The Right Stuff: Class Identity, Material Culture and the Victorian Police Detective

Abstract My argument here considers the ways that anxieties and aspirations raised by ideas about the plain-clothes detective’s ability to ‘adapt’ his appearance were reflected in diverse mid-century representations of his work. Building on scholarship of material culture, I examine how and why some...

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Published in:Journal of Victorian Culture : JVC 2019-01, Vol.24 (1), p.53-71
Main Author: Guest, Kristen
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Language:English
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description Abstract My argument here considers the ways that anxieties and aspirations raised by ideas about the plain-clothes detective’s ability to ‘adapt’ his appearance were reflected in diverse mid-century representations of his work. Building on scholarship of material culture, I examine how and why some depictions of the police detective worked purposefully to render him an ‘obvious and unmistakable’ figure whose clothing tells us everything about his identity we need to know, while others envision him in quite different terms as an aspirational figure of class mobility. Taking up contrasting representations of the detectives in the work of Charles Dickens and the casebook fiction of ‘Waters’, I suggest that representations of the police detective suggest how material culture both prompted anxieties about social mobility and offered the prospect of reshaping one’s class identity in the Victorian era.
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title The Right Stuff: Class Identity, Material Culture and the Victorian Police Detective
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