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  • The First English Detectives: The Bow Street Runners and the Policing of London, 1750-1840

    The First English Detectives by Beattie, J. M.;

    The Bow Street Runners and the Policing of London, 1750-1840

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    Product details:

    • Publisher OUP Oxford
    • Date of Publication 6 February 2014

    • ISBN 9780199675388
    • Binding Paperback
    • No. of pages288 pages
    • Size 236x157x16 mm
    • Weight 418 g
    • Language English
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    Short description:

    This is the first comprehensive study of the Bow Street Runners, a group of men established in the middle of the eighteenth century by Henry Fielding to confront violent offenders on the streets and highways around London.

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    Long description:

    This is the first comprehensive study of the Bow Street Runners, a group of men established in the middle of the eighteenth century by Henry Fielding, with the financial support of the government, to confront violent offenders on the streets and highways around London. They were developed over the following decades by his half-brother, John Fielding, into what became a well-known and stable group of officers who acquired skill and expertise in investigating crime, tracking and arresting offenders, and in presenting evidence at the Old Bailey, the main criminal court in London. They were, Beattie argues, detectives in all but name. Fielding also created a magistrates' court that was open to the public, at stated times every day.

    A second, intimately-related theme in the book concerns attitudes and ideas about the policing of London more broadly, particularly from the 1780s, when the detective and prosecutorial work of the runners came to be challenged by arguments in favour of the prevention of crime by surveillance and other means. The last three chapters of the book continue to follow the runners' work, but at the same time are concerned with discussions of the larger structure of policing in London - in parliament, in the Home Office, and in the press. These discussions were to intensify after 1815, in the face of a sharp increase in criminal prosecutions. They led - in a far from straightforward way - to a fundamental reconstitution of the basis of policing in the capital by Robert Peel's Metropolitan Police Act of 1829. The runners were not immediately affected by the creation of the New Police, but indirectly it led to their disbandment a decade later.

    ... the foremost historian of crime, the law and policing in Hanoverian London, brings his formidable knowledge and astute perception to tracing the history of the Bow Street police ... a short review cannot do justice to the research and shrewd judgements that underlie this lively volume ... anyone interested in the history of crime and policing in England cannot afford to ignore it.

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    Table of Contents:

    Introduction
    Henry Fielding at Bow Street
    John Fielding and the making of the Bow Street Runners
    Detection: the Runners at Work, 1765-1792
    Prosecution: the runners in court, 1765-1792
    Fielding's Legacy: police reform in the 1780s
    The Runners in a New Age of Policing, 1792-1815
    Prevention: the Runners in Retreat, 1815-1839
    Epilogue
    Bibliography

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