They Did the Police in Different Voices: Representations of the Detective on the Victorian Stage

In the spring of 1863, Detective Jack Hawkshaw strolled carelessly onto the stage of the Olympic Theatre. The first British stage detective of any significance, Hawkshaw ushered in the beginning of a detective era on the London stage. Established quickly as a significant part of the nineteenth-century theatrical scene, the stage detective was swiftly codified into a theatrical “line.” Always happy to adopt a fictional persona or throw off a disguise, to play with performance conventions or manifestly observe his theatrical counterparts, the stage detective spoke the language of nineteenth-century theatre. More than this, he became an integral part of contemporary dramatic structure and style, both facilitating melodramatic resolution and looking forward to the dandiacal style of Wilde’s society comedies. The plays which form the focus of this work are a mixture of the canonical and those unknown to modern scholarship: from Tom Taylor’s well-known 1863 play, The Ticket-of-Leave Man, to Clement Scott’s long-forgotten The Detective (1875), from Wilkie Collins’s stage adaptation of The Moonstone (1877) to two adaptations of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. To build a clear picture of English attitudes to the new detective and his appearance on the London stage I draw from contemporaneous newspaper articles and accounts, critical reviews and essays dedicated to theories of performance, as well as acting manuals and official police orders. Understanding the detective’s dramatic purpose and theatrical positioning sheds light on nineteenth-century theatrical conventions – from the complex interplay between representation and authenticity to the ways in which the melodramatic universe was conceived – as laid out by scholars such as Lynn Voskuil, Martin Meisel, Peter Brooks and Elaine Hadley. It also better illuminates the epistemological frameworks of the period – from questions of deception and fraud to concerns about omniscience and earned authority – as explored by Audrey Jaffe, Lorraine Daston, Peter Galison and others. Despite his significance, the figure of the stage detective has received scant scholarly attention. By pursuing original archival research as well as revisiting the stage detective’s appearance in the more canonical work of the period, I aim to reinstate the detective in the theatre history of the period.

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