‘To Pry Unnecessarily into Other Men’s Secrets’: Crime Writing, Private Spaces and the Mid-Victorian Police Memoir

Abstract

This article explores connections between eighteenth/early nineteenth century forms of crime writing and police memoir-fiction – a genre that deserves greater recognition for its contribution to the development of the detective genre. It does this through examining how eighteenth/early nineteenth century crime-writing and mid-Victorian police memoirs were connected through their interest in examining private spaces associated with criminality and rendering them public, yet which remained distinct from each other through their different representations of police officers and detectives.