On some levels it is decidedly odd. Given the vast array of Victorian crimes readily available through digitised newspapers and online resources such as the Old Bailey material, its insistence on working in criminal activities that appeal more to 21st century sensitivities can set my teeth on edge and my wife's (my reluctant viewing partner) eyes rolling. Sinister property-owning conspiracies and child-abductions did take place in the nineteenth century, of course, but are better pitched towards some sort of woolen-jumpered Scandinavian noir I feel sometimes.
Yet I cannot deny the research that, overall, is packed into Ripper Street. It has that most important characteristic of the successful period drama - the "feel" of the past. Streets are lovingly recreated, replete with grime and grim-faced Victorian paupers, and the insides of houses range from the sumptuous to the cobwebbed. I love the attempt at a Victorian patois from Matthew Macfadyen. I love the attention to the rattling soundscape of carriage on cobble. I love the (sadly underplayed in this current series) bible thumping evangelism of the bearded duty sergeant.
Despite Ripper Street treading the same East End streets as I have in my research, so far, over two and a half series, I've managed to keep the series at an academic arms-length. Enjoy it without it intruding into my critical thoughts. Until this latest episode.
Featuring an extensive prowl through the streets connected to the original Whitechapel Murders, a revelation of the episode (I'm trying to avoid spoilers here) hinged around the production of a map of the area.
So far I had managed to avoid the map hanging in the Station office, sliding my eyes away from it. But this one was, quite literally, thrust under my nose as a viewer and, I think, demands attention.
Edmund Reid's creepy scrap map. Not for kids.
Online Ripper nutcases (the professional term I'm sure, having met some) were quick to point out that some of the pictures of victims/suspects are pinned in the wrong places. This post is not about that. Nor is it a criticism of Ripper Street. This is about the idea of Victorian police officers and the mapping out of space in London.
I've only come across one "Police map" in my time in the archives. Charles Booth, my erudite guide to late Victorian London, came across one during his surveys. Inspector Wyborn of Southwark (M) Division had a copy of the Booth map, colour coded for poverty, hanging on his wall. Booth, chuffed, made a special note of it before the interview commenced. There is no other mention of a map in any of the other police interviews in the Life and Labour notebook collection. I've already, at Urban History just gone, mused on why Wyborn might have one, especially as he informed Booth that 'there has been very little change [in the district] in the last ten years'. Southwark was one of the rougher postings for a Metropolitan officer, but no worse than parts of the East End or the notorious Clapham and Lambeth areas. It may have been a strategic document, used for pointing out large patterns of policing as the wall map in Ripper Street's H Division office is used, or may simply have been a statement of admiration for Booth and his work.
On the street, however, a more sensory mapping would have taken place. There are repeated sections in the late Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels where the grizzled Police Captain Vimes can, by working his paper-thin soles, tell where he is in the city by the feel of the cobbles beneath. Fanciful, maybe, but I think the sensory history of working in the Victorian city demands more attention.
Sight:
With recent studies of vision in the city, both during the day and the night, much of the broad strokes of visual policing has been covered. Fixed-point policing, so established that in his Dictionary of London Charles Dickens's son could list the places a police officer could be found on duty throughout the day, fixed lines of vision throughout the metropolis. Focused on key points, such as Lambeth's notorious New Cut or Bethnal Green Road, the presence of a police officer served a dual purpose - he was there to see and to be seen. A physical imposition on the landscape of the Victorian city.
Sound:
Perhaps the most ubiquitous, and maybe the most spine-tingling, of sensory landscapes would have been the police whistle. The high pitched rasping of the tin whistle would, most likely, have signaled an officer in trouble. It was a precaution that tied in with fixed-point policing. Men were able to summon help as quickly as possible, officers running in from various points. The records of assaults on Police Officers in the Old Bailey records show that it was an imperfect system. PC Young, attacked in Bethnal Green in 1871, was only able to summon help when he handed his rattle (precursor to whistles) to a bystander.
By the early 1900s police phone boxes were beginning to be sited around the capital. These could be used to call the station for help but also, with their flashing light on top, could be used to summon officers if the station needed to speak to them. Again, they reinforced the patrolling culture of the Metropolitan Police, further tying them to moving between fixed points.
Taste:
One of the elements that united all police testimony in Booth's Life and Labour was an insistence that they did not take tipple from publicans. Throughout the Victorian period police forces struggled with drunkenness among their officers, with many fired for inability to stay sober on duty. Increasingly, forces such as the Metropolitan cracked down on instances of officers taking brides or payments from publicans. Inspector Barker, in Bethnal Green, would not be pushed on the issue. Even when Booth told him that he had encountered police in other divisions that took money from publicans in exchange for looking the other way, 'he still persisted in saying he knew nothing of it'.
Officers would have been more than aware of public houses, nexus points for trouble and places of social gathering. The attackers of PC Young, for example, were quickly swept up from a nearby public house where, in their blood-spattered clothing, they were drinking and joking about the 'bloody lark' they had had with a police officer. With not just public houses but coffee stalls, street sellers, and other food and drink vendors throughout the streets of London, it is worth considering the extent to which a landscape was created for Police officers by the smells and tastes of these ephemeral markets.
Fear:
Ripper Street has traded off the terror of Whitechapel, the roughest of the rough, in casting its premise. Yet the area was, particularly before the events of 1888, no more violent or dangerous than others. Lambeth, south of the river, was for much of the 1900s and 1910s seen as a rough posting for junior officers. Likewise the constellation of railway labourers and slum housing around Clapham Junction was a notoriously tough beat. Clive Emsley, in his work on the British Bobby, has argued that many an urban beat before 1914 needed a 'tough man to walk it'. This suggests that, in addition to the sensory mapping out of their subdivisions and beats, Police Officers may have been engaged in mapping their emotions and experiences onto the streets.
What jumps out from even the most casual perusal of the Booth notebooks is a sense of foreboding regarding some streets. Several times officers informed him that their men did not venture into certain courts or streets. The majority of these, such as the Nichol Slum eventually replaced by the LCC and well-studied by Sarah Wise, were areas where the sensory strategies of the Metropolitan Police did not work. Lines of sight were obscured, sounds blocked by high walls or narrow passages. This was further exacerbated when officers ventured into homes. From the painstaking description of what he found to be a clearly alien immigrant lodging house he gave at the trial of Israel Lipski in 1887 Sergeant Bitten may as well have been on the moon.
Too rarely are the histories of senses and emotions combined, especially with regards to the Police who are too often studied as automaton from an institutional perspective. Yet these men, urban wanderers, were daily engaged in mapping out the city around them. They just didn't rely on pen and paper to do it.
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