The Making of the Modern Police, 1780–1914, Part I Vol 1

Paul Lawrence, Francis Dodsworth, Robert M Morris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781138761568
• eBook ISBN: 9781000559729
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Over six volumes this edited collection of pamphlets, government publications, printed ephemera and manuscript sources looks at the development of the first modern police force. It will be of interest to social and political historians, criminologists and those interested in the development of the detective novel in nineteenth-century literature.  This is Volume I in Part One.

JONAS HANWAY, THE CITIZEN’S MONITOR (1780), EXCERPTS

DOI: 10.4324/9781003112914-3

Jonas Hanway, The Citizen’s Monitor (London, 1780), ‘Advertisement’, pp. iii–xxix, ‘To the Clergy …’, pp. ii–xxv.

Jonas Hanway’s The Citizen’s Monitor was published in 1780 in response to the Gordon Riots in June of that year.¹ The riots began on 2 June as a demonstration against the Roman Catholic Relief Act passed two years earlier, but quickly got out of hand and developed into a general protest against authority of all kinds, particularly the symbols of law and order. The Bow Street offices of John Fielding, described in the previous excerpts, were a particular target, along with several prisons, the Old Bailey, the house of Lord Mansfield the Lord Chief Justice and Clerkenwell House of Correction.² The riots exposed the difficulties the existing system of justice had in dealing with large scale disorder. In general in this period riots and large disturbances were dealt with by the militia or the military, in this instance both, and with bloody results: by the evening of 8 June almost 300 people had been killed; some people put the figure as high as 700.³ It was in this context that Hanway decided to revise and reissue a work initially published under the shadow of the American war in 1775, The Defects of Police.

The term ‘police’ was at this point relatively novel and Hanway felt the need to justify it in a way that is strikingly absent in some of the later texts in this collection. Hanway was an acquaintance of John Fielding and may have used the term simply for that reason (although there is some evidence of disagreement between them); however, Hanway had lived in Portugal and Russia and travelled in Germany and the Netherlands and may have encountered it there and been impressed by the more orderly government of some European cities, which was occasionally commented upon.⁴ In contrast to accusations that a system of police would introduce French-style political ‘slavery’ to British government, Hanway sought to reconfigure the issue to argue that a lack of effective police was the worst slavery (an argument that would be repeated by Robert Peel fifty years later).⁵ In doing so he sought to cast the police as a body of ‘civil soldiers’ like the militia, i.e. a body of men organized with military discipline but drawn from amongst the citizens rather than employed permanently by the state.⁶ Like William Blizard, the author of the following extract, Hanway thought many of the problems in the police stemmed from the negligence of those gentlemen who filled the traditional offices of authority and his aim was to re-animate them by what he called ‘civil discipline’ comparable to the regular organization, geographical division and hierarchy of military discipline.⁷ In terms of the function of police, the text is particularly concerned with moral order and discipline and especially with the effects of ungoverned poverty on the young. It fits squarely within the tradition of moral reformation, a revival which was to occur in the later century, but which generally runs throughout many texts on police, including the earlier work of the Fieldings. This work on police must also be located in Hanway’s wide range of philanthropic activity which can be seen as the expression of a new sensibility and humanitarianism, but also by a sense that moral reformation would be achieved through particular forms of organizing.⁸

Notes

1. J. S. Taylor, ‘Hanway, Jonas (bap. 1712 d. 1786)’, ODNB.
2. T. Hitchcock, ‘Re-Negotiating the Bloody Code: The Gordon Riots and the Transformation of Popular Attitudes to the Criminal Justice System’, in I. Haywood and J. Seed (eds), The Gordon Riots: Politics, Culture and Insurrection in Late Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 185–203, particularly 188–9.
3. Haywood and Seed, ‘Introduction’, in Haywood and Seed (eds), The Gordon Riots, p. 7.
4. For the suggestion that John Fielding fell out with Hanway and Robert Dingley and therefore pursued separately the Magdalen House and Lambeth Asylum, see F. Dabhoiwala, The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution (London: Allen Lane, 2012), pp. 241–50, 257–8. For Hanway’s travels see Taylor, ‘Hanway’ and for an English view on the police of Paris see W. Mildmay, The Police of France (London, 1763).
5. The contrast bewtween liberty and slavery to arbitrary power was a well establised trope in English political argument: see Q. Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and ‘Freedom as the Absence of Arbitrary Power’, in C. Labourde and J. Maynor (eds), Republicanism and Political Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 83–101.
6. On which see M. L. McCormack, “‘A Species of Civil Soldier”: Masculinity, Policingand the Military in 1780s England’, in D. G. Barrie and S. Broomhall (eds) A History of Police and Masculinities, 1700–2010 (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 55–71.
7. In fact it is clear from reading the texts of Hanway and Blizard that the letters Hanway quoted are from Blizard and much of the material Blizard presents is drawn from these letters to Hanway.
8. On which see D. T. Andrew, Philanthropy and Police: London Charity in the Eighteenth Century (London: Princeton University Press, 1989); G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibiliy: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: University of Chicago Press, 1992); A. Hunt, Governing Morals: A Social History of Moral Regulation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 28–76; J. Innes, Inferior Politics: Social Problems and Social Policies in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 179–228.

Jonas Hanway, The Citizen’s Monitor (1780), excerpts

ADVERTISEMENT.

30 July 1780.

This work appeared in 1775, under the title of Defects of Police, &c. It was then acknowledged, by some persons of high rank, to contain many useful hints: perhaps they may be now more generally approved of; it being found, that to appeal to a mob,¹ is not the way of preserving the property of subjects, the sanctity of laws, nor the lives of individuals.

It hath been a frequent complaint, that the nature of our constitution will not admit of a police; in other words, it will not admit of such salutary domestic regulations, as are calculated to preserve the lives and properties of the people, from that violence and rapine they are subject to, and which sometimes aim a dagger at the vitals of liberty. This complaint is the result of indolence, and the ignorance which usually accompanies it. It descends from the civil magistrate to the parochial clergy; and obstructs the fear of God and man.

Thus we have often reasoned ourselves into a principle which establishes the worst kind of slavery: and while riches encreased the dissipation of the higher classes, and the immoral and irreligious conduct of the lower, have threatened the dissolution of both civil and religious rights.

What is the natural consequence of this situation? The most profligate will look out for an occasion of subverting all order, and of / levelling all distinctions. We have seen the most atrocious violences committed, even under a meridian sun; encreasing under the shadow of the night, by dreadful conflagrations. The frantic humour which played havock with places of worship; broke down all the boundaries of hospitality to strangers; destroyed the houses of many peaceful fellow-subjects; opened prisons, and destroyed them with fire; so far rooted up the foundations of government: – while magistrates, with a timidity that stains our annals, looked on with seeming indifference! – A number of the most wretched, countenanced by the most thoughtless, have done this!

If we trace the cause through all its windings, we shall find it originate in the lenity of government, or the relaxation of it. Our spirit for commerce, and our libertinism, have operated so far, as even to reduce thievery to a system; and no inconsiderable number of persons live by supporting thieves, drawing a maintenance from converting the pecuniary rewards for taking them, into the chief motives of their conduct; acting, as if it were the political interest of the community to preserve the fraternity.

Thus the blackest arts of villainy find secret abettors, as if they were beneficial to the public. Set a thief to catch a thief, is proverbial: and though it may be difficult to find suitable encouragements, without pecuniary rewards, it is easy to discover the haunts of those who live by plunder; and in the breast of the magistrate that no such haunts shall exist amongst us.

The fact is, that in this land, so justly boasting of freedom, liberty is alloyed by terror, and the bright enjoyment of property by law, is darkened by rapine. Are the people of any civilized nation upon the earth, so subject to be disturbed on the highways, and even in their beds, as the English; unless we except the outrages sometimes committed by daring violence in Ireland? /

It is well know, that there are many persons in London, who have systematised thief-catching:² that our prisons are crouded with numbers of malefactors, which disgraces our reputation for police, good sense, and religion: that a large number of such persons is continually brought off by defect of evidence; and fifty or sixty, chiefly of men in the prime of life, annually go to Tyburn.³

Thus we proceed, from generation to generation, as if the evil were irremediable; and our condition becomes disgraceful, when, if such exertions were made as reason and experience dictate, it might increase in glory.

We are become too profligate for the mild system of our government: liberty cannot stand without virtue. There is so gross an inconsistency in the harshness of our penal laws, that the tenderness with which they are executed is become a grievance. Let us make these laws less severe,⁴ but execute them with strict justice, and maintain their sanctity!

That the magistrate may discharge, in the first instance, if he thinks the evidence deficient, is right, to suppress cruelty, and a litigious spirit: but if he is well chosen, he will consider his duty, with strict attention to the community at large. Though a grand jury ⁵ may throw out a bill, it will be the less inclined to do it, when the law is suited to the offence. And will the petit jury ⁶ acquit wantonly, when it sees that reformation is sought, and not the blood of the offender? And when this jury convicts; will it recommend him to mercy, for a release, when it should prevent his going into the world, till he is better taught how to conduct himself in ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• General Introduction
• Introduction
• Bibliography
• Timothy Beck and Ben Sedgley, Observations on Mr. Fielding’s Enquiry (1751), excerpts
• John Fielding, A Plan for Preventing Robberies (1755)
• Jonas Hanway, The Citizen’s Monitor (1780), excerpts
• Thomas Gilbert, A Plan of Police (1781), excerpt
• Edward Sayer, Observations on the Police (1784), excerpts
• William Blizard, Desultory Refl ections on Police (1785), excerpts
• William Mainwaring, An Address to the Grand Jury (1785), excerpt
• George Barrett, Establishing a System of Police (1786), excerpt
• A Letter to Archibald MacDonald (1786), excerpts
• Henry Zouch, Hints Respecting the Public Police (1786), excerpts
• William Man Godschall, A General Plan of Parochial and Provincial Police (1787), excerpts
• W. H., Some Hints Towards a Revisal of the Penal Laws (1787), excerpts
• David Williams, Regulations of Parochial Police (1797), excerpts
• Patrick Colquhoun, A General View of the National Police System (1799), excerpts
• Observations on a Late Publication (1800), excerpts
• Editorial Notes
• List of Sources