LANGUAGE ON THE LOOSE 53into the Home for Homeless Women that he ran for the rich philanthropist
Angela Burdett-Coutts, and into the social writing he did for Household
Wo rd s. In July 1850 he began a series of Household Words articles on the detec-
tive police that begin to reveal the intensity of his admiring fantasy.
“A Detective Police Party” ran on two successive weeks, and was based
on a group interview arranged by Dickens with several members of the
detective force, including Inspector Charles Frederick Field, who became
Dickens’s special friend and served as a model for Inspector Bucket. As Dick-
ens tells it, the group met in the Household Words office: “Every man of them,
in a glance, takes an inventory of the furniture and an accurate sketch of the
editorial presence. The Editor feels that any gentleman in company could
take him up, if need should be, without the smallest hesitation, twenty years
hence” (Dent 2.268). It’s hard to tell who’s doing the keenest watching here,
and that is the point throughout: the detectives are represented as ideal ver-
sions of Dickens himself. It isn’t long before Dickens is performing a bit of
competition on the page, asking several questions in which his obsession with
con games and character reading is instantly recognizable. He asks whether
there are actual highway robberies in London, or whether “circumstances
not convenient to be mentioned by the aggrieved party” usually precede
them. He asks whether in servants suspected of household robbery “inno-
cence under suspicion ever becomes so like guilt in appearance” that officers
have to take special care. He asks whether thieves and officers know each
other when they see each other in a public place, “because each recognizes
in the other, under all disguise, an inattention to what is going on, and a
purpose that is not the purpose of being entertained?” (269). Of course the
answers to all these clever questions affirm that Dickens is right; in effect,
he is one of their order. Soon the police become storytellers, with Dickens
“transcribing” the stories complete with dialogue in various voices. Much
of the second article is a story told by an officer who disguises himself as a
simple butcher from the country so he can infiltrate—over a period of ten
weeks—a gang of warehouse thieves. “Even while he spoke,” Dickens writes,
“he became a greasy, sleepy, shy, good-natured, chuckle-headed, unsuspicious,
and confiding young butcher” (277). Who could be more like Boz himself,
in the process of creation? What more Boz-like plot than this story of faked
innocence vanquishing the criminal at its own game?
About a year later Dickens published another article called “On Duty
with Inspector Field” (14 June 1851), in which his identification takes on
more troubling political overtones (Dent 2.359–69). As he accompanies Field
through the lowest haunts of London, visiting one foul den after another, he
focuses on the power of Field’s personal knowledge of individual criminals