A Detective Police Party

Long before the fictional sleuth, there were the real ones: in A Detective Police Party, Charles Dickens gathers Scotland Yard's pioneering detectives at his own fireside and lets them talk.

Published in his weekly journal Household Words in 1850, this celebrated piece of reportage is one of the earliest sympathetic portraits of England's new detective force, established only in 1842. Dickens (1812 - 1870), the greatest novelist of the Victorian age and a tireless social observer, invited th...