The hidden world of Victorian female detectives
From going undercover as housemaids to searching the petticoats of light-fingered ladies, the secret lives of female Victorian detectives have been little documented until now.
The traditional image of the Victorian detective, including Sherlock Holmes and the sleuths of Wilkie Collins, is male. But a new book by Professor Sara Lodge (1989) reveals that, before Sherlock Holmes ever brushed-off his deerstalker, real-life female detectives were investigating crime in Victorian England – and inspiring fictional counterparts on the stage and in print.
In The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective, which will be out in paperback in October, Sara, Professor of Victorian literature and culture at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, recovers these forgotten women’s lives. They included women employed by the police as “searchers” who could body search suspected female thieves without impropriety – often discovering cash, jewels, and pawn shop tickets for stolen goods.
“If you’re a male, you can’t search a woman, even now, with propriety because you have to take off her clothes,” explains Sara.
Victorian ladies’ dresses offered plenty of places to hide stolen items. “Victorian period clothes are quite voluminous, so you can conceal all sorts of things on your person or sewed into the sole of your shoe or even in your hair. Anything that you could lift from a shop could potentially be put in a canvas bag inside of your bustle,” she says.
“One Frenchwoman was found to have 40 pawn shop tickets in her chignon. Women had lots of places, some of them are too impolite to mention, where they could hide stolen jewellery or coins, and women searchers were the ones who ferreted them out.”
Sara also reveals the sensational role played by the fantasy female detective in Victorian melodrama and popular fiction, enthralling a public who relished the spectacle of a cross-dressing, fist-swinging heroine who got the better of love rats, burglars, and murderers alike.
“I started this research because of two fictional accounts of female detectives that were published in 1864 which were written as casebooks that claimed to be by women detectives,” she says.
One was called Revelations of a Lady Detective, with a woman lifting her petticoat on the cover: “It’s a tease. You think that the revelations might be sexual, but they’re not.”
A second book, published the same year was called The Female Detective. Both books enjoyed considerable success and were reprinted by the British Library in 2012. Sara enjoyed reviewing them but found herself disagreeing with the editorial assumption that there were no real female detectives in this period.
“I found myself asking why these casebooks would emerge simultaneously if nobody was imagining or following the activities of real female detectives? So, then I started looking in digitised newspaper archives, and bingo! In the Times in the 1870s I saw these small ads that were advertising the services of ‘experienced’ male and female detectives. That was what led me to start digging,” says Sara.
Trawling through the digitised archives of old newspapers, she found adverts and court reports that showed female detectives uncovering criminals from the mid-nineteenth century.
There were also several successful stage plays about female detectives, who were often played by mature actresses in their 30s and 40s.
“The female detective exists as a character long before Sherlock Holmes ever makes his debut,” she says.
The plots frequently involved them cross-dressing as men to catch their mark. Sara adds: “They can appear as lots of different characters. They will play an old lady or a Somersetshire nurse and nobody ever recognizes them. They can dress up as a boy or as a man, and pass successfully in society, undercover. At the end they clap the villain in handcuffs, which they usually call ‘bracelets’, a slang term that suggests these women’s power to put errant men in jail, but also to feminise them”.
“I think we still have this hope that women in the justice system will be able to detect male malfeasance and will be able to put a stop to it. But often for us, as for the Victorians, it’s a kind of wish fulfilment. It’s not entirely true.”
As well as working for the police to catch criminals, Sara found that in real life women were also employed as private enquiry agents, sometimes to uncover female adultery to enable husbands to divorce their wives. As she explains: “Female detectives were not always on the side of the angels”.
Officially, women are recorded as working for the police as “Matrons” from the 1890s and then as police officers from around the time of the First World War.
But Sara’s research shows women were working with police 70 years earlier. “Women are working for the police in a detective capacity, at least from the 1840s as ‘detective searchers’ within police stations and, as my research uncovered, quite often outside of police stations as well,” she says.
“I think the reason we haven’t heard about them is that their work was largely undercover, and the police weren’t particularly fond of alluding to them. Women were much more useful to them when their names weren’t known, and a lot of these women were wives of policemen or related to police officers. They were paid in a rather irregular fashion, often for each job that they undertook, and some of them weren’t paid at all.”
The first court case involving a female searcher that Sara discovered was that of Elizabeth Joyes, who in 1855 solved the case of serial baggage thief John Cotton Curtis who preyed on customers in the First-Class lounge at Shoreditch train station. After going undercover to observe him, Joyes identified Cotton Curtis by his shabby shoes which didn’t fit the profile of a First-Class Customer. “I discovered that she worked as a searcher at St Bride’s police station near Fleet Street, and that her evidence appears regularly in the Old Bailey record,” says Sara.
“She’s constantly giving evidence against women who’ve been pickpocketing or stealing things on buses or women whom she searched, where she’s found missing objects on them. You can see how her training in the police station leads her to be able to do work successfully outside of the station as well.”
Another prolific female searcher was Ann Lovsey, whom Sara discovered was employed as a female searcher in Birmingham for at least 36 years. “Even in the modern day, that is a very long policing career,” says Sara.
“She was quite well known in the newspapers in Birmingham as a female detective, and she would ride the buses looking for conductors who were diddling the fare. She would go into markets where people were short-changing their employers. She had eyes everywhere, even debunking spiritualists and fake fortune tellers. Lovsey wasn’t investigating murders or the sort of cases that we often imagine female detectives solving today, though she did have to deal with the aftermath of a tragic infanticide by an impoverished, mentally unstable woman. The daily grind of the Victorian police station was mostly theft with a bit of fraud, false coining, prostitution, and drunk and disorderly offences. Women were dealing with this all the time, just in the way that men did.”
Some of these women searchers became private detectives after learning about how to deal with suspects and give evidence in court. The fact that they lived among the people they were watching helped them do their job. “Most of these women are working-class, so they know the area that they live in. They know who’s on the game, the shopkeepers. They know where people live,” says Sara.
“Women are incredibly useful, because as a woman you can go places that a man couldn’t go, and you can go without suspicion. So female detection was hugely useful to the police, and then also to private detective agencies, which became a thing from the 1840s and 1850s. By the 1890s there are private inquiry agencies in pretty much every city in Britain, and lots of them in London.”
As the first Sherlock Holmes book, A Study in Scarlet, came out in 1887, it’s obvious that women were well established as detectives long before Conan Doyle’s character became the blueprint for the Victorian sleuth.
Sara says: “In the history of private detection, the real Enola Holmes was not Sherlock Holmes’s younger sister, but his mother. She actually came before him.”
The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective, by Dr Sara Lodge, is published by Yale University Press.