ABSTRACT
The charge of the new police with a "domestic missionary" function and the monitoring of many important facets of everyday life in working-class neighborhoods reflected a profound social change as well as a deep rupture in class relations in nineteenth-century Britain. The policeman was perhaps every bit as important a "domestic missionary" as the earnest and often sympathetic men high-minded Unitarians dispatched into darkest Leeds or Manchester in the 1830s and 1840s. By the middle of the nineteenth century—if not earlier—a profound interruption of communications had occurred between the classes: both the "language" and the objectives of urban masses were, if intelligible at all, deeply frightening. The police had a broader mission in the nineteenth century, however—to act as an all-purpose lever of urban discipline. Fair days were nightmares for respectable townsmen when disorder and popular revelry ran unchecked. Popular reaction to the policeman's refrain, "move on there!" must be considered in assessing the sources of working-class resentment and resistance.
