ABSTRACT
The letter of Frederic Rainer to his friend and vicar, Canon Ellison the chairman and co-founder of Church of England Temperance Society (CETS) has a prominent position in most accounts of the origins of the probation service. The circumstantial evidence of the sending of the letter as an historical event, therefore, is strong. However, legend or fact its true importance lies not in the part it plays in describing how the progenitors of the probation officer came about but rather in its symbolic status in orthodox histories. This chapter argues that those histories mostly place the origins of probation within the context of humanitarianism, good works and continual 'reformist pressure' or what more recently Pratt has described as the civilising continuum. It discusses all the potential features of a revisionist history, then – the religious, social and political contexts, the development of psychology, and eugenics.
