ABSTRACT
Before the introduction of the police force in Britain, crime journalism served as a form of pseudo-law enforcement through the presentation of horrifying scenes of judicial retribution and attempted appeals to moral or religious sentiment in its readers. This has been well-documented by scholars such as Stephen Knight, Richard Ward, and V.A.C. Gatrell, as well as by critical theorists such as Michel Foucault. However, here it is argued that this function of crime journalism to act as both instructor and deterrent declined in importance during the nineteenth century, as the uniformed police came to take over this responsibility. The advent of policing thus helped to direct numerous changes in periodical journalism where, as Haia Shpayer Makov suggested, the police officer began to move slowly towards the centre of narratives.
Consequently, this chapter argues, professionalization of law enforcement in early nineteenth-century society drove both a physical and an ‘ideological wedge’ between everyday society and criminality, pushing them further apart. The rise of the police and their occupation of a liminal or threshold space between respectable society and criminality, as the first incarnation of the ‘thin blue line’, helped change public opinion on the more gruesome forms of punishment, and that this was reflected in crime journalism itself.
