ABSTRACT
The machinery of law and order was both inefficient and corrupt, and the population as a whole stood firmly against the introduction of a state police, believing it to be inimical to freedom. This chapter considers three controversial questions. Why were the new police established? What contribution did they make to the so-called peace and equipoise of Mid-Victorian Britain? How did society respond to the men in blue? By 1842 one estimate put the number of embodied policemen in England and Wales at 10,000, more than half the number of 1857 and almost a third of the figure of 1881. The purpose of the government reports of 1828 and 1839, and of a host of social novels and surveys, was to lower society's tolerance of crime and protest. Some lords lieutenant and magistrates had become alarmed at the incidence of crime, poaching, vagrancy and violence in the countryside as well as the towns.
