ABSTRACT
On 27 May 1863, two decades after the establishment of the detective branch of the Metropolitan Police, Britain's first detective drama, Tom Taylor's The Ticket-of-Leave Man opened at the Olympic Theatre. While operating within the same broad melodramatic framework, but at the opposite end of the continuum, the role of Hawkshaw the Detective was created by Horace Wigan, who in 1867 would also go on to manage the Olympic. The conflation of French and English performance styles that we find in the Hawkshaw of Horace Wigan reflects a larger dynamic in the mid-century Victorian theatre. While the persistent visibility of Hawkshaw – observed both in his stagey naturalness and playful impersonations – served as an effective counter to contemporaraneous anxieties about Britain's young police force, it also helped to anchor the stage detective in the theatrical and aesthetic conventions of the period.
