Victorian female detectives unmasked

Dr Sara Lodge publishes this month a book that reveals for the first time the extent of women's involvement in detective work in the Victorian period.

Lodge's book, The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective, published by Yale University Press, shows that women were working routinely with the police from the 1840s, both as 'detective searchers' in city police stations, frisking the bodies and clothes of female suspects for stolen items, and assisting officers on the streets in risky sting operations, surveillance of suspected embezzlers, and apprehension of con-men, sneak thieves, and backstreet abortionists.

Lodge's work also uncovers the dark secrets of Victorian private detective agencies. These routinely deployed women, especially in divorce cases where a sleuth posing as a housemaid or lodger could more easily infiltrate a property where adultery was suspected. As Lodge reveals, real 19th-century female detectives were often working-class women, who might also be single mothers. Their jobs often involved moral ambiguity, and more squalor than glamour.  They were not always working on the side of the angels, or even of their fellow women.

However, detection did open up a profession for women that offered increasing power, knowledge, and mobility. Entrepreneurial divorcee Antonia Moser and actress-detective Kate Easton, who founded their own enquiry agencies, used their position to assert women's right to vote. On the Victorian stage, meanwhile, the fantasy figure of the female detective played to audiences of 4000 working-class theatregoers a night. Gun-toting, fist-swinging, cross-dressing, and pun-loving, the imagined female sleuth was the ancestor of action heroines Jennifer Lawrence and Sigourney Weaver: mature, physically indomitable, the scourge of men who abuse women.

Lodge's book, which is the fruit of over ten years of painstaking research, shows the interplay between fantasy and reality in depictions of women investigators throughout the 1800s. She studies real female detective cases from Glasgow and Dundee to Manchester, Cardiff, and London. As she argues: "Seeing the Victorian female detective more clearly involves…looking beyond the crimes the detective 'solves' to interrogate the social desires her persona embodies for her contemporaries and for us and the darker tale of violence, corruption and inequity her figure can neither resolve nor conceal."

The book has already gained a 5-star review in the Telegraph which calls it 'a joy to read' that 'blends academic rigour with vivid and witty storytelling' and praise from Sunday Times, which calls it 'a revelation' and The Literary Review, which says 'Lodge has marshalled the treasures of her research with enormous skill and style, producing a book of true importance.'

A playful book trailer and a more serious mini-film about actress detective Kate Easton can be viewed on YouTube.