The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana

by Jess Nevins

The Boy Detective; or, The Crimes of London. A Romance of Modern Times (1865-1866) 

copyright © Jess Nevins 2022

The author of The Boy Detective; or, The Crimes of London. A Romance of Modern Times is unknown.

The Boy Detective was published anonymously, although both Springhall and Kirkpatrick attribute authorship of the text to Edward Ellis, pseudonym of Charles Henry Ross¼while John Adcock speculates that Vane Ireton Shaftesbury St. John, who wrote serial stories for the story papers of Edwin J. Brett and the Emmett Brothers from the 1860s, wrote part of The Boy Detective¼.1 

The Boy Detective is of more interest contextually and historically than as prose.

The Boy Detective is about Ernest Keen, whose father is murdered by his step-mother. Ernest’s birth mother died when he was young, and his over-religious father quickly remarried. But his new wife, Barbara, is evil, and hated Ernest and cheated on Ernest’s father. Ernest was forced to run away and join the navy. But when Ernest returned from a term of service at sea as a cabin boy he found that his father had been murdered and that Barbara refused to allow him back in the house. Homeless and with both birth parents dead, Ernest tries to drown himself but is saved by his friend Joe. Joe brings Ernest to the secret den of a group of homeless boys. After Ernest has been befriended by the boys and given food and shelter, he resolves to solve the mystery of his father’s murder and prove that it was his step-mother who did it. Ernest and his Boy Band of helpers eventually gather enough evidence to convict Barbara Keen as well as defeat her lover, Gaspard Massilon, and his Shadow Band of political conspirators. Ernest also builds a successful business as a consulting detective.

The Boy Detective is thoroughly typical as a penny dreadful. It has the superfluous exchanges of dialogue typical of paid-by-the-word writers, and the sprawling, endlessly-prolonged plot characteristic of authors who depended on the penny dreadfuls for their livelihood. The Boy Detective has the stiff style, melodramatic narration, lumbering “comedy” written in dialect, and long passages of one-line paragraphs typical of many dreadfuls. The novel’s illustrations are stiff and portrait-like, although one shows a topless woman tied to the roof beams of a burning room (the text accompanying this portrait describes how the woman was stripped bare and then whipped). One bright spot is the varieties of dialect which the various street characters speak; they are a relatively realistic representation of how street people might actually have spoken in the 1860s. But generally The Boy Detective is a mediocre reading experience.

However, its content more than makes up for its humdrum style. The Boy Detective is often tedious as a penny dreadful, but as a literary and cultural artifact it is intriguing. Keen himself is notable. After he has been accepted by the other homeless boys and become their leader, he takes it upon himself to start solving crimes–not just his father’s murder, but other crimes which he hears about and eventually which people bring to him. By the end of the novel he is famous in London for his success in capturing criminals. At the beginning of The Boy Detective he describes his personal history in this way:

My story is a strange record of crimes and mysteries, of the joys and sorrows of the envied rich, and the trials and triumphs of the struggling poor; its darkest and most harrowing pages are brightened and relieved by traits of benevolence, devotion, honesty and fortitude. I have been employed in cases of Murder, Forgery, Larceny and Profligacy; have hunted down criminals of every class, yet, in the vilest I have ever found some latent germ of good, in the worthiest some defect. My characters are photographs from life taken in the camera of my wide experience.2

The word “detective” is rarely used, and the phrase “consulting detective” is never used, but it is clear that is Keen’s job. This was an unusual choice for the author of The Boy Detective. In the 1860s most law enforcement characters in British mysteries were policemen. While there were certainly private detectives in England in the mid-1860s (see: Detectives), most authors, whether of penny dreadfuls or sensation novels, followed the model of Charles Dickens in Bleak House and made their detectives policemen. Private detectives were not socially respectable in the 1860s and did not become common in British fiction until the 1880s and 1890s. While Keen’s job as a professional private detective is indicative of his lowered social standing, it is surprising that he is one to begin with.

Of course, amateur boy detectives were not a new idea in the mid-1860s. As Lucy Andrew notes,

Over thirty years before the creation of Sherlock Holmes’s notorious Baker Street Irregulars, the boy detective appeared as an assistant to the adult investigator in Collins’s short story “The Fourth Poor Traveller” (Household Words, 1854), later republished as “The Lawyer’s Story of a Stolen Letter” (1856). Fourteen-year-old Tom, acting primarily as a tracker or spy for the lawyer-detective protagonist, and lauded as “the smallest, quickest, quietist, sharpest, stealthiest little snake of a chap that ever dogged a gentleman’s steps,” nevertheless plays a peripheral role in the narrative (“The Fourth Poor Traveller” 22). Equally fleeting is the appearance of street urchin Jack Doyle as a “servant” to Mrs. Paschal in Revelations of a Lady Detective.3 

But Ernest Keen is set apart from his predecessors by his role as a professional private detective: “The Boy Detective is the first ‘penny dreadful’—and indeed the earliest British text aimed at children—to feature a clearly defined boy detective hero.”4 Keen is the clear model for later nineteenth-century professional boy detectives, such as Nipper (see: The Nelson Lee Mysteries), Tinker (see: The Sexton Blake Mysteries), the various boy assistants who aided Nick Carter (see: The Nick Carter Mysteries), the various boy assistants to dime novel detectives like Old King Brady (see: The Old King Brady Mysteries), and for the boy detectives of twentieth-century popular fiction, such as Edward Stratemeyer’s Frank and Joe Hardy.

Unlike many of its contemporaries, The Boy Detective is not overly influenced by Gothic novels. The author of The Boy Detective instead followed the lead of Charles Dickens as well as Eugène Sue (see: The Mysteries of Paris), focusing on the gap between rich and poor in British society and the lives of the poor and homeless who live in St. Giles and the more squalid sections of London. As the serial progresses and Keen becomes more successful and financially secure this emphasis on the lives of the poor fades, but in general The Boy Detective is about life en bas. The author’s sympathies are clear from the outset: she or he stresses the difficulties of life on the street, especially for children, and contrasts it with the indolence, immorality, and corruption of the wealthy, who are portrayed as foppish, lisping swells. The author explicitly links crime to poverty and hunger, describing several real neighborhoods and buildings, and concludes that

The children in such spots as those we have illustrated, if left to the course of events, can scarcely escape the moral sewer.

They will be swept away to vice and crime, misery and early death.

It would be cheaper for society to send these children to a first-class boarding-school, and put them away to be healthy and wise, than to allow them to become, as they probably will, thieves and prostitutes.

It is not even a question between prevention and cure.

Educate the children downwards to convicts, and cure is very nearly impossible.

If you would do anything, you must prevent!5

This is likely a deliberate reference to Thomas Carlyle’s famous passage in Past and Present (1843): 

One of Dr. Allison’s Scotch facts struck us much. A poor Irish Widow, her husband having died in one of the Lanes of Edinburgh, went forth with her three children, bare of all resource, to solicit help from the Charitable Establishments of that City. At this Charitable Establishment and then at that she was refused; referred from one to the other, helped by none; -- till she had exhausted them all; till her strength and heart failed her: she sank down in typhus fever; died, and infected her Lane with fever, so that ‘seventeen other persons’ died of fever there in consequence. The humane Physician asks thereupon, as with a heart too full for speaking, Would it not have been economy to help this poor Widow?6 

The influence of Eugène Sue on The Boy Detective is particularly strong in the names of the dreadful’s cast of characters. Keen’s Boy Band, what he calls his “Band of Light” (to “oppose...the foul rascally Shadows”7), consists of Fanny the Flower Girl, Inky Bob, Kit the Coaly, Stumpy Sam, and Wildfire Will. The villains have names like Jem the Penman, Slashing Tom (the leader of vicious gang of thugs who are the opposite of the Boy Band), Leary Bill, “Old Death the fence,” Nobby Joe, Happy Jack, Billy the Butterfly, and Dan the Diddler. And Gaspard Massilon, the murderer of Ernest’s father, is “the King of Coiners;” his “Shadow Band” is a ring of political conspirators modeled on the Illuminati and the Rosicrucians. Portrayals in fiction of political conspiracies were not new to cheap popular fiction, and had recently been given added weight by Paul Féval’s first Black Coats novel (see: The Black Coats Adventures). The “Shadow Band” is not so much an innovation as a prominent example of a then-current trend.

The women of The Boy Detective are as colorful as the men. Fanny the Flower Girl is appealingly sweet and innocent, and her goodness earns her the friendship of the proud and ferocious “Hindoo” dancing girl Zamma, who hates all “Feringhee” except Fanny. Later in the serial the kind but tragic Ella the Gipsy Girl appears, and a wily false medium named Miranda leads a fraudulent séance, and the good and kind Romany Ishmael protects Fanny against the schemes of the hideous, withered, and evil Leah the “queen” of the “Zingaros.”

The Boy Detective appeared at a time when the enthusiasm of the penny dreadful’s reading audience for highwayman stories was rapidly increasing. When The Boy Detective debuted Black Bess; or the Knight of the Road (see: Blueskin, Rookwood) had been running for two years and had already inspired copies. While penny dreadfuls did not react to the moral panic about the future of the Empire until the 1870s (see: English Jack Amongst the Afghans), the backlash against sensation fiction and highwayman stories appeared in the 1860s in penny dreadfuls. The dreadfuls were seen as reading material for the lower classes and for boys and teenagers, and moralists and self-appointed guardians of culture replayed the Newgate novel backlash of the 1840s (see: Proto-Mysteries) in expressing their concerns about the negative effect that fiction which supposedly glorified crime and violence would have on the reading audience of the dreadfuls.

The Boy Detective is particularly outspoken in its revulsion to highwayman stories and Dick Turpin-like heroes. The Boy Detective moralizes against both throughout the story, both through Ernest Keen’s words and through narratorial asides. The moralizing begins with a footnote in Chapter X:

Boys, I am one of yourselves, and, like yourselves, have taken great delight in reading the dashing adventures of Pirates, Highwaymen, and Robbers, and have sometimes felt satisfaction when the bold thief has beaten the thief-taker. You will, in this story, see the other side of the picture, and will learn how a noble band of lads joined together to lend a helping hand to those who were tempted by poverty and hunger to become dishonest, and to hunt down the most terrible who dared to corrupt others by their villainy. Should you find as much pleasure in startling deeds of daring, performed in the cause of honesty, as you do in the courage of great robbers; if you acknowledge how noble how great and brave an honest thief hater may be, great is the reward of your loving comrade—Ernest Keen, the Boy Detective.8

Long paragraphs follow in which the narrator describes the facts behind the myth of Dick Turpin. The author stresses the point that the real Dick Turpin performed none of the noble acts of the Dick Turpin of Rookwood and the penny dreadfuls. The author reminds the reader that Turpin got his money through robbery and murder, and the concludes by telling the reader that they shouldn’t mistake style and good dress for being a hero.

The author of The Boy Detective, apparently feeling the need to provide a counter-model to Charley Wag (see: Charley Wag, the New Jack Sheppard), Jack Rawlings (see: Fanny White), and other boy thieves, makes Ernest Keen both a boy detective and someone opposed to boy thieves and penny dreadfuls which feature boy thieves:

“Couldn’t you read these things if they were better written—if the stories were not so wild and improbable, so black and bloodthirsty?” asked Ernest, sadly.

“Tain’t likely; everybody likes to read about a jolly murder; but the chaps as writes these yere things often winces, and now and again they shows up the awfulness of willainy and makes yer shudder, and sometimes they pictures kind and plucky chaps like you and Keeney; but they’re obliged to mix up the good with sich a lot of bosh or we should never buy ‘em; not as they’re much wuss than a many grand works as is ready by young gents and ladies in high society, and if suppose they are writ with a good purpose, they ought to be allowed good license¼I allers reads ‘em afore I goes to bed, they make me dream; every boy likes to read of battles and fights. I used to dream I was the Black Pirate, and was boarding a man-of-war; but somehow it allers made me feel ashamed o’myself, but now I fancies I’m a Boy Detective, a fightin’ to be sure, but pitchin’ into burglars and murderers, and battlin’ with the Shadow Band!”9

In passages like these The Boy Detective not only attempts to counteract the potential effects of highwaymen fiction but becomes part of the societal narrative about penny dreadfuls. The “Black Pirate” comment is a reference to H.J. Copson’s The Black Pirate; or, The Phantom Ship (1838), one of the first penny dreadfuls and one of the earliest works of fiction about pirates. The comment is also indicative of mainstream feeling about penny dreadfuls. The debate over the perceived perniciousness of dreadfuls reached its height in the 1870s and 1880s, when the Times of London regularly published supposedly true anecdotes about the negative effects which reading penny dreadfuls had on young men and accounts of murders allegedly caused by young men addicted to reading penny dreadfuls. Within the penny dreadful industry the same argument raged between Hogarth House, founded by the Emmett brothers (see: Charity Joe. From Street Boy to Lord Mayor) and the Newsagents’ Publishing Company, founded and run by Edwin J. Brett. The Newsagents’ Publishing Company, or NPC, was responsible for many of the more sensationalist and gory penny dreadfuls, including The Dance of Death and The Wild Boys of London, and the Emmett brothers made a point of claiming that their serials were of a much higher moral quality than Brett’s.

Brett was a canny publisher and was sensitive to the changing attitudes of the establishment toward his more sensationalist and exploitive material, so when the backlash began he cleaned up his catalogue of works. (But as The Jack Harkaway Adventures show, Brett never got rid of the bad material completely; he just altered it so it would be objectionable to fewer people). Although the sanitizing of Brett’s product would not begin for years after The Boy Detective appeared, there are passages in The Boy Detective that show Brett, through the author of the serial, reacting to the criticism and staking out a moral position regarding how the youth should act:

“...shall I tell you on whom depends the glorious future, the increasing rate of progress? On the BOYS OF ENGLAND!”

“The boys of England are beginning to feel this, I think, sir.”

“But they’ve a great deal to learn yet.”

“Yes, sir, and more still to unlearn.”

“They are too fond of aping ‘manhood,’ are they not?”

“Yes, sir; but I don’t blame them so much for wishing to be like men, that is, for not caring to remain babies longer than they can help; but they spoil their growth, inure their health, weaken their intellect by smoking, lounging about, being too big for play, and reading a lot of unnatural, theatrical, sensational bosh about cut-throats, robbers and bad girls, all of which, if they were ‘men,’ they would be ashamed to do. Ask half the Cockney boys, who go alone to music-halls, bet on races, puff their ‘weeds,’ to swim, to race, to fight even, and where are they? And then the books and papers they read! There are but two classes of literature that ever reach them, or rather ever sink to them—the religious books which, however good, are either too tame to interest them, or too abstract for them to understand, and the poisonous tract written by poor, overworked hacks, who have neither time nor opportunity to write with any care, and who are too often without conscience, and only think of making their vile work pay!”10 

Fiction for boys had begun to change in the early 1850s, with the work of writers like Thomas Mayne Reid (see: War Life) and W.H.G. Kingston (see: Boy Heroes), and by 1865 there were numerous novels which were neither the religious books or the “poison tract” mentioned above, but rather muscular adventure fiction designed to guide the morals of their young readers. But those works were aimed at a middle-class audience and given to middle-class children as gifts, and were not generally read by the working class boys and young men who consumed the penny dreadfuls.

The dialogue continues:

“Well, Master Keen, but if this is really the case why don’t these ‘sensation’ writers turn their hands to something better? Why don’t they write the truly startling adventures of some of our British worthies, our soldiers, sailors, explorers—of Napier, Nelson, or Mungo Park, for instance? Do you mean to say that boys of this advanced age would not take more interest in romances founded upon the lives of these wonderful men than in lying tales of the exploits of a dirty burglar like Jack Sheppard, or a capering, mischievous ape like Claude Duval? [see: Claude Duval, the Dashing Highwayman] The lads are not fools, are they?”

“No, sir; but it is said that when once the tiger has tasted human blood he is never satisfied unless he is tearing flesh, crunching bones and lapping gore. The boys are very tigers for a romance of crime, they will have murder and fire and fury!”

“And nothing else?”

“Oh, yes, sir; they will read, and, I think, enjoy occasional quiet, innocent, yet amusing chapters, full of fun and frolic, mingled with sound doctrine. The writer need not be very clever; he is not bound to accomplish the impossibility of writing many numbers of an interminable seriel [sic] with much care or coherency; but he may choose his heroes from the Band of Light, and make his villains simply detestable. Some authors do this, and their works succeed. The boys are getting sickened by the stench of blood, palled by the scene of horror, shocked by the obscenity of the debauch; and there’s a good time coming, sir, when they will not call a dashing highwayman a brave man and a hero, but will despise him as a thief and a humbug, when they will eagerly follow the course of a great man from the lowest to the highest step of fame’s ladder, and will rejoice to think that some of Baldwin’s noblest heroes were once but common errand-boys, plough-boys or sailor-boys, but that they were ‘boys,’ and not brigands, and that they did not cut other’s throats, but conquered themselves—studied, toiled, invented, grew rich in knowledge and skill, rose and triumphed, and will close their book with the vow, ‘I, too, will be a hero!’”11

Ernest Keen concludes the dialogue by stating that if boys read The Boy Detective, which is purportedly Keen’s diary of events, then it will turn them against the evil penny dreadfuls: “¼if we can but keep up the dashing, heroic style, that pleases boys, before the winter is over many a lad will laugh at the bosh that is written about Jack Sheppard and Turpin.”12 The narrator adds to this by saying that in the past few years boys have read better works, like Scott’s “Marmion,” Longfellow, and Shakespeare, as well as “Joe Blueskin and Jack Sheppard,” and now have an appreciation for these better works. The author pulls quotes from Black Bess and the 1851 dreadful The Life of Captain Macheath, the Bold Highwayman and scornfully compares them to the poetry of Scott and Shakespeare.

In an amusing aside, Boy Band member Stumpy Sam says that he is sick of highwayman stories, but that he has an idea for a serial, whose title will be: “The Black Bandits of Bloomsbury; or, the Headless Howlers of Hounslow Heath, and the Dumb Demon of the Dark Arches.”13 At the bottom of the page is a footnote: “Cawshun.—The abuv work is copywrite.—St.S.”14 

The author returns to the themes of bad fiction leading to bad morals, that the real-life figures who fictional thieves were based on were villains rather than heroes, and that the criminal acts shown in The Boy Detective were based on true stories every ten to twenty chapters. When the Boy Band encounters a gang of child thieves, the children take the names of various famous fictional thieves, including Jack Sheppard, Blueskin, Claude Duval, and Sixteen-String Jack Rann. The author then describes the real-life sources for each of these characters, stressing their villainy. The author also repeatedly inserts true crime stories from the Criminal Annals.

The Boy Detective is not particularly compelling reading, but contextually and historically it is a notable work.

Recommended Edition

Print: The Boy Detective, or, the Crimes of London: a Romance of Modern Times. London: British Library, 2010. 

Online: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100632995

For Further Research

Lucy Andrew, The Boy Detective in Early British Children’s Literature: Patrolling the Borders Between Boyhood and Manhood. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

 

1 Lucy Andrew, The Boy Detective in Early British Children’s Literature: Patrolling the Borders Between Boyhood and Manhood (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 49.

2 The Boy Detective; or, The Crimes of London. A Romance of Modern Times, 1-2.  

3 Andrew, The Boy Detective, 16.

4 Andrew, The Boy Detective, 23.

5 The Boy Detective, 232-233.

6 Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (New York: William H. Colyer, 1843), 88.

7 The Boy Detective, 86.

8 The Boy Detective, 21.

9 The Boy Detective, 197-198.

10 The Boy Detective, 250.

11 The Boy Detective, 250-251.

12 The Boy Detective, 251.

13 The Boy Detective, 284.

14 The Boy Detective, 284.

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