1: Introduction
2: Henry Fielding at Bow Street
3: John Fielding and the making of the Bow Street Runners
4: Detection: the Runners at Work, 1765-1792
5: Prosecution: the runners in court, 1765-1792
6: Fielding's Legacy: police reform in the 1780s
7: The Runners in a New Age of Policing, 1792-1815
8: Prevention: the Runners in Retreat, 1815-1839
Epilogue
Bibliography
The late J. M. Beattie was born in England in 1932 and emigrated to
the US in 1949. He studied at the University of San Francisco (BA,
1954), the University of California, Berkeley (MA, 1956), and
Cambridge (Ph.D, 1963). He taught in the History Department and the
Centre of Criminology at the University of Toronto from 1961 to his
retirement in 1997. He has published The English Court in the Reign
of George I (1967 and 2008), Crime and the Courts in
England, 1660-1800 (1986), and Policing and Punishment in London,
1660-1750: Urban Crime and the Limits of Terror (2001).
`... the foremost historian of crime, the law and policing in
Hanoverian London, brings his formidable knowledge and astute
perception to tracing the history of the Bow Street police ... a
short review cannot do justice to the research and shrewd
judgements that underlie this lively volume ... anyone interested
in the history of crime and policing in England cannot afford to
ignore it.'
Clive Emsley, History Today
`[a] superb book ... As those who know his earlier works on crime,
policing and criminal justice in the 18th century would expect, one
of the great strengths of this book is the sense it gives of the
way the changing activities of the runners intertwined with changes
in other brances of the criminal justice system - the changing
functions of the magistrates' courts, for example, as awareness
grew of the need to separate the investigative and judicial
functions of the magistracy, and to extend the system of police
courts more widely through London.'
John Barrell, London Review of Books
`Beattie's lively history of the Bow Street Runners is a first-rate
account of the evolution of 'thief-takers' into a professional
crime-solving force after the group's creation by Henry
Fielding.'
The Canadian Journal of History
`The publication of a new book by John Beattie is inevitably a
major event in criminal justice history. As a pioneering historian
of eighteenth-century crime, law and punishment, his previous works
instantly became foundational studies in the field. In this latest
offering, Beattie turns his formidable historical acumen to
research on the most famous body of police officers prior to the
new police the Bow Street runners. The result is an extremely
thorough
and insightful account of crime and policing, yet one which
nonetheless signals the persistent complexities which surround the
interpretation of nineteenth-century police reforms.'
David Churchill, Crime, History & Societies
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