Patrick Leary. The Punch Brotherhood: Table Talk and Print Culture in Mid-Victorian London . London: British Library, 2010. Pp. 184. $40.00 (cloth).

Abstract

relationships with the public. These were characterized by patterns of conflict and comity that varied by class and gender. The working classes were most likely to respond to police interference with violence, while the middle and upper classes were more prone to be “patronizing” and send letters of complaint. Klein sees a general improvement in policeand-public interactions, noting an increased civilian willingness to assist constables in trouble and, more generally, to cooperate with investigations. Constables had friendly relations with the public through gossip, assistance, favors, perks, and charity. Such contacts show, Klein argues, that constables “remained part of the working-class community” (221). One tricky issue, however, involved police relationships with women, which took both consensual and coercive forms. One of the book’s most interesting aspects concerns the multifaceted relationship between policing and new transportation and communication technologies, particularly the growth of motoring and the expanding use of the telephone. Both sorts of tasks—whether directing traffic and ticketing motorists or responding to telephone requests for assistance with a myriad of (often petty) problems—not only interfered with what officers saw as their main duty (i.e., fighting crime) but also contributed to tensions between police and public: notably, the growth of motoring meant the “higher classes” had more encounters with (working-class) police officers. Klein’s focus on provincial cities is indeed a valuable, refreshing corrective to a historiographical tendency to view policing in Britain chiefly through the prism of London; however, while one can applaud the desire to emphasize the distinctive character of policing in Birmingham, Liverpool, and Manchester, greater engagement with events in (and the existing literature on) the capital would have enabled more direct comparison and improved clarity about the revisionist potential these other contexts offer. As Britain’s largest and most high-profile force, London’s Metropolitan Police surely disproportionately influenced the image and practice of British policing. The late 1920s, for example, saw several high-profile scandals in the nation’s capital, involving topics such as street offenses, interrogation procedures, and corruption. The results were not only heated press and political debates but also parliamentary investigations, which, while briefly referred to, are not contextualized. The introduction of female police (or at least the intense debate around the issue) is also curiously absent from an otherwise comprehensive analysis of the police issues of the time. Police relations with foreigners or ethnic minorities are only mentioned in passing, which is surprising given that in all three urban areas—particularly Liverpool—such groups would have been a significant presence. Nonetheless, this is a lively and remarkable book. If one of Klein’s goals was to break down the public’s view of the police (perhaps held as much now as then) as a “monolithic entity” (110), she has succeeded magnificently by offering a complex portrait of how everyday policing was experienced as a mixture of boredom, excitement, violence, humor, tragedy, and, at times, absurdity. In a strikingly original chapter, the extensive institutional supervision to which constables were subjected even allows Klein to provide insight into police officers’ domestic lives. An effective combination of detailed research and clear writing, Invisible Men joins the ranks of the must-read books about British policing.