Policing Morals: The Metropolitan Police and the Home Office 1870-1914

This is the first full scholarly study of the Metropolitan Police in the period 1870-1914, the time when it was transformed into a recognizable modern professional police force. Stefan Petrow examines how the Metropolitan Police, under the direction of the Home Office, grew and changed over these years. He explores the ways in which policing methods developed, traces the growth of the police bureacracy, and assesses the role played by public attitudes, relations with courts, police corruption, and the resistance of those policed.

Dr Petrow focuses on what moral reformers in organized pressure groups claimed were serious threats to social order in late Victorian and Edwardian London - habitual criminality, prostitution, drunkenness, and betting - and examines the Metropolitan force's policing of these areas.