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

From 1870 to 1914 the Metropolitan Police were transformed into a recognizably modern professional police force. This book explores how the transformation developed and assesses the role played by public attitudes. Stefan Petrow focuses on what moral reformers 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 contentious areas.