Publisher's Synopsis
What explains the law-abidingness of late Victorian England? A number of modern historians contend that the answer lies with the effectiveness of policing, and with the imposition of a 'policeman-state' in Victorian and Edwardian England. Victor Bailey reveals that historians have overestimated the extent to which policemen were able or willing to intervene in the daily behaviour of inhabitants to suppress law breaking. Social order was a function less of policing than of a complex combination of informal family and community sanctions, the mixed welfare of charity and state support, the new board schools, slum clearance, and the negotiated justice of the magistrates' courts.
