The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To THE EDITOR OF THE DAILY NEWS,1 7 FEBRUARY 1853

Text from the Daily News, 7 February 1853, p. 5.

Contradicting a report, quoted from The Derby Reporter2, relating how £300 had been presented to Inspector Field,3 late of the detective force.

The statement is unimportant to me, but as it might cast a slur on the conduct of a most excellent officer in the discharge of his duty, I beg you to do him the justice of contradicting it, on my assurance that it is one of the most extravagant inventions I have ever seen in my life, without a scrap of truth for its foundation.4

• 1. The editor of the Daily News was Frederick Knight Hunt (1814-54; Dictionary of National Biography), who held the office from 1851 until his death in 1854. Hunt had acted as an assistant editor during CD’s brief tenure as editor of the newspaper in 1846, and contributed to Household Words during the first two years of the journal.
• 2. The offending article was reprinted from The Derby and Chesterfield Reporter, in which it was published on 4 Feb. However, the story also appeared in the [Penzance] Cornish Telegraph on 2 Feb (crediting a ‘London Correspondent’ and dating it 31 Jan), the Derbyshire Chronicle of 4 Feb, and the Hull Advertiser and Exchange Gazette of 4 Feb. William F. Long suggests at least thirty-five other newspapers also carried the story, four of which pre-dated the Derby Reporter. It was reprinted in the Daily News on 5 Feb with attribution to the Derby Reporter: “Mr. CHARLES DICKENS has, with great liberality, presented a cheque for 300l. to Sergeant Field, a super-annuated officer of the detective police, upon whose information he founded several articles in Household Words, relative to the detective system” (5 Feb 1853, p. 3).
• 3. Charles Frederick Field (?1805-74) began his career as a Bow Street runner; was chief inspector of Metropolitan detective police until 1851, then retired on "good-service pension", but continued to work for the police at Great Scotland Yard and also as private inquiry agent. For CD’s expedition with him and articles in Household Words, see his letters to W. H. Wills of 12 July and 17 Sep 1850, Pilgrim Letters 6, pp. 130 and 172, and to Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, 9 May 1851, Pilgrim Letters 6, p. 380. His characteristics, depicted most vividly in CD’s Household Words article "On Duty with Inspector Field", contributed much to Inspector Bucket in Bleak House.
• 4. See William F. Long, ‘Inspector Field and the Improbable Gift’, Dickens Quarterly 30.1 (2013): 43-54. Long suggests it may have been Field himself who circulated the rumour: Field set himself up as a private detective in 1853, writing to Dickens in August to ask for help in promoting his new business (Long 48; 27 Aug 1853, Pilgrim Letters 12, p. 652). However, as Long notes, the article incorrectly gives Field the title of ‘Sergeant’, and risked doing more harm to Field’s reputation than good.