Any reader of Charles Dickens in the 19th century – and, of course, there were many – would have recognised the figure of Inspector Bucket.

Bucket was a police detective, created by Dickens in Bleak House to denote a particular type of policeman: a tenacious, decent and tolerant professional, but one lacking in creativity. Bucket is a patient man who thinks nothing of plodding the streets in search of crime, a quiet watcher of human life.

For those living and working in London during a large part of the Victorian era, however, Bucket would have appeared familiar not just because he fitted a stereotype of a policeman of the time, but because they may well have recognised the real individual he was based on – Charles Frederick Field of the Metropolitan Police.

Field was a man who followed trends, and was typical of his era. Like many Victorian police officers in the metropolis, he was from the lower, but aspirational, classes. He was the son of a Chelsea publican – described in a later press article as ‘a respectable innkeeper&hellip and one of the earliest promoters of the Licensed Victuallers’ School’.

However, like many, Charles wanted to become an actor, seeking variety and a more interesting career, perhaps, than his father, and began as an amateur actor, performing at the Catherine Street Theatre off the Grays Inn Road, as well as at other unlicensed theatres. But his family was poor, and they needed him to get a secure job – and, it was said, Field himself was motivated largely by money (‘money [was]&hellip a commodity duly valued by Mr Field’). When Robert Peel’s measures led to the establishment of the Metropolitan Police in 1829, Field immediately joined up, his first position being a sergeant in E Division, based at the High Street in St Giles.

His career therefore started prior to the Victorian era; aged 24 when he signed up, Field became an officer when the corpulent and disliked George IV was still on the throne – a year later, he would be dead, and the new king, William IV, would take the throne, serving a mere seven years. George IV was disliked, but so, too, was the fledgling Met Police. The British public was suspicious of a state-run, professional police force; they did not want this level of state control, and the working classes, becoming increasingly politically aware and rebelling against their status in society, saw the police as an attempt to control them further.

The new policemen – who would start to be joined, ten years later, by forces across the country – were therefore viewed with suspicion and sometimes explicit hostility. There were attacks on policemen in their early years, although this was not altogether new. In the late 18th century, two enterprising magistrates had established the Thames River Police in Wapping; a riot two years after its foundation, in 1798, led to the death of one of its officers. The first time that Field had to use his police staff was when a row broke out in the slums, the ‘dens’, of St Giles. Field saw a row break out between some Irish immigrants in a ‘sink of villainy and iniquity’ known as Rats’ Castle, on Buckeridge Street, and had to use violence to stop the row. In the process, he inadvertently found that he had arrested a man who was actually a notorious highway robber.

One of the more unlikely aspects of Field’s job was to sometimes accompany a writer around London. This writer was Dickens, a man fascinated with the modern police force, who would sometimes walk with the constables as they traversed their beat around the capital. He and Field became friends through their nightly walks, and not only did Dickens capture the essence of Field’s personality and policing in Bleak House, but he also used him in other ways. In 1851, Field was the subject of an essay by Dickens about his work, entitled ‘On Duty With Inspector Field’, and he also wrote three articles for his publication Household Words, looking at various cases and adventures involving Field. In one, he described the man – who was rapidly promoted to become an inspector in L Division at Lambeth within a year of joining the police – as middle-aged, portly, with a husky voice, Field had ‘a habit of emphasising his conversation by the air of a corpulent forefinger, which is constantly in juxtaposition with his eyes or nose’.

By the time Dickens wrote this pen-portrait, Field was in his mid-40s, but already looking at retirement. After L Division, he had moved to R Division at Deptford Dockyard, then to Woolwich, where he had organised the police based at Government Yard. When Inspector Shackell of the Met retired, Field was appointed to be chief of the Detective Police of A Division at Scotland Yard. This role involved him being ‘actively engaged in various important matters connected with the government and the publice’. In 1852, he left the Met after 23 years service (gaining in the process not only a generous pension, but also a certificate of good character), but this was by no means the end of his professional life. Instead, he decided to take on private investigative work.

Field needed to publicise himself in order to win clients, and perhaps this lies behind his attempt to get involved in a notorious murder case and subsequent trial. The case was that of Dr William Palmer, a Staffordshire man with a taste for gambling and a desire for money to fuel his hobby. This had led to several deaths – including those of his brother and mother-in-law – but when he was charged with three murders by poisoning, it caused numerous headlines. Palmer was seen as a respectable man in a strongly class-based society, and there was doubt as to whether he would be convicted.

On 2 February 1856, the Illustrated News of the World published a special news supplement, featuring Field’s views on the case, and implying not only that he was still a serving police inspector, but also that he was heavily involved in the case. In fact, Field was now a private investigator working for himself, and had only been asked to look into Palmer’s finances in a limited capacity. His involvement was so small that he was never asked to testify at Palmer’s trial. But Field’s need to publicise his business meant that he continued to use his former police rank throughout his official ‘retirement’, which caused annoyance in the police. More than one investigation was made into his behaviour, and at one point, in 1861, his pension was stopped for several months. It was only in 1865, after Field had finally retired for good, that the Home Secretary finally dismissed the allegations of misconduct.

Field was a man made to be a private investigator. He loved disguising himself, adopting different identities in order to investigate individuals. Many private detectives had been former actors, as the two roles shared this desire to take on different roles, and so Field, the frustrated actor, could play out his thwarted desire by becoming a private detective instead. His love of acting was acknowledged by Dickens, who noted that his friend ‘boasted and play[ed] to the gallery’, enjoying both his work and the plaudits he received, and seeking that public approval of his skills.

After less than a decade of retirement, Charles Field died in London, his lifelong home, on 27 September 1874, and was buried in Brompton Cemetery. He was 69 years old. Thanks to his awareness of the value of publicity, whether good or bad, and the help of his friend Charles Dickens, he would remain known of, and read about, for decades, and now centuries, after his death: something he would have found rather gratifying.