We Sail The Ocean NYPD Blue: How Naval Melodramas Were The Police Procedurals Of Old England
Everyone has a class, or a course, or even perhaps a book or documentary that was so interesting, it lingers in the mind far longer than its natural lifespan. For this author, one of those examples was a college course on English Literature from the first half of the 19th century, taught by Matthew Kaiser.
Though there were many nuggets of knowledge imparted throughout the course, one of my favorites was when he pointed out that the present day is obsessed with cop shows. NYPD Blue, Hawaii 5-0, even reality fare like Cops are ubiquitous on television – and have been for many years.
Even when the police suffered from new lows in public opinion in the 2020 summer riots, the demand for police-centric television shows was incredibly strong. As summarized in an article from New York’s Vulture1:
“At 8 p.m. on Saturday, at the same time CNN, MSNBC, and FOX News were airing live coverage of the nationwide protests against police violence, cable audiences also had other options for what to watch. On PopTV, there was a marathon of NCIS: New Orleans. On WE, Criminal Minds. On WGN, Blue Bloods. On Ion, Law & Order: SVU. And on USA, a marathon of Chicago PD that began 11 hours earlier and continued until Sunday morning, followed by an episode of CSI.
These aren’t identical shows, exactly. Criminal Minds is about FBI profilers who try to anticipate crime before it happens. The NCIS franchise is about a team who investigate crimes involving Navy and Marine personnel. Blue Bloods and SVU are about New York cops; Chicago PD is about Chicago police. But they and dozens of other popular, profitable TV shows share a fundamental ideology: The cops are the protagonists.”
Looking into the actual numbers only backs this up. According an article titled “How Much Network TV Depends on Cop Shows” from The Hollywood Reporter, “shows about police officers, detectives and other law enforcers made up nearly a fifth of the scripted shows on network TV in the 2019-20 season — which was on the low end of things over the past decade. Crime shows outnumber every other drama subgenre (family dramas, medical shows and the like) on the broadcast nets.”2
So how does this tie into 19th century English literature? Well, according to Professor Kaiser, the equivalent to cop shows two hundred-odd years ago was the naval melodrama. The genre started to become popular in the late 18th century, hit its golden age in the 1820s and 1830s, and remained in demand until the late 19th century.
Like with cop shows, the raw data backs this up; according to Arnold Schmidt’s British Nautical Melodramas, 1820–1850, “more than two hundred nautical melodramas were performed from 1820 to 1850.” Schmidt went so far as to proclaim that naval melodramas “reigned” supreme on the London stage.3
It wasn’t just the number of plays, but the scale. In one of Professor Kaiser’s own articles, he notes that the Sadler’s Wells Theatre (then known as the Aquatic Theatre) installed on its stage a water tank with a 50,000 gallon capacity that had the ability to produce “cannon fire and miniature waves.”4 Though its original purpose was for naval reenactments, the tank became a prop of naval melodramas by the 1830s.
Though many offerings from the time are forgotten today, some are still in the public consciousness. Most famous is undoubtedly Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore, though it is perhaps more accurate to call it a parody of naval melodrama versus a melodrama itself. As long-time readers will know, we here at HR&R are Gilbert and Sullivan devotés (see “Hurrah for Gilbert & Sullivan: How Two 19th Century English Social Critics Can Still Teach Us Today”), and it seems as if Victorian Englanders were no different. The operetta opened at London’s Opera Comique in 1878 and ran for 571 performances, the second-longest run of any musical theater piece up to that time.5
But this popularity didn’t make the Navy immune from criticism, just as the popularity of police dramas hasn’t saved cops from attack. In fact, despite the popularity of naval melodramas, riots against the navy often took place concurrently to a play’s success, almost exactly mirroring the Vulture quotation above. The cause for the angst against the navy? Impressment.
A Bad Impression
The practice of impressment by the British Royal Navy, particularly prominent during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, was a significant and contentious method of naval recruitment. Impressment, often referred to as "the press gang," involved the forced conscription of men into naval service; in simpler terms, members of the navy would essentially kidnap civilians – whether with sea-faring experience or not – and sail away.
This practice was unsurprisingly used most during the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815) and the War of 1812. Ironically, impressment was a major cause of the latter, when British sailors impressed Americans in the Chesapeake-Leopard Affair.
The public response to impressment was profoundly negative, as it was seen as an abuse of government power and an infringement on personal liberty. The press gangs themselves were reportedly violent and would invade towns and ports, seizing men with little regard for their circumstances, or the circumstances of their families. See some of the cartoons below for how the media portrayed impressment – again at a time when naval melodramas were the biggest draw on the West End.
Unsurprisingly, impressment led to numerous riots and violent confrontations between civilians and press gangs throughout Britain. One of the most notable riots occurred in October 1793:6
“ . . The Regulating Captain for Liverpool, Captain Smith Child, who had successfully recruited in the city since the opening year of the war and had a good standing with the local populace, suffered two recruiting houses destroyed. Then a seven-hour riot broke out, all due to a frigate captain who ignored his counsel and turned a press gang loose on the port. The chaos resulted in the press gang killing the master of a merchant ship, as well as several injuries.”
But despite some social unrest against the practice, naval melodramas endured. For example, mere months after the Liverpool riots, celebrated composer and dramatist Charles Dibdin premiered “In Good News,” which included lyrics completely devoid of any outrage towards the Navy:7
“Then broach a can before we part,
A friendly one, with all his heart,
And as we put the grog about, we'll chearly sing,
At land and sea, may Britons fight,
The world's example and delight,
And conquer every enemy of George our King:
'Tis he, that proves the hero's friend,
His bounty waits us to our end,
Though cripple, and laid up, with one foot in the grave,
Then Tars and never fear,
You shall not wan [sic] compassion's tear,
Misfortune ever claimed the pity of the brave.”
The widespread use of impressment declined after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, primarily due to the decreased need for manpower and the increasing unpopularity of the practice. The British government began to seek other methods of manning their navy, including offering better pay and conditions to volunteers, to avoid the civil unrest that impressment had often caused. However, the legacy of impressment in sparking riots and contributing to the erosion of public trust in governmental authority had a lasting impact on British society and its practices of military recruitment.
Truth vs. Fair-Weathered Fiction
But there is one more potential similarity between naval melodramas, pre-Victorian views on the Navy, cop shows, and opinions on police: the disconnect between fact and fiction – especially when both get intertwined in the mediasphere.
J. R. Darcy’s fascinating The Myth of the Press Gang claims that centuries of assumptions about impressment are wrong by arguing that the practice was neither particularly commonplace nor as unpopular as later descriptions suggested.
Among Darcy’s arguments is that the British Navy’s success depended on enthusiastic and talented sailors – not reluctant novices. Moreover, Darcy points out that the topic of impressment was never raised as a grievance during the Naval Mutinies of 1797.
Rather, Darcy claims that while impressment did occasionally occur and was unpopular, the practice was exaggerated in popular culture starting in the 1820s and 1830s “when naval manning procedures were vilified in order to support the arguments of radical politicians.”
He also claimed that depictions relied on “opinions” from the period, like autobiographies, newspaper content, and other works by attention-seeking figures, which tends to highlight unusual cases and fails to provide an accurate representation of daily life.8
Though this author is not knowledgeable enough on this subject to determine the veracity of such assertions, the data is compelling; moreover, recent events are evidence enough that grifters are not above maligning a law-enforcement-type body for gain – whether it be political or financial.
To be clear, while there are certainly corrupt, lazy, and bigoted cops, the charges leveled at the police by radical progressives are often completely disconnected from reality.
For example, a 2021 survey developed by skeptic.com asked Americans from a variety of political backgrounds how many unarmed black men were killed by police in 2019. More than 50 percent of “very liberal” respondents thought law enforcement killed more than 1,000 unarmed black men. Nearly 10 percent of that same cohort thought that number was an astronomical 10,000.9
The answer, per The Washington Post? Twelve. Many Americans (and many abroad) have been fed a false picture of police brutality, and it seems unlikely that it will be rectified anytime soon.
Conclusion
Not to wax too philosophically, but something I find fascinating (and serves as motivation for this Substack) is how human nature generally remains steadfast, despite centuries of change. In this case, it is how the public can form an obsession with a genre or type of entertainment, notwithstanding said genre’s charges of controversy.
There is something incredible about grabbing a takeaway and lazily turning on the television to watch a simple rerun of Law and Order: SVU and knowing that 200 years ago, someone was grabbing some bread and cold meats and heading to a West End play for the fifth time with the same intentions.
https://www.vulture.com/2020/06/tv-cops-are-always-the-main-characters.html
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/heres-how-network-tv-depends-cop-shows-1299504/
https://www.routledge.com/British-Nautical-Melodramas-1820-1850/Schmidt/p/book/9781848935648
https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_World_in_Play/LwXUCHSFcgYC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22Fair+Play+in+an+Ugly+World:+The+Politics+of+Nautical+Melodrama%22&pg=PT55&printsec=frontcover
https://gsarchive.net/pinafore/html/
https://books.google.com/books?id=Mp-fBwAAQBAJ&pg=PA112&lpg=PA112&dq=%22Captain+Smith+Child,+who+had+successfully+recruited+in+the+city+since+the+opening+year+of+the+war+and+had%22&source=bl&ots=vAvLOBjDGt&sig=ACfU3U0ORDFgupeiZCEdhJWtK4tg1wTQ_Q&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwipvNKWus6FAxWOjYkEHTowCq0Q6AF6BAgOEAM#v=onepage&q=%22Captain%20Smith%20Child%2C%20who%20had%20successfully%20recruited%20in%20the%20city%20since%20the%20opening%20year%20of%20the%20war%20and%20had%22&f=false
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/evans/N26624.0001.001/1:2?rgn=div1;view=fulltext
https://porttowns.port.ac.uk/press-gang2/
https://www.skeptic.com/research-center/reports/Research-Report-CUPES-007.pdf