Pictures and Problems from London Police Courts — Inside the Classic

A Missionary’s View of the Courtroom

Holmes positions himself inside the police court as an observer and an actor. He notes the magistrates, clerks, police, and press who populate this world, and he thanks them in his preface for their courtesy and confidence. But his attention is on the defendants—the men and women who appear before the bench. He describes their trembling, their shame, their penitence, and their remorse, often in the same breath as their craving for drink. The courtroom is not a place of judgment alone; it is a stage where Holmes watches the same faces reappear, and where he begins his work of intervention.

The Recurring Figure of the Drunkard

Alcoholism is the thread that runs through many of Holmes’s cases. He writes of a chartered accountant who had swept streets in San Francisco, suffered delirium tremens in the Transvaal, and driven bullocks in Mexico—yet the 'drink fiend stuck to him.' Holmes takes the man into his home, finds him work, plays chess and whist with him, discusses literature, takes him to church and on holiday. For twelve months he tries to break the cycle, but each weekend the man relapses. The account is specific and unsparing: the locked door, the bottle of eau-de-Cologne drunk as water, the pacing and cursing. Holmes does not offer a cure; he offers a record of effort and failure.

Movement Between Shelter and Street

The book’s structure depends on movement: from the police court to the home, from the shelter to the street, from London to San Francisco and back. Holmes follows his subjects across these spaces, documenting their shifts in fortune. The chartered accountant arrives 'friendless, homeless,' then lives with Holmes, then leaves. Jane Cakebread and Kate Henessey are given their own chapters as 'record-breakers'—women whose repeated appearances in court mark them as exceptional even in this population. Holmes’s method is to track, to wait, and to describe the moment when a person ‘bordered on d.-t.’s’ and he had to doctor them himself.

The Limits of the Missionary’s Gaze

Holmes is candid about what he cannot do. He admits that the chartered accountant lied to him about his craving, that he was 'lusting and planning for drink' even as he promised reform. The book does not claim to have saved anyone; it offers instead a series of episodes in which Holmes tries and often fails. The preface dedicates the work to Mrs. Perry Herrick, who supported him financially, and Holmes acknowledges that 'much that I have done I could not have done' without her help. The book is thus a partial record, bounded by the limits of one man’s time, resources, and patience.

Holmes writes not as a reformer with a program but as a witness who has spent years in close contact with the people he describes. Readers should expect no grand conclusions: the book ends with chapters on home workers and the poor, not with a solution. What it offers is a series of sharp, concrete scenes—a man drinking eau-de-Cologne, a woman writing from a shelter, a struggle over a locked door—that together form a picture of a world the author knew intimately but could not fix.

I remember Mr. Holmes, watching so patiently through those courtroom doors, charting the quiet unravelings of lives. There’s a strange kinship with that other volume, the one tracing America’s own restless peril. Both are ledgers of desperation, kept by men who hoped to understand. Sometimes, setting one down for the other feels like overhearing a single, long conversation about how swiftly order dissolves into chaos. The Rise and Fall of Anarchy in America From its Incipient Stage to the First Bomb Thrown in Chicago — Story, Setting & Ideas sits beside it on my shelf, two patient witnesses to the same storm.