Kristina: Okay, next question — let’s get one that’s not Rupert Graves. Okay, this is from Commish24 — in canon and films he’s always portrayed as lower class than Holmes or Watson. Why does this Victorian prejudice continue?

Lyndsay: Interesting. He’s kind of an everyman, a guy’s guy. He is typical of the police at the time, if you’re going to talk history. The police were not paid all that well, so it was a working class job and it was not a job a gentleman would go into, if you were a police officer.

Kristina: If you were a gentleman, you’d be a judge.

Lyndsay: Oh, totally. So culturally that made perfect sense. You wouldn’t become a police inspector — well, first of all he would have risen through the ranks from being a roundsman. So he would have been a roundsman first, and he would have shown aptitude and grit and awesomeness, and then eventually he would have been promoted to being a detective or an inspector. And to go into that job in the first place meant that you were working class. It also meant that you were somebody who needed a day job, you needed a paycheck. So this was not necessarily like a profession that, say for example, Sherlock Holmes would have felt the need to enter. Sherlock Holmes had some money troubles in A Study in Scarlet, but not sufficiently that he needed a day job, and Lestrade would have, culturally speaking. So that actually makes sense.

Kristina: Also on top of that, the police force was still quite young in London at that point as an organization.

Lyndsay: Sure. The Peelers had been founded in the 1820s, I think.

Kristina: So relatively speaking it was less than a hundred years old.

Lyndsay: Absolutely. It was something like 16 years old when Lestrade would have been joining them, so it was not a system that was particularly well-liked, it was not a system that was particularly well-organized, but they were intuitive and they were awesome. They were one of the earliest police forces, actually — Paris and London were very, very early for forming police. It took until 1845 for the New York police force to be founded. The Peelers were a model for everyone thereafter, and they should get mad credit. Lestrade’s peeps, they changed law enforcement. The London force really did.