Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” remains unsettlingly relevant. Beneath its colonial setting lies a searching reflection on public humiliation, crowd cruelty, political violence, and the desire to belong. Robin’s laughter at his disgraced kinsman reminds us how easily people join the crowd when pity becomes dangerous.
At a time when Henry Mayhew ventured like an explorer into the ‘darkest’ parts of London to publish London Labour and the London Poor (1851), social investigators such as Jacob A. Riis and Helen Campbell did the same for New York city. And just as French policemen such as Vidocqu published their recollections of their time in the police—a book which inspired the characters of Jean Valjean and Javert in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables—so too did one Scottish-American detective, named George McWatters, publish his memoir of policing.