First Impressions: Footprints as Forensic Evidence in Crime in Fact and Fiction

As skilled ‘detectives’, dress historians are experts in closely reading surviving artefacts and using them to glean evidence of the lives of those who made and wore them. With shoes and footwear, this rich, object-based approach can yield new information that challenges established histories. This article turns traditional object analysis on its head by interrogating instead the impressions and traces that objects leave behind, taking a forensic approach to footwear. It examines the rise of scientific policing and the history of footprints as a key form of evidence in crime fact and fiction. Five key British and Francophone stories and novels written between 1833 and 1931 provide a barometer of how narratives of the capital offence of murder and footwear evidence shifted during this century. These are interwoven with contemporary forensic science texts, police handbooks, newspaper articles and trial transcripts from the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales, commonly known as the Old Bailey. This article charts the shift in perceptions that occurred between 1830 and 1890, which I call the ‘Age of Conviction’, a period where there was a widespread belief in the veracity of prints, to an ‘Age of Suspicion’ from 1890 to 1930, as more scientific and critical methods of examination and recording made detectives and the public sceptical and wary of deception.

This expanse of earth covered with snow is a white page upon which the people we are in search of have written, not only their movements, their goings, and comings, but also their secret thoughts, their alternate hopes and anxieties. What do these foot-prints say to you, Papa Absinthe? To me they are alive like the persons who made them; they breathe, speak, accuse! (Émile Gaboriau, Monsieur Lecoq (1868), p. 27)