Chapter 2 considers the implications of Greenwood’s innovation for contemporary perceptions of psychiatric institutions. The roles of undercover pioneer and literary author converge here in a single individual: the Anglo-Irish aristocrat Lewis Strange Wingfield, who impersonated an asylum warder for the purposes of literary research. Wingfield aimed to expose the endemic abuse of vulnerable individuals – but in the form of a novel. Covert observation, he believed, would furnish him with material for a new kind of fiction whose authenticity would supersede the factual scrupulousness of a ‘newspaper novelist’ like Charles Reade and even the first-hand testimonies of former inmates. As his novel Gehenna (1882) makes clear, Wingfield’s extraordinary experiment in undercover authorship attests to the creative opportunities opened up by undercover journalism as well as to the overshadowing of British trailblazers by American investigators such as Nellie Bly.

Chapter 6 centres on a cluster of related activities loosely designated as ‘tramping’: primarily labour migrancy and rural vagrancy but also the leisure activity known today as hiking. The advent of covert investigation radically extended the possibilities for exploring the hardships and freedoms associated with these overlapping varieties of mobility. In illuminating the psychology, social mores, and solidarities of lives spent on the move, undercover journalists changed the way Britons viewed rural space and its inhabitants. Foremost among the many writers impacted by this development was Thomas Hardy, whose Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891–92) is set in a landscape being doubly reshaped by labour migrancy and pedestrian tourism. In Tess Durbeyfield and Angel Clare’s aimless but utopian flight across open country, Hardy imagines a new kind of cross-class ‘tramping’ whose origins can be traced back to the impersonations and blurred identities of investigative journalism’s most openly participatory genre.

Chapter 1 makes a thoroughgoing reassessment of James Greenwood’s infiltration of Lambeth Workhouse that establishes its centrality for the emergence of undercover journalism and the ‘amateur’ investigations that followed in its wake. Greenwood’s ‘A Night in a Workhouse’ was one of the most reprinted news stories of the century and defined the methods, terminology, and even descriptive monikers used by generations of practitioners. Our focus is on the historical novelty of the reading experience that underpinned the new mode of covert reporting. Greenwood’s account gripped the public where previous investigators had failed because it inaugurated an original narrative subject position. Examining a Greenwood imitator named Thomas Carlisle who was motivated by scepticism, we show that undercover journalism appealed to audiences, not on the grounds of compassion or political sympathy, but because the incognito persona of an immersed reporter presented a powerful opportunity for readers to identify with the investigator.

Chapter 4 focuses on childcare and adoption services, at this time a motley array of provisions that included long- and short-term supervision by impoverished private entrepreneurs, whose negligence or callous calculation, in a few proven cases, resulted in infant deaths. Despite the public’s strength of feeling on the issue, neither the authorities nor the medical press were ever able to demonstrate the existence of neglect or infanticide on a systemic scale. Undeterred, undercover journalists conducted lurid and manipulative investigations into so-called baby farmers and abortionists that effectively created their own discursive object of enquiry. Tracing this development, we show how investigative journalism harnessed popular outrage and a spirit of vigilantism to call for greater state regulation. This investigative context is crucial to understanding the force of George Moore’s Esther Waters (1894), in whose climactic scene the heroine refuses a baby-farmer’s offer to dispose of her illegitimate child.

The conclusion considers the limits of undercover journalism as illustrated by the special case of prison investigating. Though widely considered impossible to infiltrate, prisons were in fact among the earliest social realms to attract undercover investigators. Yet the reports brought back by these intrepid journalists ultimately confirm the experiential gap separating the ostensible subjects of undercover reporting and the observers.

The Introduction sets out the scale of the Victorian investigative revolution and its relation to other literary and journalistic modes such as special correspondence, official commissions, low-life guides, and social exploration. We highlight the prominent role played by female investigators and the local press in developing the new genre as well as key formal features such as the series and the first-person narrative voice. In making the reporter’s own experience central to their narratives, we argue, undercover investigations drew periodical audiences into a new kind of identificatory relationship. Journalists who pretended to be insane, destitute, or otherwise straitened were not merely penetrating closed social spaces but serving as proxies for readers imagining a hypothetical social catastrophe of their own. This impulse to titillate, rather than campaigning zeal, lay behind most undercover forays and underlay the genre’s long-term popularity and, not least, its wide-reaching impact on literary writing of these years.

Chapter 5 addresses undercover investigations of street begging, a topic that illustrates the new genre’s prioritizing of journalistic considerations over humanitarian aims. Beggary’s conflation with fraud in the public imagination made the practice a unique object for incognito investigating. Undercover journalists sought to reveal not the sufferings of those driven to public humiliation but the exploitation of charity by a cadre of swindlers. Despite failing in this ambition, such would-be exposés were perennially popular with newspaper audiences, who saw in them a simulation of their own hypothetical shipwreck but also a low-life equivalent to the specialist expertise and terminology characteristic of all professions. Undercover investigators thereby forged the troubling connection between respectability and criminality that informs the portrayal of beggars in fictional works such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’ (1891), a Sherlock Holmes story in which a respected businessman is exposed as a professional beggar.

Chapter 3 examines the exposure of conditions in emigrant steerage travel to the United States and other countries. Despite the efforts of campaigners and several commissions of inquiry, the public long remained unaware of the sufferings of transatlantic emigrants. In exposing the brutal realities behind the assurances of emigration firms, undercover journalists gave a voice to the countless thousands of emigrants who endured overcrowding, inadequate food, and sexual harassment while crossing the Atlantic. Yet their harrowing accounts of squalor and danger also offered newspaper readers a vicarious experience of the exotic. Drawing on this investigative archive, we establish how Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Amateur Emigrant (1895) began life as an incognito investigation destined for a newspaper. By turns idealizing and disillusioning, Stevenson’s narrative illustrates the social insights and unanticipated personal transformations that are hallmarks of undercover journalistic experience and whose influence extends to his best-known fictional work, Treasure Island (1883).