The Police Court section is far and wide my favorite part of the paper. Mainly accounts of public drunkenness and disorderly conduct, the prose in these snippets is so melodramatic it would make Edward Bulwer-Lytton blush.
Here's an example:
 |
| The Evening Telegram, 1879 |
Notice how the headline above reads, "Assaulting the Police", yet it was a sheep that was actually assaulted? Specifically the inspector's poor lamb? That's pretty standard for Police Court. The author's tone is grandiose and mocking, dripping with smugness.
Here's another one:
 |
| The Telegram, 1879-04-17 |
This style of writing is called “purple prose”, a term coined by Roman poet Horace, who compared it to the practice of sewing patches of purple material onto clothes. Since purple dye was rare and expensive at the time, the patches were a sign of wealth and by extension, pretentiousness.
Criticized for being mundane and uninteresting, purple prose is most successful when used for comedic effect. One of the best known examples is Geoffrey Chaucer's A Knight's Tale. In contemporary popular culture, consider the elaborate prose of Frasier Crane from Cheers and Frasier.
Another example of purple prose from pop culture are the drawn-out, seemingly never-ending monologues given by Agent Fox Mulder in The X-Files. While spoken in earnest when The X-Files first aired, these cringe-worthy monologues were criticized for being over-the-top. Interestingly, when the show returned in 2016, the trope was played for laughs when Mulder goes on a long-winded, one-sided rant in "Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-monster."
As for the Police Court descriptions, I like to think they were written in this style to achieve a similar effect. The use of exaggerated language juxtaposed with such inconsequential, petty crimes is comedic purple prose at its best.
Here's one more for the road:
 |
| The Telegram, 1897-08-14 |
