Page:Dictionary of Artists of the English School (1878).djvu/14

 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE. Offences; this he amplified into an annual volume, registering every criminal and criminal offence, and to ensure accuracy he read up our criminal law with great attention. This was at a period when the criminal code was undergoing serious and continuous changes, and he was able to aid the movement by his careful and exact statistics, and to support or suggest alterations which the extreme severity of the English laws against crime so greatly needed. These labours met with encouragement and acceptance by the best statisticians both here and on the Continent, and it was in acknowledgment of the value of his statistical labours connected with criminal offences, that he was made a life member of the Statistical Society.

In 1836 the Constabulary Force Commission was appointed; and Mr. Redgrave was named as its secretary; much valuable information was obtained, from which the secretary drew up a most graphic report as to the many ways in which the public was preyed upon by thieves and vagrants. In May 1839 Lord John Russell appointed him his Assistant Private Secretary, and on his leaving office, he was continued as Mr. Fox Maule's till September 1841. He was also Private Secretary to Mr. Fitzroy from December 1852 to January 1855.

Later in his official life, in 1853, the Home Secretary confided to him the consolidation, with a view to extinction, of the Turnpike Trusts of the United Kingdom. This he did not hesitate to accept, and, in addition, the task of arranging an annual registration of the procedure in civil cases, as he had already done with criminal offences—a duty requiring much previous reading and study; such labour, though wholly distinct from the routine of office, he nevertheless carried out as part of his usual official work.

At the desire of the then Home Secretary, Sir G. Cornewall Lewis, Mr. Redgrave undertook to compile and codify all the duties of the Secretary of State—the authority for such duties, their use and source. This confidential volume he completed, after much research, to the satisfaction of his chief; it is entitled 'Some Account of the Powers, Authorities, and Duties of Her Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for the Home Department.' It was printed for the use of the Home Secretary in 1852. The research incident to this work induced the author to enter upon the larger ix