To "have someone's number"

Where does the saying

I've got your number

come from?

I found this earlier use of the phrase from a political poem in Volume 7 of Punch, 1844, which might indicate a law-enforcement origin:

The OED associates it with the earlier phrase to take measure [of] ("to form an estimate of; to weigh or gauge the abilities or character of, or assess what to expect from"), which dates from the 17th century.

The earliest citation of get/take/have [one's] number is from Dickens' Bleak House, published in 1853:

Whenever a person proclaims to you ‘In worldly matters I'm a child,’ that person is only a crying off from being held accountable, and you have got that person's number, and it's Number One.

I doubt we'll find a definitive "first use", but here is an example from 1915 explicitly making the point that (for some people, at least) the expression was considered "yesterday's slang" even then.

In terms of the semantics, I doubt the origin owes much to actual house address number, telephone number, etc. I think it's a fairly transparent metaphorical usage, indicating that the speaker thinks he's successfully classified the person he's speaking to. And would therefore easily be able to put him into a hypothetical numbered 'pigeonhole', and know where to find him again later.

In most usages today, the expression means something akin to "You can't fool me", meaning the speaker has classified the other person as devious, self-seeking, and untrustworthy. So it's usually derogatory, which it wasn't necessarily in the past.

LATER: Fanciful, perhaps, but I'm quite prepared to believe Dickens's wry observation on the specific case of someone with "Number One" as his number (per @phenry's Answer) could have been influential in causing the expression to shift from positive/neutral understanding of another's primary concerns, to seeing through another's deceit.

In Revelation 13:18 (KJV) we read:

Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.

These words are usually thought of as pointing to some specific man who fits into the prophecy in the previous verses. You’ve got his number. It’s 666. Now, if you understand the prophecy, figure out who this man is. One popular interpretation in ancient times was that Nero Caesar was the man whose number is 666.

In ancient Greek and Hebrew, every letter of the alphabet also served as a numeral, and thus had a numerical value. Consequently every word, phrase, or name had a numerical value which was the sum of the letter values. And it was believed that one could learn something about the essence of a god or a man by looking at the number of his name, and comparing it to words and phrases that have the same number. This sort of numerology is called gematria if referring to Hebrew, and isopsephy if referring to Greek.

There is no guarantee that the idiom “I’ve got your number” has its origins in the ancient practice of gematria. But it seems pretty obvious that it might. And likewise for metaphorical language such as “he weighed his words carefully” or “he spoke in measured words”.

Etymonline reports that:

To get or have (someone's) number "have someone figured out" is attested from 1853.

Sadly it doesn't offer any insight as to how the phrase came about, but clearly it can't be related to telephone numbers.