Murder by the book : the crime that shocked Dickens's London

First Title Value for Searching:

Personal Author:

Harman, Claire

Edition:

First American edition.

Physical Description:

252 pages : ill. ; 22 cm.

General Note:

"This is a Borzoi Book."

Genre:

True crime stories.

Summary:

"From the prize-winning biographer--the fascinating, little-known story of a Victorian-era murder that rocked literary London, leading Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, and Queen Victoria herself to wonder: can a novel kill? In May 1840, Lord William Russell, well known in London's highest social circles, was found with his throat cut. The brutal murder had the whole city talking. The police suspected Russell's valet, Courvoisier, but the evidence was weak. And the missing clue lay in the unlikeliest place: what Courvoisier had been reading. In the years just before the murder, new printing methods had made books cheap and abundant, the novel form was on the rise, and suddenly everyone was reading. The best-selling titles were the most sensational true-crime stories. Even Dickens and Thackeray, both at the beginning of their careers, fell under the spell of these tales--Dickens publicly admiring them, Thackeray rejecting them. One such phenomenon was William Harrison Ainsworth's Jack Sheppard, the story of an unrepentant criminal who escaped the gallows time and again. When Courvoisier finally confessed his guilt, he would cite this novel in his defense. Murder By the Book combines the thrilling true-crime story with a illuminating account of the rise of the novel form and the battle for its early soul between the most famous writers of the time. It is a superbly researched, vividly written, fascinating read from first to last"--

Contents:

A last walk -- The crime -- This nightmare of a book -- The play -- The investigation -- The trial -- In the Stone Jug -- The execution -- The aftermath -- Postscript : unanswered questions.

Subject Term:

Murder -- England -- London.

Murder in literature

Publication Info:

New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2019.

Subject:

Murder -- England -- London.

Murder in literature

True crime stories.

Courvoisier, François Benjamin, -1840 -- Trials, litigation, etc.

Russell, William, Lord, 1767-1840

Ainsworth, William Harrison, 1805-1882. Jack Sheppard.

Courvoisier, François Benjamin, d. 1840

Ainsworth, W. Harrison (William Harrison), 1805-1882

Ainsworth, W. H. (William Harrison), 1805-1882

Ainsworth, Harrison, 1805-1882

Ainworth, W. Harrison (William Harrison), 1805-1882

Ticheburn, Cheviot, 1805-1882

SAILS ISBN:

9780525520399

Available:

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Summary

"Enthralling . . . A page-turner that can hold its own with any one of the many murder-minded podcasts out there."
--Jezebel

From the acclaimed biographer--the fascinating, little-known story of a Victorian-era murder that rocked literary London, leading Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, and Queen Victoria herself to wonder: Can a novel kill?

In May 1840, Lord William Russell, well known in London's highest social circles, was found with his throat cut. The brutal murder had the whole city talking. The police suspected Russell's valet, Courvoisier, but the evidence was weak. The missing clue, it turned out, lay in the unlikeliest place: what Courvoisier had been reading. In the years just before the murder, new printing methods had made books cheap and abundant, the novel form was on the rise, and suddenly everyone was reading. The best-selling titles were the most sensational true-crime stories. Even Dickens and Thackeray, both at the beginning of their careers, fell under the spell of these tales--Dickens publicly admiring them, Thackeray rejecting them. One such phenomenon was William Harrison Ainsworth's Jack Sheppard , the story of an unrepentant criminal who escaped the gallows time and again. When Lord William's murderer finally confessed his guilt, he would cite this novel in his defense. Murder By the Book combines this thrilling true-crime story with an illuminating account of the rise of the novel form and the battle for its early soul among the most famous writers of the time. It is superbly researched, vividly written, and captivating from first to last.

Reviews (4)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Biographer Harman (Charlotte BrontA«: A Fiery Heart) effectively uses a novelist's approach to recreate a now obscure 1840 English murder case that was a sensation at the time. Lord William Russell, uncle to the secretary of state for the colonies, was found in the bedroom of his London home with his throat slit. But while the wound was horrific, almost severing Lord Russell's head, oddly there were no bloodstains anywhere besides the bed. The crime panicked the upper classes, who wondered, if the victim had not been "safe in his bed, in the most exclusive and privileged residential enclave" in England, who was? Although some household items were missing, the evidence of theft was equivocal, leading the affluent to fear that the murder may have been motivated by underclass hatred of the privileged. The police focused on the theory that the killer was a servant, and charged Lord William's new valet, FranA§ois Courvoisier, who eventually confessed to his attorneys and was executed after a trial. By exploring concerns about the glorification of criminals in the fiction of the day and addressing some lingering mysteries, such as whether Courvoisier had an accomplice, Harman adds depth to a fascinating true crime narrative. Agent: Zoe Waldie, Rogers, Coleridge & White. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Guardian Review

Did one novel written in 1839 inspire a lurid murder and an assassination attempt on Queen Victoria? As Leonard Bast discovers in Howards End when a heavy shelf collapses on him, books can kill. Can they also inspire killers? Mark David Chapman, who murdered John Lennon, was carrying a copy of The Catcher in the Rye when arrested. Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, was thought (by the FBI) to have been inspired by Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent. Anthony Burgess, John Fowles, Stephen King, Isaac Asimov, Anne Rice and Bret Easton Ellis all faced accusations of writing novels that caused copycat crimes. Motivation is a complex matter. Still, stories of this kind keep cropping up (in a lurid variation, the Chinese crime writer Liu Yongbiao was recently sentenced to death for committing murders that inspired novels he wrote years later), and it turns out they're nothing new. In May 1840, Lord William Russell was found dead in bed at his house in Mayfair, London: his throat had been cut so deeply that his head was almost severed. News of the murder travelled fast ("This is really too horrid!" Queen Victoria wrote in her diary) and set off panic among the well-to-do: that an inoffensive, elderly widower could be murdered in bed seemed evidence of an "unfortunate spirit of insubordination" in a London destabilised by immigrants, criminal gangs and an increasingly vocal working class. While police searched for the culprit, contemporary authors came under fire for writing "Newgate novels" that glamorised crime and violence, with one novelist, William Harrison Ainsworth, singled out. Ainsworth was a good-looking lawyer from Manchester who moved to London to pursue a literary career and found fame with his 1834 novel Ro okwood, which featured the highwayman Dick Turpin. The young Dickens admired it and, along with his future biographer, John Forster, became a close friend of Ainsworth. Even greater success followed in 1839 with Jack Sheppard, also based on a real-life criminal: pirated editions reached a wide audience and so did stage versions, with half a dozen productions (including a pantomime) put on in London. This time, though, Ainsworth found critics turning against him. "All the Chartists in the land are less dangerous than this nightmare of a book," was one verdict, while Thackeray denounced Ainsworth for nurturing a public appetite for thievery, murder and prostitution. The most contentious scene in Jack Sheppard has the protagonist and his accomplice slitting the throat of a victim during a bungled burglary - just as happened with Russell. There was one key difference, however: the real-life murder had the hallmarks of an inside job, all the more so when valuables were found behind a skirting board. Suspicion fell on the servants: the cook, Mary Hannell; the maid, Sarah Mancer; and the valet, the Swiss-born François Courvoisier. Might one of them have done the deed out of malice, resentment or greed? Or could Courvoisier's friend Henry Carr, who visited the house the day of the murder, be responsible? And what of reports that a naked figure had been seen in the window that night? Crowds gathered outside the house as the police pursued their investigation. Lurid reports, wild speculation and lamentable verse filled the press. The painter Edwin Landseer (a friend of Russell) suffered a nervous collapse. Five weeks after the murder, moral panic about a subversive new underclass intensified when an 18-year-old from Birmingham, Edward Oxford, fired and missed at Victoria and Albert as their coach drove along Constitution Hill. Deemed insane, Oxford was sent to Broadmoor rather than executed. But Jack Sheppard was a novel he'd read. And several other criminals brought to trial for petty offences claimed that reading the book, or seeing the play, had corrupted them. A week after the assassination attempt, Russell's alleged killer was found guilty. Even before the verdict, the person in question (easily discovered, but no spoiler here) owned up to their defence counsel, whose failure to disclose this to the judge incensed many observers, including Dickens. Several variations on the original confession followed, including the claim that "perusal of the romance of Jack Sheppard " had planted the idea. If this was a bid for clemency, it didn't work. The hanging took place at Newgate in July. An estimated 40,000 spectators came to see it, some paying to watch from nearby windows and roofs. Dickens and Thackeray wrote of their self-disgust at being among the crowd and campaigned for a change in the law. Claire Harman doesn't claim to have unearthed an unknown Victorian murder mystery (she includes an extensive bibliography). And since the case was quickly solved and put to bed, her narrative lacks the twists and turns of Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr Whicher. But she tells the story with clarity and vigour, and her postscript explores a number of unanswered questions: could others have been involved, for example, and might the removal of Russell's truss point to a sexual motive? She also notes one fascinating legacy. Among the many letters the police received after the murder was one from a Norfolk surgeon, who had noticed that "every individual has a peculiar arrangement" on "the grain of the skin", and who suggested that impressions left on sheets and pillows might lead to the culprit. The letter was ignored, but kept in a file from which it was unearthed 50 years later - and the idea of fingerprint identification took off. - Blake Morrison.

Kirkus Review

An endlessly fascinating, bookish tale of true crime in Victorian England.In May 1840, writes literary biographer Harman (Charlotte Bront: A Fiery Heart, 2016), Londoners were shocked to learn of the gruesome killing of an "unobtrusive minor aristocrat" whose throat was cut. The crime occurred in an era when London was full of immigrants and revolutionary and counterrevolutionary movements were roiling about, but suspicion eventually settled on Lord William Russell's valet. Charles Dickens was then well embarked on his novel Barnaby Rudge, which opens with a similarly shocking if not quite so grisly murder. Though, as Harman notes, both he and a young illustrator named William Makepeace Thackeray took notice of the killing, neither could imagine how it would enfold them and other London literati. As visitors came to the site of "ghoulish tourism," so penny dreadfuls were flourishing, courtesy of the likes of Edward Bulwer's Paul Clifford, a "fictionalized account of the real-life murderer Eugene Aram," and William Harrison Ainsworth's Jack Sheppard, with its not ignoble but still criminal hero. These "Newgate novels" were immensely popular, though critics deemed them "a class of bad books, got up for a bad public." They were also influential, it seems, for the valet claimed that he committed the foul deed under the sway of Ainsworth's book. That defense didn't quite work, writes Harman; the perp didn't succeed in "offloading responsibility for his actions onto the year's most notorious youth-corrupter" but instead wound up at the end of a rope. Though full of literary implicationBulwer, for instance, became Bulwer-Lytton, of "it was a dark and stormy night" fame, while Ainsworth is forgottenthe story hangs, beg pardon, on threads of murder most foul and its sequelae: Did the valet act alone? Was Lord William already dead when his throat was slit? What dark secret lay behind the killing?Lovers of Drood, Sherlock, Jack the Ripper, and their kin real and fictional will relish the gruesome details of this entertaining book. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

New York Review of Books Review

DON'T LET ANYONE tell you that a preoccupation with reallife murders and murderers is morbid. Morbid is dashing off to Paris every other week to gape at the corpses on public display at the city morgue, which is what Charles Dickens and his friend Wilkie Collins did for fun. Morbid is expecting an entire nation to wear black because you are personally in deepest mourning, which is what Queen Victoria did when her beloved Prince Albert died. Morbid is collecting 19th-century deathbed portraits - although I doubt those half-dozen vintage photos on my desk constitute a "collection." Speaking of Queen Victoria, she was scandalized by the violent death of Lord William Russell, as recounted by Claire Harman in MURDER BY THE BOOK: The Crime That Shocked Dickens's London (Knopf, $26.95). "This IS really too horrid! " the young monarch reportedly wrote in her diary about the events of May 6,1840. "It is almost an unparalleled thing for a person of Ld William's rank, to be killed like that," she remarked, referring to the manner of his death. As Harman reports it: "His throat cut so deeply that the windpipe was sliced right through and the head almost severed." The Metropolitan Police soon arrested François Courvoisier, Lord William's new valet, who was rushed to trial and speedily hanged before a crowd of around 40,000. (A hard death, but not as cruel as the customary penalty of being drawn and quartered.) Harman, bless her, avoids the bogus stratagem of inventing dialogue for historical characters, relying instead on authentic literary sources like "Going to See a Man Hanged," William Makepeace Thackeray's first-person account of the hurly-burly of Courvoisier's public execution. "Many young dandies are there with mustaches and cigars," he dispassionately observes, along with "quiet fat family-parties, of simple honest tradesmen and their wives, as we fancy, who are looking on with the greatest imaginable calmness, and sipping their tea." Leaving those blasé spectators to sip their tea in the shadow of the gibbet, Harman turns an eye to those newly literate Londoners of humble origins who craved something exciting to read. Something like the so-called Newgate novels that romanticized bold crimes and celebrated the audacious criminals who committed them. For those thrill seekers there was "Jack Sheppard," a popular potboiler by William Harrison Ainsworth romanticizing a real-life 18th-century highwayman. This dashing rogue, like John Gay's Macheath revered as a folk hero, became a role model for young men eager to prove their manhood - or at least dream of it - through criminal derring-do. Although their heroes were celebrated in song and story, this fashionable "felon literature" was excoriated by literary critics for its "corrosive effect on readers' morals" and "pernicious influences" on youth. Sounds familiar. when did the midwest lose its wholesome reputation? In WHERE MONSTERS HIDE: Sex, Murder, and Madness in the Midwest (Kensington, paper, $15.95) M. William Phelps makes Iron River, Mich., sound like a cesspool of depravity and murder. Before the rot sets in, this small town seems "quiet. Secluded. Wide open. Generally flat. Friendly. Homey. And totally Midwestern." That notion evaporates once we meet Kelly Cochran, a player who collects men like toys and tosses them aside when they break. "It was a game to her," according to Phelps, who takes a more forgiving tone with the men (including Kelly's long-suffering husband) who put up with her shenanigans. So, Kelly is shameless - but is she a murderer? That's what Laura Frizzo, the "street-tough and strong-willed" police chief, intends to find out when one of Kelly's boytoys, clean-cut Chris Regan, goes missing. The case isn't all that complicated, but Phelps knows how to work it, mainly by fleshing out Kelly's character with prurient details about her sexual escapades and examples of her maddening game-playing. "A person does not forget where she dumped a dismembered human body," one fed-up detective grumbles. life is cheap in the Mexican border city that inspired Dan Werb to write CITY OF OMENS: A Search for the Missing Women of the Borderlands (Bloomsbury, $28). Hundreds of women die each year in the city of Tijuana and along the highway of the Baja coast, many of them from domestic violence, drug overdoses and H.I.V.-related diseases associated with the sex trade. Other bodies, often teenagers, turn up "bound and mutilated." Still others simply disappear. The author refers to all these deaths as "femicide - an epidemic of death visited upon the region's women solely because they are women." Werb attributes much of the region's social and economic ills to the collapse of Tijuana's thriving vice economy after 2009, when the city became off-limits to American sailors and Marines. No longer protected by the Yankees, working girls became fair game for predators along the border. "Their lack of income from a dwindling clientele pool forced them to choose johns who were sick or crazy, their potential for violence flaring like a beacon." An epidemiologist by profession, Werb often lapses into science-speak that bogs down the narrative. But he's a good interviewer and he respects the voices of his sources. One primary informant, a prostitute named Susi, speaks expressively about some of the friends she has lost: La Paniqueada, murdered in a hotel room by ajohn; Angie, hit by a car as she was running from the police; La Lobita, killed by her boyfriend; La Osa, who died of AIDS - and the friend she never speaks of: La Paloma, the Dove, one of the many women who were "levantarlo" (disappeared). These are only a few of the latest count (in 2013) of 1,200plus women who die under suspicious circumstances every year in the Mexican state of Baja California, but Werb says they represent "a microcosm of the population at risk of succumbing to the epidemic of femicide" and he's determined to give them back some humanity. HALLiE RUBENHOLD writes about another group of forgotten women in THE FIVE: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $27). The main fallacy Rubenhold wants to rectify is the accepted notion that Jack's victims were all prostitutes working in the alleys of Whitechapel. But from the position of their bodies alone, it seems obvious to the author that the victims were all homeless and sleeping rough, not trolling for customers. And while the sensationalist newspapers were quick to identify them as streetwalkers plying their "hideous trade," even the police weren't so sure about that, acknowledging "the difficulties in distinguishing a prostitute and her behavior from that of other poor, working-class women and their behavior." By going into their individual histories in great detail, Rubenhold makes a convincing case that, while each of the Ripper's victims might have been "a broken woman" or "a fallen woman," there's no evidence that they were doing business when they were killed. William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, took a more charitable view of such street people. "To very many, even of those who live in London, it may be news that there are so many hundreds who sleep out of doors every night," he wrote in his study of poverty, "In Darkest England and the Way Out." "These homeless, hungry people are, however, there, but being broken-spirited folk for the most part they seldom make their voices audible." In giving these women their voices back, Rubenhold, a social historian, has produced a significant study of how poor and working-class women subsisted in an unforgiving age. Mainly, they got married, hopefully to someone who could hold down a job to support them and their large families. But they were hardly the slatterns history has made of them. Before falling on hard times, Elisabeth Stride once owned a coffeehouse. Kate Eddowes was quite musical; when her cousin was murdered, she composed a ballad in memoriam. Polly Nichols, a blacksmith's daughter who once worked as a maid, was schooled until the age of 15 and could surely read and write. Annie Chapman, the daughter of a valet, married a gentleman's coachman and lived with him and their children on his master's grand estate. Of all the Ripper's victims, she lived the most comfortable life before losing all those comforts when she became an alcoholic. Drink seems to have been the main reason Jack's victims slipped down the social ladder and wound up alone in the slums of Whitechapel. ("The female drunkard was considered an abomination," the author reminds us.) But the death of a husband, or a husband's loss of a job, could change any woman's fortunes overnight. Rubenhold doesn't transform these women into church ladies, but she's determined to save their sullied reputations. "The notion that the victims were 'only prostitutes,' perpetuates the belief that there are good women and bad women," she writes. "It suggests that there is an acceptable standard of female behavior, and those who deviate from it are fit to be punished." EVERYBODY LOVESA BAD GIRL - in Crime stories, if not in life. One person who meets that description is Florence Burns, the subject of Virginia A. McConnell's juicy biography, THE BELLE OF BEDFORD AVENUE: The Sensational Brooks-Burns Murder in Turn-of-theCentury New York (Kent State University, paper, $24.95). Coming of age at the turn of the 20 th century, the American-born sons and daughters of immigrants were not so keen on living by the austere moral codes their parents brought over from the home countries. There were so many amusing enticements in New York City: dance halls, gin mills and roadhouses for the adventures, the amusements at Coney Island for excitement, and fast cars with darkened back seats for sex. Florence Wallace Burns was one of those young rebels, her defiant behavior placing her at the extreme end of the spectrum. This wild child left school (under a cloud) after the eighth grade, got tossed out of the Sheepshead Bay Race Track for smoking, and hung out with the Bedford Gang, a group of bad boys. At one point, her exasperated father hired a private detective who found the poor man's errant daughter at a dancing pavilion in Coney Island. And on top of all that, she was boy-crazy. She started dating early and had a serious boyfriend by the time she was 16. Even at that young age there were signs that Florence was more than willful. When the boyfriend broke off that relationship, she hounded him so relentlessly that his parents had to send him away to prep school. Years later, when another boyfriend, Walter Brooks, rejected her, she shot him dead. She got away with it, too, because of what McConnell smartly calls "the Unwritten Law." By that reckoning, "once it was revealed that Walter Brooks had refused to marry her after supposedly taking her virginity and possibly getting her pregnant, the Unwritten Law was a subtext in the case." The thing is, that defense wasn't true. Florence hadn't been a virgin, she wasn't pregnant, and when Walter became involved with someone else, she made her intentions clear: "I will kill Walter unless he marries me," she told his own mother. Having done the deed, Florence was put on trial, but so thoroughly had she bewitched the jury, they acquitted her in less than an hour. "With such unanimity, it is not hard to imagine the jurors all taking out cigars or pipes or cigarettes to enjoy a smoke and give the illusion of an actual deliberation." McConnell's droll speculation offers a fair example of her extremely readable writing style, which is often sharp, but never nasty. She doesn't even make a big deal out of Florence's habit of carrying a gun in her muff - maybe not to the trial, but years later, she drew a piece from her muff and challenged the officer who was trying to arrest her: "One false move and there'll be one less cop." Spoken like a true lady. what would you do if you honestly believed that the world was on the verge of "a catastrophe of biblical proportions, one in which only the well armed and well prepared would survive"? Would robbing a bank seem like a smart move? That's what five California dudes do in norco '80: The True Story of the Most Spectacular Bank Robbery in American History (Counterpoint, $26), Peter Houlahan's alarming account of a bank heist that rocked the country in 1980 and reflected "the peculiar Zeitgeist of that decade" in all its cockeyed drama. George Smith's "evangelical zeal and deep belief in End Times theology" was the driving force behind the calamitous botched robbery on May 9,1980, of the Security Pacific Bank in Norco, Calif. A true believer in the coming apocalypse, George was desperate for money to build a secure bunker against the end of days. So he and his friend Chris Harven decided to recruit some guys they knew to rob a bank. As George later explained to an F.B.I. agent, he planned the entire robbery himself. "I told them. I cased the bank. I made the bombs. I did all that." Not his fault, really, but everything that could go wrong went wrong. Somebody forgot to lock the door, so bank customers kept coming inside. A helpful passing motorist stopped to put out the fire they had set as a distraction. Finally, through sheer incompetence, they find themselves with a hostage on their hands and no idea what to do with him. For a first-time writer, Houlahan sure knows how to dramatize a scene. His cinematic treatment of the robbery itself reads like wildfire, the fatal shootout with the police ends in colorful chaos, and the huge manhunt through San Bernardino National Forest conducted by "Hunt & Kill Teams" is a nail-biter. "Hundreds of heavily armed men were arriving with helicopters, dog teams, mounted search and rescue squads," along with the helicopter gunship and night vision goggles supplied by the military. But for my money, there's nothing quite as unnerving as the meticulously detailed descriptions of the militarygrade weaponry put into action throughout the story. Just for starters, there's a regulation .38 revolver, a modified-choke Wingmaster shotgun, a Colt "Shorty" AR-15, a Heckler .308 and, for some reason, a samurai sword. Gun control, anyone? MARILYN STASIO has covered crime fiction for the Book Review since 1988. Her column appears twice a month.

Excerpts

Introduction Early in the morning of Wednesday 6 May 1840, on an ultra-respectable Mayfair street one block to the east of Park Lane, a footman called Young answered the door to a panic-stricken young woman, Sarah Mancer, the maid of the house opposite. Fetch a surgeon, fetch a constable, she cried; her master, Lord William Russell, was lying in bed with his throat cut. It was thought at first to be a suicide; that is what the young Queen was told at noon, but later that day when her Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord John Russell, arrived at the Palace it was with the melancholy news that his uncle had in fact been murdered, his throat cut so deeply that the windpipe was sliced right through and the head almost severed. The motive appeared to be robbery, as the drawing room of Lord William's house had been turned upside down and a pile of valuables had been discovered near the front door. But the brutality of the crime was what struck the 21-year old monarch: 'This is really too horrid' she wrote in her diary; 'It is almost an unparalleled thing for a person of Ld William's rank, to be killed like that'. Lord William's rank did indeed make him a notable corpse, however quiet and unobjectionable a live man he had been. Third and youngest son of the Marquess of Tavistock, he had passed the thirty years since the death of his wife mostly in travel and connoisseurship. He was known at Gore House, Holland House, the Royal Academy and at the Palace itself, but his status and means were nothing to those of his nephew Francis, the seventh Duke of Bedford (owner of Woburn Abbey and its priceless art collection), nor of his nephew Lord John Russell, who was one of the most influential politicians in the land. The house in Norfolk Street where he lived alone was modest by Mayfair standards and Lord William kept only three servants, a maid, a cook and a valet. Two other employees, a coachman and groom, lived off the premises. Who would want to butcher in his sleep this unobtrusive minor aristocrat, with his afternoons at Brooks's and his restrained widower habits? In the newspaper articles that were about to appear, no one could find much to say about Lord William's 'placid and benignant' life and 'unoffending days' as a continental traveller and absentee M.P. 'Aged and respected' he was called in the Times , like a cheese. But as details emerged of the murder and the bungled burglary that seemed to have provoked it, fears grew that they might be symptoms of something more widespread and insidious. If such a person as Lord William was not safe in his bed, who could be? Such was the panic provoked by the crime, one newspaper declared, that 'many families at the west-end, and more particularly aged persons living as the deceased had done in comparative retirement, entertain, perhaps for the first time, a feeling of insecurity'. These were indeed nervous times for the ruling classes. London in 1840 was teeming with immigrants, the unemployed and a burgeoning working class who were more literate and organised than ever before. The winter just past had been one of mass rallies by Chartists demanding universal suffrage that in some places had turned into bloody riots and Lord Brougham had warned at the opening of Parliament in January that the country might in fact be on the brink of revolution, so marked was the change taking place in the disposition of the common people towards 'all men in power'. When over two hundred Chartist demonstrators were arrested and twenty one found guilty of high treason after the uprising in Newport on 4 November 1839, the ancient and barbarous punishment of death by being hung, drawn and quartered seemed suitable to make an example of those convicted. Was Lord William Russell's murder informed by the same 'spirit of insubordination', some people wondered? Class boundaries were changing rapidly; had he been chosen as a victim for what he represented as much as what he owned? The crime soon had all London talking, from the thieves' dens of Soho to Buckingham Palace itself, and for the first time, perhaps, politicians weren't the only people being blamed for rousing up a volatile underclass. As the investigation into Lord William Russell's death proceeded, several of the leading writers of the day were alarmed to find themselves suddenly under fire for having written fictions that were simply too popular and too convincing. Given the chance to mould the taste of a mass audience, many of them were now accused of pandering to the lowest, with books full of violent excitements and vulgarity, that could all too easily lead susceptible readers astray. But to understand how the gory events in Norfolk Street were linked to this panic about 'low' culture, and one bestselling book in particular, we need to go back to the evening of Lord William's murder and follow his movements on his last day alive. Excerpted from Murder by the Book: The Crime That Shocked Dickens's London by Claire Harman All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.