Murder by the Book: A Sensational Chapter in Victorian Crime
- Submitting institution
-
University of Durham
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 128682
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Penguin Books
- ISBN
- 9780241346945
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- -
- Year of publication
- 2018
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
-
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- I became aware of the murder of Lord William Russell while researching the life of Charlotte Brontë: it was one of the most notorious news stories of 1840 and kept appearing in the letters and journalism of her contemporaries, especially Thackeray and Dickens. The man who was eventually found guilty of the murder, Lord William’s valet, claimed in the last days before his execution to have been inspired by William Harrison Ainsworth’s bestselling novel, Jack Sheppard. Ascertaining the truth of this, and assessing its significance involved reading the published and unpublished works of many early Victorians, including the Queen herself, Ainsworth, Dickens, Thackeray, Elizabeth Barrett and Edgar Allen Poe. It also included research into contemporary newspapers, legal archives and police records, in which I found a great deal of unpublished material, including a scrapbook kept by one of the attorneys on the case, full of evidence statements that were not used in the inquest or trial. I was thus able to build up a highly original picture of daily life in one Mayfair street in 1840 and to reassess the evidence that did go forward in this new context. The resulting book became a mixture of true crime and literary history, with a deliberate emphasis on the narrative potential of the material, its profound ‘human interest’ and its relevance to ongoing moral debates about sensational entertainment.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -