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Murder by the Book by Claire Harman

What's It About?

It seems our society is obsessed with murder, the inner workings of the minds of criminals, their innocence or their guilt, their natures and their beings. Yet, this obsession with murder in our entertainment is by no means a new phenomenon.

Claire Harman’s Murder by the Book: The Crime That Shocked Dickens’s London (Knopf) begins with the murder of Lord William Russell, which took place in Victorian London in May of 1840. Outrage and fascination with the grisly murder was widespread, as Lord William’s throat was so deeply severed he was nearly decapitated. From low social circles to one’s occupied by royals and Charles Dickens himself, the investigation, the motive, and the trial became the talk of London that summer.

It was around this time that the popularization of the “Newgate” novel started to occur. The most notable feature of a Newgate novel is that they possess criminal protagonists. In Victorian London, it is easy to see why this was exciting for any kind of moral disruption seemed welcome in a society known for suppressing any and all carnal desire. And while Dickens himself dabbled in the genre, with Barnaby Ridge, and perhaps aspects of Oliver Twist, he soon left the genre behind as it was heavily scrutinized by higher society. As Harmon writes, “it was the blurring of moral signals in these books that alarmed critics, who thought they gave birth to something worse than bad taste.”

The central Newgate novel discussed by Harman is the one that potentially served as the blueprint to the murder of Lord William Russell. Jack Sheppard by William Harrison Ainsworth took London by storm. The protagonist, who bears the novel’s name, is a character who stands only for himself. He lives by the doctrine that stealing and criminality are worth it, even if the punishment is a hanging. The book provides motive by asserting that being a criminal is better than being an upstanding citizen in a society with the odds already stacked against you.  And perhaps this is exactly why many well-to-do Londoners disliked it so much – it was, in many ways, a political statement, a call-to-action for the lower classes of London.

What makes Harman’s work so powerful is that she doesn’t engage in the debate of censorship, on whether entertainment should challenge, make us question our norms, or meld easily into the background of existence. Instead, she side-steps around it deftly, providing an account of what happened in the aftermath of Lord William Russell’s murder, and why, thereby allowing the reader room to wonder for themselves why such an obsession with morally questionable characters is still just as fascinating almost two hundred years later.

What we can say for certain is while an obsession with murder and Justice in our entertainment lingers from the Victorian era and prior, surely, perhaps it is works like Harman’s – historical accounts that are well-researched, well-rounded, and unbiased that enable a society a bird’s eye view of the past in order to better judge behavior in the present.

 

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Murder by the Book by Claire Harman
Genre: Crime, Fiction
Author: Claire Harman
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 9780525436160
Daniel Modlin

Daniel Modlin is a freelance writer based out of NYC. He really wants to own a dog soon.

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