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 Daniel 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.
Murder by the Book has such an interesting premise: A burglary that ended with the gruesome murder of an upper-class gent in his own bed is ultimately blamed, by the tried and condemned murderer himself, on a novel that seemed to glorify the devil-may-care lifestyle of the rapscallion vagabond thief. Apparently while researching a previous book on Charlotte Brontë, noted biographer Claire Harman kept coming across references to this shocking murder and its ties to the Victorian literary world; and while the concept and the details are, indeed, intriguing enough, Harman doesn't quite create a rewarding read out of the material. This book feels both too dense and too shallow; there are too many names and we don't get to know any of the people behind them well; there are too many small (and insignificant) details and frequent conjecture; and it all comes across as a little dull. Excellently researched, not satisfyingly executed. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
So much had been written about the contagion of Ainsworth's novel, so many column inches had been expended on quantifying the evil impact of the theatrical and the broadside versions and the shows at the penny gaffs, that the public had got used to seeing Ainsworth's book blamed for a sudden and steep increase in petty criminality, but having responsibility for a murder placed at its door took criticism of the book into a different stratum.It was interesting to read of the rise of both literacy and the accessibility of cheap reading material in Victorian London, and subsequently, novelists' quest to feed the demand for exciting reads. One trend was to novelise true crime in the “flash” vernacular of lower-class criminals, and the most popular novel to appear in this vein was William Harrison Ainsworth's Jack Sheppard: about a charming thief who uses his wits to keep one step ahead of the law and the gallows. Anauthorised theatrical adaptations of Ainsworth's story soon followed (which drove book sales, so he didn't really mind), and cheap penny dreadfuls sensationalised the basic plot even further. When criminals – from child pickpockets to a mentally ill man who tried to assassinate Queen Victoria – began to cite Jack Sheppard as the inspiration for their acts, it was hard to lay all the blame at Ainsworth's feet: he took a true story and made a good yarn out of it; many others took the story even further, making a popular folk hero out of a character who ultimately slit the throat of a victim as she lay in her own bed. Newspapers were filled with letters and articles denouncing the bad influence of these types of stories (the type of denunciations that would eventually be repeated against comic books, heavy metal music, and video games), and the giants of the literary world attempted to take back control of what sorts of stories ought to reach the public. Again, all of that was interesting, but Harman goes a bit too far by trying to develop a parallel story about this debate's influence on Dickens and Thackery; two authors who seem to get shoehorned into this book at every available opportunity:
Charles Dickens, who was living nearby in Devonshire Terrace, must have followed the unfolding news with more than usual interest. He was writing a story – Barnaby Rudge – that begins with the brutal stabbing in his bed of the elderly Reuban Haredale, by an undiscovered intruder. Life, it seemed, was imitating art. And at his desk in Great Coram Street in Bloomsbury, the young illustrator and journalist William Makepeace Thackery was bothered by the noise of the news-seller's cries outside: “Here is a man shouting out We shall have this Lord William Russell murder,” he wrote to his mother, “a nuisance and so it is the stupid town talks of nothing else.” Little did he realize how much more talk there would be in the coming months, nor how closely this crime touched his own concerns.We see how each author reacted to the trend of using flash vernacular, we read of their interest in the murder of Lord Russell and their decisions to watch his murderer's hanging (and each of their transformations into advocates against public executions). Sure, all of this is interesting to someone who likes books about books and authors, but running in parallel to a not-very-exciting police investigation, criminal trial, and attempts to fill in an unreliable confession with conjectured facts, it all felt a bit like padding. On the one hand, it felt like padding to read that Edgar Allen Poe was delighted to meet with Charles Dickens when he came to America; that Poe was inspired by the raven in Barnaby Rudge to write his most famous poem, which is quoted at length. Yet on the other, I did find it interesting to learn that Dickens' pet raven, Grip, who served as his own inspiration, was eventually stuffed and made its way to the Free Library of Philadelphia in honour of Poe. And that must be the greatest challenge in writing this kind of a book: Harman obviously did extensive research, and she can't possibly know which bits any individual reader will find interesting; put it all in and it risks feeling padded and dull.
The murder itself – along with the ensuing investigation, trial, and incarceration/execution scenes – were of even less interest to me as presented, so I really can't call this my cuppa tea. Pity: it still seems like such a winning concept. Three stars is a rounding up.
