![]() ![]() ![]() At the time of the murder, a new class of novels proliferated - ones that "celebrated the native cunning, ambition and potential of the ordinary man" through gory tales of highwaymen, robbers, and murderers. When Russell's valet, a Swissman named François Benjamin Courvoisier, was convicted of the crime, it both reminded the upper classes that they were at the mercy of the help and also opened a national debate over the dangers of violence in literature. (She would survive an assassination attempt a few weeks later). "It is almost an unparalleled thing for a person of Ld William's rank, to be killed like that," Queen Victoria wrote in her diary. It was 1840, and Lord William Russell had lived quietly, with no apparent enemies: "'Aged and respected,' he was called in the Times, like a cheese," writes Claire Harman in her wry, sharp Murder By The Book: The Crime That Shocked Dickens's London. The scene could have come from a novel: an unlocked door, a screaming maid, and an "unobtrusive minor aristocrat" lying in bed with his throat cut. ![]()
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