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    Murder by the Book: The Crime That Shocked Dickens's London
    Unavailable
    Murder by the Book: The Crime That Shocked Dickens's London
    Unavailable
    Murder by the Book: The Crime That Shocked Dickens's London
    Audiobook7 hours

    Murder by the Book: The Crime That Shocked Dickens's London

    Written by Claire Harman

    Narrated by Andy Secombe

    2.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateMar 26, 2019
    ISBN9781984840110
    Unavailable
    Murder by the Book: The Crime That Shocked Dickens's London
    Author

    Claire Harman

    Claire Harman's first book, a biography of the writer Sylvia Townsend Warner, won the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys prize in 1990, and her second, Fanny Burney: A Biography was shortlisted for the Whitbread Award. Since 2003 she has been teaching a course in biography at Columbia University and lives in New York City and Oxford.

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