Icho68 reviewed Murder by the Book by Claire Harman
Murder by the book
4 stars
This is an account of a nineteenth-century murder and moral panic. The murder is a case of upstairs-downstairs violence, the moral panic a fright about the pernicious influence of crime fiction, focused on William Harrison Atherton's "Jack Sheppard," a fictionalized biography of a notorious criminal. Harman argues that the murder and the controversy affected the direction of Victorian literature, including the careers of Dickens and Thackeray. To me, the connection between the crime and the book felt thinner than advertised, but the lit-history bits were especially interesting.
This is an account of a nineteenth-century murder and moral panic. The murder is a case of upstairs-downstairs violence, the moral panic a fright about the pernicious influence of crime fiction, focused on William Harrison Atherton's "Jack Sheppard," a fictionalized biography of a notorious criminal. Harman argues that the murder and the controversy affected the direction of Victorian literature, including the careers of Dickens and Thackeray. To me, the connection between the crime and the book felt thinner than advertised, but the lit-history bits were especially interesting.