Before the detective novel arrived in the mid-19th century, readers fed their appetite for crime and punishment with Newgate novels. Published in the 1830s and 1840s but set 100 years earlier, these tremendously popular works recounted the adventures of both real-life and fictional criminals whose deeds eventually led them to Newgate Prison. The most successful of these novels – almost all by writers virtually unknown today – was William Harrison Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard (1839), which depicted the many thefts and prison breaks of its hero. In the weeks following its publication, nine London theatres staged dramatisations of Jack Sheppard.
Criminals in Newgate novels are glamorous and daring, even noble; the authorities are misguided at best and tyrannical at worst. Critics fretted that such portrayals would destroy the morals of the newly literate working classes. In the summer of 1840, their worries seemed confirmed. Lord William Russell, uncle to the Duke of Bedford, was found in bed with his throat slit. The crime was set up to look like a burglary gone wrong, but the police realised that the murderer had to be one of the household, and arrested Lord William’s young Swiss valet, François Courvoisier. Having been convicted, Courvoisier declared that Jack Sheppard – both the novel and its theatrical adaptations – had inspired him to kill his master.
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