In the bedroom, with a carving-knife

Early on the morning of 6 May 1840, a young housemaid in a respectable Mayfair street discovered that her master, the elderly and mildly eccentric peer Lord William Russell, had been murdered in his bed. His throat had been hacked at like a joint of meat, slicing through the windpipe and almost severing his head. It turned out not to be much of a whodunit. Within a few days, a young Swiss-born valet in the house named François Courvoisier was taken away for questioning, and faced by a pile of circumstantial evidence eventually he confessed to the crime. The real question is why he did it.

The answer that shocked everyone at the time was that he was following the lead of Jack Sheppard, the thief and prison-breaker who had recently featured as the hero of a wildly successful novel by William Harrison Ainsworth, and then had become a cult hero with working-class audiences who flocked to see theatrical adaptations of the story. As late as 1851, Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor included an interview with a boy who claimed that he became a purse-snatcher after being ‘remarkably pleased’ by the glamorous life of crime depicted in one version.

The idea that stories of crime might encourage servants to commit crimes of their own was especially disturbing to contemplate in the nervous political atmosphere of 1840, when working-class crowds often seemed to be on the verge of turning into a French-style revolutionary mob. Understandably, Queen Victoria followed the case of Lord Russell’s murder very closely, writing in her diary that it was ‘really too horrid’, but no doubt similar thoughts floated through the heads of many householders as they watched their maids quietly polishing the silver. After all, it was only a small step from slitting your master’s throat to sticking it on a pike.