![]() ![]() ![]() When Maud Drennan arrives at the west London home of elderly Cathal Flood as the latest in a long line of underpaid carers, she discovers a pair of photographs in which faces have been burned through. ![]() The result is a fascinating portrait of Victorian London amid the rising popularity of the novel. Harman’s meticulous research places the murder within the literary context of the day, from Dickens’s fascination with true crime to Thackeray’s repudiation of it. When Russell’s valet, François Courvoisier, was arrested, the evidence seemed weak until police began to investigate Courvoisier’s obsession with sensational true-crime stories, which had recently become readily and cheaply available. The murder of Lord William Russell in 1840 was a national scandal, sending a wave of hysteria across London: a member of the landed classes murdered in his bed with a cut to the throat that had almost severed his head. ![]()
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