ABSTRACT
When François Benjamin Courvoisier confessed, in 1840, to slitting the throat of his employer Lord William Russell, the murderous valet helped to energize what has become a long-lasting controversy about class, violence, and the effects of popular culture, particularly on young people. Critics condemned, as inciting working-class violence such as Courvoisier's, texts by William Harrison Ainsworth and Edward Bulwer-Lytton—the “Newgate novels” that represented the exciting careers of criminal heroes for consumption by middle-class readers and, as in Courvoisier's case, servants who raided their employ-ers' libraries. Courvoisier's crime was inspired, the valet asserted, by his reading of Ainsworth's Jack Sheppard (1839). 1 At least since the 1728 production of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, critics had worried that crime literature influenced criminal behavior; throughout the 1840s, many among the middle classes—who saw themselves as continually threatened by working-class political agitation—found persuasive the argument that fictional violence incites real violence. By naming a novel as an accessory to a real crime, Courvoisier seemed to confirm this argument and gave to discussion about the effects of popular representations of violence an urgency that it retains in the twenty-first century. 2 When Ainsworth's novel was first pub-lished, the London Examiner had given it a brief, unfavorable, but not particularly hostile review. 3 Seven days after Courvoisier was sentenced to death, a front-page editorial in the same paper reminded readers that “he ascribes his crimes to the perusal of that detestable book, Jack Sheppard.” 4 As if to exculpate itself for not properly warning the public earlier, the Examiner editorial implies that Ainsworth's text was previously masquerading as a mere bad novel and had finally been unmasked as a seditious work: “certainly it is a publication calculated to familiarise the mind with cruelties, and to serve as the cut-throat's manual … in which character we now expect to see it adver-tised.” 5
