Wilkie Collins by Andrew Lycett - review

In the outrageous 2010 press hounding of the innocent schoolteacher Christopher Jefferies over the murder of his young female tenant (of which a neighbour, Vincent Tabak, was later convicted and over which the guilty newspapers later shelled out punitive sums), the Sun produced, as suspicious facts, that Jefferies was ‘obsessed by death’, and ‘scared the kids’ in his classroom. He had, for example, exposed his pupils to the ‘Victorian murder novel’ The Moonstone.

As an English teacher at a high-ranked school, Jefferies would surely have prescribed my edition of Wilkie Collins’s novel— the only one, if I may toot my trumpet, to make comprehensive use of the manuscript. Pulp the edition, I thought with a shudder, before it kills again.

The Victorians believed that crime novels could, indeed, be crime-inducing things. In 1840, the Swiss valet François-Benjamin Courvoisier, slit the throat of his 70-year-old master, Lord William Russell. The motive was theft. The murderer was briskly tried, convicted and hanged outside Newgate prison on 6 July 1840. Forty thousand Londoners turned up to watch as the warm summer morning broke for the ‘Hang Fair’ (as such merry occasions were called). Also present were Dickens and Thackeray, who had bought themselves window views. Why had he done it? Courvoisier pleaded it was a crime novel, Jack Sheppard, written by Harrison Ainsworth (a close acquaintance of Dickens and Thackeray), which had inspired him to homicide. It triggered a familiar English moral panic. Ainsworth’s novel, the papers thundered, was a ‘cut-throat’s manual’.

Such panics bubbled up through the century. It would be preferable, the Times said, to throw acid in a child’s face than for Zola’s filthy French fiction to be translated into English. The publisher, Henry Vizetelly, who had committed the dire offence against British decency, was sent to prison. The cruel sentence killed the decent old bookman.