Murder by the Book Quotes

“Dickens was already planning a novel of his own which would develop several of the themes in “A Visit to Newgate,” to be called Gabriel Vardon, the Locksmith of London, set during the period of the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots in the 1780s. But while Sketches by Boz was being prepared for the press, he was diverted by a request to write some stories to accompany a set of sporting prints. The result was The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, the first and least typical of all the great novels which were to flow subsequently”
― Claire Harman, Murder by the Book: The Crime That Shocked Dickens's London

“The titles that went down spectacularly well with this new mass audience were, predictably, the most sensational ones, like Bulwer’s Paul Clifford (a gripping outlaw tale, published in 1830*2), Bulwer’s fictionalized account of the real-life murderer Eugene Aram (1832), or Charles Whitehead’s Lives and Exploits of English Highwaymen, Pirates and Robbers (1834). They spawned a whole school of criminal romance,”
― Claire Harman, Murder by the Book: The Crime That Shocked Dickens's London