Newgate Prison had rarely seen anything quite like it. On 6 July 1840, a crowd of 40,000 people – among them aristocrats, politicians and world-famous novelists – descended on one of London’s oldest jails to savour the grisliest of spectacles: a convict being put to death.
The man condemned to hang was a 23-year-old Swiss valet named François Benjamin Courvoisier, and his trial for cutting his employer Lord William Russell’s throat in his fashionable Mayfair residence had electrified the capital for weeks. A rapt public had followed the case’s every twist and turn, from Courvoisier’s protestations of innocence to the game-changing revelation that he had deposited silverware stolen from Russell’s household to a Madame Piolaine. By the time Courvoisier was led to the scaffold to, as one report put it, a cacophony of “hootings, hissings, yells and whistling”, his was one of the best-known
