The Murderer of Warren Street

'A Victorian whodunit... Swashbuckling adventure and political thriller… A magnificent book.' Francis Wheen, The Oldie

In December 1854, Emmanuel Barthélemy visited 73 Warren Street in the heart of radical London for the very last time. Within half an hour, two men were dead... This is the true story of one of nineteenth-century London’s most notorious murderers and revolutionaries.

The newspapers of Victorian England were soon in a frenzy. Who was this foreigner come to British shores to slay two upstanding subjects? As Oxford historian, Marc Mulholland, has uncovered, Barthélemy was no ordinary criminal. Rather, here was a dedicated activist fighting for the cause of the oppressed worker, a fugitive shaped by the storms of revolution, counterrevolution and a society in the midst of huge transformation.

Following in Barthélemy’s footsteps, Mulholland leads us from the barricades of the French capital and the icy rooftops of a Parisian jail to the English fireside of Karl Marx, a misty duelling ground and the dangling noose of London's Newgate prison, shining a light into a dark underworld of conspiracy, insurrection and fatal idealism.

The Murderer of Warren Street is a thrilling portrait of a troubled man in troubled times - full of resonance for our own terrorised age.