Execution Culture in Nineteenth Century Britain

From Public Spectacle to Hidden Ritual

Patrick Low, Helen Rutherford, Clare Sandford-Couch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367332457
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000095814
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

This edited collection offers multi-disciplinary reflections and analysis on a variety of themes centred on nineteenth century executions in the UK, many specifically related to the fundamental change in capital punishment culture as the execution moved from the public arena to behind the prison wall. By examining a period of dramatic change in punishment practice, this collection of essays provides a fresh historical perspective on nineteenth century execution culture, with a focus on Scotland, Wales and the regions of England.

From Public Spectacle to Hidden Ritual has two parts. Part 1 addresses the criminal body and the witnessing of executions in the nineteenth century, including studies of the execution crowd and executioners' memoirs, as well as reflections on the experience of narratives around capital punishment in museums in the present day. Part 2 explores the treatment of the execution experience in the print media, from the nineteenth and into the twentieth century.

The collection draws together contributions from the fields of Heritage and Museum Studies, History, Law, Legal History and Literary Studies, to shed new light on execution culture in nineteenth century Britain. This volume will be of interest to students and academics in the fields of criminology, heritage and museum studies, history, law, legal history, medical humanities and socio-legal studies.

1 ‘[T]he broken stave at the top of the ladder of England’s civilisation’¹
Representing the ending of public execution in 1868

James Gregory

Introduction

In 1868, the British state removed capital punishment from the public gaze through an ‘Act to provide for carrying out of Capital Punishment within Prisons’ (The Capital Punishment Amendment Act 1868 (31 and 32 Vict. c. 24)), a measure long anticipated, from letters in the press by Charles Dickens to parliamentary debate, House of Lords select committee in 1856, Law Amendment Society report, and Royal Commission from 1864 to 1866.² The scene had already been partially obscured by the ‘short black curtain which has of late years been placed round the shabby old gallows’.³ The Fenian Michael Barrett was the last man to be publicly executed in Britain, outside the debtor’s gate at Newgate prison on 26 May 1868.⁴ Three days later when the bill, first introduced in March 1866, was enacted, judgment of death was ‘carried into effect within the walls of the prison in which the offender is confined at the time of execution’.⁵ This chapter analyses press treatment of the last public execution and first private executions; considers how the shift in 1868 was explained thereafter in Britain; studies what evidence for public attitudes towards this transformation in penal practice exist; and situates it in the broader perspective of the British empire and commentary from outside Britain.⁶

‘In the present day things have somehow come about’, The Jurist commented in August 1868, ‘which nobody now living expected ever to see’. What had hitherto been generally treated as ‘an honest, straightforward proceeding … a durable British institution … an open and legitimate triumph of good government over its irreclaimable foes’, was abolished.⁷ Why this most fatal of penal practices was altered, The Jurist suggested, was down to public opinion sapping and mining ‘in all directions the most venerable traditions’. An opponent of capital punishment, published in The Examiner a month before, described the change as the consequence of ‘good society’ and enlightened legislature, ‘suddenly and shamefacedly’ confessing no longer to believe in the gallows’ public lesson.⁸ For the barrister Francis Rowsell, writing a history of capital punishment in 1876, the growth of a humane popular opinion had triggered the Royal Commission in 1864.⁹ For the more cynical there was the factor of trade disruption caused by the crowd, although in an age of ‘compensation for all improvements’, The Times wondered whether those out of pocket for loss of tenants to view the executions, should make claims.¹⁰ The alteration was certainly not out of mercy for gallows’ victims – although advocates for continued capital punishment, like John Stuart Mill, claimed intramural execution was more merciful than life imprisonment. Newspaper commentary suggested quiet spiritual preparation for execution without the shrieks of the crowd, was more merciful.¹¹

In the Commons, debating the measure, opponents of abolition envisioned a more awful performance to render it ‘solemn and momentous’.¹² In line with this, V.A.C. Gatrell argued forcefully for the absence of humanitarian motives from the minds of the architects of this legislation. While contemporaries might identify intramural execution as the march of progressive feeling, and abolitionists hope indeed that this outrage on British sensibilities towards ‘secret assassination’ would bring about abolition, the truth was that it was seen as shoring up the death penalty, and perhaps even permitting its extension where the execution of women in public had been reduced.¹³

The last public hanging and the first two private hangings in Britain

The ‘end days’ of public hanging were in the spring of 1868. There were several contenders for the last public executions as newspapers anticipated legislative change – Timothy Faherty and Miles Weatherill at the New Bailey in Salford in mid-April for instance.¹⁴ ‘I suppose,’ wrote one newspaper on 10 April, ‘the Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment is still in existence, though it makes no sign. If so, its members will have hard work now in effecting their objects.’¹⁵ The newspaper accounts of Barrett’s hanging, as the only man executed for the Clerkenwell explosion of 1867 when an attempt was made to free O’Sullivan Burke and Joseph Casey from prison (killing twelve and injuring many more) implied a wide ‘disenchantment’ with public infliction. Yet the circumstances of the Clerkenwell outrage, and security around the execution (the authorities feared Fenian retaliation) meant this concluding performance of the public gallows was hardly normal.

The Chelsea News and General Advertiser stated that the ‘last public execution has given rise to an immense amount of writing and talk anent the custom, the criminal, and the executioner’.¹⁶ For the Morning Post, the day after, the execution ‘seemed to excite but little interest’ and despite knowledge that it would probably be the last public execution in England the crowd was ‘very much smaller than usual on such occasions. The persons present also conducted themselves in a most decorous manner.’¹⁷ Other newspapers echoed the representation of the crowd’s silence: ‘almost less noise and less confusion than at almost any previous execution,’ suggested ‘the most complete apathy on the part of the London populace.’¹⁸ For The Times, given its historic status, this execution ‘deserved more than usual notice,’ and in its report suggested that ‘with all its exceptional quietness,’ there was a ‘thankful feeling that this was to be the last public execution in England’. Yet the reporter described an immense crowd ‘swaying to and fro like waving corn’.¹⁹ Unsurprisingly supporters of Irish republicanism recalled it differently. The London correspondent of the Waterford Citizen dwelt on the ‘ruffianism of a London rabble’. The lengthy recollections of the American correspondent of New York World, reusing an engraving of the Newgate scene from Thomas Miller’s Picturesque Sketches of London, claimed the city seethed like a cauldron.²⁰

Figure 1.1 ‘The Execution of Barrett’, Illustrated Police News, 30 May 1868. Newspaper image © The British Library Board. All rights reserved. With thanks to The British Newspaper Archive (www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk).

The messages extracted by metropolitan and provincial newspapers depended on their views on capital punishment. Thus the abolitionist Norwich Mercury saw the execution as an event in social history ‘which will mark off the future mo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 ‘[T]he broken stave at the top of the ladder of England’s civilisation’: representing the ending of public execution in 1868
• Part I ‘Going to see a man hanged’
• Part II ‘One had better narrate the circumstances as they occurred’
• Index