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Civilizing Punishment: The End of the Public Execution in England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Randall McGowen
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Extract

On August 14, 1868, Thomas Wells was executed behind prison walls in Maidstone. According to the The Times, the event passed off so quietly that the public perhaps failed to note the significance of the occasion. With his death the drama of the public execution came to an end. “It is,” the newspaper explained, “emphatically one of those reforms which are hard to realize before they are made, but which, once made, seem so simple and unobjectionable that they are treated almost as a matter of course.” On the face of it, this passage seems to capture the salient features of the episode. In the decades leading up to abolition, opinion was deeply divided about the value of the death penalty and the wisdom of public executions. The Times itself, almost to the last moment, resisted the change. But once the issue was resolved in favor of privacy, no voice demanded their return. There were no demonstrations protesting the reform. Even the arguments once used to defend the publicity of punishment disappeared from view.

But The Times meant something more by the phrase “one of those reforms.” It indicated a belief that the abolition belonged to a special category of measures, those that contributed to the progress of civilization in England. The idea that civilization demanded the end of the public execution figured prominently in reform arguments, and occupied just as important a place in later interpretations of the change. A liberal member of Parliament, John Hibbert, in pointing to an execution in 1866, explained that “no one anxious to promote civilization could wish to see the recurrence of a scene of that kind.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 33 , Issue 3 , July 1994 , pp. 257 - 282
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1994

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References

1 The Times (August 14, 1868), p. 6Google Scholar.

2 Parliamentary Debates (hereafter PD) 1866, vol. 181Google Scholar, col. 1623; PD 1868, vol. 190, col. 1139.

3 Parliamentary Papers (hereafter PP) 1866, vol. XXI, p. 13Google Scholar.

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11 Emsley, pp. 222–23, 230

12 PD 1841, vol. 56, col. 650.

13 For a fuller statement of the reform position, see my article, “A Powerful Sympathy: Terror, the Prison, and Humanitarian Reform in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain,” Journal of British Studies 25 (1986): 312–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 PP 1866, vol. XXI, pp. 299, 96.

15 PP 1856 (366), vol. VII, p. 24.

16 PD 1866, vol. 183, col. 254.

17 PD 1841, vol. 56, col. 653.

18 PD 1864, vol. 174, col. 2062.

19 PP 1866, vol. XXI, pp. 351–52.

20 Thackeray, William Makepeace, “Going to See a Man Hanged,” Fraser's Magazine 20 (1840): 156Google Scholar; see Wiener, Martin, Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law, and Policy in England, 1830–1914 (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 92–101Google Scholar.

21 PP 1866, vol. XXI, pp. 121, 74–75, 219.

22 PP 1866, vol. XXI, pp. 121, 351–52. Despite the constant repetition of such arguments, some among the respectable classes continued to attend executions. This inconvenient fact was ignored, as was the evidence that not all murderers were drawn from among the poor and criminal classes.

23 PD 1868, vol. 190, col. 1130.

24 PP 1866, vol. XXI, pp. 426–27.

25 PP 1856 (366), vol. VII, p. 24.

26 PD 1864, vol. 173, col. 952.

27 PP 1866, vol. XXI, pp. 110, 112.

28 PP 1856 (366), vol. VII, pp. 21–22.

29 Lowe, Robert, “Criminal Law Reform,” Edinburgh Review 121 (1865): 116Google Scholar.

30 PD 1864, vol, 173, col. 944.

31 PD 1841, vol. 56, cols. 649, 654.

32 PP 1866, vol. XXI, pp. 220–21.

33 PD 1864, vol. 173, col. 945.

34 PP 1856 (366), vol. VII, p. 12.

35 PD 1866, vol. 184, col. 455.

36 The Times (February 23, 1864), p. 7Google Scholar.

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38 Annual Register, “Chronicle,” 1864, pp. 7, 178Google Scholar.

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41 PD 1866, vol. 184, col. 452.

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44 The Times (November 17, 1864), p. 8Google Scholar.

45 Thomas Laqueur most fully explores this aspect of the crowd's presence. In calling these descriptions offered by the opponents of the crowd into question, I do not mean to imply that “disreputable” behavior did not occur. And I do not disagree with Laqueur's characterization of the carnivalesque moments in the crowd's activities. But I do think that his account presents us with a caricature of the crowd, one that echoes without the disapproving tones the portrait drawn by middle-class moralists (Laqueur, Thomas, “Crowds, Carnival, and the State in English Executions, 1604–1868,” in The First Modern Society, ed. Beier, A. L.et al. [Cambridge, 1989], pp. 305–55Google Scholar).

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47 PP 1866, vol. XXI, pp. 211, 195, 75–77.

48 PD 1868, vol. 191, cols. 1048–51. The best discussion of the intellectual shift is found in Wiener's Reconstructing the Criminal (n. 20 above).

49 PP 1866, vol. XXI, p. 104.

50 PP 1866, vol. XXI, p. 150.

51 PD 1864, vol. 173, col. 951; for a fuller discussion of such language, see Stallybrass, Peter and White, Allon, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 125–40Google Scholar.

52 “The Debate on Capital Punishment,” Saturday Review 25 (1868): 547Google Scholar.

53 PP 1856 (366), vol. VII, pp. 35–36, 32.

54 PD 1856, vol. 142, col. 247.

55 PD 1841, vol. 56, col. 662.

56 PP 1856 (366), vol. VII, pp. 35–36, 32. It only reinforces the general argument of this essay to note that the question of what the condemned suffered at the moment of death scarcely entered into the debate. Despite the wide recognition that a hanging might produce a slow strangulation accompanied by great suffering, there was no enthusiasm for Charles Neate's proposal that they seek a “less painful mode of execution” (PD 1868, vol. 191, col. 1063; PD 1866, vol. 184, col. 454).

57 PD 1854, vol. 133, col. 307.

58 PD 1856, vol. 142, col. 1241.

59 PD 1864, vol. 173, col. 954.

60 The Times (August 14, 1868), pp. 6, 10Google Scholar. What are we to make of the fact that there were no popular protests at the end of the public execution? Perhaps that for the people punishment had always been something more than merely entertainment.

61 The mid-Victorian public health movement and the introduction of the private execution share more than just a language for characterizing the poor and the threat they represent to society. See Wohl, Anthony, Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain (London, 1983)Google Scholar.

62 Canetti, Elias, Crowds and Power (New York, 1978), p. 52Google Scholar.