This chapter examines the irony, complexity, and pleasure in rhetorical ingenuity evident in the satirical essay in English, taking as its central exemplars some of the key historical figures in that tradition in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, from the Irish authors Jonathan Swift and Maria and Richard Lovell Edgeworth through to the Romantic essayists Charles Lamb, Thomas De Quincey, and Thomas Love Peacock. It demonstrates how the prose essay became a powerful satirical form in the Georgian period, and discusses the tonal richness and ambiguity which render the satirical essay a key subgenre in the tradition of the prose essay in English. It pays particular attention to the links between satire, colonialism, the Gothic, and the sublime in the form of the essay.

This chapter examines works of Pirandello that feature the act of suicide against the backdrop of a historical epoch in which the issue of taking one’s own life was critical and culturally charged. Some of the suicides of the age were heroic self-immolators, as Carlo Michelstaedter appeared to many to be. Some were simply in desperate existential straits. Still others were women suffering intolerably in erotic relationships. The last two groups abound in Pirandello’s literary fictions, and he shares deep sympathy for them in approximately two dozen stories, many of which are analyzed closely here for their ethical and philosophical implications. Even more interesting “Pirandellian suicides” are symbolic ones, like Vitangelo Moscarda and Mattia Pascal in the novels. These characters reject, but do not end, the lives they have known before the narratives take their turns, producing the radical vitality of a non-life by bourgeois standards.

The section on Thomas Becket includes a letter from Becket to the Empress Matilda (daughter of king Henry I) who was based in Rouen at the time, and one from the Empress in response, reprimanding Becket for his behaviour towards her son, Henry II. The second part contains two parallel excerpts from the accounts, by Edward Grim and William Fitzstephen, of the murder of Becket in Canterbury cathedral in 1170.

The Murder Act of 1752 required that criminals who were not dissected to be hung in chains on a gibbet. Yet just as many non-killers were hung in chains during the years 1752–1801 as in 1700–52. And. by the time use of the gibbet was confined strictly to murder, its use against any crime whatsoever had fallen into disfavour. That process was well under way in London no later than 1700 and was apparent in many other places soon after 1750. Urbane people frequently demanded that gibbets be removed to places more remote from respectable residences, and further back from roadsides to avoid offending travellers’ sensibilities. By the nineteenth century, the erection of a gibbet seemed more often an occasion for carnival than a plausible deterrent to crime. Until its abolition in 1834, however, England’s traditional elites clung to the option of the gibbet almost as determinedly as they did to execution for crimes against property.

The transition from one culture of governance to another explains the character and timing of changes in the nature, location and scale of English executions from 1660 to 1900. Traditional landed elites adhered both to a “Bloody Code,” whose enforcement against common criminals could be regularly adjusted through consultations between trial judges and themselves, and to the occasional use of prolongedly agonizing execution rituals against traitors. The men who dominated England’s uniquely extensive and steadily expanding urban realms, and embraced new cultures of desacralization, feeling and reason, increasingly viewed the purposes, numerical extent and staging of executions differently. As the numbers and power of urbane people grew, first the extent and finally the practices of execution were adjusted accordingly. The many paradoxes of “feeling”, however, ensured their continued commitment to execution for murder, and some measure of hypocrisy in their views of executions and the people who attended them.

The Murder Act of 1752 imposed post-mortem dissection as the primary punishment for all people convicted of that crime. Recent historians have viewed this statute as strikingly regressive. In fact, its purposes and effects were notably humane. It dramatically reduced the number of dissections imposed on criminal bodies in London. By almost entirely confining dissection to murder alone, it substantially ended riots at executions. And, in ensuring a legal supply of “subjects” to anatomists, it helped make surgery as swift as possible in an age before reliable anaesthesia. On the other hand, public anatomization of dead killers was so uncommon that it seems likely to have inspired fascination rather than deterrent horror. And, in failing to supply enough “subjects,” the Act inspired epidemical levels of grave robbery, finally coming undone when enterprising monsters resorted to murder itself in meeting the needs of anatomists, who now seemed complicit in such crimes.

Although the execution crowd is a common mind’s-eye image of Victorian England, we still have much to learn or to reconsider about nineteenth-century executions. The Whig governments of the 1830s are rightly seen as far more restrained in using the gallows than their Tory predecessors, but they in fact sustained a surprisingly vigorous, residual “Bloody Code” – centred on violent crimes against property – until 1837. The prevailing conviction amongst historians that the removal of executions within prison walls in 1868 averted a move towards the complete abolition of execution is not supported by the actual character of the attempts to achieve this in parliament. The change of 1868 really did stem from concerns about the execution crowd and the complicity of urbane elites in their extent. To an under-appreciated degree, however, journalists kept the work of the gallows before the public eye through the turn of the twentieth century.

This chapter covers the story of three enslaved people who used various poisons to slowly murder their owner in colonial Massachusetts.

This chapter centers on a plot by three generations of slaves, led by the elderly matriarch, to murder their owner. This Virginia enslaved family used an ax, shovels, and fence posts to end their owner’s abuse.

This chapter examines the case of a teenaged term slave named Cloe who used her hands to strangle her owners’ young daughters a week apart in rural early nineteenth-century Pennsylvania.

The final chapter covers the life of Lucy who killed her mistress with a blunt instrument and threw her body down a cistern in Galveston, Texas, in 1858.

This chapter examines the curious case of a group of enslaved people who used a featherbed to smother their owner to death in colonial North Carolina.

This chapter is about Jane Williams, an enslaved woman who hacked her owners and their infant daughter to death with an ax as they slept in Richmond, Virginia, in 1853.

Our penultimate chapter explores the extent to which the Tudor period saw a legal renaissance. It examines developments in the common law courts but also explores the development of new conciliar courts outside the common law, most notably star chamber and the court of equity, which were to prove influential. It also examines the further rise in the use and importance of statute law in this period, demonstrating that the Reformation statutes that split England from the Roman Catholic Church underscored the power of Parliamentary statute. Attention is also given to some developments in the common law courts during this period concerning the law of obligations (the development of the principle of consideration in contract law), property law (the development of the writ of ejectment that replaced the older land law writs and the origins of the law of trusts) and criminal law (the development of the distinction between murder and manslaughter).

This chapter completes our examination of the long Plantagenet period, which culminated in the bloody War of the Roses. However, as the chapter title makes plain, the focus is on the impact that the deadly plague of this period had upon law and order. The chapter explores the different interpretations made of the importance of the Black Death and surveys developments of this period such as the origins of what we would today call employment law, significant increases in the effectiveness of the administration of justice chiefly through increased powers for justices of the peace and important developments in both law of obligations (exploring how actions on the case developed from the writ of trespass and how it further developed into the action on the case for assumpsit) and the criminal law (focusing on treason and murder).

The day after the massacre, the judicial authorities in charge canvas Dongo’s neighbors, seeking information about any strange sounds or other unusual events that they observed the day before. Although Dongo paid a hefty sum to rent his spacious home and warehouse, he shared the neighborhood with a diverse group of small businessmen and their families. Some rent rooms, and others maintain large households in two-story buildings. The local residents have a good reputation. All are known as honorable men, however humble. Some of these witnesses were lucky to have one last quiet night before awakening to the shocking massacre which took place just steps away from their doorways. But others experience strange sightings and sounds which disrupt their rest and foreshadow the terrible discovery made the following morning of October 24.