Victorians Against the Gallows: Capital Punishment and the Abolitionist Movement in Nineteenth-Century Britain 9780755698493, 9781848856943

Citation preview

For my father

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURE 1. ‘Peter Bedford conversing with two Thieves’. Frontispiece from W. Tallack, Peter Bedford, the Spitalfields Philanthropist (London: S.W. Partridge, 1865). Courtesy of the Society of Friends Library. [p.18] FIGURE 2. Charles Gilpin, Reynolds’s Miscellany, 30 September 1854. Image produced as part of British Periodicals Collection I, by ProQuest, The Quorum, Barnwell Road, Cambridge, CB5 8SW, http://www.proquest.co.uk. Published with permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. [p.68] FIGURE 3. Thomas Beggs. ©Rotherham Metropolitan Borough, Archives and Local Studies. [p.72] FIGURE 4. Left: Alfred H. Dymond in April 1874, Topley Studio/Library and Archives Canada, PA–033738; right: William Tallack, from Howard Letters and Memories (1905), courtesy of Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick. [p.112] FIGURE 5. Illustration by Henry Anelay from Edwin F. Roberts, ‘The Six Stages of Punishment; or the Victim of a Vitiated Society,’ in Reynolds’s Miscellany 17 February 1849, p.505. Image produced as part of British Periodicals Collection I, by ProQuest, The Quorum, Barnwell Road, Cambridge, CB5 8SW, http://www.proquest.co.uk. Published with permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. [p.121] FIGURE 6. ‘The Hangman,’ depicted by Joseph Kenny Meadows, Heads of the People, or, Portraits of the English (1839). The reader is placed in the position of the condemned person. Author’s own collection. [p.131] FIGURE 7. Facsimile of a broadside by Charles Gilpin, the original in the British Library. [p.136] FIGURE 8. Facsimile of a broadside by ‘Philo’, the original in Dundee Local Studies Collection. [p.137] FIGURE 9. William Ewart, carte de visite by John and Charles Watkins. ©National Portrait Gallery, London. [p.144] FIGURE 10. Illustration by Henry Anelay to G.W.M. Reynolds, The Mysteries of the Courts of London (1849), 1, p.225. Bodleian Library. [p.202]

ABBREVIATIONS AND ENDNOTE CONVENTIONS

Report of the Capital Punishment Commission; together with the minutes of evidence and appendix. Session 1866, vol.XXI.I.

C.P.C.

Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment Religious Society of Friends Library, London Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Parliamentary Papers Parliamentary Debates National Archives, Kew

S.A.C.P. S.F.L. ODNB Parl. Papers Parl. Debates. N.A.

The ‘peculiar’ dating observed in the journals of the Society of Friends has been modernized, thus ‘4th mo. 1848’ becomes April 1848. There is an abbreviated bibliography since a full documentation of primary and secondary sources used in this research would be excessive. A complete description of a source is provided in the first citation in the Notes; this is subsequently abbreviated to author and shortened title. A full bibliography may be accessed from the book’s page on the I.B.Tauris website.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The research on which this book is based would have been impossible without the support of my parents. It began in M.Phil. research at Cambridge in 1996–1997, and although the direction of research then took me into the associated world of the vegetarians, and from there, to the lives of the aristocratic social reformers, the Cowper-Temples, I hoped to revisit and develop this work. Victorians Against the Gallows has been shaped by my response to the rich historiography appearing in the intervening period, on aspects such as infanticide, the law in an imperial context, and literary responses to the gallows, as well as the wider literature on radical and reform movements. When I began to uncover the press response to abolitionist propaganda and activities, I had to follow leads picked up in abolitionist tracts, and search through microfilm and crumbling original newspapers in Colindale and Cambridge. Fifteeen years ago, there was a limited amount of primary material which I could discover through CD-ROM collections; the digitization of the nineteenth-century archive (such as the massive archive accessible online via Google Books or a more specialist collection such as 19th Century British Library Newspapers) has greatly assisted my work. In researching the movement against capital punishment, I wish to thank Dr Jonathan Parry, my supervisor at Cambridge, and my colleagues at the University of Bradford, Professor Munro Price, Dr Gábor Bátonyi and Dr Fiona McCulloch. I am indebted to Bob Muscutt for sharing his expertise on capital punishment in Coventry in 1849. My editors at I.B. Tauris, Jenna Steventon and Joanna Godfrey, have been supportive throughout the lengthy process of producing the book. I am grateful, for the advice and corrections they offered, to Dr Simon Devereaux and Dr Carolyn Strange, who acted as readers for I.B.Tauris. As ever, my copy editor, Audrey Daly, provided a meticulous service – any mistakes which remain being entirely my own.

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I acknowledge the permission of Duke University, Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library; the Modern Records Centre at the University of Warwick, the Howard League for Penal Reform, the Religious Society of Friends’ Library, Friends House, and Herefordshire Record Office, to use and make quotations from material in their archives or as copyright holders. In addition, I wish to thank the staff in the following libraries and collections: the Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds, Dundee Local Studies Collection, the Mitchell Library in Glasgow, and the National Library of Scotland, for their aid in the course of my research. I am grateful to staff at Library and Archives Canada, Helen Ford at the Modern Records Centre at the University of Warwick, and Rotherham Archives and Local Studies Service, for assistance with illustrative material. Joanna Clark kindly provided the image of Peter Bedford, from a copy of William Tallack’s biography of the Quaker philanthropist, in the Religious Society of Friends Library. The portrait of Charles Gilpin from Reynolds’s Miscellany (1854), and the illustration by Henry Anelay from Edwin F. Roberts, ‘The Six Stages of Punishment; or the Victim of a Vitiated Society’ in Reynolds’s Miscellany (1849) were produced as part of British Periodicals Collection I, by ProQuest, The Quorum, Barnwell Road, Cambridge, CB5 8SW, http://www.proquest.co.uk, and I am grateful for the permission granted by ProQuest to reproduce them here. This book is for my father. James Gregory

INTRODUCTION

‘One by one the jewels of his hempen coronal have been plucked away, and himself driven into a corner with the murderer and the traitor,’ an early Victorian wrote, in an essay arguing for the retirement of the hangman, ‘there he is in that corner, so intrenched and fortified by the laws of men, and by strained interpretations of the law of God, that it will take a vigorous effort to dislodge him.’1 This is a study of that effort against capital punishment during the Victorian era, which was at its height in the period from the late 1840s until 1868 when the public infliction of capital punishment was ended by the Capital Punishment within Prisons Act. By the late 1840s, capital punishment, which had been the penalty liable for several hundred offences by statute at the beginning of the century, was effectively only inflicted for murder: the cause of abolition had been brought ‘within a narrow compass’.2 A focal point for this study is the organization created in April 1846 specifically for promoting the total abolition of the death penalty, the Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment (hereafter S.A.C.P). This is the first treatment of the British nineteenth-century capital punishment question to examine in detail the abolitionist movement in its heyday and to study closely the wider manifestations of abolitionism in Victorian culture both in the ‘home country’ and in the British empire. A ‘movement’ perspective, in analysing the S.A.C.P.’s leadership, personnel, organization and activities, is combined with an interest in such matters as the representation of the gallows question in novels and short stories, and the response of Christian defenders of capital punishment. The first chapter outlines the earlier nineteenth-century efforts to ameliorate the criminal code, sketches the fortunes of the abolitionist society and relates its growth and decline to the larger political context of Britain between the triumph of the Anti-Corn Law League and the agitation surrounding the Second Reform Act (i.e., c.1846–1868).

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‘Few questions of law and public policy have remained so long in the region of debate as the question of capital punishment. Not in England alone, but in every country in the world able to lay claim to any degree of civilization,’ wrote one commentator, at the time of the Royal Commission on capital punishment established in 1864.3 The region of debate is extended in the second chapter by locating British abolitionist effort in a wider colonial or imperial context. The problem of the death penalty’s relationship to Irish political and rural violence provided one set of ‘imperial’ challenges for the British.4 The question of abolition could be brought to a practical test, one English newspaper declared in 1848, by asking ‘whether any one would propose to begin the experiment in Ireland. It is there, according to the arguments of the abolitionists, the strongest case for doing away with the capital penalty exists. Murder is averred to be caused by the punishment; well, it is in Ireland that there is most murder.’5 The question of what would happen to the antipodean penal colonies was also raised.6 As chapter 2 reveals, capital punishment debates, abolitionist efforts, and even organizations, appeared in British colonies. Many of the arguments echoed those to be found in the metropole, but whether in India, British North America or the Australian states, there were aspects to the ‘gallows question’ which expressed local peculiarities. The British abolitionists were more advanced in the level of their organization than their colonial brethren but the movement should be understood to include not only members of the S.A.C.P., but also those who, in parliament or through the press, or as audience and on the platform of metropolitan and provincial meetings, endorsed abolition.7 Abolitionists were eager to stress the growth of support for their cause; they grew out of and modelled themselves on larger ‘pressure from without’ efforts at reform in the 1840s. Their own cause belonged with a cluster of political and philanthropic concerns shared by many soi-disant reformers, in the early and mid-Victorian era, such as anti-slavery and peace, temperance and vegetarianism. This is exemplified by the biography of Charles Gilpin, described as the ‘Cobden of the movement’, contained in chapter 3. This chapter also examines the occupational and social background of abolitionism and the geography of support. Chapter 4 studies the participation by women in the abolitionist movement and the gendered and ‘class’ aspects to the question. The public face of the movement (whether its officers at a national or local level, or activists who secured the attention of the press) were predominantly male but the roles that women played in the capital punishment question were important. Most of the S.A.C.P.’s leaders were middle-class but there were significant working-class agitators for abolition and ‘class’ played an important part in radical attacks on the

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capital penalty and in agitations surrounding reprieve in specific capital cases. The society’s strategies for achieving its goal are studied in chapter 5. Financial weakness stemming from its small size hampered activities but the S.A.C.P. deployed traditional tools of ‘pressure from without’ which are studied here: public meetings, petitions to parliament, propagandist literature and provincial branches. The relationship between capital punishment and the press is then considered. The capital punishment question as it was debated in national and provincial newspapers and periodicals involved a sustained critique of public execution which might or might not be associated with support for total abolition. The abolitionists’ press strategy included the effort to present the gallows problem as an international one. But obviously this engine for shaping and expressing public opinion could be hostile to abolitionists, and The Times, the most prominent and influential of Victorian newspapers, consistently used its ‘ferocious eloquence’ to oppose abolition.8 Throughout the study, reference is made to the opinions of the pro-capital punishment newspapers and journals, whether in editorials and extended articles, or through the medium of correspondence in which the succinctly itemized arguments or sentimental and pathetic accounts of the abolitionists evoked similarly varied rebuttals. The capital punishment question was expressed in a mass of pamphlets by advocates and opponents of hanging, and the reliance of the S.A.C.P. on sophisticated texts such as statistical essays and pamphlets is apparent; these texts, and the instances of a more demotic form of propaganda, and pictorial approaches, are discussed. The analysis of the movement as a pressure group culminates (in chapter 6) with a treatment of abolitionism and parliament, since meetings, branch societies and anti-gallows tracts were directed towards the parliamentary arena. The abolitionist society relied on the intervention of ‘correspondents’ sending letters and tracts to MPs, and although it was sometimes emboldened to suggest electoral pressure, the desultory record of abolitionism in parliament partly expressed the political priorities of those who endorsed abolition in parliament. Parliamentary attention towards capital punishment was expressed in such endeavours as the efforts to consolidate and codify the law. The two most significant parliamentary interventions in the debate on the continuation or venue for capital punishment in this period, a select committee of the House of Lords in 1856 and the Royal Commission on capital punishment (1864–1866) are examined in relation to the abolitionists. The next chapter provides a study of the mentalités or ideologies associated with responses to the gallows, on the part of opponents and supporters of its use in Victorian Britain. In a religious age, one privileged

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mode of discourse for examining capital punishment mobilized or interpreted scripture. Chapter 7 studies the religious imperative behind abolition, and considers its association with unorthodox religious ideas, embodied, for instance, in the most prominent abolitionists, Quakers and Unitarians. The broad denominational characteristics of abolitionism are outlined, and abolitionism is partly explained by the emergence of a theology of Christocentrism and antipathy to a forensic atonement or retribution meted out by a stern God. Abolitionists were motivated by a variety of non-religious beliefs so that theological perspectives might combine with (for instance) utilitarianism, or with interpretations of the psychology of crime and punishment derived from phrenology, or with understandings of the genesis of crime derived from temperance and sanitary reform. Whatever the intellectual source of an abolitionist position, it generally expressed a self-consciously ‘rational’ interpretation of crime and punishment, and a faith in the possibility of redemption. It was necessary to present abolition as a progressive cause for strategic reasons (as in other reform agitations) but this stance also reflected the abolitionist mentality concerning human nature and the role of the state in civilization. This chapter ends with an examination of the critique of sentimentalism produced by retentionist opponents.9 In recreating abolitionist mentalités, one needs to consider where and in what forms people encountered abolitionist (and retentionist) arguments in this period. The printed discourse on abolition was diverse in form, and, since the use of capital punishment was one of the controversies of the age, extensive: commentary appearing in such works as penny encyclopaedias of the Society for Diffusing Useful Knowledge, the Oxford and Cambridge Review, Odd Fellows’ Magazine and the British Medical Journal.10 Foreign writers also discussed the British State’s infliction of the death penalty.11 Thoughtful Victorians, of all sorts, pondered the institution of the gallows – and comments on capital punishment are found in such diverse biographical sources as the memorials of Frederick W. Robertson, the famous preacher of Trinity Chapel, Brighton, and the memoirs of the literary man Richard Robert Madden, long opposed to the death penalty when, in his seventies, he sent a solemn declaration against the efficacy of capital punishment to the Earl of Derby, when the Fenian General Thomas F. Burke was condemned to be executed for high treason, following the insurrection in March 1867, in Dublin.12 Experts in Victorian literature have studied the shadow of the scaffold before, in the context of particular authors such as William Makepeace Thackeray or Charles Dickens, the latter perhaps the most prominent literary figure associated with the question.13 But more work needs to be done on other literary responses to capital punishment, encompassing

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novels and short stories in periodicals, poetry, and drama. Chapter 8 examines a range of texts in which the punishment of death, abolitionism, or abolitionists, were presented. Fiction, offering cautionary lessons or dangerous enticement to the reader, was an important medium in debates about crime and punishment.14 Chapter 9 addresses a number of related themes as part of an appraisal of the S.A.C.P.’s impact, notwithstanding the failure to achieve total abolition. It examines the S.A.C.P.’s involvement with capital cases in the period before capital punishment was inflicted within the prison, studying its activities in reprieve efforts in relation to the Home Office’s exercise of the royal prerogative of mercy.15 The gallows question was divisible into abstract and practical sides but individual campaigns for reprieve served to place ‘the law on its trial’ and thus highlight the injustices of a criminal code centred on death. It was an opportunistic strategy of improving the disaster shared by other pressure groups.16 The ‘maudlin anti-gibbetarians’ (as one newspaper called them) of the S.A.C.P. often adopted an anti-sentimental pose in appeals to the Home Office.17 The chapter concludes with an examination of the response of the government (or State) to abolitionism, partly in the context of the 1860s when inquiry by Royal Commission and various gallows scandals represented a renewed level of controversy. The final chapter charts the continued efforts at abolition through parliament, and in national and provincial organizations, and outlines some of the lateVictorian literary expressions of opposition to the gallows. The British abolition effort in this period has not had the attention that it deserves. Without such a study our understanding of the institution of capital punishment is incomplete. But, in what one scholar has described as ‘almost a small cottage-industry’ on capital punishment, there have appeared studies of the mentality surrounding the gallows spectacle, the exercise of the royal prerogative, and the response of literary figures to hanging.18 The debt to such work, here, is obvious. What follows is a survey of the historiography, identifying the relevance or value of particular works for the purpose of understanding the movement. Previous treatment of abolitionism has tended to see it largely in terms of a parliamentary debate, rather than as a sentiment and activity beyond Westminster. Yet even at the parliamentary level detailed treatment of the personnel is absent. Munford’s biography of the leading abolitionist MP in the period 1840–1868, William Ewart, offers no discussion of his relationship with the S.A.C.P.19 Ewart, who had many other reform interests, is not given centre stage in this study because his activity was concerned with the parliamentary arena rather than the movement outside, and the parliamentary aspect to abolition is perhaps the one which has been

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the most researched. Whilst Ewart was prominent in Westminster, there were other abolitionist leaders who have been neglected. A focus on the effort at a parliamentary level is found in the criminologist Leon Radzinowicz’s magisterial history of the criminal law. This provides an excellent chronological framework and overview of the legislative developments but assumes an equation between parliamentary and ‘public’ opinion.20 Radzinowicz studied abolitionist texts and discussed the difficulties for abolitionist polemicists and the ambiguity of statistics on serious crime for both sides of the debate. He emphasized the connection of capital punishment to other penal and criminal law matters which developed their own autonomy: criminal law consolidation and the problems of penal administration. Radzinowicz’s The Emergence of Penal Policy in Victorian and Edwardian England (with Roger Hood) includes a useful treatment of the parliamentary attempts to create ‘degrees’ of murder and is the most satisfactory treatment of abolitionism after 1868.21 Elizabeth Tuttle’s The Crusade against Capital Punishment in Great Britain outlined nineteenth-century abolitionism without reference to the S.A.C.P. or the question of popular attitudes to capital punishment. Gordon Rose’s study of the Howard League for Penal Reform and its predecessors considered the work of William Tallack, a secretary of the S.A.C.P. who was the Howard Association’s secretary from 1866 to 1901.22 More substantial engagement with the abolitionists appeared in David D. Cooper’s studies, though he treated them as a vocal minority manufacturing ‘public opinion’ and limping on through a sense of righteousness, and put more stress on the efforts to conceal rather than abolish, the gallows.23 The patronizing or vilification of abolitionists which he thought prevalent by the 1860s had actually existed for decades. For Cooper, The Times represented more accurately the voice ‘of a retrenched, stable and prosperous England as it entered the decade of the fifties’, an interpretation which can be more easily tested with the digitization of the Victorian British press. Certainly there was no absence, as he implies, of discussion about the death penalty and public executions in ‘respectable middle class magazines’.24 Cooper’s treatment of opposition to public execution emphasizes that dilemma for abolitionism reiterated by others: the misbehaviour of the scaffold crowd did not necessarily condemn the gallows.25 Harry Potter’s Hanging in Judgement, covering the period from the eighteenth century to mid-twentieth century, is indispensable for the religious and theological dimensions to capital punishment. However, he focused on Quaker abolitionism rather than detail the contribution of other denominations; this present study aims to address this gap in our understanding, in particular it emphasizes the Unitarian contribution which has often been ignored.26 A more recent contribution is Richard Follett’s

INTRODUCTION

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Evangelicalism, Penal Theory and the Politics of Criminal Law Reform in England 1808–1830, stressing the role of philanthropic Evangelicalism, rather than Benthamite utilitarianism (often privileged as an agent), in penal reform. Religion was effectively appealed to, ‘both to delegitimate the capital statutes and their administration, and to legitimate the reformers’ alternative proposals.’27 Roger Chadwick’s work, Bureaucratic Mercy, is a valuable analysis of the Home Office’s exercise of the royal prerogative in capital cases, c.1860– 1900.28 Chadwick exposed an ‘evolving bureaucratic calculus’ in capital cases which is to be contrasted with the Home Secretary’s belief or rhetoric (in the words of Sir George Grey, who was Home Secretary, on and off, for over two decades, in the eras of Chartism and Palmerston) that ‘each case must stand on its own merits’.29 Chadwick felt that widespread opposition to capital punishment was ‘characteristic of the 1860s’ whereas Radzinowicz had viewed reduction of the capital code as largely an academic issue after the late 1840s.30 But Bureaucratic Mercy had little to say on the abolitionists who were written off as too weak to compete with innate English pessimism.31 Chadwick’s account of precedents for mitigation in capital cases established after the 1860s is hindered by a limited study of earlier capital cases: the S.A.C.P.’s activity in earlier capital cases demonstrates a ‘bureaucratic calculus’ in operation in the 1850s, with the abolitionists appealing on the basis of the ‘practical’ and particular circumstances of individual cases rather than on abstract principle. Chadwick detected an urban / rural distinction in capital cases and in S.A.C.P. policy which does not appear in my own reading of the archive.32 Perhaps the most provocative or troubling work on British capital punishment and the ‘gallows culture’ in this period is V.A.C. Gatrell’s The Hanging Tree, an impassioned tour de force which seeks to evoke and analyse the feelings of the British towards the spectacle of death on the gallows from the eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century. Drawing on a rich range of texts and images, Gatrell is alert to the complexity of the responses to the gallows tree which formed such a prominent presence in British culture.33 Gatrell’s appreciation of the power of the image is particularly pertinent for the abolitionist pressure group, which if it was opposing a highly visible entity, showed no imaginative use of imagery itself.34 Gatrell’s interpretation of the ‘privatization’ of execution rejected as simplistic the notion of increasing humaneness; a position which aligned his work, at least in this regard, with that Foucault-inspired scholarship critical of teleological meta-narratives of the processes of civilizing.35 In fact, contemporaries queried the discourse of humaneness exploited by abolitionists – ‘how,’ wrote one critic, ‘can an act be inhuman which the great majority of mankind think it a duty to do?’36 The concealment of execution

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was a development ‘for reasons greater than the fact that some people began to feel bad about it’.37 Gatrell argued for the ‘limits of sensibility’ on the part of the middle-class humanitarians, whose feeling of revulsion at the scaffold was cowardly and fastidious ‘squeamishness’ rather than genuine sympathy. The language of humanity was used as justification in ‘elaborate self-delusions’ by Victorian elites.38 For Gatrell, penal amelioration was not to be explained in cultural terms via changing ‘sensibility’ but as a result of political, economic and bureaucratic factors. Yet the defenders of the gallows, more often than not, identified the opponents of capital punishment as sentimentalists, so that arguments about sensibility were at the heart of the debate.39 The concealment of capital punishment, not just in Britain but across Europe in the nineteenth century, Pieter Spierenburg suggests, represented ‘a new threshold ... in the amount of mutual identification human beings were capable of’. While it offers only one aspect to the amelioration of the criminal code, a growing sensibility that public and physical punishment was barbaric will be studied in Victorians Against the Gallows – the description of capital punishment as a ‘barbarous relic’ is a refrain in abolitionist texts.40 Gatrell interpreted the concealment of the penalty of death as partially a pre-emptive one by retentionists in order to preserve it. He treated what he saw as the politicization of a scaffold crowd, which refused to accept docilely the scaffold lesson, as an important factor in explaining what happened in 1868 – though abolitionists, polite or plebeian, had contributed to this politicization.41 His stress on the non-humanitarian impulse acted as a corrective to older, Whiggish, narratives of the growth of a more rational and humane penal system. For the horrors involved in capital punishment continued for almost a century thereafter, though in private. The gallows, moreover, was the crowning edifice to a system in which the British state (like other Western states) inflicted violence, as part of a judicial sentence or penal punishment, well into the twentieth century. This was a society which deemed it appropriate, until recent times, to inflict violence within schools and at home, as a means of discipline.42 Other works of relevance to the study of capital punishment in nineteenth-century Britain have appeared since Gatrell. These include a doctoral thesis on the London crowd and punishment in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries which stressed the enduring ‘good order’ of the Victorian London scaffold audience in contrast to press hyperbole and vilification.43 Martin Wiener and John Carter Wood have examined violence, masculinity and crime in Victorian England.44 Others have explored Victorian society through close study of famous murderers such as William Dove, the Mannings, Madeleine Smith, William Palmer and Constance Kent. Murder, as various studies in cultural and social history

INTRODUCTION

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have demonstrated, was a tremendous fascination for Victorians.45 The Mannings’ crime, for instance, stimulated a mass of commentary and serialized biographies in 1849. When Constance Kent, a middle-class girl of sixteen, was suspected of murdering her step-brother (she later confessed to the crime), a similar textual deluge followed. A detailed study by the local surgeon, Joseph W. Stapleton, The Great Crime of 1860. A Summary of the Facts relating to the Murder committed at Road. A critical review of its social and scientific aspects and an authorized account of the family began with a homily on inherited vice, intemperance, the pursuit of gentility; associated the ‘affluence of crime’ with a decade of war and ‘muscular Christianity’; and included lithographic plates and a map of the scene of the crime.46 A taste for homicide was embodied in such material artefacts as waxwork chambers of horrors, Staffordshire pottery ware of the guilty parties and the crime scenes, illustrated biographies and even medals.47 The executioner of the poisoner Dr William Palmer was even exhibited for a paying crowd at the Wilmslow Races in 1856, with ‘SCAFFOLD and BEAM,| With a Company of Trained Officials, who will perform and go through the ceremony of | HANGING! | Twice each Morning of the Races.’48 Victorian murders and executions form enduring topics for scholarly local studies and popular histories.49 The continued taste for retellings of the most infamous of nineteenth-century homicides is reflected in such works as Graves’ They hanged my saintly Billy (1957) on Palmer, T.A. Critchley and P.D. James’s The Maul and the Pear Tree (1971) on the Ratcliffe highway murders of 1811, Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr Whicher (2008) on Constance Kent, and Colquhoun’s Mr Briggs’ Hat (2011) on Franz Müller.50 The chapter in this study on the imperial ramifications of the gallows question is one expression of the international dimension to a question which might otherwise be characterized, mistakenly, on the basis of the S.A.C.P.’s fortunes, as failing to generate mass interest. British abolitionists also followed the efforts and occasional successes of like-minded people in the United States, France, Belgium, Italian and German states.51 Formal and informal associations were made with foreign abolitionists. During periods of optimism in the late 1840s and in the 1860s there was a sense of an international effort against capital punishment.52 The ‘international’ links of the S.A.C.P. were represented by the foreign correspondents of the society by the 1860s, by the republication of S.A.C.P. works in the Belgian and German abolitionist press and also through the international currency of abolitionist texts by the German Carl Joseph Anton Mittermaier, the Englishman Henry Christmas and the American Charles Spear. Cobdenite internationalism, transatlantic philanthropic ties and sympathies for movements for national independence for Poland, Hungary and Italy characterized the abolitionists of the 1850s. The international context was

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emphasized in abolitionist literature and in parliament to shame the nation and convey a global abolitionist effort. The American abolitionist movement – a national anti-capital punishment society was formed in 1845 and there were a number of state societies – offers parallels with the British in both personnel and strategies of petitioning, lobbying of politicians, and use of the press.53 Its peak was at the same period as the British movement (with Michigan abolishing the penalty of death in 1846, and Rhode Island and Wisconsin following in 1852 and 1853 respectively) and its activists often had a similar outlook on bettering the world. In 1855 Lyman L. Curtis, writing in the journal The New Existence of Man upon the Earth, informed its editor, the British social reformer Robert Owen, that one Paschal B. Randolph planned to lecture throughout the British Isles ‘on all the great questions of reform. Temperance, slavery, peace, war, prison, reform, woman, labour, capital, democracy, education, socialism, capital punishment and the marvelous revelations from the spirit world’.54 The sense of a transatlantic culture of progressive reform is also expressed in the encounter made by Margaret Fuller, the American transcendentalist, with two landowners in England, both engaged in ‘Reform’ against capital punishment and corn laws, one of them being also an ‘earnest student of Emerson’s essays’.55 It was natural that American abolitionists would develop ties with British counterparts: British abolitionist organization in the first decade of the nineteenth century was directly stimulated by efforts in Philadelphia.56 The Boston Universalist minister Charles Spear’s abolitionist periodical Hangman was sent to the editor of the British Unitarian Christian Reformer and Spear’s abolitionist Essays (1844) were also published in London and transmitted to the Irish abolitionist James Haughton.57 In this book Spear paid compliment to the efforts of the English philanthropists organized in the Society for the Diffusion of Information on the Subject of Capital Punishment which had done an ‘immense service to the cause of humanity … we have been much indented to their labors for many valuable facts’. He singled out the work of the Quaker penal reformer Elizabeth Fry: ‘Language is utterly inadequate to express our own feelings. Her whole history is a commentary upon the practical influences of Christianity.’58 Later, Spear’s Prisoner’s Friend received news and pamphlets from a London correspondent and published large extracts from ‘Death by the Law’, an article appearing in the British weekly journal The Topic, in the autumn and winter of 1848.59 Spear travelled to Britain in 1851 to share information on reform of criminals, meeting the Home Secretary Sir George Grey.60 And in 1869 one of the parliamentary supporters of abolition, the radical John Bright, wrote to the Chicago reformer Marvin H. Bovee, who had led a nationwide campaign for abolition in the late 1850s: ‘If the United States could get rid of the

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gallows, it would not stand long here. One by one we “Americanize” our institutions; and I hope, in all that is good, we may not be unwilling to follow you.’61 The primary sources for a study of abolitionism Previous treatment of abolitionism relied heavily on works by two former secretaries of the Society, Alfred H. Dymond’s The Law on its Trial and William Tallack’s Howard Letters. Dymond’s work was written to meet the immediate polemical needs of the mid-1860s, with a Royal Commission studying the question of capital punishment. One favourable reviewer, in the journal Temple Bar, praised its powerful use of illustration, rendering it of ‘far more interest than a so-called sensation novel. Nothing is so generally engrossing as the simple narrative of criminal cases such as those which Mr Dymond sketches.’62 It was quoted in the Commons and reviewed abroad.63 While it is an essential source for documenting the activity of the S.A.C.P. in capital cases and for some of the personnel involved, it frequently lacks specific dates and details for such cases, and was deliberate reticent about colleagues. It neglected the platform and provincial organization in focusing on the relationship with the Home Office. Not intended to be biographical, The Law on its Trial did not indicate Dymond’s Quaker background or his relationship to the famous pacifist Jonathan Dymond. His British abolitionism was only a stage in a career which took in shoe and gutta percha manufacturing, journalism in London and, following his emigration in 1869, a distinguished political career in Canada.64 Tallack’s memoir is also biographically reticent, being presented as a record of the chief features of the work, correspondence and objectives of the Howard Association, but preserved valuable letters relating to Tallack’s activity for the S.A.C.P. in the 1860s.65 There is no extensive discussion of abolitionist activity in the memoirs or biographies of others associated with the movement, a situation which indicates the wider concerns of supporters of abolition who were certainly not ‘faddists’ worried only about the gallows. The wider concerns are highlighted in the papers of one of the leaders of the movement, Charles Gilpin, which contain some material relating to his abolitionist activity. The papers of many of the most important abolitionists no longer exist.66 A challenge in the study of the abolition movement is the incompleteness of the S.A.C.P. archive – the absence of minute books which would uncover the decision-making process in formulating strategy for instance – though the problem occurs with other Victorian pressure groups, and the gaps in the society’s archives in relation to personnel, finances and campaigns can be filled by summaries of reports and circulars published in sympathetic

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newspapers or periodicals.67 A couple of reports survive in the archives of the S.A.C.P.’s successor society, the Howard Association.68 The national newspapers used include those familiar to scholars of the Victorian era, such as Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper, Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper and The Nonconformist, and others which have rarely been used before in researching capital punishment even though the death penalty and its abolition were prominent topics in these papers. In order to uncover the provincial dimension to abolitionism, which is one of the notable lacunae in our knowledge, the provincial press has been studied. This aspect of research has been revolutionized by digitization. Pamphlets were an important contribution to nineteenth-century political life and have also been the focus of digitization recently. The abolitionist pamphlets, some of which were produced under the auspices of the S.A.C.P. and written by associates of the Society, have been studied to help reveal the ideology of the movement. The pamphleteering which in Radzinowicz’s words produced a ‘protracted debate ... which, though now forgotten, caused a lively stir at the time’ resulted in well over a hundred abolitionist and retentionist works, ranging from cursory tracts, to substantial monographs: almost a hundred of which are abolitionist in sentiment.69 Commentary on the death penalty appeared in other ephemeral and tract-like works such as published sermons.70 The present study stresses the biographical approach, a movement being after all about people. The initial form that my research took used a database of c.400 named abolitionists to analyse the occupational, political and social characteristics of the abolitionists. To identify abolitionists (and understand the movement’s techniques and strategies) one needs to study allied Victorian reform causes such as peace, temperance and anti-slavery. This study is indebted to research such as Brian Harrison’s on the temperance movement, Howard Temperley’s on anti-slavery and Martin Ceadel’s on the peace movement.71 The analysis of abolitionists in terms of their social backgrounds and broader interests also draws heavily on biographical dictionaries such as Boase and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Quaker biographical information at Friends’ House Library in Euston has also been helpful in researching the personnel of the movement, although the material relating to abolitionism itself preserved in this archive is disappointing.72 Study of the parliamentary record and authorship of anti-gallows tracts, sermons and letters has also revealed other abolitionists. Digitization of archival finding aids has uncovered other sources for documentation of abolitionist sentiment: memorials for restriction of capital punishment to prison precincts from a variety of communities or organizations, correspondence in which murder trials and the penalty of

INTRODUCTION

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death were privately discussed, and essays on the question in commonplace books or the records of literary societies.73 Capital punishments were noted as events in diaries, and it is probable that some diarists felt moved to write on the morality of the death penalty.74 The Home Office archive of appeals in capital cases (in the National Archives at Kew) was studied to assess the role of the S.A.C.P. in efforts to obtain reprieve for the condemned, the focus of Dymond’s Law on its Trial. The files for over forty cases were examined, some of these bearing traces of S.A.C.P. involvement through letters or records of deputations.75 The official archive also preserves the voice of humble and otherwise unknown abolitionists and the petitions of communities who sought to frame their appeals for mercy in language which showed respect for the Law and rarely offered a critique of the penalty of death. It includes interventions by public figures who had already voiced their opposition to the gallows, and efforts by concerned members of the public to improve and so preserve the death penalty through innovations such as the use of chloroform or measures to reduce the presence of the crowd. Obviously, it is the official viewpoint that predominates – the views of judges, secretaries and Home Secretaries who occasionally voiced doubts and disquiet. Critics of the death penalty – in the abstract and in general, or in particular cases, sometimes spoke of the Home Secretaries as unfeeling bureaucrats who refused to show mercy. Chapter 8 considers, in part as a reflection of the shifting attitudes to penality, the recorded sentiments of Home Secretaries in their exercise of the royal prerogative of mercy. This study owes much to the recent digitization of the nineteenthcentury Anglophone archive; a revolution which has made texts accessible to the scholar in ways not possible to their original readers and which has opened up a mass of British, Australasian, Canadian and African newspapers and periodicals, and a vast archive of nineteenth-century material in book and pamphlet form. It is worthwhile reflecting on the implications of this innovation in methodology. The texts (and images) which exerted an influence in the capital punishment debate on the Victorian political elite – those men that mattered because they would be the ones who retarded or accelerated legislative reform – did not appear in obscure quarters. The anonymous essays of the retentionist James Fitzjames Stephen published in the quarterly reviews, interventions from opposing sides in the debate by The Times or Punch, or in closely reasoned pamphlets such as Charles Phillips’s abolitionist Vacation Thoughts, formed part of an elite discourse. But many of the texts studied and cited in this book have been neglected by historians because of inaccessibility outside repositories such as the British Library. Participants in the debates about capital punishment include forgotten or non-canonical Victorian novels,

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poems, and short stories whose contemporary readership must have been limited (though reviews in the press can be studied to appreciate the critical reception of even obscure titles) but whose relevance to the study of abolitionism is now uncovered by virtue of random or methodical digitization. Where previously it would have required an admirable level of patience and a generous amount of research leave to study the provincial and London papers in the newspaper archive at Colindale, one can explore with rapidity the correspondence pages, advertisements and editorials of the press, to reveal a great deal of material which was simply unknown to scholars before. This allows us to appreciate as never before, the abolitionist (and retentionist) efforts, and enriches our understanding of the extent, content and register of discussion about the gallows question. We can see how debate on what was one of the ‘grand subjects of controversy’ might be sustained over many weeks in the local press.76 But there is the risk of creating a salmagundi of novel references, heedless of the status and relative significance of texts. Good history is not made by accumulation of facts or piling up quotations from rare and choice sources, but through sensitivity to the relative significance at the time, of particular literary, verbal or visual interventions. The retentionist arguments of parliamentarians (accessible through the digitization of parliamentary papers and Hansard reports) may often have been trite or hackneyed but what was expressed in the Commons mattered more than what was said by way of commentary by eccentric philosophers.77 The support of the British Medical Journal for abolitionism may have been influential within the new medical profession and digitization makes study of the journal’s views easier. It counted for more, nationally, than the abolitionism of the journals produced by the Unitarian abolitionist George Harris in Glasgow and Newcastle. Do we make more of a ‘movement’ or controversy than contemporaries did, by bringing together a diversity of sources? The historian is not only recreative in rescuing from historical condescension but also creative, in the sense of bringing together material that was not assembled at the time. James Anthony Froude, attempting the life of St Neot for the Oxford movement, is said to have declared that this pious life included not just all that was known about a subject, but rather more than all that was known about the subject.78 Victorians Against the Gallows does not involve this pious invention, but in my enthusiasm for documenting abolitionism and the capital punishment question, I might be criticized for presenting something as more extensive, or coherent, or tidy, than it actually was. Contemporaries did identify it as a ‘platform’ and movement, the latter term suggestive of purposeful action. Of course its supporters were varied in their commitment: some were unwavering whilst others were

INTRODUCTION

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intermittent, temporary or nominal in their support.79 Though we might consider those who supported abolitionist efforts within parliament as part of the movement, two of the men who supported abolitionist motions in the Commons went on to become supporters of the penalty as Home Secretaries.80 Some joined national or local abolitionist societies and may be identified as leaders, officers, committee members and subscribers. But the national society was not a wealthy or stable society and nor was the wider movement a tightly organized mass movement. Some abolitionists demonstrated their sympathies by chairing abolitionist meetings or joining the platform at provincial meetings. Those who wrote in favour of abolition might also be included in the abolition movement. Religious congregations might support abolitionist petitions and some denominations, notably the Society of Friends (as discussed in chapter 7), rejected the death penalty. It would be pointless to attempt to quantify the movement, but it is worthwhile to note the competition by abolitionists and opponents to claim the major share of ‘public opinion’, or the public opinion that counted.81 Opponents described the effort as vocal but numerically small.

1 THE RISE AND DECLINE OF THE MOVEMENT The S.A.C.P.’s commitment to abolition of the gallows was unambiguously expressed in its name. Its early promoters denied having a duty to provide a substitute, but this became one of the concerns of abolitionist literature over the period, though it was never stated univocally what the substitute should be.1 Abolition was a clear and easily intelligible task. Such a focused aim makes it appear a classic Victorian ‘fad’ or ‘crotchet’, though abolition did not fall into the error of some single-issue campaigns promoted as ‘a universal panacea, ending a great number of the evils to which society had become subject’.2 This chapter outlines the precursors to the S.A.C.P., its basic chronology and political context. The abolitionist movement was opportunistic: sensitive to current affairs such as gallows scandals involving bungled executions or controversial sentences. Like any other pressure from without, its fortunes waxed and waned according to the national political scene and the competing interests of activists who might be distracted by many other philanthopric or political causes. The S.A.C.P. was founded in April 1846 in that famous metropolitan centre for Protestant Evangelicalism, social reform and general philanthropy, Exeter Hall, a large building above whose Corinthiancolumned entrance opening on to the Strand there appeared appropriately the Greek inscription to ‘loving brethren’.3 The meeting for its inauguration was trailed in advance by the metropolitan press.4 As an organized expression of opposition to penal practices, the S.A.C.P. was not a novel development, and what follows is a brief survey of the abolitionist societies active in the early nineteenth century. These small societies, supported by Quakers and Evangelicals, were frequently bankrupted when their limited budgets were exhausted in printing books and tracts to shape public opinion and influence

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parliament. One recent study of reform efforts in this period credits the ‘carefully controlled agitation’ of these societies in making criminal law reform ‘politically plausible’ and argues that ‘the Capital Punishment Society clearly was believed in its own time to have been speaking for a considerable portion of the population, and that is what established it as one of the shapers of public opinion.’5 Reform of the legal and penal systems obviously involved far more than the question of the death penalty throughout our period.6 The title of the first anti-capital punishment society in Britain, the Society for the Diffusion of Knowledge Respecting the Punishment of Death and the Improvement of Prison Discipline (hereafter, S.D.K.P.D.I.P.D.), conveys this wider penal interest. There was also a separate society for prison discipline, which attracted some of the core abolitionists, but which in general (until the later 1820s) avoided public connection with the capital punishment question.7 One important supporter of the S.D.K.P.D.I.P.D. was the legal author Basil Montagu, the illegitimate son of the fourth earl of Sandwich, a man of ‘fine, aristocratic features, a perfect address, totally devoid of the barrister’s impertinence and forwardness’.8 Through his pamphlets and what became a three-volume collection of authorities on capital punishment, Montagu became the most prominent publicist for the reform of the criminal code in this period.9 Other key figures included the Quakers Samuel Hoare, Frederick Smith of Croydon (a chemist-druggist and convert to Quakerism), William Forster, and Luke Howard (meteorologist and partner in a firm of chemists, which included the Quaker reformer William Allen, at Plough Court in Lombard Street), the radical and friend of Charles Lamb, George Dyer, and the radical publisher Richard Phillips.10 Quaker families associated with the society included the Frys, Buxtons, Gurneys and Fosters. The society’s supporters came also from the established church, with six clergymen on the London committee, including Samuel Wix, vicar of St Bartholomew the Less, Daniel Wilson (later Bishop of Calcutta) and the bibliophile and erstwhile republican Archdeacon Francis Wrangham.11 Anglican clergy were also represented on a Dublin committee. The abolitionist society supported the parliamentary campaigners for criminal law reform such as the Whig politician and lawyer Sir Samuel Romilly and helped publicize parliamentary debates through their pamphlets.12 But the policy of diffusion of information was costly and bankrupted the society 1814–1815. In 1817 the society, following Romilly’s belief in prosecutor and juror reluctance to prosecute and convict, attempted to obtain ‘interesting cases’ of capital punishment from provincial supporters.13 These supporters were now encouraged, in a shift

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in the society’s tactics away from metropolitan domination and tight control of membership, to form provincial societies.14 The society’s financial straits reflects the relative significance of capital punishment as a concern for its chief supporters in the early-nineteenth century, the Society of Friends. Although the Quakers were to be associated by the Victorian press with efforts to eradicate the death penalty and although they were undeniably one of the most important components of the wider penal reform movement (in societies such as The Society for Investigating the Alarming Increase of Juvenile Delinquency in the Metropolis, co-founded by the Quaker Peter Bedford in 1815) their support for anti-slavery efforts dwarfed their activities against the gallows and the Bloody Code.15 A change in the society’s name in these years followed a dormant period brought about by financial weakness. The Society for the Diffusion of Information on the Subject of Capital Punishment (hereafter S.D.I.S.C.P.), established in 1820, saw its role as publishing metropolitan and provincial facts about capital punishment, promoting petitions to parliament and letters to MPs and peers, circulating pamphlets, and obtaining necessary funds.16 It lapsed after a few years, to be revived in 1829 without a title change, until reformation with a more militant title in 1846.

FIGURE 1. ‘Peter Bedford conversing with two Thieves’. Frontispiece from W. Tallack, Peter Bedford, the Spitalfields Philanthropist (London: S.W. Partridge, 1865). Courtesy of Society of Friends Library.

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Although the archive for the earlier societies is almost limited to the tracts they produced, a report dated March 1845 includes a statement of the accounts, and a list of contributors for 1828–1845 lists some 130 named individuals and family members, with places of residence providing information on geographical concentrations of support. The list indicates the prominence of Quaker support and also reveals some Unitarian support.17 The Quaker journal The Friend reported the committee’s claim to have ‘established an extensive Correspondence’, in 1830.18 Support came predominantly from London, but Quaker subscribers came from other Quaker centres such as Hitchin in Hertfordshire, Sidcot in Somerset and Bristol. Key abolitionists in this period included Peter Bedford, the retired manufacturing chemist John Thomas Barry who was a former partner of Allen’s in the business at Plough Court and Thomas B. Wrightson, a member of the London Peace Society whose pamphlet on capital punishment reached several editions, and who also continued to be involved with the movement after 1846.19 Barry’s figure ‘dressed in the friendliest of [F]riends’ costumes’ (he had become a Quaker early in life), became familiar gliding quietly through the corridors into the lobby of the House of Parliament.20 Tall and slim, ‘his head was remarkably well developed and fine in form, his nose long and aquiline and his features strongly expressive of the calm refined thoughtfulness of his mind,’ an obituarist wrote. His own strategy, since public feeling was fickle and would not support any long continued agitation, was to show by ‘persistent efforts the injustice, impolicy and inconsistency of the law in dealing with individual offenders’. By force of circumstances rather than argument, he hoped to convert the administrators of the law into allies or supporters.21 As one friend of the ‘untiring advocate’ privately wrote in 1843, Barry’s health was ‘much shattered by his great exertions’.22 Wrightson, whose brother William was MP for Northallerton, was mentioned as a Liberal candidate for Sheffield in 1837, when the support of local Quakers seems to have been canvassed on the basis of his devotion to criminal law reform – he was also a supporter of the ballot and disestablishment of the Church of England.23 It is interesting to see a number of female contributors to the society, particularly given the absence of named women involved in the S.A.C.P. The abolitionist society in 1831–1832 asserted the ‘inestimable value’ of the involvement of the ‘softer sex’, on the grounds that they felt ‘for the misery of the widows and orphans which the system creates’.24 Such women, mainly Quakers, gave some generous contributions. The average contribution was a few pounds as a one-off payment, which suggests involvement due to the visit of a member of the abolition society to a

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locality or town, possibly in connection with petitioning efforts for reprieve in a particular capital case. The largest sum donated was £300 anonymously via Barry. From 1830–1844 a total of £1,462 6s 4d was donated to the society, including sums from groups in Ireland. The larger sums tended to be tied to specific purposes. Petitioning efforts for reform of the capital code were encouraged by S.D.I.S.C.P. advertisements in English, Scottish and Irish newspapers. The society had a committee in Dublin (entitled the Howard Society for Improvement of Prisons, and the Abolition of the Punishment of Death25) and in Edinburgh (founded in April 1830). These committees held public meetings in 1836 but the Edinburgh society was publicly rebuked for linking its efforts with the Scottish Prison Discipline Society.26 Stimulated by the S.D.I.S.C.P. or organized independently by religious denominations or communities, petitions were organized to further reform the law: thus the general Baptist churches at Leicester petitioned parliament to abolish capital punishment for all crimes except murder in 1838.27 Some insight on activities in the 1830s is derived from the letters published by the solicitor, William Sandford Phillips of Liverpool, who was also interested in reform of secondary punishments and the problem of juvenile delinquency (Barry cautioned him to avoid subjects that would confuse the goals of the Capital Punishment Society).28 His Considerations on the Increase and Progress of Crime allows us to trace some of the efforts of the ‘central society’ in London, and the Howard Society in Dublin, with letters between him and John McCay, an abolitionist who had been assistant secretary to the Bank of Ireland, the parliamentary abolitionist William Ewart (Liberal MP for Dumfries), and John Thomas Barry.29 An allusion to ‘Howard Trinity’ reports suggests co-ordinated activities by the London, Dublin and Edinburgh societies. The honorary secretary of the London society for eleven years, William B. Sarsfield Taylor, testified to the ‘untiring zeal, intelligence, and judicious perseverance, with which these societies carried on their movements, and co-operated in the most cordial manner to regenerate and purge … the criminal code of Great Britain’.30 Phillips established a Liverpool branch of the ‘Capital Punishment Society’ in February 1833.31 Prince Augustus Frederick, Duke of Sussex, the Whiggish sixth son of George III, prized by Ewart for his ‘general consistency of principle – and his independence, as well as dignified station’ became the S.D.I.S.C.P.’s patron in 1832.32 This was the year of the Great Reform Act, and Ewart expressed his faith that the reformed parliament, representing the people, would pass ameliorating legislature as the people had ‘long since declared their hostility to laws at once sanguinary and inefficient’.33

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Romilly’s parliamentary exertions from 1808 until his suicide in November 1818 had little immediate success. Though his efforts and those of the extra-parliamentary abolitionists had a role in the amelioration of the sanguinary code which had dealt so harshly with property crimes (including such petty pilferings as the theft of a shilling from a dwelling place or five shillings from a shop), the transformation that took place in the 1830s was the result of Sir Robert Peel’s consolidation of the criminal law, and the repeal of a large number of capital offences by Lord John Russell. By the accession of Queen Victoria capital punishment was limited only to treason, murder, rape, sodomy, and violent theft.34 Harriet Martineau’s History of the Thirty Years’ Peace commented on this capital law amelioration, that those who understood the subject had become advocates of total abolition, the facts and figures apparently leaving no doubt about the result of the ‘principle of leniency’ in the past or its likely impact in the future. But the government and criminal law commissioners would not go as far as ‘society at large’, and argued that if grave crimes increased after abolition there might be a ‘danger of revulsion to a vindictive system’. Martineau dismissed this as a plea which could have been urged against any amelioration, and as something which ‘took for granted the almost impossible supposition that society can go back to a barbarous system, after having achieved emancipation from it’.35 The problem which emerged for politicians was the lack of an adequate alternative in secondary punishments, of ‘knowing what to do with the criminals now cleared off by the halter’.36 This could not have been admitted, for such an avowal, ‘that men must be hanged because we did not know what else to do with them – could not be made by any government, either in decency, or because no man could be hanged after such an avowal’. The History of the Thirty Years’ Peace maintained that public opinion would have gone with a further or complete remittance of the death penalty, and that ‘nobody believed’ the reasons offered by the commissioners and government. No doubt the abolitionist society was frustrated: a well-wisher cautioned the moderating of its ‘strong, subsidiary, anti-ministerial feeling’ in 1837.37 In March 1840, eight years after beginning his parliamentary campaigns to ameliorate the capital code, Ewart introduced the first parliamentary motion for complete abolition (in 1837 he had called for abolition of all capital punishment for all crimes except murder38). Over 250 MPs were present but only 93 MPs supported him – although as ‘men of education, of talent, and social worth’ their decision was sufficiently alarming for one retentionist to pen a pamphlet defending the penalty ‘for cruel atrocities’, in which the fear that the debates in the ‘senate’ were diminishing the horror of murder ‘amongst the half-educated classes’ and troubling the

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consciences of potential jurors and others was evident.39 Abolitionists hoped that ‘some nominal defeats are real and substantial victories’.40 By 1842, a year after capital punishment was essentially restricted to murder, a liberal such as Thomas Arnold of Rugby, in his introductory lectures on modern history, could suggest that the ‘popular feeling at this moment against capital punishment’ was no longer leading to the restraint of legal cruelty but ‘the injury of innocence’.41 The S.D.I.S.C.P.’s final report in 1845 struck an optimistic tone – the committee claiming the movement was ‘making rapid strides in public opinion’ – but it was financially weak, and operating without the assistance of key figures like the Quaker chemist William Allen and the Irish journalist and lawyer John Sydney Taylor, who had died. The royal patron also died, in April 1843.42 It was not surprising then, that one correspondent of the abolitionist Liverpool Mercury should think it necessary to call for a national society for abolition, in February 1846, unaware that this still existed.43 At the same time, as this correspondence suggests, there were signs of renewed provincial interest across Britain with lectures, public meetings in a number of towns and cities, and a few local societies, eagerly reported in a magazine devoted to the movement, the Magazine of Popular Information on Capital and Secondary Punishments, first appearing on 15 March 1845. The S.D.I.S.C.P.’s report of 1845 referred to a committee in Warrington.44 New societies appeared in 1845–1846 in Aylesbury, Exeter, Reading and Southampton, although the claim made by the Exeter society that societies had been formed in ‘many places’ was clearly an exaggeration.45 In the 1850s and 1860s a few short-lived local branches of the S.A.C.P. were formed, sometimes in the aftermath of local executions. The society relied on a network of correspondents, as we shall see when we look at the reprieve activities in more detail, who sent money and information, and coordinated local efforts, including petitioning. The Magazine of Popular Information revealed – ironically in what seems to have been its final surviving number – that a meeting would be held at Exeter Hall on or about 19 April 1846 to petition for total abolition.46 In fact the Exeter Hall meeting was pre-empted by abolitionists in Liverpool where there had been public discussion from the quarter of a ‘Health and Life Association’ meeting at Lime Street. Members included the financial reformer Lawrence Heyworth, who became the association’s president, the magistrate and merchant William Rathbone, the bookseller Samuel Kent, the merchant’s clerk Johnston Russell, the principal of the Mechanics’ Institute, Dr William Ballantyne Hodgson, and a former governor of Salop County Gaol, W.H. Griffiths.47 The association intended to promote peace and abolition of capital punishment as subjects of ‘the most vital importance to the well-being of mankind’.48

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The Sunday newspaper Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper announced that it understood the association’s secretary would propose a ‘National Association for the Total Abolition of Capital Punishment’ at the general conference to be held in Liverpool on 5 May, the plan to ‘embrace a system of education, as a means of promoting temperance, health, and morality, and thereby preventing crime and disease amongst the lower orders of society’. The London paper applauded the scheme, but in fact the society that was inaugurated in London was not the same.49 Liverpool abolitionists’ efforts to initiate a new movement, which had got to the stage of proposing rules and regulations, were superseded by the metropolitan efforts, which attracted widespread attention.50 In the evening of 29 April 1846, the new society was ushered in before an audience of five thousand, one of the largest audiences to congregate in the great hall of Exeter Hall.51 Present were such luminaries of capital punishment abolition and social reform as William Ewart (who acted as the meeting’s chairman), the aristocrat Lord Nugent, the Quaker leader of anti-corn law agitation, John Bright, the preacher and anti-corn law lecturer W.J. Fox, the great Irish nationalist Daniel O’Connell and the Quaker philanthropist and banker Samuel Gurney. There were letters of support from the literary celebrities Douglas Jerrold and Charles Dickens, and John Bright’s associate in the Anti-Corn Law League, Richard Cobden.52 The meeting was convened by public announcement and the audience (admission was free) was conspicuous for the presence of Quakers and Quakeresses. A dense report in the abolitionist Daily News claimed it was ‘one of the most respectable and influential assemblies we ever recollect to have seen met together within its walls’.53 Indeed, they were so crammed in the hall and the galleries that there was not enough seating, and there were cries of ‘Time! Time!’ as Lord Nugent began his speech, such was the heat and pressure. The one dissentient hand raised to the resolutions was, inevitably, identified as Jack Ketch’s – after the almost mythical seventeenth-century executioner.54 There was also disruption because of the controversial presence of O’Connell. He had already spoken in support of abolition at Exeter Hall for an earlier abolitionist society.55 Now he appeared ‘enveloped in a cloak, feeble and haggard and bowed down’.56 One newspaper reported ‘loud cheering and a few hisses’.57 The Satirist contrasted his abolitionism at this meeting with a meeting he attended on the same day, of ‘The Friends of Ireland’, when he seemed to endorse violence.58 For a resolutely Tory journal such as John Bull, this was a congregation of ‘sentimental law-givers and humdrum philosophers’, the topic discussed superficially – skimble, skamble stuff.59 In fact the platform included men

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inspired by the apparent success of opponents of the corn laws organized in the Anti-Corn Law League.60 The timing of the new anti-gallows effort was meant to be delayed until the corn law question was settled (in fact the repeal bill was passed 26 June 1846): as Douglas Jerrold told the prominent Quaker abolitionist Charles Gilpin in late February, the public would not give due attention to two subjects at a time.61 ‘Censorious,’ in the abolitionist Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, hoped that with repeal, other important topics ‘appertaining to the social and political institutions and condition of the country’, would get their due attention by the public mind, foremost among them, in his view, being death-punishment ‘a subject which it may be safely averred, is not less interesting and important to society at large than to the unhappy beings who are, from time to time, subjected to it.’62 The abolitionists of the late 1840s were conscious of the ‘victory’ of pressure from without in the League which could be seen as the latest in a series of successful extra-parliamentary movements.63 Several leading Leaguers were associated with the abolitionist cause and allusion was made to the corn laws victory at a number of S.A.C.P. meetings.64 It was an era when politics seemed to be transformed by the influence of informed middle-class. ‘Since the splendid success of the Anti-CornLaw League,’ one reformist journal observed, ‘there has been a disposition to create leagues for the furtherance of those hundreds of reforms which are all absolutely and greatly necessary in this very corrupt country.’ The corn law repealers were thus followed by leagues for co-operative reform and international brotherhood, with new projects for ‘Anti-Gold-Law League, and Anti-Land-Law League, an Anti-Bribery League, and an Electoral League’.65 One of the S.A.C.P.’s secretaries wrote to the American abolitionists with absurd exaggeration that the cause looked well, with ‘a great accession of strength in Parliament’, with support from ‘more than half of the clergy of all denominations’, and the middle classes ‘with us almost to a man’.66 Another abolitionist made a similar claim for mass mobilization of the middle classes in this period, in an editorial for the abolitionist Liverpool Mercury, arguing for the ‘growing moral repugnance to capital punishment in the minds of that portion of the community – the religious and industrious middle-classes – whose sentiments and feelings, in the long run, shape penal legislation’.67 Of course, the critics of League success were less complimentary when they saw, to quote ‘Pro Ecclesia Dei’, thundering in the Ipswich Journal in 1849, the ‘trading demagogues, in the name of one society or another, assail us day by day with details of grievances or plans of reform, demanding our immediate adoption or our instant redress to ward off national ruin or to avert the displeasure of Heaven.’ This particular critic

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described the abolitionists as ‘the noisiest of those societies, or at least ... that cabal which is striving at the moment to attract most notice’.68 Following the public fanfare of 1846, the S.A.C.P. was energetic in the late 1840s in nationwide meetings and lectures, in leading a propaganda war against the gallows, and in the organization of the petitioning of parliament. Clearly it had among its supporters some leading radical and philanthropic figures. The abolitionist petitions it coordinated or stimulated – in 1846 from Quakers in Southampton, Preston in Lancashire, a Unitarian chapel in New Hall, Birmingham, the Exeter AntiCapital Punishment Society (founded in 184569), the Bristol Auxiliary Peace Society, and the inhabitants of Tavistock – were meant to be employed by the parliamentary campaigners.70 The next rousing point which seemed to underline the new state of politics was 1848, when European ancien régimes appeared to be toppled and European assemblies abolished or restricted the death penalty.71 In parliament William Ewart argued that abolition would mitigate ‘the fury of the tempest’ or illuminate the calm.72 This came a day after a largely peaceful Chartist meeting at Kennington Common to celebrate the new French republic had been marred by looting. The Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor was willing to incur unpopularity among abolitionists during the parliamentary debate on the death penalty in March 1848 in claiming that the working classes supported the punishment for premeditated murder (though he associated a later affort to introduce the Charter in 1850 with abolition).73 The Chartist Goodwyn Barmby carried an address of sympathy for the French Provisional Government from the S.A.C.P. from Southampton.74 The satirical journal Puppet Show ironically contrasted the ‘savage ferocity’ of abolitionist republicans abroad with Ewart’s House of Commons motion which was always ‘negatived by a large majority’.75 Domestic crime, as well as domestic and European politics, provided stimuli. This was a period of considerable press interest in murder, above all, perhaps, concerning the notorious George Frederick Manning and his wife (who had murdered their lodger), referred to in a petition adopted unanimously by a meeting at Manchester in December 1849: To the Honourable the House of Commons of Great Britain and Ireland, in parliament assembled. The Memorial of the Inhabitants of Manchester, Respectfully showeth,—That your memorialists believe the system of capital punishments ill calculated to effect the objects intended; if, as they imagine, those objects are the repressing of crime, and the satisfaction of justice. Your memorialists believe that such

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VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS exhibitions as those connected with the Mannings, instead of proving a terror to evil doing, will rather stimulate the commission of similar crimes, by the facility thus offered of acquiring a notoriety otherwise unattainable. Your memorialists believe that public executions assume the character of public exhibitions; and they tend to gratify, perpetuate, and engender passions, feelings, and sentiments the reverse of those it is the general interest of society to encourage and foster. Your memorialists furthermore believe that capital punishments are not truthful examples of just retribution, and that they might be most advantageously abolished.—Your petitioners, therefore, &c.76

Maria Manning’s ‘authentic memoirs’ were serialized in penny numbers that combined to make a volume of over eight hundred pages.77 The execution in London in late 1849, with Mrs Manning launched into eternity before a vast crowd while dressed in a ‘handsome black satin dress’ was a media sensation, and, according to The Economist, seemed to do more to hasten abolition than any argument by abolitionists.78 Critics of public executions tended to present the mass audience – the ‘great show and spectacle of the million’ as the journalist Charles Mackay called it – as the scum of society. But the execution of the Mannings and others attracted people of all classes.79 According to one newspaper editorial on the fashionability of execution-seeing, the ‘anti-capital punishment journals’ were notable by their silence during this notorious case. Such abolitionists, ‘like all rational beings’, could only object to their hanging because hanging was too good for them, but after the couple were executed, would come out with their usual diatribes against ‘sanguinary enactments’ and ‘bloodstained codes’.80 The execution of notorious murderers stimulated discussion of the validity of death punishment not only in the press but also in debating societies and mutual improvement societies in London and across the country. Even if the subject was selected primarily for its crowd-pulling power, these societies adopted a rational stance in which participants examined the advantages and disadvantages, or morality and scriptural bases, of the penalty of death. In the Farringdon Club in 1846 (before the S.A.C.P. was founded), ‘many highly intelligent and influential citizens, common council men, and others’, listened to a debate about capital punishment during the monthly discussion evening.81 The recently established Whittington Club – ‘which was to be the beginning of all social good and the grand reforming influence and “leveler up” of the “second set” where ladies were to dance with shopmen, and gentlemen were to squire, but not flirt with shopwomen’ – discussed the topic too.82 This was

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hardly surprising given that the club had been founded by Douglas Jerrold and supported by abolitionists such as Charles Gilpin.83 An American Encyclopaedia of Instruction had declared: ‘the right which man claims to inflict capital punishments on his fellow human beings constitutes so indefinite a topic as to be a favourite theme with young disputants, who debate to evince their ingenuity rather than to attain any practical results.’84 In one mutual improvement society’s mock parliament in 1852 a bill to abolish capital punishment was passed against the government by a majority of two.85 In the autumn of 1849 Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper reported the S.A.C.P.’s impending campaign in the metropolis and provinces, with the sanitary reformer and temperance advocate Thomas Beggs lending his ‘strong practical sense; and manly eloquence’. The campaign started at Devizes where a woman had recently been hanged, before taking in the great northern towns, so that the movement would be powerfully accelerated by the appeal to the people of England.86 One newspaper critical of abolitionism saw it as part of an amalgamation of separate platforms, tacked on to financial and parliamentary reforms, when Charles Gilpin presented himself to the electors of Perth in late 1849: he was the eloquent expression of this ‘Joint-stock Universal Reform Association’.87 Abolitionist lectures at which Gilpin gave his address continued into 1850.88 A lull in national tours by S.A.C.P. officers followed until 1854– 1855. As the new decade unfolded the movement’s popular support declined, its faltering strength in the late 1850s clearly associated with the broader political environment for radical reform movements.89 Although it could partake of millennial expectations in the year of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, or at the time of the Peace Congresses, when (in the words of the French politician Émile de Girardin in August 1850) ‘Universal Peace that is to say the inviolability of human life, abolition of military slavery, of standing armies, of dueling, of capital punishment, the reduction of extravagant budgets, the augmentation of insufficient wages, freedom of exchange, unity of custom, such change in taxation as will ensure that the disastrous weight which falling on a few would crush and ruin them shall be insensibly supported by all, the organization of the means of providence and thrift, the moralization of the people through their well being,’ seemed in prospect; but this euphoria did not last.90 The accession to power of Louis-Napoleon and fears of French invasion hardly offered encouragement. The fortunes of the abolitionists might also be linked, as some commentators attempted, to parliamentary politics and the conservatism of government in contrast to the radicalism of ‘earnest Reformers’. Thus a

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preliminary for abolitionism, for the progressive weekly paper The Leader in 1850, was the abolition of Lord John Russell’s Whig government, which was infected by ‘moral Toryism’ and which gave authority to ‘popular prejudice’.91 Revived activity was associated with the first Commons motion for abolition by William Ewart for six years. Abolitionists in the Commons called for a select committee to consider abolition in June 1856.92 Meetings at Hertford, Boston, Louth, Lincoln, Lynn, Peterborough, Spalding, Hereford, Worcester, Droitwich, Walsall, Birmingham, Bath, Bristol, Carlisle and Norwich in 1855 all resulted in abolitionist petitions.93 The House of Lords, following a motion by Bishop Wilberforce of Oxford, established a select committee to investigate the operation of the law in relation to capital punishment in public (as we shall see in chapter 6) which recommended private executions, in July 1856.94 Abolitionist activity in Manchester in this year of ‘fearful murders’ led one local newspaper to query why an abolitionist ‘crusade’ should be being launched at the same time.95 A succession of notorious homicides did indeed stimulate public debate. Thus the abolitionists sought to capitalize on the trial of the poisoner William Palmer – with all its controversies over medical evidence and ‘circumstantial hanging’.96 ‘Not only had there been a trial unexampled in its duration,’ the barrister Edward Webster told a meeting of abolitionists at the London Tavern, Bishopsgate, ‘and in the interesting circumstances attending it, but we had at this time the prisoner who underwent that trial solemnly asserting his innocence.’ By chance the latest abolitionist motion by William Ewart took place at the same time: Palmer was alluded to by Ewart. But the Commons had not become more sympathetic.97 Metropolitan public opinion, also in the midst of a panic about violent burglary, was reportedly (at least in the view of the writer, climber of Mont Blanc, and showman Albert Smith, writing provocatively to The Times as the ‘London Scoundrel’) in favour of the gallows: ‘how cheering this must be to the heart of Thomas Carlyle,’ wrote one commentator, alluding to the historian’s notorious stance of brutal punishment (to be examined in chapter 7).98 The trial of Dr Thomas Smethurst, who was defended by the abolitionist John Humffreys Parry, was another controversy a few years later, in 1859. Had the murder victim (his mistress) even been poisoned? In the metropolis and across England in the provincial press, the case was debated. It raised the question of what circumstantial evidence was sufficient to hang a man.99 John Passmore Edwards, writing to the Daily News, claimed that the abolitionist cause had been advanced by the case, since the execution would do violence to the feelings and opinions of the

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thousands of people who believed in the penalty of death, ‘Smethurst’s gallows, should it ever be built; will do more than any anti-capital punishment platform ever erected.’100 Passmore Edwards urged those who were interested in the matter and had facts or opinions to give, to write to the Home Office.101 The memorials were, according to the Morning Star, ‘signed by thousands of every rank, dwelling in almost every section of the country, and having no interest whatever in the matter at issue beyond their earnest desire, for the preservation of the purity of justice’.102 But letters and memorials in one particular case, however controversial (Smethurst was reprieved), were not the same as a nation-wide campaign for abolition. This could not be mobilized in this period for obvious reasons: the nation’s military efforts and imperial crises meant pacific talk of the reformation of criminals would be given short shrift. The dormancy of nationally-organized efforts from 1857–1863 was associated with the ‘unfavourable state’ of the public mind, ‘strongly excited during the period of the Indian mutiny and other sanguinary struggles in various countries, and more recently by the subject of the national defences’.103 The S.A.C.P. was not alone in this analysis of contemporary circumstances making attempts at reform irrelevant. Those who had supported the international peace congress movement (which included many who were also anti-capital punishment activists) found the Crimean war had destroyed any hope of popular support.104 Another anti-violence movement, the vegetarian movement, organized in a Vegetarian Society since 1847, felt that ‘absorbing subjects of interest to the public, whether of a harmless or immoral character in themselves’ always disadvantaged philanthropic movements ‘which thrive best when order and an even existence prevail’.105 War put the execution of what was fifteen or so murderers annually in perspective – just as the Irish famine had been used by opponents to render the abolitionists’ parliamentary efforts in March 1847 absurd.106 One provincial newspaper, whilst affirming its abolitionist principles did not ‘change with the alternations of public humour’, seemed to accept the force of the comparison with the cost of warfare: ‘We have begun to despise an arithmetic which takes account of half a dozen human lives more or less.’107 The doctor Joseph Ewart’s The Sanitary Conditions and Discipline of Indian Jails in 1860 made a similar point about arithmetic in contrasting the mortality of the cesspool with the gallows-tree: 6814 people had been killed by insanitary conditions in 1857: compared with 13 executed in England and Wales.108 In the militarism and jingoism of the 1850s retentionists could point as The Times did in 1856 to the criminal as the ‘internal enemy’ – if one could not execute a criminal, could one execute a Kaffir?109

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Punch, which had supported abolitionism in its early days, expressed the general mood of vengeance in the aftermath of the Indian mutiny when it published such paragraphs as ‘Pity for the Poor Sepoys!’, in which a correspondent enjoined the ‘twaddlers, who keep bleating … copy-book moralities, to hold their tongues. “Hang not at all,” is a doctrine I can understand; but, if you are to hang at all, hang every Sepoy you can catch … Do not hang, if you object to death punishment; but anyhow, don’t hang and cant.’110 The journalist George Augustus Sala was expressing the same sentiment in his novel The Baddington Peerage (of 1857) when he referred to the ‘Sepoys Friend Abolition of Capital Punishment Society’ – meeting in Exeter Hall.111 The newspapers of the Indian mutiny era, when they referred to the gallows, were overwhelmingly referring to the gallows on which mutinous Indians were strung up. Supporters of abolition limited their activity to ‘such operations as could be conducted by themselves’.112 These included Manchester’s town council unanimously memorializing the Home Secretary for an inquiry into the operation of the punishment of death in October 1860.113 A year later the question of capital punishment was debated in Manchester at a gathering of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.114 In 1863 there was a public meeting in the same place, calling for private execution, a call which the British Friend felt the S.A.C.P. would view as a false step.115 An association was created in the mayor’s parlour, the corporation having earlier in that year visited the Home Secretary to promote abolition.116 The S.A.C.P. was revived in 1863, and during this period the abolitionist movement used the platform of the Social Science Association (S.S.A.) – established in 1857 to act as a platform for experts to influence government in legislative and other reforms – to disseminate abolitionist arguments.117 The S.S.A. had evolved out of the reformatory movement and the Law Amendment Society (with William Ewart one of the Society’s founding members), so that questions of penology naturally figured prominently.118 Local abolitionists attended S.S.A. congresses – as, for instance, when it met at Manchester in 1866.119 The Economist, which tended to be sympathetic towards abolitionism, criticized the way the capital punishment question was handled at one S.S.A. gathering as the chairman’s bias against the penalty and the interruptions when a retentionist spoke compromised the S.S.A.’s reputation as a forum for the practical culture of the country; it seemed as if it were being taken over by the ‘friends of humanity’ and philanthropic cliques.120 Discussions at smaller venues took place, such as the Birmingham literary and debating association in 1864, and during a Sunday evening lecture by the American Unitarian Moncure Conway, for ‘the

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Consideration and Discussion of the chief Philosophical, Religious, and Social Problems of the Day’ at the free thought Cleveland Hall in London in 1865.121 The London correspondent of the Sydney Morning Herald informed antipodean readers of discussion in the ‘Codgers’ debating society ‘chiefly frequented by journeymen printers, the proprietors of small shops, – and “seedy” Yankees, as well as the general class of men who frequent public-houses in the evening’. The audience attended to the abolitionist lecture of a barrister who was a son of a former Lord Chancellor, ‘we believe that he has already made the same speech … at nearly every Debating Society in London, from societies frequented by his brother barristers and their friends, down to the lowest in the city.’122 The S.A.C.P. explained its revival as a matter of the ‘time’ being right.123 The 1860s saw a continued emphasis on ‘public opinion’ as a potent force for abolition through revulsion at causes célèbres such as the executions together at Newgate of the five pirates of the Flowery Land (who had murdered their captain and others) and of the bricklayer Samuel Wright in 1864.124 Punch, commenting on Wright’s execution, thought indeed that ‘public opinion demands a graduated scale of punishment, and that crimes, so different in character and atrocity as those of WRIGHT, the man-slayer, and of PALMER, the poisoner, should not be called by the same indiscriminate name, and treated accordingly.’125 On the other hand, a considered article on the prerogative of pardon and the punishment of death appearing in the reformist Westminster Review in 1864, expressed a concern about the impact of ‘extensive popular agitation’ as in the case of Wright and others: ‘Law should be the guide and exponent, not the slave of popular feeling.’126 Abolitionist pressure in the Commons resulted in the appointment of a Royal Commission in 3 May 1864, to ‘inquire into the provisions and operation of the laws now in force in the United Kingdom under and by virtue of which the punishment of death may be inflicted upon persons convicted of certain crimes and also into the manner in which capital sentences are carried into execution’.127 A fair-minded commission would be a tremendous opportunity to shape opinion, and efforts were concentrated on this, rather than the platform activity which had involved provincial tours in the late 1840s and 1850s.128 The former S.A.C.P. secretary, Alfred H. Dymond, felt that the inquiry was ‘conducted with a resolute determination to hear all sides with perfect impartiality’. On the abolitionist side there were witnesses such as Thomas Beggs, the serjeantat-law John Humffreys Parry, the Reverend Lord Sidney Godolphin Osborne (a son of the fifth Duke of Leeds), the Reverend William Cook Osborn, chaplain of Bath gaol, and William Tallack, the S.A.C.P.’s secretary, who was called to provide evidence in mid-December 1864.129

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Tallack’s memoirs indicate some of the work undertaken to assemble support for abolition, through correspondence with Lord Stanley, Sir Fitzroy Kelly, John Stuart Mill, Charles Kingsley, the Quaker traveller James B. Backhouse, and communications with American experts.130 Tallack tried to impress the Commission with foreign statistical evidence. In tandem with this effort to woo the Commission was the S.A.C.P.’s renewed efforts at petitioning, and pressure on MPs. Tallack was a salaried secretary, perhaps in recognition of the importance of the task, but this meant that the S.A.C.P.’s financial situation had not improved. In 1865 Dymond published The Law on its Trial and urged the committee to concentrate on the practicalities of finance without which any programme of publicity and pressure could not take place. The Friend carried an advertisement from the S.A.C.P. seeking names from provincial supporters of legal gentlemen, prison governors, and chaplains, supporting abolition with authenticated and recent reasons for the disadvantages of capital punishment. The Friend also appealed for moral and financial support, in order to support the publication of tracts and Macrae Moir’s translation of a German abolitionist work by Mittermaier.131 As Dymond had hoped there was ‘bold and vigorous action on the part of those who have assumed the direction of the movement’. The anti-capital punishment presence continued in the ninth S.S.A. congress, with Lord Brougham praising the S.A.C.P.’s work.132 Edward Webster debated the subject at the Juridical Society with Tallack, who was also busy writing to supportive newspapers and journals, detailing the arguments against the death penalty, with illustrations from recent notorious cases. Naturally the newspapers, and more specialist press (such as the legal and medical papers133) followed the Royal Commission activities and parliamentary debate closely, and when the report finally came out Tallack advertised it in The Friend – there had been disgust expressed in the House of Lords that the report had first been publicized in the Morning Star.134 A new wave of abolitionist and retentionist tracts appeared.135 Dymond’s contribution was one of Three Papers on the Subject of Capital Punishment with Webster and Henry Mayhew. A meeting to debate capital punishment was arranged by the S.A.C.P. at the S.S.A.’s rooms in Adam Street, Adelphi, in March 1866. Those present alongside old members of the abolitionist cause included the barrister Sir John Eardley Wilmot (in the chair), Lord William Lennox (son of the fourth Duke of Richmond), and the radical Liberal barrister Dr Richard M. Pankhurst of Manchester (husband of Emmeline Pankhurst). The retentionists included the ecclesiastical lawyer Dr Alfred Waddilove and the Reverend Walter Clay. The serjeant-at-law Humphry Woolrych’s paper on the Commission’s report stressed the

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‘narrow majority’ for retention had been based on ‘scanty evidence and on insufficient knowledge’ and that the commission had ‘really pronounced no definite opinion on the matter’ for scarcely one person had expressed his decided view that death ought of necessity to be inflicted.136 But as the abolitionist society issued another report on its activities in this ‘hard, uphill fight’ as one sympathizer described it, the first meeting of the Howard Association (named after the Quaker penal reformer John Howard137) took place.138 This Association, formed under the patronage of Lord Brougham in November 1865, significantly in the Quaker stronghold of Stoke Newington, reflected a new direction by men previously involved with the S.A.C.P. The energies of even committed abolitionists had not been solely devoted to the subject of the death penalty. When abolitionists failed to obtain the Commission’s unanimous support for abolition and as parliamentary prospects for abolition seemed dim, the movement was divided about whether to support the concealment of infliction as a necessary stage leading ultimately to abolition or to resist it as a ploy on the part of retentionists to make the gallows impregnable. Tallack’s departure for the Howard Association secretaryship, and the support of other members of the S.A.C.P. for the new venture expressed a recognition of the new political realities. Those abolitionists who had feared that the acceptance by parliament of the concealment of the death penalty would impede total abolition also maintained that the measure would be un-English, a sentiment which was expressed by others. ‘Publicity being the national habit in all that regards public affairs,’ The Economist had argued in 1856, ‘any kind of private execution before a select party would probably be the parent of greater disorders than public executions.’139 The journalist Cyrus Redding, in an article in the New Monthly Magazine in 1866, thought such executions were ‘not to be heard or tolerated … Everything connected with justice and with punishment, as well as with legislation, must be exhibited in open day.’140 An optimistic report from the abolitionist society misjudged the state of public opinion in January 1867. With private execution legalized by the Capital Punishment within Prisons Act in 1868, the S.A.C.P. was reduced to a rump of committed complete abolitionists.141 As the death penalty was essentially restricted to murder and memories of the Bloody Code receded, the S.A.C.P. knew its work would be difficult. Hiding the gallows from the public meant privatizing the issue.142 Abolitionists had to hope that the move would conflict with the supposed national habit for openness, though this involved some apparent contradiction for those abolitionists – like Gilpin – who supported the struggle for the secret ballot in the exercise of the parliamentary franchise.143

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The S.A.C.P.’s subdued 1868 report declared the old methods of agitation by public meetings or lectures were futile: instead they would have to rely upon the ‘teaching of events’. They believed that the public would be ‘as little satisfied with private as they have been with public executions’.144 But the time was not ‘suited to public agitation’. With ‘the large number of public questions demanding attention, each particular one can only obtain partial and occasional hearing’.145 They believed constitutional reform was demanding the lion’s share of public and parliamentary attention.146 The S.A.C.P. put its trust in a reformed parliament as the best platform – ‘to this the Committee have more and more turned their attention’.147 Previously in the abolitionist struggle public opinion had been presented as the educator of parliament, now parliament was treated as the ‘most successful way of addressing the people’.148 Now the language was of ‘a question of time’ and ‘gradual means’.149 Gatrell has considered the ‘beguiling conjunctions’ of parliamentary reform with reform of capital punishment in the late 1860s, arguing that the extension of the franchise to urban householders by the second Reform Act of 1867 and the concealment of the gallows behind the walls of the prison in 1868 were not propelled by, or the stimulants of, complacency about the plebeian populace. In Saint Paul’s Magazine, an essayist – the Liberal politician George Joachim Goschen – saw the period after the second Reform Act as ushering in the age of enhanced sentiment in politics, in which questions relating to capital punishment, flogging, the evils of agricultural gangs, and, to use what he thought was a French phrase, the ‘dignity of man’ would be addressed.150 With the departure of its secretary and the involvement of old members with a new society devoted to wider penal matters, the S.A.C.P. largely faded from public view. Thomas Beggs apparently became the S.A.C.P.’s chairman but funds were exhausted. But the abolitionists maintained a sporadically organized existence with occasional public notice, into the twentieth century. There were S.A.C.P. offices in the rooms of the N.A.P.S.S. in Adam Street, Adelphi, in 1872 and in the same year the S.A.C.P. met at the Lambeth Baths for a public meeting chaired by the inspector of prisons Frederic Hill.151 The next year it was reported as forwarding a petition for reprieve, unsuccessfully, in the case of the wife murderer Edwin Hancock.152 In parliament Charles Gilpin, and his successors, continued to introduce bills to abolish the gallows. Abolitionists still campaigned in individual cases, as we can see by looking at the record of John Bright. Perhaps the distinction between the S.A.C.P. and the Howard Association in its infancy is unhelpful, since the Association’s early

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personnel was identical with the older Society’s.153 The Association advocated wider penal reforms and left abolition an ‘open question’ for its members.154 But the secretary – in practice the Association – penned antihanging tracts. It was not surprising that the press should direct inquirers to him as secretary of the S.A.C.P. in 1871 and 1877, though it had been Beggs who took over this position.155 When Ewart fixed a new parliamentary motion for abolition in 1867, the British Friend claimed that ‘through the press and by correspondence throughout the kingdom much attention has been aroused to the subject by the Association in particular.’ The Association decided to labour for abolition in connection with its kindred aims. The Quaker journal also published an address from the Manchester branch of the committee of the Howard Association, signed by the former mayor of Manchester, Sir James Watts, the Quaker Josiah Merrick, the free trader William Massey, the Quaker merchant Thomas Emmott of Oldham and the Quaker architect and peace activist Peter B. Alley, and issued to local MPs.156 Such efforts were in ‘accordance with the wishes of many members of the association’.157 A form for a petition for abolition was also issued in 1869 by the Association and capital punishment was the subject of a separate conference during the International Penitentiary Congress at the Middle Temple Hall in July 1872 under the auspices of the Howard Association and presided over by the Baron Von Holzendorff, a German jurist.158 Subsequent Howard Association reports, whilst detailing activities in relation to convict prisons and the diminution of crime through a range of social and legislative projects which The Times found ‘bewildering’ in 1880, did endorse the ‘process and goal’ of abolition.159 The afterlife of the abolitionist movement in the Victorian period is returned to in the concluding chapter of this study.

2 CAPITAL PUNISHMENT AS AN IMPERIAL PROBLEM British abolitionists and those wishing to defend the death penalty were interested in how the punishment or its substitutes operated in the United States and in continental Europe.1 But information on the operation of the death penalty could also be derived from British territories overseas, whether in transoceanic colonies or just over the Irish Sea. There was an imperial dimension to debates about policing, penology and the causality of crime, and colonial responses to British developments.2 The ‘rule of law’ was a significant part of the British legitimization of colonization and empire, perhaps indeed, at the heart of empire.3 To use a coinage of the comic magazine Fun, there was such as thing as a ‘British Hempire’ – and indeed the British hangman was said to supply the British colonies with rope for execution.4 Historians of crime and empire have begun to work on comparative studies of ‘crime and empire’, exploring the variations in penal policies and methods of policing. Foucauldian scholars of postcoloniality have associated capital punishment with the concepts of biopolitics and thanatopolitics.5 Like their eighteenth-century Enlightenment forebears, Victorians were fascinated by ‘native’ or ‘aboriginal’ habits of punishment, as lurid accounts of punishments in ethnographic and travel writings testified.6 But accounts of aboriginal practices could also be used by contemporary critics to render ‘civilized’ European practices problematic. Abolitionists sometimes turned to the example of ‘rude people newly impressed with Christian principles’, in order to prick the conscience of their British brethren in Christ.7 An encounter with the cruelties of the uncivilized also brought an uncomfortable similarity to mind. Thus the New Zealand Journal commented in 1840 that the death penalty, ‘of questionable expediency everywhere, appears doubly objectionable among savages: it is too like their own ideas of mere revenge, and literally resembles, or

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rather is, one of their own barbarous institutions’.8 It is not surprising that the philanthropists of the Aborigines’ Protection Society – designed to assist indigenous people in the British empire and supported by Quakers and other liberal nonconformists – sought a ‘bloodless criminal code in the colonies’.9 Other Victorians concerned to promote the Lex Britannica were critical of aboriginal anomalies and inequalities in justice: in India for instance, the Church Missionary Society asserted, when comparing the capital punishment meted out to the low caste Sudra with the impunity of the Brahmins, that the ‘monstrous partiality could not be tolerated under British rule. Equal justice has long been the practice of our law court’.10 In fact, quite apart from the inequalities due to poverty or class prejudices within the metropolitan state itself, there were local variations in the operation of the law through juror prejudices, as Conley’s comparative study of English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish responses to homicide in the late nineteenth-century reveals.11 Conley argues that in the metropolitan state, race actually advantaged a person in homicide trials, since lighter sentences were passed on Asian and African defendants, while Wiener’s study of white-on-coloured homicide demonstrates the fact that ‘race weighed heavily upon criminal justice’.12 This chapter frames the British debate about capital punishment in the context of Britain’s empire.13 This is not an entirely anachronistic approach, though the British abolitionists did not, as we shall see, pay that great an attention to imperial matters. Some comparative comments on capital punishment in the empire were made by contemporaries. In 1837 the East India Company volume of the British Colonial Library compared (with an abolitionist intent) the British abolitionist society’s domestic statistics on capital punishment with Bengal’s.14 More importantly, in the Commons the question of imperial consistency and amelioration was raised by abolitionists. Thus William Ewart in 1851 argued that mitigation should extend to the colonies since colonial law was in many cases the same as that of the mother country, although there were a great number ‘in which the law was much more severe’.15 Ewart returned to the question of consistency when he called for the assimilation of Scottish law in theory as well as in practice, to English law. As Ewart noted, there were colonies (such as St Lucia) where obsolete French law was still in force and where crimes which were no longer capital in England were liable to the death penalty. The operation of Dutch Roman law meant a similar situation existed in Ceylon and the Cape of Good Hope. Maltese law followed Justinian principles, and by the letter of this law, capital crimes included duelling, thefts of any amount at night, attempts to poison, and malicious discharge of fire-arms. Ewart

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requested parliamentary returns to ascertain how far colonial laws were assimilated to English law and found the appearance of correspondence in fourteen colonies; three were partly assimilated and nine were more severe. As Ewart agitated the question, and even as the trend was towards more self-government, moves towards assimilation took place. ‘Still,’ Ewart told the Commons, ‘even where self-government was beginning to prevail, public opinion expressed in England would have its moral and material influence.’16 This was true, although local anxieties (about security in an alien and exposed setting, for instance) and local gallows scandals also stimulated colonial discourse. Opinion transmitted through the medium of English meant capital punishment was an imperial question – although colonial newspapers also disseminated continental European and American debates on the penalty of death. The imperial nature of the gallows is also reflected in such details as the British-born abolitionists who continued to agitate for abolition when they had emigrated, or the British-born professional who brought his training under the hangman William Marwood to bear when he became the first Canadian professional hangman, or the fact that the very stuff of the hempen rope was described as New Zealand hemp, or alleged to be provided for Australian colonies by the British hangman.17 Capital punishment and Ireland We shall see that there was a small-scale Irish abolitionist effort, associated with the London society. Irish murders gave English opponents of capital punishment plenty to agitate about. Ireland had a reputation in England for homicide indeed, and, as in far away imperial territories, the criminality (and murderousness) of the natives were used to legitimise British rule.18 As Richard Hengist Horne wrote in an essay in the Journal of Physiological Medicine, ‘every opportunity is seized of heading a paragraph with “Barbarous murder in Ireland.” No doubt it is true; but, then, the thing is not peculiar to Ireland, we should remember.’19 Infliction of the extreme penalty of the law for agrarian terrorism and political murder meant that British discourse on abolition sometimes had the ‘Irish problem’ uppermost. In 1848 Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper in an article on the role of Irish members in parliamentary discussions about the punishment of death noted that the Irish MPs were absent from the chamber during Ewart’s motion (except John Green, MP for Kilkenny), or voted with the government and Ketch. The paper thought that capital punishment was no deterrent to these political murders and secondary punishments would be effective.20 In the Commons in July 1850 John Bright similarly argued that public executions had no effect in Ireland.21

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The ex-soldier and Anti-Corn Law League propagandist Alexander Somerville told a largely working-class audience in Manchester in 1849, from his experience as a journalist for the Morning Chronicle in 1843 investigating a spate of murders in Ireland, that this was linked to ‘wholesale ejectments’ which maddened the people in some districts, leading them to murder their oppressors. This created a ‘powerful sensation’ upon his audience.22 In the same town in 1856, an abolitionist meeting heard the German democratic exile John Petzler condemn capital punishment for political offences, among which he classed the Irish agrarian murders.23 The role of the British press in promoting abolitionism is examined more closely in another chapter. The provincial and national Irish press covered parliamentary debates, published abolitionist correspondence and commented on the death penalty in editorials.24 Even fiction might be employed. The writer Darby Fagan used his ‘Carrickfergus chronicle’ in the pages of the Belfast Newsletter, to write against capital punishment.25 A number of abolitionist papers can be identified. Freeman’s Journal and Tuam Herald published items from the London anti-capital punishment society in 1840, and the former anticipated ‘speedy abolition’ despite Ewart’s failed parliamentary efforts in March 1840.26 The Nenagh Guardian (Tipperary), commenting on a local execution of Hughes in March 1842, declared it had ‘long since recorded our conviction that all death punishments are legalized murder – that it is only making bad tenfold worse’.27 The editor had been told privately that abolition ‘would never answer Tipperary’.28 The ‘party’ dimension in this case was alluded to, since the murderer Hughes had been twice tried before and the juries had been unable to come to an agreement; he had been found guilty on the third occasion by a jury exclusively of Protestants. Similarly sensitive to the problems of sectarianism and religion was the Irish Times, which deplored an unseemly petition in the case of Holden in 1860: the preservation of his life had been ‘made a religious question’. The execution of Fenian terrorists in 1868 prominently raised the question of abolition in people’s minds as we shall see later. The counsel for the defence in the Dublin trials of Alexander Sullivan (of The Nation) and Richard Pigott (of The Irishman) for seditious libel in their reporting of the Manchester Fenians in 1868, after vacillating on the subject, came to the conclusion that there ought to be no death penalty.29 The amelioration of the capital code in Ireland followed in the footsteps of the English reforms, but conspiracy to murder remained capital in Ireland after it had been removed from the English capital code.30 Capital punishment was also performed differently in Ireland, for instead of the scaffold the authorities used, at least into the mid-

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nineteenth century, iron balconies fixed to the outside of gaols, with two or three trap doors. Thackeray, in his Irish Sketch Book, expressed shame at the ‘frightful satiric way’ in which the misdeed of execution was thus brazened out; Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine used a vision of the massive iron balcony at Newgate in Dublin to preface an attack on the death penalty; and the Reverend Sidney Godolphin Osborne (an abolitionist) contrasted the temporary gallows in England with the permanently displayed drop in Ireland.31 Irish commentators also discerned a difference in national responses to public execution: Freeman’s Journal claimed an ‘insatiate desire for the horrible’ characterized the English, in describing the Donnybrook fair atmosphere attending the hanging of John Gleeson Wilson (an Irishman who had slaughtered a family) in Liverpool in 1849. The horror of the scene was underscored by the detail that many spectators came equipped with telescopes.32 Similarly employing gallows practice to dramatize national difference, the Limerick Advertiser characterized capital punishment as the English way of education which perpetuated a destructive relationship between tenant and landlord.33 Capital punishment in Australasia ‘There was more real cruelty in sending souls to be killed in Norfolk Island, as that den was managed ten years ago, than in killing the body here.’ So the British Spectator suggested in May 1846, in an article picked up by the Hobart Courier in Tasmania. The British press showed interest in executions in the Australian colonies and colonial papers – interested in British political news in general – reported British abolitionist efforts.34 Certain newspapers – such as the Argus of Melbourne under Edward Wilson – expressed clear abolitionist sentiments.35 As in the ‘imperial parliament’, there were Australian legislative efforts to reform the capital code. New South Wales, for instance, mitigated the capital code in 1838 by adopting reforms passed in the mother country. When Australian states legislated in the mid-1850s to inflict the penalty of death in private, they provided test cases for the Capital Punishment Commission in Britain in 1866. In turn the Australian press reported the findings of the Commission.36 With impending reform of the criminal code in the mother country in the 1860s, Australian abolitionists contrasted their own sanguinary laws under manhood suffrage with Britain’s restricted parliamentary franchise.37 The connection between British and antipodean abolitionists is represented by an auxiliary to the ‘Parent Society in London’ established in Adelaide in October 1844. The new colony of South Australia (founded on the anti-democratic principles of the abolitionist Gibbon Wakefield) was discussed by a proponent of emigration in 1839 as ‘destined to teach

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so many useful lessons to the civilized world’, so it was a matter of honour that Adelaide was reported to lack an executioner and regrettable when it began to inflict capital punishment.38 In the colony’s infancy the governor had even permitted a lecture against capital punishment to be delivered by David McLaren, the manager of the South Australian Company (created to develop the territory), at the Literary and Scientific Association.39 Almost five months later, the Magazine of Popular Information on Capital and Secondary Punishments carried news of the Adelaide’s auxiliary’s formation in its first number: noting the promoters’ intention to ‘put themselves into immediate communication with the society at home and go hand in hand with them in their efforts to effect still further ameliorations in the criminal code of the mother country and the colonies’.40 It held weekly meetings and planned to disseminate articles on distinct aspects of the question. Members included the young artist William Anderson Cawthorne, recently arrived in Australia, a member of the Total Abstinence Society (his father was a drunkard), and a diarist whose diaries record his reactions to Australian capital punishment.41 The South Australian Register, reciprocating the interest in Adelaide activity, actually published an extract from the Magazine of Popular Information.42 There were ‘strong efforts’ to abolish capital punishment in Sydney in 1847, and abolitionist stances were taken by several papers in New South Wales, such as the Maitland Mercury and Independent Journal.43 Dr Henry Grattan Douglass – a former army surgeon during the Peninsular War, and friend of the Gurneys, Frys, Allens and Hoares, who had taken the opportunity of penal reform that a colonial appointment seemed to offer – introduced a bill to abolish public executions in 1853 in New South Wales. The royal assent to the Legislative Council’s bill to privatize executions was given in January 1855, which meant that Australia was in advance of the mother country in this reform.44 The new act, 17 Victoria no.40, continued in force in Queensland when it separated from New South Wales in 1859. There was an abolitionist petition to the legislative assembly of the state of Victoria in May 1857.45 In 1858 Terence Murray, an abolitionist since childhood, advocated abolition in the New South Wales legislative assembly.46 Henry Parkes had promoted abolitionism in his newspaper, the Empire, in the 1850s; as an elected politician he also supported the cause but in 1861 his bill for total abolition was rejected by a large majority in the assembly.47 Another bill, from Dr Louis Lawrence Smith of South Bourke, was rejected in the Victorian parliament in January 1862, the attorney general Richard D. Ireland, identifying a scattered population and the depredations of bushrangers (that is, outlaws living in the bush), among other factors which meant the penalty was required – the 1860s

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was a period of anxiety about the activities of bushrangers such as Frank Gardiner.48 The radical Member for Patrick’s Plains, Joseph J. Harpur, advocate of abolition since the 1840s, presented a bill to the New South Wales legislative assembly to abolish capital punishment for all but wilful murder in 1863.49 A petition for abolition signed by some 600 people was presented to the New South Wales assembly in 1869.50 In the same year, a Wesleyan minister was brutally murdered by a murderer he was praying with, in Pentridge Stockade. The event was credited by one critic of abolitionism with destroying popular support for abolition in all the Australian colonies, after ‘public conventions and speeches throughout the colonies against capital punishment’ had seriously affected the administration of justice and allowed this prisoner to be sentenced to life imprisonment rather than the gallows.51 But another abolitionist bill was planned in New South Wales in 1870.52 There seems to have been an abolitionist society in operation in Sydney about 1860; a society which was associated with an unsuccessful abolitionist bill. A new Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment was initiated at the Sydney Exchange in February 1868, with a ‘large number of clergy of different creeds’ and many professional gentlemen, several MPs and ‘men of note’. Henry Parkes, now colonial secretary in Sir James Martin’s government, gave his public support. A re-launch seems to have been necessary, at any rate, the Society was publicly established in August 1869 after a public meeting in the Temperance Hall in Sydney, chaired by the recently knighted Sir Terence Murray, J.B. Wilson MP, and a number of clergymen. There were some forty-one members – all men – when the society was formed.53 Though few in number, as the founders recognized, ‘truth was always in a minority.’ Murray said that the Australian abolitionists should be stimulated ‘by the knowledge that we have the support of those great men who are working with us in Great Britain’. The key figure was the merchant Frederick Lee, who had lectured on capital punishment in Sydney in 1864−1865.54 In 1865 he sought a reprieve for the dentist Henry Louis Bertrand, in the notorious murder of the banker Henry Kinder at North Shore, Sydney – the Governor, who could grant a reprieve through his exercise of the royal prerogative of mercy, refusing to do so.55 Lee now became the secretary.56 The society’s formation was reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, which wondered, a month later, if the legislators of New South Wales would be prepared, ‘from being a step behind, to take a step in advance of the law of Great Britain, as well as of most European States?’57 As in the mother country, there were bungled executions leading to press controversies, and debating societies discussing capital punishment (as for instance, the mercantile assistants’ association at Hobart Town,

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Tasmania in 1849 and 1853, the Morpeth Debating Society in New South Wales in 1849, and the Brisbane School of Arts’ debating class in 1856) existed in the Australian colonies. When the execution of two men for rape in March 1849 meant capital punishment ‘engaged public attention’ in Sydney, there were lectures for and against the rope. Some of the lectures were published as pamphlets.58 One of the earliest tracts against capital punishment came from the recent immigrant Nathaniel Luscomb Kentish, a surveyor, who published an essay ‘with an earnest appeal and dutiful petition to the Queen’ in 1842.59 Kentish’s petition also had press support in Tasmania, being published in the Launceston Examiner and Cornwall Chronicle.60 The debates on capital punishment in Australia, not surprisingly, echo those in the metropole. The same language, on the part of retentionists, anathematizing maudlin sentimentality and aversion to the infliction of pain, appeared, the same recourse to the biblical command or prediction in Genesis ix.6, ‘Whoso sheddeth man’s blood shall his blood be shed’ – that ‘great sheet anchor of the sticklers for the infliction’ – was made.61 The same appeal to save him ‘who has done or is likely to do more service than injury to society’ on the part of abolitionists.62 The morality of the execution crowd figured too. The poet Richard Hengist Horne – who emigrated to the goldfields of Australia in 1852 in the company of the Quaker writer and abolitionist William Howitt – writing an article on the punishment of death in 1853, contrasted the carnival of a British execution with the scene in Melbourne, where the crowd was ‘serious and decorous’ and the death struggles were private.63 There were also instances of Australian juror abolitionism, although Frederick Lee thought that sitting on juries in order to obtain acquittals discredited the cause.64 There was, however, the peculiarly Australian aspect of race: the question of capital punishment in relation to aborigines. As John McGuire has noted, capital punishment in Australia operated in an environment of ‘frontier violence and unhappy race relations’ – an understatement for the genocidal activities that took place in Tasmania or the excessive retribution meted out to aborigines when suspected of perpetrating crimes.65 It was argued that the penalty of death needed to be inflicted in public when it involved aborigines, so that despite the privatization effected by some of the states in the 1850s, the lesson of the scaffold remained in Queensland, Western Australia, and South Australia.66 Generally it was thought that the aborigines should be executed where they had committed their crime, something that no longer happened in Britain. There were critics. The Western Australian barrister Edward Wilson Landor informed the Aborigines’ Protection Society in 1863 of the rigid and systematic infliction of death ‘upon natives who killed their own

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countrymen in conformity with immemorial, although barbarous and indefensible, customs’, the aborigines were being executed although they had no recourse to British laws and had not been educated in European morality, and were following their own usages when they exacted revenge for the death of a relation by killing a member of the murderer’s tribe.67 The Australian debate about the treatment of aborigines was picked up in the British press.68 Oedipus or the Sphinx of the Nineteenth Century, a curious production by William Brade, excerpted from the Melbourne Herald an article apropos of the trial of two aborigines at Ballarat: Blacks ought to be permitted to butcher each other with impunity, the law only applying to them when they venture an experiment upon the blood of a white man! If this doctrine were known to the humane Europeans who first ‘colonised’ Australia, it would doubtless have afforded them infinite consolation; for, instead of having to expend their money upon poison and powder to extinguish the natives, they need only have exerted their diplomatic powers in encouraging them to slaughter each other.69 But British abolitionists were not vocal about the racism which meant that Europeans were very rarely charged with the murder of aborigines.70 Apart from the question of race, there was also the feeling in such a sparsely populated country, where European husbands and wives were often separated by work, that the punishment of death for rape should be preserved, although the imperial parliament had removed the capital penalty.71 ‘If in an old country like England,’ wrote the Moreton Bay Courier (from what was just about to become Queensland) in June 1859, ‘with its thousands of teachers and its army of police, the abrogation of death punishment is not considered politic, how much more is the colony in which we live removed from the force of the logic for abolition.’72 As the Sydney Gazette had declared in 1840, in response to Fitzroy Kelly’s bill to reform punishment of death, ‘in a Colony like as this is’, to remove the death penalty for rape and murder was impossible.73 But the capital code was reformed in Britain, so that as the Maitland Mercury in New South Wales noted, in October 1851, ‘In England a British subject dare not be executed for the crime of rape; in New South Wales (a British territory) he can and may!’74 The institution of transportation, and the antipodean agitation to end transportation, were obviously related to the reform of the British capital code.75 In 1843 Alexander Maconochie, superintendent of the penal settlement of Norfolk Island since 1840, considered that abolition of capital punishment would eventually occur, and was concerned about the

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improvements to proposed substitutes. He claimed, in correspondence with the Secretary of State for the Colonies, that ‘nothing is more common among them [the prisoners] than to express a Preference of Death to a Penal Settlement.’76 When the half-French servant Annette Myers (or Meyers) – who had murdered her faithless soldier lover Private Ducker – was spared a death sentence and transported to Australia, the Australian press commented on the affair.77 At a ‘Renewal of Transportation’ meeting in Maitland in 1846, the Presbyterian minister John Garven complained: ‘This woman, who was too bad for England, yet hardly bad enough for the scaffold, was found to be just the thing for New South Wales.’ Where previously petty criminals had been sent to Australia, it was now the ‘incendiary, the shedder of blood, the murderer, and the parricide’.78 Frederick Lee’s abolitionist activities continued into the 1890s. Prominent figures in support of abolitionism included the state librarian of Tasmania, Alfred J. Taylor.79 After our period, there was renewed abolitionist effort, with the creation of a society in Adelaide in 1908. This was aligned with the British S.A.C.P. (indeed it was introduced as a ‘branch’), and involved two corresponding members of the British society. But the abolitionists made no headway.80 Capital punishment was not to be abolished in Western Australia until 1984. In New Zealand, established as a British territory in 1840 and witnessing its first European-style capital punishment in 1842,81 there was a similar interest in the British debates on capital punishment, and newspapers published leaders and correspondence about the subject, and were attentive too to activities in Australia.82 Mechanics’ institutes, such as Auckland’s, debated the subject.83 Travel writing and memoirs of missionaries included discussion of natives’ reactions to European capital punishment here, as elsewhere. Thus Remarkable Incidents in the Life of the Reverend Samuel Leigh noted the reaction of a Maori chief to the Reverend’s expostulations of cruelty to his slaves: the chief having witnessed the hanging of a white man at Sydney, said, ‘never did I witness so horrible a spectacle.’ In Maori culture by contrast (so Leigh recounted) the approach was to kill a man when he least expected it with a blow of the maree (club).84 But Maori penology, though it embraced public infliction of pain as punishment, was to be ‘silenced’ in the effort to isolate a transplanted British society from ‘native’ customs.85 There were a few pamphlets against capital punishment published in New Zealand. One was produced by the radical nonconformist minister Samuel Edger, who had spoken against the death penalty before emigrating from Britain.86 As elsewhere in the British world, abolitionism was presented by opponents as ‘faddism’.87 But New Zealand had

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pioneered the privatization of capital punishment a decade before Britain, despite some anxieties about the risk this move posed for Europeans in the midst of a large native population.88 Claude Corlett of the Southern Cross (Auckland) had told the Manchester Times of the solemnity and order of New Zealand executions and, whilst delighting in news of the grand jury’s presentment against public infliction of capital punishment at the winter assizes in Manchester in late 1864, hoped that ‘England may learn a lesson that will be beneficial to her from her youngest colony.’89 New Zealand debates about capital punishment were to figure in the British press in the late nineteenth century as the abolitionist movement developed in New Zealand. A bill for capital punishment abolition was introduced in 1895, and leading daily newspapers published editorials advocating more merciful punishment.90 The Women’s Institution in Canterbury was stimulated by the case of the baby-farmer Williamina Dean of Winton (the only woman to be executed in New Zealand, in August 1895) to consider the question of the death penalty, and heard an abolitionist lecture from the Fabian socialist James O’ Bryen Hoare, who had witnessed an execution in 1858 (his lecture became a pamphlet). The incident was reported in the British Woman’s Signal under the significant title, ‘What women will do with the parliamentary vote.’ Since New Zealand gave the vote to women in 1893, there was the prospect that New Zealand would pioneer abolition in the British Empire – especially since the National Convention of Women of New Zealand, in its inaugural year in 1896, had expressed its abolitionist ambitions. That year there were concerted efforts to organize abolitionism.91 Antipodean abolitionism existed, but more important for the British debate about capital punishment was the fact that the colonial penal system provided the British state with data which it could examine in its study of the operation of the punishment of death in private. Thus the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment sought advice from the governments of the Australian states, and printed the letters sent in reply, in the appendix of the Report. These did not, unsurprisingly, seek to disturb the official mind with abolitionist sentiments – although the Congregational minister and newspaper editor John West, of the Sydney Morning Herald, did send a thoughtful letter in which he pointed to the objection to public execution lying near to the objection to capital punishment in any form, ‘the infliction of this punishment within the precincts of a gaol is but one step towards the abolition of capital punishment altogether.’92 The chief justice of New South Wales also admitted that there was a settled idea in many minds that it was wrong ever to inflict death as a punishment.93

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Canadian debates on capital punishment The other colonies provided material which could be mobilized by British abolitionists and retentionists too. Thus William Tallack’s evidence before the Commission in December 1864 was about Canada, where capital punishment was suspended from 1838–1858, with felons instead being committed to the provincial penitentiary in Kingston. In 1865 the death penalty was restricted to murder, treason and rape.94 The barrister Beamish Murdoch’s Epitome of the Laws of Nova Scotia had expressed a view about the comparative humaneness of the new world by contrast to the old European world, in the early 1830s: Capital punishment is enjoined in so many classes of offence, by the laws of European states, and so little regard is paid to the prevention of crime, or, to the relative proportion that should exist between the offence and the punishment, that we may turn with some satisfaction to the laws of the states and provinces of this new world. Here the subjects of capital punishment are few and well known, and the general character of the criminal code is comparatively mild and paternal, while in practice it is conducted with the most humane and benevolent spirit.95 Perhaps it was mild in practice, but it had been pointed out in 1828 that Upper Canada lagged behind the amelioration of the criminal code in England: on paper the criminal code ‘was basically that of England as it stood in 1792’.96 Lacking an elaborate prison system, hanging remained an important aspect of the colony’s penal system (and source of public entertainment), although the statistics of infliction show that it was not a violent backwoods society.97 In 1833 an Act was passed in Upper Canada which removed some of the ambiguities of penal law in the colony and which was designed to reduce the capital code.98 Canadian capital punishment became a subject of concern for some in Britain, at the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign, with the execution of rebels following the risings in Lower and Upper Canada.99 In 1839 a writer in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine – a journal which published abolitionist literature – was highly critical of the lack of disapproval expressed by the Scottish press, and the absence of any public protest meeting in Britain.100 Attention and compassion were given to a British murderer but when it came to the execution of a score of men in Canada the press had called for ‘signal and sanguinary punishments’. None of the societies for abolition of capital punishment, the writer noted, sent a petition for mercy. Alluding to the Edinburgh society, the writer asked, ‘Where are our Wighams, and Erskines, and Grevilles? Is their philanthropy, which

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protects thieves and murderers at home, not expansive enough to include rebels across the Atlantic?’101 The suspension of capital punishment for twenty years was said to be the result of a revulsion of feeling, in Upper and Lower Canada, ‘which spread across the water, to the throne of Queen Victoria’.102 There were abolitionist efforts in British North America, though these have been seen by historians as quite minor.103 A ‘Traveller’ who sympathized with the transformation in European philosophy against long and deep-rooted prejudices, published a letter in one Newfoundland journal as early as 1815, attacking sanguinary punishments: ‘one might be induced to think … that we had not advanced into the nineteenth century.’104 One modern history of the Nova Scotian supreme court points out the rare infliction of capital punishment in this province, and the reform sentiment which, if it did not endorse complete abolition, led to a sparing use of the penalty and a reduction in the capital crimes in the 1840s.105 As in Britain, similar claims were made for a growth in public revulsion to capital punishment, and the reluctance of jurors to find people guilty in capital cases.106 In January 1849 there was a public meeting and preparations for an abolitionist petition in Montreal, the petition attracted ‘nearly six hundred names’, and there were other petitions from Upper Canada (from Perth, Pakenham, Sherbrooke, and from Smith’s Falls): sent to the House of Assembly and Governor-General and Legislative Council. Those involved in Montreal included a number of surgeons, including Dr Wolfred Nelson (who chaired the meeting), who had himself been in danger of execution as a rebel in 1837.107 The Montreal petition was presented by Dr Benjamin Workman, another medical man (his brother Joseph was to become feted as the father of Canadian psychiatry) whose family had emigrated from Ireland, and who helped found the Montreal Unitarian church.108 Another prominent Unitarian based in Montreal, also of Irish origin, and also opposed to capital punishment, was John Cordner. Another abolitionist petition came from Montreal in the early 1850s, when Parliament debated a motion about the punishment’s efficacy in preventing crime.109 Abolitionist and ameliorative sentiments were expressed in Legislative Council debates on the criminal law in 1851.110 On 5 May 1855 there was an abolitionist motion in the provincial legislature. Abolitionism was also expressed in the legislative council of Prince Edward Island, where the President hoped to see the end of the punishment in 1861, when the House was resolved into a committee on a bill for punishment (by flogging) for certain felonies and misdemeanours: the President was hoping for the substitute of penal servitude instead, to allow the possibility of repentance.111

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A select committee of the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada was appointed to consider modifying the law for inflicting capital punishment in April 1856.112 In 1858 the Catholic Chaplain of the provincial penitentiary in Kingston wrote to the inspectors of the penitentiary, that the public entertained an ‘aversion’ against capital punishment.113 In February 1863 when a bill was introduced into parliament to abolish public executions, debates expressed the fear that this would lead to abolition (one retentionist arguing that ‘if ever there was an instance in which they ought to follow the mother country, it was in this’114). Although read a third time and passed it was not returned from the council; another bill was discharged in 1866. A bill to abolish the punishment of death had been presented in January 1865. Private infliction followed on the reform in Britain in 1869. Canadian journals discussed the problem in similar terms to the British press. The Nova Scotian, for instance, presented an article in 1850 debating the pro-capital punishment argument from Genesis.115 The Montreal Weekly Pilot asserted in 1852 from ‘personal acquaintance, as well as certain knowledge that a strong aversion to capital punishment has been steadily gaining ground in Montreal, and indeed through Canada’.116 The abolitionist Newfoundland paper The Public Ledger in 1863 published a letter from a retentionist which complained of the press’s influence: without exception editors ‘repudiate altogether the infliction of the death penalty upon any criminal, for any crime whatever’.117 Le Pays carried discussion of abolition written by the French Canadian lawyer Gonzalve Doutre.118 Canadian commentators could call on their American neighbours for literature (Charles C. Burleigh’s Thoughts on the Death Penalty, for instance), as well as British commentators such as The Times, and Charles Dickens on the execution of the Mannings.119 The British Colonist of Toronto received an abolitionist interpretation of British opinion from its London correspondent at the time of the Great Exhibition: though judicial stranglings were very numerous, the question was ‘being very widely canvassed … although there may be many noisy men who resolutely refuse to entertain even the faintest idea of dispensing with the gallows, the majority of the people of these kingdoms are of opinion that at least the time is near when the experiment of abolition might be tried’, it was claimed.120 In London, Ontario, the London Times under the editorship of the British surgeon John Salter promoted abolition.121 Given the primacy of British law, the discussion about the penalty in Britain figured in professional legal journals like the Upper Canada Law Journal.122 In 1866 the Lower Canada Law Journal reported that Morris’s bill to introduce private executions within the walls or enclosed yards of gaols, was ‘following the lead taken in England’. The journal believed that the

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measure would be acceptable by the large majority of the public, especially from abolitionists.123 Written in the period when capital punishment was suspended, the lawyer Robert Christie’s A History of the Late Province of Lower Canada expressed the view that capital punishment would not only be abolished for – in the context of discussing the Canadian rebellion of 1838 – political offences, but ‘indeed any other crime. Such barbarous exhibitions are disgraceful to governments, to civilization, and to humanity.’ The penitentiary (Christie’s work appeared a few years after the creation of the most elaborate penitentiary structure yet built, at Kingston) or exile were sufficient atonement of any crime and would, he hoped, supersede capital punishment.124 But opponents were vocal, and if the Unitarians provided some of the leaders of the abolitionist cause, some Catholic newspapers expressed their support for the death penalty, for instance the True Witness and Catholic Chronicle (Montreal) in 1852.125 In 1878 the Catholic Bishop of Harbour Grace spoke against the ‘satanic spirit of insubordination’ which saw men ‘crying from the Tribune of political parliaments asking the abolishing of capital punishment’.126 The language of robust antisentimentalism which critics of abolitionism deployed in Britain also surfaced in Canadian commentary.127 British commentary on Canadian capital punishment included the émigré Susanna Moodie’s view, in the context of her account of her visit to Kingston Penitentiary, where she had met the murderess Grace Marks: Executions in Canada are so rare, even for murder, that many atrocious criminals are found within these walls – men and women – who could not possibly have escaped the gallows in England.128 Canadian abolitionists may have been inspired by the abolitionist efforts in the bordering states such as Michigan, but the example of American abolitionist states did not bring the Canadian movement any success.129 Capital punishment, which had been restored in 1858, survived in Canada until 1976. Alfred H. Dymond, who had been the S.A.C.P. secretary in the 1850s, emigrated to Canada in 1869 and became an MP for the district of York North in Ontario in 1874. In 1875 he introduced a motion for the abolition of the death penalty to the Dominion parliament. On the next occasion that abolition was raised in the Canadian parliament, in 1914, the assertion was made that when there had been a twenty-year hiatus in Canadian executions, this had been ‘largely due to the feelings of Queen Victoria which were respected by the Governors of this country’.130

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African capital punishment131 In the West African colony of Sierra Leone the experience of capital punishment was the subject of reflection by the colonial and garrison chaplain Thomas Eyre Poole, in his Life, Scenery and Customs of Sierra Leone and the Gambia, in which he discussed the ineffectiveness of the gallows as a deterrence, the Africans lacking in his opinion the European sense of the ignominy of the punishment, and exhibiting stoic indifference to the terror.132 And yet, Poole wrote, to abolish the punishment in Sierra Leone would be to let loose upon the community the ‘most ungovernable and wildest elements of the worst portion of its society. Released from this check inadequate as it often proves in its operation yet the only one which offers anything like a means of successfully stemming the torrent of vice and crime there would be no security for life and property’.133 A different perspective was taken by the anti-slavery activist Dr Richard Madden – a confirmed abolitionist – who reported as Her Majesty’s Commissioner in the West African settlements in 1841, that there had ‘been no capital punishment here for many years, and it is greatly to be hoped there never may be one in this colony, or any other of our West-African settlements’.134 In the Cape of Good Hope colony, the British had inherited a Dutch legal framework in criminal and civil law, but this was modified. Capital crimes in the 1840s were murder, high treason, rape and coining of money. The colonial infliction of capital punishment here could be complicated by humanitarian sentiments, as the intervention of the antislavery abolitionist William Wilberforce in the Cape Colony reveals. Wilberforce, seeing parallels in maltreatment of ‘Hottentots’ by the Boers at the turn of the century, and the abuse of black slaves, had called for the execution of Boers who had murdered Africans, as a way of conveying the human rights of their victims.135 As elsewhere, an English-language press reported the state of capital punishment debates in Britain and Europe, and as elsewhere, the subject surfaced in debating societies.136 ‘Alpha’ wrote a couple of abolitionist letters to the editor of the Natal Witness in 1853, on the basis of the importance of the question and the frequency with which capital punishment was inflicted in the community. These letters were replete with references to Beccaria, Blackstone, Bentham, Basil Montagu and Montesquieu, and ‘Alpha’ had often discussed the subject with Lord Nugent in England.137 The same paper published an editorial against the ‘soul sickening spectacle, not probably surpassed in its detestableness even in hell!’ when a large crowd ‘including even some European women’ witnessed the execution of a coloured man for murder. Though not explicitly abolitionist, it observed that ‘every sensitive heart, and candid

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head, revolts at the idea of capital punishment.’138 If abolitionist sentiments did not lead to abolitionist organization, there was a bill proposing abolition, introduced to the House of Assembly in 1870 by the former attorney general William Porter, an Ulsterman and liberal who had possibly refused a judgeship on the grounds of opposition to the death penalty.139 The British press was interested in execution in the Cape Colony. Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper reported the criticism of a bungled execution appearing in the Cape Town Mail in December 1846.140 In 1848 John Bull reprinted the lurid report of the grisly execution of four men. In the Orange Free State in 1857, there was the apparent judicial murder of an Englishman, Charles Leo Cox, who was executed, so his supporters maintained, for the murder of his wife and two children on the basis of perjured evidence by Dr C.J.G. Krause, and the sanction given by the Free State’s president, Jacobus N. Boshof. ‘Englishmen – Fellow Countrymen! – It is seldom indeed that so shocking a case as this occurs in a community, especially where so few Europeans exist in comparison to the natives of the country,’ Cox is reported to have declared on the scaffold.141 Four decades later, and the concern expressed in South African newspapers was about the official monopoly of the execution spectacle, the hanging being held in private without press witnesses, by contrast to the practice prevailing in Canada, Australia and, so these papers believed, in the ‘mother country’.142 Capital punishment and India143 Tell me, you who plead against the penalty of death, ye who make the essence of punishment reform, not retribution; ye who in any way seek to shield the homicide and the violator, WHAT SHALL WE DO AT DELHI?144 Given the sanguinary vengeance in the form of spectacular capital punishment meted out to the mutineers in India in 1857, there was clearly an Indian dimension to British retentionists’ polemics about humanitarian effeminacy and the threat from sentimentalism.145 The existence of earlier army mutinies had occasioned anxieties in the European press about the abolition by the Governor General Lord William Bentinck of flogging.146 But the mutiny involved capital reprisals on a vast scale, a ‘war of no pity’ as Christopher Herbert has argued, which revealed that ‘culture of retribution’ in Britain associated with evangelicalism which had not been eradicated by the rise of humanitarian or progressive values. For Herbert, it was not so much racial ideology or fears about the loss of empire that

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were primary motives, but the expression of a ‘retributive view of the world’.147 In fact the domestic debates about abolitionism show that vengeance in the subcontinent was not a ‘long-suppressed national disposition’ or ‘driven underground’ (as Herbert argues). But the bloodshed in India in the aftermath of the mutiny certainly made the abolitionist cause very difficult.148 Those who were critical of ‘humanitarians’ in Britain, sought to extract a lesson from India that ‘mock humanity’ stood rebuked, and that it was no longer necessary to waste time and logic on the lawfulness or otherwise of capital punishment (or war).149 Before the mutiny transformed the context and language of punishment in India, there had been debates about capital punishment in those territories controlled by the East India Company. The first GovernorGeneral of India, Warren Hastings, had commented on the ‘most lenient principles and an abhorrence of bloodshed’ expressed in Muslim law in India, but this was not observed by Hastings with approval.150 Later British observers presented Indian society as criminal: with criminal communities such as the Thugs and Pindaris, with barbaric punishment according to Muslim law, and religious practices (such as sati) which were murderous.151 Indeed, the entire history of Asia could be presented in terms of ‘murders and assassinations’.152 A Commons select committee on Indian territories in 1853 learned of the modifications of criminal law under British rule, so that the harshness of Muslim laws, with mutilations and ‘very capricious rules of evidence’ had been transformed by European reason; though it also heard evidence of the need for discretion in administering the criminal code to take into account native ideas, about infanticide for instance.153 Reform of the criminal code (with the establishment of an Indian Law Commission in 1834) and penal system in India allowed the British to test reformist schemes untrammelled by the opposition that pertained in Britain. But the British still resorted to capital punishment even as they attempted to introduce the new prison system to the subcontinent. To what extent Indians were liable in Calcutta to English law was still a subject of debate in the Friend of India in 1847 when one correspondent referred to the great controversy of the trial and execution for forgery of the Rajah Nundcoomar in 1776.154 Should Dewan Moolraj, former governor of Mooltan, be executed for killing two British officers during his rebellion, or not? was a debate in the Indian press in 1849.155 The Friend of India campaigned against what it saw as the Sudder judges’ perverse leniency towards murderers in the early 1850s.156 Yet with doubts expressed about the trustworthiness of native testimony, there was

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hesitation expressed in some quarters about using an irrevocable sentence.157 In the Bengal civil servant George Campbell’s work on civil government (published in 1852), in which the various Indian capital and other criminal statistics were contrasted with Britain’s, there was also a call for clemency. The object of punishment being prevention, he argued for transportation as equally effective (death being regarded by the native with a ‘fatalist stoicism’), and that a ‘fearful and unknown punishment as death’ ought to be avoided. The British were ‘not such inspired ministers of justice that we should take any life while we can deter others from murdering, and yet save the murderer in another country to be disposed of as Heaven shall decree’.158 And capital punishment necessarily figured in the deliberations of the Indian Law Commission, where Alexander Campbell (in the second report on the Indian Penal Code) expressed the ‘gravest doubts …of the efficacy of death as a punishment, especially in India’. In Campbell’s case, this had stemmed from study of the impressions recorded (as required by the Madras Sudder Foujdaree Adowlut or supreme court) by the officers ordering executions since 1830, which suggested that ‘superstition’ prevented a sense of dread. It was viewed as a ‘sacrifice to fate – purified by the extreme unction of the ruling power’.159 Murders involving European perpetrators stimulated petitions for mercy, as for instance in the case of the American sailor Francis Silvester Very in 1851, who confessed to the ‘murder in the icehouse’ in Hare Street, Calcutta. The petitions in this case debated the general question of capital punishment, or touched upon the peculiar circumstances of Very’s confessions.160 In 1855 an Englishman brutally beat his wife to death but was reprieved, raising questions for the Friend of India about the gallows’ continuation in India: ‘or at least of capital punishment in the case of any individual who has respectable connections in India, and philanthropic friends in India’. For the poor chandal, the entire criminal law would need to be altered so that he would have a chance of evasion similar to that now enjoyed by the respectably-born European.161 The Indian Mutiny that broke upon the British, unsurprisingly, did not lead to a more merciful or equitable operation of the capital penalty in India. But both the ‘clemency’ resolution of Charles Canning the Governor General at the end of July 1857 and the status of the ‘Five Acts’ were controversial.162 For the Friend of India, the acts were unparalleled coercion measures for a civilized legislature to pass and reminiscent, in the broad sweep of capital crimes against the State, of the French Revolutionary Committee of Public Safety.

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Herbert has examined the anti-sentimental critique launched in papers such as The Times and Punch, with members of the public writing in to the papers insisting that no sentimental concern for fairness should prevent vengeance. At the meeting of the Indian Sufferers Relief Fund in October 1857, in the same spirit, Sir Charles Hastings contrasted maudlin philanthropy with the justice due to criminals enjoined by the Old and New Testaments.163 In the House of Lords the Anglo-Indian debates about vengeance were echoed. The Earl of Ellenborough thought the wholesale series of military executions lacked the efficacy of severe flogging, since ‘the natives were not afraid of death, but shrank from corporal pain’, the Earl of Granville agreeing that the frequency of capital punishment ‘must have the worst possible effect’.164 John Lang, author of Wanderings in India (1859), thought that Tantia Topee (a follower of Nana Sahib of Kampur) and other leaders of the mutiny, should not have been hanged for they lacked the dread of death that Europeans had, and ‘invariably meet their fate without exhibiting the faintest fear’: I would treat culprits like Tantia Topee, Nena Sahib, Bahadoor Khan, the Nawab of Bandah, &c., much in the same way as the convicts of Norfolk Island were treated in former days – make death the first favour for which they should crave, and the last which should be granted unto them …To hang such men is to frustrate the end and real object of all punishment, which is to deter others from the commission of the same offence. When such men are exterminated they are speedily forgotten … 165 A similar view of the Indian attitude to death was expressed in 1869, when the Friend of India considered ‘Intramural Executions in India’. The criminal and spectators viewed capital punishment with apathy, British modes of execution were ‘considered by them neither repulsive nor degrading. On the contrary natives who for the first time witness a Western execution, frequently express surprise that the law could resort to no severer punishment.’ But by contrast to a London mob, the native Indians would not attend an execution against which public opinion had been set, ‘as in the case of a man who has murdered his wife or some female relative for misconduct’.166 The abolitionist George Otto Trevelyan, in The Competition Wallah, expressed his sense of the hypocrisy of the English and European community, actively seeking the exercise of mercy for a former English soldier John Rudd in Calcutta in 1862, convicted of the murder of a shepherd named Fizal in Rawalpindi. He also criticized the attitudes

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expressed in response by the Bengal Hurkaru, as those of a ‘sable Christian … who has grafted upon the traditional mildness of the Hindoo character the charitable tendencies of the Gospel.’ This ‘Christian Kali’ desired blood and denounced ‘the immorality which would afford a criminal the chance of sobbing out his life in ignominy and pain.’167 Trevelyan wondered if the editor thought that the old dispensation had ended with the Mutiny, and that the Gospel had come in during the pacification of India. The Rudd case, the Bombay Miscellany reported, had attracted 3000 signatures (native and European) to a petition for mercy addressed to the Governor General, Lord Elgin, but the native press ‘as a rule, appear to have exerted themselves to procure the enforcement of the sentence, – we think it very reprehensible that the question of this man’s punishment should have been discussed in the party of distinctive nationality’.168 Perhaps, but the same writer also hoped that the ‘disgraceful exhibition’ of a European upon a gibbet in the City of Palaces would not be repeated.169 The Friend of India thought it a ‘ghastly sight’, and regretted the exposure of the European community to the charge of political unfairness, and the needless aggravation of the ‘bitterness which exists between European and native. The native press have been tempted to write on this subject in a tone natural to heathens, but deeply to be deplored’.170 In 1867 there was another case of Europeans charged with the murder of Indians, and executed in Bombay: four Marwaree money lenders having been murdered in a shop in Khojah Street by a number of European sailors. Yet the manifest impunity with which Europeans maltreated their servants and others in British India led Rabindranath Tagore to comment (in Bengali in 1904): ‘No British murderer [of an Indian] had ever been sentenced to capital punishment by an English judge or jury.’171 Indian experience surfaced in the British debates on capital punishment abolition, figuring, for instance, in abolitionist efforts in the 1820s with Sir James Mackintosh, the chairman of the Commons’ Select Committee on the Criminal Law relating to Capital Punishment, stressing his experience of the reduction in capital offences with a reduction in executions, as Recorder of Bombay over a seven year period ending in 1811.172 The example of Sir Charles Metcalfe when Resident in Delhi was also cited.173 Indian criminal law and capital punishment were discussed by the Royal Commission in 1865, with witnesses including Sir Lawrence Peel, once advocate-general at Calcutta, and Sir Mordaunt Wells, a judge in the Supreme Court of Bengal for five years. Wells thought the reform to the Indian criminal code (by the Indian Penal Code and Code of Criminal Procedure, 1860–1861) had, in fact, made it a model for the English to emulate, as one of the best codes in the world.174 Interestingly, he also

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thought capital punishment was necessary for the protection of the natives from the many Europeans of ‘bad character’ – since the police were not up to the job of protecting the natives’ lives and property.175 When it came to the question of private or public executions, in the wake of the discussions in Britain in the 1860s, the Indian newspapers debated the papers published by the government in Madras: a minute was issued in support of the existing practice. As in the debates about reforms to capital punishment in Britain, the Friend of India, a paper which had been established in India by missionaries, believed that public executions in fact exerted no deterrent or salutary effects on the natives, and that secret executions might be more useful, if rumours about the terror of the private executions – without the courage to be obtained via the crowd – could play on the ‘credulity of the native’.176 The same newspaper published a letter calling on James Fitzjames Stephen to abolish capital punishment when the Indian Penal Code was being revised in 1870, but in 1877 the paper argued that there was hardly any ‘public opinion’ in India, and scarcely any on the subject of capital punishment in particular. Perhaps this was not surprising when it had become difficult, following the creation of the Indian Penal Code, to convict anyone of the capital offence of murder, or even manslaughter.177 This lack of a public opinion on the death penalty may have been true (one would need to look at Indian language newspapers to verify the assertion), but there was certainly comment on capital punishment in India by Europeans. There are a number of literary evocations by Europeans of executions in India, some of them veering towards abolitionist sentiments, at least querying the justice of public executions, but also, as with John Lang’s comments, expressing that commonplace view of the East and West having different attitudes towards death. The colonial administrator Robert Needham Cust’s Pictures of Anglo-India has a purple passage, written in 1855 as someone carrying out the extreme sentence of the law in a ceremony ‘so painfully familiar to all in India’, in executing a young man who had killed his wife in Banda. Cust imagined the man’s thoughts on the scaffold and, significantly, compared himself to Iscariot sentencing Christ to death.178 Tracts on capital punishment were produced in India, or written by Anglo-Indians with allusions to Indian civilization. One eccentric production was by the Eurasian merchant and critic of East Indian Company injustices, Charles Reed of Calcutta, which circulated in 1833 and in 1838. Reed had been convinced of the unchristian nature of the punishment as a child, a belief confirmed by reading Beccaria.179 The Baptist missionary James Peggs, who had worked at Cuttack in Orissa, and who had penned a widely-circulated pamphlet against sati, The Suttees’ Cry

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to Britain, and organized a ‘Society for the Abolition of Human Sacrifices in India’ (which had petitioned parliament on the subjects of infanticide and sati), published a prize essay for the mathematician Sir Edward French Bromhead of Thurlby Hall, Lincolnshire, on capital punishment in 1839.180 He asked whether the abolition of capital punishment throughout the empire might not raise Britain’s reputation and be emulated by others, and linked his horror at the mortality caused by sati, infanticide, exposure of the aged on the banks of the Ganges, and the deaths of pilgrims, with the penalty of death, a similar relic of idolatry and barbarism in the west. In Madras in 1847 there appeared Lieutenant Colonel Francis Straton’s short tract against The sinfulness of death as a punishment by man.181 The other British colonies in Asia also stimulated reflections on capital punishment which appeared in the British press. Thus in Ceylon, which had been reported as having a notably humane penal code and pacific population in the 1820s, military executions under the Governor Lord Torrington following the Kandyan revolt produced controversy in 1849. The island was seen as a place where capital punishment produced no terror, as a result of Buddhist beliefs in the transmigration of souls. What impact, it was asked, would capital punishment have in Britain if a man who was to be sentenced to death believed he would be reborn as a coffee bush or as a cobra?182 The S.A.C.P. and British abolitionists did not lobby for abolition across the empire. Perhaps this was down to a sense of what was achievable. It has been succinctly stated that ‘colonial subjects were ruled through violence; violated bodies were by definition colonial.’ Imperialism ultimately meant the power of life and death over the colonized, whether in the spectacular acts of vengeance following the Indian mutiny, the exemplary hangings meted out in the campaign against thuggee, or the violence meted out to recalcitrant Australian aborigines who refused to be slaves.183 Less spectacularly, it meant the violence meted out to ‘natives’ by Britons concerned to punish affronts to their authority or dignity, an attitude which was ‘ingrained in the everyday life of Empire’.184 The European perspective also involved assumptions about ‘native’ views on death and punishment – the Indian being stoical in the face of death, or the Kafir of Natal being horrified by the ‘calm deliberation’ of judicial homicide.185 The abolitionists did include critics of imperial aggression, but an outright attack on the empire’s capital code would have robbed the movement of public sympathy. And if it was hard enough to sustain support for British efforts, and against domestic miscarriages of justice, worries about far-flung gallows scandals (even assuming the constraints of

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physical distance were not a sufficient problem) would not have generated sufficient interest in the metropolis. The exceptions – of Governor Eyre’s execution of George W. Gordon and the hanging of others involved in the Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica (where, ironically, the population had been reluctant to fill the vacant post of hangman in 1845186) – indeed presented the abolitionists, for their critics, in a bloodthirsty light, when the former called for Eyre to be punished. Nevertheless, the evident racial prejudices which allowed white settler juries to protect their white brothers from capital punishment, could have provided the abolitionists with further ammunition in undercutting the legitimacy of the death penalty.187 The colonial context complicated the positions taken by white colonists in relation to abolition: free settler struggles for power in Tasmania in the 1830s for instance, or Australian Labor party concerns about kanaka or Pacific Island labour in the late Victorian period.188 The Adelaide auxiliary of the London society was unique in this period, as a formal colonial offshoot of metropolitan efforts. It was to be in the Edwardian period that the S.A.C.P., under Josiah Oldfield, organized itself to promote imperial efforts. An India and Colonial Committee under the chairmanship of the Liberal, positivist, and former Indian administrator, Sir Henry Cotton, KCSI, MP, then sought abolition in the British Dominions, with corresponding members and local associations which were, it was envisaged, to gather information, stimulate public opinion, and organize protests locally or at an imperial level, when serious cases arose. Cotton, who had been a ‘maverick’ in attempting to apply the rule of law equally when in charge of Assam, sought the official statistics on death sentences in crown colonies in 1909.189 This chapter and the preceding chapter have sought to convey the general course of abolitionist effort, in the context of British politics and in the broader perspective of capital punishment debates in the colonies of the British Empire. The next couple of chapters examine the British movement in more detail, in terms of its leaders, constituents and its activities.

3 THE PERSONNEL OF THE S.A.C.P.

Understanding of the Victorian movement against capital punishment has tended to be limited to the parliamentary leadership – figures such as the reformer William Ewart, the radical John Bright, the Conservative MP and judge Sir Fitzroy Kelly, and the Oxford don Charles Neate, who was a ‘conservative’ Liberal MP for Oxford from 1863 – and a few extraparliamentary figures such as Charles Gilpin (later an MP), Douglas Jerrold, Charles Dickens, Alfred H. Dymond, William Tallack and Thomas Beggs. The support of Quakers in general has also been recognized. But no detailed study of the core leadership of the movement has been published. This chapter seeks to remedy this gap in our knowledge of an important group of Victorian reformers, and in particular, the leader of the revived abolitionist effort after 1846, the young Quaker publisher and later radical Liberal MP, Charles Gilpin, a man of sterling virtues but austere character.1 The chapter looks beyond the national leaders to consider the social background and typical location of provincial supporters. Leaders of the movement The abolitionist committee created in the spring of 1846 included longstanding abolitionists such as William Ewart, John Thomas Barry, Lord Nugent, Samuel Gurney and his son, the Reverend Henry Christmas and Thomas Wrightson. Of these men, Lord Nugent seemed to be taking a central role in the mid-1840s, through his leadership of abolitionists in Buckinghamshire. The ‘tall, full-chested, and somewhat massive’ George Nugent Grenville, the second son of the Marquess of Buckingham, had been a supporter of parliamentary reform, partisan of Queen Caroline, the estranged wife of George IV, and sometime Lord High Commissioner for the Ionian Isles.2 He had been enlisted by Basil Montagu in the S.D.K.P.D. when he had

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been ‘hardly yet more than a boy’. He also penned a dialogue between a ‘Mitigator’ and ‘Abolitionist’ which earned praise in the press when it appeared in 1840.3 He came to further prominence in the movement following the execution of the Quaker chemist and former Australian convict John Tawell, for poisoning his mistress Sarah Hart by adding prussic acid to her bottle of stout.4 A resident of Buckinghamshire, Tawell had been apprehended in London partly through the new medium of the telegraph. The execution took place in the county town of Aylesbury. A petition, which Nugent supported, in favour of Tawell’s reprieve, and couched in general abolitionist terms, had been signed by a few tradesmen of the town, ‘nearly all of whom are Dissenters’.5 After the execution, Lord Nugent’s nephew the second Duke of Buckingham presented an abolitionist petition from the gentry, clergy and others resident at Aylesbury in July 1845. Nugent represented the town in parliament, after several failed attempts to secure election, from 1847, although as John Foster wrote in a memorial, he ‘failed to exercise any marked influence in political life’.6 He led a committee of local inhabitants, popularly called the ‘Aylesbury Society’, and they – probably largely Nugent – produced abolitionist papers which appeared in the Aylesbury News, a paper which supported universal suffrage.7 A large edition of an abolitionist speech by Nugent was also disseminated by the Exeter Anti-Capital Punishment Society in 1845.8 New associates of the abolitionist society included prominent AntiCorn Law Leaguers such as Richard Cobden, John Bright, Joseph Brotherton (radical MP for Salford), W.J. Fox, and an Irish political economist, R.R.R. Moore. Cobden lent little more than his name, though he had publicly condemned capital punishment after the claim made by Sir Robert Peel that he supported assassination, in the heat of the corn law repeal debate in the Commons, in February 1843. But Bright and Brotherton were active in the parliamentary effort, in individual capital cases and, in Bright’s case, on the anti-gallows platform.9 Daniel O’Connell, long opposed to the gallows, lent his celebrity in what was his last year of life. The littérateurs Charles Dickens and Douglas Jerrold joined – with Jerrold advising that the preparations for establishing the S.A.C.P. be coordinated with the publication of Dickens’s Daily News letters on capital punishment – but Dickens split acrimoniously with the Society in 1849 over the focus on complete abolition. Jerrold was a friend of Lord Nugent.10 Such figures were important either as celebrities who endorsed the campaign in the press or in parliament but the individual behind the revitalization of abolitionism was the Quaker radical Charles Gilpin. His ‘tall, spectre-like form’ was to be associated with the abolitionist cause for

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almost thirty years.11 Gilpin acted as secretary in preparations for the creation of the S.A.C.P.12 With some modesty he disclaimed the title of leader in 1850, for the aged anti-gallows activist John Thomas Barry, though the cause engrossed his mind.13 Yet his abolitionist associate Frederic Rowton described him aptly as the ‘Cobden’ of the movement.14 The impression from character sketches in the press and his own speeches is of a self-possessed and earnest man. Unfortunately, though some of his papers survive, Gilpin left no memoir or extensive body of writing which would allow a more detailed biography.15 Gilpin was the nephew of the grain importer and prominent reformer Joseph Sturge of Birmingham; ‘he was thus by family, as well as choice, a reformer’ as the working-class Reynolds’s Miscellany noted.16 Another newspaper article on the young reformer described him as the Hector to Sturge’s Nestor.17 The son of a ‘well-known and worthy’ Bristol tradesman, James Gilpin, who came from a Shropshire family, Charles was born in March 1815 and educated at the recently founded Quaker school at Sidcot near Weston-super-mare (Sturge had gone there too).18 There he joined a juvenile society for ‘mutual improvement in useful knowledge’, which discussed scientific and historical subjects.19 He was said to have organized a mock trial with great ability, in 1828.20 He then went to a ‘finishing school’ in Bristol. He also joined a mechanics institute.21 His father had been in the drapery and hosiery trade since about 1808, establishing a warehouse at no.12, Bridge Street, selling woollen drapery, blankets, a material called ‘milpuff’, and flannel.22 He then moved into premises at the corner of Redcliffe Street, apparently for convenience of business. He joined fellow tradesmen in the campaign to end the monopoly of the East India Company in 1829, and supported the creation of a Bristol General cemetery (and was one of its directors until his retirement in 1842) and St Peter’s Hospital. Despite being a Quaker, he was active in the parish affairs of St Peter’s, listed in the newspaper as one of the parochial deputies. He died at the age of 75 in 1855.23 Little is known about him as a person, although one hostile account of Charles Gilpin referred to his father as a ‘worthy and jocose Quaker … known to his familiars as “Jemmy’”.24 Charles’s siblings included five sisters. Jane, his eldest sister, was born in 1811, and married Jasper Capper in 1835; Mary Ann died after a long illness at the age of twenty five (her memoir was later published by Charles); Anna Rebecca, born in 1829, married John Whiting and founded an orphan home in Headingley; Elizabeth published two books anonymously and ran a school with another sister, Sophia; and Helen became a missionary in Antananarivo in Madagascar in the late 1860s, where she taught girls and collected ferns.25 His brothers who survived

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into adulthood were Henry, whose two books of juvenile poetry were published in 1838–1839, James Bernard, who became a bookseller in Dublin, and Joseph Sturge Gilpin, who was born in 1825 and became a share broker in Nottingham.26 The family was, according to their mother’s obituary in the Bristol press in 1841 ‘fondly attached’, Mary Gilpin having also a ‘numerous circle of intimate and valued friends’.27 Charles went on the road as a commercial traveller for an important manufacturing firm in Manchester (his brother Henry also worked for a time in Manchester28), and it was in that city that he republished a sermon by William Penn, with a preface, in 1836, in order to combat distortions created by a series of published extracts of early Quaker writings. He was thus involved in that major controversy in the sect, the ‘Beaconite schism’, participating in and later helping to edit Joseph Crosfield’s report on the crisis of the ‘Manchester episode’ where Quakers had debated with disaffected members of the Manchester Meeting such as the minister Isaac Crewdson, of the Beacon to the Society of Friends (1835), the Quaker stress on the inner light rather than Scripture, a crisis which led to the secession of ‘Evangelical Friends’ who laid more emphasis on the Lord’s supper and baptism by water.29 This episode reflected Gilpin’s position as an orthodox Quaker. The journalist James Ewing Ritchie, in a sketch of Gilpin in his British Senators, wrote, ‘he breathed the Manchester air, which … seems to have been remarkably keen and salubrious, – air under the influence of which Mr. Gilpin soon acquired hardihood and robustness.’30 In late 1838, when his father moved premises, he announced that he was going into partnership with his son, and that the firm would be ‘James Gilpin and Son’: Charles having been ‘actively engaged for several years in the manufacturing districts’. But in fact his eldest son was not to continue in the drapery and tailoring trade for many years – the partnership being dissolved in early 1840.31 James Bernard Gilpin instead took over the firm and his father retired in 1846.32 At the same time, Charles married Anna Crouch, daughter of William Crouch, a flour merchant in Falmouth, at the Friends’ Meeting House in that town.33 By his ‘energy and integrity he speedily attained a position of high respectability’ in the book trade, with an extensive and successful publishing trade (and residence) at 5 Bishopsgate Street Without in London from 1842 (having briefly been in partnership as a bookseller with his fellow Quaker Joseph Smith, in Bedford Street).34 The publishing firm was ideally located, for it was close to the Gracechurch Meeting of the Society of Friends, to Broad-street where anti-slavery and other philanthropic societies were based, and near to the Quaker suburbs of Stoke Newington and Tottenham.

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Gilpin printed a range of Quaker and social or moral reform titles. Some of these appeared in a ‘Phoenix Library’ series, including works by the Reverend John Minter Morgan the Anglican ‘communist’, and a translation of a work by Pestalozzi, the Swiss educationalist. Subjects ranged from slavery (Gilpin published William Wells Brown’s slave narrative, for instance) and temperance, to the medical unorthodox, such as The Chrono-Thermalist, or People’s Medical Enquirer and the monthly Journal of Physical Regeneration. Gilpin himself took Turkish baths for health reasons.35 One business mistake he is said to have made was turning down the opportunity of printing Uncle Tom’s Cabin.36 The S.A.C.P. benefited from his proprietorship of the Quaker journal, The Friend, and no doubt also from the capacity he had to produce cheap pamphlets and other ephemera for the cause. He retired from this business in 1853. Having established himself in business, Charles became prominent in radical politics and philanthropy. His politics may have been inherited from his father, who intended, according to the comment made by one of his sons (perhaps Charles himself) reported in a local newspaper account of Tory intimidation, to vote for Henry Berkeley (the parliamentary champion of the secret ballot) and Philip Miles, in the general election of 1841.37 No doubt the influence of his uncle Joseph Sturge was also reflected in his politics. Many of Gilpin’s philanthropic concerns were typically Quaker. He helped the anti-slavery cause – he once said he was anti-slavery to the backbone, having learnt it through his revered relative Sturge and the school of Thomas Clarkson.38 The publisher of the Peace Advocate, and a ‘Peace Series of Little Books’ which included the work Harry White, or the Little Boy who wished to be a soldier, Gilpin was active in the peace movement. He became a public speaker in the cause, earning the praise of his friend Richard Cobden for the quality of one speech delivered at a London Tavern meeting against war loans in October 1849, speaking at meetings of the Peace Society at Finsbury chapel, and giving pacific counsel during the Franco-Prussian war, when he returned to attend public meetings in Bristol.39 As well as his work in the Peace Society he joined the League of Universal Brotherhood, as a close friend of the League’s founder, the American Elihu Burritt, and became the League’s treasurer.40 He had joined the temperance movement as a youth in Bristol, probably gaining valuable experience in public speaking as a result, and becoming a member of the committee of the Bristol Total Abstinence Society. Later, in the year of the Great Exhibition, he chaired a ‘great industrial demonstration’ at Exeter Hall designed to show temperance was practical and efficient for those working in the most arduous of toil.41

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He joined the freehold land movement, initiated by James Taylor of Birmingham to advance the working man by giving him a stake in the country by subscribing for the purchase of estates which would then be divided to give members 40s freeholds, thus enfranchising them. The sale of estates could give members a profit too. Charles presented it as a ‘highly moral movement’ because it inculcated self-reliance, self-control and economy in the working classes. If this sounded patronizing, he located this effort in the context of a society in which all power and privileges were monopolized by a ‘selfish, arrogant and interested class’.42 Charles became chairman of the National Freehold Company based in Moorgate Street. Cobden was a trustee. As this enterprise became successful, Gilpin retired from bookselling to manage this and the National Provident Life Assurance Company as a paid director.43 It would be tedious to document all his activities and affiliations in philanthropy, which were in the main logically interrelated and inevitable. It was inevitable, for instance, that an earnest anti-state church activist and reform-minded publisher should support the Voluntary Education Society, and the Association for the Repeal of the Taxes on Knowledge.44 He was elected to the London Common Council in 1848, having previously stood as a candidate on philanthropic and especially antigallows grounds, and helped abolish street tolls, and, according to one commentator, ‘infused a youthful vigour into its council’.45 He was also intent on a parliamentary career – indeed his name had been on a list of men fitted to represent the nonconformists in parliament, being sent a circular in May 1847 from the Dissenters’ Parliamentary Committee which had partly been established to resist Lord John Russell’s education scheme (extending state support for education), but also to promote dissenter representation in parliament.46 He attended a conference on reform, alongside the barrister John Humffreys Parry, the radical Baptist George Dawson and others in ‘an influential group of not improbably prospective legislators’ in 1850.47 The press published rumours of his intentions to stand for Ipswich in 1851.48 After unsuccessfully contesting Perth against the Liberal politicians Fox Maule and Arthur Kinnaird in May 1852 (as the candidate for the dissenters49) and reputedly issuing a circular as an independent candidate in Canterbury in July 1853,50 Gilpin became MP for Northampton (‘a very dissenting and Radical borough’ as James Ewing Ritchie described it) in the general election of March 1857. Gilpin became an enthusiast for Lajos Kossuth, who recalled him in memoirs as ‘my late lamented friend’. Gilpin had worked for Kossuth’s cause before the two men met: seeking as a member of the Court of Common Council to obtain Palmerston’s backing for the release of the Hungarian patriot by the Sublime Porte in 1851. Gilpin hailed him as the

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‘first citizen of Europe’ in the Court of Common Council.51 He arranged for Kossuth to participate in the Shakespeare tercentenary celebrations in May 1853.52 He squared his support for Kossuth with his peace principles by saying that the Hungarian was the personification of constitutional liberty.53 Later, Gilpin worked hard with Kossuth to ensure that Britain would remain neutral in the event, as it was feared, that Austria would use force against Hungarians. Richard Cobden was in the United States, so that Gilpin was Kossuth’s ‘anchor of hope’ in securing neutrality in 1859. He helped to arrange a meeting in Kossuth’s honour in London in May 1859, persuading the Lord Mayor to preside, and another in Manchester, where he used his connections in the Manchester free trade movement.54 Kossuth was received at these meetings with enthusiasm and ‘such an expression of sympathy as has never been shown to the defeated cause of any nation’.55 As a new MP Gilpin made his mark, as a prominent actor in the Conspiracy to Murder Bill controversy which ended Palmerston’s administration in 1858 – and Punch imagined Gilpin addressing Louis Napoleon, whose character he attacked in the Commons, in Cherbourg.56 According to Kossuth’s memoirs, Gilpin became a pivotal figure in the construction of Palmerston’s new ministry in June 1859 (after Derby’s short-lived Conservative administration) ensuring that there would be support from the ‘Manchester party’ through his communication with Bright and Cobden, on condition that two ministers were appointed from this party, in the interests ‘of the liberty of Hungary and Italy’. Gilpin also assured Palmerston of his party’s support if, among other things, Palmerston and Russell, and anyone else who had already been selected for the cabinet, addressed letters to him ‘binding themselves that the basis of their foreign policy would be the absolute neutrality of England, not only while war is confined to Italy, but also in case it should extend from the Po to the banks of the Danube and Theiss’. Thomas Milner Gibson and Cobden were to be offered cabinet posts: Gilpin and many others advised Cobden to accept the offer of the Board of Trade but he refused. Gilpin informed Kossuth of a private conversation he had had with the premier, that reassured him as to the government’s position on neutrality should the war in Italy spill over into Hungary, and should there be a renewed attempt by Hungarians to gain their independence – although the recollection of Gilpin’s role in 1859 later offered by Kossuth was disputed by Gilpin’s nephew Samuel James Capper.57 He also told his friend that he had, unsought and unexpectedly, been offered a ministerial position. He accepted the offer (partly given through Cobden’s influence) from a frank and cordial Palmerston, because he thought it would ‘contribute towards strengthening the standing of our party in the Ministry, and will besides enable me to do some good to my fellow-men.’

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For Palmerston’s early biographer, James Ewing Ritchie, the appointment, an ‘olive branch to the extreme radicals’, was thought a rather clever move on the premier’s part, to ‘detach Mr Gilpin from his natural leaders’ and neutralize him in the Treasury benches. Palmerston gained more than Gilpin, since the Quaker was now tongue-tied and reduced to political insignifance whilst the premier was credited with rising above party or aristocratic interests in conciliating the Manchester school and giving office to ‘men qualified by business tact and talent’.58 Gilpin became Parliamentary Secretary to the Poor Law Board, on the condition of reserving the right to advocate his own opinions on abolition and other matters, which he was to do in parliament in the 1860s. Bright had told him, ‘rather go and cut your throat than serve under Palmerston.’59 Press commentary at the time expressed the sense of strangeness in a Quaker and former bookseller of Peace Society literature and champion of non-resistance becoming a minister.60 Gilpin remained a close and valued friend of Kossuth and paid a visit to him in Turin in 1873, writing to correct the impression given by The Times that the Hungarian’s circumstances were dismal.61 After Gilpin’s death, Kossuth paid tribute to him in his memoirs: ‘I never knew a man, not himself in exile, who could so thoroughly feel what sufferings and what claims on Christian sympathy the words “without a country” contain.’ No one he knew had carried out more consistently the sublime command to love thy neighbour. Gilpin had bestowed a friendship ‘such as is seldom met with in this world’.62 In this work for oppressed Europeans, along with his assistance for the oppressed Poles, Gilpin was closely associated with the champion of Poland, the Liberal MP for Arundel, Lord Dudley Stuart. The Court Journal also reported in 1862 that Gilpin had invited Garibaldi to take up residence with him, in the event that he came to Britain.63 Described in Dod’s Parliamentary Companion as an ‘earnest and thorough Liberal’, Gilpin merits Temperley’s epithet for his uncle Joseph Sturge, a ‘compleat reformer’.64 How he was viewed in the Commons is perhaps a different matter, although an obituary in the Daily Telegraph asserted he was accorded a respect that was not given to a mere demagogue or ‘a blatant advocate of a showy crotchet’, and in another obituary he was described as popular.65 He seems to have been popular with the electorate too, since he served as an MP until his death in 1874 and was re-elected four times. Little controversy attached to him, apart from episodes such as a pacifist pamphlet he was alleged to have authored in 1852 or an incident involving a lady at a watering hole who had attempted to secure his vote in 1859, in which he displayed a gallantry which political ladies, it was reported, found attractive.66 The satirical magazine Fun described him as possessing great influence, and in 1863, as having risen high already, to a post earning £1000 a year.67

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For his supporters, he was emblematic of the self-made man – no Whigling born in the purple (suitably for a Quaker, his entry in Debrett’s House of Commons stated he bore no arms), but a man risen from the people who had begun as a commercial traveller (which underplayed the status of his father in Bristol, and the advantages of his Quaker connections).68 As the American pacifist Elihu Burritt’s Christian Citizen had expressed it, he studied questions of humanity and justice while younger sons of the aristocracy went shooting, and educated the people while ‘kid-gloved benchers’ discussed port at their London clubs. The best and most efficient reformers, the future stars of statesmanship, were not to be found in parliament but ‘behind the counter, and in the counting-houses of our tradesmen’.69 He claimed to understand the masses – their hopes, needs and aspirations – through his work as a Sunday School teacher, and presented his parliamentary role as in the interests of the masses. By widening and strengthening the base, the fabric would be made secure. He was ‘bound by a law which was far above all laws of party …to break the political bonds off the limbs of the working men of this country’. 70

FIGURE 2. Charles Gilpin, Reynolds’s Miscellany, 30 September 1854. Image produced as part of British Periodicals Collection I, by ProQuest, The Quorum, Barnwell Road, Cambridge, CB5 8SW, http://www.proquest.co.uk. Published with permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

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In the Commons during the Crimean war he bore testimony, to the amusement (or derision) of Members, to his Quaker pacifism, believing that Christian forbearance and meek expostulation could repel the armed battalions. Identified by the press as a ‘peace at any price’ man, he was rumoured – falsely – to have penned the pacifist Rifle Club, or the Manual of Duty for Soldiers pamphlet whose argument Lord Palmerston outlined to the Commons in May 1852.71 He opposed the income tax and waste in public expenditure. Through the Anti-State Church Association, he opposed State endowment of religious establishments, believing that ‘religion was a matter between man and his God, and that as between man and the deity no power or prince had a right to interfere.’72 Concerned Anglicans identified him as an enemy within the gates, as a dissenter who represented the interests of the Liberation Society within the Palmerston ministry.73 Having presented himself to the people of Perth in 1852 as a ‘thorough reformer’ as well as a ‘man of the people’ – intent on reforming parliament so that it did not represent the aristocracy – he remained in favour of an extension of the suffrage and the secret ballot, presenting himself as willing to oppose Lord Palmerston over parliamentary reform.74 He also gave support to female suffrage.75 An associate described him as ‘one of the best speakers of the day’, and his oratory is highlighted as ‘enthusiastic’ by an American visitor to London, who classed him as a popular orator, another authority described him as a fluent and cogent speaker, whose ‘gentle spirit’ meant he could not rise to fame in Westminster.76 The British Standard in 1857 spoke of his ready eloquence, ‘his style of speaking is thoroughly English, direct, and business-like – precisely the style adapted to the House of Commons.’77 Elihu Burritt’s journal called him ‘one of the boldest and promptest combatants of our age’ and praised the ‘lightning of his eloquence …the vigour of his pen’ and the ‘masculine vigour of his mind’.78 James Ewing Ritchie, in Modern Statesmen (1861) described him as ‘hard and austere’ and a very Cato in appearance, and elsewhere as ‘by no means remarkable’, in his sober black garb, ‘a plain, unpretending man, about six feet high, muscular looking, and not over-fat’. His oratory was ‘clear and sensible, aiming at perspicuity rather than effect’.79 He seems to have overworked himself – letters to the Liberal free trader George Moffatt show Richard Cobden to have been in league with Gilpin’s wife in order to prevent Gilpin taking on too much, what with his ministerial office and city appointments, otherwise Gilpin would ‘certainly commit suicide’.80 Anna Gilpin was very uneasy, as she told Cobden in June 1857 – and believing Charles had the highest opinion of his judgement thought that Cobden would have more influence over him that any other –‘Parliamentary Cares added to the many and heavy ones

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already resting on him’ since he was working at night too, ‘this overstrain is already telling upon him. No argument that I have used has had any effect in inducing him to relax.’ To bed at 2 a.m., he would be up and travelling to town at 8.30, eating only a bun and biscuit for dinner.81 As he himself told a meeting at the Corn Exchange in Northampton in 1864: the sessions in the House, from noon until 3 a.m., required the strength of a horse.82 It was hardly surprising that he should be keen to see a reform of parliamentary habits so that late sittings were curtailed: parliamentary sketch writers commented about his frame displaying ‘physical marks of overwork in no ordinary degree’ and his ‘haggard countenance and attenuated form’ in 1870.83 The caricature appearing under the title ‘capital punishment’ in Vanity Fair in 1873 certainly showed him as haggard.84 He left his junior ministerial office in September 1865: some constituents were critical of his position as a minister which seemed incompatible with radical independence. He himself had told Sir George Grey in 1864 that he had not troubled the Home Secretary concerning most recent capital cases partly because his official position had restrained him from taking the prominent position he had formerly done.85 Released from such constraint, in 1866 he joined the Jamaica committee to press for an inquiry into the behaviour of Governor Eyre in Jamaica, with Bright and others.86 The Jamaica question combined Gilpin’s concern about slavery with the outrage of terrorism through the gallows and the lash – he had been active in 1858 in public meetings for Indian reform after the mutiny.87 He also supported the anti-compulsory vaccination movement and was an early opponent of the Contagious Diseases Acts.88 The radical and atheist Charles Bradlaugh’s attempts to secure the representation of Northampton led to attention on this constituency’s politics in 1868.89 The clean-shaven young Quaker of portraits in the People’s and Howitt’s Journal and Reynolds’s Miscellany in the 1850s had dropped some of the peculiarities of Quaker garb which had made him distinguished among the crowd at the Palmerstons’ Cambridge House, by 1860, and had even grown a moustache.90 He might still wear a hat which was ‘slightly wider than that of a Regent Street swell’ and his ‘tall and sombre person’ might still be clothed in a coat of quaint and ugly cut but he had adopted a velvet roll collar.91 The text that accompanied Vanity Fair’s portrait of the politician in 1873 (who somewhat resembled an ailing Charles Dickens), stated that Gilpin ‘identified himself with all the social palliatives that modern ingenuity has invented, and belongs to untold societies of the benevolent intention kind. He is for commerce naturally and has hitherto been known as the pillar of the speculations with which he has had to do.’92 This was perhaps an allusion to his directorships of a number of

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railway companies – the South Eastern, Metropolitan, Smyrna and Cassaba. Above all, Gilpin was associated in the public mind with the attempt to abolish capital punishment – hence Punch’s joke that he was so ardent in the cause ‘that he will not allow a ham to be seen hanging in his larder’.93 His colleague in the abolitionist cause Frederic Rowton wrote that no sooner was someone condemned to death, than Gilpin’s house was inundated with petitions to present to the authorities, or a summons for him to attend a town where there was to be a ‘strangulation’, to ‘take the assurance of the townspeople that they are opposed to the practice’, and that when an execution was ordered he would haunt the Home Office and battle with the Home Secretary to save the culprit. His public role in the movement was as an advocate of abolition in the Commons, and as a platform orator. He wrote little for publication on the gallows question – a couple of pamphlets (one of which was a version of a Commons’ speech) and an article entitled ‘The Cross and the Gibbet’ which appeared in the progressive Howitt’s Journal in September 1847.94 Gilpin left no autobiography; nor did his relations produce a Quaker spiritual biography as he had done for his sister. His family life was kept private: the public papers reporting, as was to be expected, on aspects of his non-political life only when they touched on such matters as accidents or illnesses, such as the injuries he sustained when the horse pulling the chaise he was in whilst visiting his brother-in-law took fright, in 1850, or his struggle with diphtheria in 1860.95 He lost a daughter in 1859, the death of his only son – who had gone out to Australia – was a final blow.96 When he died at his London residence at 10 Bedford Square, after a lingering illness, just short of his seventieth year, he was eulogized for his ‘earnest, upright, unselfish mind’.97 He was a ‘Liberal by nature as well as by culture. He was a philanthropist in the highest sense of that misused word.’98 His integrity was often stressed, thus Dr John Campbell’s The British Standard in 1857, from twenty-five years experience of the man, said that he was the personification of integrity.99 Although not members of the S.A.C.P. committee, a number of longstanding Quaker abolitionists offered valuable assistance, men such as Peter Bedford and William Tanner of Bristol;100 and the ‘correspondents’ of abolitionist societies scattered across Britain. The Quaker journals which are essential sources for abolitionist activity emphasized this traditional Quaker leadership.101 In the late 1840s the key public figures in the S.A.C.P. were Gilpin, Frederic Rowton and the Chartist orator Henry Vincent. Vincent was a personal friend of Gilpin – having become a supporter of Sturge’s

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Complete Suffrage Union and more moderate radicalism after his spells in prison – and accompanied Gilpin as lecturer in the nationwide abolitionist meetings of this period, though his participation had ended by the 1850s.102 Other figures who became prominent were the Scotsman Thomas Beggs and the Quaker Alfred H. Dymond who became the S.A.C.P.’s secretary from c.1850–1857.103 Beggs, a temperance activist, friend of the Chartist William Lovett, secretary to the Complete Suffrage Union and also associated with Gilpin through the Health of Towns sanitary reform movement (he had been the secretary), had been convinced that capital punishment ought to be abolished since the 1830s. Beggs’ lot, according to a review in the weekly newspaper The British Banner of his Inquiry into the Extent and Causes of Juvenile Depravity, had been ‘largely to be mixed up with the working classes … He is moreover, a man of strong penetrating intellect, and possesses in a high degree whatever is needful to constitute a student of human nature.’104 Another assessment of him – made after he had ceased to be a leader of the temperance movement – was that he was sometimes ‘sarcastic to eccentricity’.105

FIGURE 3. Thomas Beggs. © Rotherham Metropolitan Borough, Archives and Local Studies.

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When the S.A.C.P. was reformed after the six-year lapse it was with another Quaker secretary, Tallack, and the core surviving leadership.106 The offices were in Southampton Street, in the Strand. Extant reports detail involvement by several prominent 1860s philanthropists and reformers, such as the publisher John Passmore Edwards, the journalist Henry Mayhew, the political reformer Edmond Beales, the surgeon and radical John Baxter Langley, the Congregational Reverend Newman Hall, and Henry Solly, the radical Unitarian minister and founder of the Working Men’s Club and Institute Union.107 The organization in 1866 was quite extensive, with an executive committee and another committee including foreigners such as the longstanding opponent of capital punishment, Victor Hugo (exiled in Guernsey, where he had sought to prevent the execution of the clerk John Charles Tapner in 1854, a pamphlet Victor Hugo on Capital Punishment appeared in 1866108) and abolitionists from Belgium, Italy, France, and North America. The Heidelberg correspondent was Professor Carl Mittermaier, the pioneer of comparative, statistics-based abolitionism.109 It was an executive committee of mostly middle-aged men but the youngest member was the radical George Otto Trevelyan, a nephew of Thomas Babington Macaulay, who was twenty eight in 1866.110 The personnel of the S.A.C.P. Bald presentations of names are less helpful – and less interesting – than an analysis of supporters’ political affiliations, religious identities, broader reform interests and occupations. Virtually all parliamentary support came from Liberals and radicals like Gilpin and Ewart, though there were a few Conservatives.111 The parliamentary aspect will be explored in detail in chapter 6: out of doors the political affiliations were also radical and Liberal and included middle-class followers of the ‘Manchester school’ and working-class Chartists (working-class political links are studied further in chapter 4). The religious dimension is more fully treated in chapter 7; here it is intended to outline the broader concerns of the abolitionists. Religious ministry, whether Anglican or nonconformist, accounts for a significant proportion of abolitionists whose careers are known; though many were merely present at single S.A.C.P. meetings and their denomination is not always identifiable.112 Prominent abolitionists who were religious ministers include Henry Christmas, Sidney Godolphin Osborne, Newman Hall and Jabez Burns; some nonconformists like W.J. Fox had left their ministry. The ministerial contingent included authors of abolitionist works, often published by Gilpin – such as the Baptist William Stokes, an Anglican assistant chaplain to Gloucester prison, Reverend George Heaton, and the vicar of Hook, the Reverend Thomas Pyne. Pyne

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had the distinction of expulsion from the American Episcopalian church for preaching emancipation of slaves, and then being the chaplain in England to two Ashanti princes held as hostages by the British; he was also a promoter of mesmerism.113 Many of the prominent abolitionists promoted temperance.114 As the Western Temperance Herald claimed in 1868, ‘Most Temperance Reformers take an interest in the Anti-Capital Punishment question.’115 This was reflected in temperance journals and tracts. Given the association between masculine violence and drunkenness in this period it was no exaggeration for a ‘Drunkard’s Coat of Arms’ appearing in Cleave’s Penny Gazette of Variety to incorporate chains, gallows and a death warrant.116 George Cruikshank’s vast temperance tract in paint, Worship of Bacchus, exhibited in 1863, incorporated a vignette of a drunken crowd below the execution of a man who had committed murder under the influence of drink. Thomas Cook’s National Temperance Magazine published an extensive letter on abolition from the former Indian missionary James Peggs in 1844, after the scandalous behaviour at the execution of William Saville in Nottingham, and the abolitionist position was advocated in other temperance journals in the 1840s.117 The connections between the two causes were close, not least because crime could be exploited by teetotal activists keen to show that a variety of social ills were attributable to the drink problem. Certainly someone like the radical and journalist Washington Wilks could seek to make a point about the intemperance that led Samuel Wright, in a case of great notoriety in 1864, to kill his partner.118 Prominent abolitionists were involved in anti-slavery agitation, such as Charles Gilpin, Joseph Sturge, John Scoble, and men like George Thompson whose sense of principle led them to reject a gradualist approach in favour of immediate measures against slavery.119 Many prominent abolitionists had been involved in the Anti-Corn Law League, ranging from leaders such as John Bright and George Wilson, to supporters such as the president of the Vegetarian Society, James Simpson of Manchester, or the reformer James Haughton of Dublin. The Daily News in 1849 classed the movements of peace and capital punishment abolition as ‘somewhat akin in sentiment and purpose … extreme modes which passion and vengeance resort to for the redressal of wrongs to nations or to individuals.’120 Such was the association in the public mind that the American Peace Society insisted in 1846 that ‘the Society be so managed as to be kept entirely distinct from anti-government, from the question of capital punishment, and all other extraneous subjects’.121 Yet the London Peace Society hailed the S.A.C.P.’s formation and many British abolitionists belonged to peace societies.122 The Baptist William Stokes, for instance, a member of the London Peace Society, gave

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public lectures on the subjects of peace and capital punishment, and later published a public letter to the Bishop of Manchester on capital punishment during the debate on privatizing the death penalty.123 We have seen the friendship that developed between the American pacifist Elihu Burritt and Charles Gilpin: one of the supporters of abolition in Sheffield signed communications to the Sheffield Independent as ‘Elihu Burritt’s Recruiting Sergeant’.124 Peace organizations protested against capital punishment before the S.A.C.P. existed and both agitations shared Quaker personnel.125 A Bristol Auxiliary Peace Society organized an abolitionist petition in 1846, later the Ross and Herefordshire Auxiliary, in the twenty-third of its annual reports, declared against capital punishment alongside war and slavery. The Wakefield Peace Association altered its declaration to give greater prominence to capital punishment in 1847 and circulated tracts on the subject.126 The Liverpool Peace Society heard lectures on capital punishment and petitioned against the gallows at the same time, and reported on the Royal Commission in 1866.127 Abolitionist texts associated war and capital punishment, for instance, War and Capital Punishment opposed to Christianity, an anonymous work responding to the Reverend Walter Scott’s retentionist tract: although the Herald of Peace queried the author’s metaphysics and principles of Biblical exegesis.128 The Italian-born Professor Leone Levi – a barrister and professor of economical and social science who lectured on commercial law at King’s College London, and who gave evidence before the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment in 1865 – wrote a work which closely associated capital punishments with war.129 But the continued infliction of violent and mass death by civilized nations through the ‘machinery of war’ provided a recurring argument for retentionists to belittle efforts to save the lives of a dozen criminals annually.130 Reform of the criminal code, including abolition of capital punishment in all cases except for murder, had been part of a radical programme in Britain after 1815 and continued to be part of a wider effort at reform of the aristocratic State in the post-1832 environment – alongside such ‘democratic’ causes as abolition of slavery and abolition of the corn laws – thus the pledge on the punishment of death expressed by the ‘democratic party’ at Marylebone in the 1830s.131 Over a dozen prominent abolitionists in the early days of the S.A.C.P. had links with Chartism, either as Chartists themselves or as promoters of middle-class association (as in the Complete Suffrage Union).132 Other concerns of the abolitionists included opposition to church rates and to the church-state link; hardly surprising when many nonconformists, including the Congregational minister Edward Miall – one of the leaders of the anti-state church movement, as well as editor of The Nonconformist – supported abolition.133 Gilpin had

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goods seized almost every year for church rates when he was a bookseller and had a truck at his door to carry goods away from the warehouse.134 The biographical data which exists on the membership of the provincial branches of the S.A.C.P. established to organize abolitionist petitions for parliament and disseminate and gather information about the death penalty, bears out the impression of the largely nonconformist support for the cause. The men on these committees (for no women were listed) were frequently active in other philanthropic concerns such as temperance, education of the working classes and urban cultural life.135 Family, business or reform connections between abolitionists perhaps provides the key to participation for some. Abolitionists had other concerns, whether they were the logically connected moral or health reforms such as vegetarianism, hydropathy and anti-tobacco which characterized several, or interest in the ‘sciences’ of phrenology and mesmerism. The financial weakness of the S.A.C.P. is an eloquent expression of the broader concerns of many of the society’s members who undoubtedly considered the gallows a lesser philanthropic priority.136 A few tentative comments may be made regarding occupational background, although exact figures are impossible because, whilst I have identified the careers of some 222 abolitionists, some represent multiple or temporary careers; other career descriptions such as ‘in business’ or ‘merchant’ are too nebulous without more research. Connection with the legal world characterizes those who had a limited legal education (such as Henry Mayhew and Reverend Newman Hall) and did not follow a legal career, and several barristers, solicitors, and judges (the latter category comprising Fitzroy Kelly, George Denman and Stephen Lushington).137 Several abolitionists had careers related to bookselling and publishing whether metropolitan or provincial – including Gilpin, William and Frederick Cash, Alfred W. Bennett and Alexander Ireland.138 Editorial and journalistic careers include Douglas Jerrold and his protégé Edward Youl (who was, it turned out, a scoundrel who wrote begging letters in the guise of the Chartist Thomas Cooper and other acquaintances) and Richard Hengist Horne; Alfred H. Dymond at the Morning Star, William Howitt, William Hepworth Dixon (a journalist who had trained at the bar, and published a study of European prisons), G.J. Holyoake and Henry Mayhew.139 Many abolitionists, including provincial supporters, were published authors. The literary abolitionists included men such as Dickens and Thackeray, both of whom moved away from complete abolition.140 Some of the most prominent abolitionists were amongst the c.16% who had newspaper ownership, editorship, publishing, bookselling or related activities as their careers.

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Careers involving medicine or science amount to at least 4%, including surgeons, phrenologists, botanists, chemists and scientific authors. But the figure fails to convey the scientific interest of many abolitionists; whether interest in ‘sciences’ such as phrenology and mesmerism, or sanitary reform. A large proportion of abolitionists had careers in commerce and manufacture. Some 5% had cloth-related careers whether as large-scale merchants, or as small drapers, cotton spinners or printer. Others were umbrella, pin, and biscuit manufacturers.141 Corn trading and starch and gum manufacture were other trades. Retailers included grocers, tea merchants and tobacconists. In total those described as merchants, traders, manufacturers and retailers account for almost 28% of the careers of abolitionists. Very few came from alcohol-related careers. A number of abolitionists worked in educational spheres as teachers and as promoters of literary institutes and mechanics institutes. Such abolitionists ranged from Dr George Mortimer, headmaster of the City of London School, who had published a tract in support of immediate abolition of slavery in 1833, to the Unitarian Dr Charles Berry on the Leicester abolitionist committee.142 Interest in educational matters was not limited to those with careers as educators. And even the humble sphere of the Sunday School teacher brought the individual into the capital punishment debate, for as the writer of moral tales George Mogridge instructed – whilst scrupulously avoiding declaring himself for or against the penalty – ‘Sunday school teachers, tell your scholars of the fearfulness of capital punishment.’143 Other occupations include banking or finance-related, including Quakers such as the Gurneys, Barclays and Alexanders, and more humble members of banking firms like Joseph Morgan of Hereford, or the longstanding Exeter correspondent, Henry Sparkes (who was a relation of Alfred H. Dymond), who had once eaten a forged note rather than allow it to remain as evidence when forgery carried a capital punishment. He had written to the Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel in 1830, urging abolition of the capital penalty in forgery, having studied the opinion of bankers, attorneys and others in Devonshire and elsewhere.144 Foundry and engineering included Barrett, Thomas Beggs and his close friends John Guest and Edward Chrimes.145 Occupational analysis of the abolitionist movement shows parallels with other reform movements and pressure groups, unsurprisingly, given the shared membership of peace, anti-slavery, temperance and other movements. The proportions are similar to those for temperance – cloth manufacture and retail, education-associated, and food retail.146 John Cordy Jeaffreson’s novel, Live it Down (1863), which involved a trial set in

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the mid-1820s, included the comment from a ‘distinguished criminal advocate’, that in all such capital cases, he sought to secure a grocer on the jury, since in rural districts a large majority of grocers were dissenters, ‘and dissenters are strongly opposed to the punishment of death. A dissenter in a jury box is a strong power in favour of a prisoner whose life is in danger.’147 Like other moral reform movements with substantial nonconformist support, the brewery trade, armed forces and landed gentry were not represented in significant numbers. Careers involving violence, whether butchers or military; or the drinks trade which was associated with the revelry of the public execution, appeared incompatible with anti-gallows agitation.148 The prominence of supporters connected with the legal world is understandable, and prominent legal abolitionists include the Irish-born commissioner of the insolvent debtors’ court, Charles Phillips, the Chancery barrister Edward Webster, serjeant-at-law John Humffreys Parry and Matthew Davenport Hill and his brother Frederic. Experience of the criminal law might at least confirm abolitionist sentiment.149 Such sentiment restricted legal careers of course: the barrister Sir William Horne’s scruples, for instance, meant that he could not sit in a criminal court and go on circuit.150 So much for the occupational side of the abolitionist. The biography of Gilpin suggested, it is hoped, something of the psychology and motivation of many abolitionists. The Times, identifying abolitionism with the ‘advanced Liberals of … the “Manchester school”’ in 1881, spoke of abolitionists as ‘men of emotional temperament and humanitarian optimism’.151 For The Times and other critics, as we shall see, it was easy to characterize the abolitionist as a maudlin sentimentalist. There was some weakness of stomach and understanding which made them ‘proselytes to the various forms of folly and fanaticism in which squeamishness exhibits itself’, commented Blackwood’s Magazine in 1839.152 How many of the abolitionists had actually confirmed or originated their distaste amidst the scaffold crowd is unclear, though the absence of extensive testimony is suggestive. The Unitarian minister George Harris had consciously chosen to ‘deepen his distaste of death punishments for crime, and give living testimony to its fearfulness’.153 The manufacturer John Guest of Rotherham went to witness an execution when in London, although already an abolitionist: any doubts he had went after witnessing the hilarity and enjoyment – ‘spell-bound amongst the cruel crowd’.154 Dymond was also made to witness the execution of the mariticide (and serial poisoner) Sarah Chesham – ‘Arsenic Sal’ – in Chelmsford in 1851 since Gilpin and others sought information on the impact of the spectacle on country people: it was an obscene ‘carnival of debauchery’.155

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Was there not something, critics of the abolitionists asked, showy about their philanthropy – a desire to stand out from the masses? One retentionist argued that the ‘desire of being celebrated for excessive benevolence, is at the very root of attempting to abolish capital punishments’.156 And where would this end? They would ‘very probably go further, and insist that no ox or sheep, or any of the inferior animals, should be slaughtered for food – that we must be compelled to live on the roots of the earth, and quench our thirst by drinking at the crystal fountain’.157 Such a prediction, exposing abolitionists to ridicule in 1840, proved accurate with the rise to prominence of teetotalism and vegetarianism in the later 1840s, when abolition of capital punishment formed part of the world view of all-round reformers.158 The geography and extent of the movement Abolitionist petitions to parliament may be used to assess the size and geography of the movement (the petitioning of the Queen in capital cases, which might include the expression of abolitionist sentiments, as, for instance, in the case of Mary Ball, executed at Coventry for the murder of her husband in 1849, is discussed in the next chapter159). We must rightly be cautious about using signatures for estimates of support, and the evidence from parliamentary petitions is incomplete: although petitioning efforts did continue in the 1850s the information is inaccessible in the absence of any ‘Index to Public Petitions’ listing towns and giving signature numbers after 1852.160 Nevertheless, a few observations may be made, on the assumption that committed abolitionists would not have missed the opportunity of registering their views even if other signatories had limited interest. The period 1841–1845 saw modest signature numbers, increased petitioning efforts came with the formation of the S.A.C.P. in 1846.161 The total signatures for the period 1846–1848 is 477,682, when the population in 1851 was c.18 millions. One petition organized by the Health and Life Association and inhabitants of Liverpool attracted 12,500 signatures, and was ‘330 feet long … and is about 20 lbs weight’.162 The patron of the Association was William Ewart, who was to present it to the Commons. The highest number of petition signatures was in 1850 with 1,046,011 signatures to abolitionist petitions. This peak corresponds to the parliamentary abolitionist debate in which abolitionists were narrowly defeated. In the next two years there was a dramatic fall, which may be explained by combat fatigue. It was unlikely that constant levels of support for abolition petitions would be offered each year. The percentage of the population who may therefore be identified crudely through petition evidence as abolitionists is c.2.5%.163 One has only to compare the

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reams of pages devoted to recording petitioning against the corn laws to appreciate the smaller scale activity and interest in abolition. Even so, the petitioning effort represents a significant abolitionist activity, and one of the key tools associated with the platform’s strategy of exerting pressure on parliament.164 John McCay, the secretary to the Dublin Howard Society, had advised a Liverpool correspondent of the problems of petitioning in 1833, from his experience he had found ‘in the country parts a Petition to Parliament is considered a most solemn affair, and almost impracticable.’165 In addition, he observed that ‘the great number of names is not so much an object, as respectability in a limited number of signatures.’ So where petitioners were members of professions or could append an address, this was to be encouraged.166 Petition origins provide information on the movement’s geography, in the absence of contemporary allusions to geographical concentrations of support. The S.A.C.P. attempted to present the movement as ‘national’: this was part of the strategy behind the platform and petitioning. London provided the majority of signatures to abolitionist petitions.167 That it was the centre of abolitionism is unsurprising, given its population, the impact of metropolitan executions, the fact that the question was an ‘imperial’ one requiring a metropolitan base, and the S.A.C.P.’s London-based leadership. To obtain national credibility it was important to have mass meetings and thenational office there. It meant nearness to the Londonbased ‘national’ press. Yet there are no references to opponents castigating abolitionism as merely the fad of sentimental Londoners. And although the movement for very practical reasons had its heart in London, the widespread geographical origins of the leaders should alone emphasize the provincial dimension. Petition evidence for the period 1846–1851 shows no striking northsouth contrast but Yorkshire provided the second highest concentration of petitions after London.168 A York association briefly existed in 1849, stimulated by the demoralizing spectacle of an execution outside the Castle and encouraged by a visit from Charles Gilpin.169 Other prominent areas included Lancashire, Devon and Essex. In Lancaster there was briefly an anti-capital punishment society in 1857.170 The abolitionist petitions came from urban strongholds of nonconformity and radicalism and market towns where presumably the influence of resident Quakers was important. We know of lecture tours in rural areas and the spectacle of the gallows did after all attract rural participation: it was not simply an urban question. The information derived from subscription from the earlier nineteenth century, such as it is, bears out the same geographical pattern of London predominance followed by areas of concentration in Yorkshire, especially the North and

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West Ridings.171 The West Riding was an important location for temperance, and we have seen that the personnel of the S.A.C.P. included many temperance figures. Other locations for organized activity included Maidstone, where a local Peace Society had endorsed abolitionism in 1845172 and where the local anti-capital punishment committee included a wholesale furnisher and ironmonger, Charles Peppercorn, as secretary in 1859, and the woollen draper and clothier George Edmett, later Mayor of the town in 1862, as chairman. The linen draper Thomas Clayton was secretary.173 According to the Annual Register in 1856, it was not only Maidstone that nurtured abolitionist sentiments, for it was ‘well known that in certain towns of Kent a kind of association has been formed by persons who object to the infliction of death as a punishment for crime and that one means they have adopted for enforcing their dogma is that when any one of the association serves on a jury trying a capital case he does not find the prisoner guilty’.174 It was an irony that was not lost on commentators when Maidstone became the first town in which private hanging was inflicted, in 1868, when the young man had to be fortified, as one witness recalled, by ‘pannikin after pannikin of brandy and water’.175 Abolitionist activity was not, of course, limited to S.A.C.P. branches. In Ipswich, for instance, according to John Glyde’s study of the ‘moral, social and religious condition’ of the town published in 1850, the advocates of abolition were numerous but there was ‘no union of effort’. Activity was spasmodic, the subject brought before fellow townsmen ‘only casually … and sometimes left until the full penalty of the law is about to be inflicted upon some poor being’.176 There are glimpses of petition efforts in Scotland. Here, where a separate legal system operated, the Royal Commissioners examining capital punishment, when they issued their report in January 1866, noted that unlike England, the capital punishment was not restricted to murder and treason, since there were offences in point of law still liable to a capital sentence, and ‘strongly recommend that this anomaly be no longer allowed to exist and that all such obsolete laws be repealed’.177 But Scottish legal professionals and commentators – operating in a system which stressed flexibility and discretion, and which had apparently in the past fewer capital crimes than the English system – used evidence of comparative mercy to argue that the Scots were more compassionate than the English.178 The rareness, and thus perhaps the inefficacy, of the punishment in Scotland was certainly something that abolitionists wished to bring out in evidence before the Royal Commission in 1865.179 The English minister George Harris – a teetotaller and leader of Scottish Unitarianism – was strenuous against capital punishment,

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lecturing throughout Scotland: on several occasions in Glasgow and twice in Aberdeen and Edinburgh, and in towns such as Paisley, Kilmarnock and Bridgeton. Harris delivered these lectures in churches and ‘associated bodies of persons’.180 He moved to Gateshead, bringing the journal The Christian Pilot with him to promote abolitionism and other causes.181 An ‘Edinburgh Society for the Diffusion of Information on Capital Punishments’ was listed in Edinburgh almanacs and directories from the 1830s–1860.182 Its early committee members – of the ‘professional and commercial classes’ – included the phrenologist (and, after 1837, former lawyer) George Combe, various advocates such as John Shank More (later professor of law), John Archibald Murray (lord advocate of Scotland 1835 and 1835), George Ross and James Simpson, the mycologist and botanist Robert Kaye Greville (the secretary), the landowner Charles Maitland Christie, the physician Dr John Gairdner, the classicist Professor James Pillans, Henry Tod, a Writer to the Signet, and the Quaker John Wigham III, who had been president of the Edinburgh anti-corn law association.183 Operating as the ‘Howard Society for the Improvement of Prisons and the Abolition of the Punishment of Death’ abolitionists organized a public meeting in Edinburgh in April 1836, chaired by the Quaker businessman Alexander Cruickshank, at the Hopetoun Rooms with tickets available for ladies and gentlemen. ‘Let us all petition the Parliaments. Let us send them, load them on the very footstool of the Throne,’ a correspondent told the Caledonian Mercury’s editor. They sought to link this activity to disquiet at the execution of the sail-maker Charles Donaldson for the murder of his wife, despite the jury’s recommendation of mercy and the petitions from ‘so many respected Citizens to the Secretary of State’.184 Some of the abolitionists were members of the anti-slavery Edinburgh Emancipation Society (established in 1833) – Wigham, Tod, Greville and the hosier Edward Cruickshank. Cruickshank was a former Quaker who had joined the Baptists and who as a member of the Edinburgh Town Council (1842–1846) opposed capital punishment. In July and August of 1845 Cruickshank and his fellow Councillor, Russell, had initiated a detailed debate on abolitionism in the Town Council which the Magazine of Popular Information on Capital and Secondary Punishments predicted would lead to a call for immediate and total abolition.185 But whilst the debate persuaded some waverers, and it was decided to petition the Queen, the bookseller and Lord Provost, Adam Black, was not convinced, and subsequently the Council decided in May 1846 to remove the call for abolition of capital punishment for murder from its petition in favour of William Ewart’s bill by 15 to 9.186 By contrast to Edinburgh, Ayr Council and magistrates sent a petition for abolition in July 1846, signed by the cloth merchant and provost Hugh

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Miller.187 Abolitionist propagandizing in St Andrews and the chief towns of Fife by a Mr Easton had led to a retentionist pamphlet which sportingly he helped by subscribing for.188 There were other Scottish retentionists who committed their thoughts to paper, for instance Thomas Mulock criticized Dickens and others: ‘it may seem a very stern proposition to Quakers, Pickwickian philosophers, and the school of social optimists who eke out creeds and codes from Goethe’s Faust or Schiller’s Robbers, but it is, nevertheless, eternally true, that capital crimes demand capital punishments.’189 Controversial sentences of death (such as Margaret Hamilton’s in Glasgow in January 1850, after conviction for murdering her sister-in-law by arsenic) led to public meetings, and petitions, some of these based on opposition to capital punishment on principle.190 The Reverend George Gilfillan of Dundee, a clergyman of the Free Kirk and reported to be an abolitionist too, sent his congregation into sobbing fits over the execution of Mary Timney in Dumfries, using his histrionic talents (a literary celebrity, he had been associated with the ‘spasmodic’ literary movement) to evoke her heart-rending cries for her children, much to the annoyance of the Caledonian Mercury in 1862.191 From Scotland, too, emanated the abolitionists’ short-lived periodical, the Magazine of Popular Information on Capital and Secondary Punishments, published monthly from March 1845 until its editor’s death in June 1846, by David Robertson of Glasgow (who also published an abolitionist tract), which featured original articles, and a ‘mass of information collected of an interesting and instructive character’, according to the Unitarian minister George Harris.192 The magazine acted as a British journal, with little that was peculiarly Scottish, except for articles on the Scottish poor law, the execution of Scottish witches, and allusion to the anti-abolitionism of the Kirk and Free Church. Scottish Chartism had earlier been associated with the cause of abolition through Robert Malcolm’s Scottish Patriot (1839), the organ of the Glasgow Chartists, which included the cause along with corn law repeal. The historian of Scottish Chartism sees the involvement of the later Chartists in peace, temperance and personal reforms, and espousal of capital punishment – as with the Congregational minister the Reverend Alexander Duncanson of Falkirk – as part of the ‘end of Chartism’ when a focus on the Charter had been eroded.193 The response of the established church in Scotland to capital punishment is examined in a later chapter. Quakers in Scotland were presumably active in abolition – Alexander Cruickshank’s public support in Edinburgh has already been noted. William Gray of Glasgow, a Friend,

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wrote in 1856 to the Home Office to seek a reprieve for the murderers Celestina Sommer and Elizabeth Ann Harris.194 Ireland, for the English, was virtually defined through its homicides. The English Review, in 1847 declared there was ‘no nation in the world which is like the Romish population of Ireland, banded together for the perpetration of murder and the protection of murderers’.195 Ewart alluded in a Commons debate to confidential communications he had received showing executions constantly followed murders in Ireland, so that ‘sanguinary punishments suggested sanguinary crimes’.196 On the other hand, one Irish newspaper, scorning the idea that there were Irish or English types of homicide, debated the ‘nationality of murder’.197 We have seen already that there was a Dublin branch of the Society for the Diffusion of Information on the Punishment of Death. It was composed of the ‘most active and influential persons among the educated classes’ such as the Quaker Joseph Bewley, Dr Litton (professor of botany for the Royal Dublin Society), Dr Jonathan Osborne (of Sir Patrick Dun’s Hospital), Dr Robert Perceval (of Trinity College and appointed Physician General in Ireland in 1819), the Reverend Dr Franc Sadleir (Whig and Provost of Trinity College), a Lieutenant Colonel Seton and an Anglican curate, Reverend Hugh White.198 The secretary, John McCay, had published a letter to Lieutenant General Sir Herbert Taylor on two capital cases, in 1834.199 Under the guise of the Howard Society for the Improvement of Prisons and the Abolition of the Punishment of Death, the Irish abolitionists had met at Londonderry in March 1836 to prepare an address to William IV, and petition parliament against capital punishment as ‘repugnant to the mercy of Christian revelation’. Significantly, the meeting discussed peculiarly Irish aspects of the penal code too – the fact that a hanging led ‘not infrequently’ to revenge killings. Numbers in Ireland, especially in times of political excitement, had been executed because of the want of a counsel or solicitor, or the resources to pay for fees or bring credible witnesses to the trial, they claimed.200 Another meeting took place in Waterford, chaired by an old friend of the penal reformer John Howard, the Quaker John W. Strangman, and with support from the local newspaper editors.201 Irish abolitionists still agitated for support for petitions in the early 1840s.202 When the S.A.C.P. was established, abolitionist meetings followed in the Irish capital and elsewhere, co-ordinated in the case of one at the Savings’ Bank in Glentworth Street, in Limerick, through a circular from London friends (probably Friends), with Ewart’s parliamentary motion on abolition in early July 1846.203 A meeting of the Town Council in Cork, chaired by the Mayor and including military officers and Father Matthew the great Catholic temperance leader, and which gestured

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towards recent notorious executions in England such as Thomas Henry Hocker’s and John Tawell’s, agreed to petition against capital punishment in 1845, and noted ‘an honour and fame upon this locality’ for being the first city to demand total repeal. The meeting decided to petition against corporal punishment too.204 In the same period, Lord Brougham presented to the Lords a petition from the ‘Remonstrant Presbyterian Synod of Tyrone,’ praying for an entire abolition of the death penalty, Lord Denman presented an abolitionist petition from a ‘Remonstrant Presbyterian’ congregation at Dromore, and Lord Londonderry presented an abolitionist petition from Presbyterians in County Down.205 Here, as elsewhere, it was the progressives involved in other social and moral reforms who led the agitation. The Dublin Weekly Herald had already, in 1840, proclaimed itself in support of abolition, alongside ‘every other measure calculated to improve and promote the happiness of the human family’.206 Prominent Dublin Quakers were involved in the public meeting which received Gilpin and other members of the London society in May 1849: the anti-slavery activist Richard Davis Webb, and the textile manufacturer Richard Allen.207 Here, there was reported to be ‘a large number of ladies present’.208 An Irish (or Hibernian) Anti-Capital Punishment Society was formed with James Haughton, Allen, Webb and Dr M’Mullen, and issued a prospectus.209 Shortly after this, Haughton delivered a paper on the subject of death punishments to the Dublin Statistical Society.210 The hostile account of Irish Quakerism by the ex-Quaker Sarah Greer – her biography was publicly criticized by Charles Gilpin – suggests that capital punishment was a minor issue for Irish Quakers. According to her, her father made efforts, after the execution of an innocent poor man, writing privately to all judges and influential men, for abolition, including the Protestant Archbishop Power Trench of Tuam.211 Yet the Howard Society meeting in April 1834 was reported to have had a respectable audience, ‘among whom were many belonging to the Society of Friends, and other philanthropists’ and we learn of the Quaker Samuel Davis heading a petition for abolition of capital punishment in the aftermath of the gruesome execution of John Daly and Terence Corboy at Clonmel gaol in March 1848, ‘and in a very busy period has received the signatures of the clergy, gentry, merchants, &c of all religious persuasions here’.212 The infliction of capital punishment in a Catholic Irish context was complicated by the tensions created by the Protestant Ascendancy and British State. Political murder complicated the question of what to do with homicides.213 George Cornewall Lewis, one of the ‘Irish poor inquiry’ commissioners, declared in 1833 that Australia had been covered with transported convicts from Ireland and capital punishment inflicted

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unsparingly ‘and all to no purpose’.214 Defending his nation’s reputation, the editor of the Irish Times wrote in July 1868 after the sentence of death had been passed on one Joseph Kelly in Wexford, that this was no agrarian murder as the traducers of Ireland claimed and that the number and character of agrarian outrages had been exaggerated and law made to seem powerless in the country.215 The ‘martyrdom’ of Fenians and the reactionary tendency of the public following the Clerkenwell outrage, embarrassed British abolitionists, but the Dublin abolitionist James Haughton led a deputation to the Lord Lieutenant against the death penalty in 1867.216 Welsh abolitionist activity is not well reported. There are a few glimpses through newspaper correspondence – where abolitionists and those who characterized them as philanthropic fanatics debated the question. Thus a correspondent from the Principality wrote on capital punishment in Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper in 1848 and the Baptist Reverend John D. Evans of Llangefni wrote to the North Wales Chronicle (published in Bangor) in 1862 in support of abolition on the basis of the New Testament.217 Ernest Sylvanus Appleyard’s Welsh sketches, referring to the present tone of feeling on capital punishments, contrasted these with the ‘bardic system’ in which the execution was made an act of sacrifice on the altar, a religious act rather than a scaffold scene.218 A recent study of the response of the constituent nations of the Union to homicide in the late nineteenth-century suggests that the Welsh were more likely to return convictions in murder trials than the Scottish and Irish, but less likely than the English. One Welsh newspaper claimed this was so because of the religious beliefs of Welsh jurors.219 Where public opinion was set against an execution it could take the form of a refusal to build the gallows, as in Dolgelly in 1878, where local carpenters declined to assist the English hangman William Marwood to execute the farmer Cadwallader Jones for the murder of Sarah Hughes.220 In 1848 the non-sectarian Edinburgh journal Hogg’s Weekly Instructor, in an abolitionist article, wrote that in London there was ‘a powerful association, with branches in almost every city in Britain, composed of men eminent alike for their Christian piety and enlightened benevolence’ manfully striving to abolish ‘this last memorial of feudal disregard for human life’. This claim to geographical spread was nonsense.221 One factor in explaining the emergence of abolitionists in particular localities was the eruption of local gallows scandals. Thus the Glasgow Chronicle reported, following the execution of the tobacco-spinner William Perrie for the murder of his wife, in Paisley in October 1837 that ‘the only theme of public discussion’ for the last couple of weeks in Paisley had been the capital penalty and the question of divine command for the

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execution of murderers. ‘Many a keen appeal to the Bible has been made, and many an attentive perusal of the passages that are generally understood to refer to the subject has taken place’. The paper claimed a large number had come over to abolitionism.222

4 ABOLITIONISM: THE ROLE OF WOMEN AND WORKERS The discussion of the personnel of the S.A.C.P. and the occupational background of identifiable abolitionists reveal two striking absences. The movement was apparently predominantly male, and middle class. But women and the working classes were certainly involved in the agitation, even though they were not present at all on the mid-Victorian platform in the case of the former, or prominent as leaders of the S.A.C.P. in the case of the latter.1 And Alfred H. Dymond, in his recollections, claimed that the cases principally calling on the energies of the S.A.C.P. were of women.2 This chapter therefore explores the place that gender and class played in debates about the infliction or abolition of capital punishment. They are important to the history of capital punishment in this period, for, to take one aspect, gender and income excluded people from participating in that ‘palladium’ of English liberty, the jury. Women were excluded from jury service except in the rare case of juries of matrons established to decide in cases where a female used the ‘plea of the belly’. The jury franchise for men was set at £20 per annum, so that the jury box was by no means open to all men; even though the theory was that men were selected at random from society, it was selection from above a certain social level.3 Women and the punishment of death The humorist Thomas Hood wrote in 1842 of ‘the over-humane lady, who feels so strongly against capital punishments and the gallows, that she would like to hang Jack Ketch with her own hands’.4 Women participated in the abolitionist cause as petitioners in reprieve cases, where they occasionally expressed their abolitionist sentiment, as subscribers to abolitionists societies, and as part of the audience in meetings. A few women published their abolitionist sentiments, fewer still throughout the nineteenth-century took part in the platform. Their

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gendered identities as nurturers might suggest it was ‘natural’ for contemporaries to identify women as sympathetic to the plight of the condemned. The unnaturalness of any woman being attracted to the subject of crime and punishment was implied when The Satirist presented Madame Tussaud, the ‘superannuated old panderer to morbid tastes’, as a ‘vile feminine (?) exhibitionist’ in 1849.5 The corollary was that it seemed ‘natural’ for opponents to characterize male abolitionists as effeminate.6 Of course women also figured in debates about capital punishment as culprits and victims. Their gendered nature appeared in public and individual responses to execution: there was discussion in parliament about a de facto abolition of female capital punishment.7 Disquiet about female hanging was detected in juries. The Times, for instance, noting in 1864 that ‘the additional horror of a female execution’ often led to the acquittal of professional poisoners, commented that the spectacle of a woman on the gallows was ‘so hideous and revolting that we can imagine the time coming when it will hardly be believed’.8 Significantly this was a private calculation too, on the part of the Home Office, for in Celestina Sommer’s case in 1856, Sir George Grey weighed up the evidence of the deliberate murder of her ten year old child against the ‘effect likely to be produced by execution of woman of 24 & said to be in appearance much younger, who was seduced at 14 & who appears not to have been well treated by her husband’: he could not disregard sympathy towards her.9 It seems that abolitionist women were mostly Protestant nonconformists: such as the writer and social scientist Harriet Martineau, the penal reformer Mary Carpenter and the educationist and writer Caroline Hill (Unitarians) or the author Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck (a convert to Moravianism).10 Florence Nightingale, in her privately printed Suggestions for Thought, drafted about 1852 onwards, had associated her unorthodox religious views with her attitudes to reform of criminals and punishment, ‘everlasting damnation and capital punishment will go out together,’ she had prophesied. God was not powerless to reform, unlike men who could only clap people in leg irons and hang them.11 Quaker women of course, were associated with the cause. We are told that Mary Leadbetter of Ballitore in Kildare, who died in 1826, often expressed her enduring hope that capital punishment would be abolished, in her conversations and letters.12 The anti-slavery activist Elizabeth Heyrick of Leicester turned to the question of capital punishment.13 The ‘bluestocking’ Caroline Fox discussed capital punishment with Thomas Carlyle and John Sterling in the early 1840s.14 The Quaker writer Amelia Opie sat, ‘placid, benevolent-looking’, near to the president of a meeting against capital punishment held at Norwich after an execution in the city

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in 1846.15 The female subscribers to the abolitionist societies were generally Quakers who contributed as part of a family – Elizabeth Fry the prison reformer, who had presented her own thoughts on capital punishment in the conclusion to her Observations on the Visiting, Superintending, and Government, of Female Prisoners (1827), shared her Gurney siblings’ abolitionist sentiments.16 She had helped, according to one writer, ‘essentially the course of the diminution of capital punishments’.17 Thinking and writing about the punishment in private, and associated with the death penalty in the public mind through published letters addressed to her from condemned female forgers, she had sought to raise the question of abolition with the monarch, through Queen Adelaide. In advertisements for local meetings in the Bradford Observer and Leeds Mercury in April 1856, ‘ladies were invited to attend’.18 Certainly the ‘peculiar’ garb of Quaker women – their plain and old-fashioned costume – led to their ready identification as members of the audience at abolitionist meetings.19 On the other hand, Gilpin found it necessary to correct The Times on one account of a capital punishment meeting in November 1849, where the reporter had underestimated the size of the audience and exaggerated the female component: ‘the proportion of females was not 1 in 10,’ Gilpin wrote.20 The female financial contribution did not equal the male one, but it was important. A report of 1866 lists 26 women who gave a total of £29 1s 6d, a sum covering general and travel expenses for that year.21 In the period 1828–1845 there was a total of £200 from women (about 15% of the total).22 The evidence of reprieve efforts in capital cases bears out an impression that the gallows was not a respectable subject for women, with women rarely writing for mercy in individual cases with which they had no personal connection (as for instance, mothers pleading for their offspring to be spared). An expression of female unease at petitioning may be found in the Home Office file on Elizabeth McIntosh (convicted of the infanticide of her five-month year old child), in a letter from a Mrs Miller of Rothesay, in October 1855, ‘Circumstances have seemed to throw this case upon my notice, and this must be my excuse for the extraordinary liberty I have taken.’ Two instances in the capital case files studied show women taking a leading role in appeals: in August 1856 from Elizabeth Outon on behalf of the inhabitants of Lewes for the reprieve of James Murdoch who had killed an elderly gaoler in Hastings and the Quakeress Maria Allen with her husband forwarding a Wanstead petition for the child killers Celestina Sommer (or Somner) and Elizabeth Ann Harris, in April 1856.23 There was also a petition for Harris and Sommer from the ladies of Stockton on Tees, in which they admitted they could not argue for commutation in these cases except from the convicts’ evident low

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moral sense and slight feeling of moral accountability, but enumerated four reasons why capital punishment should not be enforced: it lacked clear divine sanction and the New Testament was in essence clearly opposed to it, it failed as a deterrent, it demoralized, and it did not allow repentance when it hurried a person out of the world.24 Even though retentionists characterized abolitionism as ‘mawkish sentimentality’ or ‘effeminate’, there was never any sustained argument that abolitionist activity was typical of (let alone suitable for) women philanthropists. Clara Lucas Balfour – a temperance writer – was unusual in that regard, in arguing, in ‘Woman the Reformer’, for capital punishment abolition being as much a woman’s question as it was a man’s.25 ‘Is it nothing to her,’ she asked, ‘that society should be brutalized by frightful exhibitions? Nothing to her that a punishment continues in force which does not protect the lives of the community?’ She thought the revolting fact that there were women who attended executions was a ‘solemn call’ to right-minded women to protest against such scenes. On the other hand, a male writer presented the character of a feminist propagandist in his serialized novel with the absurd conclusion to her calls for equality, in suggesting (though the voice of a male character) a future when the ‘murdering lords of creation’ would be convicted by a female jury, sentenced by a female judge and hanged by a female executioner.26 (There had, in fact, been a female executioner – of men and women apparently – operating at the turn of the century in Roscommon.27) The uttering by women of abolitionist sentiments at public meetings is hardly recorded. At one gathering of Chartist abolitionists in 1846, Thomas Clark reported that a lady who had attended a meeting with him had ‘wished they would hang the system instead of the man’, but this is a rare voice.28 It was only in the 1870s that a woman spoke alongside men on the abolitionist platform and her intervention – during an international conference on capital punishment in London – was merely alluded to.29 Despite all that was claimed for the gentler sex, Victorians often affected to be shocked to find that murderers and executions attracted the attention of women.30 Thus in one abolitionist newspaper’s ‘few words about the Gallows’ in 1847 there were pointed comments about ‘delicate ladies, who professedly could not bear to watch the death of an insect … [but who] sometimes observe, with affected stoutness of heart, the dying convulsions of a fellow-creature.’31 Another newspaper, in the context of the execution at Stafford of William Palmer in June 1856, commented that ‘public reprobation of the conduct of such disgraces to their sex, would have but little effect’.32 Strategically, the abolitionist cause could, in the context of female felons condemned to death, be presented as a natural female cause.33 Elizabeth

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Fry and other women had visited condemned women. But there was something troubling about women interested in male murderers. The Quaker Hannah Backhouse visited the murderer John Tawell, who had sought to be regarded as a member of the Society of Friends, in his cell at Aylesbury.34 Some ‘pious and benevolent ladies’ in Nottingham visited a condemned man in the gaol in 1842, as Thomas Beggs informed the Royal Commission in 1866: one wonders what they made of the detail that one of the ladies had sent the man a white camellia to wear at his execution.35 One critic of abolitionists, from the Royal Navy, described such feminine efforts to mitigate the sufferings of the condemned as ‘peculiarly disgusting’.36 But the retentionist paper John Bull referred to the natural kindness and tenderheartedness of women (before arguing that when women went bad, they were tenfold more fierce as murderers).37 And the Ordinary of Newgate, no abolitionist, had edited a poem by a man who was condemned to death, in which the mercifully reprieved man uttered the thought, ‘’Twas well for me a female bosom reign’d, |Or else dear Mercy’s suit had been disdain’d |But if the seraph e’er could find abode, |’Tis surely in a woman – and in God.’38 The Queen was the target of memorials and petitions for mercy in capital cases. The Quaker author Mary Howitt’s petition in favour of mercy for Mary Ann Hunt (a murderess who was found to be enceinte, despite the verdict to the contrary by a jury of matrons), published in Howitt’s Journal in the winter of 1847, argued that as a woman and mother, and ‘chief woman of the nation and mother of her people’, the Queen could not be behind the greater portion of her female subjects in ‘desiring to set aside the barbarism now impending over one of your own sex’.39 Hunt was transported. Mary Howitt was also active in 1849 in agitating for a reprieve for Charlotte Harris of Bath, who had murdered her husband in order to marry an older and rich man, and was pregnant: one Scottish newspaper, in publicizing Howitt’s appeal to the ‘woman’s and mother’s heart’ of the Queen, claimed, ‘If it were possible to collect the suffrages of the women of England and Scotland, we feel persuaded that the petitioners for mercy would be as a million to one.’ The woman was transported.40 Mary Howitt’s attempt to mobilize women to address the Queen on behalf of Hunt (arguably a more constitutional form for women than petitioning of parliament) had been prefigured earlier in the Queen’s reign, when the silverplate manufacturer, anti-slavery activist and general social reformer Samuel Roberts, of New Grange, Sheffield, had published a sheet with the comprehensive title of Queen’s coronation: an address to the females of Sheffield on the wickedness, the barbarity, and the impolicy of the punishment of death in all cases.41

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This action, which ‘caused the subject to be very generally canvassed’ in Sheffield, was followed by a meeting there and the formation of what seems to have been a unique body, ‘a highly respectable Committee of Females formed to promote the total abolition of Capital Punishments’. Elsewhere, he referred to an ‘auxiliary society’ which ‘consisted principally of females’.42 It was not large, and was mainly comprised of Quakers. It made, so he recalled, ‘considerable progress’ and Roberts ‘felt so little doubt of the measure being generally approved and finally carried, that I laughed at the fears of some of the ladies of the Committee, who thought that there were many strong opponents to it, and I told them that they certainly must have kept bad company’.43 However, the force of religious orthodoxy was brought to bear on these women – as they busied themselves with their ‘work of mercy’ – by the evangelical Reverend Thomas Best of St James’s and two other ministers: Best used one of his weekly lectures on religious matters – which attracted a primarily female audience – to convince members of the committee, which seems to have been comprised of mainly young women, that the infliction of death on murderers was a Christian duty. Of the ladies’ committee, Roberts wrote, ‘a more respectable, disinterested, talented, amiable, pious committee of Females has rarely been formed.’ Addressing Best in a public letter, Roberts said that ‘their contributions (no trifling ones) of time, attention, and subscription, you, however, did your best, to render unavailing’.44 The ‘timid female committee’ was paralysed by the lecture and after slackening their efforts the committee ceased to operate. Roberts was circumspect about detailing who the women were, referring to them as ‘young and inexperienced’, their ‘estimable leader’ had died by the time his Letter addressed to the incumbent of St James’s was republished.45 The S.A.C.P. did consider there to be value in highlighting the dissonance between a female sovereign and the execution of women.46 The Times made the association too, between mitigating the penal system, and the ‘presence of a maiden Queen upon the throne’.47 This sentiment also surfaced in novels: Charles Reade’s It is never too late to mend (1856), made the connection between the statute book, and a nation ruled by ‘the most humane sovereign the world has ever witnessed on an earthly throne’.48 The anonymous novel How I rose in the World (1868), in which one character, George Allen, narrowly misses execution despite the jury’s recommendation of mercy and petitions, including from those with conscientious objection to the death penalty, featured the comment, made by another character that: ‘Women do not like to shed blood; and our royal lady has a true woman’s heart.’49 That Sir Peter Hesketh Fleetwood had elicited royal permission for the dedication to his translation of Victor Hugo’s abolitionist narrative, Le Dernier Jour d’un Condamné interested some

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commentators.50 The Queen’s alleged clemency was detected in her first speech to parliament, and also expressed in the ‘beautiful incident’ of her reluctance to sign a death warrant for a soldier.51 Her own view on capital punishment could be detected in the leniency which led the attempted assassin John Francis to be transported rather than executed in 1842. She seems also to have been interested in a reform of public executions in the mid-1840s, at least to the extent of requesting the Home Secretary’s view.52 The provincial press had also taken up the rumour that the Queen was unwilling to sign death warrants – a misconception about the process in any case – in 1838.53 That year saw an interesting article appear in the radical Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, purporting to be the ‘Scroll of a Letter to the Queen, on the Punishment of Death,’ the result of a conference by a ‘few respectable women of the middle class’, on this subject of signing death warrants. They wrote to their sovereign with ‘deepest pity’ and contrasted her world of vanity, splendour and comfort with the reality of ignorance, degradation and overwork. It was a question ‘by women naturally regarded on the side of religion and feeling alone’, so the husband who (it was claimed) presented this letter to the Tait’s Magazine argued, but alongside womanly feelings there also went the matter of queenly reputation – Elizabeth’s reputation had been harmed by the blood shed during her reign.54 The public had to be disabused of the idea that the Queen herself exercised the prerogative of mercy, although it was the conceit of the radical London Pioneer in the year that the S.A.C.P. was launched, in a prominently positioned article entitled ‘Court Circular’, that Victoria and Albert discussed the ‘great effort in the country to effect the abolition of capital punishment’, with Albert having abolitionist sympathies.55 A female petitioner for mercy almost twenty years later still hoped that the Queen might be involved in the reprieve of a murderer, even though aware she ‘was not suffered to peruse trials of life and death’, as it involved the ‘only real power left to Royalty’.56 Sarah Stickney Ellis, in her famous The Daughters of England (an edition of which, Gilpin had published), argued that every female mind ought to be engaged in topics such as slavery, war, cruelty to animals, temperance, and the punishment of death, ‘on which neither to know or to feel is almost equally disgraceful’. Not that Ellis herself wrote on the question, and Clara Lucas Balfour, despite recognizing the subject as within women’s scope, seems to have published nothing. In fact there were, perhaps surprisingly, few women writing about capital punishment apart from Mary Howitt (though there were some anonymous pamphlets which may have been authored by women).57 Howitt’s daughter, the artist and

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spiritualist Anna Mary Howitt, showed her dislike of public executions at least, in her An Art-Student in Munich, when discussing the Bavarian practice of public beheading.58 There was the socialist and freethinker Emma Martin’s lecture, delivered outside the ambit of the S.A.C.P. and official abolitionist platform, at the radical Hall of Science in Manchester, and published in 1849. Written in the context of the notorious double hanging of the Mannings for the murder of Patrick O’Connor, ‘the object being to give a useful direction to the public attention’, Martin quoted from Charles Dickens and adopted a stance self-consciously opposed to a ‘maudlin sentimentality.’59 Her tract was sold by booksellers associated with the ‘free thought movement’: the Free Enquiry and General Bookseller next to the Institute at Fitzroy Square for instance – not the sort of place where ‘well-brought up’ women would go, of course. There seems to have been an essay on capital punishment by a Madame Steinberg, professor in elocution and author of a poem entitled Oswald the Enthusiast, in the early 1850s.60 There was also Susannah Beedle’s An Essay on the Advisability of Total Abolition of Capital Punishment, dedicated to the ‘rulers and people of England’ but its few pages offered no peculiarly feminine take. It appeared, too, rather late in the capital punishment agitation, in 1867.61 Early Victorian women did not publish legal disquisitions or examinations of the criminal justice or penal systems. A rare commentary on criminal law by a woman was by the scholar and feminist Caroline Frances Cornwallis in 1846, but this was anonymous and took no special view on capital punishment.62 Harriet Taylor Mill wrote – anonymously and with her lover John Stuart Mill – about the iniquities of all-male juries in trials concerning homicide by wives compared with wife-killing.63 Fiction – examined in detail in chapter 7 – perhaps provided another location for women to discuss the question. Women who wrote novels often included homicide as part of the plot and might therefore express opinions about crime and punishment. One example is Eliza Stephenson’s three-volume novel Janita’s cross (1864) in which a character, Royland, has the ordeal of a murder trial after his love rival Peter Monk is killed. What is interesting about Stephenson’s handling of capital punishment is not her intrusion of morality into the plot, but an awareness that women might be motivated by a ghoulish desire to hear the sentence of death proclaimed, and that women ‘of family and position, women who have been brought up in refined society, women who pride themselves upon the delicacy of their sensibilities, who would faint at the sight of a cut finger and go into hysterics if the drowning of a litter of kittens were mentioned in their hearing – such women can sit for hours listening to the details of a cold-blooded murderer’. Janita’s cross displays a recognition of female excitement in

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murder trials, and a depiction of females in support of the death penalty, as ‘quite necessary for the proper maintenance of public peace’.64 Another example is Mrs Beckett’s The Uttermost Farthing (1865), where the character Mary is said to have ‘no concern’ with the ‘abstract question of capital punishment’ and yet if this could be left to ‘wiser heads than hers’ (not, to be sure, gendered), ‘with the absolute thirst for blood, however guilty, however just that it should be shed, she could not sympathize’. But this was not presented as a typically feminine response. Perhaps it did not need to be made explicit. Were women supposed to be less vengeful than males?65 A thorough study of Victorian novels – a possibility in the not distant future if digitization incorporates the mass of forgotten and barely read at the time novels of the period – would uncover more traces of female abolitionism. But they are probably only traces. No great novel by a female writer made capital punishment the purpose or central theme of her work. The Brontë sisters did not, for instance, although Charlotte Brontë privately rejoiced in 1848 when the French provisional government abolished the death penalty and in the first chapter of Jane Eyre, Jane is fascinated by one of Bewick’s vignettes from History of British Birds, depicting the devil gazing on a gallows crowd.66 Periodical literature yields little by way of female comment. No doubt some of the anonymous correspondence on capital punishment in the newspaper press came from women: an autobiography of one nonconformist schoolmistress, Mary Smith, refers to her letters which advocated abolition, following a public execution at Carlisle.67 The Magazine of Popular Information on Capital Punishment had virtually no female contributions, although Elizabeth Fry (who had recently died when the magazine appeared) was featured, and poetry from women was printed.68 Magazines devoted to women may have discussed capital punishment – no exhaustive research has been done on this. The Lady’s Newspaper proposed abolition in an editorial after the execution of the eighteen year-old Catharine Foster in 1847, and thought the sentence of death on Annette Myers for shooting the ‘base seducer’ Ducker in 1848, proved the injustice of capital punishment as it failed to distinguish degrees in murder and was a manifestly unfair punishment, given that, as Dr Mortimer had said in the London Tavern meeting organized to petition for mercy, in the event that there had been a duel to obtain satisfaction between a brother of Myers and Ducker, there would have been no sentence of doom.69 There is a pro-abolitionist comment in The Ladies’ Companion from ‘C.A.W.’ in 1859, which referred to the absence of solemnity and wholesome horror in public executions: ‘the finer nerves and nicer noses of the present generation may be shocked at the

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suggestion, the true end of capital punishment being to deter from crime our forefathers showed a more common-sense appreciation of the end in view, when they left the murderer swinging on the gibbet.’70 The journal The Rose, the Shamrock and the Thistle carried an article by Herbert Graham in 1864 advocating capital punishment, despite being edited by a woman, printed by women, and produced for a national association for promoting female employment printing. In the same year the female editor of the Alexandra Magazine expressed her perplexity over the question when reporting the Social Science congress debates in York. The Victoria Magazine conducted by Emily Faithfull examined the expediency of capital punishment in 1866.71 Women must have read abolitionist literature – a copy of Rowton’s tract now in the British Library was owned by a Quakeress from Hertford and another woman ‘of great intelligence’ (perhaps another Quakeress) wrote to John Bright on John Stuart Mill’s parliamentary speech against capital punishment.72 The evidence is slight, in the absence of a thorough study of unpublished diaries and correspondence. Where women are, in the late-nineteenth century, depicted as reading Le Dernier Jour d’un Condamné in novels, it is as a work of sensation, rather than polemic. One expects that as a heated topic of the day, or a philosophical question, it figured in private correspondence between women, or between men and women. For example, Elizabeth Barrett discussed the punishment of death (which she opposed – she disliked Wordsworth’s sonnets on the subject) with her lover Robert Browning, in 1846.73 There is evidence of women discussing capital punishment in their own circles, through a couple of manuscript magazines that have survived in Scotland.74 A reform-minded husband like Dr John Epps, might discuss criminal reform and abolition with his wife.75 Private channels were used to advocate the cause – as for instance the ‘excellent lady’ who sought to enlist Charles Spurgeon’s sympathies in the anti-capital punishment cause about 1860 and whose ideas on punishment the preacher used by way of introducing to his congregation the dangers from heretical preachers promoting ‘namby-pamby sentimentalism … a deity destitute of every masculine virtue’.76 Of course there were women who wrote in private against the amelioration of the capital code.77 When it came to a public voice against capital punishment, women were not prominent. Of course, they lacked the parliamentary franchise – and even Quakers in their journals did not call on Quakeresses to exert pressure on parliamentary candidates through their menfolk. Punch claimed in 1872 that if the majority of women could vote, they would vote for the abolition of the hangman’s office, but ‘its retention is advocated by the strong-minded men most antipathetic to strong-minded women.’78

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As an extra-parliamentary force, women could be formidable. Their involvement in anti-slavery (one active location for female anti-slavery being Charles Gilpin’s birthplace, at Bristol and Clifton79), or their subsequent public role in temperance, contrast with their relative absence from the capital punishment platform. In America, as the Bradford Observer informed its readers in 1848 in a snippet entitled ‘Ladies against Capital Punishment’, a petition from Delaware had been signed by 6000 ladies.80 It was otherwise in Britain. It may be that the association of capital punishment with moral depravity and life unlawfully taken by the murderer meant that it lacked the respectability and attractiveness that a crusade against the manifest sufferings of the innocent that the antislavery agitation enjoyed (although one plank in the abolitionist platform was the claim that many innocent men and women had been executed81). If both movements could be characterized as sentimental, at least the slave could be seen to deserve this response. In any case, women were not expected to take a public position in the early-Victorian period, in anti-slavery or any other cause. So when Lucretia Mott the American Quaker was on the platform at an anti-capital punishment lecture by George Harris in Birmingham she was cheered, but the World Anti-Slavery Convention did not permit her and other women to participate.82 There seem to have been few female lecturers on capital punishment, apart from Emma Martin – already extremely unusual as a female lecturer associated with secularism. The temperance lecturer and erstwhile actress Jessie Craigen gave a lecture on the subject at William Lawson’s reform-minded festival at Blennerhasset.83 Emma Hardinge was reported as a ‘zealous and eloquent advocate for abolition of capital punishment’ when she planned to deliver a lecture on the subject at St George’s Hall in Langham Place in Regent Street in December 1867.84 Whether her involvement was much to the credit of the movement – given her prior career as a lecturer on American affairs and spiritualism – is a moot point. The Daily News, in the context of Celestina Sommer’s case in 1856, declared ‘murder is of no sex’.85 But of course there was awareness that women were the victims of male violence, with newspaper articles from the 1840s condemning the brutality of husbands. The abolitionist Lloyd’s Newspaper, for example, published an article entitled ‘The Men-wolves of England’. Paying heed to the debates about capital punishment gives us access to discussions about gender whether they be about the unnatural propensities of murderesses judged by their sex, or their status as the victims themselves (as in the case of some women who had committed infanticide) of blackguard men. Abolitionists manipulated normative ideas

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about gender in order to promote the abolition of female capital punishment. In 1847, for instance, Howitt’s Journal published a letter from a ‘constant reader’ from Liverpool which sought to exploit the ‘destruction by women of their new-born offspring’, for the abolitionist cause, since ‘if the perpetrators of any particular description of capital offence were granted immunity by law from the extreme penalty, the ultimate object of the friends of total abolition would be advanced’. The correspondent got carried away with the image of the seduced and wrong woman, ‘deserted by a barbarian’, and imagined with some gusto, the perhaps beautiful creature (for where is beauty – where are all feminine attractions so rife as in beautiful England?) is now dragged from her loathsome dungeon; palpitating, trembling, fainting, she is placed beneath the fatal engine; the rudest of the rude spectators, all unused to the melting mood, bursts into a passion of tears and sobs, and from all sides are reiterated cries of Shame! Shame! The scene – the horrible scene – then closes with a storm of execrations, both loud and deep. For abominations, of which the above is a poor and inadequate sketch, see the public papers.86 The murder of children had been a powerful element in the radical critique of the Malthusian State which imposed the New Poor Law from 1834; at about the same time as the outrage expressed against ‘Marcus’ and his Book of Murder there also occurred a moral panic over working-class burial club murders.87 Especially in the 1850s and 1860s, infanticide stirred up ambivalent emotions, with medical experts and others presenting infanticide as a pervasive social problem, while in individual cases the press might express compassion for women who had killed their children.88 Thus the Daily News, in discussing the case of Anne Padfield, who killed her illegitimate child in 1860, presented the English conscience as in revolt against the ‘deliberate murder of that deeply injured woman’.89 Correspondents in the press alluded to juror disquiet about placing all the blame on the weaker sex, and their consequent exploitation of medical evidence to return verdicts of concealment of birth instead of homicide.90 The rare instances of women who murdered serially stimulated commentary expressive of the horror of nurturing roles turned to devilry, as in the disturbing case of the nurse Catherine (or Constance) Wilson in 1862: alleged to have committed seven murders by poisoning, for financial gain. ‘All considerations of sex, which, in the case of women under capital sentence, commonly brings forth a multitude of people to plead for

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mercy, were in this instance completely merged in horror of the crime, and not a voice was raised to deprecate the justice of her doom.’91 There were no women jurors, lawyers or judges. Yet in criminal law a married woman on trial for homicide had the privilege of being treated as a separate individual from the husband whose existence otherwise deprived her of a separate legal identity. It would be too much to expect, one Irish female suffragist commented in 1873, that the husband would act for the wife when the scaffold and the hangman were in question.92 Though advocates of female suffrage did point out this inequality it was not treated as an anomaly in abolitionist literature until the Edwardian era.93 Yet women were thought to be advantaged when it came to capital crime. William Ewart alluded to this in the Commons in 1864 and the Royal Commission heard it asserted that there was a ‘great indisposition to hang a woman in this country’.94 The Reverend Robert Jermyn Cooper deprecated the ‘tenderness’ exhibited in the trial of female murderers but as one American legal commentator expressed it, the ‘noose relaxes, and refuses to clasp her fair neck; it is only when it embraces Adam’s apple that it preserves its hold’. The American believed that with women trying to become lawyers and jurors, this protective spell would break.95 Wiener’s study of shifting attitudes towards masculine violence and women who killed (whether of spouses, lovers or their children), indeed demonstrates that the stereotype of the weak and wronged female meant that women were less likely than wife-killers to be sentenced to death and executed.96 The punishment of death and the working classes In the historiography of capital punishment the working classes are depicted as the main component of the crowd and the hanged – hence the witticism in the drawing room of one Malvern water-cure establishment, where the wealthy occupants, playing ‘Historical Characters of the Nineteenth Century’, had to identify the celebrity ‘greatly interested in the elevation of the lower classes’, as William Calcraft, the hangman.97 That members of the middle or upper classes were just as keen to see the ‘elevation’ on the scaffold was often underplayed in the stream of printed accounts and visual representations critical of public execution.98 It was crucial to the retentionists that the punishment was seen as popular or effective in relation to the working classes. Thus the Royal Commission in 1866 took evidence that the ‘lowest classes express satisfaction at a murderer meeting death’ and that hanging acted as a deterrent in relation to the ‘lower classes’.99 Henry Cartwright, governor of Gloucester County Prison, informed the commissioners that objections to capital punishment were increasing ‘very largely among our lower and middle classes, namely that portion who form the petty juries’.100

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As many of the hanged were working class (the Capital Punishment Commissioners were told in 1864 that it very seldom occurred ‘that a person in the middle class of life is indicted for murder’101) a strong abolitionist sentiment was a feature of newspapers directed towards the working classes: in Douglas Jerrold’s newspaper, in the radical G.W.M. Reynolds’s various newspapers, and in The Beehive.102 Though there was no working-class representation on the original S.A.C.P. committee, members included many ‘self made’ men such as John Passmore Edwards (whose first foray into publishing was encouraged by Gilpin103) and Thomas Beggs. Several who supported abolition had Chartist connections or were Chartists, including Henry Vincent, Thomas Cooper, Thomas Beggs (secretary of the Nottingham branch of the C.S.U.), Charles Gilpin, Edward Miall, John Humffreys Parry, Passmore Edwards and C.H. Elt.104 Radicals of the early Victorian era often opposed capital punishment and suggested that the extension of the parliamentary franchise would lead to abolition. The Satirist versified: ‘Extended suffrage soon will say, | We do not live in Tudor’s day; |’Tis getting time to sweep away |The Gallows!’105 Significant press organs for the mass working-class political protest which was Chartism were opposed to capital punishment.106 The Scottish Chartist Circular, for instance, published this in February 1840: Magistrates must derive all their power from the people. In this delegation of their powers to the rulers, the people can give no more than they themselves possess. We now ask, have men power over their own lives? Are they at perfect liberty to dispose of them as they please? – Has the Almighty permitted any of the human race to extinguish the vital spark whenever they think proper or to delegate that power to another? … Let Chartists be consistent. Let them become the uncompromising advocates for the total abolition of capital punishments.107 Given that Chartists were liable to capital punishment for their rebellions – the effort to preserve the life of John Frost and the rebellious Newport Chartists, and then to secure their return from Australian exile, were significant episodes in Chartism – the subject of death punishments was not a theoretical issue. The radical wood-engraver William Linton helped organize the agitation to mitigate the sentence on Frost in 1840 and then drafted a protest against capital punishment which was signed by the writer Leigh Hunt and W.J. Fox (Carlyle refused to sign).108 A thoughtful Chartist who had witnessed the hardening effects of executions, Thomas Cooper, made a comment on the punishment of death in his poem, The Purgatory of Suicides in 1845, lectured on the subject

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of capital punishment in response to a request from abolitionists in Newcastle concerned at the defence of the gallows given by the Catholic Charles Larkin, and evidently supported the cause as editor of The Plain Speaker in 1849, and in Cooper’s Journal in 1850.109 The new abolitionist society was endorsed by the Chartists, as a report in the Northern Star, of a meeting held in 1846, demonstrates. Though the question was ‘supported by men of all classes and parties’, Chartists, ‘ever foremost in the good work of promoting mankind’s progression, are also in the field, and will give signal aid’. The meeting, which was ‘numerous and highly respectable’, took place in South London Chartist Hall, and was addressed by Edmund Stallwood, a leader of London Chartism, who corrected the impression that the agitation owed its existence largely to the Chartists but claimed it was nevertheless due to a ‘section of the democratic party’.110 Chartists had, of course, like others, witnessed public executions, and could bring to these debates the usual anecdotes about pick-pocketing before the gallows or murderers who had attended hangings. At this gathering in South London in 1846 it was agreed to appoint a committee of nine ‘to agitate the metropolis and thus press this important question on the attention of the legislature’.111 Stallwood later lectured on the subject at the same venue, inevitably stressing the need for ‘laws made by the people’ rather than ‘blighting class-made laws’.112 A resolution was passed in support of abolition at the Convention held in Leeds in 1846, the Northern Star commenting, that this, alongside support for abolition of flogging (a campaign whose associations with capital punishment are discussed in a later chapter), and the Ten Hours’ working day question, showed they were ‘watchful of the signs of the times … recognizing the values of social and moral reforms’.113 The Northern Star carried reports of a few metropolitan lectures on death punishments by Chartists such as the Scottish Dr Peter M’Douall and Philip M’Grath in 1846–1849.114 M’Grath, who maintained it was the working classes who wished to abolish capital punishment and not the middle classes, discussed abolition when he stood as a candidate in the general election in 1847.115 Chartists were labelled ‘Red’ by opponents who thought they endorsed blood-shedding and spoliation. So standing for abolition was a good strategy, as the Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor and G.W.M. Reynolds recognized, at one lecture on Chartism at Sheffield in 1850.116 Yet the Northern Star, like any other newspaper, carried accounts of frightful murders and hangings, despite regret in 1846, ‘that the base fashion of the newspaper press compels us to chronicle them as a matter interesting to the reader’.117

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That other working-class movement, the freethought or secularist movement, also took up the question of capital punishment. The Owenites had opposed death punishments as part of the old immoral world. The Crisis in the early 1830s had for its title-page, the old world of vernacular inn, gallows, lunatic asylum and blood sports; contrasted with the new world of regular street paving, fountains and classical architecture.118 At Robert Owen’s public birthday celebrations in 1851, Robert Cooper declared him the pioneer of capital punishment abolitionist, along with secular education and sanitary reform.119 It was not surprising that retentionists such as ‘Phinehas’ (taking the name of the man who slew an adulterer, in Numbers 25, 8) writing to the editor of the Morning Post in 1846 would identify the movement as ‘merely a part of that deistical and infidel movement which aims at destroying the very foundations of Christianity’.120 Certainly the pages of The Reasoner discussed the question in terms of the religious sanction. Later, Charles Bradlaugh’s examination The Bible. What it is! observed that Moses would never have joined the S.A.C.P.121 Bradlaugh’s intimate friend Annie Besant, in her radical atheist career, shared his opposition to the gallows, alongside flogging, imperialism and war.122 The Hanley Chartist Frank Grant’s essay, ‘Abolition of the Gallows’ in The Reasoner in 1850, noted that the issue of total abolition ‘has [not] as yet taken a strong hold on the mind of the working classes. They do not seem to be interested in the question; their sympathies are not roused, and their hearts fail to respond to the voice of those who desire immediately to remove that blot from the face of civilization.’ Grant ended the article asserting ‘All the Tory prints are champions for “blood for blood”.’123 Other schemes of reforming society inevitably perhaps, incorporated the call to abolish capital punishment in this period, such as the National Regeneration Society established in 1850, with Luke Hansard, Bronterre O’Brien and Robert Owen involved.124 Clearly, what might be called ‘proletarian’ abolitionism treated the gallows as a political issue, a class weapon and symbol of social and legal inequality. The newspapers interpreted crime as the result of social injustice, the gallows noose as the ultimate response by a society which was biased against working people. There was intense scrutiny of cases involving the rich. It is interesting to reflect on the memory of the banker Henry Fauntleroy’s execution for forgery in 1824. Railway News in 1864 stressed the ‘class interest’ and ‘class prejudice’ expressed in the execution: a vast crowd was present; someone engraved on a penny coin the sentiment that his was a just desert for a ‘bilking banker’.125 When the Commons came to debate the Capital Punishment within Prisons Bill in 1868, Fauntleroy surfaced again (alongside an allusion to the disgraced

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politician John Sadleir who had killed himself in 1856) when Serjeant Gaselee asserted the poor man’s right to be hanged in public, with witnesses to his assertion of innocence or acknowledgment of his crime.126 The problem of capital punishment, the ‘foul and impudent prostitution’ of the royal prerogative of mercy, was located within wider concerns about smug and unrepresentative Whig politicians in papers such as Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper and The Beehive.127 The utilization of the gallows to attack the social system is apparent in the 1840s and 1850s when it was associated with the game laws designed to preserve the hunting of game for the gentry and aristocracy. The Newcastle Guardian, after the execution of William Thompson at Durham in 1848, stated that the sport of the gentry ‘leads indirectly to the death, in the nocturnal affray and on the scaffold, of many of the poor peasantry’.128 In Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper in January 1851, the writer who chose the Roman republican nom-de-plume of Gracchus attributed crime to the treatment of the poor, especially via the harsh game laws. An advertisement for the creation of the Cheshire and North Wales Association for the Suppression of Game Preserves made the same link between game laws and gallows in 1859.129 In August 1851 Gracchus characterized most victims of the gallows as ‘victims to evil laws, unjust usurpations, arbitrary privileges, and a vile system of government’. In an editorial in the same paper, on ‘Crab-like Legislation – Barbarous enactments’ the flogging of garrotters was used to exemplify the neo-feudal trend of society.130 Working-class abolitionism was not merely symbolic protest. Although the ‘class’ critique was partly rhetorical it also stemmed from the knowledge that the criminal law (including the reprieve system) involved serious inequalities for the poor. Homicide itself was presented by some abolitionists as a class issue – because the murder of inconvenient spouses could be blamed on the iniquities of divorce law. Once a homicide had been committed, one abolitionist editor wrote, the rich could afford the best legal advice and would be warned not to make admissions which would be couched as ‘confessions’ if they had been poor.131 Opposition therefore combined criticism of real flaws in the legal system, and continued longstanding deployment of the gallows as symbolic of the establishment’s vested interests.132 The Manchester anti-capital punishment committee established in February 1856 ‘determined to advocate the movement as far as possible amongst the working classes’.133 A report of the Manchester meeting in late 1849 suggests that there had been a pronounced working class-interest in the topic then: when the platform (at the Hall of Science in Camp Field) was taken by the social reform lecturer Walter Cooper (a cousin of Thomas Cooper), the Chartist and trade-union lawyer W.P. Roberts and

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Alexander Somerville, the ‘Whistler at the Plough’ (journalist and propagandist for the Anti-Corn Law League) – who had declared that there would be a sure sign of progress if working men came together to discuss the question.134 It is difficult to get at the working-class abolitionist voices beyond the Chartist movement and press sentiment. The town clerk of Leicester, Samuel Stone, judging a competition on ‘The Causes of Crime – its Prevention and Punishment’, claimed that the essays submitted by working men were with one exception, opposed to capital punishments as inexpedient or unjustifiable.135 In 1856, at the time that Albert Smith published a letter as the ‘London Scoundrel’ calling for the liberal use of the gallows, the abolitionist Reynolds’s Newspaper published a retentionist letter from ‘Alma’ entitled, rather unfairly, ‘The Gallows and its admirers’, offset by one from an ‘operative bootmaker’ in Devonport. The bootmaker claimed to be uneducated and that ‘there are many here in Devonport who, with myself, think “that good old institution”, the gallows, is a great curse and shame to the present age.’ And yet he was clearly a radical, as he was opposed to State church, aristocracy, monarchy and Louis Napoleon.136 It was the Townley-Wright cause célèbre of 1864 which provided the most powerful instance of reported working-class abolition, though the leaders of agitation were from the artisan elite and liaised with S.A.C.P. members. The middle-class George Victor Townley, a man of twenty five, who was convicted of killing his former sweetheart Bessie Caroline Goodwin, had been reprieved due to his supporters’ success in obtaining a certificate of insanity (some journals suggested the Home Secretary had been swayed by abolitionists).137 The working-class Samuel Wright, a bricklayer (or carpenter) from Southwark, was executed for the murder of a ‘bad woman with who he cohabited’ despite extensive campaigning on his behalf in London.138 The two cases were contrasted by editorials in many (not just workingclass) papers, and seen as conveying the appearance of unequal justice.139 It was partly a matter of the inequities produced by being poor and ignorant. Without funds, as John Bright told the Commons, a suspect could not have the services of a practised lawyer from London, or pay the fees of a solicitor to collect evidence.140 As Gilpin, who was much involved in seeking a reprieve for Wright, recalled to the House of Commons during the debates on the bill to privatize hanging in 1868, the man had pleaded guilty: ‘they could not expect a carpenter to be trained to the niceties of the law, and it could not be wondered at that he, a conscientious man, determined to plead guilty.’ When a large workingclass deputation went to the Home Office, the Secretary did not receive it

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as it was seen as an attempt to terrorize the authorities (in fact, Grey did receive a smaller group led by the Reverend G.M. Murphy who had decided it was prudent to scale back the number involved, and Grey had given them ‘credit for their observance of law and order’141). Gilpin claimed that it was a case which it would take a long time to wipe out from the memories of the neighbourhood.142 The agitators seeking to reprieve Wright even addressed the Queen through a deputation to Windsor received by her Private Secretary, Sir Charles Phillips, when they learned that the Queen, though she deeply regretted the position of the unfortunate man, could not constitutionally interfere with the decision of the Home Secretary.143 This deputation – ‘ignorant, unconstitutional, and cowardly’ – was deplored by one commentator for putting the Queen in a cruel position, but the Morning Star queried the decision not to permit the memorialists to meet her.144 Before Wright was executed at Horsemonger Lane Gaol, the following handbill was reported to be circulating: A SOLEMN PROTEST AGAINST THE EXECUTION OF WRIGHT—Men

and Women of London, abstain from witnessing this sad spectacle of injustice. Let Calcraft and Co. do their work with none but the eye of heaven to look upon their crime. Let all window shutters be up and window blinds be down for an hour on Tuesday morning in Southwark. Englishmen, shall Wright be hung? If so, there is one law for the rich and another for the poor.145

Another extensively circulated document asked ‘Men of London, will you participate in the blood of the unfortunate Wright?’146 As these notices showed, there were efforts to boycott the execution. Indeed, following a suggestion made by the Unitarian Reverend Robert Spears of Stamford Street Chapel, at an early hour before the execution workmen were stationed at the main roads into the place of execution and ‘used every possible persuasion and entreaty’ to workmen intent on going to the execution site.147 Fears about the disturbances that would take place as a result of the working-class opposition to Wright’s execution led the authorities to post a thousand police, some of them mounted, in the neighbourhood of the execution. The agitation continued afterwards in the formation of a Lambeth Working Men’s Committee whose chairman was the trade unionist Robert Applegarth – who would soon join the first International Working Men’s Association.148 The monster meeting at the Lambeth Baths (an institution which hosted temperance meetings bankrolled by the philanthropist Samuel Morley) which established this society registered a protest ‘against

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the injustice that had been inflicted on one of their body’.149 G.M. Murphy was careful to step back from the agitation, as it was ‘desirable that this should be understood, that this is a working-class meeting and nothing else’. Although one of the committee members, the gas-fitter George Thorneloe, wanted the question agitated in the metropolitan workshops and by working men across the country, the Lambeth society concentrated on petitioning for abolition in a policy ‘approved’ by the S.A.C.P.150 The committee adopted a petition – signed by over two thousand, with the following wording: … your petitioners have on many recent occasions been made painfully sensible of the impolicy and injustice of the law inflicting the punishment of death for the crime of murder. Your petitioners have witnessed the infliction of the penalty upon the poor and friendless when the voice of public opinion was most loudly heard appealing in vain for mercy and on the other hand have seen the most guilty escape from death through the skilful and persistent efforts which wealth alone could command… The petitioners pointed out that there were ‘thousands of our brother members who have a vote for a representative in the House of Parliament. We say at the next general election withhold your support from those who will not pledge themselves to vote for its total abolition’.151 The Londoners also sent their moral support to working men of Birmingham campaigning for a reprieve for George Hall who had killed his unfaithful wife. The incident was the most prominent one mobilizing rhetoric of the gallows as a class weapon, and memory of it continued in press treatment of later executions.152 The Windsor deputation episode suggested, to one critic of the efforts of Newman Hall and G.M. Murphy of Surrey chapel, ‘the unfitfulness of the working-classes to govern’ … ‘The Lambeth Bath politicians may depend upon it that they have given an advantage to the enemy.’153 Middle-class abolitionists did play on class fears of sans-culotte terrorism. The radical lawyer W.P. Roberts of Manchester, for instance, at the abolitionist meeting in this city in late 1849, whilst speaking of the movement as one ‘brought forward as it thus was by the working classes themselves’, pointed out that ‘the stronghold of cruelty in former days had been with their own class. They had to do with the guillotine’: Some two or three years ago the greatest opposition to the placing of political power in the hands of the people arose from the belief that,

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if that power were granted, they would immediately extend capital punishments in the same way, and to the same horrible degree which had characterized the first French revolution; and therefore he could not fully express the delight which he felt to find the people of England – the working classes of England – taking up the present question, one which he believed was destined to do more to the business of humanity than any other which could be brought forward.154 Sensitive too, to the working-class interest in the question of capital punishment was the Reverend Newman Hall of the Congregationalists, who told his audience at the Congregational Union of England and Wales in 1849 that the attempt to instruct people in religion would be listened to if they aided the people in their real grievances. His lectures on capital punishment to large audiences of the working classes in Hull, he said, had been an opportunity to introduce scriptural truth.155 This chapter has partly considered the question in ‘class’ terms – at times the problem of capital punishment lent itself to a class interpretation of society. How did the polemics relate this institution to the new society being forged in this ‘modern’ nineteenth century? Critics of abolition like the anonymous ‘A.B.’ writing to the Morning Post in 1842 could worry that under the ‘present state of society in our manufacturing districts, it was very injudicious to withdraw the terror of capital punishment from many crimes from which it has lately been taken away’.156 The working class did not provide sufficient support for abolitionists in this period, and if the evidence of working-class volunteers who, unsolicited, offered their services as hangman with the death of William Marwood in 1883 has been interpreted correctly, many working-class men still considered the unpleasant role of public executioner in the lateVictorian era as a necessary evil in society.157 The improbability of working-class divorce, which might tempt an unhappy man or woman to seek unlawful and permanent removal of their spouse, and infanticide (or ‘child-murder’, as the crime if committed by a man tended to be described158), mean that the gendered and class aspects to capital punishment cannot be separated. The working-class female voice on abolition is not accessible to us, unfortunately, though there are some suggestive hints. It is symbolic that some petitioners to the Prince of Wales in the case of Wright (when they hoped that, with the birth of his son, the prince would exert influence for mercy) included, amongst the named men, ‘A Woman of the Working Class’.159 The Morning Star had reported wives joining their husbands at the Lambeth Baths meeting

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before he was executed.160 The religious writer Marianne Farningham’s autobiography, written in the first years of the twentieth century, is one record of a working woman’s unhappiness about the subject of the death penalty: in the 1870s, disturbed by the execution of a man who was later proved to be innocent, she wrote a story ‘which I hoped would do a little toward influencing public opinion’ on behalf of abolition.161 Although her case was unusual – the serialization of a story in the leading weekly religious newspaper, The Christian World, in which a London preacher was wrongfully hanged – there were surely other women from humble backgrounds (though Farningham was the daughter of a small tradesman) who were disturbed by capital punishment and hoped for abolition.

5 ABOLITIONISM IN OPERATION

Abolitionism as an organized movement followed many standard ‘platform’ techniques.1 These are explored in this chapter, which begins by studying the financial basis of organized activities – clearly a factor in imposing limits on what could be done by way of ‘pressure from without’ – and the following chapter, which examines the abolitionist relationship to parliament. Parliament was appealed to through petitioning, partly organized through provincial and metropolitan meetings, and through the abolitionist press. These efforts to shape and mobilize public opinion aspects are also studied here. The finances of the S.A.C.P. It is not right that a Society formed for a national object, should rely for its support on half a dozen individuals; for, with all their liberality, its resources are crippled, and its means of usefulness curtailed.2 So the British Friend, a Quaker journal, complained about the pecuniary burden, in soliciting donations and subscriptions for the S.A.C.P. in December 1848. The S.A.C.P. always operated, when it did operate, on a budget dwarfed by other pressure groups. William Tallack subsequently described the situation as ‘ridiculously inadequate for any national “agitation”’, and contrasted the S.A.C.P. budget of £300 p.a. with the thousands at the disposal of the temperance United Kingdom Alliance, which, he pointed out, was itself unsuccessful in its attempt to secure prohibition.3 This situation represented longstanding financial weakness for abolition societies; the S.D.I.C.P. had an expenditure of only £2,994 in total, 1828–1845.4 The S.A.C.P.’s minimum membership fee of 5s was not a large sum.5 Although detailed information on the society’s finances does not exist, the extant reports and the various reports which were

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summarized in newspapers show its financial straits.6 Another perspective may be gained by contrasting its balance of just over £318 for the year ending March 1855 with the salary of the secretary of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in the period 1840–1870, which was £300. Yet this major philanthropic society’s annual budget has been described as ‘absurdly small’.7 This situation obviously imposed limitations on activity, whether restricting meetings to the metropolis or preventing them totally as seems the case for 1852–1854. Its efforts to convert through pamphleteering would be curbed by printing and postage expenses – the use of MPs’ franking privileges was a great help in propagandizing (the agitation which led to the virtual suspension of the capital punishment for forgery apparently required the equivalent of £1000 in franks).8 The long dormant period 1857–1863 seems also, in part, to have been due to lack of resources.9 The S.A.C.P. was not the philanthropic priority of its subscribers, to judge from the majority of small donations listed in subscription lists concluding the reports: lists used in other pressure groups to demonstrate the popularity and eminence of the cause.10 The largest donations in 1866 were £25 each from the Quakers Samuel Gurney and Henry E. Gurney; the majority out of 220 subscribers listed gave sums of £1 or less. Society expenses covered the secretary’s salary, travel and meeting costs; office rent and stationery, and the publication and dissemination of literature. The publication of Charles Phillips’s work in 1856 was a major financial venture for the S.A.C.P. though its dissemination and reprinting was aided by his forgoing of copyright.11 The work was subsidized by the Quakers John Thomas Barry and Peter Bedford, with a campaign to raise funds through advertising Joseph Sturge’s contribution of £20 to his fellow Quakers through the British Friend.12 There is no evidence that money was recouped through pamphlet sales at meetings, reference to literature usually stresses its gratuity. Meetings must have worked at a loss since there are rarely references to tickets. The 1866 report reveals salary and literature expenses to have been the greatest charges on the Society’s funds, with the £177 salary for Tallack probably a generous reward for his statistical and comparative research for the cause during the Royal Commission.13 We can measure the impact of the departure of supporters in the wake of execution becoming private in 1868 by the fall of the Society’s resources to a total of £11.14 Yet Tallack’s supposition that a massive income provided success was a pressure group myth. The ability to communicate was central, not consumption of vast sums per se.15 If the S.A.C.P. was often naive it was spared the complacent attitude that financial security and comfort

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brought. As a humbler pressure group, offering no chance of financial advancement for its officers, Dymond’s claim that his involvement was ‘emphatically a labour of love’ was probably true for all the S.A.C.P.’s officers.16 Of course, and as we shall see in more detail shortly, the fascination with murder and the gallows meant that the cause was not going to lack press attention. Through sympathetic newspapers and publishers, abolitionist news and requests could be disseminated cheaply and perhaps more widely than any magazine devoted solely to the question. The S.S.A., and its associated journals (the sanitary reformer B.W. Richardson’s Social Science Review and the United Kingdom Alliancebacked Meliora) all played similar roles in the 1860s: platforms without the expense of independent meetings and journals.17 The British Controversialist reviewed publications by Tallack, Beggs and other abolitionists in 1866.18

FIGURE 4. Left: Alfred H. Dymond in April 1874, Topley Studio / Library and Archives Canada, PA - 033738; right: William Tallack, from Howard Letters and Memories (1905), courtesy of the Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick.

S.A.C.P. meetings There has never been a question, however exciting, however interesting, which has gathered larger assemblies in the largest rooms in every city.19 Or so John Bright claimed, during the parliamentary debate on William Ewart’s motion for abolition in May 1849. This was an undoubted

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exaggeration, for capital punishment abolition could not attract the same level of support that anti-slavery, Chartism, and other agitations secured. One of the classic features of nineteenth-century ‘pressure from without’ was the meeting, national and provincial – from Exeter Hall to town and village hall. Meetings were valued tools of pressure groups as multipurpose events with didactic and expressive functions. The didactic component represented a faith in education; the rational principles of a cause winning over the public through platform speeches, lectures, and the dissemination of literature. To that end meetings might be presented as discussions. But they were also meant to be expressive of an ‘authentic’ support, perhaps to convey mass sympathy and the urgency of the issue. Audience size and unanimity over resolutions could convey the importance and legitimacy of a cause. Representativeness or respectability were conveyed through association with worthies invited to grace the platform. Press support was crucial for the dissemination of this message through advertisements, reports, editorials, brief paragraphs, and correspondence. Careful management was required to ensure the aims of meetings were not subverted by audience dissension, yet at the same time spontaneity needed to be preserved. Local meetings performed such central roles as establishing or vitalizing local efforts, fund-raising and petitioning efforts for parliament. National meetings in London combined the needs of organization – the assembly of provincial delegates and executive officers – with the ambition to show the ‘national’ nature of the issue. The S.A.C.P. was not a giant organization, and meetings numbered fifty by 1849 rather than hundreds, but the society made concerted efforts in its early years to organize meetings.20 Exeter Hall was the venue for the inaugural meeting and the S.A.C.P. would continue to meet at London assembly rooms such as the London Tavern (in early June 1856, in order to petition parliament in support of Ewart’s total abolition motion), or smaller venues such as literary institutes and British School rooms. But early on there were provincial tours by Gilpin, Vincent and secretary Rowton. Initially these were focused on the Midlands with mass meetings at Northampton, Nottingham, Leicester and Derby. The S.A.C.P. gradually visited towns and cities across England, in the north (Carlisle in 1848 and 1855; and Newcastle in 1848 and 1856, for instance), in the eastern counties (towns such as Ipswich, Norwich and King’s Lynn), and in the west (Bristol, Bath and Gloucester but not the extreme west). The meeting at Bristol followed on from the shocking scenes at the execution there of Sarah Thomas in 1849 (who had to be dragged from her cell), after efforts to secure a reprieve by Gilpin and the Reverend G.H. Davies.21 A local society had been established in Bristol in November 1847.22

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A tour in January 1848 took in Newcastle, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Carlisle and Liverpool in a clear effort to target the north and convey the ‘British’ nature of the movement. The meetings were prearranged with friends of the cause in these cities rather than being spontaneous lightning visits. The Manchester Examiner drew the contrast between the extensive journey of the hangman (‘about 80 miles to hang a woman last summer’) with the philanthropic use of the railway by Gilpin, ‘thinking he might have the recreation of a week absent from business, and being one of those genuine philanthropists whose very recreations consist of the luxury of doing good’.23 Before the national society had been inaugurated, abolitionists in Morpeth had formed an Anti-Capital Punishment Society in the aftermath of the execution of a young farm labourer, Ralph Joicey, convicted in February 1846 of poisoning his father, and as well as organizing a committee to forward a petition to Queen and parliament, the local society reprinted an ‘appropriate article’ from Charles Dickens in the Daily News for local circulation.24 In the same region, in Newcastle and Gateshead, the Unitarian minister George Harris, now relocated to Hanover Square Chapel (where he was minister from 1845–1859), had delivered a number of lectures against capital punishment, at the request of people in Newcastle, Gateshead and Sunderland, in 1845, and urged inhabitants to join the London Society for Diffusion of Information on Capital Punishment, or better still to form their own association and besiege the legislature with petitions for repeal.25 The activity was stimulated by the execution of Mark Sherwood, despite hope (expressed in petitions) that the killing of his wife would be viewed as manslaughter. Newcastle was seen by abolitionists as an ‘improving community’ and Dr Headlam exploited the ‘deep and lasting impression’ of this unpopular execution to express the abolitionist sentiment of the town corporation: the Magazine for Popular Information on Capital and Secondary Punishments hoped an abolitionist society would follow under him.26 A local society did emerge, since the pamphlet riposte to a local retentionist effort (in the form of a lecture by a Catholic layman and a tract by a Calvinist minister belonging to the Religious Freedom Society) was penned by the honorary secretary to the ‘Newcastle and Gateshead Society for the Abolition of the Punishment of Death’, the radical Dr William Newton. The local press discussed the question with ‘cogency of reasoning and powerful and apt illustrations’, and reported the local society’s activities which included corresponding with MPs to find out their views on the death penalty.27 Later, the ‘Church of the Divine Unity’,

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as the Hanover Square Chapel became in 1854, sent a petition for abolition of capital punishment.28 In Glasgow a committee was formed to further the abolitionist cause.29 But this does not appear to have been very active, and apart from the Edinburgh committee Scotland developed no significant organized efforts. Despite the support for abolition in North Britain and the North East of England, S.A.C.P. meetings did not stray further than Carlisle and Newcastle in the mid-1850s. In 1852–1853 there were no meetings reported outside London. Revived activity in 1855 saw the society tour on a scattered itinerary including Birmingham and Droitwich.30 In the 1860s the situation was very different, with no attempt at national tours. The S.A.C.P. meetings in cities seem to have attracted large if not overwhelming audiences. The inaugural meeting at Exeter Hall was described as ‘very numerous and highly respectable’, with the hall and galleries so packed that many had to stand.31 The refrain of ‘numerous and highly respectable’ is frequent in reports of subsequent meetings, though numbers are rarely offered. Metropolitan meetings in 1846 were well attended as were meetings at Leicester and Nottingham where branch societies were established. The Leicester audience was numerous and influential, with representatives of all sects, classes and both sexes.32 Interest had already been raised by the execution, despite a petition to the Queen, of William Hubbard for the murder of his wife.33 The ‘families of the town’ and humbler residents came to the Nottingham meeting.34 The Nonconformist gives the committees in full: one of the Nottingham society’s members was active in the capital case of Sarah Barber in Nottingham in 1854, which drew on the energies of the local Quakers.35 Gilpin exhausted himself in this tour, so that the anti-slavery agitator George Thompson stood in for him at a meeting at the Finsbury Chapel, saying he was not even worthy to tie Gilpin’s shoes in this work. The 1848 tour attracted substantial numbers, though never any to compete with the massive crowds attracted to a dwindled supply of gallows spectacles. At Newcastle there were an estimated 1200–3000; Carlisle’s city hall was crowded before the meeting started and hundreds were unable to attend due to lack of space; Glasgow had another ‘audience of magnitude’ estimated at 3,000.36 More provincial meetings, at places such as Ipswich and Devizes, attracted large audiences to the town halls.37 The major effort of the S.A.C.P. to tour England in 1854–1855 saw, according to a report, well attended meetings with large majorities for abolition.38 A London Tavern meeting in the summer of 1856 was reported well attended with several thousands crowding the hall, perhaps not surprising given that execution was a topic of ‘absorbing interest’ in the context of the Rugeley poisonings.39 In November of that year the

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Manchester Free Trade Hall was filled with some 5000, ‘a large proportion of the audience being apparently of the working class’.40 Press reports indicate therefore, that the capital punishment question was able to attract into the mid-1850s packed and supportive audiences for abolition, despite the unpropitious context of war scares or actual conflicts.41 York was held up for criticism by the Quaker Joseph Spence in 1856 when attendance was ‘petty [sic] numerous’ but not sufficient to fill the venue, and contrasted with the interest ‘awakened in many other towns’.42 The most easily identifiable audience group comprised Quakers of both sexes.43 The ‘respectability’ of those present was emphasized, though working-class participation is indicated in the Free Trade Hall in Manchester and at the New Hall in Leicester in 1846 with the abolitionist Leicestershire Mercury pleased at the attitude and scale of the working-class presence.44 Audiences were generally described as unanimous with little reported on intervention, dissension or reaction to platform speeches. We hear of enthusiasm and deep impressions created; occasionally audience cheers and applause were recorded, for instance during Gilpin’s speech at Liverpool in January 1848: a ‘riveting hour long speech’ had a ‘deep and thrilling effect’ on the listeners.45 But the large-scale urban meetings convey the impression of preaching to the converted. A Manchester lecture by Dymond had the audience reluctant to ask any questions.46 There are sometimes glimpses of dissent. A participant who attended a S.A.C.P. meeting at the Guildhall in Worcester in 1849, after there had been local interest in the topic following the execution of Robert Pulley for the murder of Mary Staight, published a refutation of abolitionism.47 In 1850 the theological tutor and president of Airedale College, the Reverend Walter Scott, who had already made himself unpopular with the Bradford Observer for a pamphlet against abolition, led an effort at amendment which, whilst asserting support for the amelioration of the capital code, insisted that scripture endorsed the penalty for murderers. In the face of the mayor’s approval for the subject of the meeting, and in front of Quakers and other local philanthropists such as the anti-tobacco activist Alderman Beaumont and the anti-slavery writer the Reverend Benjamin Godwin, Scott delivered a response to Gilpin’s well-rehearsed speech. A supporter (and fellow teacher at Airedale College), the Reverend Daniel Fraser, was called to the platform. When it came to a vote, only twenty hands, the Observer claimed, were in favour of the amendment for capital punishment for wilful and clearly proved murder, whereas a hundred supported the abolitionists. The great bulk of the audience (which had been slow to form) abstained.48 Reports of the London Tavern meeting in June 1856 also record opposition. A Mr Farmer, ‘apparently a working man’, opposed abolition

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and asked whether the speakers were vegetarians. ‘Symptoms of opposition’ followed Dymond’s statistical evidence. Someone objected that the majority were preventing free discussion, which was an ‘unEnglish mode of proceeding’.49 Like other pressure group gatherings with civic worthies and deputations from ‘parent societies’ the display of numerical support was as important as oratory. In the same year, at a meeting in the Teutonic Hall in Liverpool, attended by a great many ‘Society of Friends’ and various ministers of religion, an amendment was proposed for capital punishment by a Mr Barnes who stood on the platform, and three other men also dissented.50 Critics were also reported at Dymond’s lecture in Leicester in the same year.51 Opponents could condemn agitators for their handling of critics. Thus The Satirist (not consistently retentionist, to be sure) declared against the ‘Abolition of the Punishment of Death gentry’, who would lose their occupation soon, when they were found to be ‘engaging every out-ofplace spouter, mere venal traders in talk by the hour’ with their ‘laughing down any and every individual’ who took them at their word about free discussion on the topic. ‘This,’ the paper wrote, ‘is the rule of the “Murderers’ Friend Association and Felons’ Protectors”.’52 The impact of meetings for mercy and for abolition was pernicious, critics maintained. For the weekly magazine The True Briton, meetings in support of mercy could have no other effect than to ‘encourage crime, by exciting sympathy, not for the victim, but for the murderer’.53 The Scottish Congregational Magazine condemned the ‘multitudes’ who had fallen prey through ignorance and false sentimentalism to ‘itinerant declaimers’: this had led to an increase of murders.54 The understanding of the expressive nature of civic meetings is shown by a letter from Gilpin to J.B. Cooke – a member of the Liverpool Peace Society’s committee – outlining preparations for the Liverpool meeting of 1848, demonstrating the close planning involved in these large meetings. Platform resolutions by local leaders were planned to express support for the S.A.C.P.; hence the stereotypical pattern of the meetings in the late 1840s. Gilpin outlined the ‘usual course’: chairman’s remarks, first resolution condemnatory of all capital punishments to be moved by a townsman, seconded by Gilpin and chairman and a second resolution adopting a petition to the Commons ‘to be moved by two of your Liverpool Influentials (if you can catch them)’. Behind such efforts was the desire to present meetings as the spontaneous sign of local hostility to capital punishment, the voice of the provinces with merely the presence of the ‘London society’. Gilpin wanted to be seen merely ‘taking part in the Public Meeting’.55

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On the platform were the key S.A.C.P. officers, in the late 1840s generally Gilpin, Rowton and Vincent; subsequently Dymond, Beggs and Gilpin.56 Local worthies and locally based political and philanthropic associates chaired the meetings – for example the former Quaker philanthropist and supporter of the Irish, William Rathbone in Liverpool, and the Quaker social reformer John Wigham in Edinburgh in 1848; the free trader George Wilson at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester in 1856 (Wilson, a starch and gum manufacturer, was chairman of the Manchester branch of the S.A.C.P.).57 The attempt to make the platform as respectable and representative as possible involved ministers of various denominations.58 Where possible the presence of experienced men such as county prison chaplains (as in Gloucester and Bath in 1849) was welcomed.59 In the period 1846–1849 the S.A.C.P. meetings attracted the support of mayors and ex-mayors in several towns; such support was valued by Gilpin who told a meeting at Devizes in 1849 presided over by the mayor, that an abolitionist document had been signed by the Lord Mayor of London and several provincial mayors. Mayors joined the platform at Ipswich, Exeter, Leicester and Nottingham; and would have been at Derby in 1846.60 Other dignitaries occasionally present included prominent magistrates, under-sheriffs and high sheriffs. The meetings of 1854–1855 listed in the S.A.C.P. report do not mention mayoral support.61 At Bradford in May 1856 the mayor, William Murgatroyd, although chairing the meeting, announced his opposition to abolition.62 Civic meetings were designed to express local support by their performance and press report. They were also meant to create a tangible abolitionist message in the form of petitions, to be presented to parliament, although following reforms in the 1830s designed to curb radicals’ manipulation of the right to speak to petitions there were no longer Commons debates on petitions. Meetings are therefore closely associated with the parliamentary effort. At some meetings signatures were collected as the audience left, others set up the local committees to oversee petitioning.63 The focus on parliament is apparent in the abortive plan of Blanchard Jerrold (Douglas Jerrold’s eldest son) to circulate an ‘imperial petition’ in the lecture rooms of all the important British towns as a statement of ‘educated’ public opinion, for Commons attention.64 The parliamentary abolitionists certainly stressed the proof of public support via nation-wide meetings and their petitions: William Ewart spoke of ‘deep and earnest interest’ in 1847 and adduced from numerous almost unanimous meetings in 1849 evidence of growing public conviction.65 Tellingly, in John Bright’s speech during the same debate in 1849, which

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opens this section, he felt obliged to emphasize that the gatherings were not ‘passionate’ and ‘hasty’ – the conclusions were reached calmly.66 Yet the meetings and petitions were treated sceptically by the opposition in parliament. The Home Secretary, Sir George Grey, pointed out ‘it was easier to get up a meeting to ask for abolition, than one to say “by all means let it be maintained”.’67 The judge Baron Bramwell made a similar point before the Capital Punishment Commission: ‘those who are for letting well alone, say nothing about it.’68 The Nonconformist suggested penal code mitigation owed more to juror reluctance than to platform or parliament – an aspect which is examined in chapter 9.69 Critics presented the platform effort as superficial and misguided and Gilpin was aware that the Chartist Henry Vincent’s involvement worried the more traditional, ‘unpolitical’ abolitionists, as he wrote in December 1847 prior to the meeting in Liverpool.70 Yet into the 1850s the S.A.C.P. seemed to have faith in the power of public meetings and attracted well known nonconformists, radicals and philanthropists to join the platform.71 Alongside large urban meetings were discussions in mechanics’ institutes and lecture rooms, for instance Dymond’s at Lewes Mechanics’ Lecture Room, debating the subject with an independent minister, John Irvine Dunlop.72 The room was crowded, admission was by payment and the debate was probably representative of the larger meetings in its three hour duration. Some of the debates that took place at mechanics’ institutes may have been debating exercises – capital punishment had been featuring as a subject for debate in the Speculative Society of Edinburgh since 1768 for instance (the erstwhile abolitionist Robert Louis Stevenson’s unfinished Weir of Hermiston, set during the era of the French Revolution, famously involves young Hermiston’s support for abolition of capital punishment, following the execution of Duncan Jopp), and the topic was an illustration in books on logic73 – and, like the larger meetings, there was entertainment value to debates.74 But some of the meetings produced resolutions which were forwarded to the government: thus in August 1845 the Plymouth Mechanics’ Institute, after one large meeting, unanimously agreed an abolitionist resolution be forwarded to the Home Secretary.75 One Maidstone abolitionist suggested to Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper that abolition would come via a boycott of executions stimulated by discussions at mechanics’ institutions.76 Meetings were set up independently of the S.A.C.P., though presumably there were connections between some lecture tours by men like George Wilson McCree in the north in the late 1840s, and organized abolitionism, since the meetings were noted in the same journals.77 Howitt’s Journal – which published anti-capital punishment literature by Rowton and Gilpin, carried news of such discussions on capital punishment as those by

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members of the ‘Young Men’s Discussion Society’ meeting at Westerton’s Library (rather than a public house) in Knightsbridge in September 1847.78 Sometimes such meetings extended over several days.79 Not surprisingly, several of those who gave supportive papers on abolition were identified as Quakers, thus John Moss in Sheffield, whose paper before the Literary and Philosophical Society in 1847 on ‘The Inconsistency of Capital Punishment and its Insufficiency for the Suppression of Crime’ stimulated local press discussion.80 The paper was followed later in the year by a defence of the death penalty which could not enter into the scriptural aspects because of the Society’s rules.81 The Sheffield Young Men’s association, following a debate on capital punishment, sent the following resolution to the People’s Journal: That it is the opinion of this meeting that capital punishments are cruel and unjust; that they do not protect society by preventing crime; that they have a tendency to brutalise the people, and destroy the sensibility of our nature, and all our ideas of the sacredness and inviolability of human life; that they are the direct violations of the precepts of the gospel of Christ; and that they are unnecessary and ought to be immediately abolished.82 This was the era of phonetic and phonotypic reforms – its practitioners and propagandists often associated with other progressive causes such as temperance and vegetarianism – and one finds an account in the Phonotypic Journal in 1845, of a Manchester ‘Phonographic and Mutual Improvement Society’ having an animated discussion on whether capital punishment was justified, lasting two weeks.83 By the 1860s, the ‘unsettled question’ of capital punishment was being discussed as a hackneyed subject for debates.84 Some evidence exists of requests for the S.A.C.P. to visit – from Devizes in October 1849 and Liverpool in October 1863 – both after recent executions.85 A standing committee was established in Liverpool ‘for attending to any suitable opportunities for action and effort which may present themselves in this locality’. But who made the requests? Presumably the ‘correspondents’ of the society, just as the great civic meetings were as acts of collusion between the S.A.C.P. committee and local abolitionists and sympathetic philanthropists.86 In the 1860s with a new emphasis on the S.S.A. platform, concentration on the Royal Commission and proselytism through pamphlet meant a costly strategy of national and provincial meetings could be curtailed. Success required good oratory and abolitionists were able to call on skilled speakers such as Vincent, Gilpin and Bright. An American recalled

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in 1864 the inaugural meeting in Exeter Hall, when the radical Unitarian W.J. Fox had addressed the vast crowd, his speech brilliant and full of sophistries, eliciting a thunder of applause, amid which he stood still and calm. At least for this witness, Fox’s appearance was imposing: ‘a large frame and portly form, with massive head, well set ample shoulders. His thick iron gray hair was parted in the centre, and fell in heavy ringlets on his shoulders. His voice, sweet, and of great power, was managed with consummate skill.’87 Agitators were helped by the fact that the topic was deeply interesting in the context of recent gallows controversies or impending executions. The abolitionists were agitating about a subject which it was all too easy perhaps for their audiences’ comfort, to imagine. Yet it was also a subject of endless commentary and often sophisticated debate in the press.

FIGURE 5. Illustration by Henry Anelay from Edwin F. Roberts, ‘The Six Stages of Punishment; or the Victim of a Vitiated Society,’ in Reynolds’s Miscellany, 17 February 1849, p.505. Image produced as part of British Periodicals Collection I, by ProQuest, The Quorum, Barnwell Road, Cambridge, CB5 8SW, http://www.proquest.co.uk. Published with permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

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Communicating the message: press and pressure group techniques The subject of Capital Punishment has a little literature of its own, which is constantly receiving small additions.88 Abolitionism may have been a fashion amongst radical men of letters in the early decades of the nineteenth century but study of the occupational background to committed abolitionists has shown that these included a number of newspaper proprietors, authors and journalists. In the case of one journalist who became an abolitionist, the professional witnessing of one of the first executions in private seems to have been a factor.89 A study of the press must look at the way abolitionists used the medium. The retentionist press needs to be considered, as does the contemporary understanding of the role of the press in criminal matters – a role which became more important after the concealment of hanging, when journalists were admitted as witnesses.90 A critic in a religious magazine of 1857 thought that the press had unsettled people on matters of crime and that a doctrine of reserve ought to apply, not simply to religion, but to speculations on crime and punishment in the public journals.91 However, the unsettling role of the press was to increase as the newspapers played a ‘growing role … in the decision whether to hang or reprieve condemned murderers’.92 For John Bright, in the Commons in 1877, the press now provided more details than they did in the era of public executions, because the reporters were ‘so near’ and no longer dealt with the crowd in the streets but with a space half the size of the Commons chamber, and were able to focus on ‘every line of the convict’s countenance …the terror in every limb’. Bright suggested the evil such embellished accounts caused was greater than when capital punishment had been publicly inflicted.93 The ability to communicate was essential to a pressure group concerned with public opinion. Abolitionists knew this, and briefly produced a monthly Magazine of Popular Information on Capital and Secondary Punishments, announced in The Times in March 1845 as devoted to the ‘Advocacy of the entire Abolition of Punishment of Death, and the Improvement of the System and Working of the Criminal Laws,’ with an original paper in every monthly issue ‘on some branch of this question, with the remainder devoted to news on the subject, Parliamentary discussions, extracts from official reports on prison discipline, correspondence, and accounts of the workings of the prison and transportation systems’.94 Correspondence included a letter from the penal reformer Alexander Maconochie.95 There were snippets on temperance and anti-duelling, and material was liberally extracted from Punch, and Douglas Jerrold’s Magazine. The magazine published reports on local associations and provincial meetings. The publication date was adjusted in

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order to pick up the mail from America and thus incorporate, as early as possible, news from the other side of the Atlantic.96 The London publisher of the Magazine was Charles Gilpin. Quaker journals published by Gilpin and William Smeal promoted the cause.97 Journals associated with other pro-abolitionist religious groups endorsed abolition. Thus The Inquirer, the Unitarian weekly established in 1842, promoted abolition alongside other liberal reforms, and was quoted in the Magazine of Popular Information on Capital and Secondary Punishments.98 The abolitionist effort was covered in philanthropic or reformist journals. Provincial supporters advertised the cause, here nonconformist control of many of these papers probably helped. ‘Short articles,’ John T. Barry advised in 1839, ‘inserted occasionally in the newspapers are of great use in keeping the question alive.’99 The Atlas had optimistically argued, in 1831, for the repeated insertion in a conspicuous place in newspapers, ‘THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH MUST BE REPEALED,’ which would ‘produce a strong effect, and spread the spirit of legal reform’.100 The inaugural meeting of the S.A.C.P. exemplifies the ambiguous role accorded to the press by contemporaries in matters of crime and reform. On the one hand John Bright spoke of the necessity of ‘the assistance of that mighty engine, the press, to which they were indebted for other great reforms’; Dr Mortimer on the other hand ‘thought the press was under some obligation to assist them, for the accounts which it published of the crime were read with such assiduity that they tended to reproduce the same crime’. Modern scholarship has stressed the role that the ‘sensational’ press played in creating a sense of increasing crime, despite the reality of a reduction expressed in annual official statistics.101 It not only created a fear of violent crime, contemporaries also thought it created criminality. This criminogenic role was a cliché – the retentionist Law Magazine for instance criticized the ‘intolerable tyranny’ of a press purporting to be ‘public opinion’ yet pandering to middle and lower-class taste in London and the large towns. Press coverage made coroners vain in public examination, the Law Magazine claimed, and crime was encouraged.102 During its anti-gallows phase with Douglas Jerrold, Punch frequently attacked Sunday papers’ coverage of murders and executions.103 In parliament the same idea was aired, with Bright arguing that mass interest in murderers such as James Blomfield Rush (executed in 1849) promoted new violence.104 Retentionists were to present the press as a surrogate crowd with the volte-face of privatization: the lesson of the scaffold being communicated to the respectable majority through print.105 In the S.A.C.P.’s early days, there were a number of abolitionist national papers. Mitchell’s press directory noted in 1847 the Morning Advertiser’s pioneering abolitionism.106 Rowton published abolitionist reviews here,

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which was a mass circulation paper produced for licensed victuallers (and thus to be found in public houses), and had the boldness to tell his sovereign the ‘unwholesome truth that much of this disgrace belongs – yes, Madam! to you’ in a letter published in the paper in January 1846, condemning the frightful spectacle of a judicial murder.107 At the same time, the intriguingly entitled but short-lived Young England; or the social condition of the empire intended to promote ‘the noble work of the social condition of the people of England’ and included capital punishment at the head of a list of the reform topics. It advertised: ‘all persons desirous of aiding in the Abolition of Capital Punishments, are requested to communicate with the Editor; who will be happy to acknowledge the cooperation of Local Societies.’108 The Magazine of Popular Information on Capital and Secondary Punishments quoted from the paper.109 Douglas Jerrold was an important abolitionist publicist in his Punch articles, his Illuminated Magazine, Shilling Magazine and subsequent newspaper ventures.110 He expressed clear abolitionist sentiments in The History of St Giles and St James (serialised 1845–1847; its plot involving doubled heroes experiencing transportation, acquittal for murder, and prison) and utopian Chronicles of Clovernook; with some account of the Hermit of Bellfulle. He wrote a one-act farce entitled The Smok’d Miser, or the Benefit of Hanging in the 1820s, which was performed in the 1830s–1840s; it did not have an abolitionist message.111 As he told Gilpin’s uncle, Joseph Sturge, in 1846, he had met with many remonstrances and abuse, for his famous abolitionist propaganda, ‘The Moral Lessons of the Gallows,’ in Punch.112 Significant and sustained support came from Edward Miall’s weekly ‘advanced Liberal’ Nonconformist. Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper (edited by Douglas Jerrold from 1852–1857) was pro-abolition. John Cassell’s weekly Standard of Freedom and Working Man’s Friend endorsed the cause. Like Charles Gilpin, Cassell was a philanthropic and progressive publisher: ‘temperance, peace, political reform, social improvement, and the advance of intelligence and virtue, are the fundamental principles of both.’113 Like Gilpin, he supported the freehold land movement.114 The Standard of Freedom was heralded in 1848 by an advertisement typical of the newspapers and magazines of progress in this era: eloquent about the shaking of the pillars of old authority and ‘inquiry’, busy with its work of emancipation. A sounder public judgement and a stronger popular power existed, at the same time ‘humanising philosophy’ demanded reform of the penal code and abolition of the punishment of death, and a higher morality was displayed in the temperance movement. Individual elevation was slowly but surely preparing the community for important social and political changes.115 The Working Man’s Friend took a ‘deep interest’ in abolition, as Cassell told the Select Committee on Newspaper Stamps in

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May 1851 but the paper was not a newspaper and consequently editors had to be careful to avoid discussing current affairs such as executions, ‘we inserted an article upon circumstantial evidence; now, to carry out the letter of the law, we ought not to have inserted that article.’116 Another important national paper was the Cobdenite Morning Star edited by a brother-in-law of John Bright and managed after 1866 by Alfred H. Dymond.117 The penny London daily (established in March 1856), as one of the journalists, the politician Justin McCarthy, later recalled, advocated ‘all sorts of schemes which were odious in the eyes of what was called society’ – the ballot, suffrage extension, peace, anti-capital punishment.118 Ironically, for a journal which was seen as the mouthpiece of the Cobdenites or Manchester school, Cobden himself had been critical of Charles Gilpin’s talk of establishing or acquiring a paper devoted to ‘antis’ in 1851, when irritated by the inconsistency of press treatment of the peace movement.119 The Star was obliged to carry reports of trials and executions, but usually reported the latter with abolitionist comment; it also published abolitionist odes and correspondence.120 Other newspapers such as the Chartist Northern Star, People’s Newspaper, Weekly Tribune, and Beehive helped promote the cause.121 The sensational Illustrated Police News claimed in 1867 that it had for a generation been a strenuous, unceasing and consistent advocate for abolition of capital punishment ‘in all cases’ – a dubious claim.122 Some of the national papers which endorsed abolition were to change their editorial position on the subject, either because they were more concerned about getting rid of public executions, or because they reacted to the shift in public mood. The Morning Herald advocated abolition in the 1830s–1840s; according to an American abolitionist it published ‘more information on the subject of the infliction of the death punishment, in various parts of the world, perhaps than any other publisher’ and laying claim – according to another American commentator – to be the organ of the ‘Humanity party’.123 In 1857 it abandoned this position, partaking of the ‘national monomania’ or ‘brain fever’ in response to the ticket-of-leave scare.124 In 1855 a S.A.C.P. report recorded its thanks to the provincial press for liberal and fair reports of meetings.125 Some provincial papers were firmly abolitionist into the 1860s, Alexander Ireland’s Manchester Examiner and Times and Robert Gibbs’s Buckinghamshire Advertiser for instance; both men were associated with the S.A.C.P. The radical newspaper managed by Ireland – a friend of the American transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson – was thanked in particular by the society.126 Some of the provincial press in favour of abolition in the late 1840s are identified through excerpts, in the short-lived Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper, which created a sense of a national movement. Indeed the

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paper reported ‘Judicial murder’ across the world, with news about gallows bungling or abolitionism in places such as New York, Cincinnati, Boston, Antigua, Bombay, Capetown and Port Philip, Australia.127 Other abolitionist journals, such as Quaker journals, similarly conveyed the world-wide nature of the problem. Among provincial papers adopting abolitionist positions were a number of north England papers: York Herald, Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, Bradford Observer, Leeds Mercury and Cheshire Observer. The acerbic comments in the section entitled ‘notes to correspondence’ and editorial pages revealed the Liverpool Mercury’s status as the ‘murderer’s apologist’ in the view of its rival, the Liverpool Courier. The Mercury responded in kind, calling the Courier a ‘hangman’s advocate’.128 And yet the Mercury carried a great deal of newsprint about murder and execution, and at the time of the horrific murders of the Hinrichsons at Leveson Street in Liverpool by that ‘monster in human form’, John Gleeson Wilson, even took the unusual step of publishing an engraving of the man, having previously published an account of his phrenology.129 A similar division between abolitionist and retentionist papers can be observed in the Sheffield press, where, as the abolitionist Samuel Roberts complained in 1847, the ‘Church-devoted newspaper’ the Mercury, whilst hostile to the theatre, supported the drama of ‘legalised murder’.130 The Sheffield Times, so the abolitionist Sheffield and Rotherham Independent said in a ‘Familiar Epistle from Mr Calcraft’, ought to be renamed Calcraft’s Illustrated Noose, on the basis of its woodcuts in reporting the execution of Rush at Norwich, and the homage it had paid to ‘the spifflicating trade’.131 The reformist Bradford Observer pushed for abolition from its inception, with columns of news extracted from the ‘book of blood’ on judicial murder from across Britain and the United States designed to further the cause.132 The Liberal Cheshire Observer trumpeted its abolitionist credentials alongside its support for national education, when it advertised its enlarged status in 1861.133 The support of provincial newspapers was important – as one abolitionist correspondent noted in communicating with the editor of the York Herald, ‘the Herald, as a provincial paper, embraces a wide circulation’.134 Another provincial editorial noted that capital punishment was experienced as a social calamity in local or provincial terms: the force of sympathy was stronger when the case involved was local, ‘within a few yards of the scene of domestic enjoyment’.135 In addition there were journals aimed at the artisan aristocracy and earnest social reformers which voiced strong abolitionist sentiment.136 Howitt’s Journal for instance, presented Rowton’s ‘progressive but selfconsciously logical, deeply felt without ever seeming subjective’ essays on death punishment after a series of articles by William Howitt had appeared

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on the game laws in 1847, and his wife Mary Howitt, as we have seen, published a letter, appealing to the women of Great Britain and Ireland, to petition for mercy in the case of Mary Ann Hunt.137 The Public Good, a twopenny monthly magazine edited by John Passmore Edwards, was determined never to witness, if possible, ‘the public strangling of any human being’ in 1850 – hardly surprising when the work was published by Gilpin.138 Rowton published Murder by Law as part of the journal’s series of penny tracts. Dr Thomas Price’s monthly Eclectic Review (founded in 1805), organ of nonconformist ‘Evangelical liberalism’ and committed to ‘extinction of death punishments’, published articles which stimulated retentionist pamphlets.139 Another periodical endorsing a socially progressive programme including capital punishment abolition, to a smaller readership, was the Unitarian Philip Pearsall Carpenter’s Helper and Warrington Advertiser (‘a journal of human improvement’), which facetiously argued in 1850 that executions ought to be celebrated as an act of worship with the Primate and Queen in attendance at St Paul’s Cathedral, to pull the rope.140 Radical booksellers sold pamphlets on the capital punishment question. Apart from Gilpin, and his brother in Dublin, the Quaker bookseller William Irwin in Manchester retailed works on capital punishment alongside literature against the taxes on knowledge and anti-slavery.141 Local print controversies also made the literature of abolition available, thus the Bradford Observer told its readers that the anonymous pamphlet by ‘Ampho’, replying to the Reverend Sir Walter Scott’s retentionist work (the latter, it had examined in articles over three separate issues) could be obtained at 2d from any Bradford bookseller.142 However, if the abolitionist press included several upmarket or ‘respectable’ papers, none had the authority of The Times and the paper’s consistent opposition was a grievance for the S.A.C.P. Shortly before the society became dormant in 1857, Gilpin expressed the hope that a certain journal would cease to charge them with morbid sentimentality like the notoriously sanguine Lord Eldon had done half a century before (in his eagerness to preserve the death penalty for stealing from a shop property to the value of 5s).143 Abolitionist papers frequently attacked the ‘bloody Times’ for its opposition to mercy in capital cases and its support for the gallows: ‘Your “wicked” Times stabs hearts beyond all surgery; Your juries look to what your Times expects,’ according to one anonymous tract which referred to the ‘mournfully’ minor role conscience played in its management. It might be sincerely retentionist but its tactics were sophistical and dishonest, suppressing mitigatory details in cases, it was alleged. The paper reflected the age too accurately in its lack of principle

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and consistency, the same critic said, yet this most influential of the four estates could be a moral engine.144 Certainly The Times was consistently hostile to abolitionists and facetious and unscrupulous in its characterization of S.A.C.P. arguments, though an admission ‘that a dozen executions in a twelve month can hardly be worth much as an example, and are not much worth fighting for’ scarcely suggests a commitment to the deterrence justification it generally used, though the paper also declared it was not prepared to give up a deeprooted primeval instinct.145 Abolitionists were enthusiasts and idealists whose arguments, The Times claimed, could as well be used against warfare.146 The failure of parliamentary abolitionists in 1868 to muster even a respectable minority evoked the response: ‘We do not ask for ever new argument, but we expect that where a reasoner has truth on his side he should be able to strengthen his position year by year, and to find in the progress of events fresh illustrations of the principles he would inculcate.’147 The suggestion that the abolitionists’ polemical offensive had been static and opportunities ignored was unfair. In fact the S.A.C.P. devoted a large proportion of its budget to dissemination of information on capital punishment, tracts responding to retentionists and the placing of abolitionist material in papers.148 Albert Megson, a stationer at 103, Market Street, Manchester, and on the executive committee of the Manchester anti-capital punishment committee, advertised the Society’s works in the Manchester Guardian in the mid-1850s and organized the signing of abolitionist petitions at his shop.149 Circulars and reports were sent out and letters written to London and provincial papers, especially by Tallack in the 1860s.150 This ‘diffusing information through the medium of the press’ was also targeted at figures of authority and influence like magistrates, clergymen and MPs.151 Retentionists sometimes felt the need of similarly targeted dissemination: the Christian Messenger and Family Magazine received a copy of the American Alexander Campbell’s essay in support of capital punishment from ‘J.W.’ (presumably James Wallis, the journal’s editor), and copies were forwarded to Lord John Russell, Henry Brougham and Sir Robert Peel and ‘several other distinguished individuals of the British Senate’ in 1846.152 In the retentionist Inquisition for Blood: or, the Infliction of the Penalty of Death for Wilful Murder, the anonymous author complained that ‘so little’ had been written yet in defence of the penalty of death; if this was the case in 1850, by the time that capital punishment was removed from the public gaze this was no longer so.153 My bibliography lists all the pamphlet works on either side which I have encountered, some

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of these no longer exist, whilst there were undoubtedly other works, such as published sermons, which engaged with capital punishment inter alia. Gilpin retailed short tracts on the subject before the S.A.C.P. was formed: 6s for 100 of Christians strangling Christians, 2s for Who are the Murderers? An Earnest Appeal to the Christian Public on the Subject of Capital Punishment, and 6d for a dozen of Objections to the Punishment of Death Concisely Stated, for instance.154 Works by Charles Phillips, Alfred H. Dymond and John Macrae Moir (the latter, the secretary of the Scottish Hospital in London,155 produced an English edition of the German juriconsult and democrat Carl Joseph Anton Mittermaier’s statistical and comparative work) were often freely circulated. S.A.C.P.-authored articles by Beggs and Tallack were distributed in pamphlet-form.156 Although the pamphlet war over the gallows reached a peak in the late 1840s (many of the abolitionist tracts being published by Gilpin), new works thereafter continued to appear for the S.A.C.P. right up to the analyses of the Capital Punishment Commission Report and John Stuart Mill’s parliamentary speech – a speech to which The Times credited the division on Gilpin’s resolution in April 1868 which saw only 23 go into the lobby with Gilpin.157 S.A.C.P. works also reached an international audience.158 In addition to these widely reviewed and circulated tracts, there were many obscure works, the printed versions of local sermons, the labour of working-class reformers, or the pithy remarks of local antiquarians.159 The arguments provided by abolitionist pamphleteers inevitably varied, with some explicitly focused on a particular aspect, or responsive to a recent episode. Some were polished prize essays and a few were published parliamentary speeches. Some were learned and philosophical in tone, catering both in content and in price, to the well off. There were, inevitably, detailed efforts at scriptural argument, which debated the interpretation of the standard scriptural authorities in relation to religious obligation. This might involve a debate about the status of the New Testament against the Old Testament (as we shall see in chapter 7) or the accuracy of translation. Related moral arguments about the sense of the sanctity of human life, the need to give the murderer time to repent and even reform, might be raised. Many abolitionist tracts took the line that all punishment should be primarily about the reformation of the criminal rather than revenge – although the abolitionist John Rippon took exception to this position and asserted the primacy of the rights and well-being of the non-criminal portion of society.160 Another writer argued that the question should be considered only with reference to ‘civic policy’ and not with reference to theology.161 Authors might consider the right of the State to take life – and might even accept this right (as the jurist Sheldon Amos did, in 1864).162

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They might debate the potential to crime that all men and women had. There were arguments about the dangers of mistaken identity and examples of innocence executed which dramatized the irremissibility or irreparability of the penalty. The statistics were used to demonstrate that abolition had not led to an increase of crimes: thus addressing the subject of the expediency of the punishment. The relationship of committals to actual sentences for crimes exposed the problem of juror reluctance. Alternatives might be discussed: secondary punishments whose deterrence could be argued on the basis of comparative evidence, from, for example, certain Swiss cantons or States of the United States. Some pamphlets argued the danger to institutions from having a law which was not uniformly enforced – with evasions that recognized degrees in homicide which the law did not. Some deplored the failure of the common law to distinguish crimes of cupidity from crimes of passion. The question in relation to political offences, and to female murder such as infanticide, might be examined. The English character was raised in relation to the question of private execution. There was also the argument from history, which, we will see in a later chapter, made much of the Bloody Code of the eighteenth century in order to appal the reader and remove any sense of complacency about the smoothness of progress (and so ‘distrust our present judgement’, in Charles Neate’s words).163 Rarely was the subject tackled from a utilitarian viewpoint – thus Rowton reluctantly addressed the ‘pounds-shilling-andpence point of view’ in 1846, emphasizing that ‘by executing a man, a productive labourer is lost to society’ and classing men as part of the world’s capital.164 The reality of capital punishment in its ‘concrete and practical form’ would also be touched on by some, although the full physical degradation and suffering of the gallows would not be discussed.165 Some abolitionist tracts were published in several editions. When the third edition of the Chartist James Myles’s Remarks on Death Punishments was advertised in the London Journal, it was claimed that ‘its sale in Scotland [Myles was a Dundonian] has been unprecedented’. But retentionist pamphlets were also published in several editions too.166 Another aspect of the capital punishment debate was the ambivalence with which the figure of the hangman was treated. The hangman was supposed by many commentators to be prevented by prejudice from being part of normal society: perhaps some sympathy ought to be bestowed on him.167 Yet his deadly work as the ‘hempen extremity of the law’ could not be forgotten. In France the bourreau had been the target of abolitionist plays and novels in the 1830s, as readers of an essay in Bentley’s Miscellany were told in 1842; in 1875 there was to appear the Guernsey journalist Henri Marquand’s abolitionist Ma Visite à Henri Sanson, bourreau de Paris – a

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work published in London.168 Though the volume of abolitionist works which focused on the British hangman was not large, these similarly exploited the sense of his ‘unfortunate moral position’. His grim visage and suggestively clumsy hands featured among Joseph Kenny Meadows’ Heads of the People, or, Portraits of the English, in 1839, with an abolitionist caption and accompanying essay by Douglas Jerrold (Figure 6).169 His dilemma and his grotesqueness were versified.170

FIGURE 6. ‘The Hangman,’ depicted by Joseph Kenny Meadows, Heads of the People, or, Portraits of the English (1839). The reader is placed in the position of the condemned person.

The Victorian hangman par excellence, Calcraft, was a celebrity, his role in undertaking the ‘repulsive, though necessary, duty of finisher of the law’ meant his movements were closely followed by the press throughout his long career.171 As one essay in Dickens’s Household Words complained in 1851, the daily newspapers ensured ‘an offensively familiar mention of “Calcraft” on all possible occasions’.172 To flourish the hangman in the papers, like the toastmaster at a public dinner, was wrong. He was best ‘as a horrible shadow, obscure and shunned’. The executioner had never been

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so ‘individualized in print, to the best of our knowledge, as he has been lately, since his name was SAMSON and he worked a guillotine’. Jack Ketch was the near-mythic figure representing all British hangmen, his autobiography a successful burlesque or parody of Newgate novels with no apparent abolitionist sentiment, by Charles Whitehead (with illustrations by Kenny Meadows) in 1834; his ‘life, opinions, and pensile adventures …with recollections of his contemporaries during the last three reigns’ later acted as a satirical comment on Hanoverian criminal justice in an excellent essay in the Metropolitan Magazine in 1842.173 But the isolation of the chief hangman, Calcraft, the first among the now very limited number of British hangmen (others in this period included the Scotsman John Murdoch, whose last execution took place when he was over eighty, in 1851; and Thomas Askern of Maltby who executed William Dove174) meant a certain concentration of propagandist language on him. Thus the rather eccentric pamphlet The Groans of the Gallows, or the Past and Present Life of William Calcraft (c.1847), presented the Living Hangman of Newgate in the manner of cheap gallows literature with few pages and a crude woodcut portrait, but quoted Victor Hugo, and Douglas Jerrold. Calcraft was ‘hunted about like some hateful reptile’, the public shrinking from him as if his breath was ‘pestiferous, the very touch of [his] hand contaminating’. The tract presented Calcraft suffering from acute remorse and mental agonies, his nervous system visibly breaking down at the executions of James Tapping in 1845 and Martha Browning in 1846.175 A similar revulsion was expressed in a broadside on ‘General Executions for 1856’ which included a woodcut portrait purporting to be of the hangman, and an unflattering biography which alluded to his role in the execution of the Cato street conspirator Arthur Thistlewood in 1820 – and in which the observation was made that ‘hanging a person like a dog, does not deter others from committing a crime’.176 A ballad entitled ‘Calcraft’s Lament! Or, the Hangman in a hobble,’ was a response to Calcraft’s failure to support his aged mother in 1850, in which he lamented his lack of a tidy job, the trade having declined since the days of Rush and Manning.177 The revolution in transport as well as the amelioration of the Bloody Code (capital or otherwise) had meant work could be undertaken by a few men: Calcraft fulfilled his role as the ‘apostle of deterrence’ for almost half a century.178 With his scratch wig and fur cap, and carpet bag carrying the rope, he was a Victorian celebrity who surfaced in contemporary biography, posthumously serialized biography, fiction (including that bestseller, East Lynne) and satire.179 One account in 1868 presented him as a mild and gentle-faced man, his rope ‘soft as silk’.180 Victor Hugo claimed he was more famous than Shakespeare in England while the poet Philip James Bailey lamented the heroic benefactor of the age and other great

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men were ‘Alike with Kill-craft on his cadent stage’.181 A ‘Newgate Circular’ presented by The Satirist in 1845, observed that even the movements of ‘Royalty and Prince Albert appear to create far less sensation’; and the Dundee Advertiser commented on one flying (and abortive) visit from the London hangman in 1873, ‘if their visitor had been a Royal personage or an eminent statesman he could hardly have been treated with greater consideration.’182 As the finisher of the law, he could be the target of mob violence and press opprobrium, when the execution was bungled or unpopular.183 Of course, the debate about capital punishment was not simply conducted in pamphlets, or in newspaper leaders and articles, but in the correspondence pages, where letters from pseudonymous and named writers sifted through the justifications. Some of the abolitionist newspaper correspondents were clearly Quakers.184 Some of the letters were elaborate analyses, others were heavily ironic (as, for instance, the correspondent advocating a revival of gladiatorial combat) and others were compelling accounts of executions.185 Consider, for instance, the high literary quality of the letter from an elderly Quaker-turned-Wesleyan, Elijah Waring of Clifton, writing after witnessing the execution crowd gathered to see the death of Sarah Harriet Thomas in Bristol in April 1849, who was hanged despite an effort to secure reprieve signed by several thousand women from Bristol.186 She had to be dragged to the scaffold, and her case was raised in the House of Commons.187 Waring’s characterization of the execution scene as possessing the spirit of a holiday or fair was not original, nor was the fact that the crowd included a large proportion of women a revelation (though a ‘remarkable and painful feature’ in Waring’s view). What is interesting is his evident fascination in the scene. Having decided to reach the place of execution by a ‘circuitous route’ – as if this would protect him from the contamination of a ghoulish company – he inspected the crowd. The piece reveals interesting ambiguities at the same time as Waring, ‘no novice in scenes of death suffering’, crafted his account to convey an ‘utter distrust of death punishment as a protective agent in our social economy’. The letter was presented as ‘a safety valve for [his] over charged feelings’, yet Waring dwelt on the figure of the murderess, now ‘a mere drapened heap of collapsed joints and muscles’. Whilst scrupling to see the actual moment of legal slaughter, he was able to view her body through his pocket achromatic glass, so that her stout ‘but not ungraceful, proportions’, and the terrible distortion of her ‘long, fair, though muscular neck’ could be discerned and reported. Waring admitted that a ‘chilling thrill’ ran through his veins at the ‘unnatural’ spectacle: ‘Youth, beauty, crime, obduracy, knowledge despised, ignominy, death, a doubtful

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hereafter, all imbued, pressed themselves in that dead girl, strung up to a lofty gallows.’ There were other lengthy letters which registered their authors’ disgust: the journalist Godfrey Turner’s avowedly unexaggerated account of ‘Newgate Fair’ – in reality an ably wrought and impassioned literary response – which was sent to the Morning Chronicle in the aftermath of an execution outside the Old Bailey.188 Richard Thurrow of Edinburgh, a journalist who had reported on executions before, and opposed ‘judicial murder’, revealed he had met Calcraft and found him a ‘man of gentle disposition, and why not? And he had informed me of many cases in which he had to call in the aid of brandy to nerve him to do the slaying.’189 We have seen the S.A.C.P. attempt to spread the message via meetings in mechanics’ institutes and athenaeums; literature was also directed here and, it seems, requested. The ‘riveting’ narratives by Gilpin and Vincent were an attempt to popularize the cause at meetings. Yet as a pressure group, how imaginative or sophisticated were S.A.C.P. attempts to depict ideas – in comparison, for instance, with the anti-corn law agitation? The depiction of the gallows, it is true, was widespread in British culture: the simple silhouette of post, beam and noose instantly recognizable. From graffiti or crude and endlessly recycled woodcuts to the accomplished engraving of the Newgate scene in Thomas Miller’s Picturesque Sketches of London Past and Present in 1852, representations abounded.190 Decapitation, after the execution of the Cato Street conspirators in 1820, was no longer inflicted by the British State. The victims of the gallows (or the perpetrators of atrocities) lived on in varnished graphic storyboards for the London poor, and waxworks which Madame Tussaud and Sons assured the public, ‘so far from … creating a desire to imitate them … has a direct tendency to the contrary’.191 Though there were paintings of execution scenes from British history (de la Roche’s ‘Execution of Lady Jane Grey’ of 1834 perhaps most famously), and endlessly recycled engravings in broadsides of desperate felons in condemned cells and executions, there seem to have been few depictions by professional British artists of the modern infliction of capital punishment – William Thomson’s ‘Condemned Cell at Newgate’ (the execution of the forger Henry Fauntleroy, in 1824) being highly unusual.192 This work, painted in 1828, showed the man being prepared for execution, and surrounded by the various prison officials. Although paintings about trials and courtroom scenes were popular Victorian genres, they did not depict real cases of homicide.193 No one emulated the Belgian artist Antoine Wiertz, who depicted the ‘thoughts and visions of a severed head’.194 In the early Victorian period there was virtually no effort at a pictorial abolitionist campaign, though Punch provided a number of

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cartoons by John Leech and others against the scaffold-culture which probably reached a wide audience – the American Charles Spear’s Prisoners’ Friend had praised its ‘short and sententious sayings’ which were more effective ‘than a labored essay or a long array of statistics’ but did not allude to the pictures.195 There may indeed have been an attempt through Dickens to get the artist George Cruikshank’s help – he had famously intervened in earlier efforts to mitigate the Bloody Code by designing a satirical one-pound note (the ‘Bank Restriction Note’ of 1819), against the capital punishment for forgery of banknotes.196 One branch society (in Newcastle) declared its intention to produce ‘popular’ representations of the gallows question.197 Whether this was intended to have pictures is unclear, but at least one ‘experimental’ issue of a monthly sheet was issued at the end of April 1847. This work, entitled ‘Execution of Catherine Forster’ (about a recent execution in Bury St Edmunds), comprised arguments and statistics on the question and made an appeal for individual and public support. It was disseminated through Newcastle by ‘flying stationers’ at the usual ‘small change’ since the committee hoped this popular agency would make the cause a popular one.198 By contrast with the British abolitionists, in the 1860s the Tuscan abolitionists had the advantage of print shops exhibiting lithographic copies of Victor Hugo’s picture of the executed John Brown with translations of his abolitionist writings.199 Later, a magazine in 1874 suggested that the S.A.C.P. use the image of a devil grinning at an execution, which had been engraved as a tail-piece to volume 1 of British Birds by Thomas Bewick.200 Parody and irony conveyed the abolitionist message in pseudo-demotic form. The title of the anonymous penny pamphlet The Heroes of the Guillotine and Gallows, or, the Awful Adventures of Askern, Smith and Calcraft, the Three Rival Hangmen of York Castle, Stafford Gaol and Newgate, and Sanson, the Executioner of Paris with his cabinet of Murderer’s Curiosities reads like an exploitative Catnach press publication from Seven Dials, for instance – and indeed the three pinioned and white-capped gallows’ victims on the front cover were part of a block that had served for a broadside commemorating the execution of five pirates. The reader enticed by the prospect of gory details would have found a trenchant criticism of the death penalty rather than something pandering to ‘illiterate and depraved’ tastes.201 Punch parodied a handbill for the theatrical attractions of the Old Bailey in 1849.202 Gatrell provides an instance of Gilpin printing a parody notice of execution but this, a comment on the impending execution of the young Catherine Foster for the murder of her husband by poison, was probably unusual (Figure 7 is a facsimile).203

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The National Library of Scotland has a broadside, ‘The Life of Calcraft’, listing the executions in Scotland for the past 200 years, which had additional type added for executions in the later 1860s, and which gestured to the ‘purification of our Statute Book from blood’. The Nottingham broadsides produced by the reform-minded Suttons in the 1830s had also raised the question of capital punishment in general.204

FIGURE 7. Facsimile of a broadside by Charles Gilpin, the original in the British Library.

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There was a broadside, ‘Killing by the Hangman’, from ‘Philo’, published in Dundee in response to the impending execution of Thomas Leith, 22 September 1847. Pulling out all the typographic stops in order to convey the heavy irony of the anonymous author, the parody of an exhibition broadside told its readers of the interesting, moral, enlightening, gratifying and humanizing spectacle of killing ‘one of our fellowcreatures’.205 Whether the broadside had any impact is impossible to tell: the Dundee Advertiser reported that Leith’s execution – though he was ‘unflinching’ in the assertion of his innocence of the murder by arsenic of his wife – was ‘in presence of a great multitude of people from all quarters’. By his agreement (as he supported the ‘science’), a cast of his head was made for the phrenologist – and abolitionist – George Combe of Edinburgh.206

FIGURE 8. Facsimile of a broadside by ‘Philo’, the original in Dundee Local Studies Collection.

Pictorial abolitionism was rare, with the important exception of the cartoons that appeared in Punch, and it may be that the Quaker importance in the movement, including as publishers, determined this reluctance. Abolitionist emphasis on argument and rationality privileged the word –

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Punch, in one of its critiques of the death penalty, had argued that the gallows would inevitably crumble, ‘overthrown by no greater instruments than a few goosequills’.207 The movement was frequently associated with the Quaker broad-rim in the press, but never having devised its own motto or symbol perhaps the gallows was concrete enough as an image for the movement not to require anything else. If not by pictorial representation, the subject could be vividly depicted through verse and even, perhaps, broadcast through song.208 Since Shelley – who had written a fragmentary treatise against capital punishment209 – had declared poets to be the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’, in ‘A Defence of Poetry’, perhaps it was not surprising that their poetic mission should involve mobilizing their lyrical powers in this cause. But not every poet followed Shelley. William Wordsworth had made a notorious intervention in defence of the gallows as central to the stability of society as the ultimate symbol and tool of State power, in his ‘Sonnets upon the Punishment of Death’, published in the Quarterly Review in December 1841. The American Quaker J. Greenleaf Whittier responded in verse.210 There was also an abolitionist response to the sequence in Britain – a ‘solitary shot’ from Ireland reaching Wordsworth by 1842. Abolitionist verses by the anti-corn law poet Ebenezer Elliott, the watchmaker William Cox Bennett, the Quaker poet Bernard Barton (he had published ‘The Convict’s Appeal’ in 1818), the working-class poet John Critchley Prince and Robert Buchanan were reprinted in abolitionist papers.211 There was even a dramatized version of abolitionism in the clumsy and probably unperformed play by the sanitary reformer and businessman Charles Ellerman.212 The abolitionist poets tended to depict male victims of gallows, an exception being a poem by John King published in a Sheffield newspaper in 1850, here the condemned was a ‘wretched woman’ imagined in her solitary cell, about to be hanged for infanticide.213 The volume of poetry which was published on the subject of capital punishment at least proves that one reviewer’s view of the propriety of Wordsworth’s ‘dragging so dire a necessity as capital punishment into the poetical kingdom’ was not shared.214 If abolitionism used the medium of sentiment, retentionism rarely replied in kind, an exception after the publication of Wordsworth’s sonnets being the idiosyncratic Francis Newman’s ‘didactic religious utterance’ on the subject, published as part of his attempt to fashion a practical theism, in 1858 (Newman, brother of John Henry, later became a President of the Vegetarian Society). Coventry Patmore’s ‘A Sketch in the Manner of Hogarth’ which versified the sentence of death, building of the gallows, and the behaviour of the cord during an execution, was not, he later asserted, advocating abolition.215

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The anonymous lamentations of the condemned – in truth written by hack writers – have been studied to reveal their sometimes transgressive response to the State’s ritualized infliction of death. There seems to have been no official attempt, as there had been with the Corn-Law League, to produce a large-scale and populist literature to spread the abolitionist message – the anti-gallows movement lacked the funds and perhaps the sensibility. Broadsides on executions may have expressed abolitionist sentiments, at least one stimulated by the hullabaloo surrounding the trial of William Palmer and reprinted in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine in July 1856, touched on a key problem with the death penalty, the risk of killing the innocent, and gestured towards alternatives to the scaffold.216 Another broadside, in the John Johnson collection of ephemera in the Bodleian Library, is a prose account of the trial and sentence of the youth Ralph Joicey for the murder of his abusive father in 1846, which ends with an explicit condemnation: Thus will be added one more victim to that sanguinary law which disgraces our criminal code; wherein the state, because one man has been villain enough to destroy his fellow, follows his guilty example and also takes away life. The day is fast coming when such a barbarous law, which is abhorrent to humanity and disgraces us as a civilised people, shall be swept from our statue [sic] book.217 When Samuel Adams was executed at Newgate for the murder of his sister-in-law in July 1859, one broadside commented on the indifference of feeling which the crowd exhibited at the ‘last, sad, solemn act of justice’ and took this behaviour as evidence ‘that the gallows, the taking of life, and the dangling of a lifeless body, acts not as a warning to the evil disposed; but, rather, it is treated by such individuals as a capital exhibition’. It was, as a gratification of morbid curiosity, ‘very superior to anything the Victoria [Theatre, in Lambeth] could undertake to do’. Yet as such broadsides tended to do, the verse accompanying the details of trial and execution, acknowledged ‘Blood for blood in retribution,| You’ll find it so in God’s command.’218 By contrast to the limited number of popular abolitionist texts, thousands of pamphlets were disseminated during public executions by evangelicals wishing to exploit the large audiences congregated. In the religious revivalism of the early 1860s, evangelicals made strenuous efforts to preach and hand out almost thirty thousand copies of tracts such as A Dying Thief and a Dying Sinner, The Quiet Conscience, Pleading for Pardon, The Accepted Time and The End of the Law, as well as scripture cards and handbills, at executions.219 By contrast the Reverend Henry Christmas is

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reported to have sold a total of 26,000 copies of his abolitionist pamphlet by the early 1850s.220 For those who accepted the doctrine of the efficacy of dying repentance, the address of the contrite murderer Edwin Preedy at Dorchester in 1863 was prized.221 Executions were opportunities to preach the gospel: mobilizing the resources of the Religious Tract Society and local authors, thus the young evangelical missionary (and merchant and cricketer) William P. Lockhart penned tracts, Before the Execution and After the Execution, and had ten thousand copies of each printed, for the execution of John Ward and William Robert Taylor at Kirkdale in Liverpool.222 Such missionaries did not preach against hanging, but they believed that convicts could repent – be ‘brands plucked from the fire’ – being poor men ‘condemned by the laws of their country, but still within the reach of pardon from a gracious Saviour’.223 The proponents of the abolitionist cause sought to make headway by appealing not to the execution crowd, but to the legislature. Inevitably, in an era of statistics, the abolitionists turned to statistical analysis of crimes, just as the State did.224 Charles Neate rather reluctantly included a chapter on the statistics in his work, for fear that he should be thought evasive of the ‘most conclusive test of the truth’.225 Thomas Beggs wrote to correct statistics, characterizing the Home Secretary’s mistakes as ‘blunders …that would have disgraced a schoolboy of thirteen years of age’.226 The validity of the abolitionists’ statistics was queried by opponents – Benjamin Disraeli was not alone in thinking this ‘an age of statistical imposture’.227 The Law Magazine, in 1846, for instance, not only claimed the figures employed were faulty, but asserted this was a deliberate act of distortion.228 James Fitzjames Stephen, in Fraser’s Magazine in 1864, pointed out that ‘Statistics are the most dangerous of all weapons. They are almost always ambiguous, and this case more so than in almost any other.’229 Sir George Grey had found this out after March 1848, when, as Home Secretary, he had opposed William Ewart’s motion on statistical grounds and the basis of expediency, using, according to the critical Eclectic Review, ‘some startling off-hand figures, extracted in haste from the “Criminal Returns” annually presented to Parliament’. Grey was taken to task, and when next responding to parliamentary abolitionists in May 1849, told the House that statistics were so liable to disturbing causes that not much reliance was to be placed on them. After that admission, the reviewer thought, no government minister could resort to figures in support of the gallows.230 Both sides no doubt realized that capital punishment was a subject in which argument – statistically based or supported by scripture – had to combat prejudice. In the aftermath of the execution of William Bousfield in 1856, the newspaper The Leader – no abolitionist paper – argued that,

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although there had been many treatises on the expediency and moral effects of capital punishment, prejudice would not yield to argument. So the horrific sight that took place on the scaffold was the equivalent of a ‘great essay on capital punishment dramatized, setting forth all of its brutality in the most revolting force … embodying a grand essay on capital punishment – its brutality, inexpediency, and absurdity.’ Could capital punishment survive the ‘ghastly publication of this dramatized prize essay’?231 In the next chapter the focus shifts to parliament, where the appeal to scripture and public opinion, and the use of statistics and anecdotes jostled together, as in the extra-parliamentary platform, in an oratory of abolitionism which failed to convince a majority of Members.

6 THE ABOLITIONISTS AND PARLIAMENT Mr Ewart has only to persist with his motion, and his end will ultimately be gained.1 For one critic, writing in 1849, the ‘progressiveness’ of the abolitionists was part of present day impatience and presumption about the ‘wisest legislature’ in the world.2 This chapter considers the logical culmination of abolitionist activity, which was parliament, and therefore studies the electoral tactics of abolitionists and treatment of capital punishment at electoral meetings, and the fortunes of abolitionism in the House of Commons and the House of Lords. To be an effective pressure group the abolitionist society needed convincing results in parliamentary divisions, and the support of leading parliamentarians and government ministers.3 This situation eluded the movement despite the faith in the powers of persistence indicated by the quotation at the head of this chapter, but this failure was shared by other pressure groups. Pressure from without was rarely effective, but it was the course adopted when influence was too weak to operate successfully within parliament. The dilemma has been neatly summarized by Patricia Hollis: ‘for pressure from without to be ultimately effective must come from within, must be taken up inside parliament’.4 Influencing the senate Abolitionists had targeted the House of Commons before the S.A.C.P. was founded: with Scottish abolitionists writing to Scottish MPs in March 18375, the London society watching the behaviour of MPs when Fitzroy Kelly, a Conservative MP for the borough of Ipswich and a successful lawyer, introduced a bill in June 1840, and the London AntiCapital Punishment Society keeping a register on every division for the information of inquirers, with a list of ‘tried friends’.6 The abolitionist

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society had expected electors to learn the sentiments of candidates before promising their support, in 1841, although under no illusions about the ‘avowal of mere sentiments, whether in private or at the hustings’.7 Abolitionists had a naive faith in the power of information to alter parliamentary opinions. Circulars, significantly rarely reprinted in newspapers or periodicals other than Quaker journals, recommended ‘correspondents’ write to their MPs to persuade them to support. In June 1846 the abolitionist committee provided a model letter and statistics for this enterprise, here directed towards William Ewart’s planned abolition motion: ‘In this way the feeling existing out of doors will make its way into the House, better than at the period of an election.’8 The S.A.C.P. thus employed various well-established tactics in order to increase the strength of abolitionism in the ‘national senate’ but it was deeply unrealistic to suppose that the mere posting of abolitionist facts, tracts or letters to MPs and candidates would effect a change in their views. No amount of money could have made its parliament-focused campaign more successful, although the S.A.C.P.’s insolvency made efforts less vigorous. In parliament abolitionists were rarely from the Conservative ranks but as George Wilson, who had been president of the Anti-Corn Law League, claimed in 1856, it was ‘one of the great advantages in the discussion of this question, that the utmost ingenuity of man could not, in the slightest degree, connect it with politics’. He also thought that ‘another great advantage was that it did not interfere in any way with an existing vested interest.’9 While the problem of the gallows had political dimensions it was not a ‘party’ question and was never reduced to party terms in parliamentary debate. Politicians had, it is true, tried to make political capital from association with criminal law reform in the era of the Whig administrations in the 1830s, though not without criticism that the reforms had actually been effected through the pressure of public opinion acting through jurors.10 Although certain prominent politicians became associated with capital punishment abolitionism – most notably William Ewart, John Bright and Charles Gilpin – it was not likely to be a subject which would advance a politician’s career, although there was one work of fiction published in the New Monthly Magazine in 1844 which alluded to an adventurer (the clever but morally bankrupt Jack Grandison – who had poisoned the wife he married for her wealth) making a speech on abolition and perhaps as a result becoming a cabinet minister before long, ‘if humanity plays trump’.11

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FIGURE 9. William Ewart, carte de visite by John and Charles Watkins. ©National Portrait Gallery, London.

In July 1846 The Times carried ‘election intelligence’ from the Cornish town of Liskeard where a Quaker businessman, John Allen, raised the issue of capital punishment abolition, along with the abolition of sugar duties and the established church, with the candidate, Charles Buller.12 The general election of 1847 produced the cautious recommendation from ‘Y.Z.’ in The British Friend to ‘bring the matter before those who will constitute the new House of Commons’ by providing ‘suitable information’ and urging earnestness over abolition motions: ‘Not that I would recommend anyone to withhold his vote from a candidate whom he considers conscientious; nor endeavour to exhort a pledge from him.’13 By contrast the conservative Bell’s Weekly Messenger regretted that capital punishment had, that year, been made a ‘sort of election cry, that the candidate shall vow himself an advocate for abolition of the punishment of death – the question was not something that lent itself to intelligent discussion at the hustings’.14 A similar sense of the prominence of the

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question appeared in a letter from one ‘Anti-Beccaria’ writing to the Morning Post: Are you prepared to abolish the punishment of death? is a question which almost every candidate for the towns has had to answer during these elections; and the question generally has proceeded from those who had neither suffrage nor coats.15 Hood’s Magazine satirized the situation in 1848, when it listed abolition alongside such other concerns as the Charter, exclusion of bishops from the Lords, no Popery grants, sanitary reform, cheap bread, as placards across the town, ‘liberally committed to type, on large and fanciful posters’.16 The ‘barbarous practice’ was certainly to be abolished if James Hamerton of Hellifield had his way, during the nomination of candidates at Wakefield in December 1848, although Hamerton was not himself a candidate but the man who presented Sir Culling Eardley to the electors.17 In 1856 the S.A.C.P. promoted what it evidently saw as a major means of persuading MPs, Charles Phillips’s Vacation Thoughts, along with Home Office Tables-derived proof of gallows inefficacy.18 It was still a tactic being employed by William Tallack from 1863–1865, when sending copies of the abolitionist works by Phillips (a fourth and enlarged edition appeared in 1864) and John Macrae Moir to Lord Stanley – who became one of the Royal Commissioners investigating the laws relating to capital punishment in 1864 – and others. Presumably, as in 1857, the abolitionists believed such individuals were ‘persons likely to be influenced by its perusal’.19 The 1865 election had the S.A.C.P. ‘calling the attention of many Parliamentary candidates to the nature of the arguments’ through an address it claimed was widely circulated amongst candidates and electors, and certainly members of the Liverpool Peace Society raised the question of abolition along with other causes, when questioning candidates at Birkenhead.20 Abolitionists appear to have obtained pledges of support for William Ewart’s motions, probably informal agreements by liberal MPs rather than S.A.C.P.-organized canvassing. These promises of support were not always honoured. The Eclectic Review in September 1850 complained of the lukewarmness of ‘friends’ of the cause, out of 110 pledged.21 An 1855 report by the S.A.C.P. referred to MP assurances of support (nullified by Ewart’s ‘unavoidable delay’) and The British Friend urged Quakers to ensure attendance.22 Gilpin’s planned motion in 1866 again had supporters urged to pressurize MPs.23 Abolitionists emphasized the possibilities derived from general elections if current MPs were apathetic or hostile but their efforts in this field

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lacked conviction. John Thomas Barry listed six London candidates prepared to abolish the gallows in the British Friend in 1847 but made no comment, though they were duly elected – a notice on ten pledged candidates also appeared in the Morning Chronicle and the Standard.24 The Morning Advertiser took comfort from the metropolitan advance, because the ‘influence of anything metropolitan, sooner or later, and usually very soon, makes itself felt in the remotest corners of the kingdom’.25 Parliamentary and municipal candidates elsewhere in that year gave their support to abolition: the Quaker banker George William Alexander of London at Wakefield, the surgeon Henry Payne during the municipal elections at Sheffield, the Chartist Ernest Jones at Halifax, and the philosophic radical General Thomas Perronet Thompson at Bradford.26 Payne deliberately gestured towards the Quakers of Saint Philip’s Ward when he wrote of his pride in representing ‘men who are opposed to war and everything else that is cruel, – by men who are opposed to death punishments and all human butchery,– &c’.27 The radical Liberal George Hadfield’s published address to Sheffield electors in 1852 and 1857 presented him as an avowed advocate of entire abolition.28 James Haughton in Dublin issued an abolitionist address in 1857 whilst Barry and Peter Bedford tardily circularized supporters to pressurize MPs at this ‘opportune time’, though denying political partisanship.29 How far capital punishment was an issue in the late 1850s may be judged from Charles Gilpin’s neglect of the subject during electoral meetings in 1857, whilst eloquent on many radical questions such as the secret ballot and the separation of Church and State.30 He had stood as a candidate for the London Common Council on philanthropic ‘and especially anti-capital punishment grounds’ in 1847. This was the ‘Cobden’ of the movement.31 During the brouhaha of 1864 surrounding the reprieve of the middle-class George Victor Townley and the execution of the bricklayer Samuel Wright, capital punishment was an issue for electors and non-electors in London (where Wright had been executed) who interrogated the candidates Lord Fermoy (MP for Marylebone) and Frederick Doulton (MP for Lambeth) about their attitudes to capital punishment.32 The radical John Passmore Edwards, when a candidate in 1868, affirmed his abolitionism, but this was probably unusual even in the context of the recent privatization of the gallows.33 The abolitionists felt the parliament-focused campaign was hampered by limited funds. As an election issue it was not high up on the agenda; indeed this relegated position was not resisted by abolitionists, who after all had many other pressing concerns. They were not people who claimed abolition was the prerequisite for reformed politics. Such a situation

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prevented any dynamic electoral pressure, despite the rhetoric of the late 1840s about vested interest and parliamentary retrogression and hints as to election opportunities. Given these constraints on electoral pressure, they relied on parliamentary motions and the hope that select committees would be established to debate the subject candidly. Here, the quality of evidence, arguments, and advocates, would be important. Abolitionism within the Commons … we would rather see half a session of Parliament devoted to the discussion of the grand question of the PUNISHMENT OF DEATH, than one single day of that session given to all the foreign affairs that ever agitated in a Minister’s brain.34 So G.W.M. Reynolds the radical and novelist wrote, in his best-selling Mysteries of London. But although Reynolds affected to be outraged that parliament devoted its time to party politics and foreign policy, it was not the case that the ‘grand question’ was avoided in the Commons. Members of parliament debated it in a ‘practical and purely deliberative manner’, with reference to recent cases and statistics, and asserted, or deprecated, the need to bring up the religious or theological aspects, on a regular basis.35 By the early 1860s it had attained the status of the perennial crotchet in the Commons, alongside ‘the inevitable wife’s sister, and Maynooth, and vote by ballot’, the subject of Wednesday afternoon sessions alongside other schemes deemed ‘impracticable and purely theoretical’.36 The man most associated with the parliamentary cause was William Ewart, whose reputation in the Commons seems to have been mixed: a journalist of the 1830s judging him to be weak-voiced and monotonous as an orator, but generally listened to and respected; another early Victorian observer of the Commons thought his prim appearance showed that there ‘was not even basso relievo in his mental composition; all is smooth and shaven like a levelled green sward’.37 Ewart introduced motions for abolition annually 1847–1850, but attendance never reached 200. In 1847 there had been only 41 abolitionist MPs out of the 658 in attendance and in 1850 (the year of closest defeat with a majority of 6 noes), the MPs voting numbered 86, The Times commenting that Ewart had taken ‘particular pains to secure the parliamentary minimum of audience’ for an ‘exceedingly languid debate’.38 The newspaper John Bull presented Ewart as a ‘shallow disputant’, his whole speech, ‘a tissue of the most barren nonsense that we have ever read or heard. It was not even respectable twaddle; but the downright skimble-skamble of an addled brain.’39 In the

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same paper, the parliamentary defeat of Ewart’s and Bright’s bill, 1 May 1849, called forth witty putdowns of the abolitionist crusade, ‘the House asserted the principle of exacting the extreme penalty from great offenders by strangling their Bill.’40 The Eclectic Review presented the incident in a different light, depicting the night of 1 May 1849 as one of the greatest triumphs for humanity and good government yet achieved in parliament. This was not a triumph announced with fanfare, ‘but a solid, substantial, influential, moral victory, calling gladness, into the hearts of good men, and forming a rallying point for the philanthropist and the Christian wherever they exist’.41 The MP for West Surrey, Henry Drummond, a prime mover in the Catholic Apostolic sect and a banker, had deflated John Bright’s speech by observing, ‘I think I have had the happiness of hearing the same speech before. (“No, no!”) Yes, I remember precisely the same appeal to the right honourable Baronet (Sir George Grey) I remember the same remarkable cases from Durham and I remember too the answer which was given to those cases at the time.’42 Drummond claimed that the parliamentary debates played a part in encouraging murder, which had become more prevalent and more violent, ‘mainly because murderers are made heroes in this House and because these debates which go abroad instill into people’s minds the idea that after all murder is not such a detestable crime as in the dark ages people were accustomed to think it.’43 After 1850 there was a hiatus until 10 June 1856, and another unsuccessful motion (backed by petitions presented to parliament, ‘chiefly from Quakers’ according to one newspaper44) to establish a select committee on abolition of capital punishment. William Ewart offered The Times an unconvincing excuse for the abolitionist trouncing (158 noes to 64 ayes): dinner time. The six-year gap between this and the previous abolitionist motion was deliberate, he claimed, ‘though pressed to introduce it by others’. The Times claimed to be under the impression of an annual parade of the motion before the Commons but rightly ridiculed Ewart’s idea that dinner time had alone reduced the abolitionist strength.45 It was an inauspicious moment in any case, according to press commentary. According to one report, Ewart ‘made a quiet speech, not shrinking from dealing with the question in its relation to the most recent case of murder’, that of William Palmer, which was also alluded to by Sir George Grey. Palmer’s execution provided a backdrop of national fascination with one spectacular murderer (‘the most execrable villain the past century has produced,’ according to The Era), but the ‘customary style’ and ‘well-known arguments’ seemed to prevail in the House.46 The Morning Star reporter noted that the debate was listened to with ‘so much

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impatience that it was evident the whole matter was considered obnoxious’.47 In 1864 Bright wrote in his private journal that the discussion in the Commons was very good and that the question had ‘advanced greatly and has never before received so much attention in the House’.48 Given the detailed reports in newspapers, such speeches may well have influenced readers: we know of one future magistrate whose sympathies for abolitionism stemmed from following parliamentary debates and Bright’s speeches.49 But for one of the abolitionists’ contemporary press critics, the debate in 1864 was ‘simply a field day for the Quakers, and for the aspirants who seek easy notoriety by maintaining paradoxical opinions’. The Commons had done what it usually did when the ‘devoted adherents of an eccentric idea take out their crotchet for an airing’ and had got out of the way.50 The next phase of Commons debate took place in the context of the Royal Commission established to investigate the operation of the laws relating to capital punishment – examined in detail below – and also involved a general election in which the committee of the S.A.C.P. urged abolitionists through the medium of the British Friend, to call the attention of parliamentary candidates to the subject, whilst not wishing to assume for the subject ‘an undue degree of importance amid the great political topics which are now claiming the special attention of electors and candidates’.51 Parliamentary reform was one of these great topics: William Ewart was concerned by 1867 that action should be ‘well considered’ in the context of the Reform Bill; perhaps even ‘reserving ourselves for better times’, as he told Gilpin. As in an earlier period, abolitionists were still placing hopes in the ‘better times’ coming with parliamentary reform.52 When Charles Gilpin attempted to amend the Capital Punishment Bill (which rendered private the infliction of the capital penalty) to complete abolition in 1868, the motion was defeated by a majority of 104 in a ‘thin House’; critics judging Gilpin’s speech, on a subject which was a truly open question rather than a party political matter, to be quite unimpressive.53 Punch, reporting on the debates, thought that Gilpin’s speech ‘furnished so pathetic a picture of the dying criminal, penitent and ready for glory, but considered unfit for earth, that Mr GREGORY sprang up and declared that the question was not one of softening hearts or saving souls, but of preventing the Queen’s subjects from being murdered’.54 It was unfortunate that Gilpin’s speech followed on from John Stuart Mill’s which, according to Punch was the speech of the night (‘A speech like that “stints the strife”…’) and which The Times described as ‘remarkable’.55 The Friend by contrast considered that Mill’s arguments

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were ‘suited rather for the times of classical heathenism than for those in which life and immortality have been brought to life’.56 The Friend also offered the reasons for the parliamentary failure: the belief of some abolitionists that concealed executions would lead to total abolition, unavoidable absences such as John Bright’s, and a view that the time was not right for advancing such questions.57 The British Friend maintained, ‘There is however a very general impression that the government bill for privacy of executions is in itself a marked admission of and concession to the progress of public opinion in the direction of abolition.’58 When the infliction of the death penalty was removed from the public eye, abolitionists still brought the punishment before parliament. The second reading of Charles Gilpin’s abolitionist bill was delayed (and parliament was prorogued before it could be heard again that year), following a debate, 28 July 1869, although there were some publicized changes of heart, with the Conservative Joseph Henley avowing his view in favour of abolition.59 As the American Unitarian Moncure D. Conway wrote in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in that year, Gilpin ‘never fails to appeal to the Parliament on the subject,’ and – so Conway believed – the S.A.C.P. was ‘still vigorous’. The impact of John Stuart Mill’s speech in favour of the penalty of death, a recent increase in brutal crimes in England and the clamour for a return to capital punishment for confirmed thieves, on the part of the conservative weekly Pall Mall Gazette, had produced in Conway’s view, a setback.60 Abolitionism within the House of Lords The report itself offers only one more instance of the way in which a case can be got up to order on any subject and to prove any view of it…61 The question of capital punishment surfaced in the upper chamber in a select committee inquiring about the operation of the criminal law in 1847, which raised the question in printed form,62 and most notably in the select committee which reported in July 1856, in favour of hanging within the precinct of the gaol or in a similar location where privacy could similarly be secured. This section is prefaced with the verdict of The Times on the report produced in 1856, in an editorial which condemned the Lords for sentimentality. The committee (including three Lord Chancellors – Brougham, Campbell and St Leonards – and the Marquis of Lansdowne, Earl Stanhope, Lord Lyttelton and Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford)

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thought that all witnesses and all authorities agreed that the penalty should be retained for ‘offences of the gravest kind’. The report appeared as the Lords received Irish petitions for total abolition from Quakers and other inhabitants of Wexford, Cork, and Limerick, and Carnew and Cahir. What was the reception of the report, written after a mere three days of evidence from nine witnesses?63 The select committee had been justified by the Bishop of Oxford – a man who had described the clamour for abolition as absurd – on the grounds that there was sufficient difference of opinion.64 Since in this study we are not interested in examining in detail the movement against public execution, we need not dwell at length on the committee, except in so far as it related to the abolitionist effort. Opponents of abolition rejected the Bishop of Oxford’s ‘legal or virtual publicity’.65 Abolitionists were, not surprisingly, also critical of the result. Alfred H. Dymond told a meeting at the London Tavern in June that the Bishop ‘had defended hanging as a divine institution, and had obtained a secret committee to consider the propriety of secret hanging’.66 Charles Phillips, who presented some of its evidence in Vacation Thoughts on Capital Punishments, chose to view the committee, ‘on their own shewing as powerful though perhaps unconscious, advocates of our cause’, a bizarre comment which was not clarified by the subsequent statement, that he would ‘by no means attribute individual opinions to any of these noble Lords, which for ought we know, they may or may not hold; but we fearlessly assert that their joint report and the evidence of which it is founded, contain conclusive arguments in favour of abolition’.67 The Lincoln’s Inn barrister Edward Webster, at a meeting of the Society for the Promotion of the Amendment of the Law in 1860, thought the evidence did not justify the report, and that the British people would not accept recommendations that went against their love of ‘publicity in all’.68 The response of the journals was not complimentary either. The Westminster Review thought the peers had not condescended to give reasons for their opinions and the Saturday Review observed that ‘the evidence given was extremely inconclusive, and the opinion is expressed without any arguments being adduced to justify it,’ but that the committee was comprised of men of such stature that their unsupported opinion carried weight. In fact, after reading the report and appendix, the conservative Saturday Review thought ‘we know no more than we did, except that eight or nine peers of considerable eminence disapprove of public executions.’69 Indeed, the recommendations of the report were enshrined already in the Bishop of Oxford’s speech when he had called for a select committee, 9 May 1856 – a motion which had no opposition from the government.70 The Lords opposed the reduction in the crimes liable to the death penalty in the bills consolidating the criminal law in 1860. When it came to

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debate the Law of Capital Punishment Amendment Bill in 1866, the limited abolitionism of the upper chamber was apparent: with abolitionist sentiments being uttered by Lord Romilly – the second son of Samuel Romilly and a judge – and Lord Houghton – the ennobled Richard Monckton Milnes who had accompanied Thackeray to see François Courvoiser executed in 1840 – but Lord Shaftesbury believing (perhaps through his work in saving thieves and educating the ragged) that the general feeling of the criminal classes was that death was the proper punishment for murder.71 The Royal Commission William Ewart had long wanted a select committee to be established to study the question of the expediency of maintaining capital punishment – he had called for this in June of 1856, the year of the Lords’ select committee. The Conservative MP for Chichester, Lord Henry Lennox, although a supporter of abolition, offered an amendment to the motion when Ewart again agitated the question of a select committee in May 1864. He suggested instead an inquiry into the laws of capital punishment, a modification which Sir George Grey could support, and the government agreed to support a motion for establishing a commission rather than a committee (because a commission could have more time and be more comprehensive in its inquiry, and because there were so many committees – twenty-four – already sitting), to study the provisions and operations of the laws.72 The Royal Commission was established 8 July 1864 in order to inquire into the ‘provisions and operations of the laws’ in force in the United Kingdom by which the punishment of death was inflicted, and ‘also into the manner in which capital sentences are carried into execution’ and to report whether ‘any and what alteration is desirable in such laws or any of them, or in the manner in which such sentences are carried into execution’.73 Initially established for six months, the Commission was extended until January 1866. The members of the Commission were: the Conservative peer the sixth Duke of Richmond, Lord Stanley (former Secretary of State for India and the heir to the fourteenth Earl of Derby), the judge Stephen Lushington, the judge John Taylor Coleridge, Thomas O’Hagan (attorney general for Ireland), James Moncrieff (advocate general for Scotland), Horatio Waddington (permanent under-secretary at the Home Office, 1848–1867), John Bright MP, William Ewart MP, the Conservative Gathorne Hardy MP (under-secretary at the Home Office 1858–1859), the Conservative George Ward Hunt MP, and Charles Neate MP (whose resolution in early May 1864, praying for an address to the Queen, had led to the Commission being established). There were thus four or five abolitionists

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on the Commission, and those sympathetic to abolitionism (such as the reformist journal Meliora) stressed the fairness of the composition of the Commission, in which abolitionism views were represented.74 The Commission reported at the start of January 1866, having taken evidence from a great number of witnesses (legal, clerical, lay and official), and sought information from American and European authorities, as well as the opinion of British judges (before the Commission or in written statements), concerning the expediency of altering the laws. These responses were published in the appendix to the report. Significantly, the Commissioners forbore ‘to enter into the abstract question of the expediency of abolishing or maintaining Capital Punishment, on which subject differences of opinion exist among them’. But they could all agree that certain alterations in the law ought to be made. Obsolete capital crimes should be removed to end the anomaly that crimes other than treason and murder were capital in Scotland. They saw no reason to change the law in relation to treason where it remained capital (accompanied by ‘overt acts of rebellion, assassination, or other violence’). They took, and accepted, the legal definition of murder to be unlawfully killing another with malice aforethought, but discussed the problems of implied malice aforethought and the relationship between murder and manslaughter (killing without malice, express or implied – a crime which was not recognized under Scottish law75) – the arbitrary rules which had been ‘introduced into the law, which most materially restrict its beneficial operation’. They recommended alterations in the law of murder, presenting the two alternatives of: 1. confining it to ‘felonious homicides of great enormity’ and leaving the rest to the category of manslaughter; and 2. keeping the distinction between murder and manslaughter and dividing murder into two classes or degrees, of which the higher alone (murder in the first degree) would be liable to capital punishment. The commissioners also attended to the ‘important and difficult subject’ of infanticide, where there were frequent failures of justice. Unknown in English law as a crime distinct from murder, and subject to difficulties such as the problem of giving positive proof that the child was born alive, the Commissioners concluded that legislation should render infanticide an offence punishable with penal servitude or imprisonment, where it could be proved malicious and unlawful infliction of grievous bodily harm or serious injury which had led to the death of the child during its birth or within seven days afterwards. Concealment of birth should not be classed as murder. The witnesses unanimously agreed that the power of directing sentence of death, altered by the criminal law consolidation and amendment acts of 1861, should be restored to the judiciary.

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It was also ‘with very few exceptions’ the case that the witnesses favoured abolition of the system of public executions, and the Commissioners thought it ‘impossible to resist such a weight of authority’ and so recommended an act abolishing public executions, with the sentence carried out within the precincts of the prison – one of the commissioners, Lord Stanley, had already expressed this view in public in July 1865.76 Other matters which had been dealt with by witnesses, some of which were germane to the question of the administration of criminal law more generally, included appeals on matters of fact, the exercise of the prerogative of mercy, and the state of the law as to the ‘nature and degree of insanity which is held to relieve the accused from penal responsibility’ – the latter something which the Commission committed to ‘further investigation’.77 Concerned as we are with the relationship between the parliamentary arena, and the abolitionist movement outside Westminster, what was the response to this important development? The declaration by the minority of the Commissioners (Lushington, Bright, Neate and Ewart), that ‘Capital Punishment might, safely, and with advantage to the community, be at once abolished’ could hardly be a surprise. Justice Thomas O’Hagan had also, ‘with much deference for the great authority of those who think otherwise’, declared that the weight of evidence and reason was in favour of abolition. O’Hagan did not sign up to Ewart’s declaration, fearing that public opinion was not yet ready and that there would be an outcry in response to some great crime. He also worried about the impact on prison discipline and machinery, with the substitution of a minor penalty. Lushington, Neate, Moncrieff, Bright and Ewart also expressed their opposition to private executions. Press commentary at the time of the Commission, not surprisingly, was varied in its assessment. The reformist Meliora believed the report was a virtual surrender on the part of the government, and that the questions indicated ‘the presence of greater knowledge on the part of those who put them than seemed to be possessed by those to whom they were addressed’.78 The Edinburgh Review – supporter of criminal law reform under the influence of Henry Brougham since the early nineteenth century – thought that its existence ‘seems to announce a doubt on behalf of the advisers of the Crown, whether death punishment in any shape ought to be continued at all’.79 The Times thought the inquiry had ‘shown more clearly than anything else the inevitable complications and embarrassments of the whole question’.80 The inquiry had taken ‘copious evidence’ but had not – the paper regretted – exceeded its functions, in avoiding coming to a verdict on a court of criminal appeal (proposed by Fitzroy Kelly in 1844,

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but not set up until 1908), the exercise of the royal prerogative, or the legal definition of insanity.81 Charles Neate discussed capital punishment and alluded to the Commission at the York meeting of the Social Science Association in September 1864, at a discussion about capital punishment which was concluded by Thomas Beggs asking the Association to sustain the Commission ‘in the arduous inquiry upon which they were about to enter’.82 As one of the honorary secretaries of the S.A.C.P., Beggs signed an advertisement in the British Friend, entitled ‘The General Election and the Abolition of General Election,’ which noted that though several months might elapse before the report appeared, ‘Parliamentary action upon it may be looked for at an early date in the ensuing session (1866).’83 Indeed, whilst the Commission was still deliberating, John T. Hibbert (MP for Oldham) introduced a ‘Capital Punishment within Gaols Bill,’ in response to the scenes witnessed at the execution of Franz Müller (the ‘railway murderer’) in London in November 1864. It was, according to Ewart in the Commons in March 1866, a ‘sort of self-condemnation of the supporters of capital punishment’.84 The report, in the form of a ‘blue book’, was available to the public, and also summarized in the press – indeed the Duke of Richmond described it as an insult to parliament that the report had been published in a newspaper.85 William Tallack printed his analysis of the report in the Social Science Review, a journal affiliated with the Social Science Association.86 In this essay, which appeared anonymously as a pamphlet, it was claimed that the report had ‘done much to produce, in the minds of impartial persons’, a conviction that the penalty could be abolished, and that the large body of evidence and statistics was on the abolitionist side.87 In 1866 the S.A.C.P., in publishing Tallack’s Practical Results of Total or Partial Abolition, commented on the Commission that it was ‘appointed with the greatest fairness, and the most courteous attention has been paid to every suggestion made by the Committee as to the evidence, and the proper persons to be examined’.88 Ordinary operations by the Society were suspended during the Commission’s sittings, to allow the secretary to accumulate information especially from foreign sources, the least accessible sources for the British public, a ‘labour of much toil and difficulty’. Tallack had also contacted new MPs such as John Stuart Mill in order to seek their support – Mill being candid in his reply about not being a witness on the ‘right’ side on account of his ‘very strong opinion’ against total abolition.89 The Commission was to be cited in future debates about reforming the criminal code in relation to murder, so that its report, at least, cannot be

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classed among the fat blue-books gathering dust on the top shelves of parliamentarians’ bookcases, as Lytton Strachey damned blue books in general.90 Its significance was recognised beyond Britain. The Legislative Council of New South Wales, for example, ordered the report to be reprinted in October 1867.91 The Commission’s role in hastening the abolition of public execution obviously stimulated further opportunities to promote total abolition, and also stimulated anxieties by retentionists that the principle of secrecy would lead inevitably to this state – thus Christopher Darby-Griffith (‘Liberal Conservative’ MP for Devizes) thought the ‘national aversion’ to secrecy would lead to abolition, when the bill for concealing the infliction of the death penalty went through the committee stage in April 1868. Both the abolitionist Sir Andrew Lusk and the retentionist Lord John Russell could view it as a step towards abolition.92 For Dymond, writing his Law on its Trial in 1865, the opponents of capital punishment abolition in parliament and out of doors, admittedly a majority, were ‘change haters’: retentionists such as Charles Newdegate (whose continued representation of North Warwickshire he claimed, subsequently, was threatened by disgruntled ‘humanitarians’), Alderman William Rose (MP for Southampton and previously a Commissioner of the Central Criminal Court) and Sir John Walsh (‘Liberal Conservative’ MP for Radnorshire), ‘fossilised specimens of Parliamentary wisdom’. The next chapter explores the mentality which encouraged the abolitionists to embrace change, and which presented them with alternatives to antique verities.93

7 THE MENTAL WORLD OF ABOLITIONISM Religion and the Rope, Jesus and Jack Ketch; nothing can seem a more abominable alliteration.1 I am certain that the death penalty will not be permitted to continue for many days, if the opinions of the religious community were once changed.2 We have lately heard the punishment of death justified by the argument of the Atonement. When men in order to defend their beloved gallows are compelled to reason as if they themselves were the crucifying mob of Jerusalem it may be hoped that the Respice funem is about to become the Respice finem.3 Gordon Rose rightly emphasizes the fact that there was not a Society for the Promotion of Capital Punishment in Britain, as indeed there was none elsewhere in the western world.4 The gossip circulated in the press in the winter of 1849, in the context of revulsion at the behaviour of the crowd watching the death throes of the Mannings, that the leading waxwork exhibitors, Madame Tussaud and Sons, were anxious to give £1000 towards a society for the perpetuation of the death penalty (‘some say £1500’) was a joke.5 Had such a retentionist society been established it would have drawn succour from the orthodox of the established church and mainstream nonconformity – it was an archdeacon of the Church of England, for instance, who worded a petition against public execution in Aylesbury which deliberately assented to the doctrine that ‘the laws of the realm may punish Christian men with death for heinous and grievous offences’.6 Another supporter of capital punishment described the abolitionists as ‘strenuously doing Satan’s work’.7 In Britain, as in the United States and

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Germany, retentionists were part of the establishment. In the United States vocal opposition to abolitionism came from the Calvinist orthodoxy which was the majority denomination. In Germany the capital punishment agitation followed the clear confessional divide of State Protestantism and Catholicism with abolitionists predominantly Protestant or secular. In America the abolitionist leadership came from the Quakers, Unitarians and Universalists; in Britain Quakers and Unitarians were equally significant in abolition efforts.8 This fact is well known, we have Potter’s fine study of religion and the gallows, for instance.9 The Royal Commission on Capital Punishment gathered witness observations to that effect too: that abolitionism on religious grounds was the general opinion of Dissenters, ‘and that class being very largely on the petty jury list, the opinion exists very strongly there’.10 Religion mattered to both opponents and defenders of the penalty of death, and it is in fact hard to detect, at least in the mid-Victorian period, a distinction between the two sides in terms of a willingness to resort to religious rather than secular arguments.11 But the Quaker involvement in the capital punishment debate has never been dealt with fully, least of all by Quaker historians. Unitarian involvement has scarcely received any mention.12 Potter rightly relates their activity to unorthodox views on retribution, atonement and Bible; the atonement question in particular needs to be considered in greater depth. The period under study saw the beginning of a reaction against a punitive theology, and a shift in attitudes towards pain (although in penology, the infliction of pain – through whipping – remained part of the State repertoire until recently).13 As one abolitionist journalist expressed it, the ‘whole theory of punishment is in a state of hesitation’.14 At the same time, the religious mentality of Unitarian and radical Quaker abolitionists needs to be viewed in a broader radical framework. There was also a significant contribution by individuals from other denominations, including Anglicans. Although press allusions to broadrimmed or bonneted Friends as the archetypal abolitionists did reflect the numerical importance of Friends, it is wrong to see the abolitionist drive as simply determined by their involvement. What occurred was involvement by Christians of various denominations who rejected atonement-centred theology. The religious imperative is rarely absent from capital punishment debate in the early and mid-Victorian years, so that one cannot argue, as some suggested in the 1860s, and as some historians have subsequently argued, that it becomes less important because it is less prominent polemically.15 The Irish evangelical, phrenologist and physician Dr James Crawford Leslie Carson deliberately devoted great attention to the theological aspect in 1868, feeling that it was the aspect least

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considered by abolitionists, whereas the Eclectic had felt able to smile at old charges including ‘daring atheism’ when reviewing the subject in 1850.16 One of the intentions in establishing the S.A.C.P. in 1846 is clear: the presentation of the cause as one transcending political and denominational boundaries.17 Study of the religious affiliation of abolitionists shows many were Quakers and Unitarians, but a significant number were Anglican, and Protestant Nonconformists such as Baptists, and Methodists. Few were members of the Presbyterian establishment in Scotland, or Catholic. The statistics on religious affiliations are not tabulated here since the information on the religious identity of abolitionists is incomplete. Moreover, there was general denominational or congregational opposition to the penalty of death (of members of the vegetarian Cowherdite sect, for instance).18 It would be useful to identify affiliation in petitions for reprieve, yet this is not always possible, and anyway this does not necessarily demonstrate abolitionism.19 Instead of a quantitative approach, we need to look at the qualitative contribution of each denomination. This section focuses in turn on the response of Quakers, Unitarians and Anglicans. We must also consider the importance of people who had rejected orthodox organized religion but who followed what may be called ‘practical Christianity’, the religion of Thomas Beggs and William Lovett, for instance. This phrase is not used to suggest that such people were crypto-secularists: it seems likely that most abolitionists saw a religious aspect to their agitation even when they did not employ the common ‘pressure from without’ discourse of the crusade (and the association of the gibbet with crucifixion is something to examine in this chapter). The common features of abolitionists’ religious beliefs need to be considered.20 According to Potter ‘it was left to prominent families of Friends, aided by a few maverick Anglicans, and their Parliamentary allies to do all the running.’21 This is to ignore the leaders from other denominations, though one might want to class these as ‘mavericks’ too. The contribution of professed freethinkers should not be ignored.22 Yet the history of the earlier abolition movement, the religious affiliation of abolitionists in the Victorian period, and the prominence of the death penalty as a subject in Quaker serials, suggest predominant Quaker support. As in temperance, peace and anti-slavery, Quaker financial contribution was overwhelming.23 The Quaker leaders included Gilpin, Bright, Dymond and Tallack (although Dymond, who was a nephew of the famous Quaker writer on pacifism, Jonathan Dymond of Exeter, 1796–1828, became an Anglican).24 Quakers, at their local and national Meetings, debated the subject and petitioned for abolition and it is clear that the S.A.C.P. hoped to use Quaker networks for campaigning.25 The death penalty was a

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subject peculiarly pertinent, like war, to the Quakers but involvement by prominent Quaker families such as the Barclays, Gurneys and Hoares, measured by financial contributions, was limited. Instead, the ‘radical Quakers’ were the prominent figures, with more politically conservative or quietist Quakers perhaps embarrassed by the political associations to the movement, symbolized by the involvement of the popular Chartist orator Henry Vincent. Charles Gilpin was a radical in politics and orthodox in Quakerism but perhaps it would be wrong to separate the two aspects.26 V.A.C. Gatrell has played down the Quaker zeal for abolition in the early nineteenth century, and study of Quaker journals and reports from Meetings demonstrate other philanthropic priorities.27 The Quaker attitude to the death penalty seems to be one of a matter of course rather than one evoking great activity. In terms of glamour it came well after anti-slavery, peace and temperance even though it could clearly be seen as closely related. The Society of Friends’ efforts in relation to abolition of slavery brought more prestige, and although there was a vigorous debate about the scriptural basis for pacifism and the Christian State’s right to wage war, doing away with the gallows went against an orthodoxy in British Christianity in general, emphasizing Old Testament injunctions about the punishment for murder.28 So even though Quakers had long been opposed to capital punishment the inclination was towards efforts which were more obviously applied to innocent masses, to victims, or which had more ‘millennial’ potential. The Quakers’ public appeal for an end to hanging was therefore not loud or forceful, even when the denomination’s numerical weakness is taken into account. Yet the press and no doubt the public assumed it was pre-eminently a ‘Quaker question’ despite the level of official Quaker involvement.29 They appeared to be the only ones involved in reprieve efforts when the individual had no other supporter.30 When the mill-wright John Thompson murdered his wife to marry the widow Margaret Kane in 1847 there was no petition effort and the only indication that his hanging in Carlisle was opposed was the publication by the Quakers of Seven Reasons against Capital Punishment.31 There were voices raised within the Society of Friends against abolition. During a Yearly Meeting debate on death punishments in 1856 there were three retentionist Quakers, and a total of six in a Full Meeting, against a proposal for a committee to prepare an abolition petition. Joseph Rowntree of York objected that ‘Friends were quitting the safe ground of scripture and substituting human reasoning.’ The Evangelical Joseph Bevan Braithwaite felt (citing Romans 13, 1–7) that the magistrate ‘beareth not the sword in vain’. Gilpin expressed the majority Quaker opinion against men ‘who had dwelt (as it were) so long in the shadow of Mount

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Sinai, that they could not see the teachings of the Mount of Olives with the clearness that many babes in Christ could see them’.32 In the 1860s we find abolitionist Quakers regretting support by some Friends for ‘reactionary tendencies’ as a consequence of Fenian outrages.33 The British Friend was alarmed to hear the subject was even deemed suitable for debate as something in which an alternative to abolition could be moral, in the Liverpool Friends’ Debating Class in 1864: though the man who had taken the position of defending the penalty, it later learned, had become an advocate for abolition.34 Capital punishment was hardly a recurrent issue in Yearly Meetings in the first six decades of the nineteenth-century: it was considered in 1818, 1837, 1847 and 1856. In 1847 it was acknowledged at the London Yearly Meeting that abolition was within the proper scope of Quaker testimony, as identified with war, to the peaceable nature of the gospel dispensation. ‘Friends were encouraged to apply themselves in their respective neighbourhoods to the enlightenment of the public mind.’35 There were Quaker petitions, including Irish ones: 1819, 1848, 1856, and 1867. But the Quaker involvement needs to be seen more as individual efforts, though this was not the wish of Quaker abolitionists themselves.36 Quakers participated as individual correspondents of the S.A.C.P., and as individuals in communities where executions were threatened or had taken place.37 Samuel Gurney visited the murderer Thomas Wicks (an apprentice who had killed his master) shortly before his execution, just before the establishment of the S.A.C.P., and spoke to the governor of the gaol about the impact of public executions on the crowd, and on Wicks, who had been in the habit of attending executions.38 William Forster, another Quaker, active in anti-slavery efforts, was troubled by the impenitent state of one criminal hurried into eternity, when he visited him in July 1849.39 The serial ‘The Chronicles of Heatherthorp’, appearing in Baily’s Monthly Magazine of Sports and Pastimes in 1867, captures the popular identification between anti-gallows (and anti-slavery) and the denomination, in its depiction of the local Quakers, like rooks in the calm landscape of a conservative Yorkshire hamlet, who ‘cause awakening tracts to be distributed at the summer races … they take the chair … at anti-capital punishment and irrepressible nigger meetings held in a preternaturally ugly conventicle’.40 The correspondence with the Home Office from Quakers in capital cases stands out by its Quaker ‘plainness’ or ‘peculiarity’. Though polite, reference to the Home Secretary as ‘respected friend’ might irritate the minister, but though pleas varied according to the case, Quaker petitioning was not radically different from others’ in the stress on Christian

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legislature and the ‘new dispensation’. Thus a Quaker from Reading asserted that ‘by legally killing a person society assumes a right to do that which is expressly forbid by the Christian command “thou shalt not kill,” and also foreclosed the possibility of reclaiming the offender’.41 A Quaker couple wrote of executions as ‘totally at variance with the meek, forgiving, and long suffering spirit of Him whose disciples we profess to be’.42 The Unitarians were also active in abolitionism. Unitarians of national fame included W.J. Fox, Dr John Bowring and the Hill family (including the brothers Frederic Hill and Matthew Davenport Hill).43 There were provincial figures too. In the early 1840s the Unitarian minister George Harris had lectured across Scotland and northern England. At one meeting, in Birmingham in 1840, he had given a lecture to a crowded audience in the Town Hall where he was introduced by Thomas Ryland, ‘the individual who accompanied Dr Priestley from the scene of devastation and outrage, which, forty-nine years ago, that very day, witnessed as the appropriate manifestation and result of the lawless outcry of Church and king’.44 In Sheffield in 1847, as the Sheffield Mercury noted, he spiced his lectures with ‘popular politics’ in order to enlist the ‘feelings and prejudices of the working-classes in his favour’.45 Other provincial abolitionists included Dr Berry, Samuel Stone and James Clephan at Leicester and Gill at Nottingham.46 Petitioning efforts also attracted Unitarians – such as the bookseller John Commins in Tavistock, whose signature headed a petition from inhabitants of the town for abolition in 1846.47 Several of the towns where S.A.C.P. branches were established had Unitarian municipal leaders and their involvement gave the S.A.C.P. the benefit of the endorsement by the town elite. Unitarian links to radical strands within the abolitionist movement may be understood through the idea of ‘radical Unitarian’ circles of reformers, associated with Unitarianism (if not themselves Unitarians). This radical Unitarianism included ‘the adherents of certain reforming circles who came to develop a distinctive ideological perspective’, with links to literary circles, socialism, secularism, Utilitarianism and Unitarianism.48 They include Douglas Jerrold, Serjeant Parry, the poet Richard Hengist Horne, the family of the radical lawyer William Henry Ashurst, and the Howitts. Beggs can probably be included in this group. An elevated social concern, mixing transcendentalism and a stress on ‘progress’ and practical solutions to problems, are emphasized in the writings of Jerrold, the Howitts and Beggs. The problem of capital punishment was to be addressed, just as education and the relations between men and women needed recasting.49 While conservative Unitarians had an optimistic and enthusiastic approach to science and modern technology, radical Unitarians combined this with ideas about the

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importance of environment echoed in the science of phrenology. They viewed themselves as the progressives of the age in education, political reform, sanitary reform and municipal government. They allied with Gilpin and other radical Quakers in support of Lajos Kossuth and Giuseppe Mazzini and in opposition to slavery. It is therefore quite understandable that they should be part of the anti-capital punishment platform even if some contemporaries chose to underplay Unitarianism.50 Unitarian antipathy to atonement theology and an alternative emphasis on divine love and redemption are obvious links with abolitionism. Boyd Hilton uses as a marker of the shift in the 1850s–1860s towards atonement as a symbol of ‘reconciliation’, the praise offered by the High Church Reverend John Penrose for the penal reformer and Recorder of Birmingham, Matthew Davenport Hill’s Suggestions for the Repression of Crime (1857).51 The Unitarians helped create, for critics such as Fitzjames Stephen, ‘a creed of maudlin benevolence from which all the deeper and sterner elements of religious belief have been carefully purged away’. ‘Oh heavens!’ declared the title-page of James Ewing Ritchie’s The London Pulpit, quoting the pungent words of Thomas Carlyle, ‘From the Christianity of Oliver Cromwell, wrestling in grim fight with Satan and his incarnate blackguardisms, hypocrisies, injustices, and legion of human and infernal angels, to that of eloquent Mr. Hesperus Fiddlestring, denouncing capital punishments, and inculcating the benevolences, on a platform, what a road we have travelled!’52 The retentionist position reflected a revulsion against Enlightenment theism and also expressed ideas or veiled anxieties about masculinity; hence repeated reference to ‘sickly’, ‘sentimental’, ‘maudlin’, and ‘effeminate’ by Fitzjames Stephen, Carlyle, Ruskin and even Dickens – who satirized the abolitionists in the figure of Mr Honeythunder, in Edwin Drood. The Anglican Thomas Hill Lowe, dean of Exeter, in a sermon, on Genesis 9, 6, which abolitionists identified as ‘the hinge on which hang the objections of many of our opponents’,53 declared that he was ‘so far from giving in to that spurious sentimentality, which, under the guise and pretext of Religion, would shelter a murderer from capital punishment’.54 As one modern writer has put it, ‘the noose remained a symbol second only to the cross in denoting a tradition and way of death upon which our society was founded’ – manliness and orthodoxy required the gallows.55 Even John Robert Seeley’s controversial Ecce Homo criticized the characterization of a ‘morbid or at least a feminine tenderness’ – against war and capital punishment – as Christian.56 The support for the death penalty given by the Church of England, (like the Kirk, and German and American ‘state churches’), distasteful for disestablishmentarian abolitionists, was a serious impediment to the cause.

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Yet Anglican clerical abolitionists existed, characterized no doubt by a preference for a theology which embraced a merciful and loving Christ. Unfortunately we do not have the names of the 150 clergy referred to by one retentionist.57 There was no attempt to organize any Anglican committee on abolition, reflecting their minority status as well as a desire, presumably, to be above religious party. Some of these clergymen simply held that Christianity was opposed to the penalty of death.58 Theologians who argued against a scriptural sanction for capital punishment stressed the injunction ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ Thus the Anglican clergyman Herbert Mortimer Luckock’s The Tables of Stone (1867) was cited by one abolitionist.59 The widely sold tract by the Reverend Henry Christmas, Librarian of Sion College, voiced clear arguments against retentionist reading of scripture.60 For others it was a position clearly related also to a general liberalism or even radicalism in politics, in the case of Anglican abolitionists such as the Reverend Thomas Spencer and Lord Sidney Godolphin Osborne.61 The scriptural authority of Romans 13, 1–7 was described by one theological commentator as a text for ‘friends of despotic governments, the defenders of war, and the advocates of capital punishment’.62 ‘Our topics of theological contention look but insignificant beside it,’ the Reverend Sanderson Robins commented, in a book on ‘party spirit in the English church’ in 1860.63 None of the clergymen apart from Samuel Wix, vicar of St Bartholomew the Less in London, appear to have been High Church and one, Henry Christmas, had family links with nonconformity.64 For Osborne (who published famous ‘lay sermons’ to The Times under the signature of ‘S.G.O.’) the problem of governance in Ireland, where capital punishment seemed an ineffective deterrent to violence, seems to have motivated his abolitionism.65 Another Anglican abolitionist was a gaol chaplain whose experience with a man condemned on doubtful evidence led him to publish a sermon on capital punishment.66 It is probable that in individual capital cases, Anglican clergy were important figures in local efforts to win commutation of sentence, perhaps especially in rural communities. Roger Chadwick suggests a distinction between rural communities where the vicar and local gentry were involved in appeals into the 1860s and urban homicides involving the S.A.C.P. and nonconformity. This is in fact not apparent from my research in the Home Office archive for this period or from the histories of the S.A.C.P. by Dymond and Tallack and indeed Chadwick offers no evidence to support this thesis.67 Of course support for the poor individuals liable for an ignominious death on the scaffold must not be confused with abolitionist sentiment, though it is likely that a failure to win commutation where there were grounds to believe this should be granted (on the basis

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of doubtful guilt or expectations of a precedent for mercy) would stimulate clerical, or lay, abolitionism. To treat Anglican clergymen as theologically disposed to be ‘hanging reverends’ would be an error, based on an assumption that the Church of England was monolithic and unchanging. If evangelicalism had a retributive tendency favourable to death punishments there was also a redemptive dimension which created a sense of the wasted opportunity in executing a sinner. But the Anglicans who were involved in the early nineteenth-century abolition movement were in a minority.68 What has been said of the eighteenth-century Church remains true for our period: ‘to attribute their compliance with the status quo entirely to selfishness or servility is to deny the moral investment that the ecclesiastical establishment had in the criminal justice system’.69 Clerical members of the Church could support an extension of the period following sentence for spiritual reflection and repentance, and might endorse the call for privatizing executions, but abolition was different. Many Anglicans thought that the Bible clearly advocated punishment of death for murder. Thus the Monthly Packet of Evening Readings for Younger Members of the English Church thought the sixth commandment (‘the Law of Vengeance’) clearly enjoined capital punishment for murder. It also noted that the ungodly Robespierre began his public career by advocating abolition.70 Other Anglicans pointed out the connection between abolitionism and the bloody Jacobin: the Reverend Denis Kelly’s Plain and familiar address on the ‘Articles of the Church of England’, 12 March 1856, quoted in the Church of England Magazine made the same connection.71 Exposition of the thirty nine articles of Anglican faith, as in this sermon, stressed the right of the civil magistrates to inflict capital punishment.72 Some writers explicitly associated capital punishment and everlasting punishment. Moral qualms about the temporal and eternal economies of punishment were noted by the Christian Socialist Charles Kingsley in a sermon in which he detected a ‘shaking of the heavens’. It was to be expected of a generation abhorring torture, and working to reform the criminal, and considering abolishing capital punishment, that there was a ‘general inclination to ask whether Holy Scripture really endorses the Middle-ages notions of future punishment in endless torment’?73 The Anglican rector of St Nicholas parish church in Worcester, cautioning his parishioners about the sophistries and sentimentalities of abolitionists in 1849, warned that the transition from these ‘to the denial of God’s punitive justice in any case, especially in the eternity to come, is easier and nearer than many imagine’.74 The Scottish travel writer Samuel Laing, in Observations on the Social and Political State of the European People (in 1850),

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concluded his discussion of capital punishment with the following proposed wording for the preamble of any abolitionist legislation: Whereas, it is expedient to abolish the punishment of death as unnecessary for the protection of society, inoperative for the prevention of crime or the amendment of criminals, and contrary to the feelings of the humane and pious; and whereas, the said infliction of capital punishment rests solely on certain doctrines of atonement contained in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, and no social or moral grounds of necessity or utility; be it therefore enacted that the said punishment of death and doctrine of atonement, as taught by the Christian religion, upon which alone it is founded, shall cease and be abolished from and after the passing of this act.75 It was a clever way of dramatizing what was seen to be at stake. Yet there were many abolitionists who were shocked, like James Haughton, at the hastening of people towards ‘an eternity of punishment’ without the possibility, beforehand, of repentance.76 Christians believed, after all, that men and women had immortal souls. Strangely, the fact that Jesus suffered a capital punishment was not a point much stressed by either side – though one Anglican clergyman and retentionist seemed to regret that the ‘slow and lingering torture’ of a lofty cross had been abolished, in a pamphlet of 1867.77 There was discussion of Christ suffering the prolonged and deliberate pain of a ‘mode of capital punishment’ which was the ‘most ingenious and severe’.78 One abolitionist made the point that apart from ‘our salvation through his blood’ the crucifixion taught us that a murderer (Barabbas the thief) escaped whilst the innocent was executed – it was the ‘intensified epitome of the whole history of capital punishments’.79 But there was no sustained abolitionist attempt to link the gallows to the cross (Gilpin wrote a short article for Howitt’s Journal which made the connection between gibbet and cross) – the comparisons between Christ on his ‘felonious gibbet’ and criminals were too dangerous.80 Free thinkers had made the connection between a ‘felon on a tree’ and the ‘instrument of his punishment’ as symbol, in 1843. They even imagined the making of one contemporary murderer Daniel Good into ‘our god’ (sacrificed on the gallows in 1842), with the intercessionary role of the wife of the chief magistrate of London, the court-room interest of the Duke of Sussex, and the behaviour of the scaffold mob, analogous to aspects of the Passion.81 The fact that the scriptural defence of capital punishment is ambiguous, and that even the Reverend Dr George Cheever, the influential American Calvinist minister writing for retention, admitted that the Biblical support

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was ‘somewhat limited’ is largely irrelevant.82 In this period Biblical criticism was not widespread in its influence or acceptance, so even a sympathetic abolitionist audience probably shared little of the Unitarian James Heywood’s enthusiasm when he spoke of modern discoveries on scripture dating.83 The Examiner, in a response to ‘The Foul Mouth of the Humanity-Mongery’ at an abolitionist meeting in London-bridge Hotel in 1849, expressed shock at the ‘Jack Pudding’ of the Reverend Christmas, handling Scripture with ‘coarse buffoonery’.84 The problem of the leniency with which Cain, the first murderer, was dealt, was swept away by one pulpit defence of the death penalty, by the Scottish Presbyterian Dr John Cumming, as a divine experiment which failed: ‘many centuries after God looked down and found that because he had refrained from the Death Penalty the earth was full of violence and murder and then he visited the world with one condign Capital Punishment sweeping all the murderous race away in the Death Penalty of the Waters.’85 As a reviewer of the Congregationalist Reverend Walter Scott’s retentionist pamphlet said, capital punishment was ‘a grave theological question’, despite the efforts of anti-capital interpreters of the law to divest it of this character ‘and thus clear the way for reaching bold and plausible conclusions and for enlisting public sympathy with views which they so zealously advocate’.86 This reviewer criticized abolitionists for ‘mistaken views of the divine character’, having a partial interpretation, ‘in surveying the works of God [they] select the grand and the beautiful the lovely and the fair till genius is enkindled and sensibility is delighted.’ God was conceived of as a being ‘possessed only of wisdom benignity and tenderness’, but to dwell only upon the ‘more pleasing and attractive perfections of his character’ was to neglect those ‘equally essential and … adapted to inspire us with awe and fear’.87 Others too, in combating abolitionist exegesis, stressed the inherent dangers of ‘making out for any doctrine or decree of Scripture a meaning directly opposite to its natural or literal sense’ – like other reformers who argued against the traditional and ‘literal’ reading of scripture, abolitionists were arming the infidel.88 Any gradual tendency towards a less atonement-centred theology did not necessarily strengthen abolitionism. It is true that scriptural argument is far less deployed in parliamentary debates in the 1860s, the era of the arch defender of evangelical Protestantism and established church Sir Robert Inglis had gone: it was now the age of social science and reformatories.89 But the jurist Sheldon Amos evidently thought that scriptural support was not quite a ‘dead giant’ when he tackled it in a pamphlet of 1864, though he maintained it had ‘few serious or respectable supporters’.90

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The campaign for capital punishment abolition, while not a ‘symbolic protest’ against the established church, did partake of its nonconformist and voluntarist supporters’ views on the established church as an organ of stagnation or reaction, as a Tory barrier to progress. The abolitionist Buckinghamshire Advertiser, owned by the Wesleyan Robert Gibbs, claimed that ‘only the clergy, the “roughs”, and Sir George Grey believe in capital punishment’.91 How actively was this belief in capital punishment promoted by religious ministers? Presumably atonement and punishment figure prominently in sermons (and not just sermons at assizes, to the condemned, or after executions) and this may mean a discussion of the legitimacy of capital punishment too. John Bright referred in the Commons in 1848 to ‘the threat of eternal punishment which every week was held over men’s head from the 20,000 pulpits of this kingdom’.92 A number of sermons which offered critiques of death punishments have been found. The Reverend Graham of St David’s in Glasgow used his pulpit to preach against the execution of Jessie McLachlan in 1862 (her case involved petitioning for mercy in many Scottish towns) and for abolition: leading one Scottish newspaper to condemn his intervention as a ‘sensation’ sermon.93 Graham had already published a pamphlet on the subject and the sermon was advertised in advance. Sermons in defence of capital punishment were delivered by John Davis, ordinary of Newgate; Christopher Wordsworth, archdeacon of Westminster; and Canon Charles Kennaway of Gloucester.94 The Congregationalist Dr David Thomas’s periodical The Homilist, in an article on ‘The Gallows’ in 1868 was quite clear on the moral duty: For many reasons the pulpit is the best place for the fair and efficient treatment of the subject. And it is the imperative duty of him who professes to expound and advocate the eternal principles of Christ, the world’s Legislator, to enlighten his contemporaries on a subject so vital to the race.95 In Worcester, the Anglican Reverend W.H. Havergal felt it his duty to combat a ‘local disposition to deny the lawfulness of capital punishment’ in a tract which combated Henry Christmas and Elihu Burritt. The local abolitionists were clearly religious people, since he identified many of them as members of the Religious Tract Society.96 But it is probable that most clergy avoided the subject of the gallows, either through conviction of the legitimacy of the capital code or the association of abolitionism with nonconformity (in an Anglican or Kirk context); or in fact through embarrassment and disquiet. Judges were surely not alone in professing

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not to have a well informed opinion on the subject. Support for the institution was shown by gaol chaplains who were called as witnesses before the Capital Punishment Commission, though one of the chaplains, John Davis, had his expert testimony ably demolished by the abolitionist Commissioners.97 On the other hand, there were gaol chaplains who were turned against the death penalty by their experience. Some indication of the pressures that ministers of religion experienced from their abolitionist congregations is to be found in one of Dr John Cumming’s lectures, published in 1852. Most of the letters of complaint he received were upon the three topics of capital punishment, teetotalism and war. Receiving many ‘remonstrances’ about his position on capital punishment, and deploring the necessity of its infliction, it was something he felt was nevertheless enjoined by scripture.98 Capital punishment was supported by that section of the Anglican church finding a Calvinistic voice in the columns of The Record, and by the established church in Scotland, where punishment and atonement were important foci. But nonconformist evangelicals were also supportive of the death penalty. But there were Methodists, Baptists and members of the Church of Scotland who were involved in abolitionism as participants in meetings and Congregationalists and Cowherdites contributed several abolitionist leaders.99 The Baptist Magazine published news of the S.A.C.P.’s formation, and later the General Baptist Repository published the Reverend Thomas W. Matthews of Boston’s letter seeking support for abolition in early 1864, and included his model petition.100 Official sanction did not preclude individual or private conviction that death punishments were immoral. After all, both sides presented the death penalty question as one involving conscience, not party. Capital punishment may not have been a major problem for the consciences of nonconformist ministers to tussle with, but given contemporary debate on punishment, reformation and criminality, it was surely not ignored. To judge the level of engagement would require study of the major denominational journals. Edward Miall’s abolitionist stance in The Nonconformist cannot be taken as representative. Reform of non-capital convicts, the prison and reformatory question offered scope for religious energies and redemption, free from the taint of murder. Redemption for the murderer was controversial. In 1854 the Irish case of ‘ribbonmen’, who had assassinated the land agent Thomas Bateson at Castleblaney, was covered in the English press. The article in Punch, entitled ‘A Good End; or, the reward of the Ribandmen’ recounted the execution of Grant, Quin and Coomey at Monaghan, where Catholic priests had comforted the convicts with thoughts of the penitent thief’s hopes of heaven. The papers worried that the public mind would be

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taught by the scenes of happiness and joy on the part of the condemned, that there was general impunity regarding religious sanction, for all crimes. Surely, the Law Review asked, priests had no vocation to make ‘capital punishment the scene of their own triumph over the fear of death’.101 Significantly, the Review thought that such circumstances encouraged serious consideration of private executions, or abolition. It is not difficult to see why scripture should remain forceful through the rest of the century once the capital code had been restricted essentially to murder: murder could be treated as the most heinous aberration, whereas an earlier period had not bolstered the Bloody Code with Old Testament texts on bloodshedding. Ending the spectacle, and other reforms, made capital punishment more decorous and Christian.102 The situation was one of inbuilt prejudice for capital punishment in British society and especially within the church. One key text was enough. The abolitionists were unimpressed. As Tallack wrote, ‘the Devil could cite texts to tempt our Lord,’ but the threat to the abolitionist cause from apparent scriptural support was not always taken as seriously as it deserved.103 The ideology of abolitionists is examined in its more secular aspects, in the next section, but it is worthwhile underlining an important religious aspect of this ideology here. The impact of radical Unitarianism and what may be described as ‘practical Christianity’ has already been suggested: a religion espoused by radical reformers which eschewed dogmatic and sectarian emphases. It might almost be called a Christian socialism, but for the fact that the actual ‘Christian Socialists’ did not call for abolition. When Politics for the People noted ‘popular feeling sets strongly just now against capital punishment’ and referred to ‘sturdy theorists’ on juries who swayed their fellow jurors, the Christian Socialist organ expressed no abolitionist sympathies.104 Thomas Beggs virtually reduced Christianity to a ‘beautiful moral code’ when rejecting doctrine as mere speculative belief, converting it almost into mere doing good.105 Practical religion, promoted by individuals across the denominational divide, required a moralized and rational polity in which capital punishment would be recognized as an aberration.106 As abolitionists and retentionists sought support from interpretation of the Old and New Testaments, it is relevant to consider, briefly, how the debate was viewed by British Jews.107 What emerges from a study of the Jewish Chronicle, an organ for creating a liberal and enlightened AngloJewry, is the journal’s anxiety to impress on Gentiles the fact that the ‘Mosaic law’ was not bloodthirsty (one abolitionist correspondent in Howitt’s Journal in 1847, for example, had presented readers with an incomplete ‘dark catalogue’ of ‘capital offences according to Moses’ which

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ran to 28 offences108). The point was frequently made in the Jewish Chronicle that stipulations (in Numbers 35, 30; Deuteronomy 17, 6) for the execution of murder which required two witnesses and a warning to the individual about to commit homicide had meant that practically no one who had been executed by the British State would have been liable to execution under the Mosaic or Jewish code. In the 1840s the editor of the Jewish Chronicle took an abolitionist stance, but by the 1860s the general editorial position was one of retention on the basis that the penalty was in tune with the religious sensibilities of a nation which feared God: penal servitude and life imprisonment provided terrors for those lacking a belief in eternity and the divine.109 Yet Jewish abolitionists, such as the solicitor and political reformer Joseph Guedalla, were accorded space in the Chronicle to express their sentiments, and abolitionist sentiment surfaced again in an editorial in 1872 which referred to the ‘bloodguiltiness of a whole nation’.110 Before we leave the early and mid-Victorian associations between religion and capital punishment there is the question of spiritualism – emerging as a significant development in America and Britain in the 1850s. Concerned as it was with evidence of the afterlife, what could be more thrilling than glimpses of the world ‘beyond the veil’, from the perspective of the executed? One instance of ‘solemn revelation’ involved the spirit of William Saville the Nottingham murderer, at whose execution for the killing of his wife and three children in August 1844, twelve young members of the crowd had been crushed to death. An abolitionist, the spiritualist J.G.H. Brown presented A message from the world of spirits which contained Saville’s address to the world of the living, in which he recounted his experience on the scaffold, and his warnings that all would ‘suffer’ purification, according to deeds, in the afterlife.111 American spiritualists endorsed abolition, along with other progressive concerns. A common spiritualist argument for abolition, apart from the general progressiveness that was part of spiritualism in Britain, was the argument that executed murderers exerted an influence over this world in the afterlife, leading to further murders.112 Thus Newton Crosland, husband of the writer Camilla Toulmin, opposed capital punishment, in Apparitions: A New Theory, ‘as the means of giving new influence to a bad spirit’. The electrical engineer Cromwell Fleetwood Varley offered another spiritualist response to the death penalty in a letter reported by the Pall Mall Gazette in 1869.113 Many Christians were led to reject the gallows on the basis that repentance and redemption meant it was wrong to kill a criminal. They felt that Christianity was a dispensation which had replaced the vengefulness of the

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Old Testament with a ‘law of kindness’. Rationalism, whether it was derived from sources such as Unitarianism, phrenology and Owenism, privileged education as the primary solution to crime and general social problems, and produced an emphasis on factors such as the quality of education, environment and mental faculties as causes of crime.114 The S.A.C.P. was established at a period when radicals had faith that humanity could be reformed and that human nature was even perfectible: the ‘moral radicals’ like Charles Gilpin, who were active across the philanthropic board, were optimistic about the capacity for improvement.115 The abolitionist movement also included people who possessed selfconsciously ‘scientific’ or enlightened attitudes to the treatment of crime, though not all those who wrote about reforming the treatment of criminals endorsed capital punishment abolition.116 Abolitionist literature promoted a notion of progress which made abolition appear inevitable, but behind apparent complacency was a belief that improvement was contingent on various moral, religious and secular developments.117 In their writings and speeches, abolitionists offered a narrative of domestic and foreign capital punishment which countered the view that it was a constant and ‘natural’ feature of society. In this way the movement could be presented as a reasonable rather than an utopian endeavour unlikely to be achieved except during the Millennium.118 Abolitionists had a clear sense of recent history and a keen awareness of European and American legal and penal reform, acknowledging intellectual debts to men such as Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham.119 Thus one critic of the abolitionists identified ‘the calculus of a politico-moral utilitarianism’ coupled with ‘a prevailing but morbid sensibility’.120 If the abolitionists sometimes expressed the inevitability of their reform in overly optimistic language, the discourse of progress in capital code amelioration was offered to rebut the charges of naïveté and shallow philanthropism. The discourse provided a sense of identity and offered encouragement. It was both mentality and rhetoric. Chapter 1 described the context in which the S.A.C.P. was established, the great hopes placed in informed public opinion leading the State in pragmatic yet moral reforms such as the repeal of the corn laws and the emphasis on education as an abolitionist strategy. The abolitionist narrative situated the gallows in this framework of human improvement, showing its abuses and the correlation between its infliction and social decadence. As we have seen, abolitionists denied the scriptural basis of death punishment. They claimed that the early Christians had rejected the penalty. They also claimed that the greatness of the Roman republic was to be explained by the Lex Porcia which had abolished death punishment for Roman citizens. The decline of imperial Rome was associated with the

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abandonment of this law, and the blood sports which had degraded and barbarized the empire just as blood shows (cockfighting and matadors) and the gallows degraded modern society.121 British history according to the abolitionists eloquently expressed the link between social decadence and the penalty of death. Their history of capital punishment was a tale of national decline: from a polity where, under Alfred the Great, the capital code had been reduced, or where, during the reign of William I, it was supposed, it had been abolished. The reintroduction of the capital code under the Conqueror’s descendants exemplified the depravity and superstition of the middle ages, a period of priestcraft, warfare and witch hunts. Henry VIII’s reign was singled out for odium, but the reign of Elizabeth, viewed from the perspective of penal record and recreations, also came in for censure. The high point for the gallows was during the reign of George III, the ‘most flagitious and disastrous era that the world had yet seen’.122 The capital code in operation in the Georgian age expressed an age of tyranny, bigotry and cramped intellect – here of course, the abolitionist narrative was part of a wider analysis (by Evangelicals and radicals) of the eighteenth century as an era of cynicism or ungodly and gross materialism. Abolitionists stressed the arbitrariness or uncertainty of the capital code in this period, whilst depicting it in lurid terms as an unprecedentedly sanguine Bloody Code. Commissioner Phillips’s Vacation Thoughts dwelt heavily on the capital code up to the early nineteenth-century, not so much to exaggerate the present day cruelty of the system as to show how an abhorrent institution could be supported by ‘good and wise men’. He rejected the argument that the capital code had only been bloody in theory and unenforced for petty offences.123 Of course, one did not have to be an advocate for total abolition to take this view of Hanoverian penology: a chapter in Charles Knight’s London had characterized this period as ‘gallows – gallows – nothing but gallows’.124 It is true that abolitionist polemic even into the 1860s employed such antique cases as the nineteen year old Mary Jones’s execution for taking some coarse linen from a draper’s shop in 1777 (after her husband had been stolen from her by the press-gang). But behind the marshalling of such an antique anecdote was the idea that improvement was contingent on effort. That the barbarities of fifty years ago did not happen now, owed nothing to retentionists.125 Charles Neate, also focusing on the eighteenth century in his work, Considerations on the Punishment of Death, drew the same conclusions as Phillips: that recent reform of the criminal law could only be perceived correctly if one was aware of moral and intellectual context. The highpoint for the gallows had been a period of intellectual and moral sterility: ‘an age of which Hayley was the poet, and Paley was the

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moralist.’126 Law had reached the apogee of commercial bias then and William Paley’s defence in The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785) was self-serving. Although Neate dwelt on the failings of the Bench in this period – as cruel or unbelievably careless – the State was not solely to blame for the nature of the criminal law. General sensibilities had shaped the criminal code through giving primacy to commercial priorities and, in upholding the principle of ‘English freedom’, in opposing a police force on continental lines.127 The commercial basis of the sanguinary code was also something that the retentionist MP Henry Drummond asserted, in reply to John Bright’s general critique of the land-owner class.128 Abolitionism at its most sophisticated denied there had been ‘golden ages’ in the past. Neate saw history as a revelation of pauperism and materialism. Thomas Beggs accepted that if the past was inspected: ‘we shall certainly not find much ground for exultation. At present, history is little more than the annals of war and conquest ... the history of man’s social progress has yet to be written.’129 But abolitionist writers believed in a progressive view of human nature rather than a static or cyclical model. Thus Rowton, reviewing the Reverend Scott’s abolitionist tract in 1846, characterized him as ‘another fly … settled upon the revolving wheel of civilization, in the imbecile hope of stopping its progress’.130 ‘Let us ask,’ wrote Beggs, ‘was the human race intellectually or morally better?’131 This was in a work deeply critical of contemporary economic, social and gender relations. Beggs was not complacent, but thought retrogression was impossible because truth was guaranteed and diffused by press and railway. Human progress could be demonstrated by the gradual rejection of cruel sports, improved aristocratic behaviour, the rise of temperance societies and a more practical religion.132 Great moral victories such as the abolition of slavery, Catholic emancipation and abolition of the corn laws revealed social progress, and increasing respect for human life and the individual. Abolitionism shared the mentality of that gospel of improvement which was a mid-century cliché.133 Abolitionist understandings of crime and punishment were derived from such diverse influences as evangelicalism, Benthamism, phrenology, Owenism, modern theories on insanity and personal experience as temperance workers or sanitary reformers. Mesmerism, another quasiscience with radical connections, attracted the interest of W.J. Fox, William Ewart and the temporary S.A.C.P. secretary, the Quaker Henry Thomas Humphreys, who also investigated spiritualism in the company of the scientist (and life-long abolitionist) Alfred Russel Wallace.134 The American proponent of one ‘new system of physiognomy’, James Redfield, identified the social faculties of ‘love of triumph’ and ‘love of reform’ in dentition. Warriors, duellists, murderers, carnivorous beasts,

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those who practised corporal punishment, or advocated capital punishment, had broad canines. Murderer and gallows advocate were physiognomically – and mentally – alike!135 Phrenology provided a critique of current penology – George Combe and other prominent phrenologists wrote against capital punishment – and abolitionists who were phrenologists included Thomas Beggs, James Crawford Leslie Carson, Richard Cobden, W.C. Engledue, Spencer T. Hall and MacLaren. Thomas Beggs’ early public statement of abolitionism appeared in The Phrenological Journal in 1844 in the context of the execution of the murderer William Saville at Nottingham, from which readers learned he had nearly one hundred and fifty casts, including a cast of the murderer Rush.136 Phrenologists had a professional interest in capital cases since the murderer offered them a ready-made profile: they knew the outcome and could work backwards from the ‘fall’ or consequence to trace the influences and mental tendencies behind the violence. The subject also had populist appeal. Newspapers referred to phrenological assessments of murderers and the casts of heads being made. Requests for the latter can be found in the Home Office archives. Yet phrenologists might take an abolitionist stance. The Sheffield Phrenological Society petitioned parliament against capital punishment in 1846.137 The phrenological journal The Zoist, which carried analyses and portraits of executed murderers, was a strong abolitionist voice, its founder, James Elliotson, was one of the leading phrenologists and a firm supporter of abolition.138 The Zoist attacked capital punishment from its inception in 1843, using the language of ‘civilization’, ‘humaneness’ and Christian ethics. The phrenological critique never quite abandoned the argument of New Testament rejection of retaliation.139 But the emphasis on phrenological principles flattered followers of the new science that they belonged to a select band who correctly understood mental structure and character formation, while the mass of people, parliament and judiciary were unenlightened. Such backwardness stemmed from a religion that proposed free will – ‘the assumption that a man can be a moral or immoral character just as he pleases.’ People were governed by dogma imbibed from childhood, such as the primacy of the spirit or man’s natural wickedness. Bishops supported the capital code and it was left to a few men such as Samuel Romilly and Basil Montagu to bring about reform. The Zoist called on ‘cerebral physiologists’ to support an end to the gallows. Phrenological abolitionists spoke of ‘slavery to organism’. Their psychology of crime stressed ‘disadvantageous external circumstances’ and argued that the criminal should be treated as a ‘moral patient’ whose behaviour was the result of diseased or malformed brains.140 The law

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should take into account a new focus on the causes rather than the punishment of crime. Man could be moulded and perfected if an understanding of phrenological laws replaced destructive penological and theological views. Since criminals were people who were unable to control animal promptings, capital punishment was an inappropriate response. Indeed it was pernicious, hardening the heart and smoothing the way to crime. ‘Does the specimen of legalized destructiveness, exhibited by an execution, excite the moral organs in those who witness it? Quite the reverse; it is a direct stimulant to the animal organs.’141 And the lowest were not the only spectators. Yet as with other abolitionists, phrenologists rejected the idea of making capital punishment private. The solitary cell and treadmill could not be substitutes for the death penalty but properly regulated perpetual imprisonment could be. It is easy from a modern perspective, to see mid-nineteenth century phrenology as a ridiculous ‘pseudo-science’ but it had widespread support among the advanced and educated. In its primitive psychology and attack on inherited dogma it had some telling remarks to make about legal and theological culture. Phrenologists were rivals of the professionalizing medical orthodox whose ignorance or imprecision concerning insanity could be a useful charge. Phrenologists were right to stress the need to study crime and insanity and to develop a ‘new nomenclature’ for the latter. Not that the association of abolitionism with mental science was without risks – when individuals who were deemed to merit the death sentence evaded justice. Juries would stretch their consciences, one newspaper observed, ‘and listen to the charming voice of FORBES WINSLOW’ – an allusion to the medical expert who declared Townley to be of ‘deranged intellect’ during his trial for murder in 1863.142 The abolitionist position contrasted with a penology whose main emphasis was punishment and not reformation. No doubt many Victorians saw reformation as an indulgence which murderers did not deserve as their victims were ushered ‘into eternity’ without the religious preparation that condemned homicides were offered.143 Public and official opinion turned against the reformatory principle and toward a new severity from the 1850s when reformation was perceived as failing to prevent what was seen (inaccurately) as a rising crime rate.144 The first abolitionist society had concerned itself with prison reform and this became the purpose of the Howard Association in 1865.145 Thomas Beggs attempted to keep the gallows question and reformatory prison efforts discrete in his reply to John Stuart Mill’s parliamentary speech for retention but a hostile press saw both reforms as mawkish philanthropy.146 The critique of sentimentality was an important retentionist charge and resulted in ambiguity in abolitionist statements. Abolitionists proposed

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humane alternatives to the gallows but tried to avoid the charge of sentimentality.147 Although the S.A.C.P. published the former inspector of prisons Frederic Hill’s work on substitutes, there was no party line.148 We need to be wary about generalizations given the far from explicit nature of abolitionist statement on such matters. But the common perception was that capital punishment represented all that was wrong in the treatment of crime and obscured rational ideas on crime and punishment.149 Abolitionists stressed the common humanity of criminals in a way borne of their conception of ‘brotherhood’, whether Christian or not; in contrast to the dry forensic notion of the equality of humans in terms of legal responsibility, predicated by the law.150 Beggs looked to ‘physiology’ to prove humanity shared the same mental faculties, Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine declared ‘CRIME is the bad inheritance of the whole human race.’151 Retentionists such as the historian and professional Jeremiah, Thomas Carlyle, and his emulator, the art critic John Ruskin, were deeply critical of such a view, as we shall see shortly. Abolitionism turned to environmental and mental factors for causation. The pioneer sanitary reformer Thomas Southwood Smith was quoted as an abolitionist in the 1830s.152 Thomas Beggs, a sanitary reformer as well as amateur phrenologist, accepted both factors: rejecting the derivation of human variation ‘from any arbitrary, capricious or mysterious law, but from causes well defined, and exceedingly plain when fairly investigated’.153 Frederic Hill’s study of crime published in 1853 also stressed environmentalism: poor education and living standards.154 Crime was explained by drink too, a common explanation to be sure, in the age of temperance.155 The abolitionists argued that murder itself was not generally committed by ‘those usually denominated the dangerous or criminal classes’ but as a result of uncontrollable temper, mental illness or ‘primitive behaviour’. It was a central argument that ‘crimes of violence are least likely to be prevented by the fear of death, on the ground that the most serious offenders are the most likely to be planned and committed under deep feelings, or under fits of ungovernable passion.’156 The foundation stones of contemporary criminal law, free will and consequentialism seemed redundant in such an interpretation. ‘We are legislating for men who are in a disturbed condition,’ Beggs asserted in a pamphlet in which he scorned speculative and pretentious philosophy; men ‘who have not the power to trace the connecting links in a long chain of consequences. What becomes then of Mr Mill’s restraining influence?’157 But this line of argument contradicted claims made elsewhere that the removal of the gallows would end the lottery in punishment and, through certainty, cause the individual to reflect on results.158

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Abolitionists were unclear about the question of criminal responsibility in relation to insanity (of the distinction between madness and badness, as one pithily referred to the dilemma): presenting the problem as a valid reason for removing death from the code; deprecating ‘unscrupulous’ use of the plea yet resorting to it in capital cases themselves.159 The abolitionist Nonconformist regretted the curse of English society ‘that madness is held of no account except as a pretext for the diversion of property’.160 Often averring sympathy for the ‘wretched’ criminal in individual cases, abolitionists could assert that two-thirds of capital cases involved the law treating as criminal ‘persons who might more appropriately have been treated as patients’.161 Of course, the defenders of capital punishment were critical of the insanity plea because it seemed to threaten the continuance of the penalty.162 Though crime might be solved by environmental amelioration or education there was no agreement about what the alternative to the gallows as a punishment or deterrent might be. Many critics of the gallows were more hostile to its public use rather than the death penalty itself. Newspapers identifying themselves as abolitionist condemned the damage caused by public executions, but this tactic weakened the cause when retentionists accepted concealed executions. There were problems with the alternatives. When transportation was an option, opponents had criticized it as a punishment which was too easy.163 Talk of ‘moral infirmaries’ was attacked as sentimental. Attempts to reassure the public that murderers would be dealt with severely through life-long imprisonment (including hard labour in mines) meant that The Times could gesture towards abolitionist cruelty. Other opponents of abolition also took their ground on humaneness, plausibly arguing – given the evidence that had emerged in the 1820s about the psychological impact that this regime had – against the severe alternatives proposed of ‘substituting solitary confinement, or something as mind-destroying and cruel’.164 The fact that many abolitionists were willing to adopt a stern punitive position is a reminder of Victorian liberalism’s ‘curious relationship’ to ‘illiberal’ State-inflicted penology.165 Some abolitionists denied advocacy of solitary penal servitude for life, yet others suggested a regime of ‘perpetual slavery’ or ‘degraded work’.166 Charles Phillips proposed a future of hopeless captivity, ceaseless toil, frugal subsistence and public exposure: a punishment which derived its terror not from death or intense pain but continuity. The murderer was to be excluded from the world: The prison to be appropriated exclusively to the Convicts for Murder throughout the United Kingdom, to be built on an elevation, visible,

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but secluded, to have a black flag waving from its summit, and on its front inscribed – 167

Charles Neate, however, viewed such an approach – with its melodramatic and typographically Gothic finale – as retentionist. If hanging was ended they would try to maximize what was left – ‘the gaol must be made more gloomy, transportation more terrible’.168 Neate thought the whole scale of punishment was too high.169 Yet the alternatives needed to satisfy, hence the talk of slavery, the absence of commutation and suggestions for refinements such as annual whipping or sending convicts down mines to repent in solitude and darkness. The Nonconformist spoke of a ‘blank Sahara of privation, labour, confinement, and introspection, stretching beyond the visible horizon of life’.170 Substitutes reflected the temperament of individual abolitionists and the disposition of the ‘public mind’. A discourse involving references to moral hospitals became less credible when public hostility towards a ‘liberal’ reformed penal system grew – hence the harshness of some abolitionist substitutes.171 Publicly, John Bright’s tone was optimistic when he described Sir George Grey’s objections to abolition as childish, yet sympathetic voices in the 1860s stressed the problem of finding satisfying alternatives.172 But Bright and other abolitionists felt that individually, and through the State, amelioration was possible. In discussion about civilization and progress the abolitionists were part of a discourse in which capital punishment inevitably featured as a marker of the rise of rationalism, growth of humanitarianism and development of sentimentality.173 An abolitionist such as Sheldon Amos might – it was polemically necessary – deplore morbid feeling. But Amos identified it as ‘an organic outgrowth of our national life’ which would only grow.174 Historical works such as W.A. Mackinnon’s History Of Civilisation (first published in 1828 and revised in 1846), made reference to the subject, stimulated by the contemporary efforts to extend the abolition of capital punishments.175 The Anglo-Irish historian W.E.H. Lecky thought the abolition of the punishment of death would be one of the certain triumphs of rationalism.176 Not all philosophical accounts were favourable, of course. The French founder of the Positivist movement, Auguste Comte, had located abolitionism alongside other ideas (such as a maximum daily wage and the destruction of capital cities), as ‘anarchie intellectuelle’: ‘les dangereux sophismes de nos philantropes sur l’abolition absolue de la peine capitale au nom d’une vaine assimilation métaphysique des plus indignes scélérats à de simples malades.’177

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There was a wider concern about the reduction of violence in society which was expressed by the hardening of attitudes towards masculine violence, especially working-class violence. Although abolitionists were critical of State violence through the gallows, the ‘civilizing mission’ of the Victorian criminal law itself reflected this shift in attitudes towards violence and a changing conception of masculinity which was more selfdisciplined and peaceful.178 Those disturbed by the continuance of the ‘bloody barbarism of the mis-called code of honour’ might contrast the growth in indignation about capital punishment with public acceptance of duelling.179 Interestingly, the S.A.C.P. did not link the gallows to military flogging or corporal punishment – abolitionists tracts did not place the gallows at one end of spectrum of penality which needed to be modified, though flogging abolitionists classed the punishment as a potential capital punishment for trifling offences (and critics wrote of the inevitable need to inflict capital punishments for offences which now merited flogging, if flogging was abandoned180). There were capital punishment abolitionists involved in organized anti-flogging: William Ewart, George Thompson, William Sarsfield Taylor (writer on the fine arts, curator of a ‘living model’ academy, and brother of James Sydney Taylor), Henry Vincent and Joseph Brotherton belonged to the committee of the Society for the Abolition of Flogging in the Army and Navy, or Flogging Abolition Society.181 This was established after a meeting at Exeter Hall, in August 1846, stimulated in part by the death after flogging of Private Frederick White of the 7th Hussars at Hounslow Barracks.182 The coroner, Thomas Wakley, was also a radical MP, and chaired the Exeter Hall meeting, which was attended by the prominent African-American reformer Frederick Douglass and the anti-slavery activist Henry C. Wright of Philadelphia. The flogging agitation led to petitioning efforts, organized through local meetings.183 Although there were campaigns against flogging in the army and navy, and there were critics of birching in schools, capital punishment, limited as it was largely by the 1840s–1860s to murderers, was not usually framed within a wider anti-corporal punishment crusade (the interesting abolitionist story ‘Richard Biddulph; or, the Life and Education of a Schoolboy,’ anonymously published in the Metropolitan Magazine in 1846, is an exception).184 Retentionists did make the connection, thus during a debate in the Commons on Ewart’s motion for abolition of capital punishment, Henry Drummond argued that all would remember that school boys pretended to be contemptuous of the rod, ‘and yet that it was well known that the fear of it did operate most powerfully to check insubordination and riot and enforce order and discipline amongst them’.185 Perhaps most

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Victorian parents did not believe in sparing the birch. Yet the campaign was part of a movement away from the infliction of excessive pain – the chloroform which took away some of the agony of childbirth was briefly considered by the Home Office when Lord Palmerston was Home Secretary, as a way of mitigating gallows suffering.186 The late nineteenth century anti-cruelty Humanitarian League, we shall see, included corporal and capital punishment among its targets.187 Abolitionism concerned itself with ameliorating the capital code by removing the gallows: other humanitarians (and scientific experts) saw their role as proposing improvements in the mode of dispatch.188 One journal contrasted the gallows unfavourably with the guillotine and suggested a steam-powered decapitator instead; but another study of capital punishment in Britain and France stressed the frightful quantity of blood resulting from the guillotine and the greater pain inflicted by the knife than the cord.189 On the relationship of abolitionism to evolving attitudes to pain, it should be noted that The Penny Satirist published an extract from ‘Dr Lichsfield’s Lectures’ in 1837 (which I cannot trace) which stressed the cruelty and barbarity of the punishment through anatomical study of the trachea and a consideration of the ‘amazing amount of suffering which may be comprised in two or three minutes of time’.190 In the year when executions were rendered private, there appeared an essay which purported to reveal the agonies of hanging, by one who had been cut down alive.191 Abolitionists and their opponents debated the morality of inflicting pain in punishment: The Times being critical in 1864 of the attempt to ‘raise a feeling’ against the gallows, and arguing that the ‘moral sense of the community’ remained in favour of the infliction of pain, although there had been a ‘humane process … going on in the public mind during the last fifty years’.192 Yet the response to one clergyman’s attempt in August 1849 to ‘facilitate the notion of pain’ in the mind of a convicted murderess in Coventry gaol was outrage: the Reverend Richard Chapman placed Mary Ball’s hand over a candle flame to make her consider what a century of hellfire would be like.193 Abolitionist interpretation of the State The discourse of progress and the analysis of criminogenesis potentially involved strong criticism of the State. Chapter 3 revealed the significance of liberals and radicals in the movement: men like Charles Gilpin whose distrust of the aristocratic and Anglican State in matters of politics, religion, education, and economic affairs was carried into this endeavour, which confronted the State’s claim to take away life and its prerogative (in the name of the Crown) of mercy. As abolitionists knew, the question of

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the punishment of death was at the ‘very root of all Government’.194 Punch in 1846 satirized the political defence of the death penalty thus: ‘the gallows is identical with the greatness of England. The scaffold is one of the pillars of the Constitution.’195 Abolitionists denied the right of government to punish except on the grounds of social welfare: civil governments were not divine institutions but human inventions.196 They were now dependent on a democratic mandate, and the people were reform-minded, ‘the social, moral, and political improvements of importance which have been effected within the last half century, are due mainly to the force of public opinion.’ Governments had rather retarded than assisted this tendency and Frederic Rowton found a fresh simile when he described statesmen as like ‘the old Margate Hoys – they wait for the wind and the tide’.197 The Economist identified the same spirit of democratic scrutiny at work in a new earnestness about what was done in the name of the people and the conduct of governments, expressed in the capital punishment and administrative reform movements. Yet abolitionists also allowed a positive view of the State, if only it were to accept their scientific and rational approaches to the question of crime and punishment.198 Abolitionist interpretation of the history of the criminal code precluded any enthusiasm for British legal institutions and in their efforts to reprieve the condemned abolitionists were deeply critical of the Home Office and Bench. ‘It is painful,’ wrote Charles Neate about early-nineteenth-century efforts to reduce the capital code, ‘it is even humiliating, to read the debates upon these bills. We seem then to learn for the first time not only with how little wisdom the world is governed, but with how little even of good sense, and good feeling in its rulers, a country may become great.’199 We have seen Neate’s view that the law had too closely echoed British commercial priorities. Politicians accepted that the law should express and represent the authority of ‘public opinion’. Abolitionists wanted to demonstrate public disaffection with the law and characterized the State (including the political elite) as reactionary. ‘Governments do not like to part with any power, and they do not like to part with any power over the lives of their subjects,’ John Bright observed in 1856, adding that politicians were intellectually lazy and ‘quite willing to do nothing except when they are driven to and to make their game of politics in things as they are if the people do not force a change’.200 This was an interpretation of the State’s vested interest which might find favour with modern theorists on death punishment.201 We have seen proletarian abolitionism in working-class papers in the 1860s treating the gallows as the tool of a cynical government against the poor. Capital punishment was ‘judicial murder’ by the State. If abolitionists occasionally dwelt on the culpability

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of everyone in the institution, many abolitionists stressed its imposed nature.202 Some of the abolitionist accounts of the English criminal justice system read like inverted Podsnappery, Charles Neate for instance viewing it as the least moralized in Europe.203 Samuel Romilly, he claimed, combined the learning of an English lawyer with ‘the enlightened humanity of a foreigner’.204 Neate went further and raised the question of the legitimacy of the State or man to give ‘moral lessons’, airing the ‘dangerous and perplexing idea’ that the differences between judge and criminal were merely of ‘external circumstances’.205 Beggs considered it an error to suggest the law had an educational role in checking crime through severity or refinement.206 Given the debate about abolition, it is not surprising that legal textbooks, legal journals and legal examinations covered the question of capital punishment. The University of London in 1866, for instance, asked candidates for the LL.D. and LL.B. to summarize the arguments for and against capital punishment.207 The critique of sentimentalism It has been said, by Sir Leon Radzinowicz, that ‘further reductions in the capital laws appeared as a largely academic issue’. But the engagement with abolitionism throughout the period by critics in the press and in parliament is a clear demonstration that this was far from the case.208 Opponents responded with a seriousness that was itself an achievement for the movement, though The Times made a distinction between subject and advocates: ‘respect we would not pay to the men, at least to many of them, is claimed by the subject.’209 In an unusually balanced discussion of abolitionism, in the Manchester Guardian in 1856, it was suggested that there were ‘certain broad differences of mental temperament and educational training’ involved, as with the differences between Whig and Tory, radical and conservative; it was likely that there were ‘few subjects respecting which people have such a constitutional incapability of judging alike’.210 The writer thought disposition, not a study of statistics, explained belief in the deterrence of the gallows and that both sides were at fault in their disputes – ‘Alternate speeches and alternate publications produce something that bears the outward semblance of an argumentative contest; but it is only the semblance.’ But defenders of the gallows did have a valid objection to abolitionist claims to be representative of public opinion. Unquestionably vocal, abolitionists were ‘uplifted into a vastly disproportionate and undue share of public attention’.211 The public silence of supporters of the death penalty was explained by natural reluctance to oppose when ‘to do so would be to ask that fellow creatures may be put to death’.212

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Retentionist argument that chose to defend itself from a ‘practical’ viewpoint, the predominant position in the Commons by the 1850s, emphasized the deterrent nature of the gallows as a commonsense and rational tool for social security. But there was inconsistency, due to lack of consensus on privacy or publicity of infliction, as to how the ‘lesson’ was mediated. The appeal from commonsense was one mutually reinforced by both camps in parliament and may be seen as the result of abolitionism making a theological defence problematic. Retentionists stressed a rising crime rate and the small fraction of the criminal population who were actually executed. Abolitionism was a misdirection of philanthropic effort even if there was some grounds for disputing the advantages of death punishments, and comparative evidence from other nations was either irrelevant or supported the retentionists. Central to orthodox attitudes to law, crime and punishment were notions of free will, human rationality and consequentialism.213 Abolitionists’ ideas on criminality and their arguments in capital cases seemed to undermine these ideas; opponents ignoring the abolitionist claim that the gallows prevented certainty of punishment and the operation of consequentialism. To abolish the gallows would be to question assumptions on responsibility, the right to inflict punishment and the legitimacy of State authority. Thus, whilst abolitionists were denigrated as cranks they were also accused of infidelity and even disloyalty.214 Thomas Carlyle’s intervention in the controversy over abolition helps elucidate retentionist mentalité, even though his language was hardly conventional. The Diogenes of Cheyne Walk discussed the question of capital punishment with his ‘usual strain of dogmatic wildness’ in Latter Day Pamphlets in 1850.215 He had made his position on capital punishment clear already when he relished Dr José Gaspar Francia’s use of the gallows in Paraguay, in reviewing the life of the dictator for the Foreign Quarterly in July 1843. Alas, your Reverence [Manuel Perez, the author of the funeral discourse Carlyle was reviewing], Paraguay has not yet succeeded in abolishing capital punishment, then? But indeed neither has Nature anywhere that I hear of yet succeeded in abolishing it. Act with the due degree of perversity, you are sure enough of being violently put to death, in hospital or highway,—by dyspepsia, delirium tremens or stuck through by the kindled rage of your fellow-men! What can the friend of humanity do? Twaddle in Exeter-hall or elsewhere “till he become a bore to us,” and perhaps worse! An advocate in Arras gave up a good judicial appointment, and retired into frugality and privacy rather than doom one culprit to die by law. The name of this advocate

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let us mark it well, was Maximilien Robespierre. There are sweet kinds of twaddle that have a deadly virulence of poison in them; like the sweetness of sugar of lead. Were it not better to make just laws, think you, and then execute them strictly,—as the gods still do? 216 He again attacked such humanitarian scruples, classing it as ‘Jean Jacques philanthropy, and universal rosewater’, in 1846.217 Elsewhere – in visiting the Irish estate of the philanthropic Lord George Hill in 1849, he included abolition of capital punishment alongside ‘goose at Christmas’ and emancipation, as markers of the ‘modern system’.218 Now, in the essay ‘Model Prisons’ (the second of the Latter Day Pamphlets, published March 1850 though written perhaps in 1848), he argued that revenge was ‘intrinsically a correct, and even a divine feeling in the mind of every man’. Carlyle presented the execution of a murderer, the ‘Supreme Scoundrel,’ as ‘Didactic as no spoken sermon could be’; an act which must be public. Without such an act there was mere ‘cowardly effeminacy; maudlin laxity of heart’. The essay attacked the mentality of universal brotherhood and love which promoted model prisons more comfortable than the homes of dukes and heroic men of letters. In particular Carlyle opposed ‘that tumultuous frothy ocean-tide of benevolent sentimentality’ demonstrated by the ‘Benevolent-Platform Fever’ and by the character of Hesperus Fiddlestring’ (perhaps representing Gilpin, who had sold an edition of Carlyle’s Past and Present219). The religion which he saw gestured towards on the abolitionist platform he pungently described as ‘the rotten carcase of Christianity; this malodorous phosphorescence of postmortem sentimentalism’. The abolitionist ‘stump-orator’ was characterized thus – in calculatedly offensive language: Within the paltry skin of him, it is too probable, he holds few human virtues, beyond those essential for digesting victual: envious, cowardly, vain, a splenetic hungry soul; what heroism, in word or thought or action, will you ever get from the like of him? He, in his necessity, has taken into the benevolent line; warms the cold vacuity of his inner man to some extent, in a comfortable manner, not by silently doing some virtue of his own, but by fiercely recommending hearsay pseudo-virtues and respectable benevolences to other people. Do you call that a good trade? If this was a response to the conscientious and self-sacrificing Gilpin and others of his calibre, it was offensive nonsense. Yet from Carlyle’s viewpoint, the results were deplorable: abolition congresses, odes to the

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gallows, and, in one memorably horrible metaphor, a dirty little bill to waste the time of the legislature and interest the morning papers, ‘till the abortion can be emptied out again and sent fairly floating down the gutters’. Nevertheless it must be emphasized that Carlyle totally rejected the defence of punishment on deterrent grounds, which he described as ‘mournfullest twaddle’. He allowed that its exemplary function was a ‘mere appendage and accident’. The divine command – and the everlasting facts of the Universe no less – were the only basis for the gallows. Interestingly, in Carlyle’s childhood he had been fascinated by the gallows, as an adult he developed a friendship with the pioneer abolitionist Basil Montagu.220 Did the Carlylean tirade matter? While retentionists could applaud Carlyle and that ‘small and select body of reactionaries’, strangely, the abolitionists did not respond in any great rush of pamphlets.221 In the newspapers, the Wesleyan Jabez Cole of Edinburgh sent a critique to the York Herald, pointing out that a genius had stepped out of his path and had been ‘rendered highly ridiculous, and even blameworthy’. What the reader had was poisoned carrion instead of a feast.222 Another writer parodied Carlylese in describing the public hangman as ‘high and Hero Calcraft, sole possible hero figure, and virtuous doer in these sad times’.223 A contributor to the British Controversialist affected to view it as a ‘specimen of Socratic irony’.224 It is surely not reading too much into the ‘every man’ of ‘Model Prisons’; and all the discourse on effeminacy, enervation and unmanly sentiment by retentionists, to view defence of the gallows as a manful assertion on the part of men such as Carlyle, John Ruskin, Thomas Macaulay, Charles Dickens, James Fitzjames Stephen and John Stuart Mill who raised their voices against abolition.225 The Saturday Review told readers of its review of Phillips’s Vacation Thoughts that the death penalty was a ‘standing protest against the notion that Christianity is a weak effeminate system of indulgences’.226 ‘Do not bring about an enervation, an effeminacy in the mind of the country,’ Mill begged the Commons in April 1868.227 William Gladstone was taken to task for shuddering in his autobiography, about one election placard which, attacking his inconsistency, spoke of gibbeting him.228 The call to abolition may be seen as evoking personal anxieties about what it meant to be a man. The gallows represented the ultimate act of patriarchy.229 Retentionists associated the ‘mawkish sentimentality’ of the abolitionist with a long period of peace on British soil: but for this, ‘a perverted and mawkish interpretation of the sacredness of human life,’ Fraser’s Magazine argued in 1865, ‘could scarcely have attained its wide currency.’ Thus were questions of warfare and national defence associated with the gallows.230

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Abolitionists parodied this. Young England ironically defended the gallows in 1845: did it not ‘tend to keep up the martial manhood of the country’?231 ‘The British Lion,’ Jerrold wrote in one of his satirical series of Hedgehog Letters, ‘those folks think, would be no more than a milklapping puppy-dog, if now and then, there wasn’t given to him a live murderer.’232 Abolitionists responded to the charge of sentimentality. Punch parodied the anti-sentimental position in a piece on an abolitionist gathering in the Commercial Road in London in 1846, lambasting it as one of those ‘milkand-water assemblages of sickly sentimentalists that are continually disgusting the manly mind and nauseating the good old school’.233 Reynolds’s Newspaper also took to task the retentionist who characterized abolitionism as unmanly, in responding to John Stuart Mill’s address (which it saw as a rehash of Carlyle): if Mill thought the age was effeminate, let him read the reports of the London Fire Brigade or the life boat services. Beggs thought it rather too much to be told that the ‘masculine virtues of our national character depend in any way upon the execution of criminals’. 234 Capital punishment represented moral certainty and a religion of absolutes, especially important for someone like Carlyle who had lost his orthodox religious belief and whose religious status seemed to be ‘Calvinist without the theology’.235 Carlyle feared a ‘blind loquacious pruriency of indiscriminate Philanthropism substituting itself, with much self laudation, for the silent divinely awful sense of Right and Wrong’, which may be taken as an expression of anti-philanthropism which was a prominent conservative posture.236 The pessimistic stance of ‘Shooting Niagara – and after’, tended to go with support for capital punishment.237 Indeed the argument that the cause of abolitionism suffered from a general aversion in British society to being ‘improved’ has some truth, though it seems a constant rather than a new situation in the 1850s.238 We shall see that it certainly gained new impetus in the 1860s, just as gallowsscandals were appearing to undermine the authority of the ‘governmentappointed professor of the noose’ as the free-thinker G.J. Holyoake called the hangman, and the whole rickety edifice of the gallows tree.239 In discussing the question in terms of abolitionists and retentionists, there is the danger that the shifting positions that some people took might be misunderstood. For people did alter their views.240 A major public figure who moved from abolitionism to acceptance of private execution was Charles Dickens, from the ironic sentiments expressed about what a fine thing capital punishment was, in Oliver Twist (1837–1839), to those uttered in the unfinished Edwin Drood (April–September 1870). Dickens’s increasing authoritarianism has been seen as representative of a wider shift

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among literary figures who had previously been anti-gallows.241 In the figure of Luke Honeythunder the philanthropist in Edwin Drood, Dickens, about the time that the gallows was hidden away from public view, satirized the ‘gunpowderous’ progressives (such as John Bright) who, seizing their fellow creatures by their necks and ‘bumping them into the paths of peace’, were presented as intolerant and anti-individualistic.242 The consequences, for the movement, of its relationship with Dickens need some study. Dickens’s abolitionist letters in the Daily News in 1846 were his most extensively argued essays on any social question. He handled factual, statistical and psychological aspects to the gallows with a lucidity unusual for him but significantly stressed his rejection of ‘mawkish sentimentality’, an ironic situation given his literary style and the contemporary criticism of his work. Communication between Douglas Jerrold and Gilpin reveals how important the latter viewed this propaganda for the establishment of the S.A.C.P.243 Yet apart from accepting a committee position and allowing Rowton to dedicate a tract to him, this was the extent of Dickens’s connection. Letters from Gilpin evidently called for his more active participation but he made his excuses. W.J. Fox commented: ‘these literary people have no Public work in them after all.’244 Dickens’s involvement may be seen as part of the radical posture of London literary circles, and a position susceptible to change moreover because of his ambiguity concerning crime and violence. He shared an interest in, indeed was a prime exempla of, the ‘murder mania’, and contemporary critics such as Ruskin and Fitzjames Stephen attacked him for his hyperbolic depiction of murders, violence and crime – he was a ‘Newgate’ novelist pandering to popular or lower middle-class taste for sensation. His ambivalence towards crime and penal reform has been ably delineated: ‘strong and conflicting feelings’ of fascination and revulsion.245 By 1849 he publicly rejected abolitionism and refused to attend S.A.C.P. meetings and wrote instead against the infliction of public execution in The Times. His departure has been treated as ‘political realism’ but may be similar to the boredom and indifference which led to his inactivity in the anti-flogging movement. Perhaps Dickens felt sensitive to that accusation of sentimentality which remained vigorous in the late 1840s. By rejecting his previous position of ‘advocating the total abolition of the Punishment of Death, as a general principle’ he rejected less prestigious radical movements and asserted ‘manly reason’.246 The S.A.C.P. unwisely made unfavourable contrast between Jerrold and Dickens in November 1849, criticisms reported and made much of in The Times. Privately Dickens insisted abolitionism would be impossible if demanded prematurely: abolitionists ‘however good and pure’ were ‘unreasonable’ and not to be

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argued with. Subsequently he described them as ‘utterly reckless and dishonest (generally speaking)’.247 The squabble was exploited by retentionists but it is questionable whether substantial damage was done. Rather like John Stuart Mill’s parliamentary speech or James Fitzjames Stephen’s anonymous essays, the assumption has been that damage to the abolitionist cause was inflicted because of the fame of the source. Dickens’s self-conscious toughness might exemplify a reaction to philanthropy in the 1850s but the press controversy merely expressed an enduring prejudice in favour of penal severity and did not simply represent a volte-face by those who had previously advocated mildness. Dickens had been a welcome friend for the abolitionists (even if Douglas Jerrold’s support was equally important at the time) and the abolitionists still emphasized Dickens’s attack on gallows crowds in the 1860s, clearly feeling the need to associate the movement with a major cultural figure. His association with abolition was still recalled in the 1870s when John Ruskin’s Fors Clavigera referred to ‘your modern Charles Dickens manner of Christian who would have nobody hanged’.248 In 1855 the art critic had replied to the abolitionist Dr W.C. Bennett’s gift of his poems by saying he was ‘truly sorry to see you taking up that Dickensian cry against capital punishment’.249 Fitzjames Stephen, who was violently anti-Dickens for several reasons, associated sentimentalism with the writer and attacked both his literature and politics, viewing him as representative of the shallow and untroubled optimism of the middle class. Fitzjames Stephen and Ruskin thought abolitionism naive, dangerous, and moral cowardice, ‘as in hesitating to blow out the brains of a foreign invader’ according to Fitzjames Stephen. According to Ruskin ‘[y]our modern conscience will not increase the responsibility of shortening the hourly more guilty life of a single rogue.’250 Yet both supported a more discriminating use of death punishment rather than advocating wholesale restoration, indeed Ruskin applauded the ‘recent direction of a great weight of public opinion against capital punishment ... the sign of an awakening perception that punishment is the last and worst instrument in the hands of the legislature for the prevention of crime’.251 Even a critic such as The Times could acknowledge that ‘the influence of sentimental considerations’ could not be excluded from the debate, for without the support of ‘public opinion’ penal laws could not be efficient.252 V.A.C. Gatrell argues powerfully that concealment of the gallows was merely the illusion of moral progress, but he also argues that the questioning on the part of abolitionists was important for raising doubts in the minds of retentionists, about the legitimacy of punishment.253 The

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voice raised by abolitionists at least reveals a powerful critique of complacency as Victorians entered what has since been described as the ‘age of equipoise’. Consider the impact on readers of one such abolitionist polemic in The Era in April 1849, entitled ‘Modern Murder,’ in which the writer contrasted the ‘go ahead’ spirit of the age, the refined, intelligent and pious middle classes of Exeter Hall, and the ‘Saints’ as thick as blackberries, with the commonplace occurrence of barbarity and ‘Murder! MURDER!! MURDER!!!,’ so prominent a topic that it featured in household words and everyday discussions. Probably the vehemence with which retentionists replied to abolitionism was partly the result of this uneasiness; but it also represented a response to perceived trends in feeling and thought, which they deplored. As Randall McGowen has argued, the capital punishment debate was a ‘symbolically charged dispute’ – indeed, ‘one of the pivotal contests of the day’ – in which the retentionists saw the preservation of the penalty as necessary to a healthy civilization. Those advocating the State’s continued use of the gallows in the 1860s developed new arguments in which the sanctity of life – an element which had taken centre stage in the discourse as the capital code became focused on homicide – could also be reconciled with the idea of the death penalty as a proportionate response and ultimate safeguard in a modern society where the habitual and violent criminal seemed to be flourishing.254 The relationship of the abolitionists to the State in the 1860s is examined more closely in a subsequent chapter (chapter 9), studying the S.A.C.P.’s policy of ‘embarrassment’ through capital cases and the retentionist responses. Though the offensive against capital punishment failed in parliament the final chapter considers what impact abolitionism may have had despite this defeat. But before this, it is time to examine the impact abolitionism and capital punishment debates had on the fiction of the period, and the role that fiction played in debating the question of the death penalty. Fiction provided a medium for a critique of capital punishment but also for opposition to abolition; it was also the focus of anxiety as a potential source of criminal impulse.

8 CAPITAL SENTENCES

‘Never did a young lady read an exciting romance more eagerly than millions have read the report of this famous trial,’ a disgusted John Passmore Edwards told readers of the abolitionist Morning Star in 1856 after the Rugeley poisoner Dr William Palmer had been executed, ‘the people may be said to have enjoyed its three-volume novel day after day, as the trial proceeded, chapter after chapter of that story was produced.’ Capital punishment was a thrilling or gruesome drama, a history which purported to present a moral lesson.1 This chapter examines the role of works of fiction in imagining and debating the question of capital punishment. As an art form which dealt in narratives of transgression, punishment and redemption, which examined motivation and depicted emotions such as guilt, it was hardly surprising that the novel would be acknowledged as part of Victorian debates on criminality and capital punishment. Other literary forms – short stories, poems and plays – also involved the subject of capital punishment. Indeed, it has been said that as a literary theme, ‘executions probably rank second only to adultery’.2 Perhaps this is to be expected given the number of novelists with legal backgrounds or connections. This means that literature ought to be considered in any study of attitudes towards abolitionism and retentionism in our period, especially if one accepts the assertion that ‘it is literature and not philosophy that has historically provided an intellectual space of resistance to capital punishment.’3 Research in the literature produced elsewhere in Europe and the United States has examined this subject.4 The fictional treatment of capital punishment was not a new phenomenon: Oliver Goldsmith, for instance, had reflected on it in The Vicar of Wakefield in 1766.5 Literary scholars have recently studied the pervasiveness of punishment and the death penalty in Romantic literature.6 Edward Lytton Bulwer expressed distaste at society’s reliance on capital punishment in his novel Paul Clifford (1830), a bestseller

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which was translated into French and played a role there in promoting abolitionism – the socialist Louis Blanc praised it.7 Charles Dickens showed his hatred of capital punishment in Barnaby Rudge (1841).8 Much has been written by Victorianists on crime and punishment in the work of Dickens and contemporaries.9 Those scholars inspired by the theoretical ideas of Michel Foucault have been concerned with the role that such fiction played in collusion with the State – as cultural agents that promoted normative ideas about the solution to crime, or as one of the means by which discipline was promoted, through the panopticon of the omniscient narrator. Such an interpretation has been criticized for underplaying the opposition to the State’s new penal strategies in fiction of the 1830s and 1840s.10 While the reformist agenda of Dickens and Edward Lytton Bulwer is well known, the revolution brought about by digitization allows the historian – and literary scholar – to tap, with less effort than previously, the vast body of obscure, meretricious and ephemeral fiction which, whether merely in passing or in detail, discussed or depicted the infliction of capital punishment, and thus contributed to or reflected contemporary sentiment on crime and punishment.11 The most obvious literary genre to involve the death penalty was crime fiction, which might draw on elements of real murders.12 Crime and punishment featured in penny dreadfuls, novels of sensation, and novels of ‘ideas’ or ‘purpose’. A few of the literary works examined in this chapter were designed to promote the abolitionist cause, a contribution to abolitionist discourse alongside the mobilization of statistics and the insights of mental science. Other works less artfully expressed their authors’ moral revulsion. To uncover the views presented to the literate (and semi-literate) classes on capital punishment in the Victorian era in fiction, one must also turn to the periodicals where novels might originally be serialized before their three-volume apotheoses, and where short stories also featured plots involving the gallows. Fiction particularly matters in the context of the capital punishment debate, for several reasons. Debates about taste and morality, and anxieties about the pernicious influence of the imagination (though defenders of capital punishment argued for the deterrent impact of the gallows precisely on the grounds of imagination13) were involved. The pamphleteer ‘Philander’ observed in 1865 that moral reformers addressed themselves to ‘moral means, by enlisting the imagination at the expense of the intellect’. Novelists, ‘the flesh-flies of the land’ (as the poet William Cowper had called them), had adopted this approach, while ‘sensational tales’ had replaced ‘real history and solid moral literature’ as domestic literature. Such tales involved ‘love adventure, so we have ill-assorted and commercial marriages, which bring up realities instead of fancies, lead to incontinence, appear in the divorce court, and finish off with suicide or murder.’14

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Those keen to abolish public infliction characterized the execution crowd as manifesting the same vitiated taste as the readers of newspaper and broadside trash celebrating the criminal. During the moral panic surrounding the so-called ‘Newgate’ school of literature, the conservative newspaper John Bull condemned ‘tales made pungent by fictitious deeds of dark and bloody villainy, dished up in serial numbers eagerly looked for in the shop-windows all over the town’ and a typographic chamber of horrors. Novelists had introduced readers to ‘heroes of low life, in circumstances which, instead of inspiring moral abhorrence, awaken admiration and a desire to imitate’. John Bull’s response to Charles Dickens’s abolitionist sentiments expressed at the time of the Mannings’ execution was to deny his right to pose as ‘censor of public morals’: he had been partly responsible for a vitiated public taste, ‘especially among the young and among the lower classes of society’.15 In 1841, Charles Knight’s study of London, which encompassed the ‘gallows city’ of the eighteenth century, characterized modern authors as making heroes out of gallows-birds from a ‘shallow, maudlin, sentimental philosophism’ or a belief that imaginative pleasure in the reader would be created by ‘powerful accurate delineation’.16 The abolitionist use of fiction also enabled their opponents to stress the ‘sentimental’ aspect to opposition to the gallows and to locate anti-gallows action in a wider trend towards sentimentalism. Thus in an essay in the Cornhill Magazine in 1864, one of the arch-opponents of the abolitionists, James Fitzjames Stephen, argued that there was ‘abundant evidence that great and increasing weight is attributed to the sentimental view of things. People appear to act, upon almost every occasion, on the principle that a pleasant feeling is rather an end to be desired for its own sake, than an index, pointing to the attainment of a desirable object lying beyond.’ The British Controversialist in 1868 – at the time of parliamentary deliberations about the concealment of hanging – printed an exchange about the relative merits of the sensation novel and the ‘novel with a purpose’, in which one essayist was assumed to have rushed into controversy after reading a novel with a purpose such as abolition of capital punishment: ‘under the influence of the horror of the last scene of all, in some culprit’s eventful history, [he] has rushed into type and typology.’17 Fitzjames Stephen’s Cornhill Magazine essay also observed that the gallows had often been attacked through the medium of novels: through description of ‘the process of putting a criminal to death, in such a manner as to terrify, or even, perhaps, to sicken the reader. Hence, when he hears of capital punishments, he remembers the description which he has read, and shudders himself into the conclusion that things so terrible ought to be done away with.’18 Other conservatives had already identified

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the subversive intention behind novels dealing with penal matters. The anonymous Book of Liberals of 1849 touched on the novel as a vehicle for radical propaganda: the liberal’s sympathies were with the criminal, and ‘often will he spin a three-volume novel merely for the purpose of showing that a savage murderer – though he does not call him so – and diabolic villains of other kinds, ought not to suffer the punishment which the law wisely awards to their offences.’ The liberal author was ‘perpetually exercising his ingenuity on these questions, in the laboured pages of his pseudo-philosophical romances’.19 The question of the relationship between text and reality, between fiction and actual events, was something which engaged apologists and opponents of death punishments. Edward Lytton Bulwer, in My Novel, or Varieties in English Life (1853) argued that often, what ought to have turned the mind from ‘some peculiar tendency produces the opposite effect’. Newspaper accounts of ‘some crime and capital punishment’ did not, contrary to expectations, act as a deterrent to all who ‘meditated the crime or dreaded the chance of detection’. Instead it was well known that many criminals were ‘made pondering over the fate of some predecessors in guilt’. The fictional representation of the dark and forbidden – such as a Richard III or Othello, did not incline readers to murder nephews or wives. ‘It is the reality that is necessary to constitute the danger of contagion.’ Bulwer had defended himself following the reception of his novel Lucretia; or, the Children of Night which had been condemned as providing almost a manual to the Italian art of poisoning, in a pamphlet entitled A Word to the Public (1847), which emphasized the ‘more grave, more forcible, and more enduring’ impressions of the fiction writer compared with the report of a court of law. In a work of fiction there was no single portraiture of crime and morbid fancy was balanced by images of purity and innocence.20 Charles Lamb, who had published works about hanged men, told his friend the radical publisher William Hone in 1827 that a recently published story of a resuscitated gallows’ victim in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, entitled ‘Le Revenant’ would do more to aid capital punishment abolition than 40,000 Romillys or Basil Montagus. This was a recognition of the power of thrilling narrative (which Blackwood’s specialized in), to assist the cause.21 Shortly after this story was published, there appeared a work which became significant for abolitionists seeking to present their cause in fictional guise, a first-person narrative of Romantic sensation by Victor Hugo. Certainly the several English translators of his short work Le Dernier Jour d’un Condamné (1828) – which conveyed the nightmares of a man who journeys from the Bicêtre prison to the place of execution at the Place de Grève when condemned to death for an unspecified crime – were keen to

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see the gallows abolished. When the tale was first reviewed (untranslated) in England, one reviewer, detecting its purpose, thought this quixotic, ‘to attempt a reform in the law by writing a romance, seems an exploit rather more worthy of the Knight of la Mancha, than of a sane man in this age, when the Schoolmaster and sober reason are said to have so much to do with the affairs of men.’ At this period too, total abolition was a dream of a romance-writer rather than a sober politician. Nor could the work be written by a stern Englishman, for national composure would not have produced such a womanish sensibility in a male criminal (another reviewer said the fine sensibility of the prisoner was that of a gentleman and a poet). The Westminster Review was more appreciative, seeing Hugo’s contribution as the typical French equivalent of the work of Elizabeth Fry in Britain, and likely to ‘be as beneficial as it is brilliant’.22 One later reviewer (presumably of the 1832 edition which had a polemical preface) could detect no single line which had stimulated general thoughts on the subject of death or the expediency of capital punishment, while another took Hugo’s claim that he had intended it as an abolitionist work from the outset as absurd.23 Another commentator contrasted it unfavourably with the ballad, ‘The Night before Poor Larry was Stretched,’ attributed to Dean Robert Burrows of Cork.24 For those fluent in French, the Dernier Jour was ‘too well known to require more than to be mentioned’.25 The story was first translated ‘with observations’, by Sir Peter Hesketh Fleetwood, Bt., MP for Preston, as The Last Days of the Condemned. Fleetwood dedicated his work, which was a slightly edited version, to the new Queen. A scornful review in the London Magazine suggested that the translation was by his children’s French tutor and his notes were cobbled together from old leaders of the Morning Herald.26 Another version by G.W.M. Reynolds appeared in 1840, being serialized in Reynolds’s Miscellany in 1848.27 A précis of Reynolds’s translation also appeared in Cleave’s Penny Gazette in July 1840.28 But the work was not reviewed – perhaps because it appeared in the same year as Fleetwood’s translation and lacked a royal dedication and prefatory remarks – although The Last Day of a Condemned (‘without abridgment’) did include a few useful translator’s notes on criminal procedures and prisons in Paris, and criticized the execution of the hairdresser William Lees in December 1839 as one of the most atrocious acts of the Whig government when Francis Hastings Medhurst, ‘who is a gentleman of fortune’, was saved, after killing a fellow pupil at an academy in Uxbridge.29 A third version appeared in 1865, a translation by the barrister Duncombe Pyrke, Jnr., explicitly motivated by abolitionist sentiment in the context of the Royal Commission. It drew praise from Victor Hugo as a ‘noble effort’ associated with ‘the most important social efforts of this

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age’. Pyrke visited with Hugo the crime scene in Guernsey where John Tapner, whose execution stimulated further abolitionist work by Hugo, had killed a woman in 1854. 30 The Dernier Jour seems, from the references in periodicals and books, to have been widely known in the mid-Victorian era. Appropriately, it is noted alongside de Maistre (the apologist for the gallows) in the library of Sanson, in an article purporting to be a visit to the Paris executioner.31 The work’s reception in France has been studied by scholars.32 The British reception can be further traced through literary allusions. It moved the Dumfriesshire poet Caroline Eliza Richardson to verse in 1834.33 The silver-fork novelist Countess Blessington, in 1842, felt it awakened attention to a subject ‘too little taught of in our selfish times, namely, the expediency of the abolition of capital punishment’. A graphic book, it would do more to stimulate reflection than ‘all the dull essays, or as dull speeches, that may be written or made on it.’34 Another leading silver-fork novelist, Catherine Gore, in The Story of a Royal Favourite (published in 1845), featured an anti-sentimentalist ‘steeped to the very lips in Toryism of too vitriolic an astringency to indulge in the weak leaning of the age towards a maudlin and pernicious philanthropy’, who singled out Victor Hugo’s work, and Fleetwood’s translation, when extolling ‘the club of Hercules’ against the ‘stick of barley-sugar’.35 ‘That work,’ Samuel Smiles observed in Howitt’s Journal in 1848, ‘may be said to have abolished the punishment of death in France.’36 It became, according to the Retrospective Review in 1854, a work ‘too wellknown to need much allusion’.37 James Fitzjames Stephen poured scorn on its likely impact, in an essay on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Minister’s Wooing. The Irish novelist Charles James Lever also doubted its impact.38 But Hugo’s work possibly influenced Dickens and certainly inspired later writers. An interesting short story by William Gilbert (father of the librettist) appearing in Good Words (and after, in Every Saturday) in 1866, ‘The Dreadful Four Minutes,’ presented the experiment of imagining quite how much one could remember in the space of two minutes, and extrapolating from that, the duration of suffering someone would endure whilst being hanged, the ingenuity of a sensation novel-writer to invent anything more terrible than a slow death by hanging for twenty minutes as had happened in Leeds or Sheffield recently.39 The narrator wished to find out what the mental state of a criminal while being executed was, and so determined to assist in an execution at Lewes, the interesting ‘two minutes’ in a dark railway tunnel dissuaded him but he was still undecided about the question of total abolition. In a colonial context, the impact of the Dernier Jour on abolitionist activities is difficult to gauge: though there

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are a few references in a New Zealand newspaper (to Fleetwood’s version) and an advertisement in an Australian paper.40 Publishing translations of Victor Hugo’s powerful work was one thing. The abolitionist societies did not sponsor these translations or encourage any campaign involving works of fiction. Perhaps, too, the movement needed to promote the cause on the basis of the plain, unvarnished truth, not risk accusations of melodramatic and unsubstantiated tales.41 Yet Gilpin was a publisher and bookseller, part of the London literary world through his business and through his friendship with the Howitts and others. He is said to have declined to pay for early sheets of the bestselling Uncle Tom’s Cabin: he must have appreciated the propagandist power of that work in the anti-slavery cause.42 Instead the abolitionist voice in works of fiction was left to individuals. One novelist who propagandized against capital punishment without any association with the S.A.C.P. was Dinah Maria Craik, in a novel (her next after the bestselling John Halifax) entitled A Life for a Life, published in 1859. A young curate shocks the gentleman to whom he owes his position by preaching ‘newfangled notions’ against capital punishment from the pulpit and a man atones for killing someone in his youth, as a surgeon in the Crimean war.43 The character of the clerical critic surfaced in other works. The Reverend Robert Armitage’s Ernest Singleton of 1848, a second novel after his highly successful High Church novel Doctor Hookwell, involved a discussion in which a cautious petitioning campaign was advocated, but which denied scripture was unalterably opposed to abolition. It was a line he had taken in his essay on the death penalty in Penscellwood Papers (1846), which was largely devoted to discussing the theological question of animals’ souls.44 In William Platt’s three-volume novel Yorke House of 1862, the abolitionist vicar, Arnold Grey, asks how long the institution would last if judge, jury, sheriffs or even the Secretary of State had to act as hangmen? It was high time Calcraft turned to other ways. But the Reverend Grey’s position marked him, for other characters, as being ‘out of his senses’. The ‘pseudo-philanthropic spirit of the age’ was emasculating the nation, Sir Hugh Walcot declares.45 In the same year as capital punishment was removed from the gaze of the public, Lady Wood’s Sabrina presented another minister, Edward Ferrers, opposed to capital punishment, though the eponymous heroine is eager for her uncle’s killers to be hanged.46 Also in 1868 appeared The Bramble Hut, a twovolume novel by James Hutchings which sought to illustrate the evils of capital punishment through a narrative set in the Midlands in the recent past, and which was prefaced by the author’s plea for complete abolition.47

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Capital punishment could also be rendered problematic through emplotment as well as abolitionist dialogue. Examples of this include works by the barrister, author of legal textbooks and novelist Samuel Warren. His Now and Then (1847) which had been based on a real case, was, according to The Legal Observer, a truth-speaking chapter in the history of our criminal law, and especially in the infliction of capital punishment – Rowton mentioned Warren’s work in his essay on the death penalty.48 Adam Ayliffe is accused of the murder of the son of the Earl of Milverstoke, and narrowly avoids execution – the sentence being commuted to transportation. The Times, in an otherwise favourable review of the work, cautioned Warren: ‘a writer like Mr Warren should guard against unsound inferences, since the over-zealous and too tender-hearted of the present generation will not be slow to avail themselves of authority like his whenever it may please them to become sickly and sentimental over murderers and cutthroats.’49 Warren had earlier penned the anonymous ‘Pegsworth. A Press room Sketch’ for Blackwood’s Magazine of April 1837, in which he had concluded his close account of the last days of the convicted murderer John Pegsworth, a messenger in the tea department of St Katharine’s dock who had killed a tailor, John Ready, to whom he was in debt, and who had been executed the previous month, with an endorsement of the ultimate penalty, as a deterrent.50 However the story ‘Jane Eccles’ in the serial ‘Confessions of an Attorney’ in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal in 1851 (which has been attributed to Warren), was a tale which dramatized the dangers of circumstantial evidence: the case had, according to the narrator, cured him of the propensity to sneer or laugh at the denouncers of the gallows and criminal-law reformers.51 If the examples cited above are enough to demonstrate the existence of abolitionist fiction and fiction sympathetic to criminal law reform, it must be admitted that there was no prominent novelist writing for the middleclass (or lower middle class) who habitually used fiction to mobilize sympathies against capital punishment, as the American novelist of sensation and sentiment Emma Southworth did from the 1840s, in works which sought to make the reader empathize with the condemned murderer, and the tragedy of their families, by stressing a common capacity to succumb to murderous impulse. Though not widely known or popular in England, Southworth’s novels were serialized in the London Journal, including Eudora, or, The False Princess which was set in England (where Southworth was staying in 1861) and which featured an innocent woman condemned to be executed for the murder of her aristocratic relations.52 On the other hand, there were novelists without abolitionist sympathies, who made satirical comment on the movement or the debate.

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These included novels that expressed their author’s dissatisfaction with the operation of the law being interfered with, when the guilty party was reprieved through press agitation. Thus Wilkie Collins’ sensational Armadale (set a decade earlier than its date of publication, which was in 1862) featured as its anti-heroine the murderess Lydia Gwilt, who was saved from the gallows through ‘two or three of the young Buccaniers of Literature’ who ‘wrote two or three heart-rending leading articles on the subject of the proceedings in the court’.53 The comment that follows this touches on the various forces at play in any gallows controversy – the press, the mobilization of ‘public opinion’, the decision of the judge, the position taken by the jury, and the intervention of the Home Secretary and medical experts: The next morning the public caught like tinder and the prisoner was tried again before an amateur court of justice … The general public followed the lead of the barristers and the doctors and the young buccaniers who had set the thing going … The British Public rose to protest as one man against the working of its own machinery and the Home Secretary in a state of distraction went to the judge. Collins was not opposed to capital punishment – The Legacy of Cain (1888), his last novel, referred to it as ‘an act of righteous retribution’.54 Similar disgust, at the exercise of justice undermined by petitions to ‘save every rascal from the gallows – all the more urgent in proportion to atrocity of the offence’, was registered in Henry Cadwallader Adams’ Balderscourt; or Holiday Tales in 1866.55 The three-decker novel Rank and Beauty; or, The Young Baroness (1856) – a work which was scorned by George Eliot as one of the ‘mind and millinery’ species of books – features a five-page discussion in a dialogue about the punishment of death, between the young heroine Lady Umfraville and the gentleman Mr Poynings.56 Inevitably, in novels presenting the reformer as a cranky figure of fun, capital punishment became one of the crotchets that an eccentric character could take up.57 In Christopher Riethmüller’s novel, Aldersleigh (1868), a Mr Maudlin, ‘eloquent on the abolition of the punishment of death in every case except that of a colonial governor’ (an allusion to Governor Eyre of Jamaica) was one of several shallow theorists with pet projects.58 The character of the philanthropic and Quaker bookseller Harvey in Reuben Medlicott; or, The Coming Man by Marmion Savage (a novel in which the eponymous hero broods, to a ‘formidable extent’, on the topic of capital punishment at one point), embodied the suspicion that philanthropy was adopted for material gain. Harvey’s ‘extensive concern in

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humane projects and undertakings was so far from injuring him in his trade, that it served him extremely’. His shop became the principal one in London for ‘the publication and sale of benevolent works and fanatical tracts, essays, treatises, and discourses, of all descriptions, size and pretensions’. Was this perhaps an echo of Charles Gilpin’s career?59 Mr Namby, in Colonel Edward Bruce Hamley’s ‘The Peace campaigns of Ensign Faunce’ (serialized in Fraser’s Magazine 1849–1850), wishes to remove the Punch stall from a village, as the ‘hanging-scene would have the effect of familiarizing the spectators with the ideas of capital punishment, while the frequent personal encounters of the hero with his foe tends to encourage the brutalizing practice of self-defence’.60 Another instance of the capital punishment question as emblematic of the (nonconformist) do-gooder is the aside by a character, Fitzjames, to another, in a London club, in a story of fashionable life by the editor of Random Readings for the Rail (1854) on ‘a spouting philanthropist at Exeter Hall, or the Peace, or the Anti-Capital Punishment, or any other popular humbug’.61 In Arthur Hallam Elton’s Below the Surface (1857), the desirability of the character Sir Eliot Prichard is queried on the basis of his advocacy of abolition during a country house dinner (its defenders including Mrs Clair who loves old English customs too much to support abolition) – just a passing allusion but again indicative of the controversial nature of the cause. Prichard, a landowner, is posing as a man of ‘large views and philosophic principles, a consistent advocate of toleration, Liberal in politics, but no slave to party’.62 There was the character of the bespectacled bluestocking Miss Barnaby in Blanchard Jerrold’s story ‘Faversham on his way to fame’ (1861), the author of Destiny of Woman and a woman for whom no subject was too deep, ‘no question too intricate’ – inquires earnestly of a young man his views on capital punishment.63 Perhaps Blanchard Jerrold had met such women among his father’s literary and reformist acquaintances. In a work of more serious literary pretensions, George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–1872) – set in the era of the Great Reform Act, Dorothea’s uncle tells his niece that he and Ladislaw, who ‘likes to go into everything’ are ‘working at capital punishment’.64 Eliot did not examine the morality of the penalty in her fiction, but her aunt Elizabeth’s involvement with a woman – Mary Voce – who had killed her young child and was hanged in Nottingham in 1802, contributed a central theme of her first full-length novel, Adam Bede (1858–1859), through the character of the fallen milkmaid Hetty Sorel. The Queen commissioned Edward Corbould to depict Hetty Sorel and the heroine Dinah Morris in a watercolour in 1860.65

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The works referred to above were all consumed by the respectable middle-class. Works which primarily catered to a plebeian audience also presented abolitionist views. We have seen already how the radical publisher and author G.W.M. Reynolds had supported abolitionism.66 In the mid-1840s the best-selling working class London Journal which he edited, had promoted abolitionism through explicit comments in fiction such as ‘Was he hanged til’ he was dead’ – ‘may this narrative not be without its effect’ the author had hoped, especially with the ‘immense circulation of this journal’.67 Reynolds kept this commitment to abolition in his newspapers, publishing a signed letter against the punishment in Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper in 1856 and continuing to rail against the law in general.68 It was, above all, in his fiction that he reached a mass audience for his radical political and social views. His bestselling ‘social novel-cum-Gothic romance’, The Mysteries of London, appeared in weekly and monthly parts in 1844–1846.69 It was stimulated by the success of the translation of Eugene Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris (1842), a serialized tale with a reformist agenda, and which itself featured a passage of anti-capital punishment sentiment.70 In the extremely convoluted plot there was murder, execution and resuscitation after being cut from the gallows, and opportunity for Reynolds to explicitly attack capital punishment and the legal establishment (along with military flogging, game laws, corn laws, poor laws, and the aristocratic establishment in general). In the first volume, which was set in 1831, Reynolds echoed the agonies of Hugo’s condemned man. The murderer Bill Bolter – hardly a sympathetic character – is tortured by his dreams of the scaffold and hell, and the author condemns the vindictiveness, ignorance and cowardliness of the Law. The legal establishment is implicated in this moral crime – the prosecuting barrister presented to the reader as a hypocrite who goes from the Old Bailey to his chambers in the Temple to ‘entertain a couple of prostitutes’.71 One of the later characters in The Mysteries of London is Jacob Smithers, the public executioner, whose bedroom, in the loft of a narrow and gloomy dwelling in the notorious slum district of Saint Giles, is described in detail as a shrine to the gallows: complete with miniature gibbet on the mantelpiece from which a mouse is suspended, penny engravings of murderers and his own charcoal sketches of ‘gibbets of all forms, and criminals in all the different stages of their last minutes of life’, gibbet-like furnishings holding up the curtains, and even a life-size dummy victim. ‘Oh!’ Reynolds comments, ‘had the advocates of capital punishment but been enabled to glance upon the scene of horrors.’72 The engraver duly obliged.

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FIGURE 10. Illustration by Henry Anelay to G.W.M. Reynolds, The Mysteries of the Courts of London (1849), 1, p.225. ©Bodleian Library.

Smithers is dressed in the clothing of famous murderers – John Pegsworth, James Greenacre and William Lees. He desires his son to continue in the profession, ‘after all, it’s as good as a barrister’s; for the barrister gets the man hanged – and I hang him. That’s all the difference.’ Concerned by the abolitionist efforts of Fitzmaurice Shelley MP (an echo of Fitzroy Kelly?), he has considered calling a public meeting of executioners to petition parliament, but is grateful to the Tories, peers and clergymen, for their defence of the gallows – and he is particularly thankful to the ‘saints’ (i.e., Evangelicals) who are reviled by the public press. He has named the unfortunate boy (grotesque and hunch-backed) ‘Gibbet’. But the boy views the idea of following in his father’s footsteps with deep-rooted abhorrence. Pariahs, their very touch, Gibbet tells his father, is treated as contamination and even in the neighbourhood’s lowest public house tap rooms, people leave when Smithers enters. Gibbet would rather break stones or sweep chimneys. The room, father and son, are depicted in three engravings by the engraver and publisher George Stiff.73 In the third volume of the completed novel, Reynolds again depicted murder and execution, but with the twist that the man hanged on the gallows, Thomas Rainsford, is resuscitated through the galvanic skills of

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the scientist Dr Lascelles, who has accumulated a collection of murderers’ heads. The judiciary and local magistracy were directly condemned by Reynolds in footnotes, the black cap described as the ‘mountebank piece of solemn humbug’ and legal wigs as relics of barbarism.74 Reynolds’s later serial, The Mysteries of the Courts of London (1849–1856), also incorporated abolitionist sentiment: in one scene in the ‘Cider Cellar’ off Covent Garden, there is the performance of the ballad of Sam Hall, by a ragged and wretched-looking man, the whole performance constituting ‘a tremendous illustration of the horrors experienced by the mind of a doomed being … the man who is opposed to the punishment of death, beholds in that scene an unanswerable argument in support of his philanthropic views’.75 He also published the story of a hanged man who was revived as he was about to be dissected – the scene of the execution being the subject of an engraving designed by Henry Anelay.76 Commentary on capital punishment also surfaced in reviews of novels in Reynolds’s journals, for instance Reynolds’s Miscellany reviewed Samuel Warren’s Now and Then to draw out its supposedly ‘trumpet-tongued’ anticapital punishment slant, in 1848, and Reynolds’s Newspaper reviewed Ann Stephens’s melodrama Fashion and Famine in 1854, this American novel (republished in Britain by Routledge) involved a heroine’s father murdering a villain under an assumed name, and cheating the gallows by dying in his cell. Reynolds’s editorial position evidently lay behind the explicit abolitionism of a melodrama by the Scottish advocate Gabriel Alexander, entitled ‘The Notched Knife’ (1850), about a Scottish peasant girl, Margaret Gilmore, who was fully conversant with the arguments for abolition and willing to be sacrificed on the gallows in order to hasten the end of the punishment of death – a reprieve for her when her innocence is proved, ends the story, set in some future period in Victoria’s reign.77 It is doubtful if Reynolds’s advocacy of abolitionism aided the movement. The abolitionist society was keen to advertise the support of such literary luminaries as Dickens and Jerrold. But Reynolds – teetotal lecturer, Chartist and ‘literary pander’ – was a different proposition. Although his serialized novels attracted a large readership – one commentator suggested his sales in America and Britain exceeded those of Dickens – his novels were condemned for their dangerous mixture of literary skill and sensuality.78 Nor can we know what impact the abolitionist views had on the primarily working-class readers of his serials, who turned from the horrors of the criminals to the vices of the aristocrats as the narrative progressed. Other explicitly abolitionist comments appeared in works of fiction on a smaller scale, such as ‘Richard Biddulph; or, the Life and Education of a Schoolboy’, in the Metropolitan Magazine in May 1846. A character is

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condemned to be executed and the gallows, that ‘tool in the hands of the ruling government’, erected: ‘because it has existed for a long time is no reason why it should be beneficial to society, for the rotten boroughs were a portion of the very core of the constitution for a time, when all at once the sleepy mind of the people awoke and cut the diseased and cankered part right away from the noble trunk.’ The author also condemned the new poor law and flogging.79 Another periodical of the 1840s, Ainsworth’s Magazine, similarly used fiction to discuss capital punishment: ‘our story illustrates some of the most prominent objections to its infliction, but many arguments might still be added,’ Edward P. Rowsell’s ‘A Story about an execution’ concluded – Rowsell believed the topic did not receive the attention it deserved because people thought it a ‘dreary subject’.80 The capital punishment question seems to permeate literature in this period, and not just ‘Newgate’ literature or the newer ‘Old Bailey school’ in which the ‘police-court flavour’ was a characteristic.81 Even journals for children provided a forum for debating the question, when the Boy’s Yearly Book for 1867 featured a prize essay competition on capital punishment in which the opinion of many of the essayists was that it did not deter: Evelyn Douglas Jerrold of Paris, Douglas Jerrold’s grandson, writing dispassionately and fairly according to the editor, was ‘plainly of opinion that capital punishment is not a deterrent from crime’.82 The veteran illustrator – and supporter of temperance – George Cruikshank even introduced capital punishment abolition into his reformed fairy tales, along with temperance, peace and sanitary reform: ‘he has done away with capital punishments for giants, and enacted the Maine Law through all the realms of fairy-land.’83 Writers with qualms about the death penalty could use historical settings, whether the sanguinary age of a previous century or a more recent past, to make a point about the modern horrors of the scaffold. Douglas Jerrold’s The Lesson of Life (1838) used the character of the suitably named Jacques Tenebrae, the hangman of Paris, to express abolitionist sentiment.84 In the novel Self (1845), in writing of the Regency, the prolific novelist of fashionable life Catherine Gore demonstrated her recognition that with the ascendancy of the Tories under the Prince Regent, ‘the party that advocated a standing army, standing war, and capital punishments, under whose auspices, gunpowder and hemp were looking up, and Lord Ellenborough, Newgate, and Surgeon’s Hall, [were] rubbing their hands’.85 To cite another, obscure example, the author of the two-volume historical novel, The Beggar’s Benison, or, A Hero without a name. A Clydesdale Story of 1866, featured a number of chapters depicting a trial and execution, and an extensive note to back up the depiction of execution in the appendix.86

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‘O! There were desolation of gaolers and gallowses!’ Shakespeare’s gaoler had wished, in Cymbeline.87 But capital punishment was a theatrical event, as satires on the ‘Theatre Royal, Old Bailey’ by Punch recognised.88 Indeed, Punch itself took its name from a theatrical performance that involved hanging: Hermann Puckler-Muskau’s explanation of the Punch and Judy show to his German audience noted the argument against capital punishment contained in Punch’s plea to Ketch not to be so cruel as to hang him for his act of wife-murder.89 A critic of public execution, the ‘journeyman printer’ Charles Manby Smith, also made the connection between the ‘vagabond kennel-raker’ or ‘nomadic coster’ witnessing the law descend to the ‘punch-and-judy level, and getting rid of its criminals by the same process’ and the exploits of the ‘hunch-backed worthy’ which accustomed him from infancy ‘to laugh heartily’ at the gallows.90 By the mid-century such shows offered a polite and sanitized entertainment for middle-class children, as Gatrell argues, although a satiric role was still detected by Alphonse Esquiros, who wrote essays on the English for the Revue des Deux Mondes, and who claimed to have heard one showman place words in favour of abolition in the mouth of the (admittedly biased) Mr Punch.91 Charles Phillips had pointed to the re-enactment of murders in metropolitan theatres ‘crowded to suffocation’ with cheering Christian audiences.92 Allusion has already been made to plays by Douglas Jerrold and Charles F. Ellerman, and we have a glimpse of abolitionist sentiment in the applause given to a speech against capital punishment by Adelbert the deserter, the hero of a play set in the Prussia of Frederick the Great, performed at the Royal Effingham in Whitechapel in the 1860s.93 There might also be scope for abolitionist sentiment to be apparent in ‘illegitimate’ theatrical productions of Edward Lytton Bulwer’s Paul Clifford.94 Of course theatre censorship would have prevented any explicit discussion of the contemporary debate on the legitimate stage, as in France.95 Instead, one might see plots in which capital punishment figured – as in the plays of the Romantic era Scottish playwright Joanna Baillie – as part of the conversation on reform of the criminal justice system.96 Later in the century, an attempt to touch on capital punishment in a play by Robert Buchanan and Augustus Harris, ‘A Sailor and his Lass’ (1883), proved controversial. Certainly the theatre critics criticized the melodrama for the lack of taste shown in displaying the Central Criminal Court trial, condemned cell in Newgate, chapel bell tolling, procession to the scaffold (itself not glimpsed) and last-minute reprieve of the hero, even though Buchanan protested that the scenes had been presented without dialogue, as if that defended him from the charge of poor taste.97 Buchanan may have had an abolitionist motivation, but the final two acts,

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with their ‘revolting realism’ and ‘prolonged’ detail were also designed to pander to a taste for the ‘ultra-sensational’.98 It is unclear if there was any abolitionist element to the farce, ‘The Rope Merchant, or the Hangman’s Daughter,’ in 1890 but the plot at least showed that the hangman remained a repulsive yet fascinating figure for polite society.99 More often the theatrical material was exploitative, ‘for everything about hanging was always a hit,’ as the strolling actor said, in Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (Mayhew was himself an abolitionist), when the author recounted the dramatization of the pennywork entitled The Groans of the Gallows (in the mid-1850s), and his own escape from a stoning when the public confused him with the real Calcraft, at the time of an execution at Newgate.100 The editor of the Family Herald in 1851 made the point that the strangulations, smotherings and other villanies of the stage were as morally debasing as the gallows, in responding to a letter from one abolitionist.101 In Letters from a Theatrical Scene-Painter appeared the comment (in the context of a discussion of The Fiend Barber, about Sweeney Todd) that it was a ‘perfectly well known’ fact that ‘the contemplation, or vivid description of an act of wickedness, frequently … inoculates weak minds with an irresistible impulse to do the same kind of thing.’ So the valet Courvoisier, the murderer of his master Lord William Russell, had declared himself to have been brought to the gallows.102 The parallels between theatrical audiences and hanging audiences were touched on in evidence presented to the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment. An inspector of police, Thomas Kittle, claimed that the mobs at executions looked on the scene in the same way as the lower classes at a theatre audience, in his experience, the Drury-lane Theatre had the same crowd, and exhibited similar emotions when enjoying a sensation piece.103 Appraisals of the role of fiction – dramatic and sentimental – necessarily touched on the role that empathy played in the response to depictions of punitive and legal suffering. The writer, radical MP and judge Thomas Noon Talfourd (in an essay on the seventeenth-century scholar Thomas Rymer) had pointed out the assertion by Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Inquiry in the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) that ‘if the audience at a tragedy were informed of an execution about to take place in the neighbourhood they would leave the theatre to witness it,’ and denied this was true of any but the grossest minds. Even those who went to see the dreadful infliction were ‘excited merely by curiosity and a desire to view the last mortal agony which in a form more or less terrible all must endure’. If a tragedy conveyed too vividly a character struggling in the agonies of a violent death it would repel the

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audience, since the reality of human suffering would come too closely home to their hearts to permit their enjoyment of the fiction.104 Capital punishment was part of the natural order in the nineteenth century, and its grim inevitability was accepted in many novels. John Sutherland, commenting on Becky Sharp’s apparent impunity in Vanity Fair, observes that ‘English fiction of this period was ruled by canons of poetic justice, quite Mosaic in their severity.’ Mid-Victorian fictions, he notes, did not feature adulteresses who evaded capital punishment, and there were virtually no unpunished murderers.105 Where murders featured – in novels, short stories, and as anecdotes in memoirs – sentiments of just deserts generally appeared.106 Not that this situation was without its critic. Fitzjames Stephen had written an essay while at Cambridge on ‘The Relation of Novels to Life’ in which he called this preachy poetical justice a ‘taint’, which few authors had evaded: ‘Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton generally puts on the black cap when his hero and heroine are, or are about to be, married.’107 Stephens scorned the fear that a wicked man becoming rich in a novel would unsettle the foundations of morality. By contrast, Thackeray did not shrink from allowing all sorts of villainy to go without punishment, ‘except by its own badness’.108 There was one novel which exploited the public interest around capital punishment at the time of the Royal Commission, appearing as Capital Punishment. A Tale of the Nineteenth Century in 1867: its far-fetched plot involved a murder stimulated by the wounded pride of the son of a wealthy merchant, who had bought a property in the country erected on consecrated ground. The message of Mrs Hodgson’s novel seemed to be that hanging was a justifiable fate for a parvenu.109 If that was a tale of the nineteenth century, what of novels which set out to depict the future? The famous image of the future New Zealander making his obsequies in the ruins of British civilization, from Thomas Macaulay, was used by Punch in 1859 to imagine a future antipodean ‘republic of islands’ in which capital punishment was ‘of rare occurrence’ but not absent.110 I have encountered few British novels of this period on utopian themes which suggested abolition was going to take place – though abolition and legal reforms, Gregory Claeys points out, were ‘widely mooted,’ in utopian works of the Enlightenment era. In 1516, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (which Charles Gilpin republished in his ‘Phoenix Library’) had preferred penalties such as slavery to death, for felons convicted of offences against property (but political discussion in private had been punishable by death).111 One example of utopian discussion of punishment, published in 1840, was entitled The Maiden Monarch; or, Island Queen – undoubtedly an allusion

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to Victoria. In this two-volume work a young traveller reached an island where people spoke English and had English manners and customs, ‘but a very un-English degree of sociability and virtue’. The author discussed capital and secondary punishments in the course of the novel (though not in abolitionist terms), when the hero fell amongst thieves.112 After this period, there were works such as Anthony Trollope’s sole foray into the future, The Fixed Period (1882), which imagined a ‘Britannula’ off New Zealand without the death penalty (but with a policy of euthanasia), and Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, or, Over the Ridge (1872), which imagined a society (New Zealand) where to become ill had incurred a death sentence.113 Another writer used the incredulity of a ‘future historian’ to indicate the strange barbarity that prevailed despite mid-Victorian technological advance.114 The essay ‘Nineteen Hundred’ by ‘F.’ which appeared in the Cape Monthly Magazine of 1874 imagined a world where such luxuries as artificial teeth were brought within the reach of the poorest and that relic of barbarism the noose had ‘happily long since been put a stop to’.115 William Morris’s News from Nowhere envisaged a future where the sacredness of human life did not suffer in the absence of gallows and prison from manslaughter.116 Later still, the American George Parsons Lathrop’s ‘In the Deep of Time’, serialized in an English magazine, presented a society in which criminals and ‘degenerates’ were dealt with without cruelty or capital punishment (but they would be prevented from having progeny).117 This chapter has considered a number of obscure and neglected fictional treatments of the gallows question. But of course, as Charles Manby Smith wrote in ‘The Press of the Seven Dials’, the ‘annals of literature can boast no publication whose circulation equals that of the gallows-sheet’.118 John Leech’s cartoon entitled ‘Useful Sunday Literature for the Masses; or Murder made Familiar’ in Punch in 1849 depicted a disreputable paterfamilias horrifying and setting his attentive family of ragged infants on the road to crime by reading aloud from the illustrated sheets of the Murder Monger – the slum room adorned by engraved images of murder heroes such as Greenacre, and an engraving and a model of the gallows.119 Yet capital punishment featured as the terrible fate of evildoers, in moralistic tales for a middle-class readership. Thackeray – a close friend of the abolitionist Charles Neate – was corrected when, in a lecture in 1851, he suggested that ‘subjecting the young and innocent mind to the ghastly gallows lesson [was] a mode of treatment which has ceased to find favour with those who would be much shocked at being considered one of the rabble’. For did not Mary Sherwood’s story Fairchild Family; or, The child’s manual (published in 1818), a staple of the children’s little bookshelves in

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evangelical households, feature an episode in which the paterfamilias took his children, after squabbling at the breakfast table, to witness a man on a gibbet? …the body of a man hung in chains; the body had not yet fallen to pieces, although it had hung there some years. It had on a blue coat, a silk handkerchief round the neck, with shoes and stockings, and every other part of the dress still entire; but the face of the corpse was shocking, that the children could not look upon it. ‘Oh! Papa, papa! What is that?’ cried the children. ‘That is a gibbet,’ said Mr Fairchild: ‘and the man who hangs upon it is a murderer – one who first hated and afterwards killed his brother!’120 ‘There is,’ declared the Morning Chronicle, ‘hardly an Evangelical family in England in which this lady’s works are not “the children’s library”.’121 This chapter has examined the key fictional treatments of capital punishment in the Victorian period, and also identified some of the more obscure fictional responses to the gallows. A literary scholar might explore in more detail capital punishment imagery: the ‘broader cultural trope’ of the gallows and the hangman.122 As a historical study the ambition has been limited to documenting and analysing those fictional texts which presented the figure of the abolitionist or which raised the gallows question, primarily in the heyday of the S.A.C.P. The final chapter touches on some late-Victorian examples of capital punishment in fictional form. What influence did these works have? Clearly the translators of Victor Hugo, the creators of sympathetic villains like the highwayman Paul Clifford, or of repellent figures like Reynolds’s hangmen, sought to present works which would shape attitudes towards the criminal justice system. Whether these proved to be more influential than the spectacle of the gallows itself, or newspaper accounts of executions, in shaping attitudes, is a moot point.

9 THE LAW ON TRIAL

Abolitionism had an impact despite its central failure to bring about total abolition. Too vocal a current of sentiment into the mid-Victorian era for it to be dismissed by condescending posterity, abolitionism also had a role in capital cases, when abolitionists sought reprieve, and stressed actual problems in the criminal justice system rather than penological theories. The activities of the S.A.C.P. and abolitionists in capital cases is studied in this chapter, which considers the expression of abolitionism during criminal trials through the behaviour of jurors and campaigns for mercy following sentencing, by individuals or groups of abolitionists. The principled men and women who wished to abolish capital punishment were clearly not going to ignore individual capital cases. Even if no friends or relatives were involved in the effort to save a life, as one commentator in 1866 observed ‘at all events some broad-rimmed Friend, some energetic officer of the S.A.C.P., will have sent in a formal statement of reasons why this particular criminal, above others, should be made an instance of his favourite principle.’1 But there was also a strategic aspect to capital cases, which could involve putting the law ‘on its trial’ and embarrassing the State. As Dymond wrote, ‘the most efficacious method of understanding the existing law was to attack it in practical operation, by exposing from time to time, the absurdities, inconsistencies, and injustice to which it gave rise.’2 The Home Office was the focus of memorials, petitions and letters, delegations and editorial comments in the press, and it is important to understand how the Home Secretaries responded to the onerous responsibility of the royal prerogative of mercy when the future of the death penalty seemed at times uncertain. This chapter closes with an examination of the crisis for the death penalty in the 1860s which was partly associated with the attention on the Home Office’s operation of the prerogative of mercy. It was a crisis which the State and the defenders of the gallows weathered by concealing the act of punishment.

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Capital cases: embarrassing the State During the controversy of Dr Smethurst’s trial in August 1859, scrutiny of the criminal justice system was defended by the Solicitor’s Journal by the principle of publicity in the proceedings of criminal trials, which made the nation ‘assessors of the Court’. When the special interests of jurors, relatives, and friends were put to one side, there might still be ‘reflective and reasonable doubt more or less justified by the circumstances of the case’ which the authorities ought to respond to respectfully and impartially. There was, in effect a ‘wholesome’ public scrutiny.3 It might be argued that the abolitionists also contributed to this scrutiny by highlighting flaws in the criminal law system in this period, which included the ‘growing imbalance’ between the State as prosecution and the individual defendant. The poor lacked good legal assistance, especially when they were sent to county goals remote from the assistance which might alone offer hope through evidence of manslaughter or insanity.4 The lack of defence due to poverty and ignorance was something that one Home Secretary acknowledged, in the Commons, as ‘very frequent’ owing to the imperfection of a system which consequently relied on public sympathy bringing facts to the attention of the Home Office.5 The situation was potentially worse when the accused was a foreigner: in one such case (involving three Italians) in 1856 John Coleridge, the presiding judge, was satisfied with the ‘guilty’ verdict though ‘prisoners generally having no attorney, and being foreign, unable to place before the Jury their own explanation of the transaction’.6 We have already seen the abolitionist attitude to the State and judiciary in chapter 7; their critique took active form in response to actual capital cases. In part this was a tactic of ‘improving the disaster’ shared by other pressure groups.7 Dymond, in adopting this approach, followed the example of his mentor the chemist John Thomas Barry. The abolitionist leaders William Ewart and Sir Fitzroy Kelly were in the forefront of calls for wider reform of the criminal law such as creating a court of appeal (introduced in a bill in 1844); and abolitionism stressed the injustice of the royal prerogative system then functioning.8 We have seen too that a number of abolitionists were men who had some connection with the legal world. The abolitionist Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper praised this work in 1856, characterizing the S.A.C.P.’s secretary as an ‘advocate of mercy’ who preceded Calcraft, and pled with the Home Secretary, ‘To travel on circuit with such a mission is to do noble work – although such work entitle the performer to no privileges, and perhaps secures for him little respect from the legal profession.’9 Correspondence by members of the S.A.C.P. with the Home Office shows a stress on the practical aspects to cases, such as the defendant’s

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poverty and ignorance of the laws on homicide.10 Men such as Dymond, Tallack and Bright acquired experience through reprieve activities, in the workings of the criminal law system, and in the factors behind acts of homicide. The authority of abolitionists in this subject may be seen in the hard questioning they gave the Royal Commission witnesses. They were men who had scrutinized the system. Not all abolitionists had this intimate knowledge of the legal system and its flaws, but to the extent that leading figures built up experience of the criminal justice system, they avoid the charge levelled by Brian Harrison against many Victorian pressure groups, of diversion of attention ‘from more serious problems, from better remedies ... serious social investigation’.11 In capital cases the written communications to the Home Office from S.A.C.P. officers conveyed mitigatory facts or doubts as to the evidence, and pointed to recent cases with similar features. Thus in the case of Thomas Corrigan, a man whose social decline had been brought about by drink, and who stabbed his wife with a razor in early 1856 under the influence of delirium tremens, the convict’s circumstances were contrasted favourably with those of the clerk Charles Westron who had been reprieved on the grounds of insanity. Westron had undoubtedly, Dymond argued, been impelled to kill his lawyer George Waugh by the ‘impulse of an insane delusion’ but had been fully aware of the nature of his act – who could suppose this consciousness of the act existed in Corrigan’s case?12 Sir George Grey himself minuted his own concerns about a case ‘of a very peculiar nature’, which he ‘anxiously & repeatedly reconsidered’.13 Corrigan, reprieved, became a missionary in Australia.14 Dymond attempted to get a reprieve for William Bousfield (a French polisher by trade, who had murdered his wife and three children at their home in Soho) in the same year by emphasizing a ‘similar’ case, that of Mrs Mary Ann Brough (who had murdered her six children in 1854); as well as pointing to Corrigan’s recent reprieve and observing that ‘a bold act of humanity on the part of the Home Secretary will be well appreciated by all right thinking men.’15 He failed to convince and Bousfield, who had been badly burned in throwing himself into the fire of his cell, endured a shocking execution. Allegedly the ‘roughs’ of ill-famed Kent Street had threatened, by letter, to shoot Calcraft if the execution went ahead.16 As one newspaper recalled, the circumstances of the execution ‘might have shocked the humanity of Thomas Carlyle’.17 There was little appeal to abstract principle; and whilst Sir George Grey claimed that this was a situation enforced by the Home department, the tenor of Dymond’s The Law on its Trial is the emphasis on the practical flaws of the legal system, so that his motivation was not simply Quaker scruples but the evident failings of the law.18 In the capital cases studied

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there are occasional references to the inequality of the poor in legal matters: ‘I need not remind you,’ John Bright wrote (in 1856) in the case of an Irishman from Manchester, Andrew Bracken, who had committed homicide whilst drunk, ‘of the desperate odds against a man in such a situation – ignorant, poor and all but undefended, nothing is more likely than a decision contrary to the truth of the facts, and contrary to justice.’19 Did the abolitionist activity in capital cases have any practical result in terms of greater leniency or harshness in the exercise of the royal prerogative of mercy? The Law on its Trial makes the claim that in several cases abolitionists promoted precedents which allowed the reprieve of individuals.20 But the capital cases involving S.A.C.P. members studied show virtually no such influence.21 Two instances have been found of Dymond suggesting relevant precedents in support of mitigation which appear to have swayed the Home Secretary: Elizabeth McIntosh (convicted of the infanticide of her child) and Joseph Richards (a nightwatchmen who had stabbed a man living with his family with a ‘common house knife’ whilst drunk) in 1855.22 Several of the S.A.C.P. letters were sent in quite early on in appeals, on other occasions the decision to commute had actually been made before the S.A.C.P. intervened.23 The society in its reports liked to describe cases which had resulted in commutation and in which it was involved as ‘successful’ as if its input had been important.24 Perhaps there are more instances of the society successfully suggesting some mitigatory factor or precedent, but Dymond kept a tactful silence if there were. The abolitionists hardly wanted opponents to be able to call them unconstitutional and the informal contacts which may have helped were not likely to be recorded.25 It can be argued that abolitionist activity in capital cases was an irritant and harmed the greater cause because it could be made to appear philanthropy for the wicked. This was a charge repeated by critics of the abolitionists, most vehemently by Carlyle in ‘Model Prisons’. ‘By aiming at the particular case,’ the Law Times argued, rather than objecting on principle, ‘they offend the good sense of the community no less than they discredit their own cause.’26 Retentionists presented the abolitionist effort as unprincipled and promoting injustice. Although there were letters from individuals in favour of abolition who do not appear to have been linked to the S.A.C.P., there were also letters from people who took care to identify themselves with the justice in general of capital punishments.27 Memorials from named and anonymous individuals (overwhelmingly men) who opposed campaigns to have the death sentence commuted, reiterated the view that divine and human laws demanded death. Individuals hid behind pompous titles such as

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‘Paterfamilias’ or ‘British Citizen’ to attack the Home Secretary for moral cowardice and ‘humanity mongering’.28 Petitions sent to the Home Office in homicide cases often asserted non-sentimental and anti-abolitionist credentials. Justices of the peace from Birmingham petitioning in the case of George Hall, a jewel stamper who had murdered his wife in February 1864, felt obliged to record their desire for mercy from ‘particular circumstances’ rather than ‘as objecting to capital punishment itself’.29 In the case of the nineteen-year old James Bailey (who had murdered a girl, Eliza Coles, in his village in Somerset), a vicar appealing to the Home Office wrote: ‘I would add that I am not one of those who think the crime of murder should not be expiated by death.’30 A correspondent who asked for mercy for Samuel Wright, William Thomas Hime of Louth, Lincolnshire, informed Grey, ‘I would not shrink, if need were, from performing Calcraft’s office; for I am no mere sentimentalist.’31 Memorials with a strong tone of retributive righteousness record outrage at interference in the course of justice. One correspondent in the case of George Hall, criticizing Quaker and working-class efforts at petitioning in Birmingham, affirmed his desire to support ‘an upright statesman in the discharge of a great and sad duty’. The correspondent described the petitioning which involved men, women and children signing a document on a board by the town hall and illuminated by a candle in a pop-bottle.32 ‘A lover of Justice’ also deprecated these efforts at reprieve, especially by the men of Thomas Webb Jones’ saddlery works at Birmingham. Dissatisfaction was natural since the scandal of George Victor Townley’s reprieve, but ‘why should justice give way to sentimentality under the name of mercy?’: the writer lectured Grey on the arguments for capital punishment since it was a time when people were boldly advocating ‘the total abolition of capital punishment in all cases’. But George Hall was reprieved by the Home Secretary after a huge number of petitioners begged for mercy.33 The abolitionist principle appeared to get in the way of legitimate appeals for mercy, a view which was expressed by some self-identified abolitionists too. An abolitionist memorialist in the case of Captain Henry Rogers of the Martha and Jane, who had been responsible for mistreating and eventually throwing overboard a seaman, Andrew Rose, in 1857, expressed the opinion that all who had been executed previously would have to be considered murdered by the State if the convict was saved.34 Dymond made the astute comment on retentionists who had ‘little to say about man’s fallibility, but much about retributive justice’ yet who fell out with the system in detail when attempting to get individuals reprieved; the converse was that some who were in favour of abolition fell out with their

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principles when it came to some criminals (Terence Murray’s response to Fenian outrages in Australia in 1868 is an example).35 It might be argued that the policy of embarrassing the State was selfdefeating by reducing any sympathy that those in authority may have had for the cause. Rose has provided some suggestive remarks on the Howard League: persuasion rather than a frontal attack could alone succeed – ‘the League’s influence depends not so much on its opposition to the powers that could be as on its friendliness with them.’36 To make a nuisance is to shut oneself out. In capital cases this was true, and the correspondence of the secretaries and abolitionists such as Bright and Gilpin were on the whole tactful and moderate. The correspondence shows an understanding that there was little point rehearsing abolitionist views. Their approach was designed to persuade by allaying fears about undue pressure – through appeal to precedent, to the specific mitigatory factors rather than the abstract principles.37 An occasional sting in the tail of S.A.C.P. letters was reference to a public opinion which would be displeased if mercy was withheld. Thus in the case of Lagava, Barbalano and Petrici, Italian youths tried in the Winchester Assizes for murder on the high seas in 1856, Dymond wrote to Sir George Grey: ‘You can hardly be insensible to the fact, that public opinion – by no means satisfied with the infliction of death punishments in any case, jealously scrutinizes every decision of the Executive.’ He went on to claim that less lenient exercise of the royal prerogative during the last six months had ‘sorely shaken public confidence’ in the willingness of the Home Office to exercise this power.38 The youths were executed outside Winchester gaol. When writing to the Home Secretary in the case of Andrew Bracken in the same year, Dymond claimed ‘a desire to represent each case in a spirit of fairness and truthfulness’ rather than intrude opinions unjustified by ‘reasonable evidence’. Dymond claimed there was a prevalent public belief that the Home Secretary was not as merciful and liberal as previously, due to the ‘censures of some timid but influential personages’ who wished for a return to the ‘severity of bye-gone years’. It was not for Dymond to comment on this belief, but he did point out to the Home Secretary the obligation, as a servant of the Queen, to show mercy regardless of temporary criticism produced through ‘one or two grave descriptions of the offence of murder’. But critics certainly saw the abolitionists as using ‘false and ridiculous pretexts’.39 Surviving letters in the Home Office files also convey only one aspect of the abolitionist activity in capital cases. The Law on its Trial recalled the hunting down of Sir George Grey, the Home Secretary, like a deer. If he managed to elude the deputations at the Home Office in the Treasury

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buildings at Whitehall, ‘the deputation’s representative’ would be in the Commons ‘squatting like the tempter at Eve’s ear upon the front bench, ready to whisper insidious suggestions that sadly mar his peace’. Dymond even refers to visitations at Fallodon, Grey’s country seat in Northumberland.40 Dymond had some appreciation that such action amounted to persecution, with a ‘stern negative’ as the ministerial defence.41 Punch in 1854 carried a paragraph in response to news in the daily press in March that a fund for the defence of Moses Hatto, the murderer in the atrocious Burnham Abbey Farm case, had included a donation from the S.A.C.P. This was ‘no half-hearted’ way to go about preventing the punishment, the journal observed.42 Unprincipled support for murderers was a charge that opponents levelled at abolitionists in order to damage them but any amount of tact about the Home Office’s exercise of the royal prerogative would not have furthered abolitionism itself.43 Yet there clearly was a hope that gallows-scandals, when they unfortunately took place, would further the cause by offering up subversive ‘lessons of the scaffold’ for the public and authority. Another instance of abolitionist activity should be considered too: the presence of abolitionists on the jury.44 For some abolitionists, indeed, faced by parliamentary intransigence, the way to reform was not via the senate but via jurors. As the Eclectic Review declared in 1850, if but one hundred persons publicly refused to serve as jurors in capital cases: ‘the gibbet will become fuel for a bonfire in 1851.’ By the jury-box, the law of blood would be made inoperative.45 Some men, like Charles Gilpin, did refuse to be sworn in, on principled grounds.46 One of Charles Dickens’s letters to the Daily News had asserted his willingness to evade his duty on the facts, and claim a murderer was mad rather than hang him.47 According to an expert on psychological medicine, John Charles Bucknill, in his prize-winning Unsoundness of Mind in Relation to Criminal Acts in 1854: ‘The feeling against capital punishment is spreading among the class of men from which common juries are taken; and sooner or later the executive will be compelled to devise the means of inflicting severe secondary punishment.’48 The following instances of reported juror abolitionism were the subject of comment in the press. In Edinburgh in 1847 there was the case of jurors’ recommendation for mercy, from aversion to capital punishment, at the trial of Thomas Leith, who had maltreated his wife and then attempted to get rid of her with arsenic: the Caledonian Mercury deplored the sway of ‘radically false feelings’ over a section of the community.49 The Times expressed outrage that there were jurors at the three-day trial in York of the youths James Breckon, George Barker and Thomas Raine, alleged to have committed double

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murder (of the tailor Joseph Yates and Catherine Raine) with robbery at Barnard Castle in 1847, ‘with preconceived opinions on the subject,’ who refused to accept they should listen only to the facts and observe their oaths, ‘what were oaths, duties, and obligations, to men who cherished a pet theory of their own, and deemed the lives of three murderers of greater value than the peace of society?’50 The journal was equally dismayed at the evidence of juror horror at capital punishment when a jury in York appeared to avoid its duty in another murder trial in the same year – due reputedly, the paper said, to one or two members having a determination not to support capital punishment.51 Carolyn Conley cites the editor of the conservative Maidstone and Kentish Journal: ‘juries in Maidstone have been known to declare that they would never return a verdict which would render a man liable to be hanged,’ an assertion she points out that is not borne out by the statistics on executions between 1859–1880.52 Yet the assize town did earn a reputation for practical application of abolitionist sentiments. In the Law Times and Annual Register in 1855 appeared reports that the surprising decision not to return a verdict of guilty on a young woman ‘in appearance quite a child’, Elizabeth Avis Laws, accused of the murder of her elderly mistress Catherine Bacon in Chatham in 1855, was due to there being an abolitionist ‘in all cases’ on the jury.53 The evidence against Laws had appeared to be conclusive but the juror, belonging to the ‘AntiPunishment of Death Association’ in Maidstone, declared he would never ‘under any circumstances return a verdict the effect of which would be a capital punishment’ and his resistance to fellow jurors had forced an acquittal. Organized abolitionism by some of the town’s inhabitants really did exist for the Home Office files have a letter from the ‘Maidstone Society for the Abolition of the Punishment of Death’ asking for Elizabeth Ann Harris and Celestina Sommer, notoriously convicted of infanticide, to be reprieved, in April 1856.54 The prisoner’s counsel in the case of Elizabeth Avis Laws had challenged the jury to the fullest extent allowed in order to get his abolitionist sworn.55 A case was carried to the Central Criminal Court as to the right of the Crown to set aside jurors without special cause assigned so long as a sufficient number remained upon the panel to form a jury, the counsel for the Crown having in that case desired Maidstone men to stand aside, although the counsel for the prisoner had also objected to Chatham or Rochester men: they had apparently put aside all Maidstone and Chatham men from the panel.56 The controversy took place during the trial of the soldier Thomas Mansell in December 1856. The Solicitor’s Journal complained of ‘strong local prejudice’ existing there against capital punishment and that ‘by challenging all the persons come from districts in

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which that feeling does not prevail the prisoner can secure a jury most unwilling to convict him’.57 During the empanelling of the jury, a Mr Jabez Philpot had been told to withdraw before taking his oath, due to expressing his conscientious scruples against capital punishment.58 Reynolds’s Newspaper reported in 1857 that a counsel had wished to get Maidstone men as jurors because of their anti-capital punishment prejudices.59 William Tallack quoted the Chatham News of 21 March 1863 in evidence before the Royal Commission, to show the problem created in one recent trial, of the eighteen year old carpenter Robert Burton (who deliberately looked for some one to kill, and murdered a nine year old boy, the first person he had seen, apparently motivated by a morbid desire to be hanged), on account of anticipated juror abolitionism. The counsel for the prosecution objected to Maidstone men because of the ‘notorious fact that there is an association there against Capital Punishments’.60 Yet the record of proceedings at the Central Criminal Court reveals only one instance of a juror’s conscientious objections coming to light after being sworn in, in this court, in the murder trial of William Murray on 12 July 1869: then, since the juror had been sworn in the judge refused to discharge him.61 Abolitionists needed to be sensitive to public opinion: and avoid cases where the public was likely to be hostile. The Weekly Dispatch published a note to correspondents, in the midst of that engrossing murder trial which led to the execution of William Palmer. In this, it contrasted public meetings on the case, and for capital punishment in general, with the behaviour of ‘the honourable advocates of reform in that particular’ who refrained from attending at ‘so very inopportune a time’, when the strongest case for retention was before the public, and when there might have been an attempt to seek support for Palmer in ‘a great philosophic movement’.62 But The Saturday Review (the home of Fitzjames Stephen’s anonymous retentionist articles in this period) thought the abolitionist party had ‘discreditably permitted itself to tamper with eternal justice’ in the case.63 Abolitionists stressed apparent miscarriages of justice such as the execution of the nineteen year old William Ross at York in 1850, which had not been averted despite the efforts of John Thomas Barry, Gilpin and Dymond (who went up to conduct an interview at Barry’s prompting) to get the case reconsidered on the basis of new facts, an inquiry during a week’s respite which was unfortunately given by Sir George Grey to the original magistrates. Ross had been condemned to death for the murder, by arsenic, of his wife Mary for her burial-club money. In an anonymous article by Frederic Rowton in the Eclectic Review it was alleged that Martha

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Buckley, the sister of the deceased woman, was to blame for the murder.64 The article stimulated a further controversy in the Manchester Times and other papers, when one of the jurors, the mill overlooker David J. Ramsden, responded to the Eclectic’s insinuations. Ramsden was ‘formerly one of the leaders of every popular political movement in the neighbourhood, the associate and abettor of the Chartists, whom he effects to revile’ (Ross had been a Chartist). The workers at Carr Hill Mills raised funds for Ross’s defence at York, but Ramsden forced this to be returned. Ramsden’s letter was published in the Manchester Times with a letter from the Eclectic Review author, who defended Dymond as ‘manly, honorable and Christian-like’. But the working-class radical Alexander Somerville wrote in outrage at the Eclectic’s affixing of guilt on the woman after the execution.65 Dymond again travelled to York to ensure that the press accounts would record that Ross had continued to maintain his innocence: a pamphlet was produced by the abolitionists.66 The Home Office and abolitionism Having examined the abolitionists’ contact with the Home Office something more ought to be said about how Home Secretaries in the first three decades of Queen Victoria’s reign responded to their attentions, when exercising the royal prerogative. For an understanding of the actual position of the minister in the prerogative system and his relationship with permanent advisers and the judiciary, Roger Chadwick’s study of bureaucratic mercy is essential.67 The Home Office, by this period, controlled the reprieve process but the exercise of the prerogative frequently generated controversy. Since 1836 murderers were no longer to be hanged within forty-eight hours of conviction, and as the capital code came to be concentrated essentially on murder, there were now appeals to the Home Office in most homicide cases. Both retentionists and abolitionists advocated the creation of new mechanisms in criminal law. Abolitionists in their campaigns, tried to be objective and make a distinction between the man and the office. Charles Phillips for instance, in his famous Vacation Thoughts, thought it necessary to state that though the law was sanguinary, the Home Office which had the onerous duty of recommending mercy, was not: ‘This we say as a matter of mere justice, because there seems a growing disposition to inflict on individuals the vices of a system.’68 Abolitionists emphasized the great burden of the prerogative, a ‘most unjust and cruel’ duty. John Bright recorded the willingness and anxiety of ministers in his experience, to act justly in capital cases; whilst voicing his concern that the prerogative’s exercise might be swayed by the mundane factor of ministerial health (Punch had explained away Sir George Grey’s

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inconsistencies as the result of dyspepsia69). Dymond recorded that Grey’s response was one of constant, assiduous and painful attention: a point endorsed by an incident, noticed by a contemporary journalist, which ‘did not escape the notice of the House’, during William Ewart’s motion for abolition in May 1864, when Grey covered his temples with his hands, ‘as if the recollection of the anxiety and distress he had suffered was almost too great to be borne’.70 Dymond also recorded his view that Spencer Walpole was conscientious in efforts to be just and humane. ‘Everybody acknowledges the amiability and good intentions of Mr Walpole,’ asserted one critical provincial paper, arguing his ‘facile good-nature’ rendered him unfit for the post.71 It was not the individual who was cruel, but the reprieve system and the capital code that created the cruelty; although Dymond recalled the prejudice and pitilessness of Sir James Graham, in his final year as minister as the S.A.C.P. was being created.72 The Spectator had called Graham an ‘epicure’ of death punishment: his bowing to public pressure in commuting the sentence of death on the infanticide Mary Furley in 1844 failing to soften his reputation.73 Graham was committed to the idea that public execution before a large crowd operated as a deterrent. Though Queen Victoria evidently shared her concerns about public executions and the ‘licence’ of the press with him in 1845, he told her that anything which was likely to lead the public to desire abolition in all cases was ‘inexpedient’.74 Privately he expressed an awareness that his conduct, in exercising the prerogative of mercy, had appeared ‘cold severity’ but blamed the nature of the office.75 Lord Palmerston’s relationship with the abolitionists (as minister for the Home department, December 1852–February 1855) seems to have been one of respect.76 John Bright, at a Rochdale meeting in January 1856, noted the minister’s willingness to listen to appeals, and, ‘in case of anything being stated that he thought would allow him to do, to remit the extreme penalty of the law’.77 Dymond echoed this in referring to his good nature and geniality, though he was critical of Palmerston’s rejection of intoxication as an extenuating factor.78 Palmerston had a ‘general indisposition to sanction executions when any grounds of a mitigatory character could be urged’.79 There were several successful S.A.C.P. interventions during his tenure, one was the case of the aged labourer Abel Burrows who had murdered an old woman who lodged with him (in which the judge himself strongly urged an inquiry), involving John Bright and Dymond; another saw the S.A.C.P. save the life of the septuagenarian Michael Cosgrove (who had murdered a lodger, and was ‘sunk into a state of second childhood’ as the Annual Register put it), and incidentally give credence to a doctrine of being too aged to hang.80 Dymond makes reference to the misguided efforts at reprieve by one Dickson from Bury

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(no abolitionist) who forced Palmerston, through ‘assailing’ the minister and officials, to order a respite and investigation in the case of M’Cormick. The case demonstrated both the harm of ‘too active’ philanthropy and the accessibility of the Home Secretary.81 Grey was the minister on every occasion when Ewart’s abolition motion was discussed in the Commons since March 1847 (July 1846– February 1852; February 1855–February 1858; and July 1861–July 1866). It was also his misfortune to be minister during the series of gallowsscandals which raised questions about the equity of the reprieve system. He gained the reputation in papers such as Reynolds’s Newspaper and The Beehive for being an enemy of ‘plebeian murderers’.82 Little wonder that a paper read before the Juridical Society in 1864 discussed ‘certain propositions for the relief of the Home Secretary from the present responsibility on the conviction of a person for murder’.83 Yet the abolitionist writers and leaders could show discrimination. Charles Phillips considered Grey – a man with legal training – to be conscientious and humane, as did Dymond, showing the justice of Grey’s biographer Mandell Creighton’s verdict that dissenters from his judgements ‘had no ground to complain of want of attention to their opinions’.84 His reputation by the mid-1860s for inconsistency Dymond attributed to subjection to trial-judge opinion, though he noted Grey’s concern was the fear of establishing precedent to be used in future by abolitionists.85 Caution about doing wrong, he felt, was depriving Grey of the ability to do right. Dymond candidly described the ‘persecution’ that Grey experienced at the hands of the S.A.C.P., truly, he noted, the office was no sinecure. A description of ‘hounding’ the minister is evidently an exaggeration of the activity of the S.A.C.P., and reference to the courtesy of officials (such as the senior clerk of the criminal department, George Everest) and ministers show S.A.C.P. representation was not automatically intolerable. No doubt the fact that those involved included men of the stature of Bright and Gilpin, MP and parliamentary secretary to the Poor Law Board 1859– 1865, was significant. During the Capital Punishment Commission, Gilpin even informed the House during the debate on the bill to privatize executions in 1868 that the permanent under-secretary to the Home Office, Horatio Waddington, had told him it was desirable for society at large, that capital punishment be abolished.86 Ewart claimed when moving for a select committee in May 1864, that there were abolitionist sympathies within the Home Office itself, as in the Board of Trade before the corn laws had been repealed.87 The exercise of the prerogative was stressful. Gathorne Hardy’s mixed feelings about becoming Home Secretary (May 1867–December 1868)

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were in part due to memories of the odium heaped on Grey because of his exercise of the prerogative. To judge from his diary, Gathorne Hardy found this role onerous, particularly during the time of the Fenian executions in November 1867. Having received representations on behalf of Louis Bordier, who had cut the throat of his mistress, and the lighterman John Wiggins, who persisted in protesting his innocence even as the noose was fastened round his neck, Gathorne Hardy recorded his ‘anxiety’ and ‘intense pity’. The duty gave him ‘much thought’; ‘I must be firm,’ he wrote, ‘I hope not obstinate.’88 The familiarity with which S.A.C.P. involvement was treated by now is indicated by his diary reference, ‘Gilpin and Tallack visited me.’89 The written correspondence from the S.A.C.P. secretaries, as we have seen, involved discussions of mitigatory facts rather than appeal to principle, in an attempt to respond to the evolving ‘bureaucratic calculus’ of acceptable extenuating circumstances. Chadwick has stressed the tendency of the Home Office to reject appeals that harmed the notion of free will, and the fact that most ministers after Palmerston were lawyers who characteristically suspected subjectivity. Grey’s concern not to be trapped into creating precedents was no doubt reinforced by the S.A.C.P.’s habit of citing earlier cases, for instance the case of Charles Williams (reprieved by Palmerston) as a parallel to the Joseph Richards case in 1855.90 Dymond wrote that he was aware ‘that one minister cannot be bound by the acts of his predecessors in office’, but proceeded in this case to refer to his notes on an interview with Grey in the controversial case in which two men had been hanged for the murder of the Reverend George Hollest during a burglary at Frimley parsonage (1852–1853). It was not surprising that Grey’s standard response was the ‘usual stereotyped letter’ regretting that the Home Secretary ‘could see no reason to interfere with the course of the law’.91 Chadwick depicts a ministry evolving, pace Sir George Grey’s claim that each case stood on its own merits, an evolving set of rules and precedents to formalize and protect the system (and protect ministerial conscience).92 The abolitionists were simply playing the same game by demanding ‘consistent’ exercise of mercy. The concealment of the gallows The S.A.C.P. claimed to be reviving itself in 1863 because the public mind was more receptive, but the environment of the 1860s proved in general to be opposed to penal amelioration, let alone abolition of capital punishment. The ‘moral panic’ of the garrotte scare of 1862 was, among other things, an expression of opposition to a prison system based on the reformative principle which was perceived to be failing.93 Crime appeared

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to be increasing; Britain was in danger of being inundated by the ‘moral sewage’ that had previously been shipped off to Australia. Although the high point of penal severity had to wait until the death of Sir Joshua Jebb and the appointment of Edmund Du Cane as chairman of the Prison Commission, severity was very much the mentality of 1860s.94 The same pejorative language of ‘humanity-mongers’ and sentimentalists was directed at abolitionists and those supporting reformative principles.95 Yet the situation was not as simple as this. It has been argued by V.A.C. Gatrell that, whilst retentionists ‘sounded very sure of themselves by the mid-nineteenth century’ in their deployment of Mosaic language, there was anxiety about the gallows, discernible in the ‘straining justifications’ of newspapers in reporting executions.96 Anxiety was generated especially in 1864 by a number of gallows scandals which abolitionists tried to exploit, and which provided the backdrop for the deliberations of the Royal Commission on capital punishment. We have seen, in chapter 4, that the fate of the bricklayer Samuel Wright resulted in the formation of a working-class abolitionist committee in 1864. The immediate response had been mass meetings, petitions, deputations to the Home Office and the Queen, and, as the authorities increased the police presence to deal with the threat of disturbances and attempts at rescue, an effort to boycott the execution itself, which took place amidst cries of ‘judicial murder’.97 The Social Science Review, which described the pro-Wright effort as a ‘demonstration without parallel’, was clear what the impact had been, ‘passing events had done more than any written argument to draw the minds of men who think little on any subject, and least of all on great and difficult subjects, to the question of capital punishment.’98 The Illustrated Times thought that this boycott by the class of society to which the culprit belonged – as with the murderer John Devine too – was yet another argument against capital punishment.99 Gallows-scandals generated ‘fresh interest’ in capital punishment; they also generated severe criticism of the Home Secretary Sir George Grey and the capital code. If S.A.C.P. policy aimed to highlight the capriciousness of the administration, in this period they had the contrasting cases of Townley and Wright (taken to demonstrate there was one law for the rich and another for the poor), and of George Hall, and Jessie McLachlan in Glasgow in 1862, to exploit.100 The Townley, Wright and McLachlan cases resulted in questions being asked in the House and documents being published by order of parliament.101 Incidents such as the execution of Joseph Myers at Leeds, with his windpipe exposed by a suicide attempt, or the execution of the mutinous Flowery Land crew before a crowd of many thousands at Newgate, were also exploited by

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abolitionists in 1864.102 As ever, bungled executions by Calcraft were widely reported. Doubts about the guilt of the German Franz Müller – not quelled until he made his confession to the killing of a chief bank clerk, Thomas Briggs, on the North London Railway – and the behaviour of the massive crowd that gathered to witness his execution in the capital, also raised the prospect of abolition too in November 1864.103 It was therefore not difficult for the abolitionists to couch their cause, as William Ewart did in May 1864 when moving for a select committee to investigate capital punishment abolition, as a solution to unprecedented public pressure in capital cases.104 The year 1864 undeniably saw heightened anxiety about the operation of the capital code. The Westminster Review saw a crisis in which the very foundations of the judicial system were endangered by ‘extensive popular agitation’ on behalf of individual criminals.105 The prospect of narrowly averted judicial murder made some speak of the punishment of death being under threat. The Daily News, whilst consistently attacking ‘enthusiastic philanthropists’ for interference in capital cases, concluded after the case of Serafino Pelizioni, that ‘the public do not rest, as once they did, in the verdicts of juries and the sentences of judges’.106 Pelizioni was saved from the gallows after conviction for the murder of Michael Harrington in a pub brawl between Englishmen and Italians in Saffron Hill. His release and free pardon was due to the efforts of a compatriot, Enrico Negretti (of the photographic firm of Negretti and Zambra). The coverage of the Wright case and subsequent executions involving ‘plebeian murderers’ supports Gatrell’s contention that the working classes were not prepared to accept the operation of the gallows uncritically.107 One anonymous writer had threatened to shoot Grey if Wright was executed, another anonymous letter sent to the Home Office imagined Grey stood ‘on a splendid carpet’ haughtily replying to Wright’s question ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’ (the motto of the anti-slavery agitation) with the words ‘You! No you are a bricklayer’s labourer.’108 Grey was attacked in the newspapers as a ‘coldhearted, red-tape minister’, as ‘our pious and Draconian Home Secretary’, who was ‘stern and unmoveable when he is not whining and sanctimonious’.109 It might be argued that outrage was temporary. If interest was ‘rekindled by some sensational, well publicized execution ... it would flicker and sputter out’.110 Atrocious murders which did not permit any sympathies for the condemned could harm the abolitionist cause by providing ammunition for the retentionist.111 This is true, but in the period of the Royal Commission it seemed as if abolition could even be considered by those who had previously rejected it, because of these recent scandals and the sense that the odium heaped

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on the Home Office was reducing the respect and awe with which the system was held. The public – or their press organs – were too critical of the operation of the system for nothing to be done. The S.A.C.P. publicized the Whig grandee Lord John Russell’s acceptance of abolition in his 1865 edition of An Essay on the History of the English Government and Constitutions. Nothing would be lost to justice or the preservation of innocent life if the death penalty was totally abolished, he decided. The judicial difficulties of distinguishing cases allowing mitigation and those that required inflexible justice, the invidious position for the Home Secretary, the critical comments of the public, the sympathy and pity given to the murderer, and the brutality and limitations of this exemplary punishment had all led him to this conclusion.112 Harold King, writing on the death penalty in St James’s Magazine, while gesturing to the ‘glorious army’ of the S.A.C.P., stressed the significance of Russell’s intervention.113 Abolitionists sent copies of Russell’s comments to the press in the form of a circular.114 In 1865 the manufacturers Parkins and Gotto of Oxford Street produced a new family game (as reported by the satirical journal, Fun), ‘for short Monday mornings’ with the ‘morbidly sensational title’ of ‘Capital Punishment’.115 Privately in the same year, Baron Pollock communicated to his friend Baron Bramwell his feeling, in the context of the reprieve for Charlotte Winsor, that ‘I am not sure that we are not now ripe for the abolition of the punishment of death – even for murder’.116 These judicial qualms were admissions only in private however. Pollock’s written evidence for the Royal Commission defended its infliction on the principle of revenge and public support: ‘The lex talionis may not be very logical, but it is popular and has an air of justice.’117 But even this official statement conveys a sense that capital punishment was problematic; he described his opinions as ‘at best a bundle of doubts’ and voiced them with ‘the greatest hesitation’.118 However, when it came to being witnesses before the Commission the majority of the judiciary placed their confidence in the gallows with platitudinous ease.119 While notorious homicides in subsequent years certainly kept capital punishment before the public the fact that these included acts of Fenian terrorism and the Sheffield ‘outrages’ (revealed to the public when the ‘rattening’ of non-union workers that involved destroying their tools had escalated to the manslaughter of the saw-grinder Thomas Fearneyhough in 1867), meant that their value for the abolitionist cause was uncertain. For Irish political violence in England created an environment of fear, where ‘enlightened and informed reformers were transformed in the public eye into well-meaning theorists, or even worse, into crackpots urging virtual license for desperate, maniacal killers.’120

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Tallack might describe the Clerkenwell incident of December 1867 as demonstrative of the ‘glaring failure’ of capital punishment but S.A.C.P. efforts concerning the Fenians, even when carefully presented as individual labours (though ‘entirely approved’ of by the Committee) cannot have advertised the abolitionist cause favourably; though there was some serious public doubt that Michael Barrett was guilty of the Clerkenwell prison explosion in May 1868 when he was executed outside Newgate.121 Eton College debating society argued whether the heads of the Fenians deserved the death penalty in that year, and Winchester College debating society discussed capital punishment (along with the Reform demonstrations and Jamaica Question), and ‘ruled in spite of all the maudlin philanthropists, that some game needs hanging still’, reaching that decision by 18 to 4.122 It has rightly been argued that the concealment of the gallows which finally became enacted two days after the execution of Michael Barrett was a response to abolitionism as much as it represented its failure.123 It was a tactical move on the part of those who wanted to maintain the death penalty – ‘the real dilemma for legislators arose from their desire to preserve the death penalty while retaining for England the claim to be a civilized society.’124 The question of Englishness was debated by critics such as the conservative weekly The Spectator, which accepted that ‘social order has gained by the abolition of public hanging, but choking a man in a dark hole is not and never can become an English institution.’125 For retentionists, when concealment came, the transition was ‘satisfactory’. The Times, whose choice of adjective this was, reported a day after the black flag had been hoisted at the moment of the first private execution, within the prison in the small provincial town of Maidstone, on 13 August 1868, that it ‘passed off so quietly that the public is, perhaps, in danger of overlooking the great importance of the new principle involved’. There to witness the death agonies – though the writer thought Thomas Wells’ death ‘seems to have been unusually painless’ – were sixteen men of the press, alongside the under-sheriff, governor, serjeant and chaplain.126 The Times argued in this editorial that one of the ‘strongest recommendations’ of this reform was that ‘it takes away from those who would abolish Capital Punishment their noisiest and most popular, though not really most valid arguments.’127 Public executions had been so effectively undermined by abolitionist criticism over the decades that their sequestration represented not a humane reform but a concealment, in Randall McGowen’s words, of ‘the ambiguous and compromised solution it was’.128 Charles Gilpin in 1868 – some twenty-two years after he had helped launch the S.A.C.P. – was well aware of this, deploring the fact that in modern times the House of Commons ‘should be engaged in a

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discussion as to whether hanging men publicly or privately were best in a civilised country’.129 The S.A.C.P. and the abolition movement failed in their objective to have capital punishment abolished, and concealment of the gallows by the Capital Punishment within Prisons Bill in 1868 was seen by abolitionists as setting the cause back a generation. As a journal unsympathetic to their cause noted, the ‘chief sentimental objections to hanging’ – the behaviour of the execution crowd – had been removed from the debate.130 John Bright, in correspondence with William Tallack in 1876, wrote that he thought about the endeavour always with ‘sadness and despair’.131 In its failure it shared the fate of many nineteenth-century reform crusades identified as ‘inflexible, unrealistic and often irresponsible – they used methods which unduly confused the situation’.132 Total abolition was unrealistic given the majority support for the punishment of death for murder. As the sanitary reformer Dr Benjamin Ward Richardson (a friend of Douglas Jerrold) wrote, in response to criticism of his role as one of the medical defendants in the trial of the notorious poisoner William Palmer: In almost all cases involving death punishment, the defence is the unpopular side: for the solemn tribunal, the newspaper comment or report, the black cap, the scaffold, the executioner, and the execution, form as a whole, up to the present civilized time, one of our grand national exhibitions. Here is the main point, indeed, on which capital punishment hangs. The event supplies an avenging spectacle, horrid it is true, but none the less acceptable on that account to the avenging mind. Are 60,000 persons in a group to be cheated out of a vengeance feast with impunity? Impossible.133

CONCLUSION

The gibbet has not fifteen years’ life in it. If in 1860, fifteen years hence, there shall be a death-punishment existing, if we shall still be in this world together, reproach me with being the falsest prophet, the veriest fool, that ever presumed to talk of the advancing spirit of the times – Lord Nugent, 18451 Thus Lord Nugent had declared, shortly before that new effort at abolition which has been the focus of this study, was launched in Britain. The quotation may be contrasted with an article in Punch, following the hiding of the gallows in 1868, ironically entitled ‘Civilisation Receding’. In this, the journal which had done so much in its early days to channel and encourage disquiet at the exhibition of the gallows, and which had even at one point, declared itself to be the ‘mortal enemy to Jack Ketch’, observed, albeit in a satirical vein: Twenty years ago and more there was a very general persuasion that mankind had arrived at the commencement of a new era, in which loving kindness would subdue brutality, and overcome evil with good. Enthusiasts went out predicting that there would soon be an end of war, and of capital punishment. We said at the time they would find themselves mistaken. So they do. We have had, in spite of your Great Exhibitions, which were to knit mankind in universal brotherhood, but didn’t, a Crimean War, and an Indian Mutiny, an American Civil War, and a War for German Unity, not to mention an Insurrection stamped out in Jamaica … So much for you, mawkish sentimentalists. Let us have no more of your amiable aspirations. As the world always has been, so it is, and so it always will be. There is no hope that war will ever cease. Hooray!2

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Rather unfairly, abolitionism has been accused of standing in the way of ‘humane’ progress, prolonging the public infliction by its opposition to sequestration. Whilst some abolitionists who belonged to the S.A.C.P. did appear satisfied with this change, others, such as Charles Gilpin, knew that the measure was far from progressive, and rejected ‘the expediency of conducting executions in comparative secrecy’.3 Abolitionists had to hope that the concealment of infliction, against the spirit of the English constitution or character, would lead to its eventual demise, but they feared that without vicious crowds and visible scaffold atrocities, the institution was strengthened, and less attention would be given to the subject.4 It may be argued that abolitionism did have some success in the creation of unease about the gallows and death punishment; but the efforts since the 1846 inauguration of the S.A.C.P. resulted in legislation which was quite openly presented by retentionists as making the penalty more awful. This study has examined a movement which was more extensive and elaborate than previous accounts of the capital punishment question have suggested. As such it represents a response to Gatrell’s assessment of the relative unimportance of the movement in The Hanging Tree.5 Yet the abolitionists were unable to mobilize a sufficient body of public opinion, a failure which is only partly to be explained by the old-fashioned tactics of ‘pressure from without’ outlined in chapter 5. The study of the movement’s structure reveals its clear weaknesses – tactical, numerical, and financial – yet support for the gallows was always too strong. A minority, the abolitionists had attempted to eradicate death punishments when the prevalent belief was that murder (and perhaps some other crimes) ought to be punished with death. Of course the abolitionists and retentionists debated the direction of the sympathies of public opinion on the question. The Eclectic Review had argued in 1850 that an ‘immense majority’ of the operative and middle classes were in favour of total abolition.6 The pamphleteer ‘Philander’, writing in 1865, wrote that the feelings against hanging in public were ‘extensively and tenaciously held to be outrageously repugnant to the merciful genius of the religion of Jesus’ and that support for the abolition of capital punishment was not restricted to the ‘masses and less educated part of the community’ but was to be found in a ‘large portion of the logic of our popular journalism, the attractive eloquence of the senate, the calmness of the jury box, the sensational theology of the pulpit and perhaps all these in combination operating upon the amiable disposition of the occupant of the throne’.7 In fact the abolitionist movement was no match for a State and society in which, to employ the philosopher Sir Walter Moberly’s later phrase, there was a ‘will to disbelieve’ in abolition.8

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The evident amelioration of the capital code nevertheless had to be explained by contemporaries. The Times, in commenting on the capital punishment question in 1860, wrote that the ‘philanthropical economy of suffering, which seems to us an instinct, is in reality the slow growth of experience and a gradual refinement of sensibility’.9 A standard interpretation of the rise of humanitarian sensibility went as follows: that the Bloody Code belonged to an era when the British were constantly at war, when gentlemen would expect, in the course of their gentlemanly military careers, to kill their fellow men, when duelling was a prominent feature of aristocratic culture, when education and Methodist-inspired religion stressed the duty of society to punish or exterminate criminals, and when the slave trade was acceptable to many. Capital punishment was thus situated within a discourse which identified a decline in martial spirit, and the rise of a peace-loving commercial spirit, and in religious tendencies, with the rise of a religion of tenderness and mercy. The Times suggested that Protestant Christianity taught people to think more of the individual, to make allowance for temptations and feel sympathies with the mental agonies of the condemned felon.10 Historians may smile at such interpretations of shifts in sentiment and the growth of a humanitarian sensibility as simplistic, wishful thinking and self-deception, and stress the continued infliction of State violence and the non-humanitarian motives and consequences of the State concealing the death penalty.11 The achievement of ‘humanitarian legislation’ formed one of the themes of self-satisfied late-nineteenth century histories of the Victorian era but humanitarianism was a contested idea and a dirty word for retentionists who used it as an alternative to ‘maudlin sentimentalism’.12 Chambers’s Encyclopaedia, in defining the word ‘humanitarian’, noted it was also used of ‘those who, from overphilanthropy, object to severe measures, such as capital punishment’.13 Critics did not doubt there was a humanitarian drift but, as exemplified by the barrister and man of letters W.S. Lilly’s provocatively entitled essay ‘In Praise of Hanging’ in 1894, viewed this not as progress but decadence, a sign of moral cowardice and loss of virility.14 The response of retentionists varied, of course, but one tactic was to deny the importance of the capital punishment question, by calculating the comparative mortality, as we have seen. Most abolitionists had an absolute abhorrence of capital punishment but opponents stressed that very few people were hanged, fifteen or so of the most serious murders a year.15 As the barrister Jelinger Cookson Symons wrote in the Law Magazine in 1846, the number executed was ‘numerically insignificant’, those executed were the ‘most atrocious criminals in the community’ and its opponents were employing ‘disproportionate energy’.16 The campaign represented a

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‘philanthropic palaver’ on behalf of ‘forty one atrocious miscreants in six years’ set against the safety of millions. The number of those executed was dwarfed by the sacrifice of innocent lives in collieries or in large towns due to municipal parsimony and miasma: It is employing itself in bewailing the gallows and shedding all its beautiful compassion upon the select portion of society who have strangled their wives or slaughtered their mothers … The rest of mankind are of no consequence to your genuine gallows abolitionist. Everyday gaol birds are unworthy of his philanthropic palate. The mercies of his benevolence descend not from the scaffold, its sympathies centre on assassins.17 By contrast, the staunchly retentionist Times acknowledged in 1846 that no greater subject could ‘employ the attention of statesmen and philosophers, no better can enlist the sympathy of philanthropists and divines’.18 Abolitionism had managed to sustain a public voice in opposition to the status quo in ideas on law, crime and religion. The final chapters outlined the uneasiness generated by abolitionism and the erosion of confidence in the gallows and legal system produced by bungled executions, press-fed scrutiny and mitigatory efforts. In the 1860s, as in the late 1840s, abolitionism played the role of attacking complacency. Some contemporaries acknowledged the debt that they owed the abolitionist effort. The journal Meliora, which was admittedly favourable to the cause, spoke of ‘an act of justice to render. The change in public opinion, as to the efficacy of death punishment, has been marked and a rapid one. Much is due to the labours of the S.A.C.P.’19 Ironically, even The Times acknowledged the role when it said that the S.A.C.P. ‘may perhaps have contributed’.20 A provincial newspaper thought the S.A.C.P.’s labours had ‘assisted to create that degree of feeling and of sentiment’ favourable to reform, but had advocated a too ‘aërial’ and ‘transcendental’ view of the question.21 In the end, abolitionists could be credited with an educational role; it fell far short of the aims of the society when it had been inaugurated in Exeter Hall in 1846 yet represented the partial success of its early desire to ‘appeal to the public mind’.22 Abolitionist societies did not flourish after the 1860s, although they surfaced from time to time. Some of the leading figures had died: Henry Christmas, who had changed his surname to Noel Fearn, died in 1868, shortly after publishing an article in Bell’s Weekly Messenger against the concealment of capital punishment. William Ewart died in January 1869.23 But the abolitionists continued their effort inside and outside parliament. Bills for abolition were introduced in 1872, 1873 and 1877.24 In the latter

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year, during the evening debate on 12 June, John Bright spoke at length, believing the case against capital punishment remained unanswerable.25 The S.A.C.P. was reported to be involved in one capital case in 1877, concerning the murderer of a French Protestant clergyman, the Reverend Elias Heulin of Cheslea, and his housekeeper. In the case of the shocking ‘Penge murder mystery’, when there were efforts by the ‘Westminster Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishments’ to reprieve Patrick and Louis Staunton (who had been found guilty of the murder of Harriet Staunton by starvation in 1877) at a public meeting held at Maidstone, that hotspot for abolitionist sentiment according to the press in the 1850s– 1860s, few ‘influential townspeople were present’ and the meeting was ‘not characterized by unanimity’.26 The S.A.C.P. was reported to be involved in the case of the surgeon Dr George Henry Lansom in 1882, charged with the murder of his young brother-in-law.27 But the ‘times are against it’, commentators thought: the agitation was, for the moment, a spent force.28 When capital punishment was inflicted in the open air, the horrors of scaffold and crowd guaranteed the abolitionists the oxygen of outraged public attention on a frequent basis. With concealment, the status of the gallows as a national outrage had to be conveyed by keeping it before the public through annual parliamentary debate via abolitionist bills: but it was no more alive as a question at Westminster. Though parliament continued to hear the abolitionist case as bills were introduced, their promoters were characterized by critics as theorists, or unpractical speculators, and in general, as bores. Thus in March 1878, the Commons endured what The Examiner described as a dull and uninteresting debate in which the Quaker MP for South Durham, Joseph Whitwell Pease, earnestly but tediously discussed the statistics and cited the lack of enthusiasm for the role of executioner manifested in New Zealand.29 Pease’s bill was rejected by a majority of 199, and The Times suggested this was ‘no bad index of the views which prevail in the world outside’. The public opinion which had seemed to gather around abolition in the time of Ewart in the 1840s had subsided.30 Further bills, to abolish capital punishment or amend the law, were introduced in June 1881 and 1882. The bill of 1881 attracted only 79 supporters. After these efforts, there were no major capital punishment debates in Parliament in the Victorian era.31 As a result of failures and ‘unseemly occurrences’, the Home Secretary Richard Assheton Cross felt the need to establish a confidential departmental inquiry, chaired by Lord Aberdare (Henry Austin Bruce, a former Home Secretary), on the ‘best mode of carrying out capital punishment’ so that as little pain as possible was inflicted, in March 1886.32

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The abolitionist movement was easily lumped with other ‘questions of the day’ such as cremation, and marriage to one’s deceased wife’s sister, as crotchets for the cranky pamphleteer or faddist politician.33 So Punch identified capital punishment among the topics of the ‘dog days’ of parliament in 1877 and the conservative John Bull saw the abolitionist in parliament in ‘A Fadmonger’s Field Day’ in 1886.34 The progressives and the ultra-liberals who were labelled faddists did indeed endorse abolition of capital punishment. Sections of late-Victorian Liberalism supported abolition. The aristocratic ultra-Liberal Auberon Herbert called it a ‘useless cruelty’ in a Liberal election address published in The Albemarle in 1892. The Quaker Anna Maria Priestman of the Bristol Women’s Liberal Association claimed this new association was anxious to shape public opinion against capital punishment in 1889 and a conference of Southern Counties Women’s Liberal Associations endorsed abolition in 1891.35 The Women’s Liberal Association members at Liverpool voted to abolish capital punishment, after some debate, in 1890.36 Still an inevitable component of debating society programmes, the pros and cons of capital punishment were threshed out in progressive societies such as the Zetetical Society in London, where George Bernard Shaw spoke about the sacredness of human life and its bearing on capital punishment in early 1882.37 Radicalism remained hostile to capital punishment. The radical Reynolds’s Newspaper continued its opposition to capital punishment – contrasting the execution of poor men and women with what it presented as the impunity of the rich, in 1878: harking on about George Victor Townley’s escape from the gallows and the token hanging of ‘a couple of insolvent medical men’, in 1878. An anti-imperialist paper which was nevertheless popular in the colonies because of the attention it paid to colonial matters, the newspaper argued: ‘When we are carrying out a spirited foreign policy abroad, and are preparing to kill a few thousand Afghans, of course we must carry out a vigorous policy at home for the benefit of Mr Marwood.’38 Their opponents were thus right to see abolition as one of the articles of faith of radicalism in the late-nineteenth century.39 A parliamentary opponent during debates in 1872 identified abolitionism with a ‘humanitarian revolutionary party’, which had sought to oppose all authority from the French Revolution onwards.40 Capital punishment was a concern for socialists, although clearly the question of abolition of private property was more important than the abolition of private execution. Socialists such as Ernest Belfort Bax saw opposition to capital punishment as natural.41 But the labour movement was ambivalent. The Lausanne International Workingmen’s Congress had repudiated

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capital punishment in September 1867. The British movement endorsed abolition later. When a ‘domestic slavey’ in her early twenties, Mary Ann Ansell, was executed in 1899 for the murder of her imbecile sister (for her insurance money by sending a phosphorus-laced cake through the post42) despite intense efforts that included securing the signatures of 100 MPs for a petition, the trade union movement was mobilized to pass a resolution against capital punishment at the Trades Union Congress in Plymouth. William Clery, the representative of the Post Office sorters’ union, raised the matter with the Home Secretary when the T.U.C. delegation went to meet Sir Matthew Ridley-White in 1900. The minister, however, doubted that the T.U.C. resolution represented the view of the working classes – and Clery was dismayed to hear agreement on this point from some of the delegation.43 Progressive spiritualists and theosophists supported abolition.44 The Humanitarian League – bringing together animal lovers, vegetarians, and penal reformers in 1891 – provided a supportive environment for lateVictorian anti-capital punishment activity by the likes of Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner, daughter of Charles Bradlaugh, who wrote a pamphlet for the League’s Criminal Law and Prison Reform Department.45 We have seen, in an earlier chapter, how mid-Victorian qualms about capital punishment could be characterized as effeminate or ‘womanish scruples’.46 By this period, it was possible for a woman to lecture in public on the subject, and gain coverage in a progressive women’s journal.47 Such journals carried news about the legal careers of American women, like the attorney Judith Ellen Foster, who was a ‘strong opponent of capital punishment’ as her interviewer in the Women’s Penny Paper related in 1890. Foster had secured a verdict of life imprisonment for a woman previously condemned to death by a ‘Jury of men’.48 But as this paper pointed out, there were very few women as patrons, general committee or special correspondents of the Howard Association in 1889, when the Association was based at Charles Gilpin’s old business address of 5, Bishopsgate Street Without.49 ‘Yet,’ the Women’s Penny Paper argued, ‘the subjects with which the Association deals are those upon which women feel keenly, and many of which they have made especially their own … Many feel that capital punishment is a relic of barbarism, and that in the case of a woman it is especially to be condemned, as she is never tried by a jury of her peers, and only placed on an equality with man when punishment is to be inflicted.’50 The inequality of women in the criminal justice system was something that disturbed the veteran leader of the social purity campaign, Josephine Butler. Butler was stimulated by the case of the American Florence Maybrick, convicted of the murder of her English husband by

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arsenic in 1889, to consider reforms which included abolition, female jurors and a court of appeal.51 Critics noted the contradiction between opposition to the execution of women and the belief that the ‘political and social status and responsibilities of women should be equal with those of men’.52 Those wishing to ridicule the suffragist pursuit of equality in entry to the professions could point to the absurdity of a woman becoming the public executioner simply on the basis that women were equally liable to be hanged: but the hard-hearted New Woman would respond to this criticism as ‘old fashioned sentimentality’.53 Punch had once commented that the outcome of female enfranchisement would be abolition; later opponents of female admission to parliaments in Britain and in the Empire certainly thought that emancipation would lead to alterations in capital punishment, either for abolition (as one opponent of Dr Newman’s bill for admission of women to parliament in New Zealand asserted) or (as the anti-suffragist intellectual Goldwin Smith thought in 1874), extension of capital punishment in cases of ‘outrages on their sex’.54 In practice, feminist concern with criminal justice meant organized efforts at reprieve of condemned women by the Edwardian age, in, for example, the efforts by members of the Women’s Social and Political Union, and others, to save Daisy Lord (‘a kind of pinchbeck Madonna in the eyes of the feminist public,’ according to Ernest Belfort Bax).55 Queen Victoria’s merciful attitude to condemned females remained a subject of press allusion as the century drew to a close, despite her own unwillingness to be publicly involved in the petitions for mercy organized in the cases of Florence Maybrick and Mary Ann Ansell.56 A paragraph from The Spectator was read to the Queen by one of her ladies, to make her mind easier over Ansell, in July 1899 (the journalist Charles Laurent in Le Matin suggested the Queen should hang like Ansell).57 Pamphlets on capital punishment never returned to the mid-Victorian volume, but they still appeared. The journalist Henry Dunckley wrote a couple. John MacMaster published a lengthy essay on the divine purpose of capital punishment in 1892 which rejected the penalty as antiChristian.58 William Stokes’s abolitionist tract Dare we take Human Life? was reprinted by the Quaker peace activist Priscilla Peckover of Wisbech.59 Journals continued to publish articles on the capital punishment question too. There was also propaganda in fictional form such as the translation of the Austrian pacifist Alfred Herrman Fried’s Diary of a Condemned Man, a Dernier Jour for the fin de siècle, about a clerk who killed his employer when his embezzlement was discovered and whose diary recounts his six months in prison before execution, and a British edition of the American

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George Parsons Lathrop’s Would you Kill Him? 60 English novelists no doubt also dramatized the question, and provided a medium for abolitionist sentiments to be expressed or debated.61 Robert Buchanan, whom we have already encountered presenting the brutal details of the condemned cell to a late-Victorian theatre audience, also challenged notions of good taste in The Moment after. A Tale of the Unseen, when he presented a man reprieved after a bungled execution for the murder of his faithless wife, recounting to a chaplain his vision of paradise. The gallows had converted this atheist, but Buchanan took a swipe at the Home Secretary, judiciary and ‘extra-judicial murder’.62 Short stories presented the question too, thus Grant Allen offered the readers of the Strand Magazine, in March 1891, the tale of the Canadian hangman who, after refusing to execute a man whom he believed rightly to be innocent, was no longer so sure of the ‘trade’ when the law had so narrowly avoided stringing up the wrong man.63 This was the first detective story in the magazine which was to be world renowned for publishing the exploits of Sherlock Holmes – whose creator was at one time opposed to capital punishment.64 Verse too, still presented the abolitionist voice: the Scottish barrister Robert Bird’s anonymous Law Lyrics included an explicit attack on hanging, and more lyrically and horrifically there was the Ballad of Reading Gaol, Wilde’s anonymous poem (on the hanging of a Trooper of the Royal Horse Guards, C.T. Woolridge) which was viewed as a powerful work against the death penalty.65 Thoughtful literary figures such as the novelist George Gissing privately pondered the question.66 Gissing’s The Whirpool had the character Harvey Rolfe speak against mankind’s instruments of slaughter, in a world where gaol and gallows were taken as a matter of course.67 The question figured in studies of crime and punishment, of course. Havelock Ellis’s The Criminal (1890) accepted that the question no longer seemed to be ‘of much magnitude’ but had little doubt capital punishment was dying out: although Ellis was an abolitionist he expressed some uncertainty here about ‘whether complete extinction was altogether a matter for rejoicing’.68 Capital punishment was also touched on in works of theology, sociology and social problems.69 Of course, there were prominent defences of capital punishment too: thus John Ruskin used several of his letters in his eccentric Fors Clavigera in the 1870s to defend the infliction of capital punishment.70 His curt response to William Tallack’s papers on capital punishment, sent to him in 1879, was to tell Tallack that the Howard Association was of no real use, given ‘that impious trust in its own wishy-washy humanities’.71 A characteristically fiery and offensive correspondence from Lord Grimthorpe (a lawyer and an amateur horologist who had been

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responsible for the chimes of Big Ben) enlivened The Times in September 1891.72 There had been 134 applicants for the ‘carnificate’ when Calcraft retired in 1870; as Greg Smith has demonstrated, there were plenty of men willing to volunteer their services as public hangman when the position became available in 1883.73 Yet anxieties over the innocence of executed men, and scandals involving bungled executions (duly reported by the press which was still admitted to witness executions until the later 1890s), or dubious decisions by the Home Secretary, ignited calls for abolition.74 This was the situation in the reprieve of John Rutterford on account of a malformation of the throat in 1870.75 It also happened with the bungling of two hangings by Bartholomew Binns and Jones in 188376, and following the decision in 1890 by Home Secretary Henry Matthews to execute the elder of the two Davies brothers convicted of the ‘Crewe murder’ despite the Home Office being inundated by some three thousand telegrams for mercy.77 The Birmingham Owl had expressed surprise at the quietness of abolitionists in 1883, when there had ‘never been an opportunity so favourable’.78 The Times published the impassioned plea for abolition of an under-sheriff of London and Middlesex, sickened by the details of Henry Dutton’s execution at the hands of the ‘grossly inefficient, if not actually intoxicated’ hangman, in Liverpool in the winter of 1883.79 The Bristol Mercury claimed, as a result of Matthews’ decision in 1890, that ‘a widespread opinion in favour of the abolition of capital punishment’ existed.80 Matthews had already been the target of a press campaign led by the moral crusader W.T. Stead in the Pall Mall Gazette, in the case of the Polish Jew Israel Lipski, hanged for the poisoning of Miriam Angel in the East End, in 1887. A few years later, and the abolitionists had the dubious advantage of a former public hangman as a supporter of the cause, with James Berry ‘on a new platform’, delivering a lecture to a small audience at the Imperial Theatre, Royal Aquarium, with ‘a disregard for the aspirate’ and a notable lack of gruesome detail.81 His lectures (on morality and phrenology) and public fêting at public houses had been the subject of debate in the Commons in 1889.82 This new venture inaugurated what he hoped would be a campaign for abolition (as the advertisements for his lecture series in the Morning Post made clear), with petitioning, and even a Royal Commission to investigate the royal prerogative.83 The national and provincial papers were naturally interested by the delicious irony – the Penny Illustrated Paper sending its artist to sketch him on the platform, holding the notes for his carefully prepared lecture, and portraits appeared elsewhere.84 The Illustrated Police News, whilst publishing his picture, hypocritically condemned the effort as lacking in taste: for capital

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punishment ought to be ‘veiled in decent reserve’. Berry delivered the lecture to small audiences in the north of England, and the press reports emphasized the minimal interest in supporting the petition. This was unsurprising since a surviving poster for one of his talks indicates that typographically, his wonderful experiences and startling sensational lectures counted for more than his abolitionist conversion.85 The selfappointed humanitarian expert and assistant hangman Robert Ricketts Anderson of Carmarthen, who had for twenty years attended all the principal executions in order to ensure they went smoothly (or so he claimed) had also declared, in 1883, that he was now against capital punishment.86 A man with private means who had participated in hanging without taking a fee (this had gone to Calcraft) ‘for love of the thing’, his accession to the ranks of abolitionists would have been of doubtful value.87 The Times carried a strange advert asking for ‘a thoroughly efficient man’ to be secretary for a local society for the abolition of capital punishment in 1877: address, ‘Portia, 7, Florence-terrace Hornsey N.’88 Less mysteriously, a branch society surfaced, in Leicester in 1878, led by a Unitarian active in local temperance who became a vegetarian; the radical P.A. Taylor also presented a petition in favour of abolition from the local Quakers.89 An Anti-Flogging League, established about 1879, with offices in 133, Brompton Road, South Kensington, also took up the capital punishment question with other forms of judicial violence.90 Where were the survivors of that ‘gallant band of sturdy and enlightened Liberals’ which had devoted itself to abolition? asked one journalist in 1890, in the midst of the controversy over the Crewe murder. The revival of a ‘healthy popular movement’ against capital punishment which this writer hoped for did not happen despite massive public interest in the fate of the Davies brothers.91 In 1901, the same year that an essayist in Westminster Review bewailed the lack of a new Romilly or Howard to condemn capital punishment, a new Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment appeared.92 It was led in the Edwardian era by the barrister Josiah Oldfield, author of a thesis on the death penalty for which he was awarded a D.C.L. from Oxford, and which appeared as The Penalty of Death, or the problem of Capital Punishment (1901). A vegetarian, he was also a friend of M.K. Gandhi.93 The new society prepared a bill to graduate murder, as the Royal Commission of 1864 had suggested, in 1908.94 Branch societies again appeared in the first decade of the twentieth century: the Reverend David Dorrity of St Ann’s, Manchester, was the president of the Manchester branch and a Liverpool Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment featured in the pages of The Crescent, an Islamic organ. Liverpool abolitionism found encouragement in the local

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peace society, as in earlier decades, but had also, perhaps, been stimulated by the feverish reprieve activity after the trial of Florence Maybrick in 1889.95 Josiah Oldfield, in asking ‘Shall Hanging end with the Nineteenth Century?’, asserted that the British Empire, ‘assuming as it does the position of the pioneer in humanitarian civilization, should not wait to ask what has been the result of the abolition of the capital punishment in other countries, but should itself rise to the privilege that it claims, and should be willing to set the example for other countries to follow’.96 Oldfield also argued that since the Empire was more Muslim and Buddhist than Christian, imperial legislation on the death penalty ought not to express a principle ‘laid down as a statute upon a few Israelites, thousands of years ago’.97 But there was no advance in the British awareness of capital punishment as an imperial institution, the comment by the radical paper The Sun (angry at the outcome of the trial of Florence Maybrick), that the ‘beneficence of British rule in India was instanced recently, when six Sikhs were sentenced to be hanged for murder of a man who turned up smiling while the case was being re-heard on appeal’ being unusual.98 This study has been focused on abolitionist efforts in a British and imperial context – although the reader may feel I have neglected more detailed studies of Welsh, Irish and Scottish efforts. Across the empire, similar debates generated by bungled colonial executions – now in private – surfaced in newspapers which continued to pay heed to British abolitionist interventions such as a speech by John Bright, now an elder statesman, at University College London in 1880, and continued to report the controversial exercise of prerogative by British Home Secretaries.99 Capital punishment was a problem troubling the consciences of many people in the nineteenth-century. The United States abolitionists have been examined by various historians; continental European abolitionist effort is not well known by Anglophone scholars. The honorary membership of the S.A.C.P. displayed the international dimension of the abolitionist cause. As the S.A.C.P. noted while the Royal Commission conducted its inquiry in 1866, the subject of capital punishment was ‘occupying the attention of the most distinguished philanthropists and jurists in all parts of Europe and America’.100 In 1872, as we have seen, there was an international conference on the question in London. Both sides of the argument sought to marshal international evidence. At the beginning of the S.A.C.P.’s activity, Punch had contrasted ‘infidel Turkey’ with Christian England.101 The Law Magazine and Law Review in 1864 wondered how the newly-appointed Commission would deal with the fact that the abolition of capital punishment had not caused an increase in violent crimes in Bombay, and the evidence of abolition or

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suspension in ‘countries as civilised as our own’ (‘Louisiana, Rhode Island, Michigan and Wisconsin, in Laenwarden, Utrecht, Brunswick, Denmark, Belgium, Berne, and Tuscany’).102 The virtual suspension of capital punishment in Belgium between 1830–1834 provided evidence for the abolitionists.103 Tuscany in particular – as the first European state to make the experiment of abolition (under the Grand Duke Leopold, 1774–1779; and again after 1830) – was cited as a case for abolitionism or retention – The Times printing an editorial which condemned the exercise of mercy having been taken to an extreme, leading to ‘absolute impunity’ to all evil-doers in Italy.104 The Italians, the paper suggested in another editorial, had become infatuated by the ‘ultrahumane’ idea that ‘mildness of punishment is the best remedy against the frequency and atrocity of crime’ and that nothing was ‘more natural than for a young nation to aspire to the boast of advanced civilization by an exaggeration of legislative leniency’.105 More compelling for British retentionist polemics was the evidence of the Swiss plebiscite to restore capital punishment in 1879, though the actual circumstances were rather more complicated.106 The Pall Mall Gazette pointed out in 1873, when there had been, in its view, hardly a whisper of reply to John Stuart Mill’s memorable speech, that the space devoted to capital punishment in French and German papers of the extreme radical persuasion ‘is always surprising to an English reader’.107 Capital punishment was also a political issue in Spain, and the British press carried news about the debates on abolition in the Cortes following the revolution of 1869.108 The abolitionist sentiments of the Crown Prince Oscar, later Oscar I of Sweden and Norway, were brought before the British public in a translation of his pamphlet of 1840: his son Charles XV refused to sign death warrants after 1868.109 Russia’s abolitionist status – her ‘pretended clemency’ – was debatable.110 In France the question of capital punishment was clearly (in the eyes of the British) politicized. Thus the ultramontane party’s anti-abolitionist position could be presented by some British Evangelicals as an example of their resistance to reform, how Catholicism ‘sneers at every desire of progress’.111 Giuseppe Mazzini’s polemic on the papacy, published in translation by Gilpin in 1851 as The Pope in the Nineteenth Century, noted that the Savoyard conservative philosopher Joseph-Marie de Maistre had linked absolutism with the executioner: ‘Catholicism, despotism and punishment of death the three bases, according to de Maistre, of society’.112 In the same year, Douglas Jerrold and almost fifty other British and Irish journalists sent a public address to Victor Hugo’s son, after his imprisonment for an attack on capital punishment, which condemned the

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‘shackled press’ of France on such questions of ‘vast import to humanity’.113 Given that capital punishment was intimately connected with French revolutions – speeches on repeal and the mass (if more humane) infliction via guillotine during the first, the humanitarian sensibilities of LouisPhilippe after the July revolution, and the reforms promoted by the 1848 revolution – it was not surprising that the French should figure in British abolitionist debates. In the mid-1860s, when the subject of capital punishment was very much ‘on the tapis’, British newspapers carried accounts of French capital punishment debates, and trials in which the morality of execution surfaced.114 Ultra Catholics remained convinced, so one Paris correspondent wrote, that the scaffold was the clef de voute of society, whilst Liberals saw its abolition as a necessary stage in civilization. The authorities banned a banquet to promote ‘No Scaffold’.115 A ‘Paris letter’ which was reprinted in the British provincial press, spoke of the extraordinary proportions of abolitionist sentiment in France: with 80,0000 signatures to a petition to Senate for abolition and juries refusing to pronounce a verdict which involved the death penalty, in Alsace and Picardy.116 And the French barrister Emile Chédieu – in favour of abolition – had appeared before the Royal Commission to give detailed evidence in 1865. British commentators identified a clear preference for ‘extenuating circumstances’ in French society – ‘the bourreau is your pet across the Channel; he is not so with us,’ a character tells an Englishman visiting a French prison in Ouida’s story Strathmore of 1864.117 This study of the Victorian abolitionists in Britain and the British Empire has sought to render in more detail the features of what was a troubling question of the day. The Times was not exaggerating when it described it in 1866 as a ‘great question …one of national importance and certainly no other touches more nearly the interests of society’.118 Captain Basil Hall RN, in prefacing a comparative study of the British gallows and the French guillotine in 1841, argued that ‘if we wish to study the national character of any people, we must consent to witness a good deal that is disagreeable, in order to see how they act under a variety of circumstances.’119 The capital punishment question reveals so much about the Victorians.120 The abolitionist effort provides, for example, a route into nineteenth-century debates on human progress, with the contemporary age compared with the British or European past. Could capital punishment continue to operate in a country which purported to be ‘free and enlightened’?121 What role should scripture or expediency play in determining penality? Was death the most severe punishment that could be inflicted? Was pain divinely ordained? Should those who had taken

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human life not be ritually shamed in public? Should there be gradation of murder, with death restricted to wilful murder and a lesser penalty for other homicides?122 What did the crowd’s participation in the public infliction reveal about the curiosity of death which ‘haunts every human being’?123 The question of whether someone was for or against capital punishment, as the Pall Mall Gazette pointed out in 1865, ‘depends upon the temper of his mind, upon his view of the nature of death and what comes after it, upon his view of moral evil and its character as being either an abomination to be hated and destroyed, or an inconvenience to be avoided, or a weakness to be pitied and cured’.124 Of course, in dealing primarily with abolitionism, the victim of murderous violence has tended to be absent from the discussion in this study. The critics who did wish to underline the victim’s plight might identify a perverted sensibility behind abolition: The Standard characterized abolitionists in 1847 as ‘the fondlers of assassins’ who anticipated the ‘pleasure of petting their bloodstained favourites’.125 Critics called on abolitionists to stand on the ground of abstract principle rather than whitewash even the most appalling criminals.126 But as the barrister Sheldon Amos observed in his abolitionist pamphlet in 1864, ‘there is abroad in England an all but universal sympathy and interest on behalf of the murderer, far exceeding that felt for his victim’ – a demonstration that the critique of morbid sympathy could be used by abolitionists to press for their cause. In an age in which the balance of public opinion seemed to be sympathetic with the call for a life for a life, the obscuring of the victim’s (or victims’) sufferings must have been disquieting. Nevertheless, as Amos recognized, it was the murderer ‘nurtured into a monstrous prodigy’, in living through the vicissitudes of arrest, trial, death sentence, and the efforts to secure reprieve, who attracted public interest, vilification or sympathy.127 A study entitled Victorians Against the Gallows requires the qualification of ‘some, but not the majority’. As one recent study of punishment and metropolitan society notes, the reforms to the capital code by 1840 lent a ‘fresh eschatological legitimacy’ to capital punishment. Abolitionists had hoped that the retention of the penalty for murder had, advantageously for their cause, provided a ‘single point which can engage the minds of men’.128 But exacting life for life – that ‘stern equation’ as Radzinowicz called it – gave the penalty a legitimacy which proved resilient – even after that age-old participation in the free and communal entertainment of the public hanging was no longer possible.129 Perhaps, like the attitudes to poverty and sexuality, we may see the approval of the gallows as an aspect of ‘Victorian values’ which sustained the Victorian age well beyond the death of the widow of Windsor and into

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the post-1945 period. Late Victorians may have treated the amelioration of the capital code which coincided with the accession of the young queen as a ‘great moral key-note of our new era’.130 But it was to be in the midst of the ‘permissive age’ in 1969 that abolition of capital punishment for murder was finally achieved in Britain and this was not a result of a conversion of the public mind at large.131

NOTES

Introduction 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8

9

10

11

12

‘Hanging, Past and Present,’ Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine 10 (1843), pp.233-241 [p.235]. Magazine of Popular Information on Capital and Secondary Punishments, 15 June 1845, p.59. ‘Calcraft’s Calling,’ Temple Bar 15 (August 1865), pp.144-153 [ p.144]. As the pro-abolitionist ‘T.H.’ in Daily News, 17 April 1846, asked, ‘How long could Ireland be preserved in obedience without a hangman and a soldier?’ The Examiner, 18 March 1848, p.178. Mr Manning, at a meeting on capital punishment, Ipswich Journal, 27 September 1851. By ‘platform’ I mean the public advocacy of political and other reform movements, whether in large-scale open air meetings, or in ticketed indoor venues, and lectures. See H. Jephson, The Platform: its Rise and Progress (2 vols; London and New York: Macmillan, 1892) vol.1, p.xx, ‘the spoken expression of public opinion outside Parliament’. As one critic of abolitionism, The Globe, 27 November 1849, wrote, ‘the platform system and its various off-shoots are becoming perfect nuisances to English life.’ I quote from an article on capital punishment in the (abolitionist) British Medical Journal, 22 November 1862, p.536: ‘Even the ferocious eloquence of the Times fails in waking up the mind of society to full and fervent belief in the advantages and necessity for the taking of human life in the way of punishment.’ Contemporary terms for those who supported the capital punishment included ‘antiabolitionist’ – used by Charles Phillips, Vacation Thoughts on Capital Punishment (London: W. and F.G. Cash, 1857). See essay on transportation in Penny Cyclopaedia of the Society for Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (London: Charles Knight, 1843), vol.25, p.158, where the inference from the statistics of crime in connection with the mitigation of the penal code led to the comment that ‘opinion is gaining ground in favour of the entire abolition of death punishment’; H.L. Burton, ‘Criminal Law,’ The Odd Fellows’ Magazine 7 (January 1844–October 1845), pp.152-158. On the British Medical Journal’s abolitionism, see editorial, ‘Capital Punishment’, 22 November 1862, pp.536-537. For foreign comments or reports on British capital punishment, see for instance L. Blanc, Letters on England (2 vols; London: Sampson, Low, 1866), vol.1, ‘The Gallows’ (20 October 1861), pp.174-181. F.W. Robertson, ‘hanging a woman is a hideous thought,’ following the case of Hickman. Robertson discussed capital punishment in a sermon, see Sermons by the Rev. F.W. Robertson (4 vols; Leipzig: B. Tauschnitz, 1861) vol.3, p.257. On Madden’s abolitionism, see Madden, The Memoirs (chiefly autobiographical) from 1798–1889 (New York: Catholic Publication Society, 1891), pp.271-272, and also (for his views expressed

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17 18

19

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in 1835), p.89. Madden had been published by Charles Gilpin. Thomas Burke’s sentence was commuted. D.A. Thomas, ‘Thackeray, Capital Punishment, and the demise of Jos. Sedley,’ Victorian Literature and Culture 33:1 (March 2005), pp.1-20; P.C. Jones, ‘The Politics of Poetry: The Democratic Review and the Gallows verse of William Wordsworth and John Greenleaf Whittier,’ American Periodicals 17:1 (2007), pp.1-25; P.C. Jones, ‘“I put my fingers around my throat and squeezed it, to know how it feels”: Antigallows Sentimentalism and E.D.E.N. Southward’s The Hidden Hand,’ Legacy 25: 1 (2008), pp.4161. The literature of capital punishment included ‘lamentations’ purporting to come from the condemned, see E.L. O’Brien, ‘“Every Man who is Hanged Leaves a Poem”: Criminal Poets in Victorian Street Ballads,’ Victorian Poetry 39: 2 (2001), pp.319-339. The royal prerogative of mercy, already before the relevant section 1 of the Criminal Statutes Repeal Bill in 1861, was exercised by the Home Office rather than judiciary, with judges sending the department recommendations for mercy. The Royal Commission on capital punishment in 1866 published evidence about the exercise of the prerogative, concerning circumstances which might justify commutation or pardon (i.e., in the exercise of mercy, not as a substitute for a court of appeal), which involved consultation with the trial judge, study of the judge’s report on evidence, study of the prisoner’s petition, and advice from the permanent undersecretary. B. Harrison, Drink and the Victorians. The Temperance Question in England 1815–1872 (London: Faber, 1971), pp.227-229 provides a valuable discussion of the techniques of pressure groups such as the temperance movement. The Era, 6 September 1857. P. Griffiths, ‘Introduction; Punishing the English,’ in S. Devereaux and P. Griffiths, eds, Penal Practice and Culture, 1500–1900. Punishing the English (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp.1-35 [p.9]. W.A Munford, William Ewart M.P. 1798–1869. Portrait of a Radical (London: Grafton, 1960). The work fails to mention the S.A.C.P., or its officers and is cursory on Ewart’s abolitionism, pp.59-62, 153-156. O’Connell described Ewart in 1839 as ‘a rational and sober but determined radical’ (p.97); but Ewart rejected the ‘radical’ label in a letter (excerpt, p.134) to his sister in 1852, ‘except in the reformatory sense’. L. Radzinowicz, A History of English Criminal Law and its Administration from 1750. vol.4, Grappling for Control (London: Stevens, 1968). For equation between parliament and public opinion see p.337, where the defeat of a motion for a Commons committee to inquire into capital punishment (10 June 1856) represents the hardening of ‘prevailing public opinion’ against abolition. The Times is treated as the voice of public opinion, e.g., p.335 where Times’ leaders following atrocious murders (e.g., J.B. Rush’s crime in 1849) are evidence of anti-abolition sentiment being ‘powerfully stimulated’ by such crimes. L. Radzinowicz and R. Hood, The Emergence of Penal Policy in Victorian and Edwardian England (1986; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), ch.20. E.O. Tuttle, The Crusade against Capital Punishment in Great Britain (London: Stevens, 1961); G. Rose, The Struggle for Penal Reform: The Howard League and its Predecessors (London: Stevens, 1961). Tallack’s papers are in Syracuse University Library, but have little material relevant to the period of the S.A.C.P. See B. Forsythe, ‘William Tallack (1831–1908),’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). See also, for a more general survey, B.P. Block and J. Hostettler, Hanging in the Balance. A History of the Abolition of Capital Punishment in Britain (Winchester: Waterside Press, 1997); M.J.D. Roberts, Making English Morals: Voluntary Association and Moral Reform in England, 1787–1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp.207-209. D.D. Cooper, ‘Capital Punishment within Prisons Bill 1868’ (unpublished, New York University, Ph.D., 1969) and The Lesson of the Scaffold (London: Allen Lane, 1974). See also his chapter, ‘Public Executions in Victorian England; A Reform Adrift,’ in

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26 27

28

29 30 31

32

33 34 35

36 37

38 39 40

VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS W.B. Thesing, ed., Executions and the British Experience from the 17th to the 20th century: a Collection of Essays (London: McFarland, 1990). Cooper, ‘Capital Punishment within Prisons Bill,’ p.95. Cooper, ‘Capital Punishment within Prisons Bill,’ p.65; though as he points out at p.17, it was a dilemma for retentionists too. See also R. McGowen, ‘Civilizing Punishment: the End of the Public Execution in England,’ Journal of British Studies 33: 3 (July 1994), pp.257-282, where the abolitionists are seen as dominating the debate until the 1860s through effective use of gallows-scandals, the conservatives seeing, p.263, ‘the condemnation of the public execution as a stalking horse for total abolition, and this explains their long resistance to its termination’. H. Potter, Hanging in Judgement. Religion and the Death Penalty in England from the Bloody Code to Abolition (London: SCM Press, 1993). R.R. Follett, Evangelicalism, Penal Theory and the Politics of Criminal Law Reform in England 1808–1830 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), based on Follett, ‘Evangelicalism, legal theory, and the politics of Criminal Law Reform in England, 1808–1830,’ Washington University Ph.D. (1996), from which I quote, pp.26-27. R. Chadwick, Bureaucratic Mercy. The Home Office and the Treatment of capital cases in Victorian Britain (New York and London: Garland, 1992). For contemporary knowledge of the prerogative, see for instance, Alpheus Todd’s On Parliamentary Government in England: its Origin, Development, and Practical Operation (2 vols; London: Longmans, Green, 1867), vol.1, pp.343-366. Chadwick, Bureaucratic Mercy, p.148, quoting C.P.C., minute 1502, 14 February 1865, p.200. Radzinowicz, History of English Criminal Law, vol.4, p.334. Chadwick, Bureaucratic Mercy, pp.19-20. Chadwick characterizes the abolitionists as ‘a vigorous minority of idealists using the tools of utilitarian criticism’. For an earlier study of the royal prerogative of mercy using the memoirs of Dymond, the S.A.C.P. secretary, see F. Bresler, Reprieve. A Study of a System (London: George G. Harrap, 1965). Chadwick’s conclusions are based on 68 files in the National Archives (hereafter, N.A.), HO 144 series, but ten only of these are from the period 1850–1868; and only six of these cases are during the years when the S.A.C.P. was active. Nevertheless the work is essential for an understanding of how the royal prerogative operated and his treatment of the Home Secretary–Bench relationship is borne out by the cases studied here. V.A.C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree. Execution and the English People 1770–1868 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. See R. McGowen, ‘Revisiting the Hanging Tree,’ The British Journal of Criminology 40: 1 (Winter 2000), pp.1-13, for an important review of the work. For a perspective, employing the post-modern theory of performativity, and rejecting ‘teleological civilizing process’, see J. Martschukat, ‘Nineteenth-Century Executions as Performances of Law, Death and Civilizing,’ ch.2 in A Sarat and C. Boulanger, eds, The Cultural Lives of Capital Punishment: Comparative Perspectives (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2005), which stresses the ‘transfer of the killing ritual’ (p.58) in privatization – private executions still being spectacles and ritualistic. ‘The “Social Science Review” on “Insanity and Crime”,’ Journal of Mental Science 10 (1865), pp.128-131 [p.128]. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree, p.24. On growing squeamishness, see also, R.J. Evans, Rituals of Retribution. Capital Punishment in Germany. 1600–1987 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Gatrell, The Hanging Tree, p.610. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree, pp.226-227. The quotation is from ch.6 of P. Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering, Executions and the Evolution of Repression: From a Preindustrial Metropolis to the European Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p.185. Concerning abolitionists and retentionists,

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46

47

48

49

50

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Spierenburg writes, p.199: ‘It may be correct to designate those who tenaciously held to the public security view as conservatives or reactionaries, but this is largely tautological.’ Gatrell, The Hanging Tree, pp.608-609. On this subject, see C. Strange, ‘The “Shock” of Torture: a Historiographical Challenge,’ History Workshop Journal 61 (2006), pp.135-152. See M.T. White, ‘Ordering the Mob: London’s Public Punishments c.1783–1868,’ an unpublished University of Hertfordshire Ph.D., April 2009. White argues, p.321, for a changing attitude to the hanged, as a result of the reforms which left only murder to be capital punished after 1840: ‘earlier psychological connotations of the gallows as representing “illegitimate power” or the fate of the fallen “everyman” were largely removed, and the crowd’s contempt or “ordinary” hangings erased.’ M.J. Wiener, Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness and Criminal Justice in Victorian England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); J. Carter Wood, Violence and Crime in Nineteenth-Century England: the Shadow of our Refinement (London: Routledge, 2004). See R.D. Altick, Victorian Studies in Scarlet. Murders and Manners in the Age of Victoria (New York: Norton, 1970); A. Borowitz, The Women who murdered Black Satin. The Bermondsey Horror (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1981); and J. Flanders, The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime (London: HarperPress, 2011). W.L. Burn, The Age of Equipoise: a study of the mid-Victorian generation (1964; London: Taylor and Francis, 1994), p.37 cites Stapleton’s study as an interesting light on mores, since Mr Kent fathered children by his first wife when she was supposed to be insane. The Staffordshire ware included representations of J.B. Rush, Stanfield Hall, the Red Barn, and the Mannings. The Ashmolean Museum has a medal struck to commemorate the execution of Rush in 1849. Rush was also portrayed lithographically by Freeman Brothers. On biographies of murderers, see ‘The Biography of Little People’, The Church of the People (London: Kent, 1859), pp.81-83. This commodification, needless to say, had its critics, see, for instance, ‘Household Ornaments,’ Punch 17, October 1849, p.170. From the facsimile of a placard, reported in the press, for instance Caledonian Mercury, 15 September 1856. For a recent examination of the Palmer case in the context of wider concerns about poisoning in mid-Victorian culture, see I.A. Burney, Poison, Detection, and the Victorian Imagination (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006). D.R. Bentley, Capital Punishment in Northern England, 1750 – 1900 (Sheffield: ALD, 2008) critiques, pp.93-94, Gatrell’s metropolitan focus, regarding behaviour by crowd and condemned. R. Graves, They hanged my saintly Billy (London: Cassell, 1957); T.A. Critchley and P.D. James, The Maul and the Pear Tree: The Ratcliff Highway Murders, 1811 (London: Constable, 1971); D. Macgowan, Murder in Victorian Scotland: The Trial of Madeleine Smith (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1999); M. Alpert, London 1849. A Victorian Murder Story (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2004); O. Davies, Murder, Magic, Madness. The Victorian Murder Trials of Dove and the Wizard (Harlow: Pearson/Longman, 2005); B. Muscutt, A Life for a Life. The Real Story of Mary Ball (Düsseldorf: EUGEP, 2006); K. Summerscale, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, or, The Murder at Road Hill House (London: Bloomsbury, 2008); K. Colquhoun, Mr Briggs’ Hat: A Sensational Account of Britain’s First Railway Murder (London: Little, Brown, 2011). For an overview, see A. Borowitz, ‘The History and Traditions of Fact-Based Crime Literature’, Legal Studies Forum 29:2 (April 2005), pp.957-999; and Borowitz, Blood & Ink: an international guide to fact-based crime literature (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2002). The continental European dimension is touched on in my concluding chapter. The Gilpin Papers in Duke University, Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library, preserve a translation of an Italian abolitionist’s paean to Gilpin (L.F.D. Gemma, Verona, 21 June 1866): ‘The Abolition of Capital Punishment had in you one of its most strenuous defenders.’ On the American connection, see Mackey, Hanging in

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55 56

57

58 59 60 61 62 63

64

VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS the Balance; there was little direct contact but works by Henry Christmas and M.B. Sampson (the latter’s Rationale of Crime) were influential. For American coverage of Calcraft’s faltering in the 1860s see Mackey, ed., Voices against Death, p.137, excerpt from an article by E.C. Stedman in 1869. For transatlantic reform links see Harrison, Drink and the Victorians, pp.101-102 for peace, temperance, anti-slavery connections; see also A. Claybaugh, The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007). P.E. Mackey, Hanging in the Balance. The Anti Capital Punishment Movement in New York State 1776–1861 (1969; New York: Garland, 1982); P.E. Mackey, ed., Voices Against Death American Opposition to Capital Punishment 1787–1867 (New York: B. Franklin, 1976); L. Masur, Rites of Execution. Capital Punishment and the Transformation of American Culture, 1776–1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); S. Banner, The Death Penalty. An American History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002). An essay by D. Brion Davies, ‘The Movement to Abolish Capital Punishment in America, 1787– 1861,’ American Historical Review 63 (1957) pp.23-46, examined the literary dimension. The New Existence of Man upon the Earth (London: Effingham Wilson, 1855), appendix E, p.18. Randolph was an African American who established an American Rosicrucian organization, see J.P. Deveney and F. Rosemount, Paschal Beverly Randolph (Albany: State University of New York, 1996). M. Fuller Ossoli, At Home and Abroad; or, Things and Thoughts in America and Europe (Boston: Brown, Taggard and Chase, 1860), pp.129-130. ‘The Origin and Object of the Society for the Diffusion of Knowledge upon the Punishment of Death,’ reprinted in the Unitarian Monthly Repository of Theology and General Literature 6: 67 (2 July 1811), pp.385-391. Mackey, Hanging in the Balance, argues there was little direct influence between the English and New York abolitionists, but C.C. Burgoyne, ‘“Imprisonment the Best Punishment”: The Transatlantic Exchange and Communication of Ideas in the Field of Penology, 1750–1820,’ unpublished Ph.D., University of Sunderland, 1997, traces the communication of ideas, see reference in C. Emsley, ‘The Changes in Policing and Penal Policy in Nineteenth-century Europe’ in B.S. Godfrey and G. Dunstall, eds, Crime and Empire, 1840–1940. Criminal Justice in Local and Global Context (Cullompton, Devon: Willan Publishing, 2005), pp.8-24 [p.20]. Christian Reformer n.s.1 (January-December, 1845), p.568; C. Spear, Essays on the Punishment of Death (London: J. Green, 1844; later editions in 1845 published by J. Chapman); Universalist Watchman and Christian Repository (Montpelier, Vermont), 12 April 1845, p.310, reprints letters between Haughton and Daniel O’Connell on Spear’s work. C. Spear, Essays on the Punishment of Death (10th edition, Boston: the Author; London: J. Chapman, 1845), p.206; and appendix II, Mrs Fry’s visit to Newgate, pp.234-245. The essay appeared in The Topic (London: C. Mitchell) 7 (1847). In that year Grey sought information about capital punishment from the U.S. Secretary of State. On Spear’s presence in Britain, see Manchester Times, 22 October 1851. Birmingham Daily Post, 24 February 1869. ‘Calcraft’s Calling,’ Temple Bar 15, August 1865, pp.144-153 [p.153]. The article was rendered into phonetic for The Phonetic Journal, 23 December 1865. See Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.198, HC, 28 July 1869, col.846; Professor Dr Osenbrüggen, ‘Lesefruchte und Randglossen,’ Der Gerichtssaal: Zeitschrift für zivil- und militär-Strafrecht (Erlangen: Ferdinand Ente, 1867) 19, pp.161-170. Morning Post, 27 August 1852, p.8 (on his manufacturing career); A.H. Dymond, The Law on its Trial, or personal recollections of the death penalty and its opponents (London: A.W. Bennett, 1865). Explaining, p.vi, that the work is no history of the movement, due to lack of leisure, Dymond writes: ‘let it be regarded rather as rough jottings from the recollections and notes of one on whom circumstances have, for the last eight years, imposed a somewhat rigorous abstinence from all share in public agitation, but on whose memory come often crowding up reminiscences, in which the unpleasant and painful are strangely mingled.’

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For the polemical intent, see p.vii, ‘It has appeared best, however, to compile a small volume of those most likely to be of value in the anticipated discussion of the question.’ W. Tallack, Howard Letters and Memories (London: Methuen, 1905). The discussion of Tallack’s pre-Howard Association work against capital punishment is found in chs.8-9. A biography of Tallack appeared in ‘Our Portrait Album’ in the journal Charity in 1891. The Gilpin Papers, Special Collections Library, Duke University, North Carolina. The archive only preserves correspondence to Gilpin, but, as the archive catalogue describes it, these are communications from a ‘glittering array of mid-nineteenth century reformers’. The papers of abolitionists such as Ewart, Jerrold, Beggs and Dymond do not appear to exist (or are inaccessible), although it may be that there is material in archives such as the Bright papers. See for instance P. Hollis, ‘The Administrative Reform Association, 1855–1857,’ in P. Hollis, ed., Pressure from Without in Early Victorian England (London: Edward Arnold, 1974), pp.262-287; and D.A. Hamer, The Politics of Electoral Pressure. A Study in the History of Victorian Reform Agitations (Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester, 1977), where the practical problem of source material for pressure groups is highlighted, p.3. University of Warwick Library, Special Collection, HF 4000 H6 (previously catalogued as SpC 5c a1). The collection preserves reports for the years 1865–1868; 1872. The archive therefore lacks many of the reports, financial statements, subscriptions lists, and includes no minutes. It also has Howard Association reports and tracts written largely by Tallack, and material relating to the early nineteenth century abolitionist societies, including the Dublin branch. Radzinowicz, History of English Criminal Law, vol.4, p.329 (see pp.329-331 on abolitionist literature). The literature is also referred to in Potter, Hanging in Judgement and in P.A.W. Collins, Dickens and Crime (London: Macmillan, 1962), ch.10, ‘The Punishment of Death’. My bibliography lists abolitionist and retentionist pamphlets. See, for instance, D. Capper, ‘Let none of you suffer as a murderer’. A Sermon to young men, preached in the parish church of Huntley, Sunday, June 22, 1856 (Gloucester: Davies and Sons, 1856);; and two tracts in the William Salt Library in Stafford stimulated by William Palmer’s case: Reverend W.G. Hillman, Is capital punishment in unison with the teachings of the New Testament – a sermon preached shortly after the execution of William Palmer by the Reverend W.G. Hillman (Stafford: Hill and Halden, 1856); and Reverend R.H. Goodacre, The duty of intercession and the execution of the murderer (Stafford: R. Wright, 1856). See also the abolitionist but anti-sentimentalist ‘The substance of a discourse preached in Paradise Chapel, Darlington by the Reverend M. Miller, on the Execution of William Palmer,’ The Wesleyan Methodist Association Magazine 19 (1856), pp.411-419. Harrison, Drink and the Victorians; H. Temperley, British Anti-slavery 1833–1870 (London: Longman, 1972) and M. Ceadel, The Origins of War Prevention. The British Peace Movement and International Relations, 1730–1854 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). Harrison’s Dictionary of British Temperance Biography (Sheffield: Society for the Study of Labour History, 1973) helps identify temperance figures who supported abolition; the temperance-capital punishment connection is pointed out in Drink and the Victorians. See also, D. Turley, The Culture of English Antislavery, 1780–1860 (London: Routledge, 1991), ch.5, on the ‘middle-class reform complex’. Friends’ House Library, London. The biographical information on obscurer Quakers is derived from the (unpublished) Quaker Biographical Index. Material relating to abolitionism preserved in the archive includes the report of the immediate precursor to the S.A.C.P. in 1845, a testimonial to Tallack as S.A.C.P. secretary and a letter to J.B. Cooke of Liverpool arranging an abolitionist meeting for 1848. See the papers of Francis H. Dickinson, MP, Somerset Archive and Record Service, DD/DN, for a letter on abolition from Sylvanus Fox; petitions from Street and Bridgwater against capital punishment, Somerset Archive and Record Service, ZMD 167/26/129; QSP/3675/35, memorial of Justice re restriction of capital

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76 77 78 79

80 81

VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS punishment to precincts of gaols, 13 April 1863; letters from the Reverend Sidney Godolphin Osborne to his brother-in-law C.P. Grenfell, on the Commission on Capital Punishment, D-GR/8/49-50 (1860), Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies; petition organized by Reverend James Ballantyne, West Manse, Earlston, to Miss E. Weyham, on behalf of Maria Hamilton, in Nottinghamshire Archives; Reverend John Frere of Cottenham against capital punishment in newspaper clipping (1846) in Rectors’ miscellaneous volume 1, Cambridgeshire County Record Office; and volume 2, printed notice from the Reverend Frere advising parishioners to stay away from public execution to take place in Cambridge. On the question as the subject of essays in commonplace books, see the National Library of Wales, 9862A (Derwlyn 3), a commonplace book c.1865–1866. See White, ‘Ordering the Mob: London’s Public Punishments c.1783–1868,’ p.336, for blasé references to attending hangings in the mid-1840s, which White uses to suggest the ‘respectability’ of this activity as part of a day’s leisure activities. The 43 cases studied in the course of this research include some involving several convicts, for instance the three Italian youths Lagava, Barbalano and Petrici accused of the murder on the high seas of John Smith, in 1856; or the ‘pirates’ in the Flowery Land incident in 1864. The preserved minutes in these files, of the Home Secretary, permanent under-secretary and the presiding judges, generally confirm the views of Radzinowicz and Hood, Emergence of Penal Policy, pp.677-679 and Chadwick, Bureaucratic Mercy, regarding the royal prerogative and the mentality of these officers of the state. There is also insight on the ‘language of reprieve’ from petitions by individuals, religious congregations and urban communities, in addition to letters from members of the S.A.C.P. The phrase comes from a translation of Jules Simon, ‘The Death Penalty. A Narrative,’ Every Saturday 8: 204 (27 November 1869), p.676. See, for instance, W. Brade, Oedipus on the Sphinx of the Nineteenth Century: or politicopolemical riddles interpreted by an old-clothes philosopher (London: G. Mainwaring, 1862). H. Paul, Life of Froude (London: Pitman, 1905), ch.2. Temperley, British Anti-slavery, pp.77, 80 for suggestive remarks on support for the British and Foreign Anti-slavery Society both at committee level and in auxiliary societies, at the latter level ‘little more than groups of friends or parishioners who were willing, when asked, to assist ... but who otherwise paid little attention to slavery’. Sir William Harcourt and H.C.E. Childers. For retentionist views on public opinion, see ‘The Bill in behalf of Murder,’ Law Magazine (August 1850); Daily News, 2 January 1864, p.4 where ‘flaccid sentimentalists’ are credited with creating a false public opinion to parade in front to the Home Office; and Daily News, 8 March 1864, pp.4-5, during efforts to save Hall at Birmingham. The subject is dealt with more fully in Chapter 3.

Chapter 1. The rise and decline of the movement 1 2 3

4

The Times, 30 April 1846, p.4: Lord Nugent used the analogy of diet to argue that to prove a food was poisonous did not mean an obligation to regulate future diet. Hamer, The Politics of Electoral Pressure, p.1. Interestingly, the American minister W. McDonell’s Exeter Hall: a theological romance (Boston: Colby and Rich, 1869), a novel with a purpose against religious sectarianism, mentions the capital punishment abolitionists, see p.50. See the letter from ‘T.H.’, in Daily News, 17 April 1846, addressed to ‘the gentlemen who are to meet in Exeter-Hall on the 29th inst.’ An advertisement for the event, mentioning Dickens, W.J. Fox, William Ewart, Douglas Jerrold and Daniel O’Connell as expected to attend, appeared in The Standard, April 1846. Interestingly, abolition of

NOTES

5 6

7

8

9 10

11

12

13

14

251

capital punishment and slavery are stressed as the key reforms emanating from Exeter Hall, in C. Knight, London (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1851), vol.5, p.247. Follett, ‘Evangelicalism, Legal Theory and the Politics of Criminal Law Reform in England 1808–1830,’ p.316, p.331. Radzinowicz, History of English Criminal Law, vol.4: the question of the law in relation to responsibility (and mental abnormality); the necessity for a Court of Criminal Appeal; criminal law consolidation (the subject of four commissions by 1849, and further commission activity 1853–1854); and problems associated with reforming a penal system reliant on transportation. See also, on the Law Amendment Society, established 1844, with a membership including practising lawyers, and MPs, including William Ewart, L. Goldman, Science, Reform, and Politics in Victorian Britain. The Social Science Association 1857–1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp.33-39. On this strategy of separate identities in public, see Roberts, Making English Morals, p.105; Follett, ‘Evangelicalism, Legal Theory and the Politics of Criminal Law Reform in England 1808–1830,’ p.330; Report of Committee of Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline and the Reformation of Juvenile Offenders (1822), pp.13-14. There were explicit anticapital punishment sentiments in the general meeting of the Society for Improvement of Prison Discipline at Exeter Hall, see Bury and Norwich Post, 8 June 1831, Derby Mercury, 15 June 1831. A.T. Thomson, Celebrated Friendships (2 vols; London: James Hogg, 1861), vol.2, pp.9192. Montagu, standing as a radical reformer at Finsbury, appealed to ‘the Friends of Humanity’ and discussed abolitionism, in 1841, see broadside To the Electors of Finsbury (1841). He published Opinions of Different Authors upon the Punishment of Death, selected by Mr B. Montagu (London, 1809), expanded to three volumes, published tracts, Some Inquiries respecting the Punishment of Death for Crimes without Violence (1818); Thoughts on the Punishment of Death for Forgery (London: W. Pickering, 1830), and wrote to the press on capital punishment, see Morning Post, 19 March 1846, p.6. He was vegetarian. See Follett, ‘Evangelicalism, Legal Theory and the Politics of Criminal Law Reform in England 1808–1830,’ p.315. Hoare, as Follett notes, in Evangelicalism, Penal Theory and the Politics of Criminal Law Reform, became an Anglican. On Smith, see Ceadel, Origins of War Prevention, p.207. On Dyer, see M.R. Adams, ‘George Dyer and English Radicalism’ in Studies in the Literary Backgrounds of English Radicalism (Lancaster, Pennsylvania: Franklin and Marshall, 1947). See M. Phillips, Memoir of the Life of Richard Phillips (London: Seeley and Burnside, 1841), p.135, for Montagu’s recollections, aided by his study of the Minute Book record of the first meeting, 21 March 1808. On Wix, Wilson and Wrangham, see, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004): Peter B. Nockles, ‘Samuel Wix, 1771–1861’; Wilson, see A. Porter, ‘Daniel Wilson, 1778–1858’; D. Kaloustian, ‘Francis Wrangham, 1769–1842’. Romilly was not a supporter of total abolition, but his fourth son, Henry Romilly was, as recorded in a pamphlet published by John Murray in 1886. The early abolition societies are discussed in Potter, Hanging in Judgement, Gatrell, The Hanging Tree, Cooper, The Lessons of the Scaffold and Follett, Evangelicalism, Penal Theory and the Politics of Criminal Law Reform. On parliamentary debates, see Follett, ‘Evangelicalism, Legal Theory and the Politics of Criminal Law Reform in England 1808–1830,’ p.320, footnote 99. ‘Address of the Society for Diffusing Information on the Subject of Capital Punishment and Prison Discipline,’ Pocket Magazine of Classic and Polite Literature (1819), pp.106-112, records the heavy expense of collecting authorities on capital punishment, which extended to a greater length than was originally anticipated. There was also expenditure on books, pamphlets, parliamentary papers, and the printing of ‘parliamentary debates, curious facts and occasional advertisements’. See Follett, ‘Evangelicalism, Legal Theory and the Politics of Criminal Law Reform in England 1808–1830,’ p.315, p.329.

252 15

16

17

18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25

VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS On the significance of Quaker support, see Chapter 6 below and Follett, ‘Evangelicalism, Legal Theory and the Politics of Criminal Law Reform in England 1808–1830,’ p.330 (note 129) on Gatrell’s characterization in The Hanging Tree (pp.403-408). The four heads of activity as set out by John T. Barry to W.S. Phillips, 14 May 1832, see W.S. Phillips, Considerations on the Increase and Progress of Crime accompanied by Documentary Evidence as to the Propriety and necessity of a Revision and Amendment of the Existing penal Statutes with a view to the abolition of corporeal punishment; and more particularly the awful penalty of death (Liverpool: D. Marples, 1839), p.35. The significance of Quaker support was appreciated at the time, see ‘The Quakers’ in J. Grant, Light and Shadows of London Life (2 vols, London: Saunders and Otley, 1842), vol.2, p.190. The Friend, 4 September 1830, p.376. On Barry, who, according to Frederic Rowton, Howitt’s Journal 2 (1847), p.348, ‘has spared no means of time, labour, or expense’ in the cause, and who had been instrumental in saving the lives of many condemned, see E.C. Cripps, Plough Court. The Story of a Notable Pharmacy, 1715–1927 (London: Allen and Hanburys, 1927); P.H. Emden, Quakers in Commerce (London: Sampson, Low and Marston, 1940), D. Chapman-Hush, Through a City Archway. The Story of Allen and Hanburys (London: J. Murray, 1954). Thomas Barnardiston Wrightson chaired a S.A.C.P. meeting at the City of London Literary Institution, see Illustrated London News, 23 May 1846, p.332. Wrightson was admitted to Lincoln’s Inn Field but never called to the bar, fifth son of William Wrightson of Cusworth, Yorkshire, see C. de L. Ryals and K.J. Fielding, eds, Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Carlyle vol.17, 1843 – March 1844 (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1990). Wrightson tabulated statistics for the abolitionist cause, and wrote a tract, On the Punishment of Death (reaching a third ‘greatly augmented’ edition in 1837). See entry in Life of William Allen with selections from his Correspondence (2 vols; Philadelphia: Longstreth, 1847) vol.2, p.326, 11 October 1834, ‘Wrightson is about to travel on the continent to collect information on the subject of the punishment of death.’ He received information, used in his abolitionist tract (1837), from the minister of justice in Berlin, see The Punishment of Death. A Selection of articles from the Morning Herald (2 vols; London: Hatchard, 1837), vol.2, p.vi. For his membership of the London Peace Society, see Proceedings of the Eighteenth Annual Meeting of the [London] Society for the Promotion of Permanent and Universal Peace, cited in The Calumet, n.s., 2: 6 (March and April 1835) pp.185-186. He bored Erasmus Darwin in 1835, when Darwin brought him to meet Carlyle, see G.A. Calder, ‘Erasmus A. Darwin, friend of Thomas and Jane Carlyle,’ Modern Language Quarterly 20:1 (1959), pp.36-48; The Carlyle Letters Online [CLO]. 2007. . Accessed 13 February 2010, Thomas Carlyle to John A. Carlyle, 15 June 1835, footnote 41. W. Beck, The Friends. Who they are – What they have Done (London: Richmond Publishing Co., 1897), p.192; Dymond, Law on its Trial, p.29. Pharmaceutical Journal, 1865, p.33. Barry’s obituary appeared in Morning Star, 4 April 1864. Joseph Sturge to J.G. Whitter, 3 January 1843, reprinted in H. Richard, Memoirs of Joseph Sturge (2 vols; London: S.W. Partridge) 2, p.349. Sheffield Independent, 25 February 1837. See Speech of the Right Honourable Sir William Meredith, Baronet (London: Society for Diffusion of Information on the Subject of Capital Punishments, 1831–1832), p.8. The Dublin Society, whose exact title sometimes varies, is described as a central committee of the Society for the Diffusion of Information on the Subject of Capital Punishment in 1830, but the Howard Society was formed out of the Prison Association of Ireland established in 1818, see the letter by Dr Robert Perceval, its vice president, in Forgery Laws. Proceedings of a Public Meeting, Held in Dublin, the Right Hon. the Lord Mayor in the Chair on the Ninth of March, 1831 (3rd edn., Dublin: R.D. Webb, 1832), p.lxxvii. A later list of officers appears in Freeman’s Journal 8 May 1838.

NOTES 26

27 28 29

30 31 32

33 34

35 36

37 38 39

40 41 42

43 44

253

Caledonian Mercury, 14 April 1836, p.1. The committee of the Prison Discipline Society condemned the ‘rash and unfounded censure, not only of the Government of the country, but of the Judges in our Supreme Court of criminal justice’. Mirror of Parliament, 14 June 1830, 4750. Phillips, Considerations on the Increase and Progress of Crime, pp.25-26, 9 September 1832. See his letter to Lord Melbourne, Liverpool Mercury, 10 May 1833. J. McCay, A General View of the History and Objects of the Bank of England (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1822). S. Haughton, ed., Memoir of James Haughton with Extracts from His Private and Published Letters (Dublin: E. Ponsonby, 1877), refers to him as a member of the Dublin Institution, Sackville Street, p.136. W.B.S. Taylor, History of the University of Dublin (London: T. Cadell, 1845), p.507. Liverpool Mercury, 8 February 1833. Phillips, Considerations, Ewart to Phillips, 1 May 1832, p.8. On the Duke of Sussex’s abolitionism, the anecdote recounted by Dean Bourgon in 1840 related his reluctance to present a petition against capital punishment, on the basis of Genesis ix, 4-6. Phillips, Considerations, p.14 (13 April 1833). One early achievement was the bill to abolish the death penalty (by an act of George II) for stealing from linen bleaching grounds, enacted in 1811. In 1830 the abolitionists arranged for a petition of a thousand bankers – the Bank of England and the bankers of London did not support the petition – against capitally punishing forgery. The amelioration of the Bloody Code is discussed in surveys of the capital code, but for revisionist stress on the significance of the ‘forgery’ crisis over Bank of England notes and paper system, see P. Handler, ‘Forgery and the end of the “bloody code” in early nineteenth-century England,’ Historical Journal 48:3 (2005), pp.683-702; P. Handler, ‘Forging the agenda. The 1819 select committee on the criminal laws revisited,’ The Journal of Legal History 25:3 (2004), pp.249-268; R. McGowen, ‘Managing the Gallows. The Bank of England and the Death Penalty, 1797–1821,’ Law and History Review 25: 2 (2007), pp.241-282; and R. McGowen, ‘Cruel Inflictions and the Claims of Humanity in Early Nineteenth-Century England,’ in D.D. Watson ed., Assaulting the Past. Violence and Civilization in Historical Context (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2007). The measure which reduced the death penalty was 1 Vict. c.91, although another act, 1 Vict.c.85 in theory extended the penalty in the case of attempted murder. H. Martineau, The Pictorial History of England during the Thirty Years’ Peace 1816–1846 (1849–1850; London: W. and R. Chambers, 1858), Book V, p.573. Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.38, HC, 19 May 1837, Lord John Russell, col.913, wished for capital punishment to be examined by writers and public discussion, with the law following a change in public opinion, rather than abolition preceding public opinion. Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine 4: 43 (July 1837), pp.438-443 [p.442]. Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.38, HC, 19 May 1837, cols.908-911. [Ralph Carr] The Penalty of Death Retained for Cruel Atrocities. Part the First. The Divine Sanction (London: Edmund Lloyd, 1841), pp.vii-viii. He allegedly became abolitionist, Magazine of Popular Information on Capital and Secondary Punishments, 20 March 1846, p.238. Report of SDISCP, extracted in Magazine of Popular Information on Capital and Secondary Punishments, 15 June 1845, p.58. See T. Arnold, Introductory Lectures in Modern History delivered in Lent Term 1842, ed., Reed, (Oxford: J.H. Parker, 1842), pp.253-254. S.F.L., Box L3, ‘Report of the Society for Diffusion of Information on the Subject of Capital Punishments’ (1845). Taylor’s abolitionism is ignored in C.L. Falkiner, rev. M-L. Legg, ‘John Sydney Taylor (1795–1841),’ ODNB (2004). J. Johns, of 147 Mill Street, Liverpool, Liverpool Mercury, 28 February 1846, published 6 March 1846. S.F.L., Box L3, list of donations in report of SDISCP (1845). A meeting of various ministers and others at Warrington’s Friends’ Meeting House memorialized Sir James

254

45

46

47

48

49

50 51 52

53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS Graham the Home Secretary in November 1845, see Magazine of Popular Information on Capital and Secondary Punishments, 15 November 1845, p.144. Magazine of Popular Information on Capital and Secondary Punishments, 15 October 1845, p.123. The Reading committee for collecting and diffusing information, comprised of eighteen gentlemen including three dissenting ministers, is referred to in H.J.N. Chase’s tract, reviewed in Magazine of Popular Information, 17 December 1845, p.162. It was no doubt stimulated by the execution of Thomas Jennings, despite local petitioning efforts. The ‘Southampton and South of England Auxiliary to the SDISCP’ was reported in Magazine of Popular Information on Capital and Secondary Punishments, 20 February 1846, p.200, with committee and sub-committee for circulating useful publications. Magazine of Popular Information on Capital and Secondary Punishments, 20 March 1846, p.221. The volume in the National Library of Scotland collection (shelf mark ABS 4.75.1) ends with this number, but lacks a preface to indicate whether this was a collected and complete volume of 240 pages, and Daily News advertised, 9 May 1846, ‘no.14’ as ‘just published’, i.e., April and May numbers which covered the creation of the society are no longer extant. See E.L. Pierce, Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner (4 vols, Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1898), vol.3, p.65, for Rathbone’s correspondence on capital punishment, prison discipline and peace. The pamphlets and books Rathbone sent were used in Boston. See Liverpool Mercury, 24 April 1858, for a country court appearance where Russell’s occupation is recorded. He appears to have been Irish. Liverpool Mercury, 10 April 1846. News of the event reached the United States, see Universalist Union, 3 April 1847, p.323. On Heyworth, see the biography by David Ensor, and also L. Heyworth, Glimpses of the Origins, Mission and Destiny of Man (London: C. Gilpin, 1851) for his anti-capital punishment sentiments; a second edition (London: Williams and Norgate, 1866), pp.209-210, printed his letter on abolition of capital punishment to Samuel Gurney, 30 May 1864. On Hodgson, see M.C. Curthoys, ‘William Ballantyne Hodgson (1815–1880),’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004). Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper, 19 April 1846; see also Belfast News-Letter, 21 April 1846. The secretary, W.M. Young, a publisher (at 8 Kermode Street, Liverpool), of Financial Reform Association and Franchise Union tracts, lectured on capital punishment for the Association in February 1846, see Liverpool Mercury. Bradford Observer, 28 May 1846, p.6, quoting Liverpool Mercury, on the committee appointed to prepare regulations and rules. The Reverend Charles Rowton, in Morning Chronicle, 5 January 1847, claimed an audience of 7000 Englishmen. The Times, 30 April 1846, p.5; Daily News, 30 April 1846; Examiner, 2 May 1846; Leeds Mercury, 2 May 1846. On Dickens’s invitation, see K. Tillotson, ed., The Letters of Charles Dickens, vol.4 1844–1846 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p.520, 16 March 1846. Daily News, 30 April 1846. See the paragraph in ‘Our Carpet Bag,’ The Era, 10 May 1846. The joke was repeated in Liverpool Mercury, 19 June 1846. See Herald of Peace n.s. 8 (1831), pp.393-395 on the annual meeting of the SDISCP, including a detailed report of his speech. As recalled in the Boston Review 6 (July 1866), p.466. The writer, on the same platform as O’Connell, claimed not to have been able to hear a single word uttered by him. Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper, 3 May 1846. The Satirist, 3 May 1846, p.139. John Bull, 2 May 1846. The League newspaper supported Monckton Milnes’s motion against capital punishment, 5 July 1845, see J.T. Mills, John Bright and the Quakers (2 vols; London: Methuen, 1935), vol.2, pp.161-162.

NOTES 61

62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

70

71

72 73

74 75 76 77

78 79 80 81

82

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G. Storey, K. Tillotson and A. Easson, eds, The Letters of Charles Dickens, vol.7 1853 – 1855 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p.869: Ms Private, Jerrold to Gilpin, 28 February 1846. Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper, 15 March 1846. See ‘Punishment of Death,’ Eclectic Review, April 1848, pp.393-415; and Howitt’s Journal 1847 articles on capital punishment by Rowton for such a treatment. Lord Nugent fell out with the League over its electoral tactics and its unwillingness, in his view, to negotiate and compromise, see The Times, 23 November 1841, p.3. Howitt’s Journal, 23 October 1847, p.271. Herald of Truth (Cincinnati) 4:1 (July 1848), p.82. ‘The Calm and Dignified Course of Justice,’ Liverpool Mercury, 24 April 1849. Ipswich Journal, 8 December 1849. See Magazine for Popular Information on Capital and Secondary Punishments, 19 September 1845, p.102. This followed lectures by the Unitarian and Garrisonian Reverend Francis Bishop; see A. Brockett, Nonconformity in Exeter 1650–1875 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1962), and D.C. Stange, British Unitarians against American Slavery, 1833–65 (London: Associated University Presses, 1984) for references to Bishop. See Trewman’s Exeter FlyPost, 28 August 1845 for advertisement for the society, whose treasurer was William Lee and John Dymond (both in the Exeter auxiliary of Peace Society). See Appendix to the Reports of the Select Committee of the House of Commons on Public Petitions, session 1846, for abolitionist petitions, with names of leading signatories and number of signatures. See the resolution of Scobell (presumably G.T. Scobell, who died in 1869, a retired naval captain and proponent of financial and parliamentary reform), The Nonconformist, 9 March 1848, p.166, thanking the French Provisional Government for abolition of capital punishment for political offences. The Frankfurt parliament and several German states abolished capital punishment. Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.97, HC, 14 March 1848, col.548. Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.97, HC, 14 March 1848, cols.583-584; he followed debate on Ewart’s bill by saying that one way to end murder would be ‘the placing our representation system on such a sound and satisfactory basis as that every person in the kingdom should be represented in that House’ (11 July 1850, col.1282). Howitt’s Journal, 1848, p.207. In the same journal, p.208, was listed what the French had achieved in a week, including abolition of capital punishment. The Puppet-Show 2: 30, 30 September 1849, p.62. Manchester Times, 19 December 1849. R. Huish, The Progress of Crime, or the Authentic Memoirs of Maria Manning (London: Huish, 1849), which touched on the question of capital punishment, pp.827-830, quoting Charles Dickens. The Economist, 17 November 1849, p.1280. The impact in an abolitionist direction was also asserted in ‘Punishment of Death – Secret Executions,’ Eclectic Review, January 1850, p.45. C. Mackay, The Gouty Philosopher; or, The Opinions, Whims, and Eccentricities of John Wagstaffe, Esq (1862; London: Saunders, Otley, 1864 ), p.155. ‘Our London correspondent,’ Nottinghamshire Guardian, 15 November 1849, p.3. Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper, 15 March 1846. It was introduced by a ‘Mr Carpenter’, presumably the son of the Unitarian Dr Lant Carpenter. Richard Lant Carpenter lectured on capital punishment in 1845, see Magazine of Popular Information on Secondary and Capital Punishments, 15 May 1845, p.39; and wrote in the same journal against the idea of a Mosaic injunction, 15 July 1845, pp.67-70; and on Genesis 9.6, 19 September 1845, pp.110-112. Whittington Club Gazette, 1848, pp.171, 176, 180, 184; the description comes from E. Lynn Linton, The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland (3 vols; London: R. Bentley, 1885), vol.2, pp.7-8. Linton mentions the S.A.C.P. in Under which Lord? (3 vols, London:

256

83 84 85

86 87 88 89

90

91 92 93 94

95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107

VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS Chatto and Windus, 1879), vol.1, p.318, exerting itself to win the reprieve of a wifemurderer, and supported in this effort by the character Richard Spence. See ‘First Grand Soiree of the Whittington Club’ in ‘The Weekly Record’, in Howitt’s Journal 1 (1847–1848), p.17. A.B. Johnson, An Encyclopaedia of Instruction (New York: Derby and Jackson, 1857), p.308. British Controversialist (1852), p.116. Capital punishment remained a subject for debates in such mock parliaments later, see for instance, the Birmingham Parliament, in The Dart. The Birmingham Pictorial, 11 October and 25 October, 1895. Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 30 September 1849. Dundee Courier, 19 December 1849. A Parliamentary and Financial Reform Association had been established in May 1849 by John Bright and others. For instance, the public meeting in the Temperance Hall in Bradford, 1850, reported at length in the Bradford Observer, 14 February 1850, p.6. See for instance the decline of the secularist movement in the Crimean war era, E. Royle, Victorian Infidels. The Origin of the British Secularist Movement. 1791–1866 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1974) pp.208-210. See ‘an Etonian’, Our Heartless Policy. Dedicated to the High-minded and reflecting of all Nations at the Approaching Exhibition (London: J. Ridgway, 1851); Report of the Proceedings of the Third General Peace Congress, held in Frankfort (London: C. Gilpin, 1851) p.8. There was a Peace Congress in London in July 1851, and another in Manchester – arrangements for which involved Joseph Sturge and Charles Gilpin, in January 1853: see D. Nicholls, ‘The Manchester Peace Congress of 1855,’ Manchester Region History Review 5:1 (1991), pp.11-21. The Leader, 20 July 1850, p.394. Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.142, HC, 10 June 1856, col.1231. Report by John Thomas Barry acting as chairman, The British Friend, July 1855, p.169. The Bishop of Oxford’s support for capital punishment was echoed by the Oxford Union Society, when it debated capital punishment abolition, 11 May 1857, deprecating this step but execrating the way in which punishment was carried out, see Proceedings of the Oxford Union Society (Oxford: J. Vincent, 1860), p.34. Blackburn Standard, 26 November 1856. See Burney, Poison, detection, and the Victorian imagination. Morning Chronicle, 10 June 1856. Hull Packet, 19 December 1856. Smith’s letter stimulated controversy in the press: see Reynolds’s Newspaper, 21 December 1856. See, for instance, Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 31 July 1859; 28 August 1859; ‘Gracchus,’ Reynolds’s Newspaper, 28 August 1859. Daily News, 26 August. For a similar view on the consequences of Smethurst’s case, see the abolitionist John Cooper, writing to the Liverpool Mercury, 13 September 1859. Birmingham Daily Post, 26 August 1859. Morning Star, cited in Caledonian Mercury, 5 September 1859. The British Friend, 2 February 1863, p.38. O. Anderson, A Liberal State at War. English Politics and Economics during the Crimean War (London: Macmillan, 1967), ch. 5 especially. ‘Influence of Current Events,’ Vegetarian Messenger 8 (1857), p.37. The Standard, 10 March 1847. Manchester Examiner and Times, 12 September 1863, cited in The Vegetarian Messenger January 1864, p.23. Parl. Papers (1864), no.177, vol.XLIX.5, ‘Capital convictions. Return of the number of persons capitally convicted in Ireland for each of the last five years, from 1 January 1859 to 1 January 1864; specifying the offences, and whether and how the sentences were carried into effect, by execution or otherwise; similar returns for England

NOTES

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109

110

111 112 113 114

115

116 117

118 119

120 121 122 123 124

125 126 127

257

and Wales; and similar return for Scotland’ provides the statistics on execution: 9 in 1859; the figures 15, 15, 20 and 26 in the following years. J. Ewart, The Sanitary Conditions and Discipline of Indian Jails (London: Smith, Elder, 1860), p.130. This was the argument presented in ‘Abstract of the Registrar-General’s Return of the Marriages in England and Wales and Births and Deaths,’ in Journal of the Statistical Society of London 21 (December 1858), p.477. The Times, 5 November 1856, p.6. See also The Times, 23 January 1856, p.8: ‘As MR COBDEN’s pamphlet on the war has obtained a European currency as the voice of the British commercial class, perhaps MR BRIGHT’s speech may be translated, and circulated, and puffed, as the remonstrance of British humanity, and we shall be charged on its authority with hanging a dozen a-day.’ Punch 33, 10 October 1857, p.154. On the impact of the Indian mutiny, see C. Herbert, War of no Pity. The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). G.A. Sala, The Baddington Peerage. Who Won it and Who Wore It (1860; London: J. Maxwell, 1865), p.270. British Friend, 2 February 1863, p.34: excerpt from S.A.C.P. report for year ending March 1855. Councillor John Fildes’ speech was published by Johnson and Rawson of Manchester. British Association for the Advancement of Science, Manchester September 4th to 11th 1861 (Manchester: Guardian, 1861), pp.112-113. The consolidation of the criminal statutes in that year effectively limited the death penalty to murder and treason. British Friend, 2 March 1863, p.64. When Manchester became an assize city, a writer in The Reliquary and Illustrated Archaeologist, April 1869, p.217, expressed the hope that the abolition of public executions would lead to total abolition of capital punishment. Daily News, 16 October 1863. For S.A.C.P. hopes regarding the S.S.A. platform, see A.H. Dymond, Law on its Trial (1865), viii. See also Morning Star (ed. Dymond) 30 September 1864, p.4, on ‘cheering indication’ of public support via the Social Science Congress. On the Association’s influence on penal policy, see Goldman, Science, Reform, and Politics in Victorian Britain, ch.5. J.J. Alley delivered an abolitionist paper, and expressed Manchester’s disgust at the first execution consequent upon the city having a new assize court. The abolitionist contingent included Alfred Aspland, Henry Hollings, the Reverend S.A. Steinthal, Dr Richard Pankhurst, Dr Josiah Merrick and Mr Pearson. The Economist, 26 September 1863, pp.1068-1069. Birmingham Daily Post, 7 April 1864, advertisement for the adjourned debate; advertisement in The Times, 8 December 1865, p.4. Sydney Morning Herald, 29 April 1865. The British Friend, 2 February 1863, p.38. The Flowery Land executions, 22 February 1864, have been used by historians of the mid-Victorian period, see K.T. Hoppen, Mid-Victorian Generation, 1846–1886 (1998; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p.357; and Burn, Age of Equipoise, p.83. For a contemporary broadside emphasizing the vast execution crowd, see BL, 85/1899.b.1, ‘The Execution of Five Pirates for Murder’ (London: H. Disley, 1864). Punch 46, 14 May 1864, p.197. ‘The Prerogative of Pardon and the Punishment of Death,’ Westminster Review 81:160, April 1864, pp.185-195 [p.193]. It was Charles Neate’s suggestion of a Royal Commission, see Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol. 174, HC, 3 May 1864, cols. 2081-2. The Commission was established in July 1864 with four abolitionists among the commissioners: William Ewart, John Bright, Neate and the Admiralty Judge Stephen Lushington. The 36 witnesses included abolitionists associated with the S.A.C.P., such as J.H. Parry, Leoni Levi and the Reverend

258

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129 130 131 132

133 134

135 136

137 138 139 140 141 142

143 144 145 146 147 148 149

VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS W.C. Osborn. The report was published in 1866. Seven Commissioners proposed privatization, five recorded their dissension. See W. Tallack, Howard Letters, chs.8-9 and S.A.C.P. report for 1866 in Warwick University Library Special Collection (shelf reference HF 4000 H6). On the neglect of the platform, S.A.C.P. report 1866, p.3: ‘While the Commission was engaged in collecting evidence, the Committee deemed it expedient to abstain from any public agitation, and therefore did not organize meetings or lectures.’ On the Commission, see ‘Anecdotes from a Blue Book’, Temple Bar, reprinted in The The Eclectic Magazine, June 1866, pp.677-688. See ‘Letters on Capital Punishment’, ch.9 in Tallack, Howard Letters and Memories. The Friend, 2 February 1865, p.8. Brougham was no supporter of abolition, according to Sir John Eardley EardleyWilmot, Lord Brougham’s Law Reforms (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longman and Roberts, 1860), pp.127-128, on the evidence of his statement as chairman of the Committee on Transportation in 1848; and during the third reading of Crown and Government Security Bill, Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.98, HL, 20 April 1848, cols.536537. But Hansard in 1854 has Brougham saying he believed they could not give up capital punishment altogether and ‘that we could safely give up capital punishment altogether’, see Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.133, HL, 15 May 1854, col.310. For medical press coverage, see The Lancet, which reported the medical evidence submitted to the Commission, for instance 21 April and 10, 17 and 31 March 1866. Leeds Mercury, 7 February 1866, reporting the Duke of Richmond in the Lords. Extracts of the report appeared in the abolitionist Leone Levi’s Annals of British Legislation: Digest of Blue Books (n.s., 3 vols; London: Smith, Elder, 1866), vol.3, pp.134-169. J.S. Stock, Recorder, Exeter Quarter Sessions, expressed incredulity that some of the commissioners opposed capital punishment, Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post, 4 April 1866. H.W. Woolrych, ‘On the Report of the Capital Commission of 1866,’ read at a meeting of the Jurisprudence Department of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, 26 March 1866; The British Friend, 2 April 1866, pp.83-84. Woolrych lectured on capital punishment at the London Mechanics’ Institute, in 1845, see Morning Chronicle, 6 June 1845. His History and Results of the Present Capital Punishments in England (London: Saunders and Benning, 1832) was praised by Radzinowicz, History of English Criminal Law, vol.4, p.304. Howard’s status as an abolitionist was a peg for abolitionist commentary in a lecture at the Truro Institution in 1856, see Royal Cornwall Gazette, 21 November 1856, p.5. See the sympathetic article on the S.A.C.P.’s report, Wrexham Advertiser, 24 February 1866, p.4. ‘Shall Executions be Public, Private or Abolished,’ The Economist, 17 May 1856, p.532. Cyrus Redding, ‘Capital Punishment,’ New Monthly Magazine, 136, pp.342-353, p.349. S.A.C.P. report for 1868. However, Lloyds’ Weekly Newspaper, 18 August 1872, claimed, after the triple execution at Maidstone of Bradford, Moore and Tooth, that the people had imagined that abolition was soon to take place. Gilpin chaired the meeting of the Ballot Society in 1872, see Beehive, 6 March 1872. A fellow abolitionist, C.H. Elt, was also a supporter. S.A.C.P. report 1868, p.7. S.A.C.P. report 1868, p.5 S.A.C.P. report 1868, p.3. S.A.C.P. report 1868, p.5. S.A.C.P. report 1868, p.5. S.A.C.P. report 1868, p.7 and S.A.C.P. report 1872, p.3. See also Tallack, Howard Letters, p.140, where Tallack refers to the Committee decision to adopt a ‘watching and waiting attitude’.

NOTES 150

151 152

153 154 155 156

157 158

159

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Gatrell, The Hanging Tree, p.23 and p.610; [G.J. Goschen], ‘The New Electors; or the Probable Effects of the Reform Bill, on the Strength of Parties,’ St Paul’s Magazine, November 1868, pp.148-162 [p.159]. The Times, 28 November 1872, p.12. S.A.C.P. report for 1872 for its struggle to revive efforts. See Radzinowicz and Hood, Emergence of Penal Policy, ‘Abolitionists in retreat.’ The S.A.C.P. was revived half a dozen times during the remainder of the century. The new society was based initially at 5 Bishopsgate Street Without. See Rose, The Struggle for Penal Reform, for the Association; also Tallack, Howard Letters. Liverpool Mercury, 7 March 1871; Birmingham Daily Post, 17 January 1877. The British Friend, 1 April 1867, p.87. The journal, 2 March 1868, carried a report, from the Daily News, of a meeting chaired by Tallack, as secretary of the Howard Association at Bow Vestry Hall, in which capital punishment abolition was debated, and in which the supporters of abolition included Theodore H. Bryant of Bryant and May. ‘The Howard Association,’ Daily News, 10 October 1867. See ‘Drops with a Difference’, Punch 63, 20 July 1872, p.31, reporting the meeting at Armfield’s South Place Hotel, Finsbury Pavement. Pamphlets published by the Howard Association on capital punishment included The law of homicide and of capital punishment: a debate in the English parliament, June 12, 1877. The S.A.C.P. stirred again in the mid-1890s, although Notes and Queries carried a query about its existence in 1892. The Times, 25 September 1879, p.10; The Times, 24 September 1880, p.7. See also The Times, 23 September 1880, p.10, for another report.

Chapter 2. Capital Punishment as an Imperial Problem 1

2

3

4

5

Travel writers for instance, noted attitudes towards crime and punishment, e.g., C.I. Elton, Norway, the Road and the Fell (London and Oxford: J.H. Parker and J. Parker, 1864), noted the great objection to capital punishment in Baltic countries and the ‘great horror expressed both at the number of murders in England and our public system of execution’ (p.117). See U.P. Mukherjee, Crime and Empire: The Colony in Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Crime (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). Of course, right until the final stages of empire, capital punishment was inflicted by the British, see D. Anderson, Histories of the Hanged. Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the end of the Empire (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2005). On imperial law, see M.E. Lang, Codification in the British Empire and America (Amsterdam: H.J. Paris, 1924). M.J. Wiener assesses commitment to imperial ‘rule of law’ through the study of interpersonal interracial homicide, in An Empire on Trial: Race, Murder, and Justice under British Rule, 1870–1935 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), see p.5 for his claim that the law was at the heart of the imperial enterprise. See also H. Foster, A.R. Buck and B.L. Berger, eds, The Grand Experiment: Law and Legal Culture in British Settler Societies (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2008); D.E. Kirkby and C. Colebourne, eds, Law, History, Colonialism: the Reach of Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001). Fun, 12 September 1868, p.13, on Calcraft’s alleged compilation of the history of hanging down to abolition of public executions. On the hangman Marwood’s supply of rope to the colonies and his official contract for Australia, see P. Darryl, Public Life in England (London and New York: George Routledge, 1884), p.280. See Godfrey and Dunstall, Crime and Empire, 1840–1940; S. Pierce and A. Rao, eds, Discipline and the Other Body. Correction, Corporeality, Colonialism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006); B. Battacharya, ‘Public penology: postcolonial biopolitics and a death, Alipur Central Jail Calcutta,’ Postcolonial Studies 12:1 (2009), pp.7-28; T.C. Sherman, ‘Tensions of Colonial Punishment: Perspectives on Recent Developments in

260

6

7 8

9 10 11

12 13

14

15 16

17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25

VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS the Study of Coercive Networks in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean,’ History Compass 7:3 (March 2009), pp.659-677. See for instance, Sketches of some of the various classes and tribes of the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope, the Interior of Southern Africa, with a brief account descriptive of the manners and customs of each (London: W.R and L. Dickinson, 1851), p.xx; and see comments (anti-capital punishment for murder), by A F.R.G.S. [Richard Burton] Wanderings in West Africa from Liverpool to Fernando Po (2 vols; London: Tinsley Brothers, 1863), vol.2, pp.23-24. See Saxe Bannister’s Reason and Authority against Capital Punishment in any case, from Social Science Review (November 1865), which referred to Otaheite and the Basutos. ‘The Management of Aborigines,’ New Zealand Journal 81 (18 February 1843), p.40, an article which contrasted progress in the Europeanization of the Maori as exemplified by a capitalist Maori, with the less successful record in Western Australia. C. Swaisland, ‘Aborigines Protection Society, 1837–1909,’ in H. Temperley, After Slavery: Emancipation and its Discontents (London: Frank Cass, 2000), pp.265-280. Religious Neutrality in India delusive and impracticable (London: Church Missionary House, 1858). See C.A. Conley, Certain other Countries. Homicide, Gender, and National Identity in Late Nineteenth-Century England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007), drawing on a database of c. 6,000–7, 000 homicides from the period 1867– 1892. See also C.A. Conley, ‘Wars among Savages. Homicide and Ethnicity in the Victorian United Kingdom,’ Journal of British Studies 44: 4 (2005), pp.775-795. Wiener, An Empire on Trial, p.38. The infliction of the penalty as a topic for historians of empire has focused on the late nineteenth century and twentieth century, e.g., Stacey Hynd, ‘Imperial Gallows. Capital punishment, violence and colonial rule in Britain’s African territories, c.1903–1968,’ University of Oxford D.Phil., 2007, which studies the penalty in terms of its operation and ‘political economy’ and in relation to social defence and colonial violence. See also S. Hynd, ‘Killing the condemned. The Practice and Process of Capital Punishment in British Africa, 1900–1950s,’ Journal of African History 49: 3 (2008), pp.403-418. R.M. Martin, History of the Honourable East India Company (London: Whittaker, 1837) included as vol. 9 of British Colonial Library (London: Bohn, 1844), p.322. The British Magazine 13 (1838) detected the abolitionist objective behind this, p.180. Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.116, HC, 29 April 1851, col.341. On this occasion the Commons was not quorate. Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.116, HC, 22 May 1851, cols.1235-1241. The question of capital punishment in the colonies was returned to by Ewart in 1856, see Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.143, HC, 17 July 1856, col.975: Labouchere, Secretary of State for the Colonies, replied that Australian legislatures were ‘the best judges of the cases in which capital punishment ought to be carried out.’ See F.W. Anderson, A Concise History of Capital Punishment in Canada (Calgary: Frontier: 1973), on the hangman John Robert Radclive. Mukhejee, Crime and Empire, p.102, cites an article, Dublin University Magazine 15 (1840) on Thugs and Ribandmen. R.H. Horne, ‘Analysis of Crime,’ Journal of Physiological Medicine 3 (1850), pp.94-123 [p.122]. Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper, 25 March 1848, p.400. Ewart addressed the question of Ireland as he knew the case of Ireland would be pleaded against him, Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.97, HC, 14 March 1848, col.541. Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.112, HC, 11 July 1850, col.1266. Manchester Times, 19 December 1849. Manchester Guardian, 24 January 1856, p.2. See, for instance, ‘J.M.’ in The Anglo-Celt, 14 September 1848. ‘Darby Fagan on “Capital Punishment”,’ Belfast News-Letter, 24 June 1856.

NOTES 26 27 28 29

30 31

32

33 34

35 36 37 38

39 40 41

42 43

44

45 46

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On the capital punishment society, see Tuam Herald, 5 June 1841, p.2; Freeman’s Journal, 4 January 1840, p.5. On Ewart, see Freeman’s Journal, 9 March 1840, p.3. Nenagh Guardian, 26 March 1842. Nenagh Guardian, 12 September 1849. Denis C. Heron, reported in Report of the Trials of Arthur M. Sullivan and Richard Pigott for Seditious Libels on the Government, at the County of Dublin Commission (Dublin: A. Thom, 1868), p.65, p.224. The Solicitor General for Ireland introduced bills for mitigating the capital code in 1842. See Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.154, HC, 30 June 1859, col.484. See W.M. Thackeray, Irish Sketchbook (1842; London: Chapman and Hall, 1857), p.287; ‘Hanging, Past and Present,’ Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine 10 (1843), pp.233-241 [p.233]; S.G. Osborne, Gleanings in the west of Ireland (London: T. and W. Boone, 1850), p.51; W.S. Trench, Realities of Irish Life (London: Longman, Green, 1868), p.280. ‘Execution of Gleeson Wilson – An English Spectacle,’ Freeman’s Journal, 17 September 1849. The crowds outside the house where the murders took place are depicted in Illustrated London News, 7 April 1849, p.227. Quoted in Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper, 22 January 1847, p.107. So, Cleave’s Gazette of Variety, 10 November 1838, p.1, had an extract from James’s Six Months in South Australia, on ‘First Execution in the New Colony of South Australia’, of the young Irish Catholic Michael Magee, 2 May 1838, for the attempted murder of the sheriff of the colony – the governor having reprieved other prisoners at the same time. On Wilson, who used the paper to advocate criminal law reform and justice for aborigines, see the ODNB entry by Geoffrey Serle. See, for instance, Brisbane Courier, 26 March 1866. Frederick Lee, in Argus (Melbourne), 9 December 1867. J. Stephens, The Land of Promise; being an authentic and impartial history of the rise of progress of the new British province of South Australia (London: Smith, Elder, 1839), p.120; Dublin University Magazine 14, August 1839, p.204. South Australian Register, 19 December 1840; on McLaren, see E.T. McLaren, Dr McLaren of Manchester. A Sketch (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1911). Magazine of Popular Information on Capital and Secondary Punishments, 15 March 1845, p.16, from South Australian Register, 5 October 1844. South Australian Register, 3 May 1845. On Cawthorne’s diaries, see R. Hosking, ‘“Written extempore.” William Anderson Cawthorne’s “Literarium Diarium”, A Colonial Diary,’ Life Writing Symposium, 13-15 June 2006, p.2; K. Whitehead, ‘From Youth to “greatest pedagogue”: William Cawthorne and the construction of a teaching profession in mid nineteenth-century South Australia,’ History of Education, 28:4, pp.395-412. The diaries are in the Mitchell and Dixon Libraries, Capital Collection State Library of New South Wales. Cawthorne replaced the secretary pro. tem, S.R. Hall, see South Australian Register, 29 March 1845, p.3. South Australian Register, 17 June 1846, p.4. The Register printed letters from the society protesting against the retentionist paper, South Australian, e.g., 29 March 1845, p.3. See references in Maitland Mercury (New South Wales), 7 April 1847, p.4; and abolitionist letters from ‘I.M.I.’, in Maitland Mercury, e.g., 8 December 1847. See Independent Journal, 23 April 1852, for its advocacy of total abolitionism. See obituary in Sydney Morning Herald, 2 December 1865; Gentleman’s Magazine, March 1866, p.438; K.B. Noad, Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol.1 (1966), pp.314-316. On New South Wales, see G.D. Woods, A History of Criminal Law in New South Wales: The Colonial Period 1788–1900 (Annandale, N.S.W.: Federation Press, 2002), pp.132-136. The petition is reprinted in The Argus (Melbourne), 3 June 1857, p.6; See, for ‘M.J.’s letter against this petition, The Argus, 17 June 1857. Terence Murray, father of Gilbert Murray, opposed capital punishment in the New South Wales assembly in the 1850s and was a President of the S.A.C.P. in Australia in

262

47

48 49 50 51

52 53

54 55

56 57 58

59

60

VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS the 1860s, see F. West, ‘A Broken Mirror: Gilbert Murray’s Reflections of an Australian Childhood,’ ch.2 in C. Stray, ed., Gilbert Murray Reassessed. Hellenism, Theatre and International Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p.41. Murray was not a consistent opponent, distancing himself from abolitionism at the time of Fenian terrorism. On the future Colonial Secretary Sir Henry Parkes’ abolitionist sentiments, see J. McGuire, ‘Judicial Violence and the “civilizing process”: race and the transition from public to private executions in colonial Australia,’ Australian Historical Studies 29: 111 (October 1998), pp.186-209 [p.193]. Argus (Melbourne), 17 January 1862; Woods, A History of Criminal Law in New South Wales, p.284. Maitland Mercury, 4 December 1847; and 2 January 1848. Sydney Morning Herald, 13 October 1869. W. Taylor, Story of my Life: An Account of What I have Thought and Said and Done in My Ministry (New York: Hunt and Eaton, 1895), pp.284-285; see also Victoria Parliamentary Debates, session 1869 (Melbourne: Ferres, 1869), 18 May 1869, p.751; The Argus (Melbourne) 18 May 1869. Promoted by Dr Brooks, MP for Northumberland, see Maitland Mercury, 9 August 1870. The Society membership was as follows: Murray (president), J.B. Wilson MP (vice president), J.J. Curran (treasurer), Frederick Lee (secretary). The general committee comprised in addition to these men, John Lucas MP, J. Sutherland MP, Reverend Hulton S. King, Reverend Edward Rogers, Dr A.M. a’Beckett, Dr Alleyne, W.B. Dalley, Alderman Kippax, Dr Brooks, the Very Reverend S.A. Sheehy, Dr J. M’Carthy, Reverend B. Quaife, Reverend S. Humphries, Reverend H.N. Woolfny, Reverend J. Sharp, H.P. Palser JP, W. Tucker, W. Roberts, I. Freehill, J. Leary, Henry M’Cree, Charles Gedye, Drummond Gilchrist, M.C. Cowlishow, John Osborne, John Dorris, Alfred Allen, T.J. Stuthbury, T. Dangar, J.H.E. Hawke, Theophilus Griffith, J. Lipman, George Moss, Captain Eldred, D.C. Dalgliesh, William Walker. Sydney Morning Herald, 25 February 1868; Maitland Mercury (from Empire), 13 February 1868. On Lee’s abolitionist lectures, see Sydney Morning Herald, 30 May 1864, p.1. See The Argus (Melbourne), 2 October 1867. Lee’s efforts are mentioned in R. Travers, The Amorous Dentist (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1977), pp.119-120; and J. O’Sullivan, The Bloodiest Bushrangers (Adelaide: Rigby, 1973). Sydney Morning Herald, 31 August 1869, a detailed report listing the committee members; The Australasian (Melbourne), 31 July 1869, p.144. Sydney Morning Herald, 25 September 1869. F. Lee, Abolition of Capital Punishment. A Lecture delivered in the Society of Arts, New South Wales, 26th May 1864 (Sydney: Hanson and Bennett); and B.S. Nayler, An Appeal from the prejudices to the judgements, of the inhabitants of Melbourne, on the Capital Punishment Question, St George’s Hall, 12th December 1866 (Melbourne: Bell, 1866), delivered to a ‘not very numerous’ audience (The Argus, Melbourne, 13 December 1866, p.4); G. Hawke, A Lecture on Capital Punishment delivered at the Court House, Orange, New South Wales (Orange: Western Examiner Office, 1871). N.L. Kentish, Treatise on Penal Discipline (Melbourne: J.J. Blundell, 1858) discussed capital punishment. N.L. Kentish, Essay on Capital Punishment. With an earnest appeal and dutiful petition to the Queen (Hobart: S.A. Tegg, 1842). On Kentish, see M. Roe, Quest for Authority in Eastern Australia, 1835–1851 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1965), p.158. See Kentish’s letter, Melbourne Argus, 3 August 1849. The Tasmanian context was the free settler opposition to Governor Arthur – using the severity with which he inflicted capital punishment as part of their opposition in the Tasmanian press, see R.P. Davis, The Tasmanian Gallows: a Study of Capital Punishment (Hobart: Cat and Fiddle Press, 1974); J. Boyce, Van Diemen’s Land (Melbourne, Victoria: Black Inc, 2008), p.189; and

NOTES

61 62 63 64 65 66

67

68 69 70

71 72 73 74 75

76

77

78 79

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H.P. MacDonald, Human Remains: Dissection and its Histories (London: Yale University Press, 2006), p.83. See The Australasian, 31 July 1869, p.144; the description of Genesis thus, is from Magazine of Popular Information on Capital and Secondary Punishments, 15 July 1845, p.67. ‘Punishment of Death Unjust,’ The Australian Journal: A Family Magazine of Literature, Science and the Arts (Melbourne), 1 July 1869, p.678. Courier (Hobart, Tasmania), 21 April 1853, p.2. See, for instance, the juror at the trial of Sophia Cole, Courier (Hobart, Tasmania), 4 November 1846, p.3. For Lee’s view, Sydney Morning Herald, 21 February 1866, p.3. My thanks to Nicole L. Asquith for this point. See McGuire, ‘Judicial Violence,’ p.209. McGuire’s essay includes a comprehensive listing of Australian research on capital punishment, which includes S. Adams, The Unforgiving Rope. Murder and Hanging on Australia’s Western Frontier (Crawley, Western Australia: University of Western Australia Press, 2009). See also M. Finnane and J. McGuire, ‘The Uses of Punishment and Exile: Aborigines in Colonial Australia,’ Punishment and Society 3: 279 (2001), pp.279-298 [pp.281-283]. ‘The Aborigines of Australia,’ The Colonial Intelligencer and Aborigines’ Friend, 1 January 1865, p.483. See also Report of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Aboriginal Tribes (British Settlements). Reported, with comments, by the ‘Aborigines Protection Society’ (London: W. Ball, 1838): ‘Actions which they have been taught to regard as praiseworthy, we consider as meriting the punishment of death.’ (p.120) Also, as they had no belief in a punitive supreme being or punishment in the afterlife, it was not permitted for aborigines to give evidence in court, as they could not take the oath, see N.E. Wright, ‘The problem of Aboriginal evidence in early colonial New South Wales,’ ch.9 in Kirkby and Colebourne, eds, Law, History, Colonialism: the Reach of Empire. See Household Narrative of Current Events, being a supplement to Household Words (London: the Office of Household Words, 1850) August 1850, p.188. W. Brade, Oedipus or the Sphinx of the Nineteenth Century, pp.124-126. See G. Highland, ‘Aborigines, Europeans and the Criminal Law. Two Trials at the Northern Supreme Court, Townville, April 1888,’ Aboriginal History 14:2 (1990), pp.182196. A point made by R. Therry, Reminiscences of Thirty Years’ Residence in New South Wales and Victoria (2nd edn, London: Sampson, Low and Son, 1863), p.316. Moreton Bay Courier, 4 June 1859. Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 15 December 1840. Maitland Mercury, 8 October 1851. William Smith O’Brien, himself narrowly avoiding capital punishment for rebellion, wrote during his exile in Van Diemen’s Land about the growing aversion to capital punishment and its relationship to Australian transportation, in Principles of Government; or, Meditations in Exile (1856; Boston: A. Moore, 1857), p.181. House of Lords, sessional papers, 1846, vol.7, Accounts and Papers: Convict Discipline: Copies or extracts of any Correspondence between the Secretary of State having the Department of the Colonies and the Governor of New South Wales Respecting the Convict System administered in Norfolk Island under the superintendence of Captain Maconochie, R.N., also, copies or extracts of any reports on the same subject, addressed to the Treasury by the Commissariat serving in Norfolk Island or New South Wales. Ordered to be printed 23d February 1846, pp.94-95. On her ‘passion for a worthless, infamous man’ see British Quarterly Review 7 (1848), article IV, pp.332 [p.334). See the passage, written by someone who had known her employer, in W.A.C. Robinson, Truth Stranger than Fiction. A Miscellany of Interesting, Instructive and Startling Facts (Melbourne: Mason and Firth, 1861), pp.163-166. Maitland Mercury, 14 November 1846. See his letter detailing British activities, Mercury (Hobart, Tasmania), 5 March 1877. His tract, Capital Punishment. Reasons why the death penalty should be abolished was published in

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81

82 83

84 85 86

87 88 89 90

91

92 93 94

95 96 97

VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS 1872. Later nineteenth-century figures in abolitionism included the phrenologist A.S. Hamilton, the president in the 1880s, when Ned Kelly was hanged, the attempt to save him being largely taken on by the S.A.C.P., see D. Wilson, ‘Explaining the “Criminal”. Ned Kelly’s Death Mask,’ La Trobe Journal 69 (Autumn 2003), pp.55-56. See The Advertiser (Adelaide, South Australia), 5 September 1908, p.14. The Australian corresponding members were the Reverend Charles Strong of Melbourne and the novelist Evelyn Goode Vaughan. On the first execution in the colony, of a Maori, see R. Ward, Life among the Maoris of New Zealand. Being a Description of Missionary, Colonial and Military Achievements (London: G. Lamb, 1872), p.185. See, for instance, Daily Southern Cross, 22 July 1864, p.4, concerning Sydney abolitionism. For correspondence, see, for instance, Daily Southern Cross, 12 June 1866, p.4; 6 August 1866; and, on the Mechanics’ Institute debate, 26 May 1864. For penal context, see J. Pratt, Punishment in a Perfect Society. The New Zealand Penal System, 1840–1939 (Wellington, New Zealand: Victorian University Press, 1992), which notes, p.25, corporal and capital punishment were never used as extensively as in England and Wales. A. Strachan, Remarkable Incidents in the Life of the Reverend Samuel Leigh (2nd edn, London: J. Nichols, 1855), p.147. See J. Pratt, Punishment in a Perfect Society, pp.34-38, on Maori justice and punishment practices, and for the observation about recreating Britain in the South Pacific. S. Edger, The folly and evil of hanging men. An argument against capital punishment, given in the city hall, on Sunday evening, Aug. 3, 1873, on the occasion of the execution of Eppwright, in the Mount Eden gaol, Auckland (Auckland, New Zealand: Atkin, 1873); P.J. Lineham, ‘Edger, Samuel 1822/1823?–1882,’ Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, 22 June 2007. Marlborough Express, 27 May 1897, p.2, identified it as a faddism emanating from Christchurch rather than the more usual location of Auckland. J. Pratt, Punishment in a Perfect Society, p.80, by the ‘Execution of Criminals Act’ of 1858. ‘Capital Punishment in New Zealand,’ Manchester Times, 28 January 1865. Introduced by the freethinker William Collins, MP for Christchurch City, see New Zealand Parliamentary Debates 93 (1896), pp.254-262; Star, 16 July 1895, p.2. On Collins, see E. Royle, Radicals, Secularists, and Republicans: Popular Free thought in Britain, 1866–1915 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), p.82. On press abolitionism, see New Zealand Graphic and Ladies Journal, 24 August 1895, p.233. The Woman’s Signal, 7 May 1896, p.291; Star, 17 April 1896, p.4; Star, 30 April 1897, p.4; R. Nicholls and R. McIntyre, The Women’s Parliament: The National Council of the Women of New Zealand, 1896–1920 (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1996), p.25. C.P.C., John West, 14 June 1864, p.592. C.P.C., appendix, p.599, Sir Alfred Stephen to Sir John Young, Government House, Sydney, 12 August 1864. D.B. Chandler, Capital punishment in Canada: a sociological study of repressive law (Toronto: Mclelland and Stewart, 1976), p.17 dates Canadian abolitionist efforts to 1914, with the efforts by Roberts Bickerdike. See also, K. Leyton-Brown, The Practice of Execution in Canada (Vancouver, Toronto: University of British Columbia Press, 2010), including, p.9, in relation to British legislation of 1868. On one aspect, see F.M. Greenwood, Uncertain Justice: Canadian Women and Capital Punishment. 1754–1853 (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2000); on wider issues, see P. Oliver, ‘Terror to evil-doers’: Prisons and Punishment in Nineteenth Century Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press: 1998). B. Murdoch, Epitome of the Laws of Nova Scotia (4 vols; Halifax, N.S.: Howe, 1833), vol.4, p.117. J.C. Weaver, Crimes, Constables and Courts. Order and Transgression in a Canadian City (Montreal; London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995), p.62. Oliver, ‘Terror to evil-doers,’ p.30.

NOTES 98

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100 101 102 103 104 105

106

107

108

109 110 111

112

113 114 115 116 117 118

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J.D. Blackwell, ‘Crime in the London District, 1828–1837: A Case Study of the Effect of the 1833 Reform in Upper Canadian Penal Law,’ ch. 19 in J.K. Johnson and B.G. Wilson, Historical Essays on Upper Canada: New Perspectives (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1989), p.569. On the gallows after the rebellion, see D. M ’Leod, A brief review of the settlement of Upper Canada by the U.E. Loyalists and Scotch Highlanders, in 1783: and of the grievances which compelled the Canadas to have recourse to arms in defence of their rights and liberties, in 1837 and 1838 (Cleveland: Penniman, 1841), pp.239-240, citing London Examiner and making the connection between Sir George Arthur’s harshness in Van Diemen’s Land and when dealing with the rebels in Canada. It serialized John Sydney Taylor’s ‘The Punishment of Death’ in 1833. Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine 6 (1839), pp.198-200; see also Roebuck’s letter to Daniel O’Connell, The Champion and Weekly Herald, 26 May 1838, cols.84-86. Official Report of the Debates of the House of Commons of the Dominion of Canada. Third Series. Twelfth Parliament. George V. 1914, vol.113, p.483. See the comments in Oliver, ‘Terror to evil-doers,’ pp.33-35. Royal Gazette and Newfoundlander, 2 March 1815. P. Girard, B. Cahill and J. Philips, eds, ‘The Supreme Court of Nova Scotia: Origins to Confederation,’ ch. 4 in The Supreme Court of Nova Scotia, 1754–2004, from Imperial Bastion to Provincial Oracle (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), p.96. See The Public Ledger (St John’s Newfoundland), 11 December 1849; see also, from a retentionist perspective, the complaint about juror reluctance, in ‘Capital Punishment and Petit Jurors,’ Newbrunswick Reporter, 22 October 1847. Quebec Gazette, 19 January 1849. Involved were Dr Wolfred Nelson, Dr F. Badgley, Mr Workman, Dr Russell, Mr Popham, Dr Fraser, Mr Dunkin, Mr Parent, Dr Thomas Arnoldi. See General Index to the Journals of the Legislative Assembly of Canada in the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Parliaments 1841–1851(Montreal: Lovell, 1855), p.129 on the petitions: the Sherbrooke petition was sent by W.F. Whitcher, the Pakenham petition from Archibald Russell; James Easson and others organized the Perth petition. Another petition emanated from ‘William Simpson and others’. See P. Hewitt, Unitarians in Canada, 1810–1975 (Toronto: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1978). Canadian Parliamentary Proceedings and Sessional Papers, 1841–1870, vol.2. See The British Colonist, 13 April 1850, the Honourable Mr McCully on Genesis ix. 6. For 5 May 1855 debate, see Dymond, Debates of the House of Commons of the Dominion of Canada, 1875, p.213; on Prince Edward island, Debates and Proceedings of the honourable the legislative council of the province of Prince Edward Island (Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, 1861), pp.36-37. See Journals of the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada for the 15th February to the 1st July 1856 …Being the 2nd Session of the 5th Parliament of Canada, Session, 1856, vol.14, p.364, for abolitionist Pierre-Gabriel Huot’s successful resolution (24 April 1856) for select committee. No report was published. Annual Report of the Provincial Penitentiary for the Year 1858, published in Reports of the Commissioners for the Revision of the Statutes of Upper Canada (Toronto), appendix 29. Boulton, in the Legislative Assembly debate of the provincial parliament, Quebec Mercury, 7 May 1863. ‘Capital Punishment,’ The Literary Garland and British North American Magazine (Montreal) 8 (1850), pp.125-131. Montreal Weekly Pilot, 15 April 1852. Editorial and letter by ‘Justitia’, The Public Ledger (Newfoundland), 29 December 1863. Justitia referred to the abolitionist position of The Newfoundlander. See the entry in H.J. Morgan, Biblioteca Canadensis; or, a Manual of Canadian Literature (Ottawa: Desbarats, 1867), p.108.

266 119 120 121 122 123 124

125 126 127 128 129 130

131

132 133 134 135

136

137 138 139

140 141

142 143

VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS See, for instance, Newfoundlander, 13 December 1849; The Public Ledger, 6 August 1850. British Colonist, 13 May 1851. See H.O. Miller, A Century of Western Ontario. The Story of London, the ‘Free Press’ and Western Ontario, 1849–1949 (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1972), p.38. Upper Canada Law Journal n.s. 2, February 1866, quoting the Solicitors Journal on the report of the Capital Punishment Commission. Lower Canada Law Journal, August 1866, p.29. R. Christie, A History of the Late Province of Lower Canada. Parliamentary and Political (Quebec: Lovell, 1854) vol.5, p.262. A pamphlet appeared in London, A Letter to Lord Melbourne on the Executions in Canada, with remarks on Capital Punishment, by a Modern Moralist (London: 1839). Charles Neate, prominent in British abolitionism, as MP for Oxford and fellow of Oriel College, in A Plain Statement of the Quarrel with Canada, (London: J. Ridgway, 1838), p.18, commented on the impolicy of executing Papineau and others as traitors: ‘let not the last memento we leave them of our rule be the gibbet of those men, whatever we may think of their character, will be ever regarded by their country men as the authors of their nationality, the first asserters of their freedom.’ See for instance the attack on ‘our Philanthropists’ in an article on capital punishment, True Witness and Catholic Chronicle, 15 October 1852. The Newfoundlander, 15 March 1878. See, for example, Morning Chronicle (Quebec), 29 November 1850. S. Moodie, Life in the Clearings versus the Bush (London: Richard Bentley, 1853), p.211. A point made in Weaver, Crimes, Constables and Courts, p.61. Debates of the House of Commons of the Dominion of Canada, vol.6 (1875), p.212 ; Official Report of the Debates of the House of Commons of the Dominion of Canada. Third Series. Twelfth Parliament. George V. 1914. vol.113, p.484. See D. Killingray, ‘Punishment to Fit the Crime? Penal Policy and Practice in British Colonial Africa’, in F. Bernault, ed., A History of Prison and Confinement in Africa (Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Heinemann, 2003), pp.99-101, for twentieth century practice. T.E. Poole, Life, Scenery and Customs of Sierra Leone and the Gambia (2 vols, London: R. Bentley, 1850), ch.7. Poole, Life, Scenery and Customs of Sierra Leone and the Gambia, p.90. Madden, an Irish Catholic, was arbitrator in the Mixed Commission Court in Havana and Sierra Leone, with responsibilities as protector of the liberated Africans in this colony. E. Elbourne, Blood Ground: The Khoekhoe, Colonialism, Missions, and the Contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799–1853 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), pp.204-205. See, for instance, Natal Witness, 11 December 1846, p.3, on the Exeter Hall meeting; Natal Witness, 12 March 1869, Durban Young Men’s Association, where there was an equality of votes after a debate; Natal Witness, 8 October 1875 for a debate, won by the abolitionists, at the Natal Literary and Debating Society. Natal Witness, 5 August 1853; 12 August 1853. Natal Witness, 11 December 1863. Mr Porter’s Bill, second reading postponed March 1870, see The Times, 25 March 1870, p.12; J.L. McCracken, New Light at the Cape of Good Hope: William Porter, the Father of Cape Liberalism (Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 1993), p.91. Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper, 12 February 1847, p.219. John Bull, 12 February 1848, p.108; Lady’s Newspaper, 28 February 1857, p.132. On Cox, see R. Ross, Status and Respectability in the Cape Colony, 1750–1870: a Tragedy of Manners (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp.74-77. The Lantern (Cape Town), 3 December 1887, p.3. On Indian capital punishment in this period, see S. Gupta, Capital Punishment in India (New Delhi: Deep and Deep, 1986); R. Singha, A Despotism of Law. Crime and Justice in

NOTES

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146

147 148 149 150 151 152

153

154

155 156 157

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Early Colonial India (Delhi, New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). The relationship between India and Britain is also explored in U.P. Mukhejee, Crime and Empire. The Colony in Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Crime (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). See also A. Rao, ‘Problems of Violence, States of Terror. Torture in Colonial India,’ in Rao and Pierce, Discipline and the Other Body, pp.151-185. A report on Katteewar province, Transactions of the Bombay Geographical Society 7, May 1844–February 1846 (Bombay: Times Press, 1846), pp.1-96, expresses the view, p.27, of a British man used to capital punishment in civilized societies: ‘Of Civil or Criminal law the people have no idea nor do they seem sensible of the want but such is ever the case in barbarous communities … capital punishment is rarely inflicted save in two or three of the largest States. On inquiring into this subject I ascertained that in two States of some consequence the only punishment by death that could be remembered occurred during the severe famine of 1812–13 when some men were put to death for the crime of having in their hunger killed and eaten cows.’ Wheeler, What shall we do at Delhi? An Englishman’s letter to the Humanitarians (London: D.F. Oakey, 1857), p.5. See Wheeler, What shall we do at Delhi?, ‘Tell me, ye who plead against the punishment of death; ye who make the essence of punishment reform, not retribution; ye who seek in any way to shield the …’ The Madras Athenaeum, cited in Indian Mail, 6 June 1844, p.417, wrote that ‘the abolition of corporal punishment in the Native Army … intended no doubt to elevate the moral feeling of the soldiery has been attended with the worst possible results. Freed from restraint from the dread of punishment confinement to an Asiatic is scarcely deemed such at all … It is well known that we are anything but advocates of the flogging system or of the infliction of capital punishment; cases, however, will occur in which the adoption of both may be imperatively called for.’ Herbert, War of no pity, p.101. Herbert, War of no pity, p.108, p.121. Wheeler, What shall we do at Delhi?, p.31. Gupta, Capital Punishment in India, p.23. Mukhejee, Crime and Empire, pp.23-33. Mukhejee, Crime and Empire, p.102. See also D. Skuy, ‘Macaulay and the Indian Penal Code of 1862: The myth of the inherent superiority and modernity of the English legal system compared to India’s legal system in the nineteenth century,’ Modern Asian Studies 32:3 (July 1998), pp.513-557. First Report from the select Committee on Indian Territories together with the Minutes of Evidence and Appendix, ordered by the House of Commons to be printed, 2 May 1853. Evidence of H.W. Deane, 2 May 1853, minutes 3757-3758, on discretion in relation to infanticide; David Hill, March 1853, minute 1438. See ‘Stat Nominis Umbria’, to the editor, Friend of India, 18 November 1847. The controversy over this act – whether it was judicial murder or not – was to be sustained by studies by James Fitzjames Stephen and Henry Beveridge in the 1880s. Allen’s Indian Mail, 1849, pp.324-325; Khyr-Khwah-i-Sircar, Benares Recorder, quoted in Sam Sly’s African Journal, 31 May 1849. ‘What is murder?’ Friend of India, 3 April 1856, p.315. The Sudder court was composed of East India company civil servants. See the Madras civil servant William Holloway’s Notes on Madras Judicial Administration (Madras: J. Higginbotham, 1853), p.37. For the ‘problem’ of mendacity, see V. Lal, ‘Everyday Crime, Native Mendacity and the Cultural Psychology of Justice in Colonial India,’ Studies in History 15: 145 (1999), pp.145-166. G. Campbell, Modern India. A Sketch of the System of Civil Government (London: John Murray, 1852), p.512, p.478. The work discussed Muslim classification of homicide.

268 159

160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167

168

169 170 171 172

173

174

175

176 177

178 179

VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS Second Report on the Indian Penal Code, p.95, in Indian Law Commission. Copies of the Special Reports of the Indian Law Commissioners. Ordered, by the House of Commons, to be printed, 16 May 1848 (Second report on the Indian Penal Code). Friend of India, 30 January 1851, p.68. Friend of India, quoted in Allen’s Indian Mail (London), 19 May 1855, pp.255-256. Friend of India, 27 October 1859, p.1009. As reported in Berrow’s Worcester Journal, 31 October 1857, p.8. See G. Dodd, The history of the Indian revolt and of the expeditions to Persia, China and Japan, 1856–7–8 (London: W.R. Chambers, 1859), p.448. J. Lang, Wanderings in India and Other Sketches of Life in Hindostan (London: Routledge, 1859), pp.412-413. Friend of India, 1 April 1869, p.366. G.O. Trevelyan, The Competition Wallah (London and Cambridge: Macmillan, 1866), p.276. His account of the mutiny, Cawnpore (London: Macmillan, 1865) included anticapital punishment sentiment (e.g., p.109), as Mukhejee, Crime and Empire, notes, p.131. Elgin’s concern was not to be seen to administer unequal justice between Europeans and natives, but he deplored in private the brutal behaviour of low class Europeans, see the letter published in D.M. Peers, India under Colonial Rule, 1700–1885 (Harlow and London: Pearson Education, 2006), pp.118-119. Bombay Miscellany, July 1864, pp.500-501. Friend of India, 26 June 1862, pp.703-704. Cited by Wiener, An Empire on Trial, p.145. See Basil Montagu’s letter, reprinted in R.J. Mackintosh, ed., Memoirs of the Life of Sir James Mackintosh (2 vols, 2nd edn, London: E. Moxon, 1836), vol.1, p.155, for the friendship between Montagu and the elder man, and about capital punishment. For example, ‘The Prerogative of Pardon and the Punishment of Death,’ Westminster Review, April 1864, p.194; see J.W. Kaye, The Life and Correspondence of Charles, Lord Metcalfe (2 volumes, London: R. Bentley, 1854), vol.1, 471. The contrast between the two legal systems was discussed in The Friend of India, 31 July 1877, p.822: the Indian judge could in all capital cases except murder by life-convict, sentence the murderer to transportation rather than hanging, but the capital code also made abetting a murder capital, or being a member of a group carrying out a robbery, during which one member committed murder. See also ‘The Law of Homicide in England and India’, The Calcutta Review 67 (1878), pp.248-263 [p.256]. The code became the basis for subsequent systems elsewhere in the empire, including African colonies. Sir Mordaunt Wells, in C.P.C, 25 March 1864, pp.467-474. On the progressiveness of the Indian penal code, at least Macaulay’s draft, see K.J.M. Smith, ‘Macaulay’s “Utilitarian” Indian Penal Code. The Illustration of the Accidental Function of Time, Place and Personalities in Law Making,’ in W.M. Gordon and D. Fergus, eds, Legal History in the Making (London: Hambledon, 1991), p.159. Friend of India, 1 April 1869, pp.366-367. Wiener, An Empire on Trial, p.157. See The Friend of India, 6 October 1870, p.1146; The Friend of India, 31 July 1877, p.822. The Code was revised by the Criminal Procedure and Evidence Act of 1872. R.N. Cust, ‘VII. The Gallows Tree,’ in Pictures of Anglo-Indian Life, sketched with the Pen (Lahore: Lahore Chronicle Press, 1860). C. Reed, Two Applications to the Sudder Deewanee and Nizamat Adlauts Made for the Purpose of having due moral instruction afforded to Prisoners, and to have Capital Punishments Abolished (Calcutta, 1833). On Reed, see C.J. Hawes, Poor Relations: the Making of a Eurasian Community in British India, 1773–1833 (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1996), p.143; and An Address to the Honourable Court of Directors of the East India Company, in Answer to the Proceedings of the Supreme Government in the Case Mr James Barton (1811).

NOTES 180

181 182

183 184 185 186 187 188 189

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J. Peggs, Capital Punishment. The Importance of its Abolition (London: Thomas Ward: 1839). Bromhead offered a prize through the Lincoln Standard in 1838. On Peggs, see C. Midgley, Feminism and Empire: Women Activists in Imperial Britain, 1790–1865 (London, New York: Routledge, 2007), p.79. The tract included a model petition for abolition of capital punishment for all but wilful murder, as ‘preparatory to the calm discussion of the abolition of capital punishment’, see p.109. F. Straton, The sinfulness of death as a punishment by man (Madras: Reuben Twigg, 1847). See J. Davy, An account of the interior of Ceylon, and of its inhabitants, with travels in that island (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1821), pp.181-182; H.C. Sirr, Ceylon and the Cingalese (2 vols, London: W. Shoberl, 1850), 2, pp.241-246. See A. Rao and S. Pierce, ch.1, in Rao and Pierce eds, Discipline and the Other Body, p.21. Wiener, An Empire on Trial, p.7, pp.129-130. Hon. Major Erskine, ‘Capital Punishment,’ Cape Monthly Magazine, 1 September 1877. Or so the Bradford Observer, and Magazine of Popular Information on Capital and Secondary Punishments, 15 July 1845, reported. See Wiener, An Empire on Trial, on this subject. See H. McQueen, A New Britannia: an argument concerning the social origins of Australian radicalism and nationalism (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin Books, 1970). See India and Colonial Committee, BL, 8425.h.(13) and Ceylon and the Punishment of Death, BL, 8425.h.(14). See Wiener, An Empire on Trial, on Cotton, p.177, p.190.

Chapter 3. The Personnel of the S.A.C.P. 1

2 3

4

5 6 7

It is surprising that he does not figure in the DNB or the current ODNB. A useful biographical entry has appeared on Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles _Gilpin_(politician) accessed 9 February 2010. The description of his appearance appears in the obituary in People’s and Howitt’s Journal, 1851, pp.2-3: the sketch also refers to his ‘square features and projecting brow’. G.N. Grenville, On the Punishment of Death by Law. An argument in the way of dialogue; with a letter to Basil Montagu, Esq. (London: Ridgway, 1840). See Monthly Review 3: 3 (1840), pp.342-355. Nugent contributed a serialized essay ‘Crime: How has it been treated? – How should it be treated?’ to the progressive People’s Journal in 1847. Nugent was a JP, and thus served at the Bucks Easter Quarter Session which discussed the existence of Tawell’s confession the night before his execution, see The Times, 12 April 1845, p.8. See Punch’s abolitionist account of the preparations for watching the hanging, ‘Parties for the Gallows,’ 5 April 1845, p.147. For his involvement with SDKPD, see Morning Chronicle, 31 July 1839. The Times, 29 July 1845, p.3; John Bull, 24 March 1845, p.186. J. Foster, in Nugent, Some Memorials of John Hampden, his Party and his Times (3rd edn, revised, London: Chapman, 1854). On Nugent, see A.A.D. Seymour, ‘George Nugent Grenville, second Baron Nugent of Carlanstown (1788–1850),’ ODNB; and J. Forster, Life of Charles Dickens, which refers to Dickens’ friendship for him, and his ‘lettered tastes and jovial enjoyments’. Papers issued by the ‘Aylesbury Committee on Capital Punishment’ retailed at 1s separately, see Daily News, 4 May 1846. They were retailed by Charles Gilpin. The committee involving Lord Nugent, J.B. Reade, W.M. Farley and Charles Lowndes, John Lloyd, John Dell, Robert Dell, Edward Terry and J.R. Gibbs of the Aylesbury News, was formed to collect and diffuse information on the punishment of death ‘with a view to directing public attention to those three most important questions – first whether it be found that the punishment of death by law has a tendency to good example and the repression of crime, or the reverse. Secondly, whether such punishment be justifiable on general grounds. Thirdly, whether (although it is manifest that, if the punishment of death be determined to be unjustified, no difficulty in finding an efficacious substitute for it can be admissible as an

270

8 9

10

11

12 13 14

15

VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS argument against it), some substitute may not be found which will answer the only real and just end of penal law, which are, the reformation of offenders, severe and lasting terror to the evil disposed, and a protection to society against the prevalence of crime.’ Magazine of Popular Information on Capital and Secondary Punishments, 15 October 1845, p.124. On Cobden’s public espousal of abolitionism in 1843, see The Eclectic Magazine (New York and Philadelphia), May 1843, p.62. Cobden’s letter to Gilpin, in May 1846, was published in the press, see London Pioneer, 14 May 1846, p.41; and a letter apologizing for later non-attendance, in The Times, 21 November 1849, p.5. The Times, 7 May 1846, advertisement, printed once subsequently. See also committee list given in E.P. Hood, The Moral Reformer’s Almanac (1850, published by Gilpin and devoted to anti-slavery, anti-gallows and anti-war). On Bright and abolitionism see J.T. Mills, John Bright and the Quakers, vol.2, pp.160-170; and R.B. O’Brien, John Bright. A Monograph (London: Smith, Elder, 1910), p.23 which refers to a speech against the gallows by Bright in the 1830s in the Rochdale Literary and Philosophical Society. On O’Connell and abolitionism see M.R. O’Connell, ed., The Correspondence of Daniel O’Connell (8 vols; Dublin: Blackwater, 1978), vol.7, p.105 for his comments on Spear’s abolitionist work (‘admirable’) sent him by the Dublin Unitarian Haughton. He described himself as an abolitionist ‘totally and without reserve’. His Observations on Corn Laws, on Political Pravity and Ingratitude, and on clerical and personal slander, in the shape of a meek and modest reply to the second letter of the Earl of Shrewsbury, Waterford, and Wexford, to Ambrose Lisle Phillips, Esq (Dublin: Machen, 1842), observed that, despite the narrow-minded bigotry of English Protestants, Catholic Belgium had thrown off capital punishment; and see his speech before the Society for the Diffusion of Information on the Subject of Capital Punishment, 2 June 1832. For Brotherton, see J. Gregory, Of Victorians and Vegetarians. The Vegetarian Movement in Victorian Britain (London and New York: I.B.Tauris, 2007). On Dickens and abolitionism see Collins, Dickens and Crime, ch.10. On Jerrold and abolitionism, beyond his articles in Punch and his journals, see R.M. Kelly, Douglas Jerrold (New York: Twayne, 1972), and M. Slater, Douglas Jerrold (2001; London: Duckworth, 2002), p.180. For the description, from a C.S.U. meeting in 1848, see D.W. Bartlett, ‘Overseas Sketches. A Reform Meeting,’ New England Washingtonian, reprinted in The Spirit of the Age (New York) 12 January 1850, p.22. Reynolds’s Newspaper, 27 March 1864, has his recollections of being the ‘means of getting into Exeter hall as huge a meeting as could be assembled on the subject’. ‘Sketch of Charles Gilpin,’ Burritt’s Christian Gazette, quoted in Manchester Times, 20 February 1850. Rowton, ‘Charles Gilpin,’ People’s and Howitt’s Journal 1 (1849) p.301. Frederic Rowton (died 1854) was a lecturer and patron of various metropolitan literary institutes, including the West Hackney Literary and Scientific Institute, a director (with Gilpin) of the National Freehold Society, sometime editor of the City of London Magazine which presented, in its first number (October 1842), ‘Political argument against capital punishment’ (pp.4-12), and reviewed Capital Punishment Vindicated 1: 4, January 1843, p.243. Rowton also edited a collection of female poets and published a work on oratory. The Debater (1846) introduced ‘true and useful principles’ through discourse on the morality of corporal punishment, execution of Charles I, capital punishment, and the role of the jury. Rowton published an essay ‘The Gibbet’ in British Friend, September 1848, pp.248-249. His essay on capital punishment, serialized in a newspaper previously, was dedicated to Charles Dickens, by an ‘obliged and faithful servant’. The article on Gilpin credits the subject with great oratorical ability, see also The Gentleman’s Magazine, June 1855, p.654. A Reverend Charles Rowton opposed capital punishment, see the report of a meeting, Morning Chronicle, 5 January 1847. The Gilpin papers in Duke University, Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library contain letters to Gilpin from, as the catalogue says, a ‘glittering array of mid-

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17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28 29

30 31 32

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nineteenth century reformers’. His career as a publisher ‘rarely appears in the correspondence’. I am grateful for transmission of photocopied material. Little material on Gilpin is preserved in the Society of Friends Library, London. Published biographical information is from a variety of sources: Friends’ Biographical Catalogue (London: Friends’ Institute, 1888), pp.279-281, and references in contemporary press and memoirs of associates. He does not appear in the ODNB. Publishers’ catalogues appended to his publications provide some indication of his connections and interests in the 1840s: temperance, peace and anti-slavery works; biography and speeches of Cobden, works on Hungarian, and Italian nationalists. He published works by Leigh Hunt, Elihu Burritt, E.P. Hood, W.B. Carpenter and Thomas Beggs, in addition to the majority of anti-gallows works. Charles Gilpin’s aunt, Mrs Joseph Sturge, was involved in at least one reprieve effort, see Leicester Chronicle, 9 January 1864, p.5. Reynolds’s Miscellany, 30 September 1854, p.157. A. Tyrrell, Joseph Sturge and the Moral Radical Party in Early Victorian Britain (London: Helm, 1987), provides essential background in delineation of a ‘moral Radical’ party. ‘Sketch of Charles Gilpin,’ Burritt’s Christian Gazette, quoted in Manchester Times, 20 February 1850. A portrait of James Gilpin by N. Branwhite, was exhibited at the Bristol Annual Exhibition of Pictures in 1837, see Bristol Mercury, 26 August 1837. The description of James comes from a review of his son Henry Gilpin’s book of verse, Memory, the Sceptic, and other Verses, in Bristol Mercury, 14 April 1838. F.A. Knight, A History of Sidcot School. A Hundred Years of West Country Quaker Education, 1808–1908 (London: Dent, 1908), p.96. The Friend, 14 June 1935, p.553. For his views on Mechanics’ Institutes, see Northamptonshire Mercury, 11 April 1863, p.5. Advertisement in Bristol Mercury, 5 January 1839. See advertisement, The Athenaeum, 1829, p.224. Bristol Times and Mirror, quoted in Nottingham Daily Express and from there, cited in Nottingham Guardian, 5 October 1866. Christian’s Monthly News, 2 November 1868, p.4. Jane was born in 1811 and married Jasper Capper. Mary Ann was born in June 1813. Her memoir is largely devoted to religious extracts from her diary, but one can glimpse the close loving family through these entries, and letters to ‘C.’ and other siblings. Elizabeth and Sophia Gilpin advertised a school for Quakers in Edinburgh, in British Friend, 5th month 1846, p.135. See M.E. Baly, Florence Nightingale and the Nursing Legacy (London: Helm, 1986), p.89. Sophia Gilpin ran a Quaker School in Kendal. Of Joseph Sturge Gilpin, born February 1825, Annual Monitor, 1907, p.84, speaks of the influence of the sisters, especially of Mary Ann, as a ‘holy inspiration to him through all his life’. Bristol Mercury, 26 November 1842. Review of The Massacre of the Bards, in Manchester Times, 7 December 1839. A Sermon preached at the Quakers’ meeting House in Gracechurch Street, London, 8th month, 1694. By William Penn. “Salvation from Sin by Christ alone.” Edited by Charles Gilpin (London: R.H. Moore; Bancks, Manchester: 1836); The Crisis of the Quaker Contest in Manchester Resulting from the proceedings of the Monthly Meeting in Conjunction with the Yearly Meeting’s Committee in the Tenth Month 1836 (Manchester: Simpson, 1836). J.E. Ritchie, British Senators, or, Political Sketches, Past and Present (London: Tinsley, 1869), p.100. Manchester Times and Gazette, 29 February 1840. See Bristol Mercury, 20 August 1842, and advertisement in 22 October 1842; advertisement, Bristol Mercury, 17 October 1846. James Gilpin had advertised waterproofed clothing 14 November 1840, as James Gilpin and Son. Bristol Mercury, 22 February 1840. She did not play a prominent part in public life, but supported a ‘Saturday Half-Holyday Movement,’ see The Times, 24 July 1866, p.12.

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VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS [Illustrated London News?] ‘Parliamentary Portraits,’ 24 July 1858, Friends House Library, Gibson [Friends Autographs, etc.], vo.189/ MS vol.338. On the Journal of Physical Regeneration, whose aim was ‘high’, see Bradford Observer, 19 February 1852, p.7. See R. Metcalfe, Sanitas, Sanitatum et Omnia Sanitas (London: Cooperative Printing Company, 1877) vol.1, p.277, for Gilpin’s letter on Turkish baths. Journal of the Friends’ Historical Society, 1916, p.85. Bristol Mercury, 26 June 1841. See G. Cantor, ‘Friends of Science? The Role of Science in Quaker Periodicals,’ ch.7 in L. Henson, ed., Culture and Science in the nineteenth-century media (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). On his ‘genial frankness’ and efforts in anti-slavery, The Anti-Slavery Reporter, 1 October 1874, p.108; on his view of anti-slavery, Northamptonshire Mercury, 28 February 1863, p.7. Clarkson opposed capital punishment, see T. Clarkson, A Portraiture of the Christian Professions and Practice of the Society of Friends (Glasgow: W. and R. Smeal, 1847), supplementary chapter, and Clarkson’s Prospectus for the Society for the Diffusion of Information on the Subject of Capital Punishment (London, 1831). A. Howe, ed., The Letters of Richard Cobden vol.2, 1848–1853 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p.153, Richard Cobden to Joseph Sturge, 9 October 1849; A.F. Fox, Memoir of Robert Charleton (1873; revised edn, London: S. Harris, 1876), p.281. Burritt supported abolition, see essay on ‘cold-blooded homicide’ reprinted in E. Burritt, Thoughts and Things at Home and Abroad (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1854). This was, according to one retentionist tract of 1849 (Havergal’s Death for Murder, p.16), ‘widely and warmly circulated’. See T. Hudson, Temperance Pioneers of the West: Personal and Incidental Experiences (2nd edn, London: National Temperance Publication Depot, 1888), pp.43-44; Bristol Mercury, 22 June 1839; The Times, 8 April 1851, p.6. He was vice-president of the National Temperance League. Morning Post, 27 November 1849, p.5. Freeholders’ Circular 10 October 1874, cited in H. Bellman, Bricks and Mortar. A Study of the Building Society Movement and the Story of the Abbey National Society 1849 –1949 (London: Hutchinson, 1949). Gilpin joined Cobden, Samuel Morley, Edward Miall and others, in schemes to reform education, see Howe, The Letters of Richard Cobden, vol.2, p.292. The Peace Advocate and Correspondent, February 1847, p.207, reporting Morning Advertiser 26 December – other candidates declared for abolition; ‘Sketch of Charles Gilpin,’ Burritt’s Christian Gazette, quoted in Manchester Times, 20 February 1850. On the Council as a school for radicals and ‘vehicle for democracy’ in the 1830s–1840s, see M. Taylor, The Decline of British Radicalism, 1847–1860 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp.73-74. E. Hodder, Samuel Morley (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1887), pp.102-103; J.P. Parry, The Politics of Patriotism: English Liberalism, National Identity and Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p.168. ‘Review of the Month,’ Eclectic Review 27, May 1850, p.652. Essex Standard, 19 December 1851, quoting Suffolk Chronicle. Hampshire Advertiser and other papers note support by dissenter support, various papers noted he won the show of hands at nomination, e.g., Blackburn Standard, 18 February 1852. Bradford Observer, 28 July 1853, p.5. C.F. Henningsen, Kossuth and the Times. By the Author of ‘The revelations of Russia,’ containing curious and important information concerning ‘Our own Correspondents’ of ‘The Times’ (London: Gilpin, 1851), p.32. Kossuth’s portrait appeared in G. Klapka, Memoirs of the War of Independence in Hungary (London: Gilpin), 2 vols, vol.1. T. Frank, ‘Lajos Kossuth and the Hungarian Exiles in London,’ ch.8 in S. Freitag, ed., Exiles from European Revolutions: Refugees in mid-Victorian England (New York; Oxford: Berghahn, 2003), p.127. Northamptonshire Mercury, 21 March 1857, p.4.

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See Illustrated London News, 8 November 1851, p.568, for an engraving of Kossuth’s address to the Common Council. L. Kossuth, Memories of my Exile (New York: D. Appleton, 1880), pp.188-189. See his letter to The Times, 24 May 1851, p.7, correcting the report that he had argued Kossuth was justified in taking up the sword – not justified in his view by the principles of Christianity, but he was justified in breaking the ‘iron rod of oppression’. Gilpin published the second work by the Baroness von Beck, whose Personal adventures during the late war in Hungary had caught the public imagination, but it was revealed she was really one Wilhelmina Racidula, an impostor, see Morning Chronicle, 29 June 1852, Manchester Times, 10 September 1852. Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.148, HC, 8 February 1858, cols.949-952. Punch 35, 7 August 1858, p.54; The Times, 16 February 1858, p.12: Gilpin sent a letter to the protest meeting ‘against the surrender of English liberties at the dictation of a foreign Power’, at the Freemasons’ Tavern. See Illustrated London News, 18 September 1880. J.E. Ritchie, The Life and Times of Viscount Palmerston (London: London Printing and Publishing Company, 1866–1867), vol.2, p.298. See C. Mackay, Through the Long Day, or memorials of a literary life during half a century (2 vols, London: W.H. Allen, 1887), vol.1, p.346, on Gilpin seeking advice from Mackay and Morley about this post, and Bright’s view. See also the sniping in ‘Scenes from the Drama of Life,’ Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, 1859, p.534, in which Gilpin has sold to the highest bidder. E.D. Steele, Palmerston and Liberalism, 1855–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p.181, notes Shaftesbury warned his father-in-law against including a speculative businessman in the government. A ‘Parliamentary Portrait’ appeared in Illustrated London News in 1858. London correspondent, Bury and Norwich Post, 21 June 1859. See the Chronological Index of Patents Applied for and Patents Granted (London: Eyre and Spottiswode, 1867), for a patent granted to Gilpin ‘for an invention for Improvements in the production of copper or metallic plates for the purpose of printing therefrom. A communication to him from abroad by Francis Kossuth and Louis Theodore Kossuth both of Turin in Kingdom of Italy Letters Patent sealed.’ See The Times, 25 February 1874, p.12, for Gilpin’s letter. L. Kossuth, Memories of my Exile, pp.188-189. Cited in Bristol Mercury, 27 September 1862. Temperley, British Anti-slavery, p.72. His quotation from S. Gurney at p.75, ‘the Worship of God is not, in my view, to be found in a state of indolence’ is pertinent to Gilpin and many of the abolitionists. Gilpin features in histories of radicalism and Liberalism, such as Taylor, The Decline of British Radicalism. Quoted in The Shield, 1 October 1874, p.191. See Standard, 6 July 1859, p.4; Bradford Observer, 7 July 1859, p.6. Fun, 18 April 1863, p.49. ‘Parliamentary Portraits,’ 24 July 1858, Friends House Library, Gibson [Friends Autographs, etc.], vo.189/ MS vol.338. ‘Sketch of Charles Gilpin,’ Burritt’s Christian Gazette, quoted in Manchester Times, 20 February 1850. Northamptonshire Mercury, 21 March 1857, p.4. Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.121, HC, 4 May 1852, col.242. Gilpin had published this pamphlet, but the real author (who was John Tindall Harris) had written to correct the rumours of his authorship in the Daily News. See Gilpin’s own letter correcting this rumour, The Times, 2 February 1853, p.6; ‘The Progress of Russia,’ Art. VIII, Westminster Review, October 1853, p.294; ‘The Wellington of Peace,’ in Spectator, 8 May 1852. Northamptonshire Mercury, 21 March 1857, p.4.

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VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS See for instance, R. Masheder, Dissent and Democracy: their mutual relations and common objects: an historical review (London: Saunders, Otley, 1864), p.261. Morning Post, 12 February 1852, p.3; Northamptonshire Mercury, 21 March 1857, p.4. He was one of the men invited to meet the deputation from the National Reform Union which proposed household suffrage, in 1867. M.F. Fernando, Woman, considered physically, intellectually and socially. A thesis (London: W. Macintosh, 1872), p.85, lists him as attending a Hanover Square meeting of supporters of Jacob Bright’s recently defeated Women’s Disabilities Bill. F. Rowton, People’s and Howitt’s Journal 7 (1849), p.301; D.W. Bartlett, What I saw in London, or, Men and Things in the Great Metropolis (Auburn: Derby and Miller, 1853), p.268; Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 13 September 1874. Quoted in Northamptonshire Mercury, 21 March 1857, p.4. ‘Sketch of Charles Gilpin,’ Burritt’s Christian Gazette, quoted in Manchester Times, 20 February 1850. J.E. Ritchie, Modern Statesmen (London: W. Tweedie, 1861), p.181, p.299; British Senators, p.106. Herefordshire Record Office, Records of Hill Court Estate, F8/IV/42/90/55, Cobden to George Moffatt. For Gilpin in parliament, see T.A. Jenkins, ed., The Parliamentary Diaries of Sir John Trelawny. 1858–1865 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1990), p.307. West Sussex Record Office, Cobden Papers 5, 65, Anna C. Gilpin to Richard Cobden, 16 June 1857. Northamptonshire Mercury, 6 August 1864, p.7. ‘Sketches in Parliament,’ Illustrated London News, 18 June 1870, p.630; 2 July 1870, p.10. ‘Statesman no.136. Capital Punishment,’ by Melchiorre Delfico, Vanity Fair, 18 January 1873. N.A., HO 12/146/59140, 14 January 1864. George William Gordon was a ‘great and good man’, he was reported as saying, Nottinghamshire Guardian, 28 September 1866, p.3. He chaired the meeting at the London Tavern in December 1857 which considered reforming the ‘irresponsible government’ continuing in India: others at the meeting included Collett Dobson, Ernest Jones, Miall and Ernest Jones. The Co-operator, 19 November 1870, p.747; Northampton was a location for resistance to compulsory vaccination and Gilpin spoke about this in 1870, see W. White, The Story of a Great Delusion, in a series of matter-of-fact chapters (London: E.W. Allen, 1885), p.542. See Bradlaugh’s letter to The Times, 30 September 1868, p.7. Bradford Observer, 7 July 1859, p.6. For another portrait of Gilpin, see People’s and Howitt’s Journal, Part VI (1850); on his changing appearance, Bradford Observer, 26 April 1860, p.7. A steel engraving after a photograph, from the 1850s, in the Mary Evans Picture Library, shows him in typical statesman pose, holding a letter. Bury and Norwich Post, 5 July 1859. Vanity Fair, 18 January 1873. Aberdeen Journal, 11 September 1872. Howitt’s Journal, 25 September 1847, p.206. His tracts included A Letter to E.P. Bouverie MP (on the occasion of his vote against the Abolition of the Punishment of Death) in 1848, which had appeared as a letter against the MP for Kilmarnock, in the Daily News. Bradford Observer, 25 July 1850, p.3; Bradford Observer, 5 January 1860, p.7. Charles William Gilpin was born 1846 and died in 1873, see The British Friend, 1 October 1874, p.307. He had been in Australia c.1866, from where he sent his father monthly letters, see Journal of the Society of Arts, 1 June 1866, p.487. Gilpin’s other children were Anna Gilpin, born 1840, and Louie (1842–1859). His will was proved by his widow, and Samuel Morley and Thomas Beggs were his executors. He left an estate of £10,000 (personalty). His surviving child, Anna Crouch Pigott, had been married in 1872.

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Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 13 September 1874. His portrait and a further biographical note appeared in the Illustrated London News, 19 September 1874. Gilpin was buried in the Friends’ Burial ground in Winchmore hill, London. Cited in Northamptonshire Mercury, 21 March 1857, p.4. On William Tanner’s abolitionism, see his letter, 21 June 1856, Bristol Mercury, at the time of William Palmer’s execution and Ewart’s parliamentary motion for a select committee to investigate capital punishment. See The British Friend, 30 June 1846, p.152, reprinting a S.A.C.P. circular, where Quaker supporters alone are listed: Gilpin at the end of the list; also 22 February 1857 circular reprinted in the journal where Barry and Bedford head the list. On Bedford, see W. Tallack, Peter Bedford, The Spitalfields Philanthropist (London: S.W. Partridge, 1865), pp.80-81 where his behind-the-scenes prominence is stressed. Gilpin published a ‘correct and striking’ portrait of Vincent by Bell Smith in 1849, see Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 24 March 1849, p.3. For Beggs, see entry in F. Boase, Modern English biography: containing many thousand concise memoirs of persons who have died since the year 1850, with an index of the most interesting matter (Truro: Netherton and Worth, 1908), vol.4 detailing his involvement in temperance, the C.S.U., and Health of Towns and Associations in the 1840s (but there is no mention of the S.A.C.P.) and Harrison, Dictionary of British Temperance Biography. Beggs published a History of the Election for the Borough of Nottingham (Nottingham: R. Sutton, 1842) at which Sturge stood (Nottingham: H. Sutton, 1842). Dymond was related to Jonathan Dymond the pacifist (1796–1828); a biography by N. Kiefer is in Dictionary of Canadian Biography XIII, 1901–1910 which outlines his prominent career as a journalist, civil servant and educator in Canada after 1868. He advocated abolition in the Canadian Parliament as an MP, 1874–1878. Beggs had written an essay on the subject when he was nineteen, see his speech, Morning Star, 3 May 1864, p.5. T. Beggs, An Inquiry in the Extent and Causes of Juvenile Depravity (London: Gilpin, 1849), recounts, pp.85-86, Gilpin’s efforts to save a ‘wretched girl’ from execution. Bartlett, What I saw in London, p.304. Rose, The Struggle for Penal Reform, ch.2 for biography, based in part on Tallack’s Howard Letters which deliberately concentrates on the period post-1865. According to Rose, p.21, he was ‘one of those upright, conscientious men, of strong standards, whose belief in a cause swallows and sustains their whole lives’. See J.P.Edward, A Few Footprints (London: Clement’s House, 1905), ‘Also worth remembering.’ Mayhew delivered an abolitionist paper with A.H. Dymond and the barrister Webster, published as Three Papers on the subject of Capital Punishment read at the General Meeting of the Society (for Promoting the Amendment of the Law) (London: the Society, 1856). Beales was president of the Reform League and promoter of Polish independence, an interest he shared with Gilpin. John Baxter Langley was active in reprieve cases. See K.W. Hooker, The Fortunes of Victor Hugo in England (London: H. Milford, 1938), J. Andrew Frey, A Victor Hugo Encyclopedia (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1999), the exhibits catalogued in Exilium Vita Est. Victor Hugo à Guernesey. Hautevill House, 7 mai – 31 août 2002 (Paris: musées de la Ville de Paris, 2002), and the account of the case in Annual Register for 1854. Hugo was stimulated to create a pen and ink study, Le Pendu, and poetry, by the case. He wrote to Lord Palmerston, then Home Secretary, to ask for mercy, after a thirteen-day trial ended in Tapner’s conviction on circumstantial evidence, for the murder of an elderly lady in a cottage on the Relte Road, see The Times, 20 February 1854, p.11. Victor Hugo on Capital Punishment – perhaps the new translation by Duncombe Pyrke of Dernier Jour – was advertised as ‘now ready,’ priced a shilling, and published by Hardwicke of London, in Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 12 April 1866 [p.1]. See also his pamphlet, La peine de mort (Lausanne: Edition de la libraire nouvelle, 1854). The Times printed a translation of the letter, which

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VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS included such overheated passages as: ‘We, the anarchists, the demagogues, the blooddrinkers tell you, the protectors and saviours of the world, that liberty is to be respected, that human intelligence is holy, that human life is sacred, and the human soul divine.’ (20 February 1854, p.11) It is reproduced in A. Hugo, Victor Hugo. A Life. (2 vols; London: W.H. Allen, 1863), pp.207-216. Tapner’s botched execution, in a garden by the prison in Guernsey rather than in a more public space – thanks to Hugo – was the last execution on the island. Among those stimulated by the incident to write was the Anglican clergyman of St Peter Port, Frederick W.B. Bouverie, in Eleventh Hour, and the Plymouth Brother, William Kelly, who penned Powers that Be, for capital punishment. For Mittermaier, see Evans, Rituals of Retribution, p.255. The S.A.C.P. funded copies of the barrister John Macrae Moir’s English version in 1865. G.O. Trevelyan’s relations Arthur Trevelyan and Walter Calverley Trevelyan opposed capital punishment. Using the definitions in M. Stenton, Who’s Who of British Members of Parliament vol.1 1832 – 1885 (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1976). 17% of the index which comprised c.367 individuals. Pyne’s papers are in the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Information largely derived from Harrison, Dictionary of British Temperance Biography. Western Temperance Herald 32 (1868), p.102. Cleave’s Penny Gazette of Variety, 17 March, p.1. On the relationship of homicide to drunkenness, and shifting attitudes towards drunkenness as the grounds for mercy in homicide, see Wiener, Men of Blood, pp.256-267. The National Temperance Magazine (Leicester: T. Cook, 1844), pp.368-378. See also ‘Abolition of Capital Punishments’ in The Temperance News (1846), pp.6-7, p.32; and reports of abolitionist activity by G.W. McCree and others, in People’s Abstinence Standard and True Social Reformer (vol.1, London: 1849–1850), pp.190-191; p.319. See The Last two speeches of the late Washington Wilks, on behalf of the Permissive Prohibitory Liquor Bill (Manchester: United Kingdom Alliance, 1865), p.5: Wilks said four-fifths of all murders were by intoxicated people. Wilks had been published by Gilpin: The Half Century. Its history, political and social (London: Gilpin, 1852), and was one of the Morning Star’s editorial staff. Including figures such as the Quaker banker George William Alexander, Joseph Sturge, Robert Alsop, George Thompson and the Whig reformer and judge Stephen Lushington. Frederick W. Chesson, on the committee in 1866 (and on the Morning Star’s editorial team), was Thompson’s son-in-law. See Temperley, British Anti-slavery, pp.27-51. Daily News, 13 February 1849, quoted in The Satirist, 17 February 1849, p.74. Herald of Peace, September 1847, p.345. See Ceadel, The Origins of War Prevention, for identification. Herald of Peace, June 1846, p.87, from the Peace Society’s annual report. On Stokes, see Leeds Mercury, 12 June 1846; The British Friend (1863), p.77. See Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 22 and 29 May 1847, p.6, 19 June, 3 July, 11 and 14 August 1847. At its height the League of Universal Brotherhood had some 130 British branches and 15,000 members. See ‘Peace – Peace!’, an address of the Bristol Young Men’s Society to the young men of New York, Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal 127, 6 June 1846, p.367: ‘we think that standing armies, warlike preparations, and death punishments, are foul blots upon the vaunted civilization of this age.’ Bradford Observer, 4 March 1847, p.8; Leeds Mercury, 15 January 1848, p.10. Herald of Peace, August 1846, p.126, and June 1847, p.302; The British Friend, 1 May 1866, p.117. Herald of Peace, October 1846, pp.154-155.

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L. Levi, The Law of Nature and Nations as affected by Divine Law (London: W. and F.G. Cash, 1855). Born a Jew, in Ancona in 1821, after he was naturalized he became a member of the Scottish Kirk, and then converted to Anglicanism. See, for instance, The Times, 23 June 1881, p.9. J.W. Brooke, The Democrats of Marylebone (London: W.J. Cleaver, 1839), p.141. On capital punishment as part of a wider movement for reform post-1815, see S. Devereaux, ‘Peel, Pardon and Punishment: The Recorder’s Report Revisited,’ in S. Devereaux and P. Griffiths, eds, Penal Practice and Culture, 1500–1900: Punishing the English (Basingstoke: Palgrave 2004), pp.258-284 [p.276-277]. C.S.U. members include W.H. Ashurst, J.H. Parry, Joseph Sturge, Charles Gilpin, Thomas Beggs, Miall; and Chartists such as William Lovett, Cooper and Henry Vincent. Sturge presented it as the first step towards abolition of war, capital punishment and ‘many other things’, see A. Tyrrell, Joseph Sturge, p.146. Miall seems to have attended one S.A.C.P. meeting, and promoted the cause in The Nonconformist. The Co-operator, 19 November 1870, p.747. Such committees were established by political and philanthropic associates of the London society. Thus Manchester in the mid-1850s had George Wilson as Chairman, the Leicester and Nottingham committees established in 1846 attracted members of the Nonconformist elite. Leicester S.A.C.P. included the Unitarian minister Dr Berry and the Unitarian town clerk (author of the vade mecum The Justice’s pocket manual) Samuel Stone. Other members were the Quaker railway managers E.S. Ellis and J. Ellis, and men associated with the progressive Leicester proprietary school. Nottingham S.A.C.P. had prominent radical tradesmen, involved in Chartism, anti-church rates and temperance; men such as George Gill and S. Bean. These committees are listed in The Nonconformist 1846, p.776. The Dublin committee included the Unitarian merchant Haughton, see Haughton, Memoir of James Haughton. Other S.A.C.P. committees existed at Maidstone in the 1850s, Newcastle in 1847 with Thomas Headlam MP as President, at Bristol in 1847, Glasgow in 1848, and Liverpool in 1863. The Manchester society provided the second base for the S.A.C.P. in the 1850s. Tyrrell’s Joseph Sturge provides an insight into this world; K. Gleadle, The Early Feminists. Radical Unitarians and the Emergence of the Women’s Rights Movement, 1831–51 (London: Macmillan, 1995) examines ‘radical Unitarian’ circles including the abolitionists Douglas Jerrold, the Ashursts and Howitts. On phrenology and capital punishment, see D. de Giustino, Conquest of Mind. Phrenology and Victorian Social Thought (London: Croom Helm, 1975), pp.151-152, which includes correspondence between an S.A.C.P. secretary, Spencer T. Hall, and the leading phrenologist George Combe, also associated with the S.A.C.P. and author of On the Punishment of Death, which appeared, belatedly, as a response to a defence of capital punishment in The Scotsman, 9, 30 May and 13 June 1846, see The Phrenological Journal, 1847, where it first appeared. See also R. Cooter, Phrenology in the British Isles: An annotated Historical Bibliography and Index (Metuchen, New Jersey; London: Scarecrow, 1989) which identifies some of the phrenologistabolitionists. Marmaduke Sampson’s essay ‘Punishment of death’ appeared in the Dublin Medical Press (1842), pp.122-126. See also the Zoist: A Journal of Cerebral Physiology and Mesmerism, for frequent coverage of capital punishment from 1843–1856. Stephen Lushington was on the C.P.C., 1864–1866. Thomas Denman was a Whig, friend of Brougham, cofounder of S.D.U.K., supporter of Ewart in law reform and active against the slave trade. Kelly similarly supported Ewart in the Commons and was a witness before the C.P.C. Kelly was defence counsel in John Tawell’s trial in 1845. Cash and Bennett, Quaker publishers, took over successively the Bishopsgate firm from Gilpin. See P.A.H. Brown, London Publishers and Printers c.1800–1870 (London: British Library, 1982). Bennett was also a botanist, fellow of various scientific societies and scientific writer. Cash was involved in temperance. For Ireland, correspondent of

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VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS Carlyle and Emerson and friend of Robert Chambers, publisher and author of the sensational Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), see Chapter 5, below. Edward Youl contributed to Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine, and wrote two letters on capital punishment for the People’s Messenger, Richard Horne – poet, novelist and essayist – was part of the ‘radical Unitarian’ circle including W.J. Fox, Southwood Smith and Jerrold, see Biographical Dictionary of Modern British Radicals II. His abolitionist contributions include The New Dance of Death. A Scene for Legislators,’ Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine 7: 38 (January–June 1848), pp.146-149. On Holyoake and capital punishment see G.J. Holyoake, Sixty Years of an Agitator’s Life (2 vols; London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1892) vol.2, ch.78, and Public Lessons of the Scaffold (London: F. Farrah, 1864). Mayhew issued a prospectus for a Howard Society, a charitable brotherhood to assist the restoration of criminals to society (see Nation, 3 May 1856, p.13). In ‘Elizabeth Brownrigge: a Tale, Book II,’ Fraser’s Magazine 6:32 (September 1832), pp.131-148 [p.132], Mrs Deacon’s ‘mild and tender heart had always sickened at the very thought of a capital punishment’. Pendennis includes a reference to the ‘blood tonic’ of public executions, through the medium of the character Warrington, see Home and Foreign Review 4 (1864), p.501. Umbrella manufacturer and Quaker John Morland, involved in Peace Society and Spitalfields soup society, see F. Boase, Modern English biography (Truro: Netherton and Worth, 1897), vol.2, col.975; pin manufacturer and Quaker philanthropist Robert Charlton; Huntley and Palmer, the biscuit manufacturers contributed a sum to the society in 1865, see S.A.C.P. report of 1866. The Leicester committee also included men associated with the progressive proprietary school: J.F. Hollings and C.R. Edmonds. ‘Ephraim Holding on Capital Punishment,’ The Sunday School Teacher’s Magazine 5 (1854), pp.340-347. J. Morgan, Capital Punishment Inconsistent with the Doctrine of the Gospel, and the Welfare of the Community. A Lecture at Eign Brook Chapel Hereford on the 13th Day of 7th Month 1854. See Sparkes’ printed letter to Peel (posted to the Earl Spencer), in the British Library, shelfmark 3936 i.34.4. See Memoir of Mary Dymond (London: W. and F.G. Cash, 1857), written by A.H. Dymond’s father, Henry Dymond. Mary, and Henry, superintendent of Sidcot School, were children of Joseph Sparkes Dymond. Barrett was a Quaker, also active in Bible Society and total abstinence, see entry in Friends Biographical Catalogue; being an account of the lives of Friends and others whose portraits are in the London Friends’ institute. Also descriptive notices of those of the Friends’ schools and institutions of which the gallery contains illustrations (London: Friends’ Institute, 1888). On Guest, see T. Beggs, Sketch of the Life and Labours of Mr Alderman John Guest (London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1881), which provides some information on Beggs too – Beggs became London agent for the firm of Guest and Chrimes. See p.191 for account of Guest witnessing an execution in 1845. Sparkes may have been the same as the banker who canvassed Devonshire bankers for abolition of the death penalty for forgery, for Bedford in 1830, see Tallack, Peter Bedford, p.93. Harrison, Drink and the Victorians, ch.7, ‘The Teetotal Leadership: A Biographical Analysis: 1833–1872’. J.C. Jeaffreson, Live it Down. A Story of the Light Lands (3 vols, London: Hurst and Blackett, 1863), vol.3, p.225. See the comment in Parl. Papers, 1856, VII. 9, Select Committee of House of Lords to consider present Mode of Capital Punishments. Report, Minutes of Evidence and Appendix; where archdeacon Bickersteth refers, p.9, to the ‘direct interest in public exhibitions’ of hanging by pubs and beershops in Aylesbury. Butchers were supposed to be excluded from jury service in capital trials in English and Scottish law (so Immanuel Kant and Jeremy Bentham believed) and according to the entry on ‘Jury’ in the Popular Encyclopaedia; or, ‘Conversations Lexicon’ (Glasgow: Black, 1841) vol.4, p.284; the

NOTES

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150 151 152 153 154 155 156

157 158

159

160

161 162 163

164

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Encyclopaedia Britannica (8th edition: Edinburgh: A. and C. Black, 1857) vol.13, p.24, entry on ‘Jury Trial’ denied this was the case in English law. Charles Phillips, author of Vacation Thoughts on Capital Punishment (1857), defended the murderer Francois Courvoisier in 1840. A friend of Henry Brougham and Daniel O’Connell, he was commissioner of the insolvent debtors’ court 1846–1859. See J. Grant, Portraits of Public Characters (2 vols; London: Saunders and Otley, 1841), vol.1, pp.206-210. J.H. Parry, radical barrister, associate of Ashursts, Jerrold and Lovett. Cofounder of the C.S.U. His association with the S.A.C.P. is highlighted by Dymond’s Law on its Trial. Frederic and Matthew Davenport Hill, former prison inspector, latter the Recorder (1839–1866) of Birmingham, were members of the Unitarian Hill family; Rowland Hill was their brother. See C. Hill, ed., Frederic Hill; An Autobiography of Fifty Years in Times of Reform (London: R. Bentley, 1893). See the ODNB entry. The Times, 23 June 1881, p.9. Blackwood’s Magazine 45: 282, April 1839, p.482, reviewing William Gardiner of Leicester’s Music and Friends. George Harris, Magazine of Popular Information on Capital and Secondary Punishments, 15 November 1845, p.139. Beggs, Sketch of the Life and Labours of Mr Alderman John Guest, p.191, 3 May 1845. Dymond, Law on its Trial, p.216. C. Roger, Thoughts in Support of Capital Punishments. By Charles Roger. Published at the desire of his fellow-students attending the University of St Andrews (Cupar-Fife: W. Gardiner, G. Stullis and R. Anderson, 1840), p.5. C. Roger, Thoughts in Support of Capital Punishments, p.8. See also the association with vegetarianism in Blackwood’s Magazine 45: 282, April 1839, p.482; and noted later, in ‘Abolition of Capital Punishment,’ Jewish Chronicle, 9 December 1864, p.6. ‘The Memorial of the Undersigned Inhabitants of Coventry’: ‘A strong conviction is entertained by many who now address you that there are no circumstances under which the law can be justified in inflicting death upon a human being.’ I am grateful to Bob Muscutt for sending me a copy of the petition, which was headed by the signature of a dissenting minister, and included two female signatures. Parl. Papers, 1854–1855, LIV.1, ‘General Index to the Reports on Public Petitions, 1833–52.’ There are no subsequent indices of public petitions providing origin and numbers of signatures. The petitions recorded include some sent from individuals on behalf of others, such as William Alexander of Yarmouth in 1840 (reprinted in The Christian Pioneer, August 1840, pp.372-374); and 1846, from cities and towns and occasionally from groups such as the Quakers and Peace Societies, for instance the Liverpool Peace Society in 1844 and Irish Friends in 1849. Petitions are listed in the Mirror of Parliament in 1840 from Tavistock, Letham, Bournemouth, Saffron Walden. Manchester Times and Gazette, 3 July 1846; Liverpool Mercury, 26 June 1846. Derived from total signatures in 1846–1848. When arriving at this percentage account has to be made of the fact that several towns sent petitions over a couple of the years 1846–1848; the largest petitions from these towns have been selected. On petitioning, see C. Leys, ‘Petitioning in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,’ Political Studies 3:1 (February 1955), pp.45-64; P.A. Pickering, ‘“And your petitioners &c”: Chartist petitioning in Popular Politics, 1838–48,’ English Historical Review 466 (April 2001), pp.368-388; and D.G. Paz, Popular anti-Catholicism in mid-Victorian England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), pp.30-32. Phillips, Considerations on the Increase and Progress of Crime, p.27, McCay to Phillips, 18 March 1833.

280 166

167 168 169

170

171

172 173

174 175 176 177

178

179 180 181

182 183

VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS Phillips, Considerations on the Increase and Progress of Crime, p.38; Speech of the Right Honourable Sir William Meredith, Baronet (London: Society for Diffusion of Information on the Subject of Capital Punishments, 1831–1832), p.8. London produced 17 abolitionist petitions, 1846–1851. Yorkshire provided 15 abolitionist petitions, 1846–1851. The petition from York in 1847 was published in Bradford Observer, 11 March 1847, p.7. York Herald, 20 January 1849 p.5, and 27 January 1849, p.5. Meetings took place in York in 1852 and 1856; see York Herald, 17 January 1852 (attended by A.H. Dymond and E.P. Hood), and chaired by the Quaker chemist, Joseph Spence; York Herald, 23 February 1856, p.10, when the chair complained of poor attendance. Local supporters included the bookseller Richard Burdekin. See Lancaster Gazette, 19 September 1857 [p.1] and subsequent advertisements, calling for subscriptions, by the Quaker William Satterthwaite Jnr of Kings Street (treasurer) and William Harrison, secretary; and Lancaster Gazette 6 February 1858, p.4. Information on subscribers to the S.A.C.P.’s precursor show it was predominantly London-based: 37 named individuals. Out of 39 countries, 13 had no subscribers, though many others had single names. See S.F.L., Box L3, ‘Report, Statement of Accounts, List of Contributors’ (May 1845). Magazine of Popular Information on Capital and Secondary Punishments, 20 February 1846, p.212. Maidstone Directory (1851). C. Hindley’s Curiosities of Street Literature comprising ‘cocks’ or ‘catchpennies’: a large and curious assortment of street-droleries, squibs, histories, comic tales, in prose and verse (London: Reeves and Turner, 1871), p.238, refers to it as a town notorious for anti-capital punishment feeling. The abolitionists’ letters and memorials are preserved in the file on the convict Dedea Redanies, HO 12/108/24320, December 1856. Annual Register, December 1856, p.201. Liverpool Mercury, 15 August 1868, quoting Morning Star; ‘Echoes of the Week,’ by G.A.S. [George Augustus Sala], Illustrated London News, 12 February 1887, p.174. J. Glyde, Moral, Social and Religious Condition in the Middle of the Nineteenth Century, with a Sketch of its History, Rise and Progress (Ipswich: J.M. Burton, 1850), pp.168-169. The significance of a separate legal system for Scottish national identity is touched on by C.A. Conley, ‘Homicide in Late-Victorian Ireland and Scotland,’ New Hibernia Review 5: 3 (Autumn 2001), pp.66-86 [pp.67-68]. See Baron Hume’s Commentaries on the laws of Scotland Respecting Crimes (1797), see R. Hewitt, Symbolic Interactions: Social Problems and Literary Interventions in the Works of Baillie, Scott, and Landor (Cranbury, New Jersey: Associated University Presses, 2006), pp.51-52, p.71. William Ewart to William Tallack, reprinted in Tallack, Howard Letters and Memories, p.162, 19 December 1865. John Gordon, ‘George Harris. A Memoir,’ ch.5, in The Christian Reformer 16 (1860); Stange, British Unitarians against American Slavery, pp.54-56. W.L. Harle, Sketches of Public Men of the North (revised edn, London: W. Gridley, 1855), p.103: ‘robust age still wore the lines of vigorous youth – his voice musical and powerful – at one time inviting the tear by its very cadence, and at another time invoking contempt and indignation by the energy of denunciation – the eloquent skill with which he concealed the rhetorician’s art captivated his audience.’ He looked the ‘beau ideal of an English bishop’. See the American viewpoint, J. Mott, Three Months in Great Britain (Philadelphia: J. M. M’Kim, 1841), p.51, after a capital punishment lecture in Birmingham. On Cruickshank, see Journal of the Friends’ Historical Society 51−52 (1965), pp.68, 75. Edinburgh Almanack , or Universal Scots and Imperial Register (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1839) lists William Beilby, M.D., John Campbell, Charles M. Christie, George Combe, Alex. Cruickshank, Hon. H.D. Erskine, John Gairdner, M.D., Professor Pillans, James

NOTES

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185

186

187 188 189

190 191 192

193

194 195

196 197 198

199

200

281

Simpson, Henry Tod, John Wigham, Robert Kaye Greville, LL.D., and Edward Cruickshank. Caledonian Mercury, 7 April 1836, letter from ‘B’; Caledonian Mercury, 11 April 1836, from Howard Society; on Cruickshank, a teetotal pioneer, see The Annual Monitor for 1843 (York: Harvey and Darton, 1843), pp.14-20. Magazine of Popular Information on Capital and Secondary Punishments, 16 August 1845, p.86; Magazine of Popular Information on Capital and Secondary Punishments, 19 September 1845, pp.102-105; Magazine of Popular Information on Capital and Secondary Punishments, 15 October 1845, pp.121-123. See Report of Speeches delivered by the Town Council of Edinburgh by Messrs Russell and Cruickshank (Edinburgh: Oliphant, 1845). Caledonian Mercury, 14 May 1846. The Bradford Observer referred to the council as the ‘wise men of Gotham’ on hearing that the Council retracted the abolitionist petition and instead called for the punishment to be retained for murder, see 21 May 1846, p.7. Appendix to the Forty-Second report on Public Petitions, Parliamentary Papers, 8 July 1846, pp.432-433. See Roger, Thoughts in Support of Capital Punishments. ‘Capital Punishments – The Mannings and other Murderers,’ and ‘Capital Punishments – Execution of Margaret Hamilton at Glasgow,’ reprinted in T. Mulock, The Western Highlands and Islands of Scotland (Edinburgh: John Menzies, 1850), the quotation is from p.206. Other Scottish retentionist discussions include articles in Macphail’s Edinburgh ecclesiastical journal and literary review 5 (1848) pp.402-411. See Bright’s speech, Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.112, 11 July 1850, cols.1275-1276. The Scotsman, 6 May 1862; Caledonian Mercury, 10 May 1862. The Christian Pioneer 19:232 (December 1845), p.522. A copy, from 15 March 1845 to 20 March 1846, exists in the National Library of Scotland – apparently lacking April and May 1845 issues. Robertson published Does the Bible authorize Capital Punishment for Murder? By a member of the fourth estate in 1845. The Aylesbury committee called it an ‘able and useful’ periodical, see C. Dickens, ‘Letters on Social Questions. Capital Punishment,’ Daily News, 13 March 1846. See British Friend, June 1846, for letter from the publisher, W.D. Blackie, 25 June 1846, after the editor’s death. A. Wilson, The Chartist Movement in Scotland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1970), p.245. Duncanson related abolition to repeal of game laws, franchise reform, temperance and taxation reform, see his densely argued tract Ketchiana, or the punishment of death by the civil law proven to be in opposition to enlightened reason, and growing social and political policy and also to be antagonistic to the mind of God, as expressed under the Patriarchal, Jewish and Christian dispensations (London: C. Gilpin; W. Strange, 1851), p.60. N.A., HO 12/105/21537, unnumbered letter, 22 April 1856. ‘Ireland and its church,’ The English Review, December 1847, p.263. For a historical perspective, see M.R. Beames, ‘Rural Conflict in Pre-Famine Ireland: Peasant Assassinations in Tipperary, 1837–1847,’ Past and Present 81 (November 1978), pp.75-91. Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.103, HC, 14 March 1848, col.541. Belfast News-Letter, 29 November 1856. Taylor, History of the University of Dublin, p.506; The Citizen (Dublin: Machen, 1840) 2, June-December 1840, published an essay on capital punishment via the abolitionist society. J. McCay, Punishment of Death. Letter to Lieutenant General Sir Herbert Taylor KCB… Respecting George Wren and Harrington, under sentence of death (London: Hatchard and Son, 1834). See also, Proceedings of a General Meeting of the Howard Society held in Dublin (Dublin: R.D.Webb, 1834). Caledonian Mercury, 4 April 1836. The committee comprised the Reverend W. Moore, Patrick Gilmour, Thomas Harvey and William Haslett.

282 201

202 203 204

205

206 207

208 209

210

211 212 213

214

215 216

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VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS Caledonian Mercury, 7 April 1836. The committee established to address the King comprised editors of the Chronicle, Mirror and Mail, and William Peet, Strangman, and the Reverend Dr Graham. See, for instance, The Dublin Literary Journal and Select Family Visitor, reprinting letter from ‘Friend to Humanity’ to editor of Limerick Chronicle, 1 March 1844, pp.188-190. Limerick Reporter, reported in Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper, 5 July 1846. Another petition from Quakers in Limerick is reported in Belfast News-Letter, 31 May 1856. Magazine of Popular Information on Capital and Secondary Punishments, 15 May 1845, pp.3740. The Bible Christian (Belfast) 7: 4, April 1845, p.142. Those in support of abolition at the meeting included Major Beamish, Mr Fagan, Dwyer, Reverend Mr England, Captain Sullivan and Father Matthew. In the same year there appeared the Baptist Reverend George N. Watson’s Lecture on the Punishment of Death (Cork: Nash, 1845). Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser, 11 July 1846; Belfast News-Letter, 30 June 1846. For further efforts by the Remonstrant Presbyterians, see The Bible Christian 7: 4, April 1845, p.142, York Street and others in Belfast, and a decision of the synod, at Banbridge, The Bible Christian 7:9, September 1845, p.323. The Dublin Weekly Herald (Dublin: Dowling and Shea), advertisement in British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Reporter, 11 June 1840, p.120. Webb published Forgery Laws. Proceedings of a Public Meeting, Held in Dublin, the Right Hon. the Lord Mayor in the Chair on the Ninth of March, 1831 (3rd edn., Dublin: R.D. Webb, 1832). Freeman’s Journal, 2 May 1849. See Freeman’s Journal, 1 February 1848, 28 June 1849 and report of lecture before a Mechanics’ Institute, 31 July 1849. The society was revived after an advertisement in Freeman’s Journal, 23 May 1849. See Freeman’s Journal, 25 January 1842, for a memorial to the Lord Lieutenant from the Society. J. Haughton, On Death Punishments: A Paper Read before the Dublin Statistical Society (Dublin: Hodges and Smith, 1850). Histories of the Statistical Society of Ireland refer to efforts to establish a Howard Society shortly after the Statistical Society was formed, but that this became unnecessary as the latter included research on penology and punishment, see M.E. Daly, The Spirit of Earnest Inquiry: The Statistical and Inquiry Society of Ireland, 1847–1997 (Dublin: Statistical and Inquiry Society of Ireland, 1997), p.29. S.D. Greer, Quakerism; or, the Story of My Life (1851; Dublin: S.B. Oldham, 1852), p.35. Belfast News-Letter, 25 April 1834; Tipperary Vindicator, reprinted in Freeman’s Journal, 9 March 1848. See The English Review 9: 17 (March 1848), Art.VII. ‘Letters of Dr M’ Hale to Lord Arundel, Lord Shrewsbury and Lord John Russell,’ pp.128-156 [p.154], on protests at the execution of Brian Seery for attempted murder, involving the Lord Mayor, as representative of a radical corporation, a few priests, and Quakers ‘who always seem to study a sort of false philanthropy’ and John Reynolds, repeal MP for Dublin. The case was claimed by Magazine of Popular Information on Capital and Secondary Punishments, 20 March 1846, p.221, to have stimulated a ‘deep feeling both in Ireland and in this country’. Cited in J. Fisher, The Case of Ireland, being an examination of the Treaty of Union between Great Britain and Ireland (London: Ridgway, 1863), p.206. Lewis when Home Secretary, found himself the recipient of a published letter against capital punishment from the secularist and radical Arthur Trevelyan, Letter on Capital Punishment (London: Holyoake, 1859). Irish Times, 13 July 1868. Haughton, ed., Memoir of James Haughton, pp.208-210; Tallack, ‘The Glaring failure of Capital Punishment,’ British Friend, 1 January 1868, p.25; see ‘City Correspondent’s’ criticism of Tallack and others, British Friend, 1 February 1868, p.35. Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper, 9 September 1848, p.1179; North Wales Chronicle, 12 April 1862. A reply came from Amlwch, and a humorous letter purportedly from a

NOTES

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hangman’s cousin, in 19 April 1862, entitled ‘Maudlin Sympathy for Murderers.’ On ‘philanthropic fanatics’, see ‘Crito’, North Wales Chronicle, 19 November 1864. E.S. Appleyard, Welsh sketches, by the author of ‘Proposals for Christian Union’ (2nd edn; London: J. Darling, 1852), p.23. Conley, Certain other Countries, p.18, citing Carmarthen Weekly Reporter, 4 December 1869. The independent minister Samuel Roberts of Llanbrynmair (1800–1885) was an abolitionist, see J. Walvin, ed., Slavery and British Society 1776–1846 (London: Macmillan, 1982), p.235. Presumably the abolitionist cause figures in his radical monthly journal, Y Cronicl (which he edited from 1843 until his emigration in 1857). Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.238, HC, 13 March 1878, col.1241. Hogg’s Weekly Instructor, 5 February 1848, pp.369-371 [p.371]. Glasgow Chronicle quoted in Caledonian Mercury, 23 October 1837. The local minister capitalized on the execution with two published sermons and recollections of his conversations with the condemned man, see J. Macnaughtan, A Sketch of the Life of William Perrie and Recollections of Conversations with Him (Paisley: A. Gardner, 1837).

Chapter 4. Abolitionism: the Role of Women and Workers 1

2 3

4 5 6

7

8 9 10

In the twentieth century, in the interwar period, the capital punishment movement had a colourful female figure in the businesswoman Violet van der Elst, see Tuttle, Crusade against capital punishment, p.47. Two women were on the Council of the Edwardian S.A.C.P.: the novelist and poet Isabella Fyvie Mayo (pacifist and anti-imperialist) and Katherine Manson, who was also on the executive committee. On Mayo, see L. Moore, ‘The Reputation of Isabella Fyvie Mayo: Interpretations of a Life,’ Women’s History Review 19: 1 (2010), pp.71-88. Dymond, Law on its Trial, p.98. See The Standard, 23 September 1882, p.2, for a support from a participant at the Social Science Congress in Nottingham, of the T.U.C.’s demand for admission of ‘working men’ to the jury franchise. In ‘The University Feud’, originally in The New Monthly Magazine 1842, Part 1, pp.142146 [p.143]. ‘The Progress of Morbid Taste,’ The Satirist, 22 September 1849, p.408. Gendered aspects to crime and punishment have been extensively researched. See, for instance, Carolyn A. Conley; P.M. Prior, ‘Murder and Madness: Gender and the Insanity Defense in Nineteenth-century Ireland,’ New Hibernia Review 9:4 (winter 2005), pp.19-36; C. Feinman, Women in the Criminal Justice System (1980; London: Praeger, 1994). On female criminal responsibility, see R. Smith, Trial by Medicine: Insanity and Responsibility in Victorian Trials (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981). See also, for American capital punishment of women, A. Linders and A. Van Gundy-Yoder, ‘Gall, gallantry, and the gallows: capital punishment and the social construction of gender, 1840–1920,’ Gender & Society 22:3 (June 2008), pp.324-348; and comments on the development of stereotypes of weak and innocent women, in chapter ‘Homicidal Men and Homicidal Women: A Growing Contrast’, in Wiener, Men of Blood, pp.127128. Radzinowicz, History of Engish Criminal Law, vol.4, p.337; see K. Segrave, Women and Capital Punishment in America 1840–1899 (Jefferson, North Carolina; London: McFarland, 2008), p.6, citing Liverpool Mercury, quoted in Brooklyn Eagle, 12 July 1866, p.4: on Ewart’s possible motion for abolition of female capital punishment. The Times, 4 May 1864, p.11. N.A., HO 12/105/21537/22/4, no.3. On Sommer, see Mary Carpenter’s Female Life in Prison. By a Matron (2 vols; London: Hurst and Blackett, 1862), vol.1, ch.8. Martineau, a friend of Basil Montagu, attacked capital punishment in The History of England During the Thirty Years Peace: 1816−1840, vol.2 1830−1846 (London: C. Knight,

284

11

12 13

14

15

16

VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS 1850), pp.419-421; 712, and also touched on capital punishment in Forest and Game-Law Tales (3 vols; London: E. Moxon, 1845), vol.2, she also recorded in M.W. Chapman, ed., Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography (2 vols; Boston: J.R. Osgood, 1877), vol.1, p.161, a review by William Empson of her journalism, in which he objected to her supposition that society could exist without capital punishment. The S.A.C.P. officer S.T. Hall had ‘cured’ her by mesmerism, other connections with abolitionists included her acquaintance with Ewart and Basil Montagu. Mary Carpenter, the Unitarian promoter of juvenile reformatories, was a subscriber of the S.A.C.P. in the 1860s, see S.A.C.P. report for 1866. She also gestured towards the ‘remnant of a barbaric code’, in Six Months in India (2 vols; London: Longmans, Green, 1868), vol.1, p.297. Caroline Hill was a Unitarian radical, part of the Howitt connection, she wrote letters agreeing with Dickens in his condemnation of public executions, see The People’s Journal, 1849, ‘Annals of Progress,’ p.44. On the Quaker Schimmelpenninck’s sentiments, see C.C. Hankin, ed., The Life of Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck (2 vols; London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans and Roberts, 1858), vol.2, pp.224-225. L. McDonald, ed., Collected Works of Florence Nightingale vol.2 Florence Nightingale’s Suggestions for Thought (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2008), pp.425-426. The Leadbetter Papers: A Selection from the MSS and Correspondence of Mary Leadbetter (2nd edn, 2 vols; London: Bell and Daldy, 1862), vol.1, p.10. See K. Corfield, ‘Elizabeth Heyrick: Radical Quaker,’ in G. Malmgreen, ed., Religion in the Lives of English Women, 1760−1930 (London: Croom Helm, 1986), pp.41-67[p.60]. H.N. Pym, ed., Memories of Old Friends. Being Extracts from the journals and letters of Caroline Fox from 1835 to 1871 (4th edn; London: Smith Elder, 1882), p.119 for spirited discussion with John Sterling, 1840; J.S. Mill entirely objecting and sharing same view on subject as Carlyle, 10 April 1840, p.166. Her discussions with Mill and Carlyle on capital punishment have been taken as evidence of the men’s anti-capital punishment sentiment at this period. Carlyle gave Fox an American pamphlet on capital punishment from Emerson, with his ‘own characteristic notes in the margin’ (28 May 1842, p.295). M.A. Cooke, ‘Recollections of Amelia Opie,’ The Youth’s Instructor and Guardian 18 n.s. (February 1854), pp.90-92 [p.90]. Opie as a child had attended assize courts but avoided trials for capital crimes, but had, in Paris, wished to see a condemned man before his execution for wife murder, see C.L. Brightwell, ed., Memorials of the Life of Amelia Opie, Selected and Arranged from her Letters (London: Longman, Brown, 1854); ‘A Morning at Paris in 1829,’ The Aurora Borealis. A Literary Annual edited by Members of the Society of Friends (London: C. Tilt, 1833), pp.234-240. On the Norwich meeting, see Duke University, Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library, Gilpin Papers, letter from Joseph John Gurney to Charles Gilpin, Earlham, 4 March 1846. E. Fry, Observations on the Visiting, Superintending, and Government, of Female Prisoners (London: J. and A. Arch, 1827), pp.71-75. [K. Fry and R.E. Cresswell], Memoir of the Life of Elizabeth Fry (2 vols; London: J. Hatchard / Gilpin, 1848), vol.1, pp.304-305 (her memorandum on capital punishment); vol.2, p.115 (speaking to a member of Queen Adelaide’s court, 1830). Fry spoke against capital punishment before a select committee on metropolitan prisons in 1818. See too, C. Tylor, ed., Memoirs of Elizabeth Dudley (London: A.W. Bennett, 1861), referring to Dudley visiting condemned prisoners with Fry and Corder; and the entry by T.C.F. Stunt, on her friend Elizabeth Sanderson, in ODNB. The Quarterly Review 82 (1847), p.115 referred to Fry’s ‘extreme opinions against capital punishment’; and in June–September 1848, p.141, in comparing her brother-inlaw Thomas Fowell Buxton, the penal reformer, with her, commented that he was saved from ‘this extravagance … by his respect for the Bible whose plainest words he durst not with feminine rashness misinterpret’. Joseph John Gurney – who was active in seeking abolition of the capital punishment for forgery – penned The effects of infidel

NOTES

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20 21 22

23

24

25 26 27 28 29

30

31 32 33

34 35 36 37

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principles illustrated (London: Tract Association of Society of Friends, 1849) which used a capital case; his essay on war for the Society for Promotion of Permanent and Universal Peace also expressed abolitionist sentiment (London: Jackson, Walford and Hodder, 1868), footnote. Portraits of Elizabeth Fry, and Samuel and Joseph John Gurney were sold by Gilpin. North British Review (American edn., New York) 9, May 1848, p.143. Leeds Mercury, 29 April 1856; Bradford Observer, 24 April 1856. For reports of female Quakers at S.A.C.P. meetings, see below. Quaker women contributing to earlier abolitionist activity as part of a family included Sarah and Elizabeth Fox, Wellington, Somerset (1834), Jane Gurney near Norwich (1832) and Maria and Ann Woodroffe Smith (1830). Margaret Pope gave a total of £45 between 1830 and 1833, and was a subscriber still in 1866. The Times, 21 November 1849, p.5. S.A.C.P. report for 1866. S.F.L., Box L3, 1845 report for the period 1828–45. Donors were Ann Coning of Guisborough in 1834, and Sarah Fox and Elizabeth Fox of Wellington in Somerset in 1834. In 1840, Ann H. Smith of Olney donated money For female petitioning see N.A., HO 12/97/18299, no.16, for Miller’s letter, Rothesay, 19 October 1855; for Elizabeth Outon, N.A., HO 12/ 107/ 23139, 5 August 1856; for Maria Allen’s efforts, N.A., HO 12/105/21537, 18 April 1856. Mrs Miller is probably the wife of the physician Dr Miller, who had just settled in Rothesay. N.A., HO 12/105/21537. Another petition, no.8 in the file, was from the female inhabitants of Wanstead, begging Grey to show mercy to allow them repentance, and as a Christian legislator. C.L. Balfour, ‘Woman the Reformer,’ in The Public Good, February 1850, p.37. [Colonel E.B. Hamley], ‘The Peace Campaigns of Ensign Faunce,’ Fraser’s Magazine (July 1849), p.21. As W.R. Wilde, Irish Popular Superstitions (Dublin: Glashan, 1852; reprinted from Dublin University Magazine, January 1850), noted. Northern Star, 28 March 1846. Miss Amelia Lewis, Morning Post, 11 July 1872. This is probably Mrs Amelia Lewis, who produced a new weekly journal, Woman, in that year and later became wellknown for food reform. The ‘few other ladies’ present were not named. See R.D. Altick, Victorian Studies in Scarlet, ch.2, for a discussion of the general Victorian taste for murder. See also Gatrell, The Hanging Tree, for curiosity about trials and executions in the eighteenth century by gentlewomen, and the comment, p.270, that ‘Among women, feelings about the hanging body were blocked with exceptional efficiency. Social prescription now firmly insisted that respectable women put a distance between themselves and the unsightly and improper.’ Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 3 April 1847, p.6. A newspaper account reprinted in Lancaster Gazette, 21 June 1856, p.2. Male abolitionist writers examining the question of women and capital punishment included C. Neate, Considerations on the Punishment of Death (London: Ridgway, 1857), ch.11. Neate, p.76, described the execution of women as an ‘atrocity’, but in discussing, he claimed that the subjects of female infanticide and husband-murder, were, being shocking, something that female readers should pass over, as he did not write for women (p.77). Extracts from the Journal and Letters of Hannah Chapman Backhouse (privately published, 1858), pp.270-271. C.P.C., minute 2344, 3 March 1865, p.307. ‘The Cat and the Cord. With a Word in Apology for Mr Calcraft,’ The United Services Magazine 254 (January 1850), pp.17-39 [p.36]. John Bull, 1 September 1849, p.548.

286 38 39

40

41

42 43

44 45 46

47 48

VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS J. Davis, The Agony of Murder: written by a prisoner describing his feelings when under sentence of death, and in most Imminent danger of execution (London: I.R. Taylor, 1859), p.63. Howitt’s Journal 2: 45, 6 November 1847, pp.290-291 [p.291]. Other journalists also appealed, naturally, to the Queen in this case, and to the matrons of England, see ‘Mary Ann Hunt and the “Humanity” of Professing Christians’, The Satirist, 17 October 1847, p.68. See also, ‘A Cry from a Condemned Cell,’ Punch, 23 October 1847, p.158. Queen Victoria, according to E. Longford, Victoria R.I. (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964) supported abolition of the death penalty for infanticide. On Howitt’s abolitionism, see A.M. Lee, Laurels and Rosemary. The Life of William and Mary Howitt (London: Oxford University Press, 1955), p.168. Perthshire Advertiser, reprinted in Bradford Observer, 1 November 1849, p.7. Charles Gilpin referred to her involvement, Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.191, 21 April 1868, col.1035, heading a meeting of ‘40,000’ women petitioning the Throne. He quoted a letter from Cobden about this case: ‘You are right. It is truly horrible to think of nursing a woman through her confinement…Could you not have a meeting to shame the authorities.’ S. Roberts, Queen’s coronation: an address to the females of Sheffield on the wickedness, the barbarity, and the impolicy of the punishment of death in all classes [sic] (Sheffield: A. Whitaker, 1838). It appears, as an address following a dedication to the Queen, in Roberts’ Yorkshire Tales and Poems (2nd edition, enlarged, London: Whittaker, 1839), where it is dated 6 February 1839. Roberts (1763–1848), a prolific pamphleteer on issues ranging from slavery, poor law, state lottery, chimney-sweep boys and gypsies, published a number of anti-capital punishment works, including Lectures on capital punishments (Sheffield: A. Whitaker, 1839); The Sacredness of Human Life. A Letter addressed to the incumbent of St James’s, Sheffield, on capital punishments (2nd edn., London: Darton, 1841) and The Sheffield and Nottingham Tragedies; or, the evils of capital punishment (Sheffield: W. Ford, 1844). Roberts’ friends include James Montgomery and George Bennet, and of the latter, a missionary for the London Missionary Society, Roberts notes, p.315, in Yorkshire tales and poems, he was the co-author of the ‘first code of laws that ever was established in any country in the world, from which DEATH as a punishment of crime was excluded’. Biographical material on Roberts appears in his son Samuel Robert’s privately published Some memorials of the family Roberts, of Queen’s Tower, Sheffield (Sheffield: Parkin and Bacon, 1862) where his Pittite political sympathies, paternalism, and ‘nondescript’ form of Christianity are noted, p.49. A letter from Roberts appeared in Magazine of Popular Information on Capital and Secondary Punishments, 15 November 1845, pp.143-144. Sheffield Independent, 20 December 1845, reprinting letter to editor of Sheffield Mercury. S. Roberts, The Sacredness of Human Life, p.6. For the reformist context, see D. Turley ‘British anti-slavery reassessed’ in A. Burns and J. Innes, eds, Rethinking the Age of Reform. Britain 1780–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp.182-199 [p.190]. S. Roberts, The Sacredness of Human Life, p.6. The president of the Sheffield Ladies’ Anti-slavery Society was Mrs Henry Walker of Clifton House; members are listed in Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 26 January 1839. ‘Revolting scene in England, in the year of Grace 1866, and under the reign of a female sovereign,’ The British Friend, 1 May 1866, p.118; from ‘Analysis and Description of the Report of the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment – 1866,’ Social Science Review. The Times, 30 April 1846, p.4. Cited in N. Rance, Wilkie Collins, and other sensation novelists: Walking the moral hospital (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1994), p.78. E.A. Erskine Neale’s Life of Edward Duke of Kent (London: R. Bentley, 1850), states William Allen the abolitionist was a friend of the Duke of Kent – in a passage of abolitionist sentiment concerning Elizabeth Fry, p.83. James Peggs’ abolitionist essay had stressed the humanitarian sensibilities of William IV, whose mercy had ensured that there had been no metropolitan executions for three years, see Peggs, pp.11-12; and had also drawn an

NOTES

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52

53 54 55 56

57 58 59 60

61 62

63

64 65

66

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optimistic conclusion from the new Queen’s mercy towards a dragoon who was under sentence of death for the attempted murder of a sergeant-major, p.14. Anon., How I rose in the world (London: C.J. Skeet, 1868), 2 vols, vol.2, p.155. Monthly Review 2: 2 (1840), p.265. Selections from the Writings of the Late John Sydney Taylor (London: C. Gilpin, 1843), pp.286287; ‘A beautiful incident,’ The Christian Miscellany 5 (1850), p.318; A. Midlane, A Colloquy Between the Gallows and the Hangman. A Poem on the Evils of Capital Punishment with Notes (London: C. Gilpin, 1851), p.31. A.C. Benson and Viscount Esher, eds, The Letters of Queen Victoria. A selection from her Majesty’s correspondence between the years 1837 and 1861, vol.2, 1844–1853 (London: J. Murray, 1908), p.38, Sir James Graham to Queen Victoria, 13 May 1845. Freeman’s Journal, 24 August 1838. Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, 5 (1838), pp.725-726. London Pioneer, 3: 1, 14 May 1846, p.33. John Timbs’ Things not generally Known sought to correct the misconception. Mrs Hester Banks to Sir George Grey, reprinted in 1864 (37) George Victor Townley. Copy of correspondence with the Secretary of State for the Home Department, and of orders or warrants issued by him, relating to the case of George Victor Townley. Banks’ letter survives in the Home Office files. This survey does not consider earlier female abolitionism: the ODNB entry on the historian Catherine Macaulay refers to her abolitionism. A.M. Howitt, An Art-Student in Munich (2 vols; London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1853) vol.2, pp.123-124. E. Martin, The Punishment of Death: a lecture delivered by Mrs Martin Hall of Science Manchester, November 23rd 1849. See Mme Steinberg, Lecture on Female Education (Paris: Brière, 1855), G. Storey, K. Tillotson and N. Burgis, eds, The Letters of Charles Dickens, vol.6. 1850–1852 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p.738, 12 August 1852. S. Beedle, An Essay on the Advisability of Total Abolition of Capital Punishment (London: Nichols and Son, 1867). C.F. Cornwallis, On the principles of criminal law (London: W. Pickering, 1846). For a later example of a woman who wrote about the penal system and was an abolitionist, see Felicia Skene’s Scenes from a Silent World: or, Prisons and Their Inmates (Edinburgh: Blackwood and Sons, 1889), published as ‘Francis Scougal’, which added a chapter on capital punishment to essays that originally appeared in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, see E.C. Richards, Felicia Skene of Oxford. A Memoir (London: Murray, 1902), p.251; S. Morgan, ed., Women, Religion and Feminism in Britain, 1750–1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p.152. See J.E. Jacobs and P.H. Payne, eds, The Complete Works of Harriet Taylor Mill (Bloomington, Indianopolis: Indiana University Press, 1998), reprinting letters to Morning Chronicle, 26 and 29 March 1850. E. Stephenson, Janita’s Cross (3 vols, London: Hurst and Blackett, 1864), vol.3, pp.122-123. [S. Beckett], The Uttermost Farthing (3 vols; London: Saunders, Otley, 1865) vol.2, p.37. The models of feminine vengeance were the Furies, with whom the tricoteuses of the guillotine were equated. C.K. Shorter, The Brontës: Life and Letters. Being an attempt to present a full and final record of the lives of the three sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë from the biographies of Mrs Gaskell and others. And from numerous hitherto unpublished manuscripts and letters (2 vols; New York: Hodder and Stoughton, 1908) vol.1, p.401, Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey, 6 March 1848; C. Bronte, Jane Eyre. An Autobiography (3 vols; London: Smith, Elder, 1848), vol.1, ch.1. Patrick Brontë supported mitigation of the penal code, see D. Green, ‘“Always at my post”. The Letters of the Revd Patrick Brontë,’ Brontë Studies 31:3 (November 2006), pp.179-193 [p.184].

288 67 68

69 70

71

72

73

74

75 76 77

78 79 80

81

82

VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS M. Smith, The Autobiography of Mary Smith, Schoolmistress and Nonconformist (2 vols; London: Bemrose, 1892), vol.1, p.198. Magazine of Popular Information on Capital Punishment, 15 November 1845, pp.141-142 (on Fry); and verse ‘The Convict’ on William Howell the murderer, by ‘S.C.’ of Ipswich, p.142. ‘Punishment by Death,’ The Lady’s Newspaper, 17 April 1847, p.365; ‘Annette Meyers,’ editorial in The Lady’s Newspaper, 11 March 1848. ‘Passing Events Re-edited,’ The Ladies’ Companion (1859), pp.167-168. The magazine endorsed anti-capital punishment comments from ‘Introviser’, Phrenology, Psychology and Pneumatology (London: J. Chapman, 1853) in a review in 1854, p.160. H. Graham, ‘Seeing a Man Hanged,’ The Rose, the Shamrock and the Thistle 5:28, August 1864, pp.406-408; ‘S.M.,’ ‘The Social reformers at York,’ Alexandra Magazine and Englishwoman’s Journal, 1 November 1864, p.385; ‘The Expediency of Capital Punishment,’ Victoria Magazine, April 1864. Frederic Rowton’s annotated copy, later owned by a Mrs Haggar of Hertford, probably identical with Elizabeth Haggar, wife of Thomas Neatby Haggar, see The British Friend, 1 March 1858 for her obituary. See Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol. 234, HC, 12 June 1877, col.1707. The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Browning (2 vols; New York: Harper and Brothers, 1898), vol.2, pp.40-41 (6 April 1846). E. Dowden, The Life of Robert Browning (London: J.M. Dent, 1927), p.91. ‘La Bouquet, or Dundee Ladies’ Miscellany,’ p.77, 1 November 1848, Local History Centre, Central Library, Dundee, Lamb Collection; ‘Leaves & Blossoms. Manuscript Magazine in connection with Bristo Place Mutual Improvement Association,’ 1866, Edinburgh City Libraries. E. Epps, ed., Diary of the Late John Epps, MD. Embracing autobiographical records, notes on passing events, homoeopathy, general medicine, politics and religion, etc (London: Kent, 1875), p.631. S. Spurgeon and J. Harrald, eds, The Autobiography of C.H. Spurgeon (4 vols, New York: F.H. Revell, 1899), vol.1, p.273. See Lucy Aikin’s letter to Dr Channing, from Hampstead, 12 June 1841, P.H. le Breton, Memoirs, Miscellanies and letters of the late Lucy Aikin including those addressed to the Reverend Dr Channing from 1826 to 1842 (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts and Green, 1864), pp.413-414. Punch 63, 3 August 1872, p.52. See C. Midgley, Women against Slavery. The British Campaigns, 1780–1870 (1992: London: Taylor and Francis, 1995), p.132. Bradford Observer, 13 April 1848, p.8. In France, as Goodwyn Barmby reported to Howitt’s Journal 3 (1848), ‘The pamphlets of Paris,’ p.270, Sophie Saint Amand in De l’avenir des femmes dans la République [‘The Future of Women, in the Republic’], noted the advent of the republic was ‘signalized’ by capital punishment abolition. ‘Innocent Persons Hanged,’ Bradford Observer, 20 January 1848, reported Gilpin’s claim at a public meeting in Newcastle, that ‘150’ or thereabouts innocent people had been executed. See the sheet, ‘Innocent Men Put to Death’ printed by Gilpin; and [Tallack], Analysis and Review of the Blue Book of the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment, for the cases of William Ross and Chalker, p.17. One key case, discussed in Gatrell, The Hanging Tree, pp.353-370, and Follett, ‘Evangelicalism, Legal Theory and the Politics of Criminal Law Reform in England 1808–1830,’ p.311, is that of the servant Eliza Fenning, executed in 1815 for attempted murder, by poison, of her employer and his family. A.D. Hallowell, James and Lucretia Mott. Life and Letters (Boston, New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1884); Lucretia Mott to Maria Weston Chapman , 29 July 1840, in B.W. Palmer, ed., Selected Letters of Lucretia Coffin Mott (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2009), p.79. For recent work which reveals the activities of middle-class women in the

NOTES

83 84 85 86 87

88 89 90 91

92 93

94

95

96

97 98

289

public sphere, see S. Morgan, A Victorian Woman’s Place: Public Culture in the Nineteenth Century (London and New York: I.B.Tauris, 2007). W. Lawson, Ten Years of Gentlemanly Farming (London: Longmans, Green, 1875), p.133; Co-operator, 3:35 (1869), p.19. The Racing Times, 9 December 1867, p.5. Daily News, 14 May 1856. Howitt’s Journal, 17 July 1847, p.48. See J. McDonagh, Child Murder and British Culture, 1720–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), ch.4. See also J. Thorn, ed., Writing British Infanticide. Childmurder, Gender and Punishment, 1722–1859 (London: Associated University Presses, 2003); M. Jackson, ed., Infanticide. Historical Perspectives on Child Murder and Concealment, 1550–2000 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002); R.E. Homrighaus, ‘Wolves in women’s clothing: Baby-farming and the British Medical Journal, 1860–1872,’ Journal of Family History 26: 3 (July 2001), pp.350-372. McDonagh, Child Murder and British Culture, ch.5 [pp.123-126]. Daily News, 7 December 1860.. ‘Eagle Eye’, ‘Infanticide and the abolition of death punishment,’ Morning Post, 1 June 1863, p.3. See ‘Secret Poisoning’, Temple Bar 6 (1862), pp.579-584; and Annual Register (1863), pp.453-462 [p.462]. The case was reported in the American press, see Harper’s Weekly, 22 November 1862, p.743, quoting Daily Telegraph and Morning Star. A grotesque feature of the execution, 20 October 1862 – the first execution of a woman at the Old Bailey for fourteen years – was the crowd’s laughter when they saw the pinioned and white capped figure resembling a figure from advertising posters for ‘The Cure’. A.I. Robertson, Women’s Need of Representation. A Lecture upon the necessity of giving women the Parliamentary franchise (Dublin: Irish National Society for Women’s Suffrage, 1873), p.10. Carl Heath, ‘Reform and the Death Penalty,’ International Journal of Ethics 17 (April 1907), pp.290-301, noted that from arrest to burial, a woman was dealt with by men. Suffragist critics of the British situation gestured to the women jurors of Wyoming, whose behaviour was reported in British papers such as Pall Mall Gazette, 27 April 1870: see reactions in National Society for Women’s Suffrage (Manchester Times, 9 November 1872), Englishwoman’s Review, e.g., 15 October 1884, p.484. Josephine Butler raised the issue, see Pall Mall Gazette 10 August 1889; Florence Fenwick-Miller endorsed women jurors, Women’s Signal, 26 August 1987, p.131. Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.174, HC, ‘Punishment of Death.– Select Committee moved for,’ cols.2057-2058; C.P.C., minute 2560, J.H. Parry (in response to John Bright’s question), 4 March 1865, p.344. R. Jermyn Cooper, On Capital Punishment, and the Extreme Danger of Relaxing or Modifying the Law in Cases of Murder, or Death by Violence. Earnestly addressed to the consideration of members of both houses of the legislature (London: Parker, Strand and Oxford, 1867), p.25; ‘The Conduct of Courts,’ Albany Law Journal 2 (1870), p.246, reprinted in I. Browne, Humorous Phases of the Law (San Francisco: S. Whitney, 1876). Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper, 27 November 1853. On the press comments on violent husbands, see Wiener, Men of Blood, pp.154-156. On the murderess in English culture, in sensational literature, newspapers and broadsides, see J. Knelman, Twisting in the Wind. The Murderess and the English Press (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998); for one abolitionist response, see H.W. Woolrych, ‘On the Report of the Capital Commission of 1866,’ read to the Jurisprudence Department of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, 26 March 1866, in Sessional Papers of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science (London: Chapman and Hall, 1866) pp.239-244. Anon., The Metropolis of the Water Cure (London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1858), pp.91-92. On which, see White, ‘Ordering the Mob: London’s Public Punishments c.1783–1868,’ pp.333-335. On visual representation of the execution crowd in this period, see for

290

99 100 101 102

103 104

105 106

107 108

109

110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118

119 120 121 122 123

VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS instance the detailed image ‘Under the Scaffold; or, the Hangman’s Pupils!’, The Tomahawk, 26 October 1867, p.252. C.P.C., summary of the evidence of Thomas Kittle, p.viii. C.P.C., minute 2678, 4 March 1865, p.358. C.P.C., minute 245, evidence of Sir Samuel Martin, 29 November 1864, p.36. On coverage of capital punishment in The Beehive, see, reporting middle class and parliamentary advocates of abolition, 9 January 1869; and 31 July 1869, Tallack’s letter to the editor. Leicester Chronicle, 3 November 1866, p.2. W.H. Ashurst asked Thomas Cooper to lecture at the National Hall on ‘Moral Force’, he gave two lectures ‘against taking away of Human Life’, subsequently published in 1846 – the discussion of capital punishment is not very extensive. His friend Charles Kingsley wrote to him in 1854, ‘I should be curious to hear what a man like you says on the point, for I am sure you are free from any effeminate sentimentalism, and by your countenance, would make a terrible and good fighter in a good cause,’ F.E.G. Kingsley, Charles Kingsley. His Letters and Memories of His Life (2 vols; 7th edn, London: H.S. King, 1877), vol.1, pp.380. ‘The Gallows,’ The Satirist, 17 November 1849, p.470. Earlier radical support for criminal law reform had exploited the crisis over the paper currency system in order to attack the Bank of England as a component of ‘Old Corruption’, see Handler, ‘Forging the agenda. The 1819 select committee on the criminal laws revisited,’ p.262. Chartist Circular, 15 February 1840, p.84. See F. Barrymore, Radical Artisan. W. James Linton. 1812–97 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973), p.36. Linton’s journal The English Republic (1854) debates the morality of capital punishment inflicted on tyrants, pp.381-383. T. Cooper, The purgatory of suicides. A Prison-Rhyme (1845; 3rd edn, London: Chapman and Hall, 1853), p.233. On The Plain Speaker, see 20 January 1849, p.3, on law reform; 12 May 1849, p.135 (Newcastle lecture), and p.131. Cooper’s Journal and abolitionism, see 6 April 1850, p.215, on the punishment of death from Shelley; and from Walter Savage Landor, 17 January 1850, p.39. Landor’s abolitionism is apparent in ‘Capital Punishment’, a letter in The Examiner, 1 December 1849, p.759. He was a friend of Lord Nugent. Northern Star, 28 March 1846. On Stallwood, see D. Goodway, London Chartism. 1838– 1848(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp.42-43 (portrait at p.43). Northern Star, 28 March 1846, resolution by Christopher Doyle. Northern Star, 2 May 1846. Northern Star, 15 August 1846. Northern Star, 25 July 1846, 16 January 1847, 13 November 1847, 10 March 1849. Northern Star, 21 November 1846; 19 June 1847. Northern Star, 23 March 1850. Yet O’Connor had not been an abolitionist in 1848, as we have seen. Northern Star, 10 January 1846. See The Crisis, title-page from September 1833 to April 1834; New Moral World, 1836– 1837, p.165, on ‘legal murdering’; T.W. Muskett corresponding in 1843, p.56; 1844, pp.104, 107, excerpts from ‘Humanitas’, Twelve Reasons against taking away Human Life. Northern Star, 24 May 1851. Morning Post, 29 December 1846, p.2. ‘Iconoclast,’ The Bible. What it is! (London: Holyoake, 1857). A. Besant, An Autobiography (2nd edition, London: T. Fisher Unwin), pp.174-175; see her The Ethics of Punishment (London: Besant and Bradlaugh, 1880). The Reasoner, 1850, p.356. On Grant, the paralysed son of the rector of Shelton, see R. Fyson, ‘Late Chartism in the Potteries, 1848–1858,’ Labour History Review 74: 1 (April

NOTES

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126 127

128

129 130 131 132

133 134 135

136 137

138 139

140

141

291

2009), pp.111-129 [p.120]; and Royle, Victorian Infidels, p.262. Grant was not an atheist. See also the review by Sophia Dobson Collet, as ‘Panthea’, of ‘Amico Humanitatis’, Remarks on Death Punishments. With special reference to the Bible Argument (Dundee: Myles), in Reasoner, 1847, p.596; and A. Trevelyan, Reasoner, 1849, p.315. The Weekly Tribune, 30 March 1850, p.6. The Railway News, and Joint-Stock Journal, 6 August 1864, p.125; reprinted in F. Martin, Stories of Banks and Bankers (London: Macmillan, 1865), p.175; S. Adams, ‘Cheating bankers nothing new,’ The Telegraph, 18 November 2009. Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.190, HC, 5 March 1868, col.1132. See coverage of capital punishment in Reynolds’s Newspaper, 3, 10, 17 January 1867 emphasizing the inequality of the law, the need for a parliamentary enquiry, the Queen as the ‘prostituted tool of a perverse and hackneyed Whig placemen’ and the Liberals using the gallows solely for workmen, as with the whip and plebeian soldiers. Newcastle Guardian, quoted in Morning Chronicle, 27 March 1848. The Satirist stressed the objection of Durham colliers to the execution, 2 April 1848, p.108. See also ‘How the Gallows is Fed’, Douglas Jerrold’s Newspaper, 1 April 1848, p.436. The Times, 6 April 1859, p.4. See articles signed ‘Gracchus’ in Reynolds’s Newspaper, 19 January 1851; 10 August 1851. The comment of the Isle of Wight Observer, 9 January 1864. For comments on the inequalities of the criminal law at pre-trial and trial stages for the poor see R. Chadwick, Bureaucratic Mercy, chs.2-3. For contemporary comments see Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper, for instance 10 August 1851, p.7, ‘The Hanging Season’ by ‘Gracchus’ where nine tenths of those executed are ‘victims to evil laws, unjust usurpations, arbitrary privileges, and a vile system of government’, and are inferior to savages intellectually; and 3 January 1864, p.4 ‘Mr Calcraft’s Holiday – The Hanging Season’: ‘even at the gallows there is a distinction drawn between fustian and broadcloth.’ Manchester Guardian, 13 February 1856. Manchester Times, 15 and 19 December 1849. Local collections; or records of remarkable events connected with the borough of Gateshead (Gateshead on Tyne: Douglas, 1849), p.42. The essayists included the framework-knitter and radical Thomas Emery of Leicester, whose essay was published as The Causes of Crime; its Prevention and Punishment (Leicester: J. Ayer; London: J. Watson, 1849) and was reviewed in Cooper’s Journal 7:1, 16 February 1850, pp.108-109. Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper, 28 December 1856. See the letter written by Horatio Waddington, published in the press, e.g., Liverpool Mercury, 13 January 1864; on the belief that abolitionists had been instrumental, see ‘Reprieve of G.V. Townley’, The Economist, 9 January 1864, p.37. See White, ‘Ordering the Mob: London’s Public Punishments c.1783–1868,’ pp.348-349; Parliamentary Papers, Papers and Statements of Transactions connected with Samuel Wright (1866). Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper, 17 January 1864, pp.1, 3; and 31 January, p.4 where the Townley case is seen as promising to ‘become as complicated, if not so serious in its consequences, as the Schleswig-Holstein question’ and where it is suggested Home Secretary Grey should be hanged. See also ‘Modern Histories in Verse’ no.4 ‘Treateth of the Trial of the Rich Gentleman and the Bricklayer,’ Fun, 23 January 1864, p.189; ‘The Finale of the Townley Case,’ The Economist, 6 February 1864, p.165; and Social Science Review, 1864, for treatment of the case, for instance, p.185, ‘Hanged and Not Hanged.’ See also view of inequalities of the law revealed by the scandal, in Irish Times, editorial of 12 January 1864 and 4 February 1864. The Insane Prisoners Amendment Act – amending an act of 1840 – was passed in 1864 in response to the controversy. Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.173, HC, 8 February 1864, cols.273-274, during debate on Sir George Grey’s bill to amend 3 and 4 of Vict.c.54 relating to the treatment of criminal lunatics. Morning Star, 12 January 1864, p.6.

292 142

143 144 145 146 147

148

149 150

151

152

153 154 155 156 157

158

159 160 161

VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.191, HC, 21 April 1868, col.1039. The criticism of the case included the ‘undue haste’ with which the deposition was taken before the magistrates at the examination in the police court, the fact that Justice Blackburn refused to delay proceedings despite the suggestion of the counsel for the prosecution, and the absence of an attorney or counsel for the defence. Bury and Norwich Post, 19 January 1864, p.3. ‘Townley and Wright,’ The Christian Spectator, February 1864, pp.113-115; Morning Star, 13 January 1864, p.4. Handbill, extensively circulated in the district, see Liverpool Mercury, 13 January 1864. Leicester Chronicle, 9 January 1864, p.5. Spear’s suggestions, to dissuade participation and to display disgust through blinds and shutters, was made at the Lambeth Baths ‘monster meeting’ see Morning Star, 12 January 1864, p.6. Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper, 17 January 1864, p.1, for formation of committee; The Beehive, 20 February 1864; Morning Star, 3 May 1864, p.5 (by which time, the first public meeting of the society, it was the South London Working Men’s Committee for the Abolition of Death Punishments). Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper, 17 January 1864. Newman Hall, a friend of Gilpin, recounts efforts to save Wright, interceding with George Grey, and writing to the Queen, Newman Hall: An Autobiography (London: Cassell, 1898), ch.15, pp.220-223. See A. Taylor, A Friend of the People. The Life of George M. Murphy (London: Elliot Stock, 1888), p.107, on Wright, meetings at the Baths on political and social matters, and lectures by Murphy on capital punishment. In 1873 there was another lecture on capital punishments there, alongside other reforms, p.139. 3000 signatures had been collected, apparently. The S.A.C.P.’s secretary J.C. Fishbourne attended and Thomas Beggs chaired the first public meeting of the South London Working Men’s Committee for the Abolition of Death Punishment, which met at Taylor’s Repository, over the Elephant and Castle, see Morning Star, 3 May 1864, p.5; and The Observer, 8 May 1864. For press treatment of the execution of Wright in the remainder of 1864 see Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper, 20 November 1864, letter from anonymous abolitionist ‘Gracchus’ in the context of the execution of Miller, which refers to nine tenths of the population opposing Wright’s execution and claiming the scandal still ‘rankled’. There was coverage of the abolitionist activity in relation to Wright in the Friendly Societies’ Journal, 1 March 1864, p.499. ‘Townley and Wright,’ The Christian Spectator, February 1864, pp.113-115 [p.115]. Manchester Times, 19 December 1849. Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 13 October 1849, p.6. See the reply from ‘Sigma’, Morning Post, 7 November 1842, p.2. G.T. Smith, ‘“I Could Hang Anything you can Bring Before Me”: England’s Willing Executioners in 1883’, in Devereaux and Griffiths, eds, Penal Practice and Culture, pp.285308. Marwood’s death also occasioned a serialized biography, ‘the most exciting and thrilling romance of criminal life,’ advertisement for Marwood the Hangman, in Illustrated Police News, 13 October 1883. See M.V. Gregory, ‘“Most Revolting Murder by a Father”: The Violent Rhetoric of Paternal Child-Murder in The Times (London), 1826-1849,’ in Thorn, ed., Writing British Infanticide, pp.70-90. N.A., HO 12/ 146/59140, no.35. Morning Star, 9 January 1864, p.4. M. Farningham [Mary Ann Hearn], A Working Woman’s Life. An Autobiography (London: J. Clarke, 1907), p.135.

NOTES

293

Chapter 5. Abolitionism in operation 1 2 3

4 5 6

7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24

25 26 27

On the platform, see H. Jephson, The Platform: its rise and progress (London and New York, Macmillan: 1892), 2 vols. British Friend, December 1848, pp.320-321. The Friends and Capital Punishment (1883), p.2. An anonymous Howard Association tract, probably by Tallack. See The Friend, 1 September 1865, pp.189-190, referring to the S.A.C.P.: ‘the funds of the Association have always been very limited, and it is believed that few (if any) societies have accomplished so much with so little pecuniary expenditure.’ S.F.L., Box L3, ‘Report, Statements of Accounts, List of Contributors’ (May 1845). The Times, 7 May 1846, advertisement announcing S.A.C.P. formation. S.A.C.P. reports for 1866, 1868 and 1872. Other financial information on the S.A.C.P. is sparse: Howitt’s Journal (1849) ‘Annals of Progress’ for 1846–1849 expenditure and The Friend (May 1855), p.84. The Friend (May 1855), p.84; Temperley, British Anti-slavery, pp.80-84. Pharmaceutical Journal, 1 July 1864, p.32, quoting obituary Morning Star, 4 April. The British Friend 2 February 1863, p.38. The last reference to S.A.C.P. in The Friend before 1863 (December 1856, p.223) was a request for funds for parliamentary action, the committee (of the Manchester branch) hoped for £1,000. B. Harrison, ‘Philanthropy and the Victorians,’ Victorian Studies 9:4 (1965–1966), pp.353-374. The British Friend, March 1857, p.79, for S.A.C.P. circular dated 22 February 1857. The British Friend, February 1857, p.55. S.A.C.P. report for 1866. S.A.C.P. reports for 1866 and 1872. Temperley, British Anti-slavery, p.84; Harrison, ‘Philanthropy and the Victorians’ and Harrison, Drink and the Victorians. Dymond, Law on its Trial, p.vi. The N.A.P.S.S. was to provide a rent-free office for the revived S.A.C.P. in 1872, see S.A.C.P. report for 1872. ‘The Reviewer,’ The British Controversialist and Literary Magazine 22, pp.369-375. The periodical had selected capital punishments as topic in the first volume. Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.104, HC, 1 May 1849, motion of William Ewart and John Bright, col. 1082. See Harrison, Drink and the Victorians, pp.227-228; and P. Hollis, ‘The Administrative Reform Association, 1855–1857,’ in P. Hollis, ed., Pressure from Without, pp.262-87, for insight into pressure group of meetings. The details on meetings that follow are derived from contemporary press accounts and, for the period 1854–1855, from the summary of a S.A.C.P. report. See Bristol Mercury 12 April 1849, on Thomas; 12 May 1849, on the meeting in the Large-Room, Broadmead. According to Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper, 13 November 1847, p.1426. Reprinted in Bradford Observer, 27 January 1848, p.3. Manchester Times and Gazette, 3 April 1846, see also Newcastle Courant, 13 March 1846. The article, one of the ‘Letters on Social Questions. Capital Punishment’, published in the Daily News, 9, 13, 16 March 1846. The letters were republished in provincial papers, such as the Derby Mercury. On the Joicey murder, see K. Watson, Poisoned Lives. English Poisoners and their Victims (2004; Hambledon: Continuum, 2007), pp.123-125. The Christian Pioneer, 1845, pp.501-512; pp.535-538. Magazine for Popular Information on Capital and Secondary Punishments, 16 August 1845, p.90. See Harris’ review in The Christian Pilot and Gospel Moralist 1850, pp.278-279, of W. Newton, The Total Abolition of the Death Penalty Defended (London: C. Gilpin). For

294

28

29 30

31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

42 43

44

45

46 47

48

VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS other abolitionist material in the Pilot, see serialized essay ‘Death Punishment for Crime as Inflicted by Human law’, by ‘D.D.S.’, in 1849. Peace Advocate and Correspondent, May 1847, p.230 reported the society established 26 March 1847; see Gateshead Observer, 29 May 1847, for its letters of inquiry. See the archival notes for the Church of the Divine Unity catalogue, Tyne and Wear Archive Service. Northumberland Record Office has a printer’s proof of a church notice for lectures on abolition of capital punishment by Harris. Dundee Courier, 19 January 1848. The British Friend, July 1855, p.169: extracts from report for year terminating 31 March 1855, signed J.T. Barry. Dymond was present at all of these meetings and also attended discussions at places of ‘less importance’. The Times, 30 April 1846, p.4. The Nonconformist, 6 May 1846, p.776. Leicester Chronicle, 28 March 1846; the petition took an abolitionist stance. The Nonconformist, 6 May 1846, p.776. Nottingham Guardian, 31 July 1851, p.4. The Nonconformist, 19 January 1848, p.39; Manchester Examiner quoted in Bradford Observer, 27 January 1848, p.3. The Nonconformist, 1849, pp.261, 828. The British Friend, July 1855, p.169. The Times, 10 June 1856, p.12; Morning Chronicle 10 June 1856.. The Manchester Guardian, 21 November 1856, p.3; Evening Star, quoted in Wrexham and Denbighshire Weekly Advertiser, 20 December 1856. The audience sizes given are of course open to question, being based on the impression by favourable reports. But they are not vast numbers – the 3,000 at Glasgow in 1848 is similar to the audience size for a discussion on secularism vs. Christianity by Holyoake at the same venue in the 1850s, see Royle, Victorian Infidels, p.208. York Herald, 23 February 1856, p.10. Spence supported Dymond’s efforts at reprieve, see Law on its Trial, p.284. See The Nonconformist, 1846, p.297, for their presence at the inaugural meeting; 1849, pp.929-930 for a Southwark meeting where they were noted; and 1856, pp.426-427 for their presence at London Tavern, see The Leicestershire Mercury, 14 November 1846. The Leicestershire Mercury, 14 November 1846. It was ‘greatly to the credit of the good town of Leicester’ that the meeting was well attended, especially by the working classes who comprised the gallows audience and were therefore the excuse for the infliction. The Nonconformist, 19 January 1848, p.39. The Literary and Philosophical Society had already heard an abolitionist paper from the Unitarian Reverend John Robberds of Toxteth Park chapel, in March 1847, see Proceedings of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Liverpool (1847), pp.121-125; on Robberds see J.A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: the Extraordinary Publication, Reception and Secret Authorship of the Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p.204. Robberds attended an abolitionist meeting in 1856, see Liverpool Mercury, 3 May 1856. The Times, 22 January 1856, p.5 (from Manchester Examiner and Times). See Divine Authority for the Capital Punishment of Murderers. Derived from Genesis IX, 4,5,6, and the Eclectic reviewer Reviewed. Being the Substance of a Speech Delivered at a Meeting Held at the Guildhall, Worcester, April 4, 1849, for the Purpose of Hearing Messrs. Gilpin and Beggs Advocate the entire abolition of the punishment of death. The author also published a tract against church rates and church state-ism, so he was evidently a Nonconformist. See T.C. Turberville, Worcestershire in the Nineteenth Century (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1852), p.149. Bradford Observer, 14 February 1850, p.6. For Fraser’s complaint about Gilpin’s allusion to ‘The Theology of Bradford’, see Bradford Observer, 14 February 1850, p.8.

NOTES 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

57 58

59

60

61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70

71

72

73

295

The Nonconformist, 11 June 1856, pp.426-427; The Times, 10 June 1856, p.12; Morning Chronicle, 10 June 1856. Liverpool Mercury, 3 May 1856. Leicester Chronicle, 10 May 1856. The Satirist, 24 May 1846, p.163. ‘The Punishment of Death,’ True Briton, pp.717-719 [p.719]. Editorial, Scottish Congregational Magazine, 1 February 1848, p.55. Gilpin to J.B. Cooke, December 1847, S.F.L., Gibson (Friends’ Autographs etc.) V.189/MS vol. 338. E.P. Hood led the Newcastle meeting in March 1847 where a S.A.C.P. branch was established, see The Peace Advocate and Correspondent, April 1847. The mesmerist Spencer T. Hall, remembered now for his ‘curing’ of Harriet Martineau, was on the platform as assistant secretary during the 1848 tour, see The Nonconformist, 19 January 1848, p.39. John Wigham, a Quaker, was a friend of Frederic Hill the prison inspector and abolitionist, and involved in the A.C.L.L. and anti-slavery. This had been one of the intentions behind the inaugural meeting. For critical comments from abolitionists when ministers avoided such meetings see Leicestershire Mercury, 21 November 1846 and Glasgow Examiner, 15 January 1848, p.1. People’s Journal 7 (1849), p.44. The Gloucester meeting in the Town Hall (10 May) was chaired by the High Sheriff. The Bath meeting (11 May) was presided over by Reverend William Cook Osborn, the gaol chaplain and later a C.P.C. witness, author of The Plea of ‘Not Guilty’ or the Evils arising from the present mode of Arraigning Prisoners. Considered in a letter to Sir George Grey (London: Hamilton, Adams, 1847). On the platform was the radical Reverend Thomas Spencer. A petition sent to Parliament was re-classified as a personal petition as Cook alone had signed it, as chairman. Leicestershire Mercury, 21 November 1846, report based on Derby Reporter. The mayor was called away, the meeting was instead chaired by the Baptist minister Dr Perry. On mayors as part of the platform in 1849, see The Nonconformist, 1849, p.261 (Ipswich) and p.828 (Devizes, where the petition is referred to). The British Friend, July 1855, p.169. Leeds Mercury, 3 May 1856. This seems to have been the major purpose of the committees. The Nonconformist, 23 January 1850, p.63, from Weekly News. Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.90, HC, 9 March 1847, motion on repeal of death punishment, cols. 1079-1080; Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.104, HC, 1 May 1849, col.1058. Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.104, HC, 1 May 1849, col.1082. Parl Debates, 3rd series, vol.112, HC, 11 July 1850, col.1264. C.P.C., appendix, written evidence to the Commissioners, 27 October 1864, p.621. ‘Public or Private Executions,’ The Nonconformist, 14 May 1856. Gilpin to J.B. Cooke, December 1847, S.F.L., Gibson (Friend’s Autographs etc.), V.189/MS vol. 338. The unease about Vincent’s participation was shared by more conservative members of the peace movement when he participated in that platform. On the platform 1846–1856 were John Bright, Joseph Brotherton, George Thompson, Joseph Hume, W. Rathbone, W.H. Ashurst, E. Miall, Dr John Epps, Reverend T. Binney, Lord Nugent, James Heywood, James Simpson, Reverend Jabez Burns, Alderman Harvey. Dymond, A Full and Impartial Report of the Public Discussion on the scriptural argument, relating to the punishment of death, held at Lewes, 9th Oct., 1855 between J.I. Dunlop and A.H. Dymond (Lewes: A. Morris, 1855). On capital punishment as a subject for debate in the Edinburgh society, see History of the Speculative Society of Edinburgh (Edinburgh: for the Society, 1845), pp.388, 347, 364, 374, 402, 427; R.L. Stevenson, Weir of Hermiston (1896), ch.3, ‘In the Matter of the Hanging of Duncan Jopp’; see also G. Balfour, The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson (1901; London:

296

74 75 76 77

78 79

80

81 82 83 84 85 86 87

88 89

90

91 92

93

VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS Methuen, 1915), p.78. For books on logic, using capital punishment, see S.H. Emmens, A Treatise on Logic, Pure and Applied (2nd edn, London: Virtue Brothers, 1865), p.93. As in the meetings of other pressure groups and movements, especially on controversial subjects such as secularism, see Royle, Victorian Infidels, p.234. Magazine for Popular Information on Capital and Secondary Punishments, 16 August 1845, p.95. Thomas L. Merritt, Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper, 6 November 1847, p.1388. See The Peace Advocate and Correspondent (published by Gilpin), January 1847, p.230 for Baptist minister McCree’s lectures on peace, temperance and capital punishment in Yorkshire and Lancashire from late 1846. Another lecturer was Henry Pond in southern England, see Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper, 13 November 1847, p.1426; other lecturers on the subject were the secularist / Unitarian Frederick Rowland Young at Diss, Norfolk (see Public Good, 1850, p.212; The People’s Journal, 1849, p.38, ‘Annals of Progress’) and Dr Cantor, on ‘Man as an Intellectual being’ at the London Mechanics’ Institute. The People’s Journal reported in 1851 that the Southampton Mutual Improvement Society, with the mayor presiding, discussed the subject. Howitt’s Journal, 4 September 1847, p.160, from J. Beal. See, for instance, adjourned debates at the Rotherham Literary and Philosophical Society, Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 9 January 1863, p.2; and London Road Chapel Young Men’s Class reported in Leicester Chronicle, 3 December 1864, p.5. W. Hudson, The Life of John Holland of Sheffield House (London: Longmans, Green, 1874), p.304; Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 17 July 1847, p.8. Moss was cited in the plebeian George Bakewell’s Observations on Circumstantial Evidence (Sheffield: J. Dyson, 1848). Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 11 September 1847, p.8. ‘Annals of Progress,’ People’s Journal, 4, p.4. Phonotypic Journal, vol.4 (1845), p.182. The Walsall Observer, and repository of local literature, 1862, p.167. The British Friend, 31 October 1849 on Devizes; The British Friend, 2 November 1863, p.272 on invitation to S.A.C.P. after the recent quadruple execution at Liverpool. On the Liverpool committee, see the report, from the Liverpool Post, reported in Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper, 25 October 1863, and the Appendix. The Boston Review, January 1864, p.96. On Fox’s published letters, as ‘Publicola’, in the Weekly Despatch, see Memorial Edition of the Collected Works of W.J. Fox (London: Charles Fox, 1866), vol.5, pp.247-249. Fox lectured on capital punishment, see Lectures addressed to the Working Classes (London: Charles Fox, 1845). Westminster Review, 1857, pp.267-268, in a review of a tract by John Rippon. David Christie Murray, journalist and novelist, expressed abolitionist views in a lecture in New Zealand, see Ashburton Guardian, 8 July 1890, p.3; his accounts of the execution of Edward Hughes (in Birmingham Morning News) are in The Making of a Novelist (London: Chatto and Windus, 1894), Part I and II, and Recollections (London: Long, 1908). C.A. Casey, ‘Common Misperceptions: The Press and Victorian Views of Crime,’ Journal of Interdisciplinary History 41:3 (winter 2011), pp.367-391; J. Tulloch, ‘The privatising of pain. Lincoln newspapers, “mediated publicness” and the end of public execution,’ Journalism Studies 7:3 (2006), pp.437-451; M.J. Wiener, ‘Convicted Murderers and the Victorian Press: Condemnation vs. Sympathy,’ Crimes and Misdemeanours 1:2 (2007), pp.110-125. On early nineteenth century abolitionist periodicals, see Follett, Evangelicalism, Penal Theory and the Politics of Criminal Law, pp.133-137. ‘Public Questions,’ United Presbyterian Magazine, February 1857, p.96. Wiener, ‘Convicted Murderers and the Victorian Press,’ notes the interest taken by the late nineteenth century, in local newspaper opinion, as part of the documentation sent to the Home Office in capital cases. Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.234, HC, 12 June 1877, col.1707. On the gradual restriction of the press from the execution, see Lord Houghton, Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.251, HL, 9 March 1880, col.671-674.

NOTES 94 95

96 97 98

99 100 101 102 103

104 105

106 107 108

109 110

111

112

297

The Times, 3 March 1845, p.9. Magazine of Popular Information on Capital and Secondary Punishments, 15 October 1845, pp.118120. Gilpin published J.B. Atkinson, Penal Settlements and their Evils: penitentiaries and their advantages, including an examination of Captain Maconochie’s system, and suggestions for the improvement of prison discipline (1847). Magazine of Popular Information on Capital and Secondary Punishments, 20 January 1846, p.169. See Daily News, 4 May 1846, for an advertisement for Gilpin’s abolitionist literature. It was edited by the Reverend William Hincks (1794–1871) an Anglo-Irishman who settled in Toronto, where he promoted capital punishment abolition and other reforms, and where he was professor of natural history at University College. W.S. Phillips, Considerations on the Increase and Progress of Crime, 1 March 1833, Barry to W.S. Phillips. The Atlas (1831), p.453. The Times, 30 April 1846, p.4; Casey, ‘Common Misperceptions’. ‘The Late Murders,’ The Law Magazine (1845), pp.317-319; and ‘The Trial of Thomas Smethurst’ in The Law Magazine (1859–1860), pp.145-147. ‘Household Ornaments,’ Punch 17, 27 October 1849, p.170. The article attacks a Sunday paper advertising portraits of the Mannings: murderers were so common now they should be made more permanent as locket portraits. ‘Fashions for Old Bailey Ladies’ (November 1849, p.186) where a female convict reads ‘The Murdermonger’. ‘The Proper Time for Public Executions’ (1 December 1849, p.214) where, in a common ploy having criticized papers such as the ‘Sunday Drop’, ‘Scaffold Weekly News’ and ‘Old Bailey Enquirer’, the writer blames the scaffold for the existence of such literature. See the echo of this argument in ‘Criminal Literature’, Social Science Review n.s., vol.1 (January–June 1864), pp.282-283. On capital punishment and Punch, see R.D. Altick, Punch. The Lively Youth of a British Institution, 1841–1851 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1997), pp.642-644; and Collins, Dickens and Crime, pp.242-243. Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.112, HC, ‘Punishment of Death’ motion, 11 July 1850. Grey had suggested the ‘moral lessons’ of the gallows ought to be judged by those who read about the execution, rather than by its immediate audience. Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper, 13 March 1847, treated this as a novel argument and sarcastically enquired: perhaps the pious Standard (a retentionist paper) should recommend moral instruction through ‘Blossoms of Tyburn Tree’. C. Mitchell, The Newspaper Press Directory (London: C. Mitchell, 1847), p.63; see also ‘Review of the Press’ in G.J. Harney’s The Beacon, 26 October 1853. F. Rowton, The Punishment of Death Reviewed (London: C. Gilpin, 1846), appendix, pp.93-94. See the advertisement in Examiner, 8 February 1845, and provincial press such as Hampshire Telegraph, 8 February 1845. For anti-capital punishment editorials, see Young England; or the social condition of the empire, 1 February 1845, p.72; 29 March 1845, p.200. On the complicated possible editorial history of the paper, see J. Morrow, Young England: the New Generation: a Selection of Primary Texts (London: Leicester University Press, 1999), and M.G. Wiebe, Benjamin Disraeli Letters: 1842–1847 (Toronto, London: Toronto University Press, 1989) p.161, note 1. Magazine of Popular Information on Capital and Secondary Punishments 1 (15 March 1845), p.12; no.2 (15 April 1845), p.26. See Kelly, Douglas Jerrold, for his newspapers. See his Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine, ‘The Hedgehog Letters, Letter 29. To Lord Nugent,’ 3: 18 (January to June 1846), pp.556-562. The ‘intellectual delicacy’ of Jerrold’s argument, that capital punishment debased the sanctity of death is mentioned in the British Quarterly (1849) 10, pp.206-207. Chronicles of Clovernook; with some account of the Hermit of Bellfulle (London: Punch, 1846), p.27, attacked the ‘killing by twelve men bolted in a box’; The Lesson of Life (1838), mentioned in chapter 7, was also about capital punishment. Richard, Memoirs of Joseph Sturge 2, p.407; Punch, 17 January 1846, p.33.

298 113 114 115

116 117

118

119 120

121 122 123

124 125

126

VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS Bradford Observer, 10 January 1850, p.4. He shared the platform with Gilpin, Cobden and Samuel Morley in 1849. See advertisement in Report of the speeches and general proceedings of the great peace congress, Brussels (London: Standard of Freedom, 1848), ‘The Friends of Peace, of Temperance, and the Abolition of Capital Punishment, will rejoice to learn that the success which the “Standard of Freedom” has already attained has placed it in the foremost rank among the more influential Journals of the day’; and the lengthy advertisement in Baptist Reporter and Missionary Intelligencer, 1848, pp.1-4 [p.2], from which this passage is quoted. The passage announcing the paper was cited by the Quarterly Journal of Prophecy (London: Nisbet, 1849), p.12, as symptomatic of the current spirit of ‘self-advancement, selfelevation’ and words of pride. Report from the Select Committee on Newspaper Stamps, interview with Cassell, 16 May 1851. The Morning Star was published by free traders and ‘peace’ men to demonstrate what a post ‘tax on knowledge’ newspaper should be like. Bright advised the second editor, Justin McCarthy : ‘I would think only of what was right and just.’ The paper ran at a loss partly due to limited advertisements. See A.J. Lee, Origins of the Popular Press. 1855– 1914 (London: Croom Helm, 1976), pp.213-214. Dymond joined the staff in 1857, eventually becoming general manager of the paper in the 1860s. According to the Northampton Mercury, 1 October 1864, p.5, the paper ‘possesses an unhappy talent for injuring any cause it takes by excessive advocacy’. J. McCarthy, Reminiscences (2 vols; London: Chatto and Windus, 1899), vol.1, ch.9, ‘The Morning Star: A Retrospect’; C.A. Cooper, An Editor’s retrospect. Fifty Years of Newspaper Work (London: Macmillan, 1896). McCarthy’s The Dictator: a Novel of Politics and Society (3 vols; London: Chatto and Windus, 1893) features a character who objects to capital punishment. Cooper, once sub-editor of the paper, thought the chief investor was Henry Rawson of Manchester (an Anti-Corn Law Leaguer, he had been one of the men who acquired the Manchester Times in 1845). Cooper’s memoirs also recall the work of the ‘hangman’s liner’ Butterfield, see pp.86-87. See D. Brown, ‘Cobden and the Press,’ ch.5 in A. Howe, Rethinking Nineteenth-century Liberalism: Richard Cobden Bicentenary Essays (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp.87-91. Howe, ed., The Letters of Richard Cobden, vol.2, p.260, Cobden to John Bright, 3 December 1850. For instance, the report on the execution of William Fowkes, Morning Star, 20 March 1856, p.3; C.B.’s ‘An Ode for the 14th of June’, Morning Star, 3 June 1856, p.4; and Alfred B. Richards, ‘A Lay of the Scaffold,’ Morning Star, 15 January 1864, p.5. See The Weekly Tribune, 39 March 1850, p.6. Illustrated Police News, 1 June 1867, but see the same paper’s 27 April 1867 article, ‘The Lesson of Longhurst’s Execution,’ for a different treatment of the question. See W.Y. Emmet, Thoughts on the Death Penalty, showing that it is atheistical in doctrine; contrary to the laws of God and the Bible; and opposed to the spirit of Christianity (Cincinnati: the Author, 1849), p.49; American Whig Review, September 1846, p.283. Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper 11 January 1857. British Friend, July 1850. For study of capital punishment in the newspapers before this period, see Z. Dyndor, ‘Death Recorded: Capital Punishment and the Press in Northampton, 1780–1834,’ Midland History 33:2 (Autumn 2008), pp.179-195. Using the Northampton Mercury and Northampton Independent, Dyndor shows that very few of the articles concerning capital punishment advocated abolitionism (one in 1793, another, from the London press, in 1834). Manchester Guardian, 21 November 1856, third resolution of S.A.C.P. meeting: Fildes’ cordial thanks to a large section of the press, especially the ‘powerful advocacy’ of the Manchester Examiner and Times.

NOTES 127

128 129

130

131 132

133 134 135 136

137

138

139

140 141 142 143 144

299

Douglas Jerrold’s Newspaper, 24 June 1848, p.826, for instance: ‘Killing by the Indian Hangman’ from Bombay Telegraph. There was also extensive coverage of Ireland and capital punishment. ‘The Hangman’s Advocate,’ Liverpool Mercury, 31 December 1847; note in ‘To correspondents’, Liverpool Mercury, 20 July 1849. On Wilson’s phrenological development, see Liverpool Mercury, 3 April 1849, on the portrait see Liverpool Mercury 6 April 1849, on the controversy between the paper and the Courier, see Liverpool Mercury , 17 April 1849. Samuel Roberts, ‘Real and Fictitious Tragedies Compared,’ Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 1 May 1847, p.6. This paper had advertised the anti-capital punishment magazine in 22 February 1845. Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 5 May 1849, p.6. See also, for the ‘Second Epistle’, 22 September 1849, p.7. See for instance, Bradford Observer, 11 May 1837, p.119 (when the paper was committed at least to abolition of the death penalty for all crimes but murder); ‘The Punishment of Death,’ Bradford Observer, 16 June 1845, p.7: this followed a section on ‘A Game Law Murder’; and Bradford Observer, 15 January 1852, p.4, concerning its role in efforts to save Sarah Ann Hill, condemned to death for infanticide at the York Winter Assizes. Advertisements, [p.1] of Cheshire Observer, 3 and 17 August 1861. ‘Vox Parva,’ York Herald, 25 September 1858, p.5. Leicester Chronicle, 21 July 1860. These journals include Howitt’s Journal, John Saunders’ People’s Journal (and the amalgamation of these two journals), William Horsell’s The Pioneer and Weekly Record of Movements (1851), associated with the Vegetarian Advocate, Dr F.R. Lees’ The Truth Seeker in literature (with an essay on capital punishment in 1850) and Eclectic Review. ‘To the Women of Great Britain and Ireland,’ Howitt’s Journal (1847), pp.290-291. The assessment on Rowton’s essays is B.E. Maidment, ‘“Works in unbroken succession”: the literary career of Mary Howitt,’ in K. Boardman, S. Jones, eds, Popular Victorian women writers (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp.22-45[p.34]. Rowton’s essays on capital punishment were reprinted in Spear’s American abolitionist journal, The Prisoner, and were published by Gilpin as The Punishment of Death Reviewed. The Public Good 1850, p.30. An advertisement for the work stated: ‘All persons who wish to see established the great principles particularly advocated in the Writings and Public Life of Joseph Sturge, Elihu Burritt, Richard Cobden, Edward Miall, Lamartine, Joseph Hume, Father Mathew, Frederick Douglas, Charles Gilpin, Dr Southwood Smith, Lord Ashley, Isaac Pitman, Sir William Molesworth and Henry Vincent should procure and read the PUBLIC GOOD.’ For the abolitionist commitment, see advertisement for Review in The Athenaeum, 13 January 1849, p.26. See, by the United Presbyterian minister of Newcastle upon Tyne, John Clarke Houston, Criticism criticized: A letter to the Author of two articles in the “Eclectic review” on the Punishment of Death (London: Whittaker, 1850), and the pamphlet by George Grove, cited elsewhere in these Notes. The Eclectic’s earlier role in criminal law reform is discussed in Follett, Evangelicalism, Penal Theory and the Politics of Criminal Law Reform, see also J.E. Basker, ‘The Eclectic Review,’ in A. Sullivan ed., British Literary Magazines: The Romantic Age, 1789 – 1836 (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1983), pp.124-133. Published in Manchester by A. Heywood, and by Horsell in London. British Friend, Advertiser, June 1851. Bradford Observer, 7 May, 14 May, 21 May and 16 July 1846. Manchester Guardian, 21 November 1856. Hints for whom they may concern, No.2, Capital Punishment. Dedicated to ‘the church’ (London: F. Bowyer Kitto, 5 Bishopsgate Without, 1867), p.27, pp.83-84. It was written by the author of England’s Free Slavery. The tract was reviewed in Meliora 10, 1867, p.288 and

300

145 146 147

148 149

150 151 152 153

154

155 156

157

158 159

160 161 162 163

VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS advertised in The Times, e.g., 11 March 1868, p.13. On the domination of The Times, and mid-Victorian radical hostility, see Anderson, A Liberal State at War, p.76. The Times, 23 January 1856, p.8. The Times, 5 November 1856, p.6. The Times, 22 April 1868, p.8; ‘Surely when a nation condemns hundreds or thousands of its bravest citizens to die to avenge a slight to its honour, or, as in the case of the present Abyssinian war, to release a few obscure persons from captivity, it is fully justified putting to death now and then one of the more infamous of mankind.’ S.A.C.P. report for 1866, p.6. Manchester Guardian, 16 February 1856; Manchester Times 3 May 1856. Megson’s humanitarian efforts included efforts to save Mansell, see HO 12/110/25646, no.31, 29 June 1857. See Manchester Times, 17 February 1883, for an obituary, which refers to his wider philanthropic work in relation to early closing and Saturday half holiday. See his letter (signed A.J. Megson), on ‘reformatory schools’, Manchester Times, 25 February 1854. He was also involved in the ‘Church of the People’, an anti-pew movement. See, for instance, Medical Times and Gazette, 1854, p.268. S.A.C.P. report for 1866. Christian Messenger and Family Magazine 4:2 (February 1847), p.61. Anon., ‘Inquisition for Blood’: or, the Infliction of the Penalty of Death for Wilful Murder. A duty imperatively required of all rulers, by natural law, moral right, and social obligation, as well as by divine commandment. By a witness for ‘Judgment, Mercy, and Faith’ (2nd edition, enlarged, London: Seeleys, 1850), author’s apology. See the advertisement appearing in the Daily News, 2 March 1846. Some of these tracts would appear to be old stock – the Christians strangling Christians is noted as widely circulated in Ireland, in Bristol Mercury, 6 April 1839. Moir is described by his friend William Maccall, National Missions: A Series of Lectures (London: Trübner, 1855), p.iv as ‘incomparably generous and noble’. S.A.C.P. report for 1866. Dymond’s contribution to Phillips’ Vacation Thoughts is acknowledged in the text; the author of the sympathetic ‘Capital Punishment – the Royal Commission’, Law Magazine 17: 34 (1864), p.220, acknowledged the help of the S.A.C.P.’s officer H.T. Humphreys. Phillips’ work was reviewed in an editorial in The Times, 5 November 1856, p.6. The S.A.C.P. report for 1866, p.7, emphasized the publication of Lord John Russell’s sympathetic opinions on abolition, Russell had questioned the worth of capital punishment in his new edition of The English Constitution. On Mill, see The Times, 22 April 1868, p.8, which characterized it thus: ‘cogent reasoning and with a courage rare in our day – the courage to disregard the sentimental and showily benevolent view of things’. Replies to the speech included Thomas Beggs’ pamphlet, and an anonymous letter, Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 3 May 1868, reprinted by Thomas Tweedie as The Philosopher on the Hangman. See also ‘Mr Mill’s Speech on Capital Punishment’, Westminster Review 91: 180 (n.s.), pp.429-436. The S.A.C.P. report for 1866, for translations by a Belgian abolitionist and by Mittermaier in Germany. See the (now incomplete) ‘Remarks on Capital Punishments’ in the British Library copy of J. Bennett, A Genuine Account of the Trial of John Richards, and William Smith (Plymouth: John Bennett, 1847; enlarged second edition), p.14 – shelfmark 1570/3996. J. Rippon, An Essay on the Punishment of Death (London: W. and F.G. Cash, 1853), p.112. Anon., Punishment, The Statistical Argument: reprinted by permission, from the Eclectic Review, of August, 1848, with Emendations (London: Gilpin, 1848). S. Amos, Capital Punishment in England viewed as operating in the Present Day (London: Ridgway, 1864), p.4, although Amos spoke of the ‘general body of the community’. Neate, Considerations on the Punishment of Death, p.80.

NOTES 164

165 166 167

168

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170 171 172 173

174

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176 177 178 179

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Rowton, Punishment of Death Reviewed, pp.58-59. The argument that abolition or reduction is linked to the ‘entrenchment of industrial capitalism’, with a gesture towards Foucault’s Discipline and Punishment, is made by Mukherjee, Crime and Empire, p.75, fn.14. Neate, Considerations on the Punishment of Death, p.37. The London Journal, 20 November 1847, p.192. See G.M. Hart, ‘Emotion as a Law-Maker. A Sociological Suggestion,’ Westminster Review 168 (August 1907), pp.178-186, for sympathy with the plight of the hangman. A useful short overview of the ambiguous position of the hangman is provided by G.T. Smith, ‘I Could Hang Anything you can Bring Before Me …’ Isabella F. Romer, ‘The Two Interviews,’ Bentley’s Miscellany 11:65 (May 1842), pp.453460. See H. Marquand, Ma Visite à Henri Sanson, bourreau de Paris (London: Rolandi, 1875). The work had English and Channel Islands subscribers and was dedicated to the Bailiff of Guernsey. Marquand was a close friend of the exiled Victor Hugo. ‘The Hangman’ (1840), with quotation ‘a Ridiculous Superfluity’. The work, first serialized in 1839, appeared in J.K. Meadows, Heads of the People, or, Portraits of the English (2 vols, London: Robert Tyas, 1840), vol.1, pp.346-368; it was subsequently published as Heads of the People, or Portraits of the English (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1864); the text by Jerrold was published separately in collections such as D. Jerrold, Punch’s Letters to his Son (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1853). For example, ‘Death and the Hangman,’ Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine 33 (JanuaryJune 1846), p.115; R.W. Buchanan, ‘The Last of the Hangman. A Grotesque,’ 1871. The phrase appears in ‘Our Institutions. The Hangman’, Illustrated London News, 31 May 1856, p.606. [R.H. Horne and C. Dickens] ‘Cain in the Fields,’ Household Words 3, 10 May 1851, pp.147-151 [p.151]. C. Whitehead, The Autobiography of Jack Ketch (London: E. Churton, 1835), which reached a third edition by 1838. Charles Wall’s ‘Life, opinions, and pensile adventures, with recollections of his contemporaries during the last three reigns. Edited by the author of “Old Bailey Experiences,” Metropolitan Magazine 14-15 (1835–1836), pp.185200, was reprinted in Penny Satirist, 31 December 1842, pp.1-2. See ‘The Rivals in the Rope-Walk’, Punch 41, 2 November 1861, p.173, on Askern (and Calcraft). John Murdoch succeeded Thomas Young in 1837. The last regular hangman in Edinburgh, John Scott, died in 1847. Anon., The Groans of the Gallows, or the Past and Present Life of William Calcraft. The Living Hangman of Newgate (E. Hancock, 5, Summer Street-hill). A version of this work seems to have appeared in 1840, and purports to be published by the ‘Society for Reforming the Criminal Code and Abolishing the Punishment of Death’. A later edition referred to Bousfield’s execution, see [William Brighty Rands] ‘Tangled Talk. VII’, Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, June 1856, pp.402-408 [p.406], for a reproduction of the title-page. BL, Broadsides on Murder, 74/1888.c.3.1.100, ‘General Executions for 1856’ (Bristol: John Chapman). BL, Broadsides on Murder, 74/1888.c.3.1.33, ‘Calcraft’s lament! Or, the Hangman in a hobble’ (‘London: printed for the author’). The phrase is Alfred Aspland’s, Transactions of Manchester Statistical Society (1867), p.73. E. Wood, East Lynne (3 vols; London: R. Bentley, 1861), vol.3; H. Mayhew, Young Benjamin Franklin; or, The right road through life (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1862), p.xv, on his wig and cap, for disguise; see Andrew Wynter’s ‘A fortnight in North Wales’, originally in Fraser’s Magazine 46 (August 1852), p.172; reprinted in Our Social Bees (1861), where a character gets rid of an annoying individual by pretending to be Calcraft. Life and Recollections of Calcraft (1880) was issued in thirty numbers in the Illustrated Police News and was dismissive of abolitionist sentiment. ‘Now!’, All the Year Round 20: 486 (15 August 1868), pp.223-225.

302 181 182 183

184

185

186

187 188 189 190 191

192

193

194 195

196

VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS V. Hugo, William Shakespeare (5th edn, Paris: A. Lacroix, Verboeckhoven & Co., 1869), p.306; P.J. Bailey, The Age: a Colloquial Satire (London: Chapman and Hall, 1858), p.165. The Satirist, 20 April 145, p.122; quote in Huddersfield Daily Chronicle, 2 May 1873. The execution of Harriet Thomas at Bristol was one notorious instance; see Calcraft’s alleged comments on this, ‘the worst I ever met,’ ‘Interview with Calcraft after an Execution,’ Cheshire Observer, 13 April 1861, p.8, from Western Morning News. Defence of Calcraft as a regular Anglican appeared in 1868, see the letter from ‘Themis’ in the Daily Telegraph, reproduced in the provincial press, e.g., Dundee Courier, 1 June 1868. ‘Police,’ Chamber’s Journal (1862), p.85 suggested that in Scotland the hangman was viewed with disgust and abhorrence, and in England was an object of antipathy. See the letter of Thomas Bewley, of Kirkby Stephen, Leeds Mercury, 16 May 1846, and the letter alluded to by the editor from an esteemed friend at Hawkshead, in reply to the review of the Reverend Walter Scott’s retentionist pamphlet. See ‘A lover of improvement’, Leeds Mercury, 12 May 1855, for the gladiatorial combat. Some letters were subsequently published as pamphlets, e.g., G.J. Holyoake’s Public Lessons of the Hangman which had appeared as a letter in the Morning Star, see Holyoake’s Sixty Years of an Agitator’s Life (2 vols; London: T.F. Unwin, 1909), vol.2, ch.77. ‘A Glance at Hangman’s Work,’ North Wales Chronicle, 8 May 1849. Waring, who spent much of his life in Wales, was a supporter of disestablishment of the Church and parliamentary reform, see the entry in Welsh Biography Online. He had published in The Cambrian, his life of Iolo Moganwg was published by Gilpin. Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.104, HC, 1 May 1849, col.1076 (John Bright). ‘Newgate Fair,’ Morning Chronicle, 1 January 1857. Caledonian Mercury, 20 February 1860. On graffiti, see Gatrell, The Hanging Tree, p.195. T. Miller, Picturesque Sketches of London Past and Present (London: Office of the National Illustrated Library, 1852), p.185. ‘Of Street Art,’ in H. Mayhew, London Labour and the Labouring Poor; or Cyclopaedia of the condition and earnings of those that will work, those that cannot work, and those that will not work (London: G. Woodfall, 1851), vol.1, pp.301-302. Coloured pictures included images of Sarah Thomas dragged to the gallows by turnkeys. See Biographical and Descriptive Sketches of the Distinguished Characters which compose the unrivalled exhibition and historical gallery of Madame Tussaud and Sons’ (London: G. Cole, 1866), p.36. Painted c.1828, this is in the Museum of London collection, see A. Ellis, Oil Paintings in Public Ownership in the City of London (London: Public Catalogue Foundation, 2009), p.279. A study of C. Wright, British and Irish Paintings in Public Collections (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006) suggests no mass of art devoted to execution scenes in this period: there is a painting of Rebecca Smith’s execution at Devizes in 1849 after killing her eleven children. See E.D.H. Johnson, ‘Victorians Artists and the Urban Milieu,’ in H.J. Dyos and M. Wolff, eds, The Victorian City. Images and Realities (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), vol.2, p.459. Abraham Solomon’s ‘Waiting for the Verdict’ (1857), ‘Not Guilty’ and ‘The Acquittal’, and Frank Hall’s ‘Newgate. Committed for Trial’ (1878) are examples. The triptych, Pensees et visions d’une tete coupee was referred to in the British press, e.g., Fraser’s Magazine, 1872, pp.541-545. The Prisoners’ Friend, 1849. Punch items were reprinted in provincial and national newspapers, for instance, see Bradford Observer, 22 January 1846, p.7, reprinted ‘Moral Lesson of the Scaffold’. G. Storey and K. Fielding, eds, Letters of Charles Dickens vol.5 1847 – 1849 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), p.218, to Gilpin, 1847: ‘But I will consider this and talk with George Cruikshank about it.’ No more detail is given. Common Sense. The Domestic Habits of the People with Six Illustrations by George Cruikshank (1852) was published by Charles

NOTES

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198 199 200 201

202 203

204

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206 207 208

209

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Gilpin; but when Cruikshank wrote to The Times 22 June 1877, his opposition to capital punishment was not complete. The Peace Advocate and Correspondence, April 1847, reporting the formation of a Newcastle S.A.C.P. on 26 March: the committee ‘now preparing to issue a sheet of illustrations on the subject, in a cheap and popular form’. Bradford and Wakefield Observer, 6 May 1847, p.3, quoting from the Gateshead Observer. See C.R. Weld, Florence, the new capital of Italy (London: Longmans, Green, 1867), p.311. Yorkshire Magazine, vol.2, 1874, p.63. Bewick had designed the image initially as a warning to a dishonest coal-merchant. The Heroes of the Guillotine and Gallows, or, the Awful Adventures of Askern, Smith and Calcraft, the Three Rival Hangman of York Castle, Stafford Gaol and Newgate, and Sanson, the Executioner of Paris with his cabinet of Murderer’s Curiosities (London: Frederick Farrah), p.4. See the British Library copy, X.102/2021; the broadside referred to is in BL, 85/1899.b.1 (2), ‘The Execution of Five Pirates.’ Punch 16, 24 March 1849, p.122. This followed a parodied letter soliciting the continued custom of the public for the ‘Theatre Criminal’, 10 March 1849, p.101. See BL, 74/1888.c.3 (31). I attempt to reproduce the typography; see Gatrell, The Hanging Tree, p.164, the parody is rather oddly credited by him to ‘fashionable’ abolitionism. See A. Ford-Smith, ‘Confessions: The Midlands Execution Broadside Trade,’ in J. Hinks and C. Armstrong, eds, Printing Places: Locations of Book Production and Distribution since 1500 (New Castle, Delaware: Oak Knoll Press, 2005), pp.153-168 [p.159]. My thanks to Dundee Local Studies Collection for a copy of the broadside. I have presented a facsimile, to fit the format of this book and reproduce the typography as closely as possible. Dundee-based abolitionists included the mason, Chartist and bookseller James Myles (1819–1851), author of Chapters in the Life of a Dundee Factory Boy, whose Remarks on Death Punishments was praised by Douglas Jerrold as an ‘excellent and useful pamphlet’ which reached a fourth edition in 1848. Leith was raised a Wesleyan, became a Primitive Methodist and then a Socialist. He had been trained as a tailor. See Dundee, Perth and Cupar Advertiser, 8 October 1847. ‘The “Moral Lesson” of the Gallows,’ Punch, 17 January 1846, p.33. Abolitionist poetry may be located using English Poetry. The English Poetry Full-Text Database (1995, CD-ROM edition). On the poetics of murder, see E. O’Brien, Crime in Verse. The Poetics of Murder in the Victorian Era (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008). See T. Medwin, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (2 vols; London: Cautley Newby, 1847), vol.2, pp.353-354; and Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments (London: E. Moxon, 1845), pp.52-55 [p.52], for ‘On the Punishment of Death. A fragment’, which began: ‘The first law which it become a Reformer to propose and support, at the approach of a period of great political change, is the abolition of the punishment of death.’ See C. Wordsworth, Memoirs of William Wordsworth, poet laureate, D.C.L. (2 vols; London: E. Moxon, 1851), vol.2, pp.386-387 for Wordsworth’s reaction to ‘weak-minded humanitarians’ about his ‘penal sonnets’; and P.C. Jones, ‘The Politics of Poetry.’ It is interesting to see how frequently this work, written in the context of the Parliamentary debate on ameliorating the capital code, 1839–1840, was invoked, on both sides, in the British capital punishment debate in the period 1841–1868. See F. Rowton, ‘The Gibbet,’ Howitt’s Journal, 1848, pp.248-249. See R.H. Horne, A New Spirit of the Age (London: Smith, Elder, 1844), p.329 on the sonnets as ‘the tomb of his prophet-title’. Ebenezer Elliott’s abolitionist verse was ‘O Lord, how long’, with the stanza ‘Oh vengeance! – No forgive, forgive!|’Tis frailty still that errs: | Forgive? Revenge! – shall murderers live? | Christ blessed his murderers.’ The poems by W.C. Bennett (reviewed in Literary World, 18 December 1852, p.391 (reprinted in Poems, 1862) included ‘The

304

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213 214 215

216

217

218

219 220

VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS Execution and how it edified its Beholders. A Sketch’ and ‘Were I a king! Were I a king. My Utopia’. Bernard Barton also wrote ‘A Stone Thrown at the Gallows’; and ‘A Familiar Epistle to my good friend G.C.— on Capital Punishments’, which appeared in Magazine of Popular Information on Capital and Secondary Punishments, 15 May 1845. J.C. Prince, ‘Three Angels. A Vision’ (1847), had the angel of mercy willing away ‘legalised slaughters, offensive to God, hideous and useless’, see also his ‘A Rhyme for the Time’. R.W. Buchanan’s 391-line verse ‘The Last of the Hangman. A grotesque,’ depicted an old philosopher who is revealed as the pensioned-off Calcraft who kept the Constitution ‘sharp and clean’. J.H. Rohers, a fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, published an abolitionist verse, ‘The Architect of the Gallows,’ in Poems (1848). George Linnaeus Banks, Staves for the human ladder (London: C. Gilpin, 1850) included, pp.86-90, the abolitionist ‘The Spectacle’, on an execution, and ‘Calcraft’s Carnival’ was published in his Daisies in the Grass. A Collection of Songs and Poems (London: R. Hardwicke, 1865), pp.122-125. J.G. Watts, in Lyrics of Progress and other Pieces (London: Benjamin L. Green, 1853) included an abolitionist verse, ‘The Gallows Tree.’ See also Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine and Howitt’s Journal 3 (1848), p.339, for abolitionist poems, such as Henry Sutton’s ‘We know better’. Alfred Tennyson’s verse ‘Rizpah, 17 – ’ (written in 1878) expresses humanitarian sentiments, gesturing to the compassion and mercy of the Bible, and that Christ would only put on a black cap for ‘the worst of the worst’. C.F. Ellerman, Alphonso Barbo, or the Punishment of Death. A Tragedy in Three Acts (London: Effingham Wilson, 1850), based on the case of a Venetian baker in 1507. The preface is strongly abolitionist and the play itself is an attack on the fallibility and irreparable nature of the penalty, and on the scaffold crowd. It also expressed the belief in the vested interest of the state in the gallows: ‘Tis firmness and determination which|Alone upholds the prestige of the State,’ (Act III, scene 2). Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 13 July 1850. Church of England Quarterly 11 (1842), p.487. See W.B. Thesing, ‘The Frame for the Feeling: Hangings in Poetry by Wordsworth, Patmore, and Housman’ in Thesing, ed., Executions and the British Experience. C. Patmore, Tamerton Church-Tower, and other Poems (London: W. Pickering, 1853), pp.208-212, note appended to verse, p.212; the verse had appeared in Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine, and Patmore subsequently denied abolitionist intent. F.W. Newman’s ‘Capital Punishment’ appears in Theism, Doctrinal and Practical, or, Didactic Religious Utterances (London: J. Chapman, 1858), pp.143-146. Contacted by Tallack for his views on capital punishment, Newman’s reply is printed in Tallack, Howard Letters and Memories, p.153, 12 November 1863. ‘Tangled Talk: 27,’ ‘The Common People,’ Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, July 1856, p.407. On the reference in this broadsheet, to Thomas Wakley, the radical doctor who established The Lancet, see S.S. Sprigge, The Life and Times of Thomas Wakley (London: Longmans, Green, 1897); and B.P. Block and J. Hostettler, Hanging in the Balance: a History of the Abolition of Capital Punishment in Britain (Winchester: Waterside Press, 1997), p.39. Trial and Sentence of Ralph Joicey, for the murder of his father, Robert Joicey, at Cockle Park, near Morpeth, before Her Majesty’s judge of assize, the right honourable Justice Coleridge, Feb. 27, 1846, Oxford, Bodleian Library, John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera, Harding B9/3 (188), in The John Johnson collection: An Archive of Printed Ephemera http://johnjohnson.chadwyck.com [accessed 19 February 2011]. The Life, Trial, Sentence and Execution of S. Adams, in BL, Broadsides on murder, 74/1888.c.3.1. See L. Yetter, ed., Public Execution in England (8 vols; London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009–2010) on execution narratives, abolitionist texts, and dying speeches, and the prefatory essay by Yetter to vol.5 especially, for the growth in a questioning tone in reporting executions, though Yetter refers here (p.xiv) to newspapers. See The Revival, 23 April 1863, p.198, for estimates. See the entry on Henry Christmas in Walford, Men of the Time (1852).

NOTES 221

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225 226 227 228

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See The Revival for reports from executions by Gawin Kirkham of the Open-air Mission in London, 23 April 1863. Preedy’s address was reprinted in Reverend Henry Moule’s Hope against Hope. Illuminated in the Case of the Convict, Edwin Preedy (London: Nisbet, 1863), see The Revival, 9 April 1863, pp.178-179. Potter, Hanging in Judgement, p.51 characterizes Moule as a passionate advocate of capital punishment. On dying repentance, see critical comments by Archbishop Whately c.1849, in E.J. Whately, Life and Correspondence of Richard Whately, DD Late Archbishop of Dublin (2 vols; London: Longmans, Green, 1866) vol.2, p.140. The Revival, 1862, p.142. William Robert Taylor was suspected of the infanticide of his children, and found guilty of the murder of an estate agent in Manchester; John Ward had killed a policeman in Ashton-under-Lyne, see Reynolds’s Newspaper, 14 September 1862. The Revival, 23 April 1863, p.201. On Lockhart, see M.J. Lockhart, William P. Lockhart. Merchant and Preacher (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1895), pp.108-109. The pamphlet literature by clergymen and ministers which took murder as an opportunity for sermonizing may be vast, examples include Capper, ‘Let none of you suffer as a murderer’. A Sermon to young men; G.W. Mc’Cree, Jeffrey the Murderer (London: S.W. Partridge, 1866), and J.D. Smith, ‘Grace; what is it?’, in Notes of Addresses delivered in Merrion Hall, Dublin (London: S.W. Partridge, 1865), which also circulated as a tract. For contemporary statistical analysis, see A. Aspland, ‘On Capital Punishment,’ The Transactions of the Manchester Statistical Society (1862), pp.65-85. Official statistics – the Criminal Returns – were provided by the Criminal Registrar Samuel Redgrave. Home Office Tables were annually presented to the Commons, tabulating crimes. See V.A.C. Gatrell and T.B. Hadden, ‘Criminal Statistics and their interpretation,’ in E.A. Wrigley, ed., Nineteenth-century Society: Essays in the Use of Quantitative Methods for the Study of Social Data (London: Cambridge University Press, 1972), pp.336-396. Neate, Considerations on the Punishment of Death, p.65. Nonconformist, 26 February 1851, p.175. Disraeli, before a Chesham agricultural association, reported in The Leader, 25 October 1856, 7: 344, p.1028. ‘Capital Punishments and the Law Magazine,’ Daily News, 11 May 1846 (from a correspondent), and the reply of the author of the article in the Law Magazine 71, in Daily News, 15 May 1846; see also ‘Lawyers’ affection for Jack Ketch’, Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper, 17 May 1846. ‘Capital Punishments,’ Fraser’s Magazine 69 (June 1864), pp.753-772 [p.759]. Eclectic Review 26, July 1849, pp.98-122 [p.99]; the journal’s article in August 1848 was reprinted as Punishment of Death – the Statistical Argument, reprinted from ‘The Eclectic Review’ by Gilpin. ‘Bousfield on Capital Punishment,’ The Leader, 5 April 1856, p.326.

Chapter 6. The Abolitionists and Parliament 1 2

3

Glasgow Examiner, 8 March 1848, p.2. ‘Pro Ecclesia Dei,’ Morning Post 1849. This writer associated capital punishment with ‘developments of a revolutionary principle’, in his tract “Our duty and our Encouragement” (London: W. Pickering, 1850), p.11. There is no adequate detailed study of capital punishment in the parliamentary context in this period, K.J. Romer, ‘Parliament and the Death Penalty during the age of reform’ (Unpublished D.Phil. thesis, Athens, Georgia, 1970) asserts, at p.147, that ‘The period from 1842 to 1860, from the viewpoint of this work, is of sporadic interest.’ He is under the impression that there was a Radical party that had abolition as part of its political programme; and that the most vocal advocate of abolition was Fitzroy Kelly.

306 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30

31

VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS P. Hollis, ‘Pressure from without: an Introduction,’ Hollis ed., Pressure from Without, p.23. The Scotsman, 29 March 1837, p.4. Tuam Herald, 5 June 1841, p.2. Tuam Herald, 5 June 1841, p.2. The British Friend, June 1846, p.152. George Wilson, Manchester Guardian, 21 November 1856. See the criticism of Joseph Brotherton, radical MP, in The Champion and Weekly Herald, 5 March 1838, p.1347, for making this claim on behalf of the Whigs. ‘Scenes of Society,’ I, ch.3, in New Monthly Magazine 72: 287 (1844), p.299. The Times, 18 July 1846, p.8. The British Friend, July 1847, p.188, letter from ‘Y.Z’; this was followed immediately by the letter from J.T. Barry informing readers of the attempt to produce a statistical refutation, for sending to prospective MPs, of Home Secretary Graham’s claims concerning the adverse results of abolition in previously capital offences. Bell’s Weekly Messenger, 8 August 1847, p.2. Morning Post, 21 August 1847, p.3. Whiz, ‘Cogglewood Trustum’s First Struggle for a seat in Parliament,’ Hood’s Magazine and Comic Miscellany 9 (January–June 1848), pp.26-34 [p.26]. Bradford Observer, 14 December 1848, p.7. The British Friend, March 1857, reprinting an S.A.C.P. circular dated 22 February 1857; circular dated 7 March 1857, published in British Friend, April 1857, p.105. Tallack, Howard Letters, p.105 reprinting replies from Stanley, June 1863, and March and June 1865. See also Tallack, Peter Bedford, p.82 for campaign in 1857 involving the posting of Phillips’s work. For a review of the 1864 edition of Vacation Thoughts, see London Quarterly Review 23: 45, October 1864, pp.1-22. S.A.C.P. report for 1866, pp.7-8; The British Friend, 1 May 1866, p.117. ‘The Punishment of Death,’ Eclectic Review, September 1850, pp.317-324 [p.318]. The British Friend, July 1854, p.169. The Friend, June 1866, p.127. The British Friend, July 1847, p.189. The six candidates were James Pattison, J.W. Freshfield, John Masterman, Lionel de Rothschild, William Payne and Sir George Larpent. Morning Chronicle, 27 July 1847 added Charles Lushington, Charles Pearson, George Thompson and C. Tennyson D’Eyncourt; see also Standard, 27 July 1847 p.[1]. Other candidates faced questioning about their position on capital punishment, for instance Sir James Hamilton, standing for Marylebone, and against the penalty except for murder and rape, see Morning Post, 24 July 1847, p.2, and Standard 27 July 1847. Morning Advertiser, quoted in The People’s Newspaper, 7 August 1847, p.7. Bradford Observer, 27 May 1847 (Alexander); Bradford Observer, 24 June 1847, p.5 (Jones); Bradford Observer, 22 July 1847, p.6 (Thompson). Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 6 November 1847 [p.1]. Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 26 June 1852 [p.1]; 14 March 1857 [p.1]. S. Haughton, Memoir of James Haughton, pp.136-137. The British Friend, April 1857, pp.105-106: S.A.C.P. circular, 7 March 1857. Northampton Mercury, in meetings with electors and non-electors, 21 March 1857, p.4 and 10 January 1863, p.7. He did refer to his abolitionism in a meeting in 1864, see 6 August 1864, p.7. His reticence may be contrasted with Lord Nugent in 1847 when the latter was cheered for affirming abolitionism, see Bucks. Advertiser and Aylesbury News, 24 July 1864, p.6. The dates are important, 1857–1863 being a period when abolitionists felt the time was not right for organized agitation. The Peace Advocate and Correspondent, December 1847, p.207: excerpt from Morning Advertiser, 26 December 1847 Gilpin apparently ‘forced’ the other 16 candidates to declare against capital punishment.

NOTES 32

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34 35 36 37

38 39 40 41 42

43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

307

Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper, 24 January 1864. Gilpin replaced Lord Fermoy as chairman of the Metropolitan and Provincial Bank in 1864, see the Banker’s Magazine, 24 JanuaryDecember 1864, p.317. S. Maccoby, The English Radical Tradition. 1763–1914 (1952; London: Adam and Charles Black, 1966), pp.177-178; cited in D.D. Cooper, ‘The Capital Punishment within Prisons Bill, 1868’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, New York 1969). G.W.M. Reynolds, The Mysteries of London (London: George Vickers, 1846), vol.3, p.159. Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.142, HC, 10 June 1856, col.1232. Manchester Guardian, 1 March 1861; ‘John Bright,’ Harper’s Magazine, 34: 199 (December 1866), pp.94-99 [p.94]. Munford, Ewart, p.163, quoting James Grant’s Random Recollections of the House of Commons (1836); anon., Sir Robert Peel, and His Era: Being a Synoptical View of the Chief Events and Measures of His Life and Times (London: N.H. Cotes, 1843), p.279. Howitt’s Journal 2 (1847), p.218: Rowton at National Hall, Holborn in January; The Times, 12 July 1850, p.4. John Bull, 13 March 1847, p.166. John Bull, 5 May 1849, p.276. ‘Punishment of Death,’ Eclectic Review, July 1849, p.98. For Drummond’s speech, see A.G. Percy (Lord Lovaine), ed., Speeches in Parliament and some Miscellaneous Pamphlets of the late Henry Drummond, Esq (2 vols, London: Bosworth and Harrison, 1860), vol.1, pp.90-91; the volume contains Drummond’s other interventions in the debate too. Lovaine, ed., Speeches in Parliament and some Miscellaneous Pamphlets of the late Henry Drummond, p.90. Hull Packet, 13 June 1856. The Times, 12 June 1856, p.12. The Era, 15 June 1856; Bristol Mercury, 14 June 1856. Morning Star, 11 June 1856, p.2. J.T. Mills, John Bright and the Quakers, vol.2, citing journal entry 3 May 1864, p.162. A.C. Plowden, Grain or Chaff. The Autobiography of a Police Magistrate (London: Nelson, 1903), pp.210-211. ‘The Abolition of Hanging,’ Saturday Review, 7 May 1864, pp.550-551 [p.550]. British Friend, 1 July 1865, p.2. Duke University, Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library, Gilpin Papers, William Ewart to Charles Gilpin, 10 and 12 May 1867, referring to the opinion of Thomas Denman. On this episode, see London Review, 25 April 1868, p.406; and Saturday Review, 25 April 1868, p.546, on Gilpin’s speech. Punch 54, 2 May 1868, pp.197-198. The Times, 22 April 1868, p.8. The Friend, 1 May 1868, ‘Editorial remarks.’ The Friend, 1 May 1868, ‘Editorial remarks.’ The British Friend, 1 May 1868, p.119. Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.198, HC, 28 July 1869, cols.876-877. ‘South Coast Saunterings,’ Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 39:231 (August 1869), pp.330353 [p.346]. The Times, 17 July 1856, p.8. A summary of the report appeared on p.10. The 1847 committee asked judges their individual opinions of transportation or imprisonment as sufficient substitute for death in the cases still left capital, as question 25. See Neate, Considerations on the Punishment of Death, pp.22-24. The judicial opinions were also reprinted in C.P.C., pp.640-643.

308 63

64 65 66 67 68

69 70

71

72

73 74 75 76 77

78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89

VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS Report from the Select Committee of the House of Lords, appointed ‘to take into Consideration the present Mode of carrying into effect Capital Punishments;’ and to report thereon to the house; together with the minutes of evidence and appendix. Ordered to be printed 7th July 1856. Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.98, HL, 20 April 1848, col.536. The Times, 13 May 1856, p.8. North Wales Chronicle, 14 June 1856. Phillips, Vacation Thoughts, p.59, ‘We claim every line of it for the abolitionists.’ E. Webster, Observations on the Report of the Select Committee of the House of Lords, 1856…p.5, p.11. Webster maintained a ‘psychological interpretation’ of the causation of murder, as he informed the Morning Post during the Townley affair, 31 August 1863, p.2. Westminster Review 130, October 1856, p.299; Saturday Review 2: 41 (9 August 1856), p.336. For a full report of the Bishop of Oxford’s speech, see The Times, 10 May 1856. Wilberforce, indeed, had already made clear his view, in presenting a petition from Aylesbury after the execution of Moses Hatto, see Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.133, HL, 15 May 1854, cols.305-308. Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.183, HL, 1 May 1866, Shaftesbury, col.257. For Shaftesbury on punishment, see E. Hodder, The Life and Work of the Earl of Shaftesbury, K.G. (3 vols, London: Cassell, 1887), p.453. Milnes raised the question of capital punishment at a dinner party with Bishop Wilberforce and Carlyle, see A.R. Ashwell and R.G. Wilberforce, Life of the Right Reverend Samuel Wilberforce D.D. Lord Bishop of Oxford and afterwards of Winchester (3 vols; London: John Murray, 1880), vol.1, p.400; he advocated private execution in 1845. Hibbert had moved for papers on the subject of the demoralizing effect of public executions at the beginning of the year, see Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.173, HC, 23 February 1864, cols.941-955. Lennox is classed by Dymond, Law on its Trial, as an abolitionist. On the question of a commission instead of select committee, see Morning Star, 14 May 1864, pp.4-5. C.P.C., p.iii-iv. ‘The Capital Punishment Commission,’ Meliora 9: 34 (1866), pp.125-139 [p.126]. In Scottish law there was instead a crime of culpable homicide, see C.A. Conley, ‘Homicide in Late-Victorian Ireland and Scotland,’ p.71. Solicitor’s Journal and Reporter, 15 July 1865, p.821. On the question of sanity, evidence was provided by Dr Harrison Tuke, Dr Hood and Lord Sidney Godolphin Osborne. Daniel Tuke wrote on the subject, Social Science Review, April 1866. Meliora 9, 1866, art. III. Edinburgh Review, p.57. The Times, 26 January 1866, p.8. The Times, 14 February 1866, p.9. See R. Pattenden, English Criminal Appeals, 1844–1994: Appeals against Conviction and Sentence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). Transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science (1866), p.300. British Friend, 1 July 1865, p.2. Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.181, HC, 6 March 1866, col.1627. Hibbert was supported by J.A. Bonham Carter and Viscount Enfield. See O. Frankel, ‘Blue Books and the Victorian Reader,’ Victorian Studies 46:2 (winter 2004), pp.308-318. ‘Analysis and Review of the Blue Book of the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment,’ Social Science Review, May–June 1866. [W. Tallack], Analysis and Review of the Blue Book of the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment, p.3. W. Tallack, The Practical Results of the Total or Partial Abolition of Capital Punishment in Various Countries (London: 1866), p.3. Tallack, Howard Letters and Memories, p.152, 10 January 1865.

NOTES 90 91 92 93

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L. Strachey, Eminent Victorians, cited in Frankel, ‘Blue Books,’ p.315. The report was republished by the government printer Thomas Richards in 1868. Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.191, HC, 1 April 1868, Darby Griffith, col.1055; Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol. 183, HL, 31 May 1866, Earl Russell, col.1546. Dymond, Law on its Trial, p.299, p.308, p.310. On Newdegate’s claims, see Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.262, HC, 22 June 1881, col.1068.

Chapter 7. The Mental World of Abolitionism 1 2 3

4 5

6

7 8 9

10 11

12

13

Rowton, ‘Punishment of Death considered theologically,’ The People’s Journal 7 (1849), p.296, a continuation, as no.11, of Rowton’s essays in Howitt’s Journal, 3 (1848). J.C.L. Carson, Capital Punishment is Murder Legalized (2nd edn; London: Houlston and Wright, 1868), Preface. Editor’s comment, in R. Gardner, England’s grievance discovered in relation to the coal trade the tyrannical oppression of the magistrates of Newcastle their charters and grants the several trials depositions and judgments obtained against them…(1655; North Shields: Philipson and Hare, 1849), p.50. The pun on ‘look to the end’ and the ‘rope’s end’ appears in Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors. Rose, The Struggle for Penal Reform, p.272. This joke appeared in the Weekly News, from whence it was republished in provincial papers such as Freeman’s Journal, 29 November 1849, and Leeds Mercury, 1 December 1849. The petition, triggered by the execution of Moses Hatto, is reprinted in full, as part of Bickersteth’s evidence before the House of Lords’ select committee, 30 May 1856, see pp.8-9. Church of England Monthly, quoted in the Literary Gazette, 8 October 1858, p.356. Mackey, Voices against Death; Mackey, ed., Hanging in the Balance; and R.J. Evans, Rituals of Retribution. Potter, Hanging in Judgement. See also, for a more recent overview, H. McLeod, ‘God and the Gallows: Christianity and Capital Punishment in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,’ Studies in Church History 40 (2004), pp.330-356; also appearing as a chapter in K. Cooper and J. Gregory, eds, Retribution, Repentance and Reconciliation (Rochester, New York: Boydell and Brewer, 2004). C.P.C., minute 2679, Henry Cartwright, barrister at law and Governor of Gloucester County Prison, 4 March 1865, p.358. H. McLeod argues, ‘God and the Gallows,’ p.352, that religious argument was ‘used by a high proportion of those who opposed the death penalty, but by few of its defenders’ during the C.P.C., but wider study of the debate indicates that this distinction is invalid. See C.R. Simpson, ‘Friends and Capital Punishment,’ Friends’ Quarterly Examiner 57 (1923), pp.169-177, which asserts the ‘pertinacity of the Quakerism of the last century’ concerning capital punishment without demonstrating it. E. Isichei, Victorian Quakers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), is a fair but brief treatment of the subject. The prominent Unitarian Joseph Priestley discussed capital punishment in Lectures on History and General Policy (Dublin: Byrne, 1788), but did not take an abolitionist position. Potter, Hanging in Judgement, ch.5, ‘A Sentence of Scripture: Capital punishment and Biblical Exegesis in the Early Victorian Age.’ See the recent treatment of atonement and penology from early Christian to modern times by T. Gorringe, God’s Just Vengeance, Crime, Violence and the Rhetoric of Salvation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) which presents the Victorian age as the ‘age of atonement’ par excellence, in contrast to B. Hilton, The Age of Atonement. The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) which locates it in the early nineteenth-century. For Gorringe, p.195, ‘It was an age which sought atonement’; for he sees the ‘forensic’ interpretation of atonement as vigorous into the 1880s: with R.W.

310

14 15

16 17

18

19

20 21 22

23 24

25

26

27

VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS Dale and Lyttelton providing the ‘theological underpinning of the Du Cane regime’. Works discussing atonement in which capital punishment appears include T.W. Jenkyn, On The Extent of the Atonement (London: Hamilton, Adams, 1833). G. Turner, ‘Au Reservoir,’ The Welcome Guest (London: Houlston and Wright, 1860), pp.368-372 [p.370]. W.T. Brande, A Dictionary of Science, Literature and Art (London: Longmans, Green, 1867), p.140, refers to the scriptural command as ‘tacitly, if not avowedly, abandoned, and the argument for expediency … more prominently brought forward in its stead’. See Radzinowicz, History of English Criminal Law, vol.4, p.388 for the ‘renewed vitality’ of theological arguments. Carson, Capital Punishment is Murder Legalized, ‘Preface’; ‘Punishment of Death – Secret Executions,’ Eclectic Review, January 1850, pp.33-49 [p.33]. Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper, 27 March 1864, p.1, a meeting at Surrey Chapel chaired by Newman Hall where Gilpin noted that the Church and Dissent were represented on the platform. See also the concern when ministers failed to attend meetings, e.g., Leicestershire Mercury, 21 November 1847 and Glasgow Examiner, 15 January 1848, p.1. For the Cowherdites see Gregory, Of Victorians and Vegetarians. Important Cowherdite abolitionists were Brotherton, William Harvey and James Simpson. The Swedenborgians do not appear to have opposed capital punishment, although The Intellectual Repository for the New Church (1848) published ‘On Capital Punishment for Murder. An appeal to the Members of the New Church, from a member,’ which drew on information supplied by the S.A.C.P. See N.A., HO 45/9400/52638, George Hall file (1864), enclosure in no.20, for a Birmingham rector’s general disapproval of memorials signed by clergy: ‘Their compliance was becoming so frequent, that their names were fast losing all weight.’ See S.A.C.P. report for 1866, ending ‘And they earnestly desire the Divine blessing upon their labours.’ Potter, Hanging in Judgement, p.45. Secularist abolitionists include Holyoake, Ashurst, F.R. Young, J.B. Langley, Arthur Trevelyan, though the definition ‘radical unitarian’ also covers many secularists. For secularist abolitionism, see W.A., ‘The influence of the religious teachings of the age on questions of social and political progress,’ in The Reasoner, 16 May 1849, pp.306-309. For Quaker leadership and financial predominance in the peace, anti-slavery and temperance movements see Ceadel, Harrison and Temperley. On Jonathan Dymond, an Exeter draper, and author of the famous pacifist text, An inquiry into the accordancy of War with the Principles of Christianity, see M. Ceadel, The Origins of War Prevention, ch.7. Dymond had also known Peter Bedford from his youth. The S.A.C.P. use of Quaker connections is most clearly indicated by its presence in Quaker journals. The Dublin Yearly Meeting’s abolitionist sympathies are reported in Magazine of Popular Information on Capital and Secondary Punishments, 15 June 1845, p.64. See British Friend, 2 May 1853, p.118 for an appeal to Quakers for funds, support as country correspondents and for involvement in the Yearly Meeting. There is little material on abolitionists’ own explanations for their antipathy to the gallows: Gilpin said his dated back to childhood and Christian teachings: ‘I had a child’s reason, but that reason has grown with my growth,’ Reynolds’s Newspaper, 27 March 1864, p.1; Dymond dated his abolitionist conviction back to childhood witnessing of a capital convict’s sister shrieking at the sentence, and by his family providing an alibi for a man accused of rick-burning, Law on its Trial, pp.1-2; Tallack described a childhood in Cornwall raised by parents who were concerned with animal welfare and poor relief, Howard Letters, pp.1-2. Gatrell, Hanging Tree, pp.403-405, 413-416; Isichei, Victorian Quakers, p.248, on penal reform and capital punishment: ‘they were much less important than the other movements discussed in this chapter, whether measured by the numbers of Friends

NOTES

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29

30 31 32

33 34 35 36

37

38

39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

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involved, or by the importance they attached to them. Moreover the records of most of these societies which did exist are defective and meagre.’ Isichei describes Tallack as an eccentric and persona non grata amongst some Quaker circles, though without expanding on this. However, see M. Canuel, Shadow of Death: Literature, Romanticism, and the Subject of Punishment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), ch.6, ‘The Two Abolitions,’ which argues that the two movements were rhetorically and logically associated: ‘two pervasive and inextricably entwined analogies: the criminal analogized to the innocent slave, and the slave analogized to the properly punished criminal.’ (p.144) See L.L. Shiman, Crusade against Drink in Victorian England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), pp.53-68, for lack of ‘official’ line on temperance amongst nonconformist churches; and the resort therefore to individual initiative. Samuel Bowly of Cirencester, also a capital punishment abolitionist, attempted to have the Quakers adopt an official temperance line, as they had adopted anti-slavery. For instance, in the case of the Thornberry murder, Morning Post, 22 August 1864, p.2. Leicester Chronicle, 28 August 1847. The Friend, June 1856, pp.99-100. The proposal was put forward by the Exeter correspondent of the S.A.C.P., Henry Sparkes. For earlier statements by Friends, see Extracts from the minutes and epistles of the Yearly Meeting (London, 1862). ‘The Glaring failures of Capital Punishment,’ The Friend, 1 January 1868, p.16, letter from Tallack; see also Friends’ Intelligencer (Philadelphia), 27 July 1867, p.330. The British Friend, 1 July 1864, p.169; and reply, p.220. See The Friend (Philadelphia), 26 June 1847, p.319. Simpson, ‘Friends and Capital Punishment.’ See also W.P. Thistlethwaite, Yorkshire Quarterly Meeting 1665–1966 (Harrogate: the Author, 1979), p.388 highlights absence of discussion on penal matters in the nineteenth century. The observation by Harrison concerning temperance’s dependence on individual Quakers in isolated communities is pertinent to capital punishment, Harrison, Drink and the Victorians, p.166: ‘Quaker independence of local opinion, especially in rural areas, made them particularly receptive to new ideas from the towns; they sometimes became invaluable supporters of teetotalism and a powerful educational influence on the whole surrounding countryside. The death of a leading Quaker supporter...could disrupt temperance activity in an entire locality.’ On local efforts, see William Tanner’s efforts to save a convict, F. Ford, ed., Memoir of William Tanner (London: F. Bowyer Kitto, 1868), pp.33-34. See report of Gurney’s speech at the S.A.C.P.’s inauguration, The Baptist Magazine (1846), p.372. An account of Wicks is in J.R. Dix, Passages from the History of a Wasted Life (London: B.L. Green, 1853), pp.61-66. B. Seebohm, ed., Memoirs of William Forster (2 vols; London: A.W. Bennett, 1865), vol.2, p.257 (letter to A.D. Alexander, 27 April 1849). ‘The Chronicles of Heatherthorp. I,’ Baily’s Monthly Magazine of Sports and Pastimes, 1 May 1867, p.145. N.A., HO 12/15/801, Henry Lea, 11 May 1849, after execution of the Mannings. Lea was a traveller in the firm of Huntley and Palmer, biscuit manufacturers. N.A., HO 12/105/21537, no number, dated 18 April 1856, letter from the Allens on behalf of the inhabitants of Wanstead, in the cases of Sommer and Harris. Bowring seconded Ewart’s abolitionist motion in the Commons, 9 March 1847. The Christian Pioneer, 14 July 1840, p.383. Samuel Roberts, ‘Real and Fictitious Tragedies compared,’ Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 1 May 1847, p.6. See Hill, ed., Frederic Hill, ch.15, pp.286-287. On Clephan (1804–1888), see the entry in the ODNB.

312 47

48

49 50

51 52

53 54 55

56 57

58

59 60

61

62 63 64

VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS Parliamentary Papers, p.376; obituary in The Christian Reformer 16 (1860), p.63. From ‘extreme sensitiveness’, Commins had given up his plan to join the medical profession. A petition in favour of the punishment of death bill in 15 July 1840 came from Tavistock. Gleadle, The Early Feminists, provides the best introduction to Unitarianism in the period 1800–1850 and a helpful discussion of ‘radical Unitarianism’ and connections behind such ventures as the Whittington Club. Capitalizing ‘Unitarian’ is not meant to suggest institutional solidity comparable to other nonconformists: it was not a ‘church’. T.R. Tholfsen, Working Class Radicalism in Mid-Victorian England (London: Croom Helm, 1976), pp.140-147. R.V. Holt, The Unitarian Contribution to Social Progress in England (London: Allen and Unwin, 1938) points out the suppression of Unitarian conviction in Victorian biographies such as Eliza Meteyard’s life of Josiah Westwood or the biography of Cartwright by his niece. There is occasional identification of platform members as Unitarian. Hilton, Age of Atonement, p.280; though as noted already, Gorringe, God’s Just Vengeance, stresses the continuity of ‘forensic’ atonement in the Victorian era. J. Fitzjames Stephen, quoted in Hilton, Age of Atonement, p.279; J.E. Ritchie, The London Pulpit (2nd edn, London: W. Tweedie, 1858). Ritchie published, ‘Seeing a man hanged,’ in The Night Side of London (London: W. Tweedie, 1858), expressing revulsion at the scenes at a public execution but avoiding the question of abolition. Magazine of Popular Information on Capital and Secondary Punishments, 15 May 1845, p.38. T. Hill Lowe, The Sacredness of Life and the Doom of Murder (Exeter: Wallis, 1849). B. Bailey, Hangmen of England. A History of Execution from Jack Ketch to Albert Pierrepoint (London: W.H. Allen, 1989), p.1. As McLeod notes, ‘God and the Gallows,’ p.333, the Enlightenment should not be viewed as bearing merely anti-religious or non-religious aspects. J.R. Seeley, Ecce Homo: a survey of the life and works of Jesus Christ (2nd edn, London: Macmillan, 1866), p.278. ‘Pro Ecclesia Dei,’ Capital Punishment not Opposed to the Doctrine of the Christian Religion, considered in Two Letters by a priest of the Catholic Church established in England (London: Pickering, 1850), pp.10-11, cited in Potter, Hanging in Judgement, p.71. For instance Wix, vicar of St Bartholomew’s, London, a member of the S.D.P.D., who emphasized his views were Christian and not ‘Quaker’, see Potter, Hanging in Judgement, pp.56-57. The Homilist, or, The Pulpit for the People (1868), pp.257-266 [p.259]. Christmas’s Capital Punishment Unsanctioned by the Gospel, and unnecessary in a Christian State. A letter to the Rev. Sir John Page Wood (London: Smith, Elder, 1845) was said to have sold 26,000 copies, see his entry in ODNB. Christmas expressed abolitionist sentiment in The Shores and Islands of the Mediterranean (3 vols, London: R. Bentley, 1851) vol.1, p.95. The Reverend Thomas Spencer was a voluntarist and supported of the C.S.U. Osborne defended the murderer Preedy in 1863, see Tallack, Howard Letters and Memories, for letters from Osborne, pp.162-164. Sydney Smith preached sermons for the S.A.C.P.’s precursor, the Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline, Sermons preached at St Paul’s, the Foundling Hospital and several churches in London (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1846), but was not for abolition. The Homilist, pp.257-266 [p.261], see also Lord de Vere Hobart, On Capital Punishment for Murder: An Essay (London: Parker, Son, and Bourn, 1861), p.7. The Reverend Sanderson Robins, On Party Spirit in the English Church (London: Bell and Daldy, 1860), pp.52-53. Wix published an abolitionist tract in 1832 which originated in an essay begun in 1790, see the entry by P.N. Nockles in ODNB. Henry Christmas’s father was a partner in the

NOTES

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68 69 70

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72 73

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76 77 78 79 80

81 82

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company of Allen and Bedford. Christmas was a prolific scholar on a variety of subjects including numismatics, Islam, church history and the English language. Lord Sidney Godolphin Osborne expressed radical ideas on education, sanitation, women’s rights and other topics The Irish problem as motivation is emphasized in the entry in J.O. Baylen and N.J. Gossman, eds, Biographical Dictionary of Modern British Radicals vol.2 1830–1870 (Brighton: Harvester, 1984). He acted as counsel in a number of murder trails, according to Potter. E.G. Williams (of Swansea gaol), A Series of Sermons on the Sunday and festival lessons: or, Sermons composed upon texts selected from the first and second lessons alternately of each Sunday and great festival day throughout the year (London: W. Macintosh, 1865), vol.1. Chadwick, Bureaucratic Mercy. The cases studied do not fall into such a neat pattern as Chadwick suggests, and The Law on its Trial makes clear that such a distinction between urban and rural cases was not followed: Chadwick only studied ten cases for the period 1857–1868. Anglicans involved in the earlier societies included Wix, Daniel Wilson and Archdeacon Wrangham, there were also Anglicans on the Dublin committee. Potter, Hanging in Judgement, p.37. Monthly Packet of Evening Readings for Younger Members of the English Church January-June 1857 (London: James and Charles Mozley), p.346. During the French revolution of 1848 a journal, Robespierre, according to Eclectic Review 25 n.s., March 1849, p.455 advocated abolition of capital punishment. Church of England Magazine 41: 1192, 5 July 1856, p.46. The radical W.J. Linton’s The National. A Library for the People (London: J. Watson, 1839) republished Robespierre’s speech without pejorative comment, pp.32-33. J. Gorle, Professor Harold Browne’s Exposition of the Thirty Nine Articles (London: John W. Parker, 1857), art. 37. C. Kingsley, ‘The Shaking of the Heavens and the Earth,’ preached at the Chapel Royal, Whitehall, reprinted in The Water of Life, and other sermons (London: Macmillan, 1867), p.95. W.H. Havergal, Death for Murder. The doctrine of all Holy Scripture. A Discourse delivered in the Parish Church of St Nicholas, in the city of Worcester, on the evening of Thursday, March 22nd, 1849 (Worcester; T. Stratford, London: Longman, 1849), p.27. S. Laing, Observations on the Social and Political State of the European People in 1848 and 1849; Being the second series of the notes of a traveller (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1850), p.265. On Laing, see B. Porter, ‘“Monstrous Vandalism”: Capitalism and Philistinism in the Works of Samuel Laing (1780–1868),’ Albion 23: 2 (Summer 1991), pp.253-268. J. Haughton, On Death Punishments: A paper read before the Dublin Statistical Society (Dublin: Hodges and Smith, 1850), p.10. R. Jermyn Cooper, On Capital Punishment, pp.23-24. Reverend J.M. Whitelaw, Hours of Quiet Thought (London: T.C. Newby, 1865), p.151. Reverend J.W.C. Drane, God’s Punishment of Cain the Murderer’s. Or, Does Christianity Sanction the Taking of Life for the Crime of Murder? (London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1856), p.37. G.J. Holyoake pointed to the disparity between religious opposition to capital punishment and the crucifixion, see Christianity and Secularism (London: Ward, 1853), p.167. The Oracle of Reason 79, 17 June 1843, p.19. G.B. Cheever, Punishment by death: its authority and expediency (New York: M.W. Dodd, 1842), p.13: but Cheever stated that the scriptural argument was ‘plain and powerful’; Potter, Hanging in Judgement, p.57. Manchester Guardian, 21 November 1856, p.3. Heywood was MP for North Lancashire. The Examiner 2182, 24 November 1849, p.739.

314 85

86 87 88 89 90

91

92

93 94

95 96 97

98 99

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VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS [E.P. Hood], Lamps of the Temple: Shadows from the Lights of the Modern Pulpits (London: Partridge, Oakey, 1852), p.336; the actual words of Cumming on the death penalty are in The Church Before the Flood (Boston: J.P. Jewett, 1854), p.153. The Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle (London), p.77. The Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle (London), p.83. Anon., ‘Inquisition for Blood,’ p.3, p.39. On Inglis, see Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.90, HC, 9 March 1847, col.1096. Amos, Capital Punishment in England, p.6, though he acknowledged, in the introduction, p.3, the difficulty of proposing abolition when the gallows was ‘in some way entwined in the general religious feelings of the nation’. Bucks. Advertiser, 23 July 1864, p.4. See anon., Hints for whom they may concern No.2 Capital Punishment, Dedicated to ‘the Church’ (London: L.F. Bowyer Kitto, 1867) attacking a church concerned more with vestment scandals than souls, and promoting an ungodly theology of eternal damnation and atonement. Other abolitionist criticisms of the church include ‘Our Little Bird’, Punch 17, 24 November 1849, p.203, where the priest reads on while the bolt is drawn; and see Dymond’s comments on gaol chaplains, Law on its Trial, pp.22-23, ‘who hold not so much that a man if guilty must be convicted, as that a man convicted must be guilty’. Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.97, HC, 14 March 1848, col.578. On the sermon’s status, an artefact of ‘oral literature’, see R.H. Ellison, The Victorian Pulpit. Spoken and written sermons in nineteenth-century Britain (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 1998). Dundee Courier, 17 October 1862. R.L. Carpenter, writing in Magazine of Popular Information on Capital Punishment, 15 June 1845, p.51; Tallack in The Friend, 1866, p.175, refuting Kennaway’s sermon. For Wordsworth’s Westminster Abbey sermon (reaching a second edition as a pamphlet in 1868), 24 November 1867, see article in The Friends Quarterly Examiner II (1868) and W. Ball, Cunningham and Kelly refuted, and other Contributions to the periodicals of the Society of Friends (Edinburgh: J. Taylor, 1869), pp.43-49. Rowton engaged in correspondence regarding the Dean of Exeter’s pro-gallows sentiments in the Western Times, see The Peace Advocate and Correspondent, June 1849. Another pro-capital punishment sermon was by the Reverend A. Hume LL.D. of Vauxhall, which was summarized by the abolitionist Liverpool Mercury, 6 March 1849. An instance of a lecture to working men, entitled ‘A Few thoughts about Palmer’, in which anti-capital punishment sentiments were alluded to, by the Reverend Hugh Stowell Brown, is reported in detail in the Liverpool Mercury, 5 July 1856. The Homilist (London: R. Dickinson), 1 (4th series), pp.257-266. W.H. Havergal, Death for Murder, p.25. Potter, Hanging in Judgement, ch.7, for the ‘muddled’ thinking of Reverend John Davis of Newgate and the impressive performances by the Reverend John Jessop, chaplain of Horsemonger Lane Gaol, Southwark for ten years, W.C. Osborn and S.G. Osborne. See, in general, Potter’s chapter 4, ‘Technicians of Guilt’ (pp.46-54). Davis edited The Agony of Murder, which was claimed to be the production of a young father of four who killed his wife whilst drunk, and who was reprieved through the efforts of Alderman Rose and Milner Gibson, c.1847. J. Cumming, Foreshadows: or Lectures on Lord’s Miracles (London: A. Hall, Virtue, 1852), pp.29-30. Congregationalist abolitionists included the Reverend Alexander Duncanson who had been expelled from his church for his views on the atonement. His ‘spirited’ (the description is Eclectic Review’s 27:91, 1850, p.1267) abolitionist work Ketchiana was published by Gilpin in 1851. Others include Newman Hall, Thomas Binney, and John Campbell. Baptist Magazine 37 (1846), pp.370-372; General Baptist Repository (1864), p.91, see also General Baptist Repository (1863), p.183 on the Lincolnshire Conference resolution to consider petitioning parliament.

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107 108 109

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Punch, 22 April 1854, p.167; ‘Capital punishments – Spiritual ministrations’; Law Review (1854), pp.222-225; ‘Popery – A Gallows Scene,’ The Christian Witness 11 (1854), pp.418420. Potter, Hanging in Judgement, p.56 for the non-biblical basis of justification for the Bloody Code. See Hanging in Judgement, p.79 on the ‘outward veneer of respectability’ that privatization was. Potter, Hanging in Judgement, p.60, quotation from ‘A General View’, p.34. ‘Moral Force Chartism. III,’ Politics for the People, 13 (15 July 1848), p.216. F.D. Maurice referred to Cain’s fate and Noahinic injunction, in The Patriarchs and Lawgivers of the Old Testament (2nd edn; Cambridge: Macmillan, 1855), pp.70-71. Charles Kingsley wrote to The Times calling for an execution to go ahead, see also The Water of Life, and other Sermons (1867), and All Saints Day, and other Sermons (1872), and Kingsley, Charles Kingsley, vol.1, p.380, letter to Thomas Cooper in 1854. See A.D. Murray, John Ludlow: the autobiography of a Christian Socialist (London: Cass, 1981), where Ludlow acknowledges that Maurice, and especially Kingsley, turned him away from his abolitionism. Dymond considered Earl de Grey and Ripon as abolitionist, Law on its Trial, p.295. On practical Christianity, see Beggs’s friend William Lovett, The Life and Struggles of William Lovett in the pursuit of bread, knowledge, and freedom (London: Trübner, 1876), p.37: ‘a union for the promotion of brotherly kindness and good deeds to one another’. See Harrison, Drink and the Victorians, pp.184-186 on rationalist and secularist tendencies in teetotalism and the tendency towards biblical criticism of texts supporting alcohol. T. Beggs, Three Lectures on the Moral Elevation of the People (London: Gilpin, 1847), pp.14, 27-28. Interestingly, given the importance accorded to readings of the Old Testament and the new dispensation, in Henry Mayhew’s The Magic of Kindness, or, The Wondrous Story of the Good Huan (1849; New York: Harper and Brothers, 1849), the statement is made, p.90, that ‘none have more quietly and yet more perseveringly pleaded for mitigation of capital punishment and reform in prison discipline than the Jews.’ D. Caesarani, The Jewish Chronicle and Anglo-Jewry, 1841–1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). ‘The Weekly Record,’ Howitt’s Journal 1, February 1847, p.16. On British character and the gallows, see Jewish Chronicle, 26 October 1866, pp.4-5. See also ‘The Law of Sinai and Capital Punishment,’ Jewish Chronicle, 31 March 1865, p.4; the letters from the abolitionist Fred Barnett, Jewish Chronicle, 10 October and 28 October October 1850; the retentionist ‘Judex’, in reply to a query sent by William Perry, Jewish Chronicle, 3 February 1860; and the abolitionist letter by Joseph Guedalla, 18 November 1864, Jewish Chronicle, p.7. See Jewish Chronicle, ‘Capital Punishment and the Bible,’ 2 August 1872, pp.250-251. J.G.H. Brown, A Message from the World of Spirits (London: Holyoake, 1857), pp. 33-35. The work also brought messages from William Palmer, in the context of which, Brown expressed his abolitionist sentiments (see p.171). See the medium Annie, cited in ‘The Literature of Spirit-Rapping’, The National Review 4, January to April 1857, pp.131-151 [p.142]. See review of Apparitions: A New Theory (London: Effingham Wilson, 1856), Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine 23, p.317. On Varley, see Bradford Observer, 29 June 1869, p.4. However, as Christine Ferguson notes, ‘Eugenics and the After Life: Lombroso, Doyle, and the Spiritualist Purification of the Race,’ Journal of Victorian Culture 12:1 (2007), pp.64-85 [p.72], debates about capital punishment in the journal Light in 1890, did not elicit wholly abolitionist responses. Ewart’s arguments on capital punishment, eschewing theology, are noted by F.D. Roberts, The Social Conscience of the early Victorians (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp.316-317 as an example of the empirical and rational response to social problems.

316 115 116

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120 121

122

123 124

VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS A. Tyrrell, Joseph Sturge and the Moral Radical Party (London: Helm, 1987). Pamphlets and works on the problem of crime from a social science or reformist perspective in the mid-Victorian period have not been extensively surveyed for this study, but the following discusses capital punishment in a way sympathetic to abolition: W. Ellis, Where must we look for the further prevention of crime? (London: Smith, Elder, 1857), p.19, p.37. The ‘abolitionist literature’ referred to includes works by Charles Phillips, Neate, Beggs and Frederic Hill, and articles in The Eclectic and in Jerrold’s papers. For the ‘utopian’ label see an editorial in The Times, following the Exeter Hall meeting that inaugurated the S.A.C.P., 30 April 1846, p.4: ‘Whatever holds out a promise of improving the condition of society is eagerly embraced by those well meaning philosophers who seeing a vast amount of misery attribute it to all to a defective system ... There is nothing they will not do, and better than this there is nothing they believe they cannot do’ and 5 November 1856, p.6: ‘There have been a few fine spirits in every age who believe more firmly than other men in human perfectibility, and the speedy approach of a millennium in which the lion will lie down with the lamb.’ For a refutation see Meliora 5 (1863), pp.356-357: ‘We do not believe that abolition of capital punishment is to annihilate all crime, and to introduce the Millennium forthwith.’ See also ‘Discipulus Nugentis’ – an abolitionist – for doubts that the author of ‘A Kiss for a Blow’ was presenting the proper case, ‘whatever may be the case when the Millennium shall breathe its halcyon calm upon the troubled sea of life,’ Essex Standard, 13 April 1849. See H. Dunthorne, ‘Beccaria and Britain,’ in D.W. Howell and K.O. Morgan, eds, Crime, Protest and Police in Modern British Society. Essays in Honour of David J.V. Jones (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999), pp.73-96; ‘Beccaria Anglicus,’ Letters on Capital Punishments addressed to the English Judges (London: J. Johnson, 1807); and Phillips, Vacation Thoughts, p.2, citing Beccaria approvingly and describing Romilly (p.8) as sent by Providence. The work frequently refers to Bentham and Bacon. See Neate, Considerations on the Punishment of Death, p.9, on Bentham. See also Part. Debates, 3rd series, 90, 9 March 1847, where Beccaria’s maxim on certainty of punishment is referred to by Ewart. On Bentham’s actual position on capital punishment, which was complicated, see Jeremy Bentham to his fellow citizens of France, on death punishments (London: R. Heward, 1831), which supported abolition; and, advocating restriction rather than abolition, The Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789; new edition, 2 vols; London: W. Pickering, 1823); and The Rationale of Punishment (London: R. Heward, 1830), pp.177-195. In the latter, Bentham wrote that the punishment was far from popular and becoming less every day in proportion as mankind became more enlightened, ‘and their manners more softened,’ but it remained popular for murder (p.191). Follett examines the relative significance of Bentham and utilitarianism, in ‘Evangelicalism, legal theory, and the Politics of Criminal Law Reform,’ ch.3. See R. McGowen, ‘Law and Enlightenment,’ in M. Fitzpatrick, P. Jones and C. Knellwolf, eds, The Enlightenment World (London: Routledge, 2004), pp.502-514. Review of Walter Scott’s retentionist pamphlet, in The Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle 25 (1842), pp.77-83. Phillips, Vacation Thoughts, p.25, Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.97, HC, 14 March 1848, Ewart, col.546. Ewart cites Montesquieu and Blackstone in support of this view of Roman history. Rowton, ‘Capital Punishment, no.5,’ Howitt’s Journal 2:48 (27 November 1847), pp.345348 (p.345). On Victorian treatment of the eighteenth century, see F. O’Gorman and K. Turner, Victorians and the Eighteenth Century: Reassessing the Tradition (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004); B.W. Young, The Victorian Eighteenth Century: An Intellectual History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Phillips, Vacation Thoughts, pp.1-6. C. Knight, London (6 vols; London: C. Knight, 1841–1844), vol.2, p.359.

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127 128 129 130 131 132

133 134

135 136 137

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Phillips, Vacation Thoughts, p.14. The case of Mary Jones was raised by Sir William Meredith in the Commons in 1777, and is mentioned in Dickens’ preface to Barnaby Rudge. Neate’s characterization of the period was rejected in Solicitor’s Journal and Reporter vol.1, 2 May 1857, pp.414-415 [p.415] – which gestured to Burke, Camden, Chatham and Charles James Fox, as exemplars of better feelings. Henry Christmas wrote against Paley’s Principles of Political Philosophy in six chapters of Book III of Christian Politics. An Essay on the Text of Paley. In Three Books (London: Hope, 1855). C. Neate, Considerations on the Punishment of Death (1857), p.2. H. Drummond, A Letter to Mr Bright on his plan for turning the English Monarchy into a Democracy (London: Bosworth and Harrison, 1858), p.33. Beggs, Three Lectures, p.9. Morning Advertiser, 6 April 1846, in Rowton, The Punishment of Death Reviewed, pp.98-102. Beggs, Three Lectures, p.9. Tholfsen, Working Class Radicalism in Mid-Victorian England, pp.147-149 somewhat unfairly characterizes Beggs as indulging ‘in the long-range aspiration that the social reformers found so appealing’. He does in fact emphasize, Three Lectures, p.27, the need to get directly involved in social improvement of the poor, and avoid condescension. See Tholfsen, Working Class Radicalism in Mid-Victorian England, pp.143-147, for the ‘gospel of improvement’. On Humphreys, see The Zoist 1852, p.374; The Spiritual Magazine, 1867, p.144. Not all phrenologists rejected capital punishment, although, as the abolitionist editor of Kidd’s Own Journal for Inter-communications on natural history, popular science, and things in general 5 (1854), pp.37-40, argued in editorial comments on F.J. Gall’s essay ‘Phrenology for the Million. No.51. Physiology of the Brain’, that Gall’s stance was ‘unphilosophical’ and a reaction, in its ‘suggestions of destructiveness’, to critique [p.40]. Another phrenologist who supported capital punishment was William Scott, see The Phrenological Journal 19: 34 (April 1846). J.W. Redfield, Outlines of a New System of Physiognomy (1849; London: Webbs, Millington and Co., 1856), p.115. See Phrenological Journal, October 1844, p.388. Beggs asked the painter Raymond Bussey to sketch the murderer’s profile, which appeared as a wood engraving in the journal. The Phrenological Journal and Miscellany (1846), p.382; Sheffield and Rotherham Independent 31 October 1846, p.5 reports an abolitionist lecture before the Society by John Yeomans (solicitor). The Phrenological and Psychological Annual for the Year 1846, p.178, criticized William Scott’s retentionist pamphlet, as ‘deeply imbued with toryism’. See L.E.G.E., ‘Capital punishment; or, killing according to law,’ The Zoist 7, January 1850, pp.331-351, citing Elliotson’s involvement in the case of Matthew Davies of Birmingham, when William Ewart attempted to intercede with Sir George Grey. In Zoist 13 (April 1855 to January 1856) the Reverend Chauncy Hare Townshend’s letter ‘A Visit to the Government Prison at Munich’, addressed to Elliotson, pp.419440, expressed his clear abolitionist views, even treating the execution of the worst criminal as a kind of judicial murder, and that ‘Put it to the universal vote, whether capital punishment should be abolished or not, and the result of the ballot to-day would be the abolishment of capital punishment tomorrow.’ (p.432) The letters were reprinted in the Morning Post, 27 March 1856, p.2. The Zoist 1 (March 1843 to January 1844), report of Elliotson’s talk, during the ladies’ night of the Phrenological Society of London, 21 November 1843, p.53. ‘L.E.G.E.,’ The Zoist, 1: 2 (July 1843), p.105. Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 5 March 1868, p.2. On Forbes Winslow’s views on capital punishment, see The Lancet 1 (10 March 1866). On the attitudes of ‘alienists’ towards capital punishment – where desire to save a life if there was any evidence of

318

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150 151 152

153 154 155

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VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS insanity balanced the desire to safeguard professional authority, towards capital punishment, see Smith, Trial by Medicine, pp.26-30. Neate, Considerations on the Punishment of Death, p.9: suggesting Bentham was unfortunate not to have been born in classical Greece, since he would have made Aristotle and Plato redundant. See de Giustino, The Conquest of the Mind for phrenological input into abolitionism and penal reform, and Owenite influence. See Manchester Guardian, 21 November 1856, p.3 for Gilpin’s statement: ‘He, and those who thought with him contended that the true ends of punishment were these: – Protection of society; the reformation of the offenders; and, if possible, reparation for the injured parties. On the retentionist counter-response about reformation, see, for example, anon., ‘Inquisition for Blood,’ p.13. J. Davis, ‘The London Garrotting Panic of 1862: A Moral Panic and the creation of a Criminal Class in mid-Victorian England,’ in V.A.C. Gatrell, B. Lenman and G. Parker, eds, Crime and the Law. The Social History of Crime in Western Europe since 1500 (London: Europa, 1980), pp.190-213. The panic led to a Royal Commission on Penal Servitude which reported in 1863, and flogging for robbery with violence. Rose, The Struggle for Penal Reform, ch.2. T. Beggs, The Deterrent Influence of Capital Punishment Being a Reply to the Speech of J.S. Mill Esq, MP, Delivered by Him in the House of Commons on the 21st of April, 1868 (London: Tweedie, 1868). A revised second edition appeared. See Davis, ‘The London Garrotting Panic of 1862’; coverage of capital cases in Daily News, The Times, and T. Carlyle, Latter Day Pamphlets, No. 2 ‘Model Prisons’ for the connection. For abolitionist sentiment by a former convict, see (reprinted from Temple Bar), F. Henderson, ed., Six Years in the Prisons of England. By a Merchant (London: R. Bentley, 1869). Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.191, HC, 21 April 1868, motion to amend Capital Punishment within Prisons Bill, Gilpin, col.1034, ‘He disavowed emphatically any sympathy with crime – he disavowed any maudlin sympathy with respect to this question.’ F. Hill, The Substitute for Capital Punishment (London: Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment, 1866). Manchester Guardian, 21 November 1856, p.3: Gilpin, ‘a question of great national importance – one that lay at the roots of all efforts and philanthropical endeavours after the improvement of our criminal and pauper population; for until we recognize the life of man to be a sacred thing, so long we should be ignorant as to the true principles upon which to treat crime or criminals.’ D. Garland, Punishment and Welfare. A History of Penal Strategies (Aldershot: Gower, 1985), ch.2, especially pp.43-44. Beggs, Three Lectures, p.14; anon., ‘Criminals,’ Shilling Magazine, July–December 1846, pp.122-35. See T.S. Smith, Illustrations of the Divine Government (London: Sherwood, 1822), ‘The system is worthy only of the rudest savages, barren in expedients, and pursuing their object by the shortest course.’ Beggs, Three Lectures, p.14. F. Hill, Crime, its amount, cause and remedies (London: J. Murray, 1853). The Pioneer, 31 May 1851, p.101, records a meeting attended by Dymond in which ‘teetotal abstinence was held to be a great remedy for such evils, as drunkenness was the great cause of crime’. See also Harrison, Drink and the Victorians, p.96, for Thomas Spencer’s belief every teetotaller ‘was a policeman engaged in suppressing crime’. Beggs, The Deterrent Influence of Capital Punishment being a Reply to the Speech of J.S. Mill Esq MP, Delivered by Him in the House of Commons on the 21st of April, 1868 (London: W. Tweedie, 1868, 2nd edn), a S.A.C.P. publication, p.7. Beggs, The Deterrent Influence of Capital Punishment, p.10. On the doctrine or necessary fiction of free will as applied to criminals and others in the Victorian era, see Garland, Punishment and Welfare, pp.43-44.

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Beggs, The Deterrent Influence of Capital Punishment [p.2]. For abolitionist depiction of the lottery of punishment, see Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.90, HC, 9 March 1847, col.1085, where Ewart describes the imprecise English legal definition of murder, interference by local interest and public feeling, and morbid sympathy created by the penalty alone. Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.97, 14 March 1848, Ewart at col. 541 spoke of juror antipathy to the gallows due to the connection seen between extraordinary crime and insanity, and said that the conflict between law and medicine would recur. The pithy phrase comes from J.W. Pease, Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.262, HC, 22 June 1881, col.1042. See Dymond, Law on its Trial, p.167, pp.303-304 on the problem of insanity because of capital punishment. The S.A.C.P. promoted a paper by Daniel Tuke published in the Social Science Review, in The British Friend, 2 April 1866, p.100. The Nonconformist, 6 August 1856. Beggs, The Deterrent Influence of Capital Punishment [p.2]. See The Mirror of Literature, Amusement and Instruction (1843), p.147, for a verse comment, ‘The Lay of the Last Hangman,’ by ‘Jack Ketch’, in response to the case of Daniel McNaghten. See for instance, The Times, 30 April 1846, p.4, ‘in the present state of the poor of this country, it is hardly a punishment at all. Exile has no horrors for him who starves in his native land … The state of the transported convict would seem to be one of hope, rather than of fear.’ See too, anon., Benevolence in Punishment, or, Transportation made reformatory (London: Seeley, Burnside and Seeley, 1845), which pointed to the need to get the substitute for capital punishment right, though public opinion had ‘of late years inclined towards the total abolition of capital punishment’ (p.44). ‘Exeter Hall Cant about Humanity,’ The Satirist, 3 May 1846, p.139; The Times, 30 April 1846, p.4: ‘idiotcy, madness, incurable weakness of mind and body’; and The Times, 22 April 1868, p.8, ‘It is strange to see men proposing in the name of humanity the practice of horrors against which the feeling of the whole country would certainly revolt.’ See ‘Progress of the new penitentiary system and prison discipline in America’, Monthly Magazine and British Register 53, 1 May 1822, pp.322-323 for an early comment. The Times, 13 June 1856, p.9; 22 April 1868. On work in the mines, see Shall the Murderer be Hanged? Reflections on Capital Punishment: By a Barrister of the Middle Temple (London: Hatton and Sons, 1865). The comment on this ‘curious relationship’ is made by Goldman, in Science, Reform, and Politics, p.143. The Athenaeum, 8 July 1865, p.44, for the suggestion (in reviewing Dymond’s Law on its Trial) of ‘perpetual slavery’; The Nonconformist 20 September 1865, for Tallack’s report of the suggestion of mines offered by the former medical officer of Winchester county gaol. Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.112, HC, 11 July 1850, col. 1273 for Bright’s reference to the Danish alternative of annual whipping. Samuel Roberts had advocated imprisonment in individual cells, with sound tubes leading to a chapel in a circular chapel around which the cells were built, so the chaplain could address them at any time. Any murderer who tried to escape would be liable for amputation, see S. Roberts, The Sacredness of Human Life (1841), p.19. Phillips, Vacation thoughts on capital punishment, p.125. Neate, Considerations on the Punishment of Death, p.27. Neate to Sir Walter Crofton (who had been chairman of the directors of convict prisons in Ireland), 30 September 1866, letter published in ‘Summary of Proceedings’ of Jurisprudence Department, Manchester, 1866, Transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science (London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1867). The Nonconformist, 21 November 1860, p.931. See Radzinowicz and Hood, Emergence of Penal Policy, p.253, on the shift away from ‘reformation’ and moral improvement.

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VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.112, HC, 11 July 1850, col.1273; ‘The Prerogative of Pardon and the Punishment of Death,’ Westminster Review, April 1864, pp.185-195; Meliora 7 (1865), report on Social Science Congress Jurisprudence Department. See R. McGowen, ‘History, Culture and the Death Penalty. The British Debates, 1840– 70,’ Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques 29: 2 (2003) pp.229-249. S. Amos, Capital punishment in England, p.11. W.A. Mackinnon, History of Civilisation (London: Longman, 1846), reviewed in Mirror of Literature 2:2, 1 September 1846, pp.106-108 [p.108]. See W.H. Lecky, History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism (2 vols, London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts and Green, 1865), vol.1, p.383, on the slow but steady advance towards abolition’s inevitable triumph – though Lecky stressed the role not just of rationalists such as Beccaria and Bentham, but also Evangelicalism. See also the Reverend W.L. Clay’s retentionist interpretation of the impact of rationalism, and utilitarianism, in ‘On Capital and Secondary Punishments’, Proceedings of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Liverpool 23, pp.147-165. See W. Adam, An inquiry into the theories of history with special reference to the principles of the positive philosophy (London: W. Allen, 1862), citing, p.35, Philosophie positive vol.4, pp.122124; R. Congreve, transl., Catechism of Positive Religion (London: J. Chapman, 1858), p.298. See A. Wernick, Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity: the post-theistic program of French social theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p.163. See M.J. Wiener, Men of Blood, p.59, on the civilizing mission of the law, and pp.27-29 for the shifting attitudes towards interpersonal violence. ‘Duelling,’ The Cork Magazine, 1846, pp.105-115. Abolition of capital punishment for duelling was recommended by the Second Report of His Majesty’s Commissioners on Criminal Law, Parl. Papers 1836 (343), vol.36. See, for instance, E. Bulwer, The Student. A Series of Papers (London: Saunders and Otley, 1840), p.223. W.B. Sarfield Taylor acted as the abolitionist society’s honorary secretary from c.1835, see addresses in provincial papers such as the Leeds Mercury and Newcastle Courant. Daily News, 21 August 1846. Offices 2, Hanover Chambers Buckingham Street, Adelphi; and article on the inaugural meeting, Morning Chronicle, 20 August 1846. Charles Gilpin published a handbill against military flogging too, as part of the antimilitia agitation by the Peace Society: its distributors were threatened with prosecution by the government, see Nicholls, ‘The Manchester Peace Congress of 1853,’ p.16. There were meetings in Braintree, Essex; the New Hall, Hounslow, Hammersmith, and Reading. See Wiener, Men of Blood, p.65. J.J. Haus, La peine de mort: son passé, son présent, son avenir (Gand: H. Hoste, 1867) linked the two causes in England, writing, p.105, footnote 5, of ‘tous les vertueux gentlemen qui s’agitent au sein et en dehors du parlement, pour sauver de la potence les assassins qu’on y attache, ne tardent point, nous en avons la conviction, à élèver aussi la voixen faveur des pauvres soldats qui, en Angleterre, dans la second moitié du dix-neuvième siècle, sont encore fouettés et marqués au feu rouges comme des nègres.’ See ‘The Cat and the Cord,’ United Services Magazine 254 (January 1850), p.17. Chloroform had been discussed in American Whig Review in this context in 1848, and was discussed twenty years later, e.g., by New York Roundtable in 1869. Another innovatory technique suggested was electrocution, see C.N. Ellis, ‘Death by Electricity,’ Chemical News and Journal of Industrial Sciences, 1 May 1868, pp.216-217. The late nineteenth-century umbrella organization, the Humanitarian League, opposed flogging and supported abolition of capital punishment, see H.B. Bonner, The Gallows and the Lash: an enquiry into the necessity for capital and corporal punishments (London: W. Reeves, 1897). This also appeared as an essay in vol. 3 of the ‘Cruelties of Civilization’ series. The Reverend Samuel Haughton, for instance, communicated an essay replete with equations, ‘On Hanging, considered from a Mechanical and Physiological point of

NOTES

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190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197

198

199 200 201 202

203 204 205 206 207

208 209 210 211 212

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view,’ to The London, Edinburgh and Dublin Physiological Magazine and Journal of Sciences 32, 4th series (July-December 1866), pp.23-34; and reprinted separately. It did express concern about the clumsiness and pain involved. ‘Euthanasia according to the law,’ Punch XLI, 31 August 1861, p.89. See B. Hall, Patchwork. Sketches of travel in France, Italy and Switzerland (3 vols; London: Edward Moxon, 1841), vol. 2, ch.5, ‘The Gallows and the Guillotine,’ pp.61-96, and the review reprinted in The St Petersburg English Review (St Petersburg, 1842), pp.428-435. The Penny Satirist, 3 June 1837, p.1: I am unable to identify this author or work. Studies in Biology. Comprising the agonies of hanging. By one who was cut down from the gallows (London and Glasgow: Ridgway, 1868). The Times, 23 February 1864, p.7, in an editorial on the execution of the five Flowery Land pirates at Newgate. Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 26 August 1849, and accounts in provincial newspapers, 22-31 August 1849. F. Rowton, The Punishment of Death Reviewed, ch.1. The Almanack of the Month (London: Punch office) 1 (January to June 1846), p.108. Eclectic Review 27 (1850), article 6 [a rejoinder to Houston’s Criticism Criticized: A Letter to the author of Two Articles in the Eclectic Review of April and August 1848], p.224. F. Rowton, ‘Capital Punishment, no.1’ Howitt’s Journal 2 (2 October 1847), p.218. For a similar view of the democratic basis of ‘the civil corporation named government’ in the context of capital punishment abolition, see National Reformer (Douglas, Isle of Man) 10 October 1846, pp12-13. Beggs, Facts and Reflections on Crime, Criminals, and Jurisprudence (London: C. Gilpin, 1851), p.22, concluding sentence: ‘It is in vain to censure the government or the law – the work to be done awaits the public will.’ See Harrison, Drink and Victorians for an endorsement by some temperance writers of the State’s potentially beneficial role. For recent work on Victorian attitudes to the State, see essays in P. Mandler ed., Liberty and Authority in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), including M. Finn, ‘The Authority of the Law.’ Neate, Considerations on the Punishment of Death, pp.10-11. The Times, 22 January 1856, quoting from Manchester Examiner and Times. See Gatrell, The Hanging Tree, pp.94-99, for instance. On who shared the blame for the institution, see The Friend, 1 December 1864, p.289, referring to the execution of Franz Müller: ‘All shelter themselves, no doubt, behind the law, but the law did not make itself, nor does it execute its own provisions.’ See also Dymond, Law on its Trial, p.236, for the fault of those prejudiced against change or reform who bring the law into disrepute. Neate, Considerations on the Punishment of Death, p.44. Neate, Considerations on the Punishment of Death, p.9. Neate himself had been brought up in France. Neate, Considerations on the Punishment of Death, p.46. Beggs, The Deterrent Influence of Capital Punishment, p.9. University of London. The Calendar for the Year 1867 (London: Taylor and Francis, 1867), p.cli and p. cxlviii. Other examinations featured capital punishment, thus the Madras University Calendar (Madras: Caleb Foster, 1867) had a text, p.xc, discussing capital punishment in the context of the case of the murderer Baker, convicted in Madras, for translation into Hindustani in an examination in 1866. Radzinowicz, History of English Criminal Law, vol.4, p.334. The Times, 30 April 1846, p.4. The Manchester Guardian, 22 November 1856. ‘Capital and Prison Punishments,’ The Law Magazine 4:7 (1846), pp.223-250 [p.224]; Sir George Grey, Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.142, HC, 10 June 1856, col.1251. ‘Crimes and Criminals. 2,’ The Law Magazine 11, n.s. (1849), p.2.

322 213

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217 218 219 220

VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS For orthodox views on free will, see M.J. Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal. Culture, law and policy in England, 1830–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), ch.2 ‘Victorian Criminal Policy, I: reforming the law’ which discusses the addition of new ‘character-building’ meanings to terms such as ‘intent’ and the ‘reasonable man’ and the downplaying of external circumstances through the central myth of the responsible individual which was felt to be a necessary fiction for the creation of individuals capable of self-regulation. See also Garland, Punishment and welfare, pp.41-44 which presents the notion of the free-willed individual as the ‘dominant ideology’ of the 1850s–1880s; in classical economics, utilitarian philosophy and Evangelical religion. Garland stresses that the ‘free subject’ was above all expressed in the criminal law and was a paradox since most applied to criminals and paupers. Note especially the comment at p.44, that ‘there was a certain belief in their status as necessary fictions. They were prudential axioms of bourgeois social organization, necessary for disciplinary rigour, rather than credible truths about human nature and social conditions.’ See also Chadwick, Bureaucratic Mercy, ch.1 for a discussion of utilitarian attempts to reform the criminal law from the 1830s which involved rejecting the idea of moral guilt and intention for a focus on consequence. Note his comment, p.24 that ‘It seems that the underlying presumptions of equality inherent in the concepts of autonomous conscience and reason shared by both evangelicals and positivists served to deflect attention from practical questions of access to the law.’ See for instance in Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper, 2 January 1847, ridiculing ‘Phinehas’ in Morning Post, ‘Let Lord NUGENT, Joseph STURGE, Charles GILPIN, and other such proved deists and infidels destroy the condemned cells of Newgate, and is it likely they will stop there? Will they not, flushed with conquest, march to Buckingham Palace ...’ See also the anonymous ‘Inquisition for Blood’; or the Eternal obligation on States and Governments to inflict the Punishment of Death for Wilful Murder. Respectfully addressed to her Majesty’s prime minister and to all whom it may concern (1847): ‘the attempt to reverse that decree can be supported only on Infidel and Rationalist principles ... it bears unanswerable evidence that the Rationalism of Germany is now insensibly developing itself among us’. Such comments were probably less used in the next decade but see Neate, Considerations on the Punishment of Death, p.29 on Biblicalbased abolitionism: ‘the hasty conclusions of confident ignorance ... that class of critics who, if they were not overborne by the common consent of the learned in all countries, would insist upon understanding the account of the creation, in the first chapter of Genesis, as it is still interpreted by parish clerks.’ Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, 13 July 1850, p.27, which agreed with Carlyle in condemning the sentimental treatment of prisoners, but which drew back from his severity in turning to the gallows to deal with ‘recreant paupers’. T. Carlyle, Foreign Quarterly Review 31:62 (July 1843), pp.544-589 [pp.584-585], reviewing various works on Francia, including ‘Funeral Discourse delivered on occasion of celebrating the obsequies of his late Excellency the Perpetual Dictator of the Republic of Paraguay the Citizen Dr June Gasper Francia by Citizen the Rev Manuel Antonia Perez of the Church of the Incarnation on the 20th of October 1840 in the British Packet and Argentine News No.813 Buenos Ayres March 19 1842’. T. Carlyle, Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches with Elucidations (4 vols; London: Chapman and Hall, 1845), vol.2, pp.51-52. ‘‘Carlyle in Ireland, 3. Reminiscences of my journey,’ Century Magazine (New York) 24: 3 (July 1882), pp.426-441[p.438]. See the Selection from Charles Gilpin’s Catalogue of Newly Published Works, Interesting to Friends contained in works published by Gilpin, c.1844. M.K. Goldberg and J.P. Siegel, eds, Thomas Carlyle’s Latter Day Pamphlets (Ottawa: Canadian Federation for the Humanities, 1983), reprinting the first edition of the pamphlets. The comment on revenge appears on p.99; on the execution of the murderer, the ‘Supreme Scoundrel’ as didactic, p.105. on the tide of sentimentality,

NOTES

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p.83, and Hesperus Fiddlestring,’ p.93; on the true purpose of the punishment, p.97. For discussion of the controversy generated by the work, especially pamphlet No. 2, see Goldberg and Siegel’s comments at L-LXI. See also Goldberg, ‘A Universal “howl of execration”: Carlyle’s Latter-Day Pamphlets and their Critical Reception,’ ch.9 in J. Clubbe, ed., Carlyle and his Contemporaries: Essays in Honour of Charles Richard Sanders (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1976). On Carlyle’s childhood fascination with the gallows see F. Kaplan, Thomas Carlyle. A Biography (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1983), pp.30-31. See [W.A. Guy], ‘Thomas Carlyle and John Howard,’ Fraser’s Magazine 41 (April 1850), pp.406-410. York Herald, 13 April 1850, p.3. P.P. Alexander, Mill and Carlyle. An Examination of Mr John Stuart Mill’s Doctrine of Causation in Relation to Moral Freedom (Edinburgh: W.P. Nimmo, 1866), p.172. British Controversialist (1864), p.311. On masculinity and violent punishment, see Wood, Violence and crime in NineteenthCentury England, p.45. On Mill’s position, which represented a shift away from abolitionism, see M. Clark, ‘Notes and Discussions. Mill on Capital Punishment – Retributive Overtones?’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 42: 3 (2004), pp.327-332: he stressed the more humane nature of a capital punishment compared with penal servitude for life, and the similarity between the punishment and the crime which, as it rendered the punishment more impressive for the public, enhanced it as deterrent. In relation to Ireland, see A. Hawkins, ‘Review of Kinzer, England’s Disgrace? J.S. Mill and the Irish Question,’ English Historical Review 118 (February 2003), pp.156-157. See Tallack, Howard Letters and Memories, pp.151-152 for efforts to ascertain Mill’s opinion (along with Henry Fawcett). The philosopher’s father, James Mill, had published articles engaging with the subject of capital punishment and commented on the more merciful Muslim code in India, in The History of British India (8 vols; 5th edition, London: Madden, 1858), vol.2, p.357. Saturday Review, 15 November 1856, pp.635-637. The words are reported slightly differently in Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.191, 21 April 1868, col.1051. The placard, by Captain Hans Busk, spoke of the ‘would-be demagogue gibbeted and swinging in the winds of the fool’s paradise’, was issued at the Berwick election, see ‘Sensitiveness’, Saturday Review 27: 688, 2 January 1869, pp.11-12. See N. Clarke, ‘Strenuous Idleness,’ ch.2 in M. Roper and J. Tosh, eds, Manful Assertions. Masculinities in Britain since 1800 (London: Routledge, 1991), for Carlyle’s construction of a ‘literary heroism’. On Dickens and capital punishment see Collins, Dickens and Crime. Among contemporary abolitionist responses to Dickens, see John Pym, Mr Dickens’s Mysterious Gallows (from Standard of Freedom). On Stephen see K.J.M. Smith, James Fitzjames Stephen. Portrait of a Victorian Rationalist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p.58 on the Royal Commission and his view that there was ‘as much moral cowardice in shrinking from the execution of a murder as in hesitating to blow out the brains of a foreign invader’. Smith discusses Stephen’s violent aversion to Dickens as sentimentalist and as ‘world betterer’, Stephen’s antipathy to democratic radicalism and his pessimism. Stephen saw Dickens as representative of the shallow, placid optimism of the lower middle-class. It is also important to recognize Stephen’s rejection (p.243) of a Christianity based on the Sermon on the Mount. On Ruskin, see R. Casillo, ‘Parasitism and Capital Punishment in Fors Clavigera,’ Victorian Studies 29: 4 (summer 1986), pp.527-567; references to ‘your modern Charles Dickens manner of Christian’ opposed to abolition and the cowardice of abolition, in several letters in Fors Clavigera (Letters 42 and 82); and the reply to the abolitionist poet W.C. Bennett in 1855, printed in E.T. Cook and A. Wedderburn, eds, Letters of John Ruskin vol.1 1827–1869 (London: G. Allen, 1909), pp.217-218. On Macaulay, see his reply to George Combe, sending him abolitionist papers (presumably his

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238 239

240 241

242 243

244 245 246

VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS Scotsman letters, July 1846), in T. Pinney, ed., The Letters of Thomas Babington Macaulay vol.4, September 1841–December 1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp.303-304; and note his ambivalent feelings towards execution when considering the Indian Mutiny: ‘the habit of hanging murderers is found to injure the character,’ cited in Sir W. Moberly, The Ethics of Punishment (London: Faber, 1968), p.288. Fraser’s Magazine 71 (February 1865), pp.154-166 (p.156). Young England, 29 March 1845, p.200. Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine, ‘The Hedghog Letters’: 29, ‘To Lord Nugent,’ pp.556562 [p.556]. Punch, 1 August 1846, p.50. ‘The Philosopher and the Hangman,’ Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper, 26 April 1868; Beggs, The Deterrent Influence of Capital Punishment, p.16. J.A. Froude, Thomas Carlyle: A History of the First Forty Years of his Life, 1795–1835 (2 vols; London: Longmans, Green and Co, 1882), vol.2, p.2. T. Carlyle, ‘Model Prisons,’ p.12: the ‘eternal lode-stars are gone out for us’. Although Sir Edward Sullivan’s Ten Chapters on Social Reform (London: E. Stanford, 1868), having a Carlylean tone, was opposed to capital punishment, see Contemporary Review, vol.8, May-August 1868, p.158. D.D. Cooper, ‘Capital Punishment within Prisons Bill,’ p.74. See Holyoake’s letters in the Dymond-edited Morning Star, serialized as ‘Public Lessons of the Hangman’ in November 1864, and subsequently published separately (‘fifty thousand,’ 1864). Holyoake, Sixty Years of an Agitator’s Life (2 vols; London: T.F. Unwin, 1909), vol.2, p.115, exaggerates their impact. See, for instance, ‘Tangled Talk,’ Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine 24, December 1857, p.741, for William Brighty Rands’ shift away from total abolition. See G. Storey, ‘Dickens in his Letters: the Regression of the Radical,’ in J. Shattock, ed., Dickens and other Victorians. Essays in Honour of Philip Collins (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1988), pp.65-74; J. Tambling, Dickens, Violence, and the Modern State. Dreams of the Scaffold (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1995). It would take an essay, perhaps, to examine all the significant references to hangmen and gallows in Dickens’s work. The aristocratic character of the debilitated cousin of Sir Leicester Dedlock, in Dickens’ Bleak House (March 1852-September 1853), is eager to see a man hanged as a ‘zample – Thinks more interest’s wanted – get man hanged presentime – than get man place ten thousand a year. Hasn’t a doubt – zample – far better hang wrong fler than no fler’. C. Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p.45. See B. Jerrold, The Life and Remains of Douglas Jerrold (London: W. Kent, 1859), in which Dickens’s letter to Jerrold, 17 November 1849, refers to a letter received from ‘G. this morning’ – undoubtedly Gilpin, in which he quoted a recent letter of Jerrold deprecating the ‘mystery’ of private hanging. Dickens’ reply to Jerrold, printed at p.285, argued that the whole trend in penology had been ‘productive of mystery’ and that this was good. Of ‘secrecy’, Dickens wrote ‘I wish I could induce you to feel justified in leaving that word to the platform people.’ R. Garnett, E. Garnett, The Life of W.J. Fox. Public Teacher and Social Reformer, 1786–1864 (London: Bodley Head, 1910), p.283. Collins, Dickens and crime, p.1. At the time that executions were privatized, Dickens accepted for publication a short account of Calcraft’s hanging of a senile man, ‘Now!’ All the Year Round 20:486, (15 August 1868), pp.223-225. It is difficult to decide whether this was designed to undermine the penalty of death or endorse privatization since the spectacle of the old man, constantly asking Calcraft whether he was about to be hanged, did not evoke the majesty or terror of the law. It is interesting in purporting to present an intimate impression of the hanging, with a description of Calcraft ‘mild gentle faced man – short, rather stout, with plentiful grey hair’ and his rope of ‘very best hemp’.

NOTES 247 248 249 250

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Collins, Dickens and crime, pp.238-239: quoting a letter from Dickens to his Swiss friend Monsieur de Cerjat. E.T. Cook and Wedderburn, eds, The Works of John Ruskin (London: G. Allen, 1907), vol.27, p.667. E.T. Cook and Wedderburn, eds, The Works of John Ruskin (London: G. Allen, 1909), vol.36, p.217. [J. Fitzjames Stephen], ‘Capital Punishments,’ Fraser’s Magazine 69, June 1864, p.762; The Works of John Ruskin (London: G. Allen, 1905) vols 17-18, p.81 (from Fors Clavigera, 1874). For a further context for Stephen’s position, see introductory essay, ‘Victorian Hatred: A Social Evil and a Social Good,’ in C. Lane, Hatred and Civility. The Anti-social Life in Victorian England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). His anonymous essays in Saturday Review are credited by Radzinowicz with dominating the public mind on the death penalty, see History of English Criminal Law, vol.4, p.338. The Works of John Ruskin, vol.17, p.542. The Times, 14 February 1866, p.9. See Gatrell, The Hanging Tree, and R. McGowen, ‘Civilizing Punishment: the End of the Public Execution in England,’ pp.257-282. R. McGowen, ‘History, Culture and the Death Penalty,’ p.240.

Chapter 8. Capital Sentences 1 2

3 4

5

6

‘The Last Old Bailey Trial,’ Morning Star, 30 May 1856, p.4. McLeod, ‘God and the Gallows: Christianity and Capital Punishment in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,’ in K. Cooper and J. Gregory, eds, Retribution, Repentance and Reconciliation (Rochester, New York: Boydell and Brewer, 2004), pp.330-356 [p.338]. J.C. Barton, ‘Literary Executions… Plotting death sentences in U.S. Law and Literature, 1830–1925,’ University of California Ph.D., 2005, p.19. L. Poulosky, Severed Heads and Martyred Souls: Crime and Capital Punishment in French Romantic Literature (New York: Peter Lang, 2003) examines the response of Romantic writers in early nineteenth-century France – writing in the shadow of the revolutionary guillotine – but also depicting the condemned and executions in order to portray scenes of melodrama, anguish and gore. For suggestive comments as to why this theme died away after 1848 in France, see p.196. See also L.P. Guyan, Les Martyrs de la veuve: romantisme et peine de mort (Oxford, New York: Peter Lang, 2010), p.68, which notes the role of English romanticism on French writers on capital punishment, and stresses the impact the French revolutionary guillotine had on English culture (p.70). For American literary responses, see J.C. Barton, ‘Literary Executions,’ which also studies lynching; and J.C. Barton, ‘William Gilmore Simms and the Literary Aesthetics of Crime and Capital Punishment,’ Law & Literature 22: 2 (2010), pp.222-243. O. Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766; 3rd edn., London: Newbery, 1766), p.122. See the reaction of the juvenile Fanny Burney in M. Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (1996; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p.2. Another abolitionist work was the radical Thomas Holcroft’s Memoirs of Bryan Perdue (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1805). In 1794 Holcroft had been indicted for high treason. See M. Canuel, The Shadow of Death. Literature, Romanticism and the Subject of Punishment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); and the special issue, ‘Romanticism and the Law,’ European Romantic Review 18:3 (July 2007). The perspective of William Wordsworth has already been mentioned; Robert Southey moved away from abolitionism which had prevented him from taking up legal training, see W.A. Speck, Robert Southey: Entire Man of Letters (New Haven, Connecticut, London: Yale University Press, 2006), p.68, and R. Southey, Sir Thomas More; or Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society (2 vols; London: J. Murray, 1829) vol.1, p.109, in which ‘Montesinos’

326

7

8

9

10

11

12 13

VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS utters pro-capital punishment sentiments (against humanity-mongers). Thomas De Quincey’s interest in murder is clear, see his ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,’ Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (1827); D. Groves, ‘De Quincey’s “Daughter of Lebanon” and the Execution of Mary McKinnnon,’ Wordsworth Circle 19:2 (Spring 1988), pp.105-107. See L.F. Cazamian, The Social Novel in England. 1830–1850 (1973; London: Routledge, 2009), p.49; M. Sadlier, Bulwer and His Wife – A Panorama 1803–1836 (1931; London: Constable, 1933), pp.224-234, H. Worthington, ‘Against the Law: Bulwer’s Fictions of Crime,’ in A.C. Christensen, ed., The Subverting Vision of Bulwer Lytton: Bicentenary Reflections (Cranbury, New Jersey: Associated University Presses, 2004), pp.54-67; and J.H. Grossman, ‘In the Courtroom of Bulwer’s Novels: Narrative Perspective and Crime Fiction,’ in the same volume, pp.68-77, which notes that the Newgate novels Bulwer was associated with were not much associated with imprisonment or capital punishment [p.68]. Bulwer Lytton’s Alice or the Mysteries also referred to the punishment of death: ‘It is time that we should do away with the punishment of death for inadequate offences, even in books; it is time that we should allow the morality of atonement.’ This raises the question of authorial clemency: for did not authors create, in executing novels, people whose criminality they then punished or dealt with mercifully? As noted in an early life, [H.T. Taverner], Charles Dickens, the Story of his Life (London: J.C. Hotten, 1871). See S. Ledger, ‘Dickens and nineteenth-century show trials,’ in S. Ledger, Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). See E.F. Judge, ‘Law and the Victorian Novel,’ in W. Baker and K. Womack, eds, A Companion to the Victorian Novel (London: Greenwood Press, 2002), pp.123-135; J.R. Reed, ‘Laws, the Legal World and Politics’ in P. Brantlinger and W.B. Thesing, eds, A Companion to the Victorian Novel (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002); L. Rodensky, The Crime in Mind. Criminal Responsibility and the Victorian Novel (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); S. Grass, The Self in the Cell: Narrating the Victorian Prisoner (London, New York: Routledge, 2003); J. Sturrock, ‘Murder, Gender, and Popular Fictions by Women in the 1860s,’ ch.5 in A. Maunder and G. Moore, eds, Victorian Crime, Madness and Sensation. Braddon, Oliphant and Yonge (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). The ‘Law and Literature’ movement studies the role of narrative and story in legal and fictional texts, see M. Finn, ‘Victorian Law, Literature and History: Three Ships Passing in the Night,’ Journal of Victorian Culture 7:1 (2002), pp.134-146, and, as examples, A. Welsh, Strong Representations. Narrative and Circumstantial Evidence in England (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), J.H. Grossman, The Art of Alibi. English Law Courts and the Novel (Baltimore, Maryland, London: Johns Hopkins Press, 2002). See also A.E. Simpson, ed., Witnesses to the Scaffold. English Literary Figures as Observers of Public Executions (Lambertville, New Jersey: True Bill, 2008). See D.A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1988), pp.25-26; D. Porter, The Pursuit of Crime: Art and Ideology in Detective Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), p.84, both cited in Mukherjee, Crime and Empire, pp.83-85. Davis, Homicide in American Fictions includes an essay on the literary representation of the death penalty. The advantage of digitization when compared with the quirky information contained in Myron Franklin Brightfield’s Victorian England in its Novels, 1840–1870 (4 vols; Los Angeles: University of California Library, 1968) is obvious. Braddon’s Birds of Prey: a novel (London: Ward Lock, 1867) featured a murderous physician, perhaps based on Palmer, or Smethurst, or Prichard. ‘The effect of the death penalty on the imagination is beyond controversy,’ The Times, 23 June 1881, p.9. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1st edn, 1759) emphasized the role of the imagination in allowing people to conceive the sensations of ‘our brother …on the rack’.

NOTES 14 15 16 17 18

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Capital Punishment: is it defensible, by Philander (London: James Nisbet, 1865), pp.206-207. John Bull, 17 November 1849, p.725. C. Knight, London (London: C. Knight, 1841), p.367. British Controversialist, 1868, ‘Are Sensational Novels Superior to Novels with a Purpose?’ p.440. ‘Sentimentalism,’ Cornhill Magazine 10, July 1864, pp.65-75 [p.75]. The American genre of ‘execution novel’ is studied in D. Guest, Sentenced to Death: The American Novel and Capital Punishment (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 1997), and includes Theodore Dreiser’s novel, McTeague. An American Tragedy (1899), but not earlier works. ‘Gabriel Goodfellow,’ The Book of Liberals. A Book for Liberals and Anti-Liberals being a Looking-Glass for the Former and an Eye-Glass (or Spy-Glass) for the Latter (London: J. Davidson, 1849), pp.241-242. E.B.L. Bulwer, My Novel, or Varieties in English Life (4 vols; Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1853), vol.2, ch.17, p.161; on Lucretia; or, the Children of Night (London: Saunders and Otley, 1846), see favourable review of his ‘moral purpose’, The New Monthly Magazine and Humorist, 79: 313, January 1847, pp.124-131, and Burney, Poison, detection, and the Victorian imagination, p.55. [H. Thomson] ‘Le Revenant,’ Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 21: 124, April 1827, pp.409-416. See T.N. Talfourd, Letters of Charles Lamb, with some account of the writer, his friends and correspondents, with explanatory notes (London: G. Bell, 1886). Lamb published ‘On the inconveniences resulting from being hanged’ in The Reflector, 1818, reprinted in E.V. Lucas, ed., The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb – Miscellaneous Prose, 1798–1834 (7 vols, London: Methuen, 1903), vol.1, pp.56-63. On Blackwood’s ‘terror fiction’, see R. Morrison and C. Baldick, ‘Introduction,’ John Polidori: The Vampyre and other Tales of the Macabre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp.xvi-xvii. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 26: 156 (August 1829), pp.208-209 [p.209]; Foreign Quarterly Review 4 (April and August 1829), pp.233-234; Westminster Review 11, July 1829, p.164. See V. Brombert, Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel (Cambridge, Massachusetts, London: Harvard University Press, 1986), ch.2; and Hooker, The Fortunes of Victor Hugo in England, pp.91-92. Quarterly Review 56: 111 (April 1836), pp.77-79; The Edinburgh Review, July 1833, pp.348349. ‘The Songs of France,’ Fraser’s Magazine, December 1834, p.672. There do not seem to be any imitators of Victor Hugo’s plot in English. Charles Whitehead’s ‘Confession of James Wilson’, in The Autobiography of Jack Ketch (London: E. Churton, 1835), was said to be its superior, and won praise from a reviewer as ‘inferior to none of the tales of murder and remorse in Blackwood or any other periodical’ (Leeds Mercury, 19 December 1834). Metropolitan Magazine 28 (May to August 1840), p.46. London Magazine, June 1840, p.415. For other early reviews, see Monthly Review 2: 2, June 1840, pp.252-265; Foreign Quarterly Review 50 (1840), pp.394-406. For additional critical reception of this work, see Reverend Francis Chenevix Trench, Diary of Travels in France and Spain, Chiefly in the Year 1844 (2 vols; London: R. Bentley, 1845), vol.1, pp.203-204; and S. Smiles, ‘Poets of the People. V. Victor Hugo’ People’s and Howitt’s Journal 3: 76 (10 June 1848), pp.368-371 [pp.368-369]. Andrew King, ‘Reynolds’s Miscellany, 1846–1849: advertising networks and politics,’ in A. Humpherys and L. James, eds, G.W.M. Reynolds: Nineteenth Century Fiction, Politics, and the Press (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp.53-74 [p.61], states that the work was first published in 1837, and that it then appeared as an edition in 1840 with a substantial preface – but the 1840 work has no preface by Reynolds and I can find no earlier edition. The version serialized in Reynolds’s Miscellany featured illustrations, 11 December 1847–15 January 1848. Cleave’s Penny Gazette of Variety and Amusement, 18 July 1840, p.4. The Last Day of a Condemned. Translated (Without abridgment) from the French of Victor Hugo by George W.M. Reynolds (London: George Henderson, 1840), p.xxvii. On Medhurst, see

328

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33 34 35 36 37 38

39

40 41 42 43

44

45 46

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VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS John Bull, 24 March 1839 and Speeches of Lord Campbell at the Bar, and in the House of Commons; with an address to the Irish Bar as Lord Chancellor of Ireland (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1842), p.32. D. Pyrke, transl., Claude Gueux. The Last Days of Condemned Man (London : Robert Hardwicke, 1865), ‘The Translator to the Reader.’ See Victor Hugo. Oeuvres Complètes (18 vols; Paris: le Club français du livre, 1969) vol.12, p.1488, p.1490. This, a translation of a work by James Rousseau from Le Livre des Cent et Un, appeared in The Athenaeum 242 (16 June 1832), and was reprinted elsewhere, including The Day. A Journal of Literature, Fine Arts, Fashions, &c (Glasgow) 1832, pp.59-60; Tales and Readings for the People (London: G. Vickers, 1849) 1, p.38. British observers credited it with having influence in France, see for instance, Solicitor’s Journal and Reporter, 5 February 1870, p.304, ‘Many a French murderer has owed his life to the fact of a tender-hearted juryman having read MV. Hugo’s “Dernier Jour d’un Condamne”...’ ‘Le dernier Jour d’un Condamné,’ in Poems, second series (London : W. Crofts, 1834), pp.47-54. M. Gardiner, The Idler in France. A Sequel to the Idler in Italy (London: Henry Colburn, 1842), pp.53-54. C.G.F. Gore, The Story of a Royal Favourite (3 vols; London: H. Colburn, 1845), vol.2, p.195. Smiles, ‘Poets of the People. V. Victor Hugo,’ p.369. ‘Historic Memorials of Ancient Paris,’ Retrospective Review 2:7 (May 1854), pp.209-228 [p.225]. [J.F. Stephen] Essays. By a Barrister (Reprinted from the Saturday Review) (London: Smith, Elder, 1862), p.315; C.J. Lever, A Day’s Ride: A Life’s Romance (London: Chapman and Hall, 1864), p.194, previously serialized in All the Year Round. Tambling, Dickens, Violence, and the Modern State, p.148; [William Gilbert] ‘The Dreadful Four Minutes,’ Good Words 7 (1 January 1866), pp.33-38, reprinted as ‘A Question of Minutes’, Every Saturday, 27 January 1866, pp.95-100. See Maitland Mercury, 12 May 1847, p.3, for Lipscomb; Nelson Examiner (Middle Island) 24 May 1864, 9 October 1866. The Athenaeum, 8 July 1865, criticized Dymond’s strategy of appealing, in Law on its Trial, via ‘pathetic stories’ instead of ‘cold calculation’. C. Woodring,Victorian Samplers. William and Mary Howitt (Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 1952), p.100, p.163. D.M.M. Craik, A Life for a Life (2 vols, Leipzig: Bernard Tauschnitz, 1859), vol.1, pp.284-285. In Craik’s The Little Lame Prince and His Travelling Cloak (London: Daldy, Isbister, 1875) ‘Nomansland’ had no punishment of death, simply perpetual imprisonment in Hopeless Tower and the plain around it, p.161. See S. Mitchell, Dinah Mulock Craik (New York: Twayne, 1983), pp.56-58. [R. Armitage] Ernest Singleton (3 vols, London: R. Bentley, 1848) vol.3, pp.110-114; The Penscellwood Papers: comprising essays on the soul and future life of animals; on capital punishments; on the Evangelical Alliance; on the endowment of the Protestant and Roman Catholic Churches of Ireland; and on the education of the people ( 2 vols; London: R. Bentley, 1846). W. Platt, Yorke House (London: T. Cautley Newby, 1862), vol.1, pp.48, 65, 253-254. E.C. Wood, Sabrina (London: Chapman and Hall, 1868), 3 vols, vol.3. Another novel of the period involving a clergyman responding to capital punishment was the lawyer and anthropologist James McGrigor Allan’s Father Stirling (London: T. Cautley Newby, 1864), in which, in book 2, ch.3, the priest Clement Stirling intercedes with the Home Secretary for a felon at Newgate. J. Hutchings, The Bramble Hut: A Biographical Narrative of Prudence Smith (London: T. Cautley Newby, 1868), vol.1, pp.iv-v, and review in Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, 1 February 1869, p.102.

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58 59 60 61

62 63 64 65

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S. Warren, Now and Then – through a glass, darkly (1847; Edinburgh and London: W. Blackwood, 1848); F. Rowton, ‘Capital Punishment, no. 10,’ Howitt’s Journal 3:63 (11 March 1848), p.172; The Legal Observer 35: 1034 (1 January 1848), p.206. The Times, 27 December 1847, p.6. The work was reviewed elsewhere, for instance John Bull, 18 December, p.809, and 20 December 1847, p.809. ‘Pegsworth. A Press room Sketch,’ Blackwood’s Magazine (April 1837), reprinted in S. Warren, Miscellanies, critical, imaginative, and juridical (2 vols; London: Blackwood, 1855), vol.1, pp.453-466. The case was one of the subjects for the ‘running patterer’, in H. Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (London: C. Griffin, Bohn, 1864), vol.1, p.237; and also figured in such journalism as The Terrific Record and Chronicle of Remarkable and Interesting Events 1: 33 (1849), pp.515-519. ‘Jane Eccles,’ ‘Confessions of an Attorney’ in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal 15: 373 n.s., 22 February 1851, pp.118-122. See P.C. Jones, ‘“I put my fingers around my throat and squeezed it”…’ ; R.L. Boyle, Mrs E.D.E.N. Southworth, Novelist (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1939). Southworth’s ‘The Gipsy Prophecy’ included the abolitionist character of Constance Wynne, and was serialized in London Journal, see 22: 558, 25 August 1894, p.151; Eudora was serialized in 1892, see London Journal 18: 471, December 1892, ch.23. See John Sutherland’s notes, Armadale (London: Penguin, 1995). An amusing story, R.L.Gentles, ‘Mr Walker’s narrative. A Strange Story,’ Hedderwick’s Miscellany of instructive and entertaining literature 1, 4 October 1862, pp.10-15, parodies ‘Stilty Pollins. The eminent Sensation Novelist’ through a narrative which involves resuscitation from execution for a murder the narrator did not commit. W. Collins, The Legacy of Cain (London: Chatto and Windus, 1888), ch.8, see also the doctor’s discussion about murderers’ reaction to death on the gallows, ch.7. The phrase also appears in The Queen of Hearts (3 vols; London: Hurst and Blackett, 1859) vol.3, p.284, of a man condemned to transportation for manslaughter. H.C. Adams, Balderscourt; or Holiday Tales (London: Routledge, 1866), p.66. Rank and Beauty; or, The Young Baroness (3 vols; London: Hurst and Blackett, 1856), vol.3, pp.134-146. An Anglican clergyman whose delusions included the belief that he had prevented abolition of capital punishment for murder by writing to The Times was reported in ‘Commission of Lunacy,’ British Medical Journal, 24 April 1858, pp.343-344, [p.343]. C.J. Riethmüller, Aldersleigh (2 vols; London: Bell and Daldy, 1868), vol.2, p.85. M.W. Savage, Reuben Medlicott; or, The Coming Man (New York: D. Appleton, 1852), p.270. ‘Michael South,’ ‘The Peace Campaigns of Ensign Faunce. Part X,’ serialized in Fraser’s Magazine 41: 241 (January 1850), pp.76-89 [p.80]. The Editor, ‘Within and Without; a Story of Fashionable Life,’ Random Readings for the Rail, the River, and the Road; the Field and the Fireside (London: Groombridge, 1854), ch.3, p.15. A.H. Elton, Below the Surface. A Story of English Country Life (1857; revised edn, London: Smith, Elder, 1867), pp.51-55; p.95. B. Jerrold, ‘Faversham on his way to fame,’ Illustrated Dublin Journal 16, 21 December 1861 (ch.4), p.245. G. Eliot, Middlemarch, ch.39. Aunt Elizabeth had accompanied the woman to the gallows. Eliot’s friend from Coventry, the freethinker Charles Bray, opposed capital punishment, in The Education of Feelings (2nd edition, London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1849); see preface to The Philosophy of Necessity (2nd edn, revised; London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, 1863), on abolition of punishment ‘except such punishment as is good for the individual offending’, p.57. Depictions of Hetty Sorrel apart from Corbould’s in the Royal Collection, include John Collier’s, see R.D. Altick, Paintings from

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71 72 73 74

75

76

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78 79 80 81 82 83 84

VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS Books. Art and Literature in Britain, 1760–1900 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1985). His journal The Teetotaller, no.11, advertised its ‘observations on the punishment of death suggested by the probable execution of Courvoisier on Monday next’ in 1840. The concluding part of ‘Was he hanged til’ he was dead?’ London Journal 1:9 (26 April 1845), pp.133-134. See also the heated literary effort in ‘Saint Sepulchre’s Bell’, London Journal 1:11 (10 May 1845), pp.167-168 to present the cruelty of death punishment. ‘The Punishment of Death,’ Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper, 13 January 1856. On Reynolds’s polemic against capital punishment, see S.J. Carver, ‘The Wrongs and Crimes of the Poor,’ in Humpherys and James eds, G.W.M. Reynolds, pp149-162 [p.157]; G. Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty. England in the Early Industrial Age (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), ch.18 (on Reynolds), p.444. See also R. McWilliam, ‘The Mysteries of G.W.M. Reynolds: radicalism and melodrama in Victorian Britain,’ in M. Chase and I. Dyck, eds, Living and Learning: Essays in Honour of J.F.C. Harrison (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), pp.182-198. The label for this genre is Gertrude Himmelfarb’s, The Idea of Poverty, p.452. E. Sue, The Mysteries of Paris (1842–1843; London: E. Appleyard, 1845), p.490. This is a reminder that French works in translation, such as Sue and Dumas père, must also be seen as contributing to the depiction of capital punishment for a British readership. On Sue and Dumas, see Poulosky, Severed Heads and Martyred Souls, ch.2. G.W.M. Reynolds, The Mysteries of London (London: George Vickers, 1846), vol.1, ch.32, pp.89-91 (with Old Bailey illustrated, p.89); ch.36, ‘The Execution,’ p.100. Reynolds, The Mysteries of London, vol.2, ch.138, ‘A Public Functionary,’ p.6. Reynolds, The Mysteries of London, vol.2, ch.142, ‘Gibbet,’ with illustrations at p.9, and ch.143, ‘Morbid Feelings – Katherine,’ p.17. Reynolds, The Mysteries of London, vol.3, p.248. The trope of resuscitated gallows-victim echoed rumours surrounding the escape of Dr Dodd, Fauntleroy and others, from death, through mechanisms such as silver pipes to protect the throat from the noose. Reynolds, The Mysteries of the Courts of London (London: J. Dicks, 1853), 5: 1: 3rd series, p.279. This scene – involving W.G. Ross’s performance of the condemned chimney sweep – had already been depicted in ‘Mr Pips his Diary,’ Punch, 17 March 1849, p.114; see Gatrell, The Hanging Tree, pp.140-143, for the history of the ballad. Reynolds, The Mysteries of the Courts of London (London: J. Dicks, 1849), 1, pp.225-227. See also the reference to public strangulation, in Mary Price: or, The Memoirs of the servant maid (1852), p.189; and reference in The Baker’s Daughter, or, the Lost Witness (Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson, n.d.), p.115, to incarceration for life rather than gallows. Reynolds’s Miscellany, 22 January 1848, p.169; Reynolds’s Miscellany, 4: 101, 15 June 1850, p.334; Reynolds’s Newspaper, 3 September 1854. On Alexander, see A. King, ‘Reynolds’s Miscellany, 1846–1849,’ in Humpherys and James eds, G.W.M. Reynolds, p.63. Puppet Show, vol.2, 14 October 1848, p.59; ‘Mischievous Literature,’ Bookseller, 1 July 1868, pp.445-448 [p.447]. ‘Richard Biddulph; or, the Life and Education of a Schoolboy,’ Metropolitan Magazine 46: 181 (May 1846), pp.48-53. ‘A Story about an Execution,’ Ainsworth’s Magazine 16 (1849), pp.30-40. Rowsell’s An Essay on Capital Punishment was published by Gilpin. On the ‘Old Bailey School’, see the review of Edmund Yates, Black Sheep, Pall Mall Gazette, 30 April 1868, p.11. The Boy’s Yearly Book for 1867 (London: Ward, Lock and Tyler, 1867), p.144. A review of Cruikshank’s Fairy Library in Poems and Essays by the late William Caldwell Roscoe, vol.2, Essays (London: Chapman and Hall, 1860), pp.513-514. The Works of Douglas Jerrold (4 vols; London: Bradbury and Evans, 1863) vol.2, p.273. The story had appeared in Colburn’s New Monthly Magazine and Humorist in 1838.

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89 90 91

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94 95

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C.G.F. Gore, Self (3 vols; London: H. Colburn, 1845), vol.3, p.35. Gore discussed capital punishment in the context of infanticide, in Men of Capital (3 vols; London: H. Colburn, 1846), vol.3, where a clergyman magistrate has qualms about condemning to death a woman guilty of concealing the death of her baby, see pp.48-49. [G. Mills] Beggar’s Benison. A Clydesdale Story (2 vols; London: Cassell, Petter, Galpin, 1866). Mills was a shipbuilder and newspaper proprietor, and a radical nonconformist, see ODNB. Cymbeline (1610), Act 5, Scene 4. This was quoted in the abolitionist [J.H. Wilson], Temple Bar. The City Golgotha. A Narrative of the Historical Occurrences of a Criminal Character Associated with the Present Bar (London: David Bogue, 1853) on the titlepage and conclusion. Punch, 28 April 1855, p.167, in the context of Luigi Buranelli, a servant and tailor who murdered his former landlord, and who was believed by the S.A.C.P. to be insane, see Law on its Trial, p.179) and Barthelemy. H. Puckler-Muskau, Tour in England, Ireland, and France: in the years 1826, 1827, 1828 and 1829 (4 vols; London: Effingham Wilson, 1832), vol.3, p.141. ‘The Working-man’s Way in the World,’ Section XI, Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, JanuaryDecember 1852, pp.41-49 [p.48]. A. Esquiros, translated by L. Wraxall, The English at Home (2 vols; London: Chapman and Hall, 1861), vol.1, p.320. See Gatrell, The Hanging Tree, pp.119-123 [p.122]; see also P. Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (1991; London: Verso, 2003), pp.402-403. Phillips, Vacation Thoughts (1857), p.64. See M.R. Booth, Theatre in the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p.163, quoting from T.W. Erle, Letters from a Theatrical Scene-Painter (London: 1880), p.16. The play was J.M. Maddox, King and the deserter, a play in two acts. See J. Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in London. 1770–1840 (2000; Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp.113-114 on Ben Webster’s production at Coburg’s Theatre, 1832. The play La Mort en loterie was banned by the censors in 1837, objecting to performance in a popular theatre, see R.J. Goldstein, War for the Public Mind: Political Censorship in Nineteenth-century Europe (Westport, Connecticut, London: Praeger, 2000), p.11. In Britain the ‘strolling manager’ Campbell at Stockton on Tees was prosecuted by local magistrates for representing J.B. Rush (including the execution) on stage, see Morning Post, 13 November 1849. The Lord Chamberlain did not suppress a play on John Thurtell, ‘The Gamblers; or, the Hertfordshire Tragedy’ in 1824, see J.R. Stephens, The Censorship of English Drama 1824–1901 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p.62. There was a theatrical representation of Maria Manning, cited in Borowitz, The Woman who Murdered Black Satin, p.281. See Hewitt, Symbolic Interactions, pp.9-10, pp.48-49; J. Murray, ‘Joanna Baillie’s Rayner and Romantic Spectacle,’ European Romantic Review 21:1 (February 2010), pp.65-76. For the period 1820s–1830s, see D. Saglia, ‘“The Talking Demon”: Liberty and Liberal Ideologies in the 1820s British Stage,’ Nineteenth Century Contexts 28:4 (December 2006), pp.347-377, which notes the abolitionist interests of playwright James Brinsley Knowles’s journal, The Free Press of 1823–1824. I am grateful to Patrick Regan’s excellent Robert Buchanan website http://www.robertbuchanan.co.uk/for references to the critical reception of the play, first produced 15 October 1883 at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Daily News, 16 October 1883; The Theatre, 16 October 1883, p.3; New York Times, 29 October 1883. The Era, 15 March 1890 (and revived in 1899). Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (London: Griffin, Bohn, 1861), pp.143-144. Groans of the Gallows was a work which Calcraft took exception to, and he responded

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VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS with a work entitled The Hangman’s Compliments to the Public (London: Elliott), see the advertisement in Reynolds’s Newspaper, 11 May 1856. Family Herald, 17 May 1851, 42, reply to E. Stevens. T.W. Erle, Letters from a Theatrical Scene-Painter (second series; London, 1862), p.28. Courvoisier admitted to being inspired by Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard, see Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty, p.428. Other representations of capital punishment on the stage include Law of the Land, which dealt with the fate of the forger Dr Abel Dodsworth, see Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 11 August 1850; and T.J. Serle’s Annie Tyrrell, or Attree Copse, which concerned the execution of a poacher who had killed a gamekeeper, and was performed at the Surrey Theatre in 1852. T.N. Talfourd, ‘Rymer on Tragedy,’ Retrospective Review 1:1 (1820), pp.1-15 [p.10]. This was also cited by Rowton, in ‘Capital Punishment, no.3. The Gallows Considered as a Spectacle,’ Howitt’s Journal 2: 43 (23 October 1847), pp.265-266. J. Sutherland, ‘Introduction,’ in Vanity Fair (1993; Oxford: Oxford University Press: Oxford World’s Classics, 1998), p.xxii. See M.E. Braddon’s short story, ‘Sir Jasper’s Tenant,’ in Temple Bar (February–December 1865), in which a murderer does evade the hangman. See for instance the sentiments of W.H. Maxwell, in Flood and Field, or the recollections of a Soldier of Fortune (1842; London: Routledge, 1858) recounting the execution of one Sweeney, a pedlar who had murdered his companion, in Ireland, p.116. Though E.L. Bulwer’s Alice; or the Mysteries. A Sequel to Ernest Maltravers (3 vols; London: Saunders and Otley, 1838) argued it was ‘time that we should do away with the punishment of death for inadequate offences, even in books’. On Stephen in relation to novels of crime, see L. Rodensky, The Crime in Mind, especially ch.4. Fitzjames Stephen, ‘The Relation of Novels to Life,’ in Cambridge Essays. Contributed by members of the University (London: John W. Parker, 1855), pp.148-192 [pp.179-180]. On the other hand, he mistrusted his powers, so he said in a preface to The History of Pendennis: his fortunes and misfortunes (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1850) vol.2, p.vi, to depict St Giles and the gallows scene. Capital Punishment. A Tale of the Nineteenth century. By the Author of “Can She Keep a Secret?” (London: Saunders, Otley, 1867). See the condemnatory review in Pall Mall Gazette, 14 December 1867. See Punch, 29 October 1859, p.174: presenting The Graffiti of London. From Demonological Photograms taken by Sir Cannibal Tattoo with remarks by him (Bradbury and Evans, Australasia, 3859). See the first book of More’s Utopia, for discussion of punishment of death in relation to robbery, between Raphael Hythloday and the cardinal. Moir, Capital Punishment cites More, see Appendix B, p.232. Anon., The Maiden Monarch; or, Island Queen (2 vols, London: R. Hastings, 1840), vol.1, pp.79-80. See the review in The Metropolitan Magazine January–April 1840, p.84. See J.C. Davis, Utopia and the Ideal Society. A Study of English Utopian Writing, 1516–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); G. Claeys, Utopias of the British Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p.xvi. See The Commonwealth of Reason, and Memoirs of Planetes in Claeys’ collection. C. Rees, Utopian Imagination and Eighteenth Century Fiction (Harlow: Longman, 1996) points out, p.133, that Godwin’s lunar people and Burrington’s Mezzoranians opposed blood shedding, but that most utopian writers accepted that murderers should be executed. Thomas Northmore’s Memoires of Planetes; or a sketch of the laws and manners of Makar (London: Vaughan Griffiths, 1795) involved a utopia where the ‘sanguinary and inhuman punishment of death’ had been abolished. Morning Star, 16 June 1856, p.4. ‘F.’ ‘Nineteen Hundred,’ Cape Monthly Magazine (Cape Town) 1 April 1874, p.221.

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W. Morris, News from Nowhere (London: Reeves and Turner, 1891), p.188. G.L. Parsons, ‘In the Deep of Time,’ book 2, ch.6, ‘Improved Conditions,’ English Illustrated Magazine (April 1897), pp.81-91. See ‘The Press of the Seven Dials,’ Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal 130, 28 June 1856, pp.401-405, reprinted in C.M. Smith, The Little World of London; or, Pictures in Little of London Life (London: Arthur Hall, 1857). Punch 17 (1849), p.116. This was an attack on the preoccupations of Sunday papers such as the Observer. M. Sherwood, Fairchild Family; or, The child’s manual (6th edn, London: J. Hatcherd, 1822), p.58. See J.S. Bratton, The impact of Victorian children’s fiction (London: Croom Helm, 1981), p.56. Morning Chronicle, 27 June 1851. For other critical comments on Fairchild from this period see ‘Books of Fiction for Children’, Quarterly Review (January 1867), pp.29-47; and ‘Punch’s Table Talk’, Punch, 30 December 1865, p.257. Barton, ‘Literary Executions,’ p.24.

Chapter 9. The Law on Trial 1 2 3 4

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‘Law of Murder,’ London Quarterly Review 26: 52 (April–July 1866), pp.428-452 [p.439]. Dymond, The Law on its Trial, p.96. ‘The Smethurst case,’ Solicitor’s Journal, 27 August 1859, pp.809-810 [p.809]. On the flaws of the Victorian legal system see Chadwick; and Pattenden, English Criminal Appeals 1844–1994, where the appeal process in capital cases is outlined as a process involving no judicial inquiry: with no mechanism for taking evidence on oaths or cross examination of the witnesses, where reports from the Chief Constables etc., were taken in secret and not disclosed to the prisoner and where false statements could be made with impunity. The prisoner and prosecution had no right to dispute evidence given to the Home Office which exercised the royal prerogative of mercy. Pattenden quotes (p.20) a Times leader, 3 December 1847: ‘The machinery of the Home Office is scarcely one of which a condemned prisoner can claim the benefit as of right. It depends entirely on the energy and sense of justice of the counsel engaged in the cause, on the humanity of bystanders, or the exertions of influential friends, whether or not a prisoner’s case ever comes before the Home Secretary for revision.’ This is not to deny that the Bench was unaware of defects, see for instance (p.21), Bramwell’s memorandum, 25 February 1864: ‘It is certainly difficult to conceive a worse procedure than at present exists.’ Bruce, Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.200, HC, 29 April 1870, col.2107. N.A., HO 12/110/25512, December 1856, Mr Justice Coleridge. Nor is confidence in the fairness of such trials increased by the inability of the officials involved to spell the names of the accused correctly. The S.A.C.P. in a number of cases involving foreigners, emphasized the predicament for foreigners with no linguistic ability and ignorance of English law; though such arguments are commonsense ones rather than pleas that could be seen as denigrating the law. Dymond’s letter (no.3, 10 December 1856) in the Lagava case stressed the danger of the ‘semblance of unfairness’ in foreign eyes with the ‘fearful odds’ produced by unprepared defence and absence of solicitor. See N.A., HO 12/94/17703, case of Hans Hansen (1856), a German soldier stationed in England who had killed a comrade whilst drunk. Dymond (no number, letter dated 6 April 1856) emphasized the ‘forlorn’ state of a foreigner without English, knowledge of law and the absence of legal assistance save that ordered by the court after the case had gone to trial. The decision had already been taken to commute. On the question of national prejudices reflected in homicide trials, see M.J. Wiener, ‘Homicide and “Englishness”. Criminal Justice and National Identity in Victorian England,’ National Identities 6:3 (2004), pp.203-214, which refers to cases such as Pelizioni’s [p.207].

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19

20

VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS See Harrison, Drink and the Victorians, p.229, on the ‘techniques of urgency’. R. Pattenden, English Criminal Appeals; see also A. Mays, The Bar and the Old Bailey, 1750– 1850 (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, London: University of North California Press, 2003). ‘The Advocate of Mercy,’ Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 6 July 1856. See N.A., HO 12/92/17438 (1855) where Dymond (no.4, 6 August 1855) emphasized Joseph Richards had neither counsel nor attorney, with a member of the Bar volunteering after the case was called in; this in a letter arriving before the presiding Judge’s report. Harrison, Drink and the Victorians, p.35, in criticizing the tendency of pressure groups generally. N.A., HO 12/102/20497, no.3, 12 February 1856. The letter ends with phrases such as the ‘usual course in your experience’ and the ‘ample precedents’ for an act, not of mercy but of justice. As the number indicates, this letter was an early one in the appeal. A subsequent letter (No.8 in the file) reiterated the mitigatory factors of absence of premeditation and temporary insanity. Dymond, The Law on its Trial, p.198, details some of the efforts involved in this case which are not preserved in the file: Gilpin’s visit to the Home Office and Dymond’s appointment; Milner Gibson’s presentation of a Manchester petition. The Freemasons were also active in the defence of their member. N.A., HO 12/102/20497, Corrigan files, minute dated 23 February 1856. Grey deferred to the opinions of Waddington, Massey, and the judge, Wightman, though anxious that it would seem as if he were admitting temporary insanity on the basis of habitual drunkenness. See the reference, in a review of Law on its Trial, in The Athenaeum 1967, 8 July 1865, pp.43-45 [p.43]. Phillips, Vacation Thoughts, p.74, listed his punishment as penal servitude for life. For modern discussion of Corrigan, see M.J. Wiener, ‘Murder and the Modern British Murder,’ Albion 36: 1 (Spring 2004), pp.1-11 [pp.3-5]. N.A., HO 12/103/21068, No.4 (23 March 1856). In the next letter, (No. 5, 28 March) when he had not heard of any reprieve, Dymond wrote: ‘I am well aware that whilst Capital Punishment is attached to the crime of murder some cases will necessitate the vigorous infliction of the penalty. Such were those recently occurring in Hampshire and Leicester. The infliction of the punishment in those two cases will vindicate the Government from the charge of violating the law or practically ignoring its existence.’ ‘Execution of Bousfield, the Lunatic Criminal,’ Morning Star, 1 April 1856, p.3; Daily News, 1 April 1856. A private correspondent from London, Hull Packet, 19 December 1856. As Dymond wrote in The Law on its Trial, p.163, ‘No wonder there are found men who urge that these scenes should be hid by the prisons walls ... The institution could not stand many more such shocks to its reputation.’ C.P.C., minute 1504, 14 February 1865, p.201, ‘I may say that frequently there are applications from a society of very well intentioned persons, who are in favour of the abolition of Capital Punishment, and they state that as the ground of their interference. That is a statement which has no weight at all, because it is asking the Secretary of the State to change the law instead of administering it, and that is not a case in which a reference could be made to the Judge. But if circumstances are stated which ought to have an influence upon the decision, and if any facts are urged in favour of the prisoner which have any plausible ground, the memorial, as an invariable rule, is sent to the Judge.’ N.A., HO 12/108/23855, no number, 18 August 1856, The letter ends with Bright’s wish that Grey would examine capital punishment from a non official point of view. Bracken was transported – the jury had given a strong recommendation to mercy. Dymond, The Law on its Trial, pp.103-105 on successful efforts on behalf of Sarah Ann Hill, aided by Milner Gibson, George Leeman and the York Gaol chaplain; p.116 on the reprieve of Abel Burrows due to Bright and Dymond; p.117, the reprieve of the

NOTES

21

22

23

24

25

26 27

28

29

335

octogenarian Michael Cosgrove when Palmerston accepted a precedent Dymond found concerning the age at which hanging was improper; ch.8 on successful efforts to save Annette Myers, illegitimate daughter of a baronet who had killed a guardsman, Ducker, involving memorials and a London Tavern demonstration with Gilpin, Mortimer and Bright present (she was, apparently, a respectable married woman after transportation); Dymond supported the successful appeal for mercy on the behalf of the ‘idiot’ Isaac Pinnock, murderer of a farmer at Rowell in Northamptonshire. Other successful efforts involving the S.A.C.P. include that of Maria Clarke at Ipswich, April 1851 when Dymond was ‘summoned’ by ‘correspondents’. The successful case of Corrigan has been discussed. The case of James Thorogood, a poacher accused of murdering a gamekeeper in 1856 (N.A., HO 12/103/21120) has a letter, 11 March from Dymond which is virtually the only document in the file. Thorogood was reprieved. The letter succinctly listed mitigatory circumstances in numbered points and referred to the political nature of the Game Laws. Of the 43 cases studied for this research, 23 involved S.A.C.P. members or the secretary. The number of cases involving the S.A.C.P. is impossible to say exactly given the nature of the records, but from Dymond and Home Office evidence there are some 47 known cases involving the S.A.C.P. The 1868 report refers to the S.A.C.P. looking at all capital cases. Dymond, Law on its Trial, p.250, writes of ‘systematic watchfulness’ over capital cases, and his notes on all trials at assizes. N.A., HO 12/97/18299 case of Elizabeth McIntosh charged at Cupar, Fife, Dymond’s letter (no.8, 11 October 1855) refers to cases of Mary Rogers, Caroline Sherwood and Margaret Davies as ‘strong precedents for addressing you on this wretched woman’s behalf’. Grey’s response was ‘Let me see the case referred to in this letter’ and also a query as to the legitimacy of the bread and water diet for the convict which Dymond had seen as a needless aggravation; N.A., HO 12/92/17438 case of Joseph Richards, where in response to the precedent of Williams cited by Dymond, Grey referred the case to Lord Campbell with the belief that commutation would be justified. As in the case of Hans Hansen. See also case of Mussett, N.A., HO 12/104/21305, a woman convicted of infanticide 1856, where Dymond had been busy away from London on a lecture tour and so could only appeal (no.8, 11 April 1856) on the basis that infanticide was never treated capitally now; and that to execute her would be to reawaken all the horror and indignation surrounding Bousfield’s execution. He enclosed a printed version of his communication with Grey on behalf of McIntosh. The decision had already been taken (2 April) to commute the sentence. See S.A.C.P. report for 1866, where the ‘successes’ involving James Potter (Derby); George Broomfield (Winchester); Levi Taylor (Batley); William Hamilton (Manchester), Henry Hughes (Middlesbrough) are referred to, along with ‘some others’ and the assistance of ‘friends to the cause’ such as Edward Baines recorded. The files on Broomfield, Hughes and Taylor have been studied. However, Dymond, The Law on its Trial, pp.265-266, refers to the assistance of Henry Fitzroy, former undersecretary to Palmerston, in efforts (unsuccessful) to save James Murdoch in 1856. This involved Dymond going down to Wiltshire where Fitzroy lived, to obtain a letter urging the case. Law Times, 12 November 1864, p.14. Those writing in for reprieve included some prominent individuals. The stockbroker and writer Edmund Head Browne wrote in support of mercy for Celestina Somer, N.A., HO 12/105/21537, no.4, on the basis of abolitionist sentiment; and the author John Doucra Parry, N.A., HO 12/105/21537, no.7. ‘Paterfamilias’ is to be found in the Thomas Corrigan file, N.A., HO 12/102/20497, letter dated 25 February 1856. The letter went on to charge Grey: ‘Your motto is the converse of the legal maxim; it is “Fiat Injusticia, suat coelum”.’ N.A., HO 45/9400/52638, enclosure in no.20. The JPs were Thomas Lane, P.H. Muntz, S.S. Lloyd and J. Ashton.

336 30 31 32

33

34 35 36 37

38

39 40

41 42

43

44

45 46

VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS N.A., HO 12/33/9923, no.6, 7 April 1854, from the Reverend J.M. King of Cutcombe cum Luscborough near Dunster. N.A., HO 14/25/59140, no.31. N.A., HO 45/9400/52638, no.9, 8 March 1864, from a law and general bookseller, stationer and printer, S.B. Howell, from Birmingham. Howell criticized the fact that there was more sympathy for the culprit than the victim. Beggs, The Deterrent Influence of Capital Punishment, p.12. Almost 70,000 signed the petitions from Birmingham, see M.J. Wiener, ‘The Sad Story of George Hall: Adultery, Murder and the Politics of Mercy in Mid-Victorian England,’ Social History 24: 2 (1999), pp.173-195. N.A., HO 12/114/29217, the abolitionist letter (no.11, 7 September 1857) is from one Johnson Colsher. See Wiener, Men of Blood, pp.67-69. Dymond, The Law on its Trial, p.288. Rose, The Struggle for Penal Reform, p.275. Thus in the case of Hans Hansen (N.A., HO 12/94/17703, no number, 6 April 1856), Dymond emphasized the fact that he had not stolen his fellow soldier’s money and effects, both had been intoxicated and it was reasonable to infer both had quarrelled. The wound itself was not mortal, death resulted from a fracture to the skull. The case of William Conway in Ireland was a recent precedent. The six points of mitigation in the case of Joseph Richards (N.A., HO 12/92/17438, no.2) included absence of premeditation or malice aforethought, use of a common house-knife which was a weapon not necessarily deadly or used by a man contemplating murder and the fact there was no attempt to escape. N.A., HO 12/110/25512, no.23 (20 December 1856). The murders on the merchant ship The Globe, heading for the Bosphorus, are reported in The Annual Register, December 1856, pp.192-195. N.A., HO 12/108/23855, case of Andrew Bracken; no number, letter dated 21 August 1856. Dymond, Law on its Trial, pp.293-294, including the claim, ‘If he flies to Fallodon, ten to one his enemies calculate on getting an interview more easily there than when he is guarded by the well practised doorkeepers at Whitehall.’ Dymond, Law on its Trial, p.294 for the ministerial ‘stern negative’. ‘To the Felonious,’ Punch, 1854, p.126. A groom, Moses Hatto had murdered a housekeeper, Mary Sturgeon, and, defended by Serjeant Parry, had been convicted on circumstantial evidence, before confessing. He was executed at Aylesbury, and the inhabitants had then sent a petition to the House of Lords, presented by the Bishop of Oxford, against public executions, see Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.133, HL, 15 May 1854, cols.305-312. Details of the case are in Annual Register, November 1853, p.140. For criticism of unprincipled interference, see the abolitionist Matthew Davenport Hill, in written evidence to the Commissioners, C.P.C., 2 March 1865, p.631, on the ‘universal and unlimited philanthropists’ helping to engender a ‘morbid sympathy’ for the criminal. The jury system in England, Wales and Ireland followed English common law in involving twelve men, where if one juror dissented from the rest there was a hung jury (when a retrial would be needed); whereas in Scotland for criminal trials there were fifteen and a verdict was reached by simple majority, see Conley, ‘Homicide in LateVictorian Ireland and Scotland,’ pp.68-69. See also M.J. Wiener, ‘Judges v. Jurors: Courtroom Tensions in Murder Trials and the Law of Criminal Responsibility in Nineteenth-Century England,’ Law and History Review 17: 3 (Fall 1999), pp.467-506, on tensions between judges and petty juries exhibiting discretionary behaviour in homicide trials after the Bloody Code was abolished. ‘Punishment of Death – Secret Executions,’ Eclectic Review, January 1850, pp.33-49 [p.36]. Bradford Observer, 14 February 1850, p.6. See the case of William Worsey’s trial, reported in Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 31 June 1859, when Justice Byles condemned such

NOTES

47

48

49 50

51 52

53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

64

65 66 67

68 69 70 71

337

‘notions’. See also the expressions against capital punishment uttered to the judge at Clerkenwell, in the diary for 1846 of R.M. Anthony’s grandfather, ‘A grandfather’s diary,’ Brewing Review (1962), p.227. ‘Letters on Social Questions. Capital Punishment,’ Daily News, 28 February 1846; alluded to by Charles Gilpin in the Commons debate on his amendment to the Capital Punishment within Prisons bill, 21 April 1868, as ‘How Jurymen Feel’. J.C. Bucknill, Unsoundness of Mind in Relation to Criminal Acts (1854; Philadelphia: T. and J.W. Johnson, 1856), p.61. The Nonconformist, 14 May 1856 made a similar point about jury box rather than parliament and platform. The Economist, 11 September 1847, p.12; Caledonian Mercury, 20 September, 1847. The Times, 22 March 1847, p.4. Bright brought the case up in the Commons, 22 March 1847, when asking George Grey if judges had intimated to him about any increasing indisposition by jurors to find people guilty of capital crimes. The Times, 23 July 1847, p.4. C.A. Conley, The Unwritten Law: Criminal Justice in Victorian Kent (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p.47. At the time of the trial of the journalist Percy Lefroy Mapleton, who murdered Frederick Isaac Gold on the Brighton train, it was said there was a Anti-Capital Punishment Society at Maidstone still, and there was talk of moving the trial to the Old Bailey, see Manchester Times, 30 July 1881. Annual Register, January 1855, p.23. Her surname is given as Dawes in Phillips, Vacation Thoughts. N.A., HO 12/105/21537, 23 April 1856. Law Times, 24 March 1855, p.3; trial of Elizabeth Avis Laws, Maidstone Assizes, Daily News, 19 March 1855. Evidence of William Tallack, C.P.C., minute 1328, 16 December 1864, p.168. Solicitors’ journal and reporter, 9 May 1857, p.434. Queens bench, writ of error proceedings, see Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 10 May 1857. Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper, 4 January 1857, p.11. Evidence of William Tallack, C.P.C., minute 1329, 16 December 1864, p.169. Central Criminal Court, session papers. Ninth session, 1868–1869 (London: Butterworths), p.257. Weekly Dispatch, 15 June 1856. Saturday Review, 21 June 1856. Palmer’s execution stimulated at least one abolitionist sermon, see the Baptist minister Samuel Edger’s Capital Punishment wholly unscriptural and unreasonable: a discourse … preached in Ock Street, Abingdon, on the occasion of the Execution of William Palmer (Abingdon, 1856); and the relations of the convict published A Letter to the Lord Chief Justice Campbell (London: T. Taylor, 1856) which included, p.x, abolitionist sentiments about the right of Society to inflict the penalty. ‘The York Tragedy: Execution of William Ross,’ Eclectic Review 28 (October 1850), pp.468-476. The article’s authorship is given in Law on its Trial (see pp.78-95). The incident was covered in York Herald and Daily News. See British Friend (1850), p.275. Manchester Times, 16 November 1850. Dymond, Law on its Trial, p.95; Dymond, York Herald, 11 January 1851. On reprieve and the prerogative of mercy in capital cases in the period immediately before this study, see S. Devereaux, ‘Peel, Pardon and Punishment: The Recorder’s Report Revisited.’ C. Phillips, Vacation thoughts on capital punishment (1st edn Brighton: Folthorp / London: Longman, 1856) pp.80-81. Punch 32 (1857); Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.112, HC, 11 July 1850 (debate on Punishment of Death motion). London Review, 7 May 1864, p.480. Huddersfield Chronicle and West Yorkshire Advertiser, 6 April 1867, p.4. See also Hints for whom they may concern, pp.49-50.

338 72

73 74 75 76 77

78 79 80

81

82

83 84 85 86 87 88

89

90 91 92

VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS Dymond, Law on its Trial, p.135: ‘one whose heart had no place for pity.’ See A.P. Donajgrodski, ‘Sir James Graham at the Home Office,’ Historical Journal 20: l (1977), pp.97-120, detailing Graham’s poor reputation; and J.T. Ward, Sir James Graham (London: Macmillan, 1967), p.211 on his attitude to capital punishment. See also A.B. Erickson, The Public Career of Sir James Graham (Oxford: Blackwell, 1952). The Spectator’s verdict quoted in ‘The Gallows-raising Tory Government’, Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper, 12 January 1845; on Furley, see Punch, 16 April 1844, p.223. A.C. Benson and Viscount Esher, The Letters of Queen Victoria, 1837–1861, vol.2, 1844– 1853 (London: J. Murray, 1908), pp.38-39, Graham to Queen Victoria, 13 May 1845. Donajgrodski, ‘Sir James Graham at the Home Office,’ p.106, quoting Graham to Lord Ashley, 15 June 1842. J. Ridley, Lord Palmerston (London: Constable, 1970), p.510, on his attitude to the deterrent role of public hanging. The Nonconformist, 23 January 1856. Bright also said he had found him ‘very much indisposed to inflict the capital penalty’, in his interrogation of Sir George Grey in the Royal Commission, 14 February 1864, see C.P.C., minute 1537, 14 February 1865, p.205. Dymond, Law on its Trial, p.111. Dymond, Law on its Trial, p.125. Annual Register (1855), May 1854, p.84. On the position of the judge, Pollock, in the case of Abel Burrows, see N.A., HO 12/9602, no.2, received 15 March 1854. See Dymond, Law on its Trial, pp.114-116; p.118 on Burrows and Cosgrove. Dymond, Law on its Trial, pp.111-113. Palmerston referred critically to the case in the House of Commons. See Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.127, HC, ‘New Trials (Criminal Cases) Bill,’ 1 June 1853, cols.980-983. Beehive, 16 January 1864, characterizing him as an aristocratic Whig vs. popular control, ‘Such a cold-hearted, red-tape minister like SIR GEORGE GREY, is doubtless fond of precedents.’ See The Jurist, 25 June 1864, p.259. Dymond, Law on its Trial, p.293. See M. Creighton, Memoirs of Sir George Grey, Bart., G.C.B. (London: Longmans, Green, 1901), pp.100-101. Dymond, Law on its Trial, p.198. Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.191, HC, 21 April 1868, col.1036. Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.174, HC, 3 May 1864, col.2059. See Edward Dicey’s essay, ‘An Unsolved Mystery,’ Macmillan’s Magazine 18: 98 (1868), pp.152-160, on the cases of John Wiggins and the Frenchman Louis Bordier. Dicey states (p.159): ‘Owing to the number of crimes of violence which had occurred throughout the summer, the bias of the authorities, reflecting as they did the tone of public feeling, was indisposed to leniency. Mr Hardy had been so severely criticized for remitting the capital sentence on Wagner that he was naturally inclined to show he could be firm when occasion called for firmness.’ Dicey also writes, ‘Somehow, neither the press nor the public ever took up, if I may use the word, the case of John Wiggins. The common idea was that he was sure not to be really hanged, and this idea discouraged any great agitation on his behalf. Parliament was not sitting. Few of the persons who habitually interest themselves in such matters happened to be in town; and, in fact, no great pressure was brought to bear upon the Home Office.’ A.E. Gathorne-Hardy, ed., Gathorne Hardy. First Earl of Cranbrook. A Memoir (2 vols; London: Longmans, Green, 1910), vol.1, ch.12, especially diary entry 23 November on Fenians [p.233]; N.E. Johnson, ed., The Diary of Gathorne Hardy, later Lord Cranbrook 1866– 1892 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp.50-51 on response to Bordier and Wiggins cases. N.A., HO 12/92/17438, no.2 and no.5. Dymond, Law on its Trial, p.285. C.P.C., minute 1500, 14 February 1865, p.200.

NOTES 93

94 95 96 97

98 99 100

101

102

103

104

105 106

107

339

See the satirical pamphlet published anonymously by Alfred Smee, Philosophical Reasons for not hanging Garrotters and Burglars. By a member of the Society of Friends (London: Rixon and Arnold, 1863), reproduced in E.M.O., Memoir of the Late Alfred Smee, F.R.S. (London: G. Bell, 1878), pp.83-89. Du Cane was opposed to abolition, as he told the Criminal Department of the Social Science Congress in Brighton in 1875, see Belfast News-Letter, 8 October 1875. J. Davis, ‘The London Garotting Panic of 1862.’ Gatrell, The Hanging Tree, ‘Epilogue: 1868: Ending the Spectacle,’ pp.599-601. See Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper, communications in N.A., HO 12/146/59140; and ‘Confession and Execution of Samuel Wright, for the Murder of Maria Green’ (London: Taylor, 1864), reproduced in Hindley, Curiosities of Street Literature, p.207. The Social Science Review 1 (January to June, 1864), ‘Capital Murder,’ pp.150-160; ‘Hanged and Not Hanged,’ p.185. Quoted in Dundee Courier, 9 May 1864. Devine, a destitutre man, had killed the retired scaffolder Joseph Duck of Marylebone, in 1864. Jessie McLachlan’s case had generated much interest: she had hacked to death a servant girl, Jessie McPherson, in Sandyford Place, and after being found guilty, her counsel had released a statement which implicated an old man, Mr Fleming, in the murder, and the Home Secretary under popular pressure, including a mass petition, reprieved her. Parliamentary Papers 1863 (119) Jessie Maclauchlan. Copies of documents relating to the case of Jessie Maclauchlan, convicted of murder at Glasgow in September; and of the correspondence between Messrs Smith and Wright and the Home Department in October and November 1862 [ordered to be printed 20 March 1863]; 1864 (37) George Victor Townley. Copy of correspondence with the Secretary of State for the Home Department, and of orders or warrants issued by him, relating to the case of George Victor Townley [a fifty page document, ordered to be printed 11 February 1864]; 1864 (74) Samuel Wright. Papers relating to the case of Samuel Wright [ordered to be printed 22 February 1864]. In the case of Townley, the Home Office pointed out that a poor man, Clarke, convicted of murder at Newcastle upon Tyne assizes in 1862, and lacking any wealthy supporters (unlike Townley) had been reprieved on the grounds of insanity. For Myers, see ‘Capital Murder at Leeds’, Social Science Review 2 (July-December 1864), pp.370-371. The Flowery Land executions – when seven men paid for their crimes in a simultaneous execution – were discussed in advance in the Commons, see Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.173, HC, 12 February 1864, cols.497-498. See ‘Town Talk. By the Luncher at the Pub’, Fun, 26 November 1864, p.107. The case had also attracted wide interest because of the intervention of fellow Germans in his defence, and because of his flight to the United States. Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.174, HC, 3 May 1864, motion for Select Committee on Punishment of Death, col. 2056-2061 on capital punishment reduced to a lottery due to press, due to ‘minute distinctions as to insanity’ – the lottery itself caused in the end by the penalty itself. John Devine was executed in May 1864. ‘The Prerogative of Pardon and the Punishment of Death,’ Westminster Review, April 1864, pp.185-195 [p.193]. Daily News, 11 February 1865, p.4: ‘now the “case” of a murderer may be said to begin where it used to end – with his conviction and sentence.’ The case of Pelizioni (or Polioni), a ‘slightly built foreigner, with a light moustache’, as he was described in ‘Newgate Prison’, Routledge’s Every Boy’s Annual (London: G. Routledge, 1866), p.307, is preserved at N.A., HO 45/9449/68693. The case was a great embarrassment for the Home Office, who reluctantly accepted that the wrong man had been found guilty. Grey feared (no.21, n.d.) questions before parliament; the permanent under-secretary Waddington replied, ‘It will come to that, I have no doubt ...’ A similar case involving the wrong Italian, a man called Giardinieri, took place in Swansea in the same year. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree, pp.608-610.

340 108 109

110 111 112

113 114 115 116

117 118 119

120 121

122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133

VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS N.A., HO 12/146/59140, no number, received at the Home Office, 14 January 1864. The Beehive, 16 January 1864, editorial; Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper, 17 January 1864, first article on front page. It is important to emphasize the fact that these cases were front page news or leading editorial articles. Cooper, ‘Capital Punishment within Prisons bill,’ pp.73-74. Radzinowicz, History of English Criminal Law, vol.4, p.335: referring to Times leaders. S.A.C.P. report for 1866 report, p.12; which also advertised abolitionist statements in the recently published Life and Letters of Frederick W. Robertson. Russell’s statement was republished at the back of Tallack’s The Practical Results of Total or Partial Abolition of Capital Punishment in various countries (1866, S.A.C.P. publication) and noted in The Nonconformist, 22 February 1865, p.158. Russell had been targeted by William Allen in 1837, see Life of William Allen vol.2 (1847), pp.390-391. Harold King, ‘The Death Penalty,’ St James’s Magazine 13 (April to July 1865), pp.47-54 [p.54]. See, for instance, The Scottish Law Magazine and Sheriff Court Reporter, November 1865, pp.65-66. Fun, 11 November 1865, p.87 (hangings in Newgate took place on Monday mornings); B.J. Mackei, ‘The Manufacturers of England. III,’ The Family Friend (1866), p.58. C. Fairfield, Some Account of George William Wilshere Baron Bramwell of Hever and his Opinions (London: Macmillan, 1898), p.37 (25 August 1865). On Pollock, see L.C.J. Pollock. A Memoir by his Grandson Lord Hanworth, PC, KBE (London: J. Murray, 1929). Warwick University, Modern Records Centre, MSS 16A/6/1/26, 27 October 1864, printed letter to C.P.C., p.3. Warwick University, Modern Records Centre, MSS 16A/6/1/26, p.4, with John Bright’s pencil emphases on ‘bundle of doubts’. See C.P.C., minute 245, 29 November 1864, p.36, however, where Baron Martin admits that he would need to be acquainted with those who know the lower classes to ascertain the penalty’s deterrence, for a revealing admission of ignorance. Cooper, ‘Capital Punishment within Prisons bill,’ p.213. The Friend, 1 January 1868, p.16, ‘The Glaring Failure of Capital Punishment’ where Clerkenwell is shown to demonstrate the failure, after the Manchester executions, of the gallows; S.A.C.P. report for 1868, p.5, where the Committee records its approval for Beggs’s action, notes the individual nature of such activity and quotes from Beggs concerning the Fenians, ‘It is not, I think, sound policy to make martyrs of them.’ The Society of Friends’ Yearly Meeting decided to petition the government for commutation of the sentences on Fenian prisoners in Ireland, see Friends’ Quarterly Examiner 1867, p.367. The Cheltonian, 1867, p.333; The Wykehamist 7 (April 1867), p.3, reporting meeting 13 March; and 11 (November 1867), p.4, printing prologue to play of 5 September 1867. For this interpretation see Gatrell, Hanging Tree, and McGowen, ‘Civilizing Punishment’. McGowen, ‘Civilizing Punishment,’ p.278. The Spectator, quoted in Every Saturday (Boston), 10 October 1868, p.479. The Times, 14 August 1868, p.6. See also The Times, 10 September 1868, p.6. The Times, 14 August 1868, p.6. McGowen, ‘Civilizing Punishment,’ p.281. Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.190, HC, 5 March 1868, Capital Punishment within Prisons Bill, second reading, Gilpin, col. 1135. Saturday Review, quoted in Every Saturday 5, 27 June 1868, p.826. Tallack, Howard Letters, p.155. Harrison, Drink and the Victorians, p.35. British Medical Journal, 21 June 1856, p.525.

NOTES

341

Conclusion 1 2

3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15

16

17 18 19

20 21

The Legal Observer (May to October 1845), p.363. Punch 54, 7 March 1868, p.99 – of course, the magazine was satirizing the ‘strong minded but impassioned pessimists’ who were ‘cheering the backward march of humanity’; cf. Punch, 1 December 1849. Capital punishment as a touchstone for pessimism resurfaced in ‘Wisdom of Experience’, Punch 79, 7 August 1880, p.52. Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.190, HC, 5 March 1868, col.1135. Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.190, HC, 5 March 1868, col.1136, Gilpin quoting a letter by Cobden stating opponents ‘abandoned the chief argument with which they have defended the halter’ when they argue for sequestration; ‘Bomolochus,’ Is Capital Punishment necessary? A few simple reasons for altering the law (London: W. Ridgway, 1869), p.14. See the review by Randall McGowen, ‘Revisiting the Hanging Tree.’ ‘Punishment of Death – Secret Executions,’ Eclectic Review, January 1850, p.34. ‘Philander,’ Capital Punishment: Is it Defensible? (1865), pp.7-8. Moberly, The Ethics of Punishment, p.295. The Times, 5 September 1860, p.6. The Times, 5 September 1860, p.6. This is the interpretation offered by Gatrell, ‘Epilogue,’ The Hanging Tree, for instance. See ‘The Victorian Era’, London Quarterly Review 28: 2 (July 1897), pp.205-229 [p.211]. Moir, Capital Punishment, based on Professor Mittermaier’s “Todesstrafe,” had a section on ‘Humanitarian Doctrines: Their bearing on the theory of capital punishment.’ Tallack entitled a pamphlet Humanity and Humanitarianism (London: F.B. Kitto, 1871). ‘Humane’ and ‘Humanitarian’ were argued to be antagonistic terms by Sir John Davis, in 1869, Transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1870), p.457. The term ‘humanitarian’ might be rejected by abolitionists – thus G.J. Holyoake denied he was one, although opposing capital punishment in Public Lessons of the Hangman, p.8. For modern scholarly discussion, see T.W. Laqueur, ‘Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative,’ in L. Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp.176-204 [p.203]; and Laqueur, ‘Mourning, pity and the work of narrative in the making of “humanity”,’ ch.1 in R.A. Wilson and R.D. Brown, eds, Humanitarianism and Suffering. The Mobilization of Empathy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Chambers’s Encyclopaedia (10 vols; W. and R. Chambers, 1890), vol.5, p.828. W.S. Lilly, ‘In Praise of Hanging,’ The New Review 11:63 (August 1894), p.190-200 [p.194]. See Parl. Papers (1864), no.177, vol.XLIX.5, ‘Capital convictions’, for executions 1859– 1863. See also The Times, 23 January 1856: only 12 went to Ketch per year, whilst at least 100 went to Bright and his friends per year, ‘It may be said, too, that a dozen executions in a twelve month can hardly be worth much as an example, and are not much worth fighting for. It is but an infinitesimal dose of hanging for such a huge mass of criminality.’ Law Magazine 4:7 (1846), pp.223-250 [p.235]; reprinted in Tactics for the Times: as Regards the Condition and Treatment of the Dangerous Classes (London: John Ollivier, 1849). Symons wrote to the newspaper press about the statistics too. His analysis is discussed in Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal, pp.16-19. ‘The Results of Death Punishments’, Law Magazine 8 (n.s.), August 1846. The Times, 30 April 1846, p.4. ‘The Capital Punishment Commission,’ Meliora 9 (1866), p.128: ‘The society ... has pursued a quiet, unostentatious, but highly useful career; and the attention which the Commission paid to the suggestions of the officers of the society, shews that its labours have been fully appreciated even by those who do not adopt its principles.’ The Times, 3 May 1868. Huddersfield Chronicle and West Yorkshire Advertiser, 26 May 1865, p.5.

342 22 23 24

25 26

27 28 29 30 31

32 33

34 35

36 37

38 39 40 41

42 43 44

VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS The People’s Journal (1849), ‘Annals of Progress,’ p.44: listing the methods of the committee: number 1 was appeal to the public mind. See obituary in Gentleman’s Magazine, 1868, p.681. Capital Punishment Abolition bills were introduced by Gilpin in February 1872 and February 1873, other bills were introduced and then withdrawn, 23 June 1873 and 2 May 1877. J.T. Mills, John Bright and the Quakers, vol.2, p.166. Belfast News-Letter, 11 October 1877; Hull Packet and East Riding Times, 12 October 1877. The meeting was chaired by Theodore Ribton, barrister of the South East circuit. The four convicts were not hanged. The case inspired the novelist Charles Reade to agitate for them, writing letters to the Daily Telegraph entitled Hang in Haste, Repent in Leisure. Aberdeen Weekly Journal, 18 April 1882. Journal of Jurisprudence 26 (1882), p.561. The Examiner 3659 (16 March 1878), pp.328-329; Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.238, HC, 13 March 1878, cols.1241-1242. The Times, 14 March 1878, p.9. Tallack, Howard Letters and Memories, p.138, implied that procedural changes meant that it was difficult for a debate on abolition to be introduced by private members. There were mechanisms for introducing debate through a resolution, see Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.305, HC, 11 May 1886, cols.767-790. Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.312, HC, 24 March 1887, cols.1348-1349; the Report of the Committee to Inquire into Execution of Capital Sentences appeared in June 1888. See, in relation to pamphlets, Bell’s Life in London, 3 May 1886, p.2. For a serious political treatment, see S. Buxton, A Handbook to Political Questions of the Day. With the Arguments on Either Side (1880; London: John Murray, 1885), which dispenses with the controversy in just one page. Punch 63, 3 August 1872, p.52; John Bull, 15 May 1886, p.317. ‘A Liberal Election Address,’ The Albemarle 2:1 (July 1892), pp.1-8 [p.3]; on the Women’s Liberal Association, see Women’s Penny Paper, 19 October 1889, p.7; Women’s Herald, 2 May 1891, p.437: the proposal to endorse abolition came from Miss Tanner of Bristol. Women’s Penny Paper, 17 May 1890, p.351. In 1881–1882. See C. St John, ed., Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw: A Correspondence (1931; London: Reinhardt and Evans, 1949), p.303, on the murderess ‘poor Mary Mansell’. See also Shaw’s letter, ‘Murder Juries and the Home Secretary,’ The Times, 27 September 1898, p.8. ‘The Throne, the Halter and the Constitution,’ Reynolds’s Newspaper, 13 October 1878. See ‘The 39 Articles of the Radical Faith’, The Sporting Times, 28 November 1885, p.3. Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.212, HC, 24 July 1872, Mr Tipping, col.1735. B. Bax, Outspoken Essays on Social Subjects (London: W. Reeves, 1897), p.35. For other socialist sources of capital punishment debate, see Justice, 8 September 1894, p.2. Marx only wrote an article which en passant discussed capital punishment, in 1853, see R.M. Bohm, ‘Karl Marx and the Death Penalty,’ Critical Criminology 16: 4 (2008), pp.285-291. For an account by one of her supporters, see Lyttleton Forbes Winslow’s Recollections of Forty Years (London: J. Ouseley, 1910). Morning Post, 5 September 1899, p.2; Pall Mall Gazette, 3 March 1900, p.4; Birmingham Daily Post, 3 March 1900, Reynolds’s Newspaper, 22 April 1900. For spiritualism, see lecture by Iver MacDonnell at Marylebone in 1881, in Medium and Daybreak; on theosophy, Lucifer 6: 34 (June 1890), p.335, Mme Blavatsky’s reply to a correspondent, recommending ‘open protest on every occasion … refusal to participate in such half-human proceedings’; B. Crump, ‘Theosophy and Crime,’ Lucifer, September 1894 to January 1895, pp.304-310, pp.372-375; and A. Besant, The Changing World, and Lectures to Theosophical Students: Fifteen Lectures delivered in London during May, June, and July 1909 (London, Benares: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1910), pp.95-96.

NOTES 45

46 47 48 49 50 51

52 53 54

55

56

57 58

59

60

61

62

343

See Edward Carpenter’s ‘Mary Ansell and Capital Punishment’, Humanity, September 1899, reprinted in Carpenter, Prisons, Police and Punishment (London: Fifield, 1905) and H.B. Bonner, ‘The Gallows and the Lash,’ in H.S. Salt, ed., Humanitarian Essays (London: W. Reeves, 1897), vol.3, pp.1-31. Another member of the League, Joseph Collinson, also opposed the gallows. See also the report of discussion of criminal law reform at the Humanitarian League’s conference, The Times, 4 March 1895, p.4. S.J. Weyman, The King’s Stratagem and Other Stories (New York: Platt and Bruce, 1891) refers to ‘womanish scruples’ about capital punishment. Women’s Signal, 11 March 1897, p.150. Women’s Penny Paper, 15 November 1890. Women’s Penny Paper, 26 October 1889, p.9. See ‘A Judicial Murder’ Northern Echo, 19 July 1899, for a similar comment on the unrepresentative nature of the male-only jury, when a woman was on trial. See London Metropolitan University, Women’s Library Special Collections, Josephine Butler Letters Collection, 3 JBL/28/18, 5 August 1889, Josephine Butler to the Misses Priestman, from the online transcription (http://calmarchive.londonmet.ac.uk); ‘A Plea for Women as Jurors,’ Pall Mall Gazette, 10 August 1889, p.2. ‘The Death Penalty,’ Saturday Review 88: 2 (22 July 1899), pp.94-95 [p.95]. Hearth and Home, 27 May 1892, p.106. See G. Smith, ‘Female Suffrage,’ Macmillan’s Magazine, June 1874, pp.139-150. Another example of the argument that emancipation led to abolition was expressed by the Oban Times’s editor, see The Englishwoman’s Review, 1 June 1873, p.32. E. Belfort Bax, ‘Why I am an anti-suffragist,’ Social Democrat 3:5 (May 1909), pp.200206; see also E. Belfort Bax, Essays in Socialism: New and Old (London: Grant Richards, 1906), pp.183-199 [pp.194-195] on Mary Ansell. See D. Bentley, ‘She Butchers,’ ch.12 in J. Rowbotham and K. Stevenson, eds, Criminal Conversations: Victorian Crimes, Social Panic and Moral Outrage (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005) for the Queen’s satisfaction with the execution of Amelia Dyer. V. Mallet, ed., Life with Queen Victoria: Marie Mallet’s Letters from Court, 1887–1901 (London: J. Murray, 1968), p.173, 23 July 1899. Dunckley’s pamphlets are listed in the bibliography: he edited the Manchester Examiner and Times, 1855–1889; J. MacMaster, The Divine Purpose of Capital Punishment (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1892). Herald of Peace 17, n.s., 1 October 1881, p.299. On Peckover, see H. Brown, ‘The truest form of patriotism’: Pacifist Feminism in Britain, 1870–1902 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), ch.5. M. Drayton, ‘On the Abolition of Capital Punishment,’ Westminster Review 155: 4 (April 1901), pp.424-431; T.M. Hopkins, ‘Capital Punishment: ineffectual and mischievous,’ Westminster Review 155:2 (February 1901), pp.144-149; A.H. Fried, Diary of a Condemned Man (London: Heinemann, 1899), reviewed harshly in The Athenaeum, 2 September 1899, p.318; G.P. Lathrop, Would you Kill Him? (Edinburgh: Douglas, 1889); Westminster Review 134:1 (July 1890), denied that Lathrop’s romance had any real bearing on the question as the crime involved no capital charge, p.216. Novels in the period 1870–1901 which featured abolitionist sentiments include G. Carrington, Gregory Hawkshaw. His Characters and Opinions (London: Bell and Daldy, 1873), in which the character recommends the Dernier Jour d’un Condamné; and Mrs Humphry Ward’s Marcella (3 vols; London: Smith, Elder, 1894), in which the title character’s concern for the plight of the murderer Jim Hurd leads another character, Aldous Raeburn, to present capital punishment as the only chance for ‘self-recovery’ by the murderer. R. Buchanan, The Moment after. A Tale of the Unseen (London: Heinemann, 1890), pp.113116; see The Graphic, 1 November 1890.

344 63

64

65

66 67 68

69

70 71 72 73

74

75 76 77

78 79 80 81

VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS G. Allen, ‘Jerry Stokes,’ The Strand Magazine 1, March 1891, pp.209-307. See too, the abolitionism of the ‘Stormy Petrels’ in J.K. Jerome, Second Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1898); and the inevitably profound implications of capital punishment in Israel Zangwill, Without Prejudice (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1896), ‘A Vision of the Burden of Man.’ J. Lellenberg, D. Stashower, C. Foley, eds, Arther Conan Doyle. A Life in Letters (London: Harper Press, 2007), on Doyle’s opinion in August 1878. He had altered his opinion by 1915. See ‘On Hangings’, Law Lyrics (Glasgow: Wilson and McCormick, 1885), pp.34-36, and subsequent editions. For Oscar Wilde’s poem as propaganda against prison and gallows, see Arthur Symons, Saturday Review 85 (12 March 1898), pp.365-366. See P. Coustillas, London and the Life of Literature in Late Victorian England (Hassocks: Harvester, 1978), p.159. G. Gissing, Whirlpool (London: Laurence and Bullen, 1897), part III, ch.6, p.391. On Ellis’s attitude to abolition, see The Criminal (1879; London: Walter Scott, 1890), ch.6, ‘The Treatment of the criminal,’ pp.235-239; reviews of The Criminal such as Scots Observer 4: 94 (6 September 1890), pp.401-402 [p.401] and Time (1879), pp.671-672 [p.672]; H. Ellis, ‘Is war the best way of killing?’ in My Confessional; Questions of the Day (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1934). E.g., E. Belfort Bax, Outlooks from the New Standpoint (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1891), pp.105-106; W.F. Kirby, Evolution and Natural Theology (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1883); L. Leatham, Socialism and Character: a contribution towards a system of applied ethics (London: Twentieth Century Press, 1897). For countenancing total abolition in works on crime, see, for example, L.O. Pike, A History of Crime in England. Illustrating the Changes of the Laws in the Progress of Civilization (2 vols; London: Smith, Elder, 1873–1876), vol.2, p.578. The Zoist scorned C.M. Burnett’s pro-hanging Crime and Insanity; their causes, connexions and consequences 10 (1852), pp.113-115. Fors Clavigera, letter 35 (November 1873); letter 42 (June 1874); and letter 83 (October 1877). Tallack, Howard Letters and Memories, p.159. Tallack, Howard Letters and Memories, pp.148-149; Law Journal, 12 September 1891, p.587. ‘Candidates for the Carnificate,’ Punch 58, 19 February 1870, p.71; G.T. Smith, ‘“I Could Hang Anything you can Bring Before Me”…’ Smith draws on the archive of letters in the Corporation of London Record Office. Those believed to be innocent in the period after 1868 included John Hayes and Hugh Slane, executed at Durham in 1873 for the murder of Joseph Wain, see W. Tallack, Some General Observations on the Punishment of Death (London: Howard Association, 1893); M. Drayton, ‘On the Abolition of Capital Punishment,’ Westminster Review 155 (1901), pp.424-431 [p.428]. See, for instance, Ipswich Journal, 16 April 1870, which believed that the decision made it difficult to justify capital punishment according to most of the daily newspapers. See ‘The Man about Town,’ The Country Gentleman, 22 December 1883, p.1574. See Pall Mall Gazette, 18 April 1890, letter from Edward J. Watherston, silversmith and member of the National Liberal Club, who suggested a society, in the wake of the Florence Maybrick case (Daily News, 26 August 1889); and Pall Mall Gazette, 9 April 1890 on the Davies brothers, who had killed their father. A juror, A.T. Jackson, wrote to the press, to suggest establishing an abolitionist society, see Yorkshire Herald, 12 April 1890, p.5. On the telegrams, see Wanganui Herald (New Zealand), 9 April 1890, p.3. The Owl, 28 September 1883, p.4. The Times, 5 December 1883, p.6. Bristol Mercury, 8 April 1890. Illustrated London News, 19 March 1892, p.354; Huddersfield Daily Chronicle, 16 March 1892, p.4, Blackburn Standard and Weekly Express, 19 March 1892, p.6. Berry also gave

NOTES

82 83 84 85

86 87

88 89

90 91 92 93

94 95

96 97 98 99

100 101 102

345

illustrated pro-hanging talks, see M. Heard, ‘Pearls before Swine. A Prurient look at the Magic Lantern,’ Early Popular Visual Culture 3: 2 (September 2005), pp.179-195 [178]. See S.P. Evans, Executioner: the Chronicles of James Berry (Stroud: Sutton: 2004); H.S. Ward, ed., My Experiences as an Executioner (London: Lund [1892]), in which Berry asserts his support for capital punishment, but his desire to see its infliction reduced by introducing a verdict of not proven, and three degrees of murder. Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.335, HC, 12 April 1889, cols.422-424. Morning Post, 15 March 1892, [p.1]. Penny Illustrated Paper, 19 March 1892, p.185; Reynolds’s Newspaper, 20 March 1892 (which had the most detailed summary of his lecture), Illustrated Police News, 26 March 1892. He lectured at Kiernan’s Olympia Theatre, Overton Street, Edgehill, Liverpool Mercury, 24 May 1892; the Public Hall, Haslingden, 1 June 1892 (poster published on Haslingdens Blog Spot, http://haslingdens.blogspot.com/2009/05/james-berrybritish-hangmans-visit-to.html, accessed 12 December 2010); the Temperance Hall, Sheffield, see Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 15 September 1892, p.7; and the Corn Exchange, York, York Herald, 1 October 1892. See Western Mail (Cardiff), 17 May 1883, Anderson’s letter to editor, Illustrated Police News, 13 October 1883, and Reynolds’s Newspaper, 26 December 1875. Anderson advertised his services in letters to county gaol governors in 1875, see Lancaster Gazette, 21 August 1875, p.5, and reports of his execution of three convicts at Gloucester, Liverpool Mercury, 13 January 1874, Belfast News-Letter, 31 August 1876. The Times, 25 August 1877, p.3. See Leicester Chronicle and Leicester Mercury, 6 April 1878, reprinting a letter from the Society’s secretary John J. Bowles, and Leicester Chronicle, 2 February 1878, p.10. In that year an abolitionist paper had been delivered by F.T. Mott FRGS to the local literary and philosophical society. The president was the Unitarian William Wicks, see Leicester Chronicle, 6 November 1880, p.7, Dietetic Reformer, 1885; B.A. Roberts, A Reconstructed World: a Feminist Biography of Gertrude Richardson (Montreal, London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996), p.23. On the petition, see Leicester Chronicle, 16 March 1878, p.9. Illustrated Police News, 17 December 1881, George Mitchell, of the National Agricultural Labourers’ Union, who wrote as ‘One from the Plough’, was a leader. ‘The Gallows in England,’ The Speaker, 12 April 1890, pp.390-391 [p.391]. Hopkins, ‘Capital punishment: ineffectual and mischievous,’ p.149. Headquarters in 1914 at Margaret Chambers, 145 New Kent Road. It held annual meetings – one taking place at Caxton Hall in 1912. Its annual report for 1913 contained a portrait of Oldfield. See H. Potter, Hanging in Judgment. Appeals to write to the Society were published in articles by Beatrice Hastings and others, in the progressive and ‘modernist’ magazine, New Age, in 1910. The Times, 10 April 1908, p.6. Herald of Peace for 1889, p.316, for Liverpool Peace Association meeting for abolition, chaired by the Methodist county councillor Thomas Snape. Reports in The Crescent may have been due to the sympathies of the Liverpool Muslim convert William H. Quilliam. J. Oldfield, The Humane Review 1, April 1900, pp.58-71 [p.70]. J. Oldfield, The Humane Review, p.63. The Sun, 1 September 1889, p.1. On bungled colonial executions in the late nineteenth-century, see, for example, criticism of the Cape hangman Von Witt, The Lantern (Cape Town), 28 April 1883, p.3; The Lantern, 3 December 1887, p.3, on Haynes; and the execution of Gamouci, discussed in The Owl (Cape Town), 2 November 1900. See Tallack, The Practical Results of Total or Partial Abolition of Capital Punishment, p.3. Punch, 1846, p.23. ‘Capital Punishment – The Royal Commission,’ The Law Magazine and Law Review 17: 34 (1864), p.227.

346 103 104 105

106

107

108 109

110

111

VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS See Tallack, The Practical Results of Total or Partial Abolition of Capital Punishment, pp.9-10. The Times, 6 September 1869, p.7. The Times, 6 May 1868, p.11. The Italians had a Giornale per l’abolizione della pena di morte, (vol.1, 1861, Milano: Redaelli), edited by Petro Ellero, referred to in Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol.174, HC, 3 May 1864, col.2063. Like the British, this followed European efforts, e.g., on British abolitionists, vol.1, pp.153-154. Note the comment, pp.417-418, on the English and Belgians who had perhaps achieved more orderly freedom than the French (guardian and teachers to be imitated), hence there were in London and Liège, associations for the abolition of the death penalty. On Italian abolitionists see Moir, ed., Capital punishment, based on Professor Mittermaier’s ‘Todesstrafe’ (1866), pp.54-56. E.g., Pall Mall Gazette, 28 May 1879; on the complex reality of cantonal decisions, and the relevance to the capital punishment question, see ‘The Vote in Switzerland on Capital Punishment’, 29 May 1879, p.12; and the letter, ‘Switzerland and Capital Punishment,’ The Times, 28 July 1886, p.3. Pall Mall Gazette, 27 September 1873. A critique of Mill’s intervention appeared as ‘The Gallows’, The Homilist, 1868, pp.257-266, where it was treated as ‘exceedingly feeble and inconclusive’. See, for instance, Illustrated London News, 17 April 1869, p.374; 2 November 1872, p.414. On punishments and prisons. By his royal highness Oscar, Crown Prince of Sweden and Norway. Translated from the Second Swedish Edition by A. May (London: Smith, Elder, 1842), pp.614. See the obituary of Charles XV in Illustrated London News. See, for instance, E. Morton, Travels in Russia, and a Residence at St Petersburg and Odessa, in the years 1827 and 1829 (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1830), wherein the author ridicules the boast that capital punishment had been abolished by Catherine the Great; and R. Lister Venables, Domestic Scenes in Russia: in a Series of Letters (2nd edn; London: J. Murray, 1856), p.134. E. Pressensé, ‘On the state of Romanism in Paris,’ Evangelical Christendom (1851), p.421, instancing the comments of the Univers Religieux. Assembly debates about abolition – Lepelletier St Fargeau’s motion and Robespierre speech – were well-known episodes in the history of the first French Revolution. François Guizot examined the punishment for political crimes in a treatise in 1822, translated as General history of civilisation in Europe from the fall of the Roman Empire till the French Revolution: also, a treatise on death punishments (Edinburgh: Chambers, 1848). The republican Victor Destutt de Tracy suggested an entire abolition in 1830, see T. Raikes, France, since 1830 (2 vols; London: T and W. Boone, 1841), vol.1, pp.286-287. Louis-Philippe was opposed to the penalty (‘When a man has known his own father executed, this tends to make him more considerate for other men sentenced to similar fate,’ cited in a S.A.C.P. tract in the Edwardian period, see BL, 8425.h.(4)) and in 1832 capital punishment was abolished for certain crimes, in 1848 it was abolished for ‘political crimes’. Articles on capital punishment in the Morning Herald compared England with France, see The Punishment of Death. A selection of articles from the Morning Herald with notes (2 vols; London: Hatchard, 1836), vol.1, pp.6577. French ideas about ‘extenuating circumstances’ proved influential in capital punishment reform debates. The Quaker abolitionist J.T. Price was instrumental in establishing an anti-slavery and anti-capital punishment society, ‘La Société de la Morale Chrétienne’ in 1822; this presented a petition to the Chamber of Deputies in 1838, signed by three thousand, calling for the abolition of capital punishment. Alphonse Lamartine advocated abolition in the Chamber (7 March 1838). But advocacy of abolitionism in the Second Empire could lead to arrest and trial, as in 1851. An avocat of the Cour Impériale and counsel to the British embassy, N. Triete, furnished information on the French penal code to the Capital Punishment Commission in 1864. On French abolitionism, see J.M. Donovan, Juries and the Transformation of Criminal Justice in France in the Nineteenth & Twentieth Centuries (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), pp.65-67.

NOTES 112

113 114

115 116 117

118 119 120

121 122 123

124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131

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G. Mazzini, The Pope in the Nineteenth Century (London: C. Gilpin, 1851), p.20; see C. Camcastle, The More Moderate Side of Joseph de Maistre: Views on Political Liberty and Political Economy (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), pp.61-69. Address to M. Charles Hugo, from the Journalists of Great Britain and Ireland [London: 1851]. Thus the Solicitor’s Journal reported the speech delivered against abolitionists (Hugo, Mittermaier, Beccaria) by the Procureur-General at the Assize Court, Haut Rhin, 4 June 1864, p.620. Illustrated London Magazine (1864), p.40. This letter was reprinted in, amongst other places, Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 23 July 1864, p.7. Ouida [Marie Louise Ramé], ‘Strathmore, or Wrought by His Own Hand,’ New Monthly Magazine 132 (1864), part 18, ch.4, p.439; reprinted as Strathmore (3 vols; London: Chatto and Windus, 1865). On British ideas about French homicide, see Wiener, ‘Homicide and “Englishness”,’ pp.208-210. The Times, 14 February 1866, p.9. Hall, Patchwork, vol.1, p.61. I resist the temptation to survey the penal positions of eminent Victorians, apart from those most germane to the study (Dickens, Thackeray, Carlyle, Stephens, Ruskin, Eliot, the Brownings). I have not found out Charles Darwin’s views but Alfred Russel Wallace’s lifelong abolitionist sentiments appeared in a Edwardian leaflet (‘no.2’) for the S.A.C.P., see BL, 8425.h.(5). Cheshire Observer, 16 August 1856. A homicide amendment bill was introduced by the Recorder of London, Russell Gurney, in 1874. As suggested by the retentionist Alexander Smith, in an essay entitled ‘A Lark’s Flight’, in Dreamthorp. A Book of Essays written in the Country (London: Strahan, 1863). This vein of reasoning, akin to Gatrell’s point about the execution crowd’s embodiment of primal fascination with death (Hanging Tree, p.242), was not, in fact, commonly expressed. Pall Mall Gazette, 29 December 1865. The Standard, 10 March 1847. Huddersfield Chronicle, 19 November 1864, p.5. S. Amos, Capital punishment in England, pp.10-11. Magazine of Popular Information on Capital and Secondary Punishments, 15 June 1845, p.59. Radzinowicz, History of English Criminal Law vol.4, p.343; White, ‘Ordering the Mob: London’s Public Punishments c.1783–1868,’ p.314. J. Kirkpatrick, ‘The Victorian Era. Lecture III,’ Atalanta, 1 December 1891, p.172. The last execution in Britain took place in 1964. The death penalty remained on the statute book for the offences of treason and piracy with violence.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Archives National Archives (Kew) Home Office, Daily Register, HO 46. Home Office, Criminal Department, Register of Papers, HO 14. Home Office, Criminal Department, Old Criminal [OC] Papers (1849–1871; original letters, memorials and other papers relating to criminal matters entered in Registers [HO 14] as being present), HO 12. Home Office, Criminal Files, HO 45.

National Library of Scotland Magazine of Popular Information on Capital and Secondary Punishments.

Warwick University Special Collection: HF 4000 H6 (previously SpC 5c a1): reports of the S.A.C.P. (1866, 1868 and 1872); Howard Association and abolitionist tracts previously belonging to the Association’s reference library. Modern Records Centre: Howard League for Penal Reform Papers (MSS.16). MSS 16A/6/1/1-51, printed evidence of the Royal Commission 1864, with pencil annotations by John Bright.

Duke University, North Carolina Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library: Charles Gilpin Papers.

Society of Friends’ Library, London MSS and Biographical Index.

West Sussex Record Office Cobden Papers 5, 65, Anna C. Gilpin to Richard Cobden, 16 June 1857.

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Parliamentary and official papers Hansard Parliamentary Debates Parl. Papers, 1856, VII. 9, Select Committee of House of Lords to consider present Mode of Capital Punishments. Report, Minutes of Evidence and Appendix. Ordered to be printed 7th July 1856. Parl. Papers, 1863 (119) Jessie Maclauchlan. Copies of documents relating to the case of Jessie Maclauchlan, convicted of murder at Glasgow in September; and of the correspondence between Messrs Smith and Wright and the Home Department in October and November 1862. Ordered to be printed 20 March 1863. Parl. Papers, 1864 (37) George Victor Townley. Copy of correspondence with the Secretary of State for the Home Department, and of orders or warrants issued by him, relating to the case of George Victor Townley. Ordered to be printed 11 February 1864. Parl. Papers, 1864 (74) Samuel Wright. Papers relating to the case of Samuel Wright. Ordered to be printed 22 February 1864. Parl. Papers, 1866, XXI.I, Report of the Capital Punishment Commission; together with the minutes of evidence and appendix.

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Pamphlets on Capital Punishment 1. Abolitionist pamphlets. — Address by the Society for Diffusing Information on the Subject of Capital Punishment (London: Bensley and Son, 1817) — Abolition of death punishment: report of the great public meeting at Exeter, on Thursday, the 28th of January 1847, including the speech of Lord Nugent verbatim (Exeter: Exeter Society for Promoting the Total Abolition of the Punishment of Death, 1847) — Capital punishment from a utilitarian point of view. By a Barrister, late scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge (London: R.J. Mitchell, 1879) — Capital Punishment not grounded on Scripture (London, 1851) — Capital Punishment under the gospel dispensation anti-scriptural. A Letter to the author of ‘Inquisition for Blood,’ …by a member of the Church of England (London, 1847) — Capital Punishment under the Gospel dispensation anti-scriptural. A Letter to the Author of ‘Inquisition for Blood’ (London, Simpkin, Marshall, and Gilpin; Norwich: Jarrold and Son) — Ceylon and the Punishment of Death (London: S.A.C.P., 1909) — Christians strangling Christians [a paper circulating in Ireland c.1839] — Debate upon the motion for the abolition of punishment of death in the House of Commons Tuesday, March 9 1847 (London: Gilpin, 1847) — Does the Bible authorize capital punishment for murder? By a member of the Fourth Estate (Glasgow: David Robertson, 1845) — Hints for whom they may concern No.2 Capital Punishment. Dedicated to ‘the church’ (London; F. Bowyer Kitto, 1867) — India and Colonial Committee (London: S.A.C.P., 1909) — On the Punishment of Death (Liverpool: Marples, 1835)

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— Papers published by the committee established at Aylesbury, 1845, for the purpose of collecting and diffusing information on the punishment of death (London: Gilpin, 1845) — Public Meeting at Exeter Hall, Strand, 30 May, 1831. Substance of the Speeches of Dr. Lushington and J. Sydney Taylor, A.M. in discussing the Resolution relative to the Punishment of Death (London: Harvey and Darton, 1831) — Punishment of Death – the Statistical Argument. Reprinted from ‘The Eclectic Review’ 1 August 1848 (London: Gilpin) — Punishment of Death (London: Gilpin, T.P. Barkas, c.1841) — Punishment of Death. The York tragedy (York, London: Gilpin, 1850) — Report of a Public meeting called at Reading July 28 1845 Edward Vines Esq … Undersheriff in the chair [Daily News advertisement for Gilpin, 2 March 1846] — Reports of the Speeches delivered before the Town Council of Edinburgh by Messrs Russell and Cruickshank (Edinburgh: Oliphant, 1845) — Sophistries and Fallacies in defence of the gibbet exposed and refuted (Perth, 1850) — Speech of the Right Hon. Sir William Meredith, Bart. in the House of Commons, May 13, 1777, in committee on a bill creating a new capital felony (London: Harvey and Darton, 1831) — The gospel, the power of God to give immediate peace and safety, displayed in the conversion & triumphant death of William Mills, who was executed at Edinburgh, Sept. 21, 1785; to which is added an Essay on Death Punishment from Elihu Burritt’s ‘Sparks from the anvil’ (Glasgow: Christian News and Day Star Offices, 1848) — The Groans of the Gallows, or the Past and Present Life of William Calcraft. The Living Hangman of Newgate (E. Hancock, 5, Summer Street-hill). A version of this work c.1840, purports to be published by the ‘Society for Reforming the Criminal Code and Abolishing the Punishment of Death’ — The Heroes of the Guillotine and Gallows, or, the Awful Adventures of Askern, Smith and Calcraft, the Three Rival Hangman of York Castle, Stafford Gaol and Newgate, and Sanson, the Executioner of Paris with his cabinet of Murderer’s Curiosities (London: Frederick Farrah) — The Impolicy of Capital Punishment Considered, derived from given cases of Circumstantial Evidence wherein the guilty have been acquitted and the innocent convicted and executed, by a resident of Birmingham (Birmingham: R. Edwards, 1864) — The Inexpediency of Capital Punishment proved by statistics derived from official sources, 1846 (London: Gilpin, 1846) — The Philosopher on the Hangman from Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 3 May 1868 (London: Tweedie, 1868) — Who are the Murderers? An earnest appeal to the Christian Public on the Subject of Capital Punishment [Daily News advertisement for Gilpin, 2 March 1846] ‘AMPHO’, War and Capital Punishment opposed to Christianity with remarks on a tract by Walter Scott (London: Jackson and Walford, Bradford: H.B. Byles, Kirkgate, Leeds: John, 1846). ‘ANTI-GALLOWS’, Why ought the punishment of death to be abolished? (London: Gilpin, 1846) ‘BARRISTER OF THE MIDDLE TEMPLE’, Shall the Murderer be hanged? Reflections on Capital Punishment (London: Hatton, 1865) ‘D’, The Expediency of abolishing Capital Punishments. Being a series of letters addressed to the editor of the Manchester and Salford Advertiser (Manchester: Advertiser office, 1842) ‘ETONIAN’, Our Heartless Policy. Dedicated to the High Minded and Reflecting of all Nations at the Approaching Exhibition (London, 1851) ‘HUMANITAS’, Twelve Reasons against taking away life as a punishment (London: B.D. Cousins, c.1846) ‘REHUM’, Capital Punishment not grounded on scripture, uunder the gospel dispensation (London, 1851) ALEXANDER, W.L., A Plea for the Gibbet, by the editor of the Scottish Congregational magazine, with a reply by a member of the Society formed to promote the abolition of capital punishment (London, 1848) ALEXANDER, W., Capital Punishments (York, c.1840) AMOS, S., Capital Punishment in England Viewed as Operating in the Present Day (London: W. Ridgway, 1864)

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ARMITAGE, R., The Penscellwood Papers. Comprising Essays on the Suols and future life of animals; on Capital Punishments; on the Evangelical Alliance; on the endowment of the Protestant and Roman Catholic Churches of Ireland; and the Education of the People (2 vols; London: 1846) BAKEWELL, G., Observations on Circumstantial Evidence (Sheffield: J. Dyson, 1848) BANNISTER, S., Reason and Authority against Capital Punishment, from the ‘Social Science Review’ (London: W.H. Warr, 1865) BEEDLE, S., An Essay on the Advisability of Total Abolition of Capital Punishment (London: Nichols, 1867) BEGGS, T., The Deterrent Influence of Capital Punishment being a reply to the Speech of J.S. Mill Esq MP (2nd edn., London: W. Tweedie, 1868) BESANT, A., The Ethics of Punishment (London: Besant and Bradlaugh, 1880) BONNER, H., The Gallows and the Lash: an enquiry into the necessity for capital and corporal punishments (London: W. Reeves, 1897) (also published as ‘The Gallows and the Lash,’ in H.S. Salt, ed., Humanitarian Essays (London: W. Reeves, 1897), vol.3) BRENTON, E.P., The Bible and the Spade; or Captain Brenton’s account of the Rise and progress of the Children’s Friends Society …and eventually to dispense with capital punishment and impressments (London: J. Nisbet, 1837) CARSON, J.C.L., Capital Punishment is Murder Legalized (London: Houlston and Wright, 1866; and later edns) CHRISTMAS, H., Capital Punishment unsanctioned by the Gospel, and Unnecessary in a Christian State (London: C. Gilpin, 1846) CLARKSON, T., Prospectus for the Society for the Diffusion of Information on the Subject of Capital Punishment (London, 1831) COMBE, G., Thoughts on Capital Punishment (Edinburgh: Maclachlan, Stewart, 1847) COOPER, T., Two orations against taking any human life under any circumstances (London: Chapman, 1856) COPINGER, W.A., An Essay on the Abolition of Capital Punishment. Embracing more particularly an enunciation and analysis of the principles of law as applicable to criminals of the highest degree of guilt (London: Stevens and Haynes, 1876) DEES, R.R., The Inexpediency of Capital Punishment (Newcastle upon Tyne: Finlay and Charlton, 1835) DISHER, J., Lay sermons on capital punishment; or, guilt and retribution relative to the law and gospel (Glasgow: W. Macrone, 1873) DRANE, J.W.C., God’s Punishment of Cain the Murderer’s. Or, Does Christianity Sanction the Taking of Life for the Crime of Murder? (London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1856) DUNCANSON, A., Ketchiana, or the punishment of death by the civil law proven to be in opposition to enlightened reason, and growing social and political policy and also to be antagonistic to the mind of God, as expressed under the Patriarchal, Jewish and Christian dispensations (London: Gilpin; W. Strange, 1851) DUNCKLEY, H., Capital Punishment. Two Letters (Manchester: Ireland, 1884) ———— Should Capital Punishment be Retained? Reprinted by permission, from the British Weekly, 18th October 1889 (Bristol: Arrowsmith, c.1889) DYMOND, A.H., ‘Capital Punishment Practically Considered’, in Three papers on Capital Punishment (London: Society for Promoting the Amendment of the Law, 1856) ———— Discussion on Capital Punishment. A full and impartial report of the public discussion on the scriptural argument, relating to the punishment of death, held at lewes, 9th October, 1855, between Rev. J.I. Dunlop, minister of the Old Chapel; and A.H. Dymond …secretary to the Society for the Abolition of the Punishment of Death (London: W. and F.G. Cash, Lewes: Morris, 1855) ———— Inquiry into the recent execution of William Ross at York (1850) ———— The Law on its Trial, or personal recollections of the death penalty and its opponents (London: A.W. Bennett, 1865) ———— Who’s Right? A Letter to Sir George Grey, Bart., secretary of State for the Home department, in reply to the speech in the House of Commons, in opposition to the motion of W. Ewart, Esq., MP, ‘For

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a select Committee to inquire into the operation of the laws imposing the punishment of death.’ (London: W. and F.G. Cash, 1856) EDGER, S., Capital Punishment wholly unscriptural and unreasonable: a discourse …preached in Ock Street, Abingdon, on the occasion of the Execution of William Palmer (Abingdon, 1856) ELLERMAN, C.F., Alphonso Barbo, or the Punishment of Death. A Tragedy in Three Acts (London: Effingham Wilson, 1850) ELLIS, J., Some reasons why ‘capital punishment,’ or the sentence of death, ought to be abolished (London: E.W. Allen, 1879) EWART, W., Capital Punishment. Speech in favour of an Inquiry by a select Committee into the expediency of maintaining capital punishment, by William Ewart Esq., MP in the House of Commons, 1860 (London: Ridgway) FLEETWOOD, P.H., The Last Days of a Condemned from the French of M. Victor Hugo (London: Smith, Elder, 1840) GILPIN, C., Speech of Charles Gilpin Esq. M.P. in Committee on the Capital Punishment within Prisons Bill in the House of Commons, Tuesday April 21, 1868 (London: C. Buck, 1868) GOODACRE, R.H., The duty of intercession and the execution of the murderer, God’s warning to sinners (Stafford, 1856) GREEN, J., Death Punishment Indefensible; Man forbidden by God to take Man’s Life (London: J. Chapman; Birmingham: Belcher, Allen, Osborne, Guest). Three editions (3rd edn, 1862), and reprinted in John Green, Discourses: Unitarian Church, Newhall Hill, Birmingham (1862) GRENVILLE, G.N., On the Punishment of Death by Law. An argument in the way of dialogue; with a letter to Basil Montagu, Esq. (London: Ridgway, 1840) GUY, W.A. On Crime as affected by the Death Punishment (London: S.A.C.P., 1869) HANCOCK, T., The law of mercy: a poetical essay on the punishment of death, with illustrative notes (London: J. and A. Arch, 1819) HAUGHTON, J., On Death Punishments: A Paper read before the Dublin Statistical Society (Dublin: Published for the Society by Hodges and Smith, 1850) HAWKE, G., A Lecture on Capital Punishment delivered at the Court House, Orange, New South Wales (Orange: Western Examiner, 1871) HEATON, G., It is not lawful for us to put any man to death: An essay in favour of totally repealing the punishment of death in the British Dominions (London: Gilpin, 1849) HILL, F., The Substitute for Capital Punishment (London: S.A.C.P., 1866) HILLMAN, W.G., Is capital punishment in unison with the teachings of the New Testament – a sermon preached shortly after the execution of William Palmer by the Reverend W.G. Hillman (Stafford: Hill and Halden, 1856) HOBART, H.V., On Capital Punishment for Murder. An Essay (London: Parker, Son and Bourn, 1861) HOLYOAKE, G.J., Public Lessons of the Hangman. 16 November 1864 (4th thousand, London: Farrah, 1864) HORNE, R.H., Murder-Heroes and the Diseased Drama of their Crime, Trial, Sentence and Execution: all they said and did, how they were dressed, what they ate and drank, how polite and grateful they were, and with what sort of step they ascended the scaffold ; the whole history embodied and exemplified in the extraordinary narrative of Gottlieb Einhalter, a murder-hero of that eminence which invariably commands the most intense interest, and whose fate displays ... the most pungent moral lesson (London: Kent and Richards, 1849) [or Gottlieb Einhalter, or the Philanthropic Assassin, orig. in Howitt’s Journal, vol.1, 1847] HOVENDEN, R., Crime and Punishment (London: Gilpin 1849) ———— Tracts of Future Times. Reflections of Posterity. On the Excitement, Hypocrisy and Idolatry of the Nineteenth Century (London: Gilpin) ‘HOWARD ASSOCIATION’, Eminent Americans on Capital Punishment (London: Howard Association, c.1869) JEREMIE, P., A lecture delivered on Tuesday evening, December 21, 1858, at the Working men’s Association, Temperance Hall, Guernsey, on the relative effects of lenient and severe punishment on the

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repression of crime - the unlawfulness of capital punishment – and the future of the working man (Guernsey: F. Le Lievre, 1859) KENTISH, N.L., Essay on Capital Punishment. With an earnest appeal and dutiful petition to the Queen (Hobart: S.A. Tegg, 1842) ———— Treatise on Penal Discipline (Melbourne, 1858) LEE, F., Abolition of Capital Punishment. A Lecture delivered in the Society of Arts, New South Wales, 26th May 1864 (Sydney: Hanson and Bennet, 1864) LEITH-FORBES, T.A., Hanging and Scenes Witnessed before the Gallows, Being a Public Execution in a Civilized Christian Country (London, 1868) LEVI, L., The Law of Nature and Nations as affected by divine law (London: W. and F.G. Cash, 1855) MACMASTER, J., The Divine Purpose of Capital Punishment (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1892) M’ EWEN, C., Lecture on capital punishments: delivered in St Ann’s Church, Great Hamilton Street … (Glasgow: W. and W. Miller, 1840) MARTIN, E., The Punishment of Death: a Lecture delivered by Mrs Martin 23 November 1849 (London: Watson, 1849) MAYHEW, H., ‘On Capital Punishments’, in Three Papers on the subject of Capital Punishment (1866) MCCAY, J., Punishment of Death. Letter to Lieutenant General Sir Herbert Taylor KCB… Respecting George Wren and Harrington, under sentence of death (London: Hatchard and Son, 1834) MEREDITH, W., Speech of the Right Honourable Sir William Meredith, Baronet (London: Society for Diffusion of Information on the Subject of Capital Punishments, 1831–1832) MIDLANE, A., A Colloquy between the Gallows and the Hangman. A poem on the evils of capital punishment with notes (London: Gilpin, 1851) MOIR, J.M., Capital Punishment, based on Professoer Mittermaier’s ‘Todesstrafe’ (London: Smith, Elder, 1865) MONTAGU, B., The Opinions of different authors upon the punishment of death (1809; expanded 1816– 1816, London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown) 3 vols. MORGAN, J., Capital Punishment inconsistent with the Doctrine of the Gospel, and the Welfare of the Community. A lecture delivered at Eign-Brook Chapel, Hereford, on the 13th day of 7th month (July) 1854 (Hereford: Joseph Jones, 1854) MYLES, J., Remarks on Death Punishments (Dundee: James Myles, c.1848). Reached a 4th edn. NAYLER, B.S., An Appeal from the prejudices to the judgements, of the inhabitants of Melbourne, on the Capital Punishment Question, St George’s Hall, 12th December 1866 (Melbourne, R. Bell, 1866) NEATE, C., Considerations on the Punishment of Death (London: J. Ridgway, 1840) NEWTON, W., The total abolition of the death penalty defended (Newcastle on Tyne: T.P. Barkas, 1850) OLDFIELD, J., The penalty of death: or the problem of capital punishment (London: Bell, 1901) OSCAR, On punishments and prisons. By his royal highness Oscar, Crown Prince of Sweden and Norway. Translated from the Second Swedish Edition by A. May (London: Smith, Elder, 1842) PEGGS, J., Capital Punishment: the Importance of its abolition: a Prize Essay (London: T. Ward, 1839) PELL, J., Punishment of Death proved to be unlawful, in a letter to the marquis of Northampton, December 29, 1834 (London: Hamilton, Adams, 1835) PHILLIPS, C., Vacation Thoughts on Capital Punishment (Brighton: R. Folthorp / London: Longman, 1856; ‘ten thousand’, London: W. and F.G. Cash, 1857; 4th edn in 1858) PHILLIPS, W.S., Considerations on the Increase and Progress of Crime accompanied by Documentary Evidence as to the Propriety and necessity of a Revision and Amendment of the Existing penal Statutes with a view to the abolition of corporeal punishment; and more particularly the awful penalty of death (Liverpool: D. Marples, 1839) PYNE, T., A Plea for the Abolition of Capital Punishment (London: Gilpin, 1845) PYRKE, D., transl. of V. Hugo, Claude Gueux. The Last Days of Condemned Man (London: Robert Hardwicke, 1865) RIPPON, J., Capital Punishment Unlawful and Inexpedient. An Essay on the Punishment of Death (London: W. and F.G. Cash, 1854)

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ROBERTS, S., Lectures on capital punishments (Sheffield: A. Whitaker, 1839) ———— Queen’s coronation: an address to the females of Sheffield on the wickedness, the barbarity, and the impolicy of the punishment of death in all classes (Sheffield: A. Whitaker, 1838) ———— The Sacredness of Human Life. A Letter addressed to the incumbent of St James’s, Sheffield, on capital punishments (London: Darton, 1841) ———— The Sheffield and Nottingham Tragedies; or, the evils of capital punishment (Sheffield: W. Ford, 1844) ROWTON, F., The Punishment of Death Reviewed (London: Gilpin, 1846) SPEAR,C., Essays on the Punishment of Death (London: J. Green, 1844; later editions in 1845 published by J. Chapman) SPRIGGS, W., A letter originally addressed to the late William Cash, Esq. …showing the benefits of total abstinence from intoxicating liquors…to which is added remarks on capital punishment (London: Gilpin, 1849) STODDART, R.W., Capital punishment, drunkenness and the game laws. The three great questions of the day. A letter to the editor of the ‘Bury Free Press’, November 18th 1871 (Bury: Lucia, 1871) STOKES, W., Private Hanging and Capital Punishment. A Letter to the Bishop of Manchester (Manchester: A. Megson, 1863) ———— Thou shalt not Kill. An argument and a remonstrance with an appendix containing strictures on capital punishment by the Reverend Walter Scott (London: Gilpin, 1848) STRATON, F., The Sinfulness of Death as a Punishment by Man (Madras: Reuben Twigg, 1847) TALLACK, W., Humanity and Humanitarianism: with special reference to the prison systems of Great Britain and the United States, the question of criminal lunacy, and capital punishment (London: F.B. Kitto, 1871) ———— Some General Observations on the Punishment of Death (London: Howard Association, 1893) ———— The Practical Results of Total or Partial Abolition of Capital Punishment in various countries (1866, S.A.C.P. publication) ———— A General Review of the Subject of Capital Punishment (London: S.A.C.P., 1866; a reprint from the Social Science Review) TANNER, W., Death Punishments. To the Editor of the Bristol Mercury (1856) TAYLOR, J.S., Anti-Draco, or, Reasons for abolishing the punishment of death, in cases of forgery. By a barrister of the Middle Temple (London: J. Ridgway, 1830) ———— The Punishment of Death: A Selection of Articles from the Morning Herald, with Notes (London: Society for the Diffusion of Information on the Subject of Capital Punishments, 1839) 2 vols ———— A Comparative View of the Punishments annexed to crime in the United States of America and in England (London: Harvey and Darton, 1831) TREVELYAN, A., Letter on Capital Punishment addressed to Sir G.C. Lewis, Secretary of State by Arthur Trevelyan; with a litany for the gallows (1859; 2nd edn, Edinburgh) WAKEFIELD, E.G., Facts relating to the Punishment of Death in the Metropolis (London: J. Ridgway, 1831) ———— The hangman and the judge, or, a letter from Jack Ketch to Mr Justice Alderson (London: Effingham Wilson, 1833). WEBSTER, E., ‘Remarks on Capital Punishment in cases of murder’, in Three Papers on the subject of Capital Punishment (1866) ———— Observations of the Report of the Select Committee of the House of Lords (London: Society for Promoting the Amendment of the Law [1866]) WATSON, G.N., Lecture on the Punishment of Death (Cork: Nash, 1845) WILLIAMS, J., An Essay on the Inexpediency and Inefficiency of Capital Punishment (London: Baldwin and Cradock, 1836) WILLMORE, B., Letters on Capital Punishment (listed Crockford’s, 1868) WIX, S., Reflections concerning the Inexpediency and Unchrsitian Character of Capital Punishments as prescribed by the Criminal Laws of England (London: J.G. and F. Rivington, 1832)

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WOOLRYCH, H.W., ‘On the Report of the Capital Commission of 1866,’ read to the Jurisprudence Department of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, 26 March 1866, in Sessional Papers of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science (London: Chapman and Hall, 1866) pp.239-244. ———— The History and Results of the present Capital Punishments in England; to which are added full tables of convictions, executions, &c. (London: Saunders and Benning, 1866) WRIGHTSON, T., On the Punishment of Death (2nd edn, London: J. Hearne, 1833) 2. Retentionist pamphlets — Capital Punishment Vindicated. By a member of the City of London Literary and Scientific Institution (London: Wertheimer, 1843) — The Law of Capital Punishment Tested by Scripture (London: T.H. Gregg, 1857) — Witness for Judgement, Mercy and Faith. Inquisition for Blood (London: Operative Jewish Converts’ Institution, 1847) 2nd edn 1850 ‘B.W.’, Letters on Capital Punishment by a Student of St Bees College (London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1847) ‘BOMOLOCHUS’, Is Capital Punishment Necessary. A few simple reasons for altering the present law (London: W. Ridgway, 1869) ‘PHILANDER’, [Reverend James Wright] Capital Punishment: is it defensible, by Philander (London: J. Nisbet, 1865) ‘PRO ECCLESIA DEI,’ Capital Punishment not Opposed to the Doctrine of the Christian Religion, considered in Two Letters by a priest of the Catholic Church established in England (London: W. Pickering, 1850) BAGSHAWE, C.F., On Capital Punishments in Public (Manchester: Charles Simons, 1863) BALL, T.H., Capital Punishment but Private Execution. A sermon preached in nthe Parish Church of St. Andrew, Holborn … (London: J. Hope, 1860) CAMPBELL, A., Capital Punishment sanctioned by Divine Authority. An Essay reprinted from the American ‘Millenial Harbinger’ (London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1846) CARR, R., The Penalty of Death Retained for Cruel Atrocities. Part the First. The Divine Sanction (London: Edmund Lloyd and Simpkin, Marshall and Co., 1841) CHARLESWORTH, S., A Brief and Earnest Word on Capital Punishment (Newcastle upon Tyne: Blackwell, 1862) CHASE, H.J.N., Capital Punishment binding on the civil ruler (London: Hamilton, Adams, c.1848) COBBETT, J.P., Englishmen hanged in private. Two letters to the Editor of the Oldham Standard (Manchester: J. Heywood, 1863) COOK, R.T., Capital Punishment. Is it consistent with scripture, reason, and political economy? (Norwich: R.T. Cook, 1868) COOPER, R.J., On Capital Punishment and the Extreme Danger of Relaxing or Modifying the Law in Cases of Murder (London: Parker, Stroud, and Oxford, 1867) DRANE, J.W.C., God’s Punishment of Cain the Murderer: or, Does Christianity sanction the taking of life for the crime of murder? (London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1856) GROVE, G., Divine Authority for the Capital Punishment of Murderers. Derived from Genesis IX, 4,5,6, and the Eclectic reviewer Reviewed. Being the Substance of a Speech Delivered at a Meeting Held at the Guildhall, Worcester, April 4, 1849, for the Purpose of Hearing Messrs. Gilpin and Beggs Advocate the entire abolition of the punishment of death (Worcester: J. Grainger, 1849) HALESWORTH, E.H., A Vindication of the Penalty of Death (London: Longman, 1849) HAVERGAL, W.H., Death for Murder, the doctrine of all Holy Scripture. A discourse delivered in the parish church of St Nicholas, in the City of Worcester on the evening of Thursday, March 22nd, 1849 (Worcester: T. Stratford, London: Longman, 1849) HEPPLE, E., Is the Punishment of Death right? A tract for the Times (Newcastle, c.1845) HOLLAND, T.A., A time of War …with a supplementary note shewing the scriptural obligation of capital punishment (Brighton: Charles E. Verrall, 1855)

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HOUSMAN, H., The Punishment of Death for Murder. A sermon (on Mark ix.7) (London: J. Masters, 1875) HOUSTON, J.C., Criticism criticized: A letter to the Author of two articles in the ‘Eclectic review’ on the Punishment of Death (Newcastle upon Tyne / London: Whittaker, 1850) KELLY, W., ‘The Powers that be,’ …with remarks on capital punishment (London: W.H. Broom, 1854) KENNAWAY, C.E., Capital Punishment. The Sacredness of Life. An assize sermon preached in Exeter (Exeter: Mayne, Clifford, Roberts, 1866) LARKIN, C., Death: the Just Doom of the Murderers: a lecture (Newcastle upon Tyne: J.L.C. Street, 1849) LOWE, T.H., The sacredness of life, and the doom of murder: a sermon preached in the Cathedral Church of S. Peter, Exeter, on Sunday, March 25th, 1849 (Exeter: Wallis, 1849) ROGER, C., Thoughts in Support of Capital Punishments. By Charles Roger. Published at the desire of his fellow-students attending the University of St Andrews (Cupar-Fife: W. Gardiner, G. Stullis and R. Anderson, 1840) ROWTON, R.J., Capital Punishment for Murder Scriptural; or, the divine law vindicated (London: Wertheim and Macintosh, 1849) SCOTT, W., The punishment of death for the crime of murder, rational, Scriptural and salutary (London: Simpkin, 1846; 2nd edn, enlarged, 1858) SMEE, A., Philosophical Reasons for not hanging Garrotters and Burglars. By a member of the Society of Friends (London: Rixon and Arnold, 1863) STEPHEN, J.F., The Definition of Murder Considered in Relation to the Report of the Capital Punishment Commissioners (London: Longman, 1866) STEWART, A., The Law of Capital Punishment according to Scripture (London, 1873) VALDEZ, P., Song sung by the philanthropists of Great Britain and Ireland, when the bill for the abolition of the punishment of death received the sanction of the Sovereign (London, 1852) VENABLES, G., Death for murder a divine decree: a sermon preached by the Rev. G. Venables …after the execution of William Palmer (London, 1856) WATKINS, J.W., A brief reply to Mr Commissioner Phillips Vacation Thoughts (London: W. Skeffington, 1858) WOODWARD, J.H., Capital Punishment. A Sermon (Bristol, 1849) WORDSWORTH, C., On the punishment of death for wilful murder, a sermon, preached in Westminster Abbey (Oxford: Rivingtons, 1868) WRIGHT, S., A Speech in Defence of Capital Punishment (1838) 3. Other pamphlets (position not determined) — A Few Thoughts Concerning Infanticide and Capital Punishment addressed to Medical Witnesses, Coroners, Journeymen, Legislators and the Public (London: Chapman and Hall, 1867) — Report of a public meeting on the subject of capital punishment, held at the Mechanics’s Institute, Devonport, May 22nd 1849 (Devonport: W. Byers, 1849) — Benevolence in Punishment; or Transportation made Reformatory (London: Seeley, Burnside and Seeley, 1845) BUNN, H., Copy of a Letter on Capital Punishments (Birmingham: B. Hunt, 1845) CALCRAFT, W., The Hangman’s Compliments to the Public (London: Elliott) SMITH, S., The Punishment of Death and moral responsibility, with casts of the head of J.B. Rush, his development and character (London: J. Kendrick, 1849)

Broadsides British Library, 85/1899.b.1, The Execution of Five Pirates for Murder’ (London: H. Disley, 1864); 74/1888.c.3 (31), Grand Moral Spectacle (London: C. Gilpin, 1847); 74/1888.c.3.1.100, General Executions for 1856 (Bristol: John Chapman); 74/1888.c.3.1.33, Calcraft’s lament! Or, the

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JEPHSON, H., The Platform: its Rise and Progress (2 vols; London and New York: Macmillan, 1892) JERROLD, D., et al, Heads of the People, or Portraits of the English (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1864) KINGSLEY, F.E.G., Charles Kingsley. His Letters and Memories of His Life (2 vols, London: H.S. King, 1877), vol.1 KOSSUTH, L., Memories of my Exile (New York: D. Appleton, 1880) LANG, J., Wanderings in India and Other Sketches of Life in Hindostan (London: Routledge, 1859) LECKY, W.H., History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism (2 vols, London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts and Green, 1865), vol.1 LEVI, L., Annals of British Legislation: Digest of Blue Books (3 vols; London: Smith, Elder, 1866), n.s., vol.3 ———— The Law of Nature and Nations as affected by Divine Law (London: W. and F.G. Cash, 1855) MACKINTOSH, R.J., ed., Memoirs of the Life of Sir James Mackintosh (2 vols, 2nd edn, London: E. Moxon, 1836), vol.1 MARTINEAU, H., The Pictorial History of England during the Thirty Years’ Peace 1816–1846 (1849– 1850; London: W. and R. Chambers, 1858) MAYHEW, H., London Labour and the London Poor (London: Griffin, Bohn, 1861), vol.1 PIKE, L.O., A History of Crime in England. Illustrating the Changes of the Laws in the Progress of Civilization (2 vols; London: Smith, Elder, 1873–1876), vol.2 REED, C., Two Applications to the Sudder Deewanee and Nizamat Adlauts Made for the Purpose of having due moral instruction afforded to Prisoners, and to have Capital Punishments Abolished (Calcutta, 1833) REYNOLDS, G.W.M., The Mysteries of London (London: George Vickers, 1846), vol.1-3. ———— The Mysteries of the Courts of London (London: J. Dicks, 1849 – 1853) RICHARD, H., Memoirs of Joseph Sturge (2 vols; London: S.W. Partridge), vol.2 RITCHIE, J.E., British Senators, or, Political Sketches, Past and Present (London: Tinsley, 1869) SAVAGE, M.W., Reuben Medlicott; or, The Coming Man (New York: D. Appleton, 1852) SHERWOOD, M., Fairchild Family; or, The child’s manual (6th edn, London: J. Hatcherd, 1822) SKENE, F., Scenes from a Silent World: or, Prisons and their Inmates (Edinburgh: Blackwood and Sons, 1889) STEPHEN, J.F., Essays. By a Barrister (Reprinted from the Saturday Review) (London: Smith, Elder, 1862) SYMONS, J.C., Tactics for the Times: as Regards the Condition and Treatment of the Dangerous Classes (London: John Ollivier, 1849) TALLACK, W., Howard Letters and Memories (London: Methuen, 1905) ———— Peter Bedford, The Spitalfields Philanthropist (London: S.W. Partridge, 1865) TAYLOR, J.S., Selections from the Writings of the Late John Sydney Taylor (London: C. Gilpin, 1843) WARD, H.S., ed., My Experiences as an Executioner (London: Lund [1892]) WHEELER, E., What shall we do at Delhi? An Englishman’s letter to the Humanitarians (London: D.F. Oakey, 1857) WHITEHEAD, C., The Autobiography of Jack Ketch (London: E. Churton, 1835)

Articles ALLEN, G., ‘Jerry Stokes,’ The Strand Magazine 1, March 1891, pp.209-307. BURTON, H.L., ‘Criminal Law,’ The Odd Fellows’ Magazine 7 (January 1844–October 1845) pp.152-158 CARLYLE, T., ‘Dr Francia’, Foreign Quarterly Review 31: 62 (1843), pp.544-589. DRAYTON, M., ‘On the Abolition of Capital Punishment,’ Westminster Review 155: 4 (April 1901), pp.424-431. ELLIS, C.N., ‘Death by Electricity,’ Chemical News and Journal of Industrial Sciences, 1 May 1868, pp.216-217. GILBERT, W., ‘The Dreadful Four Minutes,’ Good Words 7, 1 January 1866, pp.33-38.

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GRAHAM, H., ‘Seeing a Man Hanged,’ The Rose, the Shamrock and the Thistle 5:28, August 1864, pp.406-408. HAUGHTON, S., ‘On Hanging, considered from a Mechanical and Physiological point of view,’ The London, Edinburgh and Dublin Physiological Magazine and Journal of Sciences 32, 4th series (JulyDecember 1866), pp.23-34. HOPKINS, T.M., ‘Capital punishment: ineffectual and mischievous,’ Westminster Review 155: 2 (February 1901) pp.144-149. HORNE, R.H., ‘Analysis of Crime,’ Journal of Physiological Medicine 3, p.122. ———— ‘The New Dance of Death. A Scene for Legislators,’ Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine 7: 38 (January–June 1848), pp.146-149. JERROLD, D., ‘The Hedgehog Letters: 29, To Lord Nugent,’ Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine 3: 18 (January to June 1846), pp.556-562. KING, H., ‘The Death Penalty,’ St James’s Magazine 13 (April to July 1865), pp.47-54. LILLY, W.S., ‘In Praise of Hanging,’ The New Review 11:63 (August 1894), p.190-200 MOGRIDGE, G., ‘Ephraim Holding on Capital Punishment,’ The Sunday School Teacher’s Magazine 5 (1854), pp.340-347. OPIE, A., ‘A Morning at Paris in 1829,’ The Aurora Borealis. A Literary Annual edited by Members of the Society of Friends (London: C. Tilt, 1833), pp.234-240. ROMER, I.F., ‘The Two Interviews,’ Bentley’s Miscellany 11:65 (May 1842), pp.453-460. ROWSELL, E.P., ‘A Story about an Execution,’ Ainsworth’s Magazine 16 (1849), pp.30-40. ROWTON, F., ‘Charles Gilpin,’ People’s and Howitt’s Journal 7 (1849) p.301. ———— ‘Capital Punishment’ serialised in Howitt’s Journal vols 2-3 (1847–1848), continued in People’s and Howitt’s Journal, vol.7 (1849). ———— ‘The York Tragedy: Execution of William Ross’ Eclectic Review 28 (October 1850), pp.468-476. STEPHEN, J.F., ‘Capital Punishments,’ Fraser’s Magazine 69: 414, June 1864, pp.753-772. ———— ‘Sentimentalism,’ Cornhill Magazine 10, July 1864, pp.65-75. WALL, C., ‘Life, opinions, and pensile adventures, with recollections of his contemporaries during the last three reigns. Edited by the author of “Old Bailey Experiences,” Metropolitan Magazine 14-15 (1835−1836), pp.185-200. WARREN, S., ‘Confessions of an Attorney. Jane Eccles,’ Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal 15:373 n.s., 22 February 1851, pp.118-122.

Secondary Books and chapters in books ADAMS, S., The Unforgiving Rope. Murder and Hanging on Australia’s Western Frontier (Crawley, Western Australia: University of Western Australia Press, 2009) ALTICK, R.D., Punch. The Lively Youth of a British Institution, 1841–1851 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1997) ———— Victorian Studies in Scarlet. Murders and Manners in the Age of Victoria (New York: Norton, 1970) ANDERSON, F.W., A Concise History of Capital Punishment in Canada (Calgary: Frontier, 1973) ANDERSON, O., A Liberal State at War. English Politics and Economics during the Crimean War (London: Macmillan, 1967) BAILEY, B., Hangmen of England. A History of Execution from Jack Ketch to Albert Pierrepoint (London: W.H. Allen, 1989) BANNER, S., The Death Penalty. An American History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002) BARRYMORE, F., Radical Artisan. W. James Linton. 1812–97 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973)

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BENTLEY, D., ‘She Butchers,’ ch.12 in J. Rowbotham and K. Stevenson, eds, Criminal Conversations: Victorian Crimes, Social Panic and Moral Outrage (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005) BENTLEY, D.R., Capital Punishment in Northern England, 1750 – 1900 (Sheffield: ALD, 2008) BLACKWELL, J.D., ‘Crime in the London District, 1828–1837: A Case Study of the Effect of the 1833 Reform in Upper Canadian Penal Law,’ in J.K. Johnson and B.G. Wilson, Historical Essays on Upper Canada: New Perspectives (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1989) BLOCK, B.P., and J. Hostettler, Hanging in the Balance. A History of the Abolition of Capital Punishment in Britain (Winchester: Waterside Press, 1997) BOROWITZ, A., The Women who murdered Black Satin. The Bermondsey Horror (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1981) BRESLER, F., Reprieve. A Study of a System (London: George G. Harrap, 1965) BURN, W.L., The Age of Equipoise: a study of the mid-Victorian generation (1964; London: Taylor and Francis, 1994) BURNEY, I.A., Poison, Detection, and the Victorian Imagination (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006) CANUEL, M., Shadow of Death: Literature, Romanticism, and the Subject of Punishment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007) CARTER WOOD, J., Violence and Crime in Nineteenth-Century England: the Shadow of our Refinement (London: Routledge, 2004) CEADEL, M., The Origins of War Prevention. The British Peace Movement and International Relations, 1730–1854 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) CHADWICK, R., Bureaucratic Mercy. The Home Office and the Treatment of capital cases in Victorian Britain (New York and London: Garland, 1992) COLLINS, P.A.W., Dickens and Crime (London: Macmillan, 1962) COLQUHOUN, K., Mr Briggs’ Hat: A Sensational Account of Britain’s First Railway Murder (London: Little, Brown, 2011) CONLEY, C.A., Certain other Countries. Homicide, Gender, and National Identity in Late NineteenthCentury England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007) ———— The Unwritten Law: Criminal Justice in Victorian Kent (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) THESING, W.B., ed., Executions and the British Experience from the 17th to the 20th century: a Collection of Essays (London: McFarland, 1990) COOPER, D.D., The Lesson of the Scaffold (London: Allen Lane, 1974) DAVIES, O., Murder, Magic, Madness. The Victorian Murder Trials of Dove and the Wizard (Harlow: Pearson/Longman, 2005) DAVIS, J., ‘The London Garrotting Panic of 1862: A Moral Panic and the creation of a Criminal Class in mid-Victorian England,’ in V.A.C. Gatrell, B. Lenman and G. Parker, eds, Crime and the Law. The Social History of Crime in Western Europe since 1500 (London: Europa, 1980). DAVIS, R.P., The Tasmanian Gallows: a Study of Capital Punishment (Hobart: Cat and Fiddle Press, 1974) DE GIUSTINO, D., Conquest of Mind. Phrenology and Victorian Social Thought (London: Croom Helm, 1975) DEVEREAUX, S., and P. Griffiths, eds, Penal Practice and Culture, 1500–1900: Punishing the English (Basingstoke: Palgrave 2004) DONOVAN, J.M., Juries and the Transformation of Criminal Justice in France in the Nineteenth & Twentieth Centuries (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2010) DUNTHORNE, H., ‘Beccaria and Britain,’ in D.W. Howell and K.O. Morgan, eds, Crime, Protest and Police in Modern British Society. Essays in Honour of David J.V. Jones (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999) EVANS, R.J., Rituals of Retribution. Capital Punishment in Germany. 1600–1987 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996)

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FINN, M., ‘The Authority of the Law,’ in P. Mandler ed., Liberty and Authority in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) FLANDERS, J., The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime (London: HarperPress, 2011) FORD-SMITH, A., ‘Confessions: The Midlands Execution Broadside Trade,’ in J. Hinks and C. Armstrong, eds, Printing Places: Locations of Book Production and Distribution since 1500 (New Castle, Delaware: Oak Knoll Press, 2005) FOSTER, H., A.R. Buck and B.L. Berger, eds, The Grand Experiment: Law and Legal Culture in British Settler Societies (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2008) GARNETT, R., E. Garnett, The Life of W.J. Fox. Public Teacher and Social Reformer, 1786–1864 (London: Bodley Head, 1910) GATHORNE-HARDY, A.E., ed., Gathorne Hardy. First Earl of Cranbrook. A Memoir (2 vols; London: Longmans, Green, 1910), vol.1 GATRELL, V.A.C., and T.B. Hadden, ‘Criminal Statistics and their interpretation,’ in E.A. Wrigley, ed., Nineteenth-century society: Essays in the Use of Quantitative Methods for the Study of Social Data (London: Cambridge University Press, 1972) ———— The Hanging Tree. Execution and the English People 1770–1868 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994) GLEADLE, K., The Early Feminists. Radical Unitarians and the Emergence of the Women’s Rights Movement, 1831–51 (London: Macmillan, 1995) GODFREY, B., and G. Dunstall, eds, Crime and Empire, 1840–1940. Criminal Justice in Local and Global Context (Cullompton, Devon: Willan Publishing, 2005) GOLDBERG, M.K., ‘A Universal “howl of execration”: Carlyle’s Latter-Day Pamphlets and their Critical Reception’ in J. Clubbe, ed., Carlyle and his contemporaries: Essays in honour of Charles Richard Sanders (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1976), ch.9. GOLDBERG, M.K., and J.P. Siegel, eds, Thomas Carlyle’s Latter Day Pamphlets (Ottawa: Canadian Federation for the Humanities, 1983) GOLDMAN, L., Science, Reform, and Politics in Victorian Britain. The Social Science Association 1857– 1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) GORRINGE, T., God’s Just Vengeance, Crime, Violence and the Rhetoric of Salvation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) GREENWOOD, F.M., Uncertain Justice: Canadian Women and Capital Punishment. 1754–1853 (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2000) GROSSMAN, J.H., The Art of Alibi. English Law Courts and the novel (Baltimore, Maryland, London: Johns Hopkins Press, 2002) GUYAN, L.P., Les Martyrs de la veuve: romantisme et peine de mort (Oxford, New York: Peter Lang, 2010) HARRISON, B., Drink and the Victorians. The Temperance Question in England 1815–1872 (London: Faber, 1971) HERBERT, C., War of no Pity. The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008) HEWITT, R., Symbolic Interactions: Social Problems and Literary Interventions in the Works of Baillie, Scott, and Landor (Cranbury, New Jersey: Associated University Presses, 2006) HILTON, B., The Age of Atonement. The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) HIMMELFARB, G., The Idea of Poverty. England in the Early Industrial Age (London: Faber and Faber, 1984) HOPPEN, K.T., Mid-Victorian Generation, 1846–1886 (1998; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) HOWE, A., ed., The Letters of Richard Cobden vol.2, 1848–1853 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) ISICHEI, E., Victorian Quakers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970) KAPLAN, F., Thomas Carlyle. A biography (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1983)

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INDEX

References to illustrations appear in italics, peers are listed by surnames rather than titles. Aberdare committee (chaired by Lord Aberdare, the former H.A. Bruce, from 1886, report produced in 1888) 232 Abolition, in Great Britain in 1969 253 Abolitionism, in Edwardian era 235 Abolitionism, arguments in pamphlets Aborigines 43-44, 58 Aborigines’ Protection Society 37, 43 Allen, Grant 236 Allen, William 19, 22, Amos, Sheldon 130, 167, 179, 242 Anglicanism (and capital punishment) 17, 159, 163-166, 168-169 Ansell, Mary Ann (murderer) 234-235 Anti-corn Law League, and anti-corn law 1, 23-24, 39, 61, 74, 82-83, 105, 134, 138, 143 Anti-slavery 2, 12, 18, 51, 63, 74, 77, 82, 85, 89, 98, 111, 113, 115-116, 127, 159-161, 180, 197, 224 Anti-vaccination 70 Aristocracy, and aristocratic State 67-69, 75, 104-105, 181, 201, 203, 230 Arnold, Reverend Thomas 22 Ashley-Cooper, Anthony (seventh earl of Shaftesbury) 152 Atonement 4, 157-158, 163, 166-169 Australia 40-46 Aylesbury 22, 61, 157 Baillie, Joanna 205 Balfour, Clara Lucas 91, 94 Ball, Mary (murderer) 181 Baptists 20, 57, 65, 73-74, 82, 86, 159, 169 Barmby, John Goodwyn 25 Barrett, Elizabeth 97

Barrett, Michael (Fenian) 226 Barry, John T. 19-20, 60, 62, 111, 123, 146, 211, 218 Barton, Bernard 138 Bax, Ernest Belfort 233, 235 Beccaria, Cesare 51, 53, 57, 145, 172 Bedford, Peter 18-19, 18, 71, 111, 146 Beedle, Susannah 95 Beggs, Thomas 27, 31, 34-35, 60, 72, 77, 92, 101, 112, 118, 129, 140, 155, 159, 162, 170, 174-177, 183, 187 Belgium 9, 73, 240 Bentham, Jeremy 51, 172 Benthamite utilitarianism 7, 174 Berry, Dr Charles 77, 162 Berry, James (hangman) 237-238 Besant, Annie 103 Black cap 203, 207, 227 Blessington, Countess 196 Bloody Code 18, 33, 130, 132, 135, 170, 173, 230 Bombay 56, 126, 239 Bonner, Hypatia Bradlaugh 234 Bousfield, William (murderer) 140, 212 Bracken, Andrew (murderer) 213, 215 Braddon, Mary Elzabeth Bradlaugh, Charles 70, 103, 234 Bright, John 10, 23, 34, 38, 60-61, 74, 97, 105, 112, 118, 122-123, 125, 148, 150, 152, 168, 174, 179, 182, 188, 213, 219-220, 227, 232, 239 Broadsides 132, 134-137, 139, 193 Brontë, Charlotte 96 Brougham, Henry 32, 128, 150, 154 Buchanan, Robert 138, 205, 236

INDEX Burritt, Elihu 64, 68-69, 75, 168 Burrows, Abel (murderer) 220 Bushrangers 41-42 Butler, Josephine 234-235 Calcraft, William (hangman) 100, 106, 126, 131-136, 186, 197, 206, 211-212, 214, 224, 237-238 Canada 47-50 Canadian Rebellion 47-48 Cane, Edmund Du 223 Cape Colony 51-52 Capital Punishment within Prisons Act (1868) 1, 33, 227 Carlyle, Thomas 89, 101, 184-187, 213 Carpenter, Mary 89 Carpenter, Philip Pearsall 127 Cartoons (and capital punishment) 135 Cassell, John 124-125 Catholicism 50, 85-86, 102, 114, 158-159, 169-170, 240-241 Ceylon (and capital punishment) 58 Charles XV, king of Sweden 240 Chartism (and capital punishment) 75, 83, 91, 101-103, 113 Chédieu, Emile 241 Cheever, Dr George 166 Children’s literature (and capital punishment) 208-209 Christian Socialism 165, 170 Christmas, Reverend Henry 9, 60, 73, 139, 164, 167-168, 185, 231 Clarkson, Thomas 64 Cobden, Richard 2, 9, 23, 61-62, 64-66, 69, 125, 146, 175 Collins, Wilkie 199 Combe, George 82, 137, 175 Commission, Criminal Code 17, 75 Commission, Indian Law 53-54 Commission on Capital Punishment, Royal (1864-1866) 5, 31-32, 40, 46-47, 56, 75, 81, 92, 100-101, 111, 119-120, 129, 145, 149, 152-156, 158, 169, 196, 206, 212, 218, 221, 223-225, 238-239, 241 Common law 130 Commons, House of (and capital punishment) 15, 25, 144, 147-150, 156, 232 Comte, Auguste 179 Conservatism, parliamentary (and abolition) 143, 154 Cooper, Thomas 76, 101, 104, 290 n.104 Cornwallis, Caroline Frances 95 Corrigan, Thomas (murderer) 212

367

Cowherdites 159, 169 Craigen, Jessie 98 Craik, Dinah Mary 197 Crucifixion 159, 166 Cruikshank, George 74, 135, 204 Debating societies 26, 31, 42-43, 51, 226, 233 Dernier Jour d’un Condamné (Victor Hugo) 93, 97, 194-197 Dickens, Charles 4, 23, 49, 60-61, 70, 76, 83, 95, 114, 131, 135, 163, 186-189, 192-193, 196, 203, 216 Dove, William (murderer) 8, 132 Drummond, Henry 148, 174, 180 Duelling 37, 122, 174, 180, 230 Dymond, Alfred H. 11, 13, 31-32, 50, 60, 72, 76-78, 88, 112, 116-119, 125, 129, 151, 156, 159, 164, 210-216, 218-220, 222 Dymond, Jonathan 159 Eardley, Sir Culling 145 East India Company 53, 57, 62 Edinburgh Society for the Diffusion of Information on Capital Punishments 20, 47, 82 Edwards, John Passmore 28-29, 73, 101, 127, 146, 191 Elections, general and municipal (and capital punishment) 107, 143, 145-147, 149, 155, 233 Elizabeth I, Queen 173 Eliot, George 199-200 Elliotson, James 175 Elliott, Ebenezer 138 Ellis, Havelock 236 Ellis, Sarah Stickney 94 Europeans, executed in India 56 Evangelicalism 127, 169 Evidence, circumstantial 28, 198 Ewart, William 5-6, 20-21, 23, 25, 28, 30, 35, 37-39, 60, 73, 79, 82, 84, 100, 112-113, 118, 140, 142-143, 144, 145, 147-149, 152, 154155, 174, 180, 211, 220-221, 224, 231-232 Executions, bungled by hangman 126, 224, 237 Executions, in public 6, 26, 33, 38, 40, 46, 49, 56-57, 78, 91, 94, 96, 100, 102, 122, 125, 139, 151, 154, 156-157, 161, 178, 188, 220, 226-227 Exeter Anti-Capital Punishment Society 25, 61 Exeter Hall 16, 23, 115, 121, 190 Eyre, Edward John 59, 70

368

VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS

Fauntleroy, Henry (forger) 103, 134 Female execution 89 Female murderers (see also individual listings) 50, 98, 133, 199 Feminism, and the capital punishment question 91, 235 Fenianism 4, 39, 86, 161, 215, 222, 225-226 Finances, of the abolitionist societies 110112 Fleetwood, Sir Peter Hesketh 93, 195-197 Flogging and corporal punishment 34, 55, 102-104, 180, 188, 201, 204, 238 Flowery Land (the ‘five pirates’, Juan Leone, Francesco Blanco, Marcos Vartos, Miguel Lopez and Duranno, executed 1864) 31, 223 Foucault, Michel 7, 36, 192 Fox, Caroline 89 Fox, W.J. 23, 61, 73, 101, 121, 162, 174, 188 France (and capital punishment) 130, 241 Freethinking (see also, infidelity) 31, 95, 103, 159, 166 Fried, Alfred Herrman 235 Fry, Elizabeth 10, 90, 92, 96, 195 Game entitled ‘Capital Punishment’ 225 Game laws 104, 127, 201 Garrote panic 222 Gathorne-Hardy, Gathorne (first Earl of Cranbrook) 221-222 Gattrell, V.A.C. 7-8, 34, 135, 160, 189, 205, 223-224, 229 Georgians (and capital punishment) 173 Germany (and capital punishment) 9, 158, 163, 240 Gibson, Thomas Milner 66, 334 n.12, 344 n.20 Gilpin, Charles 2, 11, 24, 27, 34, 61-71, 68, 74-75, 80, 85, 98, 101, 123-125, 146, 149150, 160, 172, 181, 200, 207, 216, 226, 229 Gissing, George 236 Good, Daniel (murderer) 166 Gordon-Lennox, Charles, sixth Duke of Richmond 152, 155 Gore, Catherine 196, 204 Graham, Sir James 220 Great Exhibition (1851) 27, 49 Grey, Sir George 7, 10, 70, 89, 119, 140, 148, 152, 168, 179, 212, 215, 218-219, 222-223 Gurney, Joseph John 284 n.15, 284 n.16 Gurney, Samuel 60, 77, 111, 161

Hall, George (murderer) 214, 223 Hall, Newman 73, 76, 107-108 Hall, Spencer T. 175 Hangman 1, 108, 121, 130-133, 131, 136, 137, 187, 201-201, 202, 204, 206, 209 Hardinge, Emma 98 Harris, Charlotte (murderer) 92 Harris, Elizabeth Ann (infanticide) 90, 217 Harris, George 98, 114, 162 Hatto, Moses (murderer) 216 Haughton, James 10, 74, 85-86, 146, 166 Health and Life Association (of Liverpool) 22-23, 79 Hell and eternal punishment 165, 168 Heyrick, Elizabeth 89 Hibernian Anti-Capital Punishment Society 85 Hill, Caroline 89 Hill, Frederic 34, 162, 177 Hill, Matthew Davenport 162 Holyoake, George Jacob 76, 187 Holzendorff, Baron Franz Von 35 Home Office and Home Secretaries 89, 105, 152, 161, 164, 181-182, 210-225 Hood, Edward Paxton 280 n.169 Horne, Richard Hengist 38, 43, 76, 162 House of Lords 3, 28, 32, 55, 150-152 Howard Association 6, 11-12, 33-35, 176, 234, 236 Howard League for Penal Reform 215 Howard Society for Improvement of Prisons, and the Abolition of the Punishment of Death (Dublin) 20, 80, 84-85 (Edinburgh) 82 Howitt, Anna Mary 95 Howitt, Mary 92, 94, 127, 162, 197 Howitt, William 43, 76, 126, 162, 197 Hugo, Charles 240 Hugo, Victor 73, 93, 132, 135, 194-197, 201, 209, 240 Humanitarian League 181, 234 Humanitarianism 8, 51-53, 78, 156, 179, 185, 230, 233, 239, 241 Hunt, Leigh 101 Imagination (and capital punishment) 192193 Imperialism (and capital punishment) 58-59, 103, 233, 239 India 29-30, 52-58, 239 Indian Mutiny 29-30, 52-56, 58, 70, 228 Infanticide 53, 58 (Indian) 98-99, 108, 138, 153, 213, 217, 220

INDEX

369

Infidelity 103, 167, 184 Innocence, assertions of (by the condemned, and by abolitionists) 22, 28, 85, 98, 104, 109, 130, 137, 139, 166, 219, 222, 225, 237 Insanity 105, 154-155, 174, 176, 178, 211-212 Ireland 2, 23, 38-40, 84-86, 164

London, Mysteries of 201-203 London, Mysteries of the Courts of 203 Lovett, William 72, 159 Ludlow, John M. 319 n.104 Lytton, Edward Bulwer 191-192, 194, 205, 207

Jebb, Sir Joshua 223 Jerrold, Blanchard 118, 200 Jerrold, Douglas 23-24, 27, 60-61, 76, 101, 123-124, 131-132, 162, 177, 187-189, 203205, 227, 240 Jerrold, Evelyn Douglas 204 Judaism (and capital punishment) 170-171 Judges 13, 52, 76, 153, 168, 175, 203, 219, 224-225, 236 Jurors (and capital punishment) 22, 48, 86, 143, 158, 170, 210, 216-218 Jurors, and women 100, 235

McCay, John 20, 80, 84 M’Grath, Phillip 102 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 186, 207 Mackintosh, Sir James 56 Madden, Richard Robert 4, 51 Magazine of Popular Information on Capital and Secondary Punishments 22, 41, 82-83, 96, 122-124 de Maistre, Joseph-Marie 196, 240 Maidstone abolitionists 81, 119, 217-218 Mannings, George Frederick and Maria Manning (murderers) 8-9, 25-26, 49, 95, 132, 193 Martin, Emma 95 Martineau, Harriet 21, 89 Marwood, William (hangman) 38, 86, 108 Marx, Karl (and capital punishment) 342 n.41 Matthew, Father Theobald 84 Matthews, Henry 237 Maurice, Frederick Denison 315 n.104 Maybrick, Florence (murderer) 234-235, 239 Mayhew, Henry 32, 73, 76, 206 Mayo, Isabella Fyvie 283 n.1 Mayors, and abolitionism 118 Mazzini, Giuseppi 163, 240 Mc’Cree, George Wilson 119 McLachlan, Jessie (murderer) 168, 223 Mechanics’ institutes 22, 45, 62, 77, 119 Medical experts 99, 176, 199, 216 Meetings, town 110, 112-121 Megson, Albert 128 Methodists 159, 169, 186, 230 Miall, Edward 75, 101, 124, 169 Middle classes 2, 6, 8, 24, 73, 75, 88, 94, 100102, 107, 190, 201, 205, 208, 229 Mill, Harriet Taylor 95 Mill, John Stuart 32, 95, 97, 176, 186-187, 189, 240 Milnes, Richard Monckton (later, Lord Houghton) 152 Mittermaier, Carl Joseph Anton 9, 32, 73, 129 Montagu, Basil 17, 51, 60, 175, 186, 194 Moodie, Susanna 50 Morley, Samuel 106

Kelly, Fitzroy 32, 44, 60, 76, 142, 154, 202, 211 Kent, Constance 8-9 Kentish, Nathaniel Luscomb 43 Ketch, Jack (mythical hangman) 23, 88, 132, 205 Kingsley, Charles 32, 165 Kossuth, Lajos 65-67, 163 Lambeth Baths 34, 106, 108 Lambeth Working Men’s Committee 106107 Langley, John Baxter 73 ‘Law and literature’ scholarship 326 n.9 Law on its Trial, The (1865) 11, 13, 32, 156, 212, 213, 215 Lecky, W.E.H. 179 Lee, Frederick 42-43, 45 Legal examinations 183 Legal profession (and capital punishment) 183 Legal profession, in Scotland 81 Leicester, abolitionism in 20, 77, 113-118, 162, 238 Lever, Charles James 196 Levi, Professor Leone 75 Lewis, Amelia 285 n.29 Liberalism 164, 178, 194, 233, 238 Linton, Elizabeth Lynn 255 n.82 Linton, William 101, 313 n.71 Liverpool branch of the ‘Capital Punishment Society’ 20 Liverpool Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment 238

370

VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS

Morning Star 29, 32, 76, 106, 108, 125, 148, 191 Mortality, comparative 29, 230 Mosaic code 103, 170-171, 223 Mott, Lucretia 98 Müller, Franz (murderer) 155, 224 Murray, Sir Terence 41-42, 215 Myers, Annette (murderer) 45, 96 National Association for the Promotion of Social Science (commonly known as Social Science Association) 30, 34, 97, 155 Neate, Charles 60, 130, 140, 152, 154-155, 173-174, 179, 182-183, 186, 208 New Zealand (and capital punishment) 36, 4546, 232, 235 Newgate, novels 132, 188, 193, 204 Newman, Francis W. 138 Nonconformity, association with abolition 61, 78, 119, 159, 164, 168-169 Northern Star (and capital punishment) 102 Novels 77-78, 91, 93, 95-97, 130, 132, 188, 191-194, 197-204, 207, 236 Nugent, Lord, George Grenville 23, 51, 6061, 228 O’Connell, Daniel 23, 61 Occupations, of abolitionist 76-78 Oldfield, Josiah 59, 238-239 Opie, Amelia 89-90 Osborne, Lord Sydney Godolphin 31, 40, 73, 164 Oscar I, king of Sweden 240 Owenites 103, 172, 174 Owen, Robert 10, 103 Pain 158, 166, 178, 181, 206-207, 226, 232, 241 Paintings of capital punishment scenes 134135 Paley, William 173-174 Palmer, Dr William (murderer) 8-9, 28, 31, 91, 139, 148, 191, 218, 227 Palmerston, Lord 7, 65-67, 69-70, 181, 220222 Parkes, Henry 41-42 Parry, John Humffreys 65, 78, 101, 162 Peace movement 12, 19, 22, 27, 29, 35, 64, 67, 69, 74-75, 125, 159-160, 204, 235 Peace societies 25 (Bristol), 74 (Ross and Herefordshire), 81 (Maidstone), 117, 145, 239 (Liverpool) Peggs, Reverend James 57, 74

Pegsworth, John (murderer) 198, 202 Pelizioni, Serafino (accused of murder) 224 Petitions, for mercy or abolition (in Britain) 61, 71, 75-76, 79-85, 88, 90, 92, 94, 96, 107-108, 110, 113-115, 117-119, 127-128, 148, 151, 157, 159-162, 168-169, 175, 197, 199, 214, 223, 234-235, 237-238 Petitions, geography of abolitionist 79-80 Petzler, John 39 Phillips, Charles 13, 78, 106, 111, 129, 145, 151, 173, 178, 205, 219, 221 Phillips, William Sandford 20 Phrenology 77, 82, 126, 137, 158, 163, 172, 174-176 Platform 244 n.7 Pledges, electoral 145 Poetry, abolitionist 138, 189, 236 Prerogative of mercy 5, 13, 42, 94, 154, 210, 213, 220 Press, abolitionist 3, 39, 125-127, 233 ‘Pressure from without’ 2-3, 16, 24, 110, 113, 142, 159, 229 Prince, John Critchley 138 Prisons 185, 222-223 Public opinion 21-22, 28, 31, 33-34, 38, 86, 107, 118, 122-123, 143, 150, 154, 172, 182183, 189, 199, 215, 218, 229, 231-233, 242243 Public opinion, in India 55, 57 Punch 97, 123-124, 134-135, 182, 187, 205 Punch and Judy 205, 207-208, 216, 219, 233 Punishments, secondary 20-21, 38, 130, 208, 216 Pyrke, Duncombe 195-196 Race and capital punishment 37, 59 Radzinonwicz, Leon 6-7, 12, 183, 242 Rape 21, 44, 47, 51 Retentionism 114, 128, 130, 138, 156-158, 160, 163, 166-167, 174, 176-178, 180, 184, 186-187, 189-190, 213-214, 218-219, 223224, 226, 229-230, 240 Revolution, French 54, 108, 233, 241 Reynolds, G.W.M. 147, 195, 201-203 Reynolds’s Newspaper 105, 187, 203, 221, 233 Richardson, Dr Benjamin Ward 112, 227 Roberts, Samuel 92-93, 126 Roberts, William Prowting 104, 107 Robertson, Reverend Frederick W. 4 Robespierre, Maximilien Marie Isidore de 165, 185 Romanticism (and capital punishment) 191

INDEX Romilly, Sir Samuel 17, 21, 152, 175, 183, 194, 238 Romilly, John (Baron Romilly) 152 Ross, William (murderer) 218-219 Rowton, Frederic 62, 71, 97, 113, 118-119, 123, 126-127, 130, 174, 182, 188, 198, 218 Rush, James Blomfield (murderer) 123, 126, 132, 175 Ruskin, John 163, 177, 186, 188-189, 236 Russell, Lord John 21, 28, 65, 128, 156, 225 Russia (and capital punishment) 240 Rutterford, John (murderer) 237 Sanitary reform 4, 27, 29, 72, 77, 103, 112, 138, 163, 177 Sati 57-58 Schimmelpenninck, Mary Ann 89 Scotland, and abolition 20, 81-84, 92, 97, 101, 115, 130, 136, 142, 168, 236 Scotland, and criminal code 81, 153 Scott, John (first Earl Eldon) 127 Scott, Reverend Walter 116, 127, 167, 174 Scottish Presbyterians 83, 159, 163, 167-169 Secrecy, of executions 33, 57, 151 Secularism 98, 103, 159, 162 Select Committee of the House of Lords on Capital Punishment (1856) 28, 150-152 Sentimentalism 8, 43, 50, 52, 78, 91, 95, 97, 117, 127, 150, 163, 165, 176-177, 179, 183189, 196, 214, 223, 228, 230, 235 Sermons (and capital punishment) 12, 129, 168 Shaw, George Bernard 233 Sheffield, female abolitionists 93 Sherwood, Mary 208 Skene, Felicia 287 n.62 Smethurst, Dr Thomas (murderer) 28-29, 211 Smith, Mary 96 Smith, Thomas Southwood 177 Socialism 233 Socialism, Christian, see Christian Socialism Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment (S.A.C.P.) 2-3, 5-6, 9, 11-13, 16, 19, 22, 24-27, 29-35, 45, 59, 61-62, 64, 71-73, 75-76, 79-81, 88, 93, 101, 105, 107, 110-120, 123, 125, 127-129, 134, 143, 145, 149-150, 155, 159, 161-162, 164, 172, 177, 188, 190, 210-216, 218-223, 225-227, 229, 231-232, 238-239 Society for the Diffusion of Information on the Subject of Capital Punishment 18, 20, 22

371

Society for the Diffusion of Knowledge Respecting the Punishment of Death and the Improvement of Prison Discipline (S.D.K.P.D.I.P.D.) 17-18 Society for Investigating the Alarming Increase of Juvenile Delinquency in the Metropolis 18 Society for the Promotion of the Amendment of the Law 151 Society of Friends (Quakers) 4, 6, 10-12, 1619, 22-25, 32-33, 35, 37, 43, 60-64, 67, 6970-71, 75, 77, 80, 82-85, 89-90, 92-93, 9798, 111, 115-116, 118, 120, 123, 126, 133, 137-138, 144-146, 148-149, 151, 158-162, 174, 199, 212, 214, 238 Society of Friends, retentionists in 160 Sommer, Celestina (murderer) 84, 89-90, 98, 217 Southworth, Emma 198 Spear, Charles 9-10, 135 Spiritualism (and capital punishment) 171 Spurgeon, Reverend Charles Haddon 97 Squeamishness 8, 78 State, the 8, 190, 211, 215 State, abolitionist interpretation of the 174, 181-183, 211 Statistics 6, 37, 73, 130, 135, 140-141, 143, 147, 155, 183, 217 Steinberg, Madame 95 Stephen, James Fitzjames 13, 57, 140, 163, 186, 188-189, 193, 196, 207, 218 Stokes, Reverend William 73-74, 235 Stone, Samuel 162 Sturge, Joseph 62, 64, 67, 71, 111, 124 Substitutes, for capital punishment 16, 176179 Sue, Eugene 201 Sussex, Duke of (Prince Augustus Frederick) 20, 166 Switzerland (and capital punishment) 240 Symons, Jelinger Cookson 230 Tallack, William 6, 11, 31-33, 47, 60, 73, 110112, 128-129, 145, 155, 159, 164, 170, 212, 218, 222, 226-227, 236 Tapner, John Charles (murderer) 73, 196 Tawell, John (murderer) 61, 85, 92 Taylor, Alfred J. 45 Taylor, John Sydney 22, 180 Taylor, William B. Sarsfield 20, 180 Temperance (and teetotalism) 2, 4, 10, 12, 23, 27, 64, 72, 74, 76-77, 81, 84, 91, 98, 106,

372

VICTORIANS AGAINST THE GALLOWS

110, 120, 122, 124, 159-160, 174, 177, 204, 238 Testament, New (and new dispensation of the gospel) 91, 120, 157-158, 161-162, 164, 175 Testament, Old (see also Mosaic code, and atonement) 160, 166 Thackeray, William Makepeace 4, 40, 76, 152, 207-208 Theatre (and capital punishment) 135, 139, 205-206, 236 Thompson, George 115 Thuggee 58 Times, The 78, 90, 127-128, 147-150, 154, 178, 181, 183, 188-189, 198, 216, 226, 230-232, 237, 240-241 Townley, George Victor 105, 146, 176, 214, 223, 233 Tracts, at executions 139 Transportation 44-45, 54, 122, 178-179 Trevelyan, George Otto 55, 73 Trollope, Anthony 208 Tuscany 240 Tussaud, Madame 89, 134, 157 Unitarianism and Unitarians 4, 6, 10, 14, 19, 25, 48, 73, 77-78, 81, 89, 106, 114, 121, 123, 127, 158-159, 162-163, 167, 238 United States of America, and capital punishment 10-11, 24, 32, 38, 49-50, 74, 98, 123, 125, 135, 158, 163, 166, 171, 234 Utopian fiction (and capital punishment) 207208 Vegetarianism 2, 29, 74, 76, 79, 117, 120, 138, 159, 234, 238 Victoria, Queen 48, 50, 92-94, 106, 127, 200, 208, 220, 235, 243 Vincent, Henry 71, 101, 113, 118-120, 134, 160, 180 Violence 8, 58, 74, 78, 98, 100, 180, 242 Wales (and capital punishment) 86, 104 Wallace, Alfred Russel 174 Ward, Mrs Humphry 343 n.61 Waring, Elijah 133-134 Warren, Samuel 198, 203 Webb, Richard Davis 85 Webster, Edward 28, 151 Westron, Charles (murderer) 212 Whittier, John Greenleaf 138 Wigham, John 47, 82, 118 Wilberforce, William 51 Wilberforce, Bishop Samuel 28, 150

Winslow, Forbes 176 Woolrych, Humphry 32 Wordsworth, Reverend Christopher 168 Wordsworth, William 97, 138 Working-class (and capital punishment) 101109, 116, 201, 234 Wright, Samuel (murderer) 31, 74, 105, 146, 214, 223 Wrightson, Thomas 19, 60 Yorkshire (and support for abolition) 80 Zoist, The 175