The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People 1770-1868Oxford University Press, 1994 - 634 páginas Some thirty-five thousand people were condemned to death in England and Wales between 1770 and 1830, and seven thousand were ultimately executed, the majority convicted of crimes such as burglary, horse theft, or forgery. Mostly poor trades people--weavers, clerks, whipmakers--these terrified men and women would suffer excruciating death before large and excited crowds. Indeed, crowds of three to seven thousand were normal, and for famous cases, the mob could swell to fifty thousand or more (a hundred thousand were said to have watched the hanging of murderers Holloway and Haggarty--so great a throng that thirty spectators were crushed to death). What brought people out for such a gruesome spectacle? How did they feel about the deadly justice meted out in their midst? These are some of the questions examined in The Hanging Tree, a fascinating history of public executions in their awful heyday in England. Drawing on letters, diaries, ballads, and poignant appeals for mercy, V.A.C. Gatrell vividly recreates the social atmosphere and heated debate swirling about these cruel spectacles. He gives readers an unflinching look at what these executions were really like, paints a colorful portrait of the large crowds who gathered to watch, and describes the part the gallows played in the popular imagination (as reflected in flash ballads, Punch and Judy shows, and broadsides). Gatrell illuminates the debate over public execution that raged in polite society, discussing the commentary of writers such as Boswell, Byron, Thackeray, and Dickens, most of whom deplored the behavior of the crowd more than the inhumanity of the sentence (Macaulay denounced abolitionists as effeminate). And Gatrell also examines the attitudes of the judges, politicians, and monarch who decided who should be reprieved and who should hang (a mortal decision often delivered with the one-sentence formula: "Let the law run its course"). Throughout the book, Gatrell traces how attitudes to death and suffering changed as the century progressed (after 1837, for instance, only murderers were hung, and after 1868, public exeuctions were abolished). Perhaps most surprising, Gatrell reveals that the demise of public hanging owed little to humanitarianism. In part, polite society simply preferred not to look at the ugly machine of justice that subtly served their interests. But ultimately, Gatrell contends, it was the unleashed passions of the scaffold crowd the unsettled the middle class: the crowd mirrored the state's violence too candidly and gave the lie to middle-class pretensions of civility and humanity. Panoramic in scope, authoritatively researched, and gripping from beginning to end, The Hanging Tree radically alters our sense of the past. It is not only a history of emotions, but also an emotional story, invested with the author's own incredulity and anger over the merciless events he chronicles. Taking up the plight of those who felt the hand of justice at its heaviest, he recaptures the lived experience of people poorly served by their own criminal law. |
Índice
Chronologies of change | 5 |
Hanging People | 33 |
Death and the Scaffold Crowd | 56 |
Direitos de autor | |
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The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770-1868 V. A. C. Gatrell,Vic Gatrell Pré-visualização limitada - 1994 |
Palavras e frases frequentes
appeal assizes attended ballads body Boswell broadsides Bury St Edmunds Cambridge capital code capital punishment Cato Street Cato Street conspirators century chapter Coalbrookdale convicted court crime criminal law crowd culture Cureton curiosity death decapitated defence diary dossier E. P. Thompson eighteenth eighteenth-century élites Eliza Fenning Elizabeth Elizabeth Fry emotion England English evangelical evidence execution feeling felons Fenning's forgery friends gallows gibbet hanged hangman Home Office home secretary Hone horror human Hunton innocent Jack Ketch John judges jury justice king later letters Lofft London Lord magistrates mercy mind moral murder never Newgate Newgate calendars Noden noose offence Old Bailey opinion Oxford pain Peel Peel's penal petition plebeian polite prison prosecution Quaker radical Radzinowicz rape recorded reform Romilly Sarah scaffold sensibility sentence sheriff social society suffer sympathy terror thought tion told treason trial Tyburn victims vols watched William witnesses woman women wrote
Referências a este livro
Handbuch sozialwissenschaftliche Diskursanalyse. 2. Forschungspraxis Reiner Keller Pré-visualização indisponível - 2004 |
Constructing Death: The Sociology of Dying and Bereavement Clive Seale Pré-visualização limitada - 1998 |