This particular gibbet
is Winter’s Gibbet, in Northumberland, named after William Winter who was hung
at Newcastle’s Westgate prior to the Victorian era in 1792.
|
I was scrolling through the BBC News website when I came
across an article entitled, “Day out at the gallows and other bygone
photographic oddities”. It was the first half of this title, “Day out at the
gallows”, and the accompanying image (see above) that grabbed my attention. How
could visiting the gallows be a family day out? I was fascinated by the notion
that Victorian families could enjoy what is essentially the murder of another
human being so much so that they would gather for a family photograph beneath a
noose and wooden head. This led me in to thinking about Victorian families
going out to see the act of public hanging itself.
Public hangings were an extremely popular form of
entertainment in Victorian London particularly. They were a spectacle enjoyed
by men, women and children of all ages and classes, until the Capital
Punishment Amendment Act (1868) banned the practice of public execution. Two
writers that are accredited with being very influential in getting this Act passed
were Charles Dickens and William Thackeray. Both of these men famously wrote
about the spectacle of public hanging.
Dickens' letter to The Times |
In a letter to The
Times dated 13th November 1849 (see above image), Dickens
describes the “wickedness and levity” (43) of the “immense crowd” (43) that had
gathered to watch the hanging of Marie and Frederick Manning. Their crime,
which became known as the ‘Bermondsey Horror’, was murdering Marie’s former
lover and attempting to run away with his money. This was the first time in
over a century that a husband and wife had been executed together and this fact
added to the public excitement and, consequently, a crowd of between 30,000 and
50,000 spectators assembled to watch.
Dickens despairs at what he perceives to be the immoral
levity of the crowd, and he describes in detail the “offensive and foul
behaviour” (43) and “tumultuous demonstrations of indecent delight” (43) that
he observes. Yet his descriptions of the crowd and the “two miserable
creatures” (43) that were “turned quivering in the wind” (43) have an element
of morbid fascination to them that are not dissimilar to the enjoyment and
intrigue of the crowd itself. Dickens’
is a very negative view of the watching crowd. He employs copious amounts of
harsh adjectives to describe the “brutal mirth” (43) of the people gathered, and he
writes that their behaviour and attitude towards the scene they had come to
witness made his “blood run cold” (43).
There is a very noticeable
difference between Dickens’ account of the Manning executions and William
Thackeray’s essay entitled, “Going to see a man hanged” (dated July 1840). Thackeray
attended the execution of Francois Benjamin Courvoisier, along with a crowd of
40,000 others (The Victorian Daily). His descriptions of the crowd are
far more positive in comparison to Dickens’, and he is far more condemning of
the actual act of public hanging itself. Thackeray writes in his essay, “I
fully confess that I came away down Snow Hill that morning with a disgust for
murder, but it was for the murder I saw done” (10).
Courvoisier’s case
generated a huge amount of public interest and broadsides (such as the one in
the image above) were kept as souvenirs by those who attended the public
hangings.
Although Thackeray’s descriptions
agree with Dickens’ in regards to the “festive” (Thackeray 5) atmosphere of the
crowd, he portrays the spectators as “extraordinarily gentle and good-humoured”
(4) in contrast to Dickens who perceives them to be “inconceivably awful” (43)
and “atrocious” (43). Dickens notes that “swooning women were dragged out of
the crowd” (43), but Thackeray makes a point of stating that “a dozen people
were ready to give the woman protection” (5) and that “round the women the men
ha[d] formed a circle, and ke[pt] them as much as possible out of the rush and
trample” (5).
Thackeray’s essay alludes to the practice of “tak[ing] a window”
(3). He observes how “The windows of the shops opposite are now pretty nearly
filled by the persons who hired them” (7). Those that owned or were tenants of
the shops and homes with a view of the gallows were able to rent out their
rooms for a fee. In Horsemonger Lane, for letting out their rooms with a view
for just one public hanging, tenants could make a minimum of the cost of a
year’s rent (The Victorian Daily).
At Horsemonger Lane Gaol, public hangings took place on the roof. Those whose homes or businesses
overlooked the building could make a lot of money in letting out their rooms
for the ‘event’.
Both Thackeray and Dickens are concerned about how
desensitised people are to the public hangings – they are willingly and unflinchingly
witnessing murder. Dickens writes despairingly of the fact that after the
Mannings were hung, there was “no more emotion, no more pity, no more thought
that two immortal souls had gone to judgement, nor more restraint in any of the
previous obscenities, than if the name of Christ had never been heard in this
world” (43). Thackeray shares a similar fear and worry in relation to the
public’s desensitisation to the “butchery” (10) of public hanging. He says that
the “punishment had grown to be a joke” (7) and that it was not until fifteen
minutes prior to the allotted time of death that the crowd began to “think
about the man [they] were going to see hanged” (7).
Dickens and Thackeray both end their writings with a prayer
of sorts; appealing to God to end the abhorrent act of public hanging that was,
as Dickens believed, contaminating and corrupting the country. Dickens ends his
letter with the following direct appeal to the reader: “And when in our prayers
and thanksgivings for the season we are humbly expressing before God our desire
to remove the moral evils of the land, I would ask your readers to consider
whether it is not time to think of this one, and to root it out” (44). Dickens
is clearly very much against, not capital punishment itself, but the public
executions that were taking place in Victorian London. Thackeray, on the other hand, is against capital punishment completely. He ends his essay
with a similar plea and on an even more despairing note: “I feel myself ashamed
and degraded at the brutal curiosity which took me to that brutal sight; and
that I pray to Almighty God to cause this disgraceful sin to pass from among
us, and to cleanse our land of blood” (10).
Works Cited:
Dickens, Charles. ‘Letter No.
013” Letters of Note: Correspondence
Deserving Of A Wider Audience. Ed. Usher, Shaun. Edinburgh: Cannongate
Books Ltd., 2013. Print.
Thackeray, William. “Going to
see a man hanged” The Ex-Classics Website.
Web. 4th December 2014. http://www.exclassics.com/newgate/courv.htm
Islay, Mathilda. “The
Spectacle of Execution part 2”. The
Victorian Daily. 25th September 2011. Web. 4th
November 2014. http://thevictoriandaily.com/?tag=executions
BBC. “Day out at the gallows
and other bygone photographic oddities”.
BBC NEWS Magazine. September 2014. Web. 4th November 2014.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-29246071
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