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Simon Devereaux, "Execution, State and Society in England, 1660–1900" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
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- [00:00]
A
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:07]
B
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Professor Simon Devereux about his book titled State and society in England, 1660-1900, published by Cambridge University Press in 2023. Now, obviously, as the subtitle suggests, this book covers a lot of time, which is really interesting because there's quite a lot of change during this, starting with what we might think of as kind of the colloquial definition of medieval, right? Like drawn and quartering, hanging, disembowelment, all sorts of ways of executing criminals that seem medieval, right? Barbaric, pretty intense, if nothing else, and obviously in England very far back in time, right? That's not what we have now. That's not what we've had for a while now. And this book helps us understand that transformation, right? We had to get from then to now somehow. When did that happen? Why did that happen? How did that happen? It's obviously not a split second sort of thing. And this book tells us that history. So, Simon, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [02:17]
C
Oh, it's my pleasure. Thanks for inviting me.
- [02:20]
B
Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write the book. I mean, within that kind of broad picture. What sorts of questions did you decide to ask and how did you get there?
- [02:31]
C
Well, I came into the book in a kind of backwards sort of fashion. I've been working on the history of capital punishment for many years now, and especially capital punishment in London in the long 18th century Glorious Revolution to Victoria becoming queen. So I've been accumulating a lot of evidence, working towards this big book project, doing other things like an Old Bailey database. And over the course of this time, I was invited to write a chapter summarizing the history of capital punishment in England. This is for a colleague. The book never eventuated and the chapter exploded. It got to 35,000 words by the time I was done, and my colleague and partner smacked me upside the head and said, dummy, you're writing a book. So I got around to writing this book, which started off as a kind of survey history, and I shouldn't admit things like this, but when it was accepted by Cambridge, by this very distinguished series, Studies in Legal History, part of me thought, oh, I'm not writing a textbook anymore. There needs to be a really clear organizing argument for this book. Why is it that all of these different punishments change in a relatively short span of time in the way that they do? And it seemed to me that the best explanation for that was trying to make sense of England as an urbanizing nation, a nation that was urbanizing more quickly than all other nations in Europe at the time. There must have been some sorts of consequences for that, kind of, let's say, precocious urbanization. And it seemed to me that one of them must involve what might be deemed to be the appropriate displays of physical punishments. I'm trying to distinguish why it is that there's a pattern that England follows that's different from the rest of Europe.
- [04:27]
B
I mean, that's a whole bunch of very interesting questions to investigate. So thank you for laying them out and also giving us a peek behind the scenes of how you got to this point. And obviously the end product, as your colleague was correct to point out, is in fact a book. So a number of things for us to discuss. So if we're thinking about the kind of key factors here.
- [04:48]
C
Right.
- [04:48]
B
You've mentioned urbanisation as being one of them. What are some of the other factors that drove officials in England to make the kinds of changes that you're documenting in the book from the Restoration period onwards?
- [05:00]
C
Well, one of the things that we might invoke is what many people have called the Civilizing process following Norbert Elias, the perception that governments and the elites that run them in pre modern society lead the way in adopting patterns of behavior that find open violence to be repulsive, and that this gradually migrates down the social pyramid towards people on the bottom who are partly adopting these habits out of an ambition for social emulation and partly because they're having them imposed upon them. Certainly this story about governing elites, in my case, I think urban elites, what we might think of as middling sorts of people. They have ideas of superiority to the people over whom they are governing in terms of public conduct, of physical punishments. But they also have the idea, and this is something I think is relatively unusual in the writing of history, that these people at the bottom of society are educable, that they can actually learn these better patterns of behavior given time.
- [06:18]
B
Okay, that's helpful to think about. Right. It goes back to what I was saying earlier, that it's not an instant change, it is change over time and kind of learning new sorts of things. And I guess in some sense it's kind of testing out change as well. Right. Because we don't see things sort of disappear overnight. For instance, crime of treason that you talk about in the book. Obviously there's lots of kinds of treason, maybe we can get into that. But this doesn't disappear after the Restoration, but the gruesome punishment attached to it does. Right. So that's something not changing and something changing, sort of linked together. So can you help us understand what's going on to explain the continuity and change in this instance?
- [07:00]
C
I think the driving force of change is the perception that certain types of physically violent punishments simply don't work. They don't achieve their ends in terms of deterring crime. There are times when crime is clearly escalating in ways that are profoundly alarming. In the case of treason, I think we see an early development of a pattern that plays out later, maybe a hundred years later in the history of crime. With treason, I think the great turning point is 1685, when a very unpopular king, a Catholic James II of England, defeats a rebellion led by his illegitimate nephew, the Duke of Monmouth, and conducts what's known as the Bloody Assizes. The Bloody Assizes has a deeply embedded place in the British cultural imagination. And the Bloody Assizes, amongst other things, sort of exhausts the moral plausibility of conventional modes of treason execution. The idea of quartering bodies in particular and displaying the quarters all over the place. A colleague of mine named William Gibson once told me that he had read an account of the state of the west country in the wake the Bloody Assizes. This person had said that the area looked like a butcher's shambles, as opposed vivid an idea, as you can have, of the butchery of a human body. There comes a point where any kind of punishment that is excessively physical in its character and imposes clearly visible suffering upon the person who's being executed, there comes a point where there's a kind of sensory explosion. And what I mean by that is the punishment is not achieving its effect anymore. The sense of horror at what's being done to a fellow human being exceeds any sense that what is being done to them is justified by any sort of crime that they have committed. We know from James II's memoirs that he realized that he had probably overdone it in the west country with the Bloody Assizes. And it's for that reason that we can actually see that certainly with treason executions in London which follow, you can see subsequent governments being much more restrained. They have learned that lesson. About a hundred years afterwards, we sort of see the same thing going on with more conventional hangings.
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B
Okay, well, that's definitely interesting to see sort of the pattern there. And I suppose we will kind of talk about what continues on, but I want to sort of stay here for a moment in terms of kind of the horror and the idea of, like, what the point is of this. Right. Because that's a kind of taps into what society thinks is sort of right and wrong and what the government should and should not be doing. And those ideas, of course, don't come out of thin air. So what is sort of feeding into these ideas about the point of executions? Obviously, there's what officials are thinking about in terms of learning. And there's class distinctions you've mentioned. There's also religion. There's also culture. So how are those sorts of things feeding into these kind of fears, shock, horror, reactions that are obviously different in this moment than they were a few hundred years earlier?
- [10:22]
C
That's a good question that flies in a lot of different directions. My first reaction to that is to emphasize that I'm very much following in the work of a colleague of mine named Randall McGowan, who 35 years ago published an article called Body and Punishment, in which he points out, with respect to conventional executions, that in the third quarter of the 18th century you can see a lot of major works in England by people like William Eden, William Blackstone, following the example of the Italian Cesare Beccaria, who's often seen as the founding father of modern criminology. These are people who argue, and this is McGowan's argument, which I emulate. These are people who argue that we've arrived at a point in which people believe that the claims of society for a superlatively horrific physical punishment for purposes of deterring crime, maintaining social control, the claims of society no longer outweigh the claims of the individual suffering body. In other words, it's no longer acceptable to impose any more suffering upon a person than is strictly necessary to accomplish a deterrent effect. Treason, of course, would be a classic example of how the punishment by the second half of the 18th century is conceived of as being vastly beyond anything that can be justified in the context of changing cultural assumptions about the priority of the individual suffering body. And this is substantially fed, I think, by the rise of a culture of sensibility, which is very much coming to the fore, certainly in England in the second half of the 18th century. A culture that emphasizes that it is morally laudable to manifest emotional revulsion at the site of suffering on the part of a fellow human being being. So you can see that it sort of starts with political imperatives and convictions that the claims of the state of society are larger than those of the individual. But by the time we're into the second half of the 18th century, many people are questioning those claims. And it starts to have very clear implications for what's deemed to be the acceptable degree to which the punishment of an individual can involve prolonged suffering. But it also starts to have significant implications for the total number of people upon whom you can impose that kind of suffering.
- [13:12]
B
Okay, these changes are very important to understand. Making sure we don't lose threads, though, because we do have a bunch of things on the table here. How does what you're just explaining around the changes in people's thinking, how does that relate to the processes, at the same time, as you've mentioned, of increased urban populations? Is that incidental or part of this change?
- [13:33]
C
The thing that really set me thinking about urbanization was trying to figure out what's different about the changes in execution modes in England by comparison with, say, the rest of Europe. There has been a great deal of attention on the part of historians to theoretical perspectives, starting with Michel Foucault, of course, Discipline and punish, moving on to Norbert Elias, and a number of other theoretical perspectives have been adopted. In fact, I think that it's become almost de rigueur to sort of embrace a particular theoretical perspective. And one of the things about this emphasis upon theory is to emphasize commonality throughout the Western world at this time, broadly speaking, everyone is sort of headed in the same direction. But one thing that I noticed about England that is unique, I think, is that the site of execution, the place in which the public demonstration of pain inflicted upon a convicted criminal's body is being the place where that's being done, moves from the edge of town right down into its heart. It starts in 1783 with the abolition of the traditional procession of the condemned to Tyburn at the northwestern margins of London. Suddenly, executions are being conducted right in the heart of the city, outside of Newgate Prison itself. Everywhere else in Europe, the pattern seems to be different. If you look at accounts of execution in medieval France and Germany and early modern France and Germany and the Netherlands, executions are starting downtown, outside the places associated with the administration of criminal justice. But over the course of time, starting from the late 18th century onwards, executions start being moved outside of towns. So England executions, geographically in England are moving in the opposite direction to where they are. And that's something I don't think a theoretical analysis that tries to emphasize commonality amongst nations takes sufficient cognizance of, to use a slightly pompous term, sorry, there's something about the English where I think they are deliberately targeting what they take to be a quintessentially urban mentality. The shock of execution which is supposed to have the deterrent effect is imagined to be more powerful if it takes place in the heart of the city. Whereas other European countries seem to be conceiving the idea that however shocking or not executions are, they should be more and more removed from the immediate gaze of what you might think of as passers by. Hmm.
- [16:45]
B
Okay. So those are some pretty clear changes, right? Different punishments for treason and different places where those punishments are taking place. Are there any other sort of impacts that all of these changes in popular perception are having on kind of the treatment of criminals more broadly? If we open up from just thinking about treason.
- [17:04]
C
Okay, well, if you think about hanging, one of the things that's very striking, especially if you focus on London, and I like London because London seems to me to be a kind of particularly intensive, if you like, laboratory for experimenting with and thinking about the effects of execution. In the second quarter of the 18th century, roughly 1727 to about 1750, you can see the government deciding to limit the number of execution days in London in a way that actually magnifies the number of people who are going to be hanged on any one occasion. That doesn't seem to have much impact on commentary in newspapers at the time. But when the Same thing is done again when it's repeated in the wake of a vast crime wave in the 1780s. And when those executions are not only involving more people being hanged at the same time, but the executions are happening much more frequently, suddenly they're provoking unprecedented criticism and disgust. Partly it has to do with the location of the executions. It's moved downtown from outside at Tyburn. But there's also a sense that the number of people being executed is hopelessly too large, that there's an idea that officials have that you can multiply the deterrent effect of a punishment by multiplying the number of people whom you put on the gallows. And that argument in terms of its practical effects is revealed to be pretty hollow and nonsensical really quite quickly. And it's one of the reasons why the desperate search for an alternative place to which to transport convicts after the loss of America in 1775, why that search becomes that much more desperate, why the opening up of a new colony around the world in Australia is so urgently needed. If you can't with legitimacy or effect hang that many people, then you've got to find a visibly severe enough alternative punishment to reflect the seriousness of the crimes that have been committed. And certainly officials in London are convinced that transportation overseas is the only acceptable alternative. By comparison, out in the provinces outside of London, not only has execution not been used to the same degree across the 18th century, a message that was made or sorry, an insight that was pioneered by my colleagues Peter King and Richard Ward. Not only is that true, but they've also been making more use of not simply transportation, but imprisonment. So there's a whole world of penal practices depending from and surrounding capital punishment that are also at work. And this is one of the other things that really fascinates me. The exact distribution of which punishments are being used for which crimes seems to vary significantly from one part of the British Isles to the other.
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D
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D
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- [21:41]
B
Yeah, variation is always very intriguing, so I'm glad you highlighted that. And I want to stay in this 18th century moment because there is lot kind of going on that seems, I mean, from my perspective, kind of experimental in a way, like, oh, things are changing and we need to adapt. And how are we kind of trying to square all these circles? So you've told us about a few of them. I wonder if we can also talk about the Murder Act. That sounds pretty brutal, right? Like, how can I not ask about a thing called the Murder Act? Now, just to clarify, this is not an act, as I understand it, that's like, go murder people, right? It's. That's not what it's trying to do. What is it trying to do? What problems does it try to solve?
- [22:23]
C
It depends on which historian you ask. I tend to lean very much towards the first argument about the Murder act that was made back in 1975 by a historian named Peter Linebaugh. Linebaugh believed that the central purpose of the Murder act was to end the problem of public riots at executions at Tyburn in London. And I think he's absolutely right. If you look at that famous illustration by Hogarth of an execution at Tyburn in 1747, if you look past the crowd into the distance at the gallows, you can see these sticks poking up from the crowd. What's going on is that the College of Surgeons in London had a legal entitlement to receive at least four felons bodies per year for purposes of anatomical instruction. Dissecting a dead body so as to teach aspiring surgeons how to find their way around the human body. Which was a vital consideration, by the way, given that there was no such thing as reliable medical anesthetics. Until the 1840s, surgery is conducted upon people who are substantially or entirely conscious at the time. Speed is of the essence, so you need to know where you're going. I'm laying out all of this in detail because I'm getting somewhere about a kind of tension between what may seem to be inhumane patterns of punishment and their humane purposes. First of all, there's all those people with sticks at Tyburn. They don't want the bodies of their loved ones being taken off and being dissected, partly because there's a substantial popular belief that the soul lingers in the body for a certain amount of time after physical death, so that the person might actually be in there suffering as the body is being dissected. There's no pattern of choosing which sort of criminal might be turned over to the surgeons. The riots are so intense that it has occurred to me that one of the reasons why executions are becoming more intermittent during the last 20 years before the Murder act is simply to control the number, to limit the number of occasions on which such riots might actually be taking place. The genius of the Murder act is that by confining post mortem dissection to people who have been convicted of murder, it seems to have occurred to the government that they might be able to conquer this problem of rioting by making a kind of deal with popular mentalities. If there is one sort of crime that might actually deserve the punishment of whatever might be going on inside the nominally dead body of a person who's been hanged, it is surely murder. And there's a fairly elaborate argument in the book about how, in fact, although there are still riots against other surgeons who are trying to get bodies, usually it's not the College of Surgeons and usually it's not people who have been convicted of murder. I think the calculation that murder could actually be appropriately punished in this way appears to have been borne out by the evidence. So there is something terrible about a postmortem punishment like dissection. But dissection, remember, serves a larger purpose that I think a lot of people, certainly amongst the propertied classes, can appreciate the crucial need of, to educate surgeons around the human body, because these surgeons are going to be cutting into the living and often screaming, but hopefully not squirming bodies of perfectly law abiding citizens. If there's one thing that I think I try to get at quite a lot in my work as a historian of punishment, is I'm trying to get at the way in which there are computers, competing calculations, some of which seem unbelievably severe, some of which have clearly humanitarian intentions, and that these two things can be present at the same time. I often write about legislation like the Murder act, and there's a later bill that's attempted to expand it in 1786. I write about these things, trying to emphasize that people in the 18th century could walk and chew gum at the same time. They could have two, what might seem to us to be contradictory ideas in their head, but in the context of the world in which they live, those things may make perfect sense and may even work well in a kind of functional way.
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B
I mean, in many cases, multiple things could be true at the same time. Right. So it's helpful to kind of outline what they are and how they're working together and. But did this actually work?
- [27:49]
C
Right.
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B
If there's multiple reasons to create this act, did they actually get what they wanted from it?
- [27:54]
C
Yes and no. One of the things that I wrestle with in the book, of course, is that it's one thing to say that the genius of the Murder act is that it provides a particular category of bodies that can be reliably provided to the College of Surgeons. And by the way, the College of Surgeons in London is explicitly mentioned in the Murder Act. That is the clearest indication that we have that it is indeed, particularly the problems of London and Tyburn and the College of Surgeons that is animating this calculation. Although, of course, it's also realized that it's going to be useful for provincial anatomy schools as well.
- [28:35]
B
Yeah, but you're not reading subtext here. Like, they are named in the Act.
- [28:39]
C
They are named in the Act. And I have colleagues who have written about the act who want to make a different argument about it. For instance, they argue that the Murder act creates a kind of scale of punishments within a larger bloody code. The death penalty is applied to all of these different crimes. People understand that murder is by far the worst sort of crime. So the idea is that they're actually trying to maintain the Bloody Code, perhaps beyond its sell by date, by creating a punishment even more extreme than just death itself. I don't actually agree with that argument, but the point that I was going to make here is that the people who make that argument, whenever they quote the passages from the Murder act, they always omit the specifically London passages in order to kind of ramp their argument up, to give it extra oomph. I think that's a mistake. That's not to say that the Murder act doesn't have implications for the rest of England. It Certainly does, and it's really quite transformative in some places. But first and foremost it's about problems that are being dealt with in London and thought about with the greatest intensity in the context of London.
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B
Okay, that's definitely helpful to emphasize. What sorts of impacts then did it have and where did it maybe fall short?
- [30:12]
C
Ah, where it fell short was in the actual numerical supply of the bodies themselves. And if you think about it, this is almost like a built in failure. If the imposition of postmortem dissection or sometimes gibbeting was going to actually have the effect of deterring murder, then that means by definition that it's going to reduce the supply of bodies to surgeons. The way that I try to square this circle in the book is to point out that the government may have thought to itself that the only obligation that it had was the four bodies per year to the College of Surgeons in London. And they probably thought to themselves, and we need to remember the Murder act is brought into being at a time when it's thought that there's particularly horrifically high levels of homicides throughout Britain. I think they may have thought to themselves, well, even if it has the effect of reducing murders, as we hope it will, there'll probably still be at least four bodies every year. The great irony, and you see this in a graph in the book, is that there's a lot of years in which there's not even that many people convicted of murder in London after 1752. And the surgeons are desperately casting about trying to find other places where they can find bodies. And the number of anatomical schools is rapidly expanding, so that by the time we get to the last quarter of the 18th century, the supply is being made up by graveyard robbery. This is where this kind of nightmare vision of grave robbing as a kind of phenomenon in England actually comes from. It's the shortfall in the supply of bodies. The Murder act final gets completely undermined in terms of its moral and penal logic in the early 19th century when it becomes apparent. Well, I think two things became apparent, although one of these probably was not spoken about much by officials. The first is, and again, you can see this in a graph in the book, accusations for murder are soaring after 1800, certainly in London. So clearly the Murder act is not deterring murder if that's its main purpose. The other problem though, is that the demand for bodies is becoming so extreme that you start to have people like Burke and Hare in Edinburgh in 1828, and then two guys named Bishop and Williams in London in 1831, who are starting to cut out the middleman, the middleman being death. They are actually killing people to supply the bodies to surgeons, because, amongst other things, the better condition a body is in, the more they can charge for it. So the Murder act actually ends by inspiring murder. And there's a very strangulated discourse in government where it's very clear that the people administering the law, the Home Secretary, Robert peel in the 1820s, know very well what is happening, but are very reluctant to alter what they perceive to be a kind of established moral calculus. And underneath all of this, by the way, underneath all of this isn't even so much a perception that postmortem dissection per se, is the worst element of the punishment that's inflicted upon a convicted murder. By the 1820s, we get some explicit statements from Peale himself which indicate that people believe that it's denying a body a permanent Christian burial. That is the most nightmarish aspect of this punishment, the thing that, in theory, might deter a prospective murderer.
- [34:19]
B
And that kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier in terms of how religion and kind of thoughts about what is good and bad are playing into these legal changes and kind of experiments about, like, well, what happens if we change this lever and that incentive, like, what is sort of the outcome of it. And you've clearly illustrated to us kind of what the Murder act was trying to do and where it did or didn't manage it. So given what you've described, I was not particularly surprised to then move to the next section of the book and be like, yes, okay, so we do not have the Murder act anymore. It is replaced with something else in the beginning of the 1800s. So what is it replaced with?
- [34:54]
C
It's replaced by the anatomy act in 1832. And this is a story that has been told superlatively by Ruth Richardson in a book called Death Dissection and the destitute, published in 1987, I think, which is one of the great works of English social and cultural history. She describes some of what I've just been talking about, grave robbing and the. The Murder Act. And she points out that the Anatomy act basically changes the official legal supply of bodies to anatomy schools, from convicted murderers to people who die in the poorhouse without their body being claimed for burial by loved ones. There's been a lot of writing about how horrific this is. It seems to coincide almost precisely with the passage of the new poor law in 1830. And so there's an idea of the poor being punished for being poor with the Anatomy act as a kind of ultimate cruelty, lining up behind awful workhouses. But one of the things that I really try to emphasize in this book, which I think gets lost in this, is that the Anatomy act act also contains a provision that is of lasting significance for the punishment of murder. It not only repeals that section of the Murder act that prescribes dissection, but it also says that murderers are now going to have their bodies buried within the precincts of the prison. And the significance of that for me is that that is a punishment that continues to be inflicted as long as people are being hanged for murder, right the way down to the 1960s in Britain. So, again, that's a reminder that ultimately it's not even so much dissection itself that's conceived of as the penal aspect of the Murder act, at least in the latter phases of the regime. It is the denial of conventional Christian burial at a site where loved ones can. Can potentially go to visit the graves of those whom they have lost.
- [37:19]
B
Yeah. This question of kind of public versus not is really interesting because it's not really a question of sort of public and private, but like kind of public versus restricted access, I suppose, like state public versus general public. And you talk in the book that this isn't just about kind of where the graves are. This is also about the execution themselves itself or any. It can be like. Is that what we see as we move towards the 1860s of executions no longer also taking place in the general public view?
- [37:48]
C
Right, Right. There's a kind of classic formulation in the minds of most historians that when in 1868, the government moves executions within prison walls, that this is part of a kind of implicitly desperate effort to preserve the death penalty for murder, which would otherwise come unraveling very, very quickly. Now, for a number of reasons that I go into, I think this is greatly overstated, but I do follow a journalistic historian named John Tulloch, who, about 15, 20 years ago, published a very interesting article on executions in Lincolnshire in the Victorian era, after 1868. And he makes the argument that newspaper accounts of executions behind prison walls are becoming a kind of alternative way of making executions public or keeping them public. But they are publicized in a different manner. They're not immediately seen by a crowd, but they can be seen imaginatively by a reading audience. I first came across this idea myself in the late 1990s when I came across the reactions to a particularly famous journalist's account of what happened in the very first execution behind prison walls. And this made such a big impression with me that I decided to start the book with it. It. What happens there is that this particular journalist, a guy named George Augustus Sala, who was quite famous at the time, produces an account of what happens to the person who's being hanged physically. Because Sala, as a journalist, standing in the execution shed only a few yards from where the person is being put to death, is now seeing this thing much more intensely and up close than ever before. And in writing about it explicitly, he's actually taking the reading audience, albeit only imaginatively, much, much closer to the physical horrors of being executed by hanging than I think ever they would have been in an execution that's carried out in the open public, where the platform is several feet above the stage of the closest W, it's surrounded by a cloth that prevents you seeing what's happening to the body as it drops through the platform. So there's actually a set of arguments that play out somewhat covertly in the last part of the 19th century about whether or not it's appropriate for such accounts to be published. But the point I'm trying to make is that in some ways, executions, if they're being reported by journalists, are more vividly public than they ever have been before. My colleague Vic Gattrell suggests that in fact, some execution accounts become a kind of pornography, something that's sort of read secretively behind doors. I don't think there's an awful lot of direct evidence for that, but he's absolutely right in a kind of larger Freudian psychological sense, in which we do in the modern age tend to treat death as sort of the last great taboo, where once it was sexuality. There's a really interesting body of work still to be done about the battle to determine why some people who are hanged get full coverage from journalists and others don't. And the interesting thing is that the central government refuses to have anything to do with this. The central government does actually issue orders, basic orders, about how execution should be conducted under the guidance of the local sheriffs who are responsible for doing it. But they never, ever presume to tell them whether they should include or exclude journalists. That decision is always made on a case by case basis by the local sheriff tariffs. And one of the things I hope to be able to do in future work is to try to explore that in a little bit more detail. If I can find the sources that will help me do that.
- [42:29]
B
Yeah, that's definitely a really interesting question. It's not often that you see the state kind of go Nope, nope, nope, nope. We are not getting involved in this at all. Right. And kind of how that decision making then plays out on the ground. So, because you've hinted at future work, I mean, is that what you're pursuing at the moment, or do you have anything else on the go you want to give us a sneak preview of before I let you get back to it?
- [42:51]
C
Well, the main thing I have on the go right now is the diaries of the prison chaplain in Newgate, the ordinary of Newgate from 1823 to 1838. Later this summer, they're going to be published. It's going to be a joint publication of the London Record Society and the Church of England Record Society. Very interesting character, this clergyman named Horace Salisbury Cotton. He kept quite detailed accounts of his work, in particular with people who were going to be hanged at Newgate. And even though as a fairly rigidly minded conservative Christian minister, he obviously has a kind of distorted perspective on things, his accounts are nonetheless the closest that we are likely to get to the emotional mindsets of people who are about to be put to death in public and the variety of emotional reactions that they're having. Some are just kind of stunned into stupefaction. Some seem to be completely submissive to the traditional Christian dialogue. Some are defiant right the way out onto the gallows. So that's the thing that I have coming up next. I suppose it's kind of a complement to this book. I'm looking forward to that. There is apparently going to be a book launch at the Old Bailey in September, which will be a great deal of fun. That will be the first time that Adevreux has been in the Old Bailey courtroom since my grandfather was convicted for smuggling in the wake of the Second World War. I'm hoping that my visit to the Old Bailey end ends better.
- [44:41]
B
I mean, I suppose he was also there by invitation, so I guess that's not a difference. But, you know, invited for very different reasons.
- [44:48]
C
Indeed, a forcible invitation. One. One to which he could not say no.
- [44:53]
B
Yes, exactly. Well, that certainly sounds like an interesting project, as you said, complementary to what we've been discussing. So, for anyone who wants to learn more, the book is titled Execution, State and society in England, 1660-1900, published by Cambridge University Press in 2020. Simon, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [45:12]
C
Thanks for inviting me, Miranda. It was a real pleasure.