Randall McGowen

A Powerful Sympathy: Terror, the Prison, and Humanitarian Reform in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain

It is felt that men are henceforth to be held together by new ties, and separated by new barriere; for the ancient bonds will now no longer unite, nor the ancient boundaries confine. [J. S. Mill, “The Spirit of the Age” (1831)] I “The punishment of death shocks every mind to which it is vividly presented,” wrote Edward Gibbon Wakefield in 1832. It “overturns the most settled notions of right and wrong.” H. G. Bennet announced in Parliament in 1820 that he thought an execution “weakened the moral taste or sensibility of the people.” Such high-minded but platitudinous phrases frequently recurred in the early nineteenth-century debate over the criminal law, though historians have had a difficult time knowing what to make of them. Yet for all their vagueness such expressions do reveal a sensibility whose outline we can trace and whose influence we can measure. In drawing a connection between feeling and morality Wakefield appealed to social assumptions and values that were popular among humanitarians. Criminal law reformers proposed a new and exacting standard for the administration of justice: “Punishment,” argued James Scarlett, “ought to be consonant to the feelings and sympathies of mankind; and … those feelings ought to be enlisted on the side of the administration of justice.” They argued that the heavy reliance on the death penalty was a mistaken policy. The gallows aroused dangerous passions that signaled the existence of intractable social antagonism. They opposed such a spectacle with reforms that aimed at the promotion of a social union founded on shared feeling.

Civilizing Punishment: The End of the Public Execution in England

On August 14, 1868, Thomas Wells was executed behind prison walls in Maidstone. According to the The Times , the event passed off so quietly that the public perhaps failed to note the significance of the occasion. With his death the drama of the public execution came to an end. “It is,” the newspaper explained, “emphatically one of those reforms which are hard to realize before they are made, but which, once made, seem so simple and unobjectionable that they are treated almost as a matter of course.” On the face of it, this passage seems to capture the salient features of the episode. In the decades leading up to abolition, opinion was deeply divided about the value of the death penalty and the wisdom of public executions. The Times itself, almost to the last moment, resisted the change. But once the issue was resolved in favor of privacy, no voice demanded their return. There were no demonstrations protesting the reform. Even the arguments once used to defend the publicity of punishment disappeared from view. But The Times meant something more by the phrase “one of those reforms.” It indicated a belief that the abolition belonged to a special category of measures, those that contributed to the progress of civilization in England. The idea that civilization demanded the end of the public execution figured prominently in reform arguments, and occupied just as important a place in later interpretations of the change. A liberal member of Parliament, John Hibbert, in pointing to an execution in 1866, explained that “no one anxious to promote civilization could wish to see the recurrence of a scene of that kind.”

Managing the Gallows: The Bank of England and the Death Penalty, 1797–1821

Over thirty years ago Douglas Hay began his influential essay, “Property, Authority and the Criminal Law,” with the unsettling claim that “the rulers of eighteenth-century England cherished the death sentence.” He went on to offer a major reinterpretation of eighteenth-century justice, one with wide-ranging implications for how we understand English society in that period. The gallows, Hay argues, was meant to inspire terror. The passage of a large number of capital statutes spoke of the resolve of the ruling class to defend its property with the most extreme of measures. Yet the ultimate sanction was used sparingly. Hays most important insight was to note the role of discretion in the operation of eighteenth-century justice. The choice not to impose death was as important as the occasions when offenders died. The elite deftly exploited these opportunities. The mercy dispensed by the Crown not only presented a more benign image of authority, it also taught the lessons of patronage and deference that instructed the lower orders in the proper attitude to take toward their social superiors. Thus justice worked more powerfully than religion to create legitimacy for the existing order.

The Problem of Punishment in Eighteenth-Century England

Although judges, as well as the ministers who delivered the assize sermons, regularly intoned about the glories of English justice, other observers took alarm at at what they saw as evidence of a disturbing situation. ‘There are more Men and Women hang’d here (I mean in London) in a Year, than in Amsterdam’ and all seven United Provinces, complained a pamphleteer in 1695.1 ‘More are condemn’d at one Newgate-Sessions’, announced Lawrence Braddon in 1717, ‘than are execut’d in some Countries within three years’.2 Such expressions, far from rare in the opening decades of the century, increased in frequency by mid-century. ‘There are more Persons hanged in England’, the London Magazine commented in 1735, ‘than almost in all Europe besides’.3 ‘I have heard it affirmed’, wrote Charles Jones in 1752, ‘that there are more Persons executed in the British Dominions, than in all Europe besides’.4 These somber reflections on the number of executions in England were scarcely offered in a spirit of national congratulation. The nation, they worried, had achieved an unenviable distinction. Whether the figures are accurate or not, the complaints testify to a concern experienced in some circles about the condition of English justice. This lament was offered by people who took the unsatisfactory state of English penal arrangements as evidence of a profound problem in the body-politic.

An Eye for an Eye: A Global History of Crime and Punishment

The sub-title of Mitchell Roth’s new volume, A Global History of Crime and Punishment, describes an extraordinarily ambitious project. He sets out not only to survey penal issues around the world b...

The Mid-Victorians and the Two-Party System

Twentieth-century historians of the development of British political institutions have been persuaded by the late Sir Lewis Namier that the eighteenth century cannot fruitfully be analyzed in terms of party politics. “In 1761,” Sir Lewis observed, “not one parliamentary election was determined by party, and in 1951 not one constituency returned a non-party member.” J. H. Plumb has admittedly discerned a temporary “rage of party” during the reign of Queen Anne, and Donald Ginter has noted significant anticipations of modern party rivalry during the 1780s and 1790s while the late Richard Pares found “a tendency to a two party system” present during the immediate post-Napoleonic War years. Yet the modern political party system is generally seen as a direct if unwitting consequence of the Reform Act of 1832. In J.B. Conachers words: First of all a political party should exist with the purpose of becoming the basis of government; secondly it should be composed of members sharing common principles and traditions; thirdly it should possess some definite form of organization inside and outside Parliament. For lack of one or more of these essential requirements the modern political party could not come into existence until after the Reform act of 1832.