Description
Book SynopsisHanging people for small crimes as well as grave, the Bloody Penal Code was at its most active between 1770 and 1830. In those years some 7,000 men and women were executed on public scaffolds, watched by thousands. Hanging was confined to murderers thereafter, but these were still killed in public until 1868. Clearly the gallows loomed over much of social life in this period. But how did those who watched, read about, or ordered these strangulations feel about the terror and suffering inflicted in the law''s name? What kind of justice was delivered, and how did it change?This book is the first to explore what a wide range of people felt about these ceremonies (rather than what a few famous men thought and wrote about them). A history of mentalities, emotions, and attitudes rather than of policies and ideas, it analyses responses to the scaffold at all social levels: among the crowds which gathered to watch executions; among `polite'' commentators from Boswell and Byron on to Fry, Thack
Trade Review[a] classic study * The Sunday Times Culture Magazine *
There is plenty to incite horror, but the cleverness of the book is the way it puts the English way of execution into a political context * Jeremy Paxman, Independent *
monumental in the subtlety and richness of the argument ... a rare combination of pellucid clarity and passion that carries the reader on to the final chapter without a single longeur. * John Adamson, Sunday Telegraph *
A quite outstanding book, moving, perceptive ... richly imaginative. * Linda Colley, Observer *
