THE HANGING TREE Execution and the English People 1770-1868.

Softcover. 1st p/b edn. Hanging people for small crimes as well as grave, the Bloody Penal Code was at its most active between 1770 and 1830. some 7,000 men and women were executed on public scaffolds then, watched by crowds of 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. 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, Thackeray and Dickens; and among the judges, home secretary, and monarch who decided who should hang and who should be reprieved. Drawing on letters, diaries, ballads, broadsides, and images, as well as on poignant appeals for mercy which historians until now have barely explored, the book surveys changing attitudes to death and suffering, 'sensibility' and 'sympathy', and demonstrates that the long retreat from public hanging owed less to the growth of a humane sensibility than to the development of new methods of punishment and law enforcement, and to polite clases' deepening squeamishness and fear of the scaffold crowd. This study is essential reading for anyone interested in the processes which have 'civilized' our social life. Challenging many conventional understandings of the period, the author sets new agendas for all students of 18th - 19th century culture and society, while reflecting uncompromisingly on the origins and limits of our modern attitudes to other people's misfortunes. With 41 Illus., Abbreviations, Appendices, Index of Persons and General Index. 634pp. lge. 8vo. soft cover. Small crease to the top r/hand corner of fr. cover o/w Vg+ with no other creases. A fairly heavy book which may require additional postage if shipped overseas.