HANGING IN JUDGEMENT Religion and the Death Penalty in England

Hardback. A comprehensive history of capital punishment in modern England, which also covers 1957-1969. It shows how time and again the Church of England came to the rescue of a punishment that was in danger of being abolished, pushing for a policy, which so sanitised the operation of hanging that people lost interest in its abolition. When finally the church withdrew its support, the retentionist cause collapsed. In the telling of this grim and depressing story, backed by extensive research and based on much unpublished archival material, the author introduces a whole series of odd, interesting and macabre characters. There are early evangelical feminists; an eccentric abolitionist millionairess; thrice-hanged Lee; religious hangmen certain of their divine calling; moral crusaders to rival those engaged in the fight against slavery; Lord Haw Haw, Edith Thompson, and Derek Bentley in the condemned cell; bishops who justified hanging on evangelical grounds as providing the perfect terrain for conversions, and literary figures like Dickens, Thackeray, Hardy, Byron, and Shelley who were both fascinated and repulsed by public hangings. With Conclusion, Chronology, Notes, Bibliog., Index of Names and Index of Subjects. 292pp. 8vo. h/back. F. in F. dw.