Implementing Abolitionist Strategies (1)

The Will to Affect Public Opinion

 

    All throughout the nineteenth century, it was common for writers to manage a career in journalism (they would write articles and reviews about other works for example) as well as writing fiction, and to publish some of their works in newspapers or magazines. For instance, fragments of story would appear regularly in new issues as installments, making a novel serial. This practice was popular even outside of Great Britain: in France, Alexandre Dumas’ Le Comte de Monte-Cristo was published in the Journal des Débats over a period of seven weeks in 1844 and then four weeks in 1846; in the United States, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin appeared during forty weeks from 1851 to 1852 in The National Era; in Russia, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov was published in The Russian Messenger from January 1879 to November 1880. Charles Dickens had not only already worked for a newspaper before publishing his open letters, he had also published a number of his literary works in a serial format. There were several advantages to this practice: a wider and more diverse audience was to be reached, poorer people having access to some of these works. A certain amount of suspense could also be produced through serials, therefore a readership was created and could grow, maybe have an impact on the circulation of a newspaper itself.
 

    The letters in Dickens' series published in the Daily News are supposed to be read together, and, as a whole, his work can be regarded as a sort of essay published like a serial novel, but in the form of open letters. His series is therefore the product of a combination of various devices. There is a continuity in his development, and the author acknowledges this practice as he alludes to more letters to come in his first letter published on February 23rd, 1846: “I choose this time for addressing to you, the first of two or three letters on the subject of Capital Punishment”, although four were to be published in addition to this one, as on the third letter (published on March 9th), Dickens mentions that he was going to “reserve another letter” to the effect of public executions on preventing crime, and on the fourth letter (published on March 13th), he announces a “next, concluding, letter”, published three days later, marking the last letter of the series and the end of his address. A sixth letter on secondary punishments was supposed to be written, but Dickens had other works to focus on (Slater 249). By the time the first letter was published, he had already resigned from the editorship of the Daily News, and his close friend John Forster took the helm of the newspaper.
 

    The series is structured: the first letter can be seen as an introduction of the topic Dickens wants to discuss, on the second letter he suggests an alternative to public executions that would not overlap a certain set of values, the third deals with the “commission” of murder and the life (and representations) of murderers, the fourth deals with whether or not crime can be prevented, and its efficiency, and the fifth and final letter concludes on the state of criminal law in Britain. His tone is overall serious, while setting the topic clearly from the beginning of his series and expressing his mind on the subject, Dickens relates precise examples of various executions to illustrate and structure his comments, recounting some cases, and he provides figures on the efficiency of public executions (Dickens DN 13 March 1846, 3). He also carefully states that he did not write these letters with the intent to either show or encourage sympathy towards criminals, and he precisely highlights that, according to him, it is as hurtful as the death penalty itself: “the morbid and odious sentimentality which has been exhibited of late years [...] is one of the evil concomitants of the Punishment of Death” (Dickens, 23 February 1846, 1).

    While the series of letters in the Daily News had for subject capital punishment as a whole, and only tended to deal with public executions specifically, Dickens’ single open letter published on November 13th, 1849 on The Times is an account on the public execution he and another 30 000 people attended [1] -as a witness. Here again, the choice of making this letter open is to reach a wider audience: “I simply wish to turn this dreadful experience to some account for the general good, by taking the readiest and most public means of adverting”. Indeed, the circulation of The Times was much bigger than that his rival liberal newspaper The Daily News, and was gradually increasing and becoming more and more popular.
 

    Because it is his own account of an event which he witnessed with his own eyes and because it was written the same day as the execution took place, Dickens might appears more involved, his address seems to be more of an immediate reaction, and it contrasts a little with the structure of his series of letters published almost four years earlier. His gaze, alongside his account, is focused more on the crowd gathered for the execution and its actions and behaviour rather than on the Mannings and the crime for which they were punished, which gives rise to Dickens’ own message against the public dimension of executions. His tone is rather straightforward as he presents the scene he witnessed in a disparaging way.

    Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray did not separate his essay in distinct fragments, but his work was published in one piece in Fraser’s Magazine, an “Ultra-Tory in politics and antisentimental in literary taste” monthly magazine, in August 1840 (Leary 105). On July 16th, 1840, Thackeray attended François Benjamin Courvoisier’s execution, a Swiss man who had confessed the murder of his employer. This execution was also attended by Charles Dickens, and an estimated 40 000 people were gathered to see him executed outside of Newgate Prison in London. Thackeray begins his essay telling about the day of the execution, starting very early in the morning with a detailed account of his own day. He then switches focus to imagine Courvoisier's morning, and then it goes back to himself leaving his house and arriving early outside Newgate. Most of his essay deals with the crowd, gradually growing, and the variety of people he observed, the discussions he took part in or overheard. He shares his own reflection on the radical shift of the situation once Courvoisier was brought out of the prison walls and up on the gallows. His account is thus not meant to be about the individual condemned to death but rather about the British crowd gathered to witness it and the aftermath of the execution, including the media response and its portrayal. There is an ambivalence in Thackeray’s essay, in his description of the crowd. First, he reports the crowd as a diverse entity, composed both of “gentlemen of good fortune” discussing politics (Thackeray 4), but also of “several tipsy dissolute-looking young men” and “debauched crew” (Thackeray 5), each group enjoying themselves. He especially puts an emphasis on the diversity of the people making up the mob, on a social level and regarding their age: “blackguards of sixteen and seventeen”, “a considerable number of girls” (Thackeray 6), “many young dandies”, “simple honest tradesmen and their wives”, “ruffians” (Thackeray 7), “mechanics, gentlemen, pickpockets, members of both House of Parliament, street-walkers, newspaper-writers” (Thackeray 8). He then points out that most of these people -the educated and the masses- seem to rejoice from such events, bringing the parties to the same level.
 

    The Northern Star’s popularity had already decreased since its higher peak in 1839, as the Chartist movement was soon to come to an end, and Feargus O’Connor was facing economic difficulties to try to keep publishing his newspaper (Epstein 58-59). The unsigned article is an account relating the crime and botched execution of John Gleeson Wilson, and the report is perhaps the most factual out of the articles on the corpus, the news writer does not only focus on the audience of the public execution, but states the crime, presents the convict’s background, recount his last days in a matter-of-factly way, mentioning that he “strongly maintained that he was an innocent man” (Northern Star 1), until the moment of his belated and somewhat graphic death, due to a late change of hangman, the newly appointed executioner being “short in stature and an old man”. There are very few passages on which the distinct voice of the writer is perceptible: the use of “usually” with the convict sitting “on the chair usually appropriated for criminals”, which suggests that the writer goes against the verdict and concedes a sense of innocence to Gleeson Wilson, who never confessed to the four murders he was accused of; and the sentence “Altogether, it is hardly possible to conceive a more disgustingly painful accident”, which has to do with the writer’s own perception and appreciation of the execution. At the end of the article, Gleeson Wilson is considered as “the wretched”, this term is ambiguous as it can be interpreted as an unfortunate person, or as a despicable being.
 

    In order to find its place in Britain, the Punch had to appeal to the masses. It was described as a family-friendly entertainment that published satirical cartoons, and its “optimistic, good-natured humour was deliberately constructed against existing popular satirical papers like the Age, the Town, and the Satirist which Punch competed with in the 1840s” (Miller 269), as those tended to be more virulent. The cartoon represents a scene outside of an opera house, a small crowd is gathered to see the spectacle -men and women, there is also someone selling tickets in a booth, someone up on a small stage, most likely trying to draw even more people, behind him is a large poster representing a trial scene. It is not exactly violent in its form, but the comparison of crime and the consumption of entertainment is significant enough to create irony.

    The broadside on the execution of Catherine Foster is also ironic, and different from other broadsides about public executions, where an engraving, ballads and accounts on a crime would be found. Broadsides would be sold a few days before an execution and was often referred to as “street literature”11. On this one, there are phrases that were printed bigger and catch attention: "Grand moral spectacle", "A young girl", "publicly strangled", and "the great moral teacher", "strangles her". The way the author of this broadside wrote almost incriminates the hangman, painting him guilty of an incoming murder. Moreover, it appears that public executions are made fun of with the emphasis on the greatness of the execution.

 

 

[1] ‘Mr Charles Dickens and the execution of the Mannings’, reprinted from The Times, The British Library.

https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/mr-charles-dickens-and-the-execution-of-the-mannings-reprinted-from-the-times

 

DICKENS, Charles. “Letters on Social Questions. Capital Punishments”. Letter in The Daily News. February 23rd 1846, pp. 4-5.
— “Letters on Social Questions. Capital Punishment”. Letter in The Daily News. February 28th 1846, pp. 6.
— “Letters on Social Questions. Capital Punishment”. Letter in The Daily News. March 9th 1846, pp. 5-6.
— “Letters on Social Questions. Capital Punishment”. Letter in The Daily News. March 13th 1846, pp. 5.
— “Letters on Social Questions. Capital Punishment”. Letter in The Daily News. March 16th 1846, pp. 6.
Series of letters in The Times [Online]. [Accessed 17/11/2020]. URL:  https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/letters-from-charles-dickens-on-capital-punishment-23-february---16-march-1846

— “Mr. Charles Dickens and the execution of the Mannings”. Letter in The Times. November 13th 1849 [Online]. [Accessed 17/11/2020]. URL:  https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/mr-charles-dickens-and-the-execution-of-the-mannings-reprinted-from-the-times

 
O’CONNOR, Feargus. “Execution of Gleeson Wilson”. Northern Star. September 22nd 1849, p. 6. [Online]. [Accessed 17/11/2020]. URL: https://ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/ns/issues/ns3_22091849/page/6/articles/ar00605/

 

LANDELLS, Ebenezer. MAYHEW, Henry. “The Trial-for-Murder Mania”. Punch’s Almanack [Online]. London, 1850. [Accessed 23/11/2020]. URL: https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/the-trial-for-murder-mania-from-punchs-almanack.

 

MAKEPEACE THACKERAY, William. Going to See a Man Hanged [Online]. July 1840. [Accessed 17/11/2020]. URL: http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/twiki/pub/AmLegalHist/AngelaProject/Thackeray_Going_To_See_A_Man_Hanged.pdf.

 

Unknown. “Grand Moral Spectacle”. Broadside about the execution of Catherine Foster [Online]. London, 1847. [Accessed 26/11/2020]. URL: https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/broadside-grand-moral-spectacle.

 

 

 

EPSTEIN, J. A. "FEARGUS O'CONNOR AND THE NORTHERN STAR." International Review of Social History [Online]. Vol. 21, no. 1 (1976): 51-97. [Accessed 14/06/2021]. URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/44581757.

 

LEARY, Patrick. ""Fraser's Magazine" and the Literary Life, 1830-1847." Victorian Periodicals Review [Online]. Vol. 27, no. 2 (1994): 105-26. [Accessed 14/06/2021]. URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20082761.

 

SLATER, Michael. Charles Dickens A Life Defined by Writing [Online]. United States of America: Yale University Press, 2009. [Accessed 14/06/2021]. URL: https://books.google.fr/books/about/Charles_Dickens.html?id=GPHkiefalPUC&redir_esc=y