What could you be hanged for in Victorian England? What was Charles DIckens' attitude to the death penilty?

Question

Work for English, I am busy answering the 3 questions before it and i need an answer before the end of the lesson. Thanks.

Answer 1

Charles Dickens opposed the Death Penalty which is one of the reasons he wrote 'Great Expectations.' Criminal Laws were evolving curing the Victorian era so what was punnishable by death at the start of the Era and what was not chnaged by the end of the Era.

Mostly though Hanging was for 'wilful murder,' 'malicious assaut,' and teason - - - -

Here is a link and words you might find helpful..
http://www.umd.umich.edu/casl/hum/eng/classes/434/geweb/PUBLICEX.htm
"""Public Executions in Nineteenth-Century England
Deirdre Blanchfield

In Great Expectations, Charles Dickens sets up a tale that centers around imprisonment. Most of the characters have had experiences with or are criminals. The prison system that Pip encounters in the novel, however, is very different from the time in which Dickens wrote.

Dickens published the novel in 1860-1 yet it takes place somewhere between 1807-10 and 1823-26 (Sandrin 37). Dickens uses the prison systems before they were reformed to set the mood for the novel. He also voices his opinions on the reformation of the prison systems and public punishment of the prisoners.

The fascination with death is a trademark of the early nineteenth century. At that time prisoners condemned to death were still being executed publicly. These public executions were horrendous. People rented out rooms with views of the gallows outside Newgate and held parties before the hangings. Pickpockets found this to be the high point in their businesses because the people were packed shoulder to shoulder in the streets. So many people would crowd the streets that in 1806 twenty-eight people were crushed to death in a panic (Babington 7).

There were not many crimes that didn't end with death as a punishment. "Under the 'Bloody Code', over two hundred offenses were capital. . . . [T]he Home Office return for persons committed for trial in 1817 showed that a majority of the 13,932 persons accused of crimes were liable to be punished by death" (Collins 3). Despite the number charged "only one in seven of persons capitally committed was actually hanged . . . [because] chances of escaping detection, prosecution, and conviction were all very high" (Collins 4). Still, executions when called for, were public.

Many attempts to repeal capital punishment were made but to no avail. However, from 1823 and 1830, Robert Peel, the Home Secretary, obtained legislation that removed the death penalty from over one hundred crimes. In 1832 "horse and sheep stealing and coining ceased to be hanging offenses; in 1837 forgery was also exempted and, in fact, from that year until the close of the nineteenth century no executions took place in Britain for any crime other than murder or attempted murder" (Babington 180). In 1837 Parliament passed several bills which called for the removal of the death penalty and limited it to crimes such as "high treason; murder and attempted murder; rape, carnal abuse of girls under ten; arson, piracy; riot. Riotous destruction, and destruction of ships and stores of war; and embezzlement by employees of the Bank of England" (Hollingsworth 26).

Dickens himself tried to rid England of public executions. After witnessing his first hanging in 1846, he published a letter in The Daily News:

I was, purposely, in the spot, from midnight of the night before; and was a near witness of the whole process of the building of the scaffold, the gathering of the crowd, the gradual swelling of the concourse with the coming-on of day, the hanging of the man, the cutting of the body down, and the removal of it into the prison. From the moment of my arrival, when there were but a few score boys in the street, and all those young thieves, and all clustered together behind the barrier nearest to the drop--down to the time when I saw the body with its dangling head, being carried on a wooden bier into the gaol--I did not see one token in all the immense crowd; at the windows, in the streets, on the house-tops, anywhere; of any one emotion suitable to the occasion.
No sorrow, no salutary terror, no abhorrence, no seriousness; nothing but ribaldry, debauchery, levity, drunkenness, and flaunting vice in fifty other shapes. I should have deemed it impossible that I could have ever felt any large assemblage of my fellow-creatures to be so odious. I hoped, for an instant, that there was some sense of Death and Eternity in the cry of "Hats off!" when the miserable wretch appeared; but I found, next moment, that they only raised it as they would at a Play--to see the stage the better, in the final scene. (Babington 225)

It is clear that Dickens was appalled. After many letters trying to stop the executions, Dickens resorted to trying to have them held in private. "The Times replied to his arguments in a leading article, stating their opinion that the mystery of private executions would be intolerable as the populace must be able to see that the rich as well as the poor murderers were really hanged" (Babington 226). Dickens proposed a jury system of twenty four men, but that was rejected.
William Ewart Gladstone was a Member of Parliament who advocated the abolition of the death penalty in 1840. He tried to push through several bills eradicating capital punishment but all were denied. In March of 1866 a bill to stop public executions was finally received and passed into a law in 1868. It wasn't until May of 1869 that public executions were totally abolished. This was almost twenty-three years after Dickens' letter was published and nine since the publication of Great Expectations.

The abolishment of public executions resulted in an overflow of criminals being put into the prisons. The prisons of the early nineteenth century were in grim conditions. Prisoners were rioting for better surroundings and meals. To stop these riots, the government passed the Prison Act of 1865.

This Act separated the prisoners and they were "prevented from holding any communication with each other either by every prisoner being kept in a separate cell by day and by night . . . and being subjected to such superintendence during the day as will prevent his communicating with any other prisoner" (Babington 221).

The act also divided the labor system into two classes. The first class consisted of the hard laborers who had either just entered the jail or were over sixteen, and prisoners who had committed serious offenses. Once the younger prisoners had completed "the first three months' sentence doing first class hard labor . . . [they] became eligible for graduation to the second class" (Babington 222). The second class consisted of older criminals who performed menial jobs in the prison. The 1865 Act also required that "every local prison have separate cells equal in number to the average of the greatest number of prisoners . . . held in the prison at any time during each of the preceding five years" (McConville 702). The Prison Act was very effective. It decreased the number of riots and increased the number of reformed prisoners.

The differences between the two halves of the century are also incredible. Reformation of the prisons was a success. In the later half of the century prisoners were not being shipped off to be left to their own devices but put to work in an attempt to reform those who could be reformed. Those who had committed the offenses still deemed punishable by death were now able to die without an audience.


Works Cited

Babington, Anthony. The English Bastille. London: MacDonald, 1971.

Collins, Philip. Dickens and Crime. New York: St. Martin's P, 1962.

Fraser, Derek. The New Poor Law in the Nineteenth Century. New York: St. Martin's P, 1976.

Hollingsworh, Keith. The Newgate Novel 1830-1847. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1963.

Johnson, W. Branch. The English Prison Hulks. London: Phillimore, 1970.

McConville, Sean. English Local Prisons 1860-1900. London: TJ P, 1995.

Morris, Norval and Rothman, David J. Oxford History of the Prison. New York: Oxford UP, 1995.

Reed, John. "Confinement and Character in Dickens' Novels." Dickens Studies Annual London: Southern Illinois UP, 1970.

Sadrin, Anny. Great Expectations. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1988. ""


Peace...

Answer 2

[1] The first answer is almost 100% wrong. In fact, it has nothing to do with 19th century England, but seems typical of so-called “modern” Islamic-law countries. Hanging (not beheading) was the method of capital punishment in 19th century England. Adultery was not a capital crime. Imprisonment (or transportation) was the usual punishment for theft.

If you want a huge amount of detail, go to link 1 below.

In summary: -

o At the beginning of the 19th century, there were an amazing 222 capital crimes, including such terrible offences as impersonating a Chelsea pensioner and damaging London Bridge.

o The number of capital crimes was reduced to just 4 (high treason, murder, piracy and arson in Royal Dockyards) by the Criminal Law Consolidation Act of 1861.




[2] Charles DICKENS attitude to the DEATH PENALTY. (see link 2 for details)

In 1846 Dickens wrote 5 opinion-editorials for the "Daily News" newspaper on the topic of capital punishment. In summary: -
He was opposed to the Death Penalty in most circumstances, because he felt the POSSIBILITY of a mistaken verdict from the Court outweighed all other considerations.

Answer 3

The Death Penalty in Dickens time was not as bad as that 20 - 50 years earlier, already the Death penalty was being constantly re assessed. Transportation was more the in thing during Dickens time up to around 1850 when Prisons became more popular with Hard Labour.
But Normally anything from High Treason Down to Robbery with threat, Highway Robbery, Piracy, Murder, Manslaughter, etc. During the height of the Death penalty any robbery that was rated over a few schillings was a black cap job.

Answer 4

Contrast the welfare state of today with that of Dickens time. - he was a campaigner for the improvement of social conditions for the poor - the Cratchitts, Pip, Oliver, all make good from humble backgrounds. Other like Lady Dedlock or Miss Havisham, wealthy but unfulfilled. Or the concept of Victorian morality - apparent respectability concealing the murkey underworld of the Victorian Era, a time of staggering hipocrisy in what was then the most powerful nation on earth.

Answer 5

Most of the above answers deal with your question, but I would like to correct on or two errors. You could not be beheaded in Victorian times as the first answer suggests. Nor did adultery attract the death penalty as that answer also suggests. That method of execution had been abolished long before Victoria came to the throne. The hanging of sometimes very young children for petty offences, such as stealing a handkerchief, as another answer suggests had also long been abolished. That was a feature of mid-18th century England, particularly during the time of the Whig oligarchy.

Answer 6

Check Charles Dickens links to learn what he thought about the death penalty and children being hanged for petty theft. You can get the information by the end of the lesson.

Answer 7

You could get hanged, imprisoned or deported for the most petty crimes such as stealing food from stalls or pickpocketing!

Dickens felt that the attitude to punishing children were wrong - they were hanged, flogged and locked up just like their adult counterparts.

A good text to read on Dicken's attitude is American Notes which is basically a diary about his visit to America and what he thought of the place - i.e. the cultural differences:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Notes

Wikipedia says about his social commentary:

Dickens's novels were, among other things, works of social commentary. He was a fierce critic of the poverty and social stratification of Victorian society. Dickens's second novel, Oliver Twist (1839), shocked readers with its images of poverty and crime and was responsible for the clearing of the actual London slum that was the basis of the story's Jacob's Island. In addition, with the character of the tragic prostitute, Nancy, Dickens "humanised" such women for the reading public; women who were regarded as "unfortunates," inherently immoral casualties of the Victorian class/economic system. Bleak House and Little Dorrit elaborated expansive critiques of the Victorian institutional apparatus: the interminable lawsuits of the Court of Chancery that destroyed people's lives in Bleak House and a dual attack in Little Dorrit on inefficient, corrupt patent offices and unregulated market speculation.

Answer 8

"It should be noted that in practice, there were only about 17 offences for which a death sentence was generally carried out in the 18th and early 19th centuries. These included murder, attempted murder, arson, rape, sodomy, forgery, uttering (passing forged or counterfeit monies or bills) coining, robbery, highway robbery (in many cases, this was the offence of street robbery, that we would now call mugging), housebreaking, robbery in a dwelling house, returning from transportation, cutting and maiming (grievous bodily harm) and horse, cattle or sheep stealing. For all the other offences, transportation to America or Australia was normally substituted for execution. From the 1820’s, imprisonment began to replace transportation for the more minor offences.
By 1861, the number of capital crimes had been reduced to just 4 (high treason, murder, piracy and arson in Royal Dockyards) by the Criminal Law Consolidation Act of that year."

Dickens was against public hangings, although he was in favour of them being carried out privately for the crime of murder.

"Some concluding words for my readers: as noted above, Dickens had become more conservative on Capital Punishment, and changed his stand from demanding total abolition (1846) to advocating private executions (1849). He maintained that more achievable and more realistic position for the rest of his life, when he gave the matter any thought at all. In a private letter to his closest friend, he commented on yet another widely famed murderer—Thomas Smethurst, a surgeon and poisoner—and wrote (25 Aug 1859): “I would hang any Home Secretary (Whig, Tory, Radical, or otherwise) who should step in between that black scoundrel and the gallows” [Pilgrim 9:111]. To a Quaker schoolmaster, he wrote (21 Jan 1864): “Distinguish, if you please, in quoting me, between Public Executions and Capital Punishment. I should be glad to abolish both, if I knew what to do with the Savages of civilization. As I do not, I would rid Society of them, when they shed blood, in a very solemn manner but would bar out the present audience.”"

Answer 9

At the begging of the Victorian period theft of items value over one shilling carried the death penalty.Often the courts deliberately undervalued items in order to allow the sentence of deportation to the colonies which kept up the supply of free covict labour.

Answer 10

In Victorian England mostly anything could have gotten you beheaded, but treason, stealing, and adultery are on the top of the list.
I really do not know what Charles D. thought about the death penalty.

Answer 11

Dickens tried to end public executions after seeing his first hanging in 1846. Usually the crimes were petty such as stealing.