MARC Record from marc_columbia

LEADER: 03488fam a2200433 a 4500
001 1536416
005 20220608183320.0
008 940202s1994 enka 001 0 eng
010 $a 94004108
020 $a0198204132 :$c£19.95
035 $a(OCoLC)29908975
035 $a(OCoLC)ocm29908975
035 $9AKB5297CU
035 $a(NNC)1536416
035 $a1536416
040 $aDLC$cDLC$dNNC
043 $ae-uk---
050 00 $aHV8699.G8$bG38 1994
082 00 $a364.6/6/0941$220
100 1 $aGatrell, Vic,$d1941-$0http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/nr2006030822
245 14 $aThe hanging tree :$bexecution and the English people 1770-1868 /$cV.A.C. Gatrell.
260 $aOxford [England] ;$aNew York [N.Y.] :$bOxford University Press,$c1994.
263 $a9501
300 $axix, 634 pages :$billustrations ;$c24 cm
336 $atext$btxt$2rdacontent
337 $aunmediated$bn$2rdamedia
500 $aIncludes indexes.
520 $aHanging 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.
520 8 $aBut 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?
520 8 $a.
520 8 $aThis 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).
520 8 $aA 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.
520 8 $aDrawing 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 classes' deepening squeamishness and fear of the scaffold crowd.
520 8 $aThis gripping study is essential reading for anyone interested in the processes which have 'civilized' our social life. Challenging many conventional understandings of the period, V. A. C. Gatrell sets new agendas for all students of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century culture and society, while reflecting uncompromisingly on the origins and limits of our modern attitudes to other people's misfortunes.
520 8 $aPanoramic in range, scholarly in method, and compelling in argument, this is one of those rare histories which both shift our sense of the past and speak powerfully to the present.
650 0 $aCapital punishment$zGreat Britain$xHistory.
650 0 $aExecutions and executioners$zGreat Britain$xHistory.
650 0 $aHanging$zGreat Britain$xHistory.
852 00 $bglx$hHV8699.G8$iG38 1994