Beyond the Law: The Politics of Ending the Death Penalty for Sodomy in Britain, by Charles Upchurch

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Given the fairly recent furore over a work on nineteenth-century homosexuality published with considerable publicity and then almost immediately revealed during a live radio interview to be based on serious misapprehensions of what the historical record actually said, it is a great pleasure to receive a work based on such deep and solid scholarship as this book by Charles Upchurch. What Upchurch meticulously uncovers are the unfulfilled possibilities that the death penalty for the ‘crime unfit to be named’ might have been abolished well before the Offences against the Person Act (1861) undertook a major tidying-up of the legislation across a range of crimes falling under that heading. Judges and juries were becoming reluctant as a general rule to impose the capital penalty as an exemplary deterrent, preferring instead carceral sentences or transportation. However, in the early nineteenth century there was a new context of a significant, even startling, disproportionate increase in the numbers of executions for sodomy. Against this background there were activist attempts to pass laws repealing that penalty.