"Every Man Who Is Hanged Leaves a Poem": Criminal Poets in Victorian Street Ballads

Abstract

The ambiguous existence of these sheets undoubtedly masks processes of a subterranean battle...around two rights, perhaps less heterogeneous than they seem at first sight--the right to kill and be killed and right to speak and narrate. --Michel Foucault, I, Pierre Riviere, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother... [1] VICTORIAN TRIAL AND EXECUTION BROADSHEETS INCLUDED COPIES OF affecting verses or purported to be by criminals themselves, which linked sentimental poet and violent murderer. [2] Said to be written from depths of condemned cell, with condemned pen, ink, and paper and discovered by guards on floor of empty cell shortly before execution, lamentation ballads sold as records of convicts overflow of powerful feeling on eve of death (Hindley, Life, p. 76). The notoriety of this publisher's trick led one Victorian commentator to proclaim, Every man who is hanged leaves a poem (cited in Shepard, John Pitts, p. 48). These ballads thus secured persona of criminal poet in hundreds of stylized laments by supplying condemned criminal with sensibility and a poetic voice. As Foucault has argued, last lamentations posit position of subject; they [mark] place--fictitious, of course--of a subject who b oth speaks and is murderous (Foucault, p. 208). With this lyrical first-person voice, balladeers narrated murderers' lives, crimes, and punishments, lamented their sad deeds, requested pity for their plight, and examined occasion (execution) which gained their voice a hearing. Like stage tragedies, their stories sought to procure pity and fear as criminals were launched into eternity, and their texts often imagined criminals in terms that deflected from conventional wisdom about barbarity and horror of their crime and moved toward emotion and sentimentality. At moment of official and eternal silencing by state, subject seized speech, and persona of criminal poet and his/her occasional poetry traced connections between transgression and speech. As with street literature in general, however, critics have doubted textual sophistication of these lamentations. Their simple rhymes and rhythms, to which syntax is often sacrificed, have been interpreted as symptoms of ideological and intellectual simplicity. In particular, scholars have questioned their capacity for inserting social criticism into songs which sensationalize violence of murder and execution. A look at their formal qualities, however, in conjunction with their historical, marketing, and performance contexts, reveals their potential for social commentary and textual sophistication. The combined effects of ballad production and marketing, scaffold audience, conventions of criminal voice, and particulars of specific crimes and executions reveal range of discourses which execution ballads deployed and adapted. Taking into account heteroglossic layers of last lamentations suggests that sensational violence of murder and execution formed a productive and pro vocative space for social analysis. Last lamentations, most popular and profitable genre of broadside industry, occupied an important place in experience of Victorian public execution and flourished until public executions ended in 1868. Their development benefited from legal changes in capital punishment; when 1836 Parliament removed provision requiring a condemned criminal to be hanged two days after sentencing, delay between condemnation and death allowed more time for the Seven Dials poet to cultivate his muse and for presses to turn out results. [3] At same time, continued reductions in capital crimes decreased number of executions, and after 1837, executions for an offense other than murder became rare. …