The Punishment of Death

Abstract

— So ran Dickens’s revised version of ‘The Fine Old English Gentleman, to be said or sung at all Conservative dinners’, composed in 1841. ‘By Jove, how radical I am getting!’ he wrote to Forster about that time. ‘I wax stronger and stronger in the true principles every day.’1 There was, then as at most times, a rough correlation between political radicalism and penal reformism, though there were many exceptions of course, as there still are — members of ‘the stupid party’ who oppose capital punishment, and Labour MPs who defend flogging as passionately as the proverbial ladies at Conservative Party Conferences. Dickens’s criticisms of the law and its administration were part of his generally Radical outlook at this period: and this, I have suggested, was closely bound up with his social prejudices against the class which represented privilege and tradition. But, if he ‘waxed stronger and stronger in the true principles every day’, he never — in my view — progressed very far in political Radicalism. He never wanted, or even envisaged, a society much different from his own in its social and political and economic organisation. Likewise, in penal reform, he regarded himself as a moderate.