Reviewed by: Execution Culture in Nineteenth Century Britain: From Public Spectacle to Hidden Ritual ed. by Patrick Low, Helen Rutherford, and Clare Sandford-Couch Michael Meranze (bio) Execution Culture in Nineteenth Century Britain: From Public Spectacle to Hidden Ritual, edited by Patrick Low, Helen Rutherford, and Clare Sandford-Couch; pp. xv + 199. London and New York: Routledge, 2021, $160.00, $48.95 paper, $44.05 ebook. The Capital Punishment Amendment Act of 1868 cut a caesura into the history of Britain's penal practices. For centuries hangings had been consistent features of Britain's public space, with the Law's ultimate display designed to clarify before the eyes of the public the penalties that accrued to those who violated its most serious mandates. After the Act, that display would be moved within walls, separated from the crowd that had traditionally been its immediate audience. Although hangings would continue, a new, more intense process of mediation would replace the visceral and visual sight of the body broken on the gallows. Execution Culture in Nineteenth Century Britain: From Public Spectacle to Hidden Ritual, edited by Patrick Low, Helen Rutherford, and Clare Sandford-Couch, tackles the implications and effects of this transition. Growing out of a conference held in 2018, Execution Culture is divided into two sections: the first focuses on the act of witnessing the execution and the second on the ways that executions were represented after 1868. The volume also raises a fascinating analytical question: how do you write the history of an absence? This question is partly addressed in James Gregory's treatment of the ways that the Capital Punishment Amendment Act of 1868 was depicted first by contemporaries and later in both popular and scholarly cultures. But it runs throughout the volume as both a methodological and analytical question. The first part of the volume, "Going to see a man hanged," takes up issues that will be most familiar to scholars of punishment. Rachel Bennett (on Scotland) and Matthew White (on London) show the myriad ways that the hanging, as well as fears about the effects of hanging, played across the nineteenth century. They remind the reader that, despite the apparent sameness of executions, they were, in fact, extremely varied in their placement, in the tactics deployed to manage both the condemned and the crowd, in the reactions of crowds, and in the penalties inflicted on the condemned both in life and death. Katherine Ebury (on the effect of the Act on the ways executioners experienced and depicted their task) and Rhiannon Pickin (on contemporary prison museums in the United Kingdom) tackle the problem from a different perspective. Here the question becomes the gap between those who engaged in the execution and wrote about the experience and those who, presented with a virtual experience of seeing an execution, return little marked to their daily lives. In Britain, after all, the death penalty now exists largely in popular culture. Ebury and Pickin's chapters lead nicely into the second part ("One had better narrate the circumstances as they occurred"), which is a series of investigations into the ways that capital punishment has been conceived and represented after it was moved behind prison walls. Samuel Saunders (on the periodical press), Rutherford and Sandford-Couch (on the depiction of a violent offender), and Seth Low (on the initial years of the Capital Punishment Amendment Act) offer careful readings of the ways in which the press framed both the execution and the condemned and of how the Act changed the practices of execution itself. Rutherford and Sandford-Couch in particular draw attention to the fact that, as executions receded from visibility, other spaces (the coroner's court, the criminal trial) [End Page 511] became increasingly important venues to watch the play of justice and the reactions of the condemned. Their readings, combined with Low's analysis of the tensions between local and national authorities, remind us that the elimination of public hanging created new issues even as it purported to solve old ones. Finally, Stephanie Emma Brown (in a study of Wales) demonstrates the complexity of national and racial issues by demonstrating that there was no simple creation of a so-called Other...
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May 29, 2024
Yang-Hui He 
Open Access
