The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To THE EDITORS OF THE DAILY NEWS,1 16 March 1846

Text from the Daily News, 16 Mar 1846, p. 6.2

Gentlemen,

           The last English Judge, I believe, who gave expression to a public and judicial opinion in favour of the Punishment of Death, is Mr. Justice Coleridge,3 who, in charging the Grand Jury at Hertford last year, took occasion to lament the presence of serious crimes in the calendar, and to say that he feared they were referable to the comparative infrequency of Capital Punishment.

           It is not incompatible with the utmost deference and respect for an authority so eminent, to say that, in this, Mr. Justice Coleridge was not supported by facts, but quite the reverse. He went out of his way to found a general assumption on certain very limited and partial grounds, and even on those grounds was wrong. For among the few crimes which he instanced, murder stood prominently forth. Now persons found guilty of murder are more certainly and unsparingly hanged at this time, as the Parliamentary Returns demonstrate,4 than such criminals ever were. So how can the decline of public executions affect that class of crimes? As to persons committing murder, and yet not found guilty of it by juries, they escape solely because there are many public executions — not because there are none or few.

           But when I submit that a criminal judge is an excellent witness against Capital Punishment, but a bad witness in its favour, I do so on more broad and general grounds than apply to this error in fact and deduction (so I presume to consider it) on the part of the distinguished judge in question. And they are grounds which do not apply offensively to judges, as a class; than whom there are no authorities in England so deserving of general respect and confidence, or so possessed of it; but which apply alike to all men in their several degrees and pursuits.

           It is certain that men contract a general liking for those things which they have studied at great cost of time and intellect, and their proficiency in which has led to their becoming distinguished and successful. It is certain that out of this feeling arises, not only that passive blindness to their defects of which the example given by my Lord Tenterden5 was quoted in the last letter,6 but an active disposition to advocate and defend them. If it were otherwise; if it were not for this spirit of interest and partisanship; no single pursuit could have that attraction for its votaries which most pursuits in course of time establish. Thus legal authorities are usually jealous of innovations on legal principles. Thus it is described of the lawyer in the Introductory Discourse to the Description of Utopia, that he said of a proposal against Capital Punishment, “‘This could never be so established in England but that it must needs bring the weal-public7 into great jeopardy and hazard,’8 and as he was thus saying, he shaked his head, and made a wry mouth, and so he held his peace.” Thus the Recorder of London,9 in 1811, objected to “the capital part being taken off” from the offence of picking pockets.10 Thus the Lord Chancellor, in 1813,11 objected to the removal of the penalty of death from the offence of stealing to the amount of five shillings in a shop. Thus Lord Ellenborough, in 1820,12 anticipated the worst effects from there being no punishment of death for stealing five shillings worth of wet linen from a bleaching ground. Thus the Solicitor-General, in 1830,13 advocated the punishment of death for forgery, and “had the satisfaction of thinking“ in the teeth of mountains of evidence from bankers and other injured parties (one thousand bankers alone!) “that he was deterring persons from the commission of crime, by the severity of the law.” Thus, Mr. Justice Coleridge delivered his charge at Hertford in 1845. Thus there were in the criminal code of England, in 1790, one hundred and sixty crimes punishable with death.14 Thus the lawyer has said, again and again, in his generation, that any change in such a state of things “must needs bring the weal-public into jeopardy and hazard.” And thus he has, all through the dismal history, “shaked his head, and made a wry mouth, and held his peace.” Except – a glorious exception! – when such lawyers as Bacon,15 More,16 Blackstone,17 Romilly,18 and – let us ever gratefully remember – in later times Mr. Basil Montagu,19 have striven, each in his day, within the utmost limits of the endurance of the mistaken feeling of the people or the legislature of the time, to champion and maintain the truth.

           There is another and a stronger reason still, why a criminal judge is a bad witness in favour of the Punishment of Death. He is a chief actor in the terrible drama of a trial, where the life or death of a fellow-creature is at issue. No one who has seen such a trial can fail to know, or can ever forget, its intense interest. I care not how painful this interest is, to the good, wise judge upon the bench. I admit its painful nature, and the judge’s goodness and wisdom to the fullest extent – but I submit that his prominent share in the excitement of such a trial, and the dread mystery involved, has a tendency to bewilder and confuse the judge upon the general subject of that penalty. I know the solemn pause before the verdict, the hush and stilling of the fever in the court, the solitary figure brought back to the bar, and standing there, observed of all the outstretched heads and gleaming eyes, to be, next minute, stricken dead, as one may say, among them. I know the thrill that goes round when the black cap is put on,20 and how there will be shrieks among the women, and a taking out of some one in a swoon; and, when the judge’s faltering voice delivers sentence, how awfully the prisoner and he confront each other; two mere men, destined one day, however far removed from one another at this time, to stand alike as suppliants at the bar of God. I know all this; I can imagine what the office of the judge costs, in this execution of it; but I say that in these strong sensations he is lost, and is unable to abstract the penalty, as a preventive or example, from an experience of it, and from associations surrounding it, which are and can be, only his, and his alone.

           Not to contend that there is no amount of wig or ermine21 that can change the nature of the man inside; not to say that the nature of a judge may be, like the dyer’s hand, subdued to what it works in, and may become too used to this punishment of death, to consider it quite dispassionately; not to say that it may possibly be inconsistent to have, deciding as calm authorities in favour of death, judges who have been constantly sentencing to death; – I contend that for the reasons I have stated, alone, a judge, and especially a criminal judge, is a bad witness for the punishment but an excellent witness against it, inasmuch as in the latter case his conviction of its inutility has been so strong and paramount as utterly to beat down and conquer these adverse incidents. I have no scruple in stating this position, because, for anything I know, the majority of excellent judges now on the bench may have overcome them, and may be opposed to the Punishment of Death under any circumstances.

           I mentioned that I would devote a portion of this letter to a few prominent illustrations of each head of objection to the Punishment of Death. Those on record are so very numerous that selection is extremely difficult; but in reference to the possibility of mistake, and the impossibility of reparation, one case is as good (I should rather say as bad) as a hundred; and if there were none but ELIZA FENNING’S,22 that would be sufficient. Nay, if there were none at all, it would be enough to sustain this objection, that men of finite and limited judgment do inflict, on testimony which admits of doubt, an infinite and irreparable punishment. But there are on record numerous instances of mistake; many of them very generally known and immediately recognizable in the following summary, which I copy from the New York Report already referred to.23

           “There have been cases in which groans have been heard in the apartment of the crime, which have attracted the steps of those on whose testimony the case has turned – when on proceeding to the spot, they have found a man bending over the murdered body, a lantern in the left hand, and the knife yet dripping with the warm current in the blood-stained right, with horror-stricken countenance, and lips which, in the presence of the dead, seem to refuse to deny the crime in the very act of which he is thus surprised – and yet the man has been, many years after, when his memory alone could be benefited by the discovery, ascertained not to have been the real murdered!24 There have been cases in which, in a house in which were two persons alone, a murder has been committed on one of them – when many additional circumstances have fastened the imputation on the other – and when, all apparent modes of access from without, being closed inward, the demonstration has seemed complete of the guilt for which that other has suffered the doom of the law – yet suffered innocently! There have been cases in which a father has been found murdered in an outhouse, the only person at home being a son, sworn by a sister to have been dissolute and undutiful, and anxious for the death of the father, and succession to the family property – when the track of his shoes in the snow is found from the house to the spot of the murder, and the hammer with which it was committed, (known as his own) found, on a search, in the corner of one of his private drawers, with the bloody evidence of the deed only imperfectly effaced from it – and yet the son has been innocent! – the sister, years after, on her death-bed, confessing herself the fratricide as well as the parricide. There have been cases in which men have been hung on the most positive testimony to identity, (aided by many suspicious circumstances), by persons familiar with their appearance, which have afterwards proved grievous mistakes, growing out of remarkable personal resemblance. There have been cases in which two men have been seen fighting in a field – an old enmity existing between them – the one found dead, killed by a stab from a pitch-fork, known as belonging to the other, and which that other had been carrying, the pitch-fork lying by the side of the murdered man – and yet its owner has been afterwards found not to have been the author of the murder of which it had been the instrument, the true murderer sitting on the jury that tried him. There have been cases in which an innkeeper has been charged by one of his servants with the murder of a traveller, the servant deposing to have seen his master on the stranger’s bed, strangling him, and afterwards rifling his pockets – another servant deposing that she saw him come down at that time at a very early hour in the morning, steal into the garden, take gold from his pocket, and carefully wrapping it up bury it in a designated spot – on the search of which the ground is found loose and freshly dug, and a sum of thirty pounds in gold found buried according to the description – the master, who confessed the burying of the money, with many evidences of guilt in his hesitation and confusion, has been hung of course, and proved innocent only too late. There have been cases in which a traveller has been robbed on the highway, of twenty guineas which he had taken the precaution to mark – one of these is found to have been paid away or changed by one of the servants of the inn which the traveller reaches the same evening – the servant is about the height of the robber, who had been cloaked and disguised – his master deposes to his having been recently unaccountably extravagant and flush of gold—and on his trunk being searched the other nineteen marked guineas and the traveller’s purse are found there, the servant being asleep at the time, half-drunk – he is of course convicted and hung, for the crime of which his master was the author! There have been cases in which a father and daughter have been overheard in violent dispute—the words “barbarity,” “cruelty,” and “death,” being heard frequently to proceed from the latter—the former goes out, locking the door behind him—groans are overheard, and the words, cruel father, thou art the cause of my death!”25 – on the room being opened, she is found on the point of death from a wound in her side, and near her the knife with which it had been inflicted – and on being questioned as to her owing her death to her father, her last motion, before expiring, is an expression of assent – the father, on returning to the room exhibits the usual evidences of guilt – he, too, is of course hung – and it is not till nearly a year afterwards that, on the discovery of conclusive evidence that it was a suicide, the vain reparation is made to his memory by the public authorities, of – waving a pair of colours over his grave26 in token of the recognition of his innocence.”27

           More than a hundred such cases are known, it is said in this Report, in English criminal jurisprudence. The same Report contains three striking cases of supposed criminals being unjustly hanged in America; and also five more, in which people whose innocence was not afterwards established were put to death on evidence as purely circumstantial and as doubtful, to say the least of it, as any that was held to be sufficient in this general summary of legal murders. Mr. O’Connell defended, in Ireland, within five-and-twenty years, three brothers who were hanged for a murder of which they were afterwards shown to have been innocent.28 I cannot find the reference at this moment, but I have seen it stated on good authority, that but for the exertions, I think of the present Lord Chief Baron,29 six or seven innocent men would certainly have been hanged. Such are the instances of wrong judgment which are known to us. How many more there may be, in which the real murderers never disclosed their guilt, or were never discovered, and where the odium of great crimes still rests on guiltless people long since resolved to dust in their untimely graves, no human power can tell.

           The effect of public executions on those who witness them, requires no better illustration, and can have none, than the scene which any execution in itself presents, and the general Police-office knowledge of the offences arising out of them. I have stated my belief that the study of such scenes leads to the disregard of human life, and to murder.30 Referring since that expression of opinion to the very last trial for murder in London, I have made inquiry, and am assured that the youth now under sentence of death in Newgate for the murder of his master in Drury-lane,31 was a vigilant spectator of the three last public executions in this City.32 What effects a daily increasing familiarity with the scaffold, and with death upon it, wrought in France in the Great Revolution, everybody knows. In reference to this very question of Capital Punishment, ROBESPIERRE33 himself, before he was

“in blood stept in so far,”34

warned the National Assembly that in taking human life, and in displaying before the eyes of the people scenes of cruelty and the bodies of murdered men, the law awakened ferocious prejudices, which gave birth to a long and growing train of their own kind. With how much reason this was said, let his own detestable name bear witness! If we would know how callous and hardened, society, even in a peaceful and settled state, becomes to public executions when they are frequent, let us recollect how few they were who made the least attempt to stay the dreadful Monday-morning spectacles35 of men and women strung up in a row for crimes as different in their degree as our whole social scheme is different in its component parts, which, within some fifteen years or so, made human shambles of the Old Bailey.

           There is no better way of testing the effect of public executions on those who do not actually behold them, but who read of them and know of them, than by inquiring into their efficiency in preventing crime. In this respect they have always, and in all countries, failed. According to all facts and figures, failed. In Russia, in Spain, in France, in Italy, in Belgium, in Sweden, in England, there has been one result.36 In Bombay, during the Recordership of Sir JAMES MACKINTOSH,37 there were fewer crimes in seven years without one execution, than in the preceding seven years with forty-seven executions; notwithstanding that in the seven years without capital punishment, the population had greatly increased, and there had been a large accession to the numbers of the ignorant and licentious soldiery, with whom the more violent offences originated. During the four wickedest years of the Bank of England (from 1814 to 1817, inclusive),38 when the one-pound note capital prosecutions were most numerous and shocking, the number of forged one-pound notes discovered by the Bank steadily increased, from the gross amount in the first year of 10,342l., to the gross amount in the last of 28,412l.39 But on every branch of this part of the subject – the inefficiency of capital punishment to prevent crime, and its efficiency to produce it – the body of evidence (if there were space to quote or analyse it here) is overpowering and resistless.

           I have purposely deferred until now any reference to one objection which is urged against the abolition of capital punishment: I mean that objection which claims to rest on Scriptural authority.

           It was excellently well said by Lord Melbourne,40 that no class of persons can be shown to be very miserable and oppressed, but some supporters of things as they are will immediately rise up and assert – not that those persons are moderately well to do, or that their lot in life has a reasonably bright side – but that they are, of all sorts and conditions of men, the happiest. In like manner, when a certain proceeding or institution is shown to be very wrong indeed, there is a class of people who rush to the fountain-head at once, and will have no less an authority for it than the Bible, on any terms.

           So, we have the Bible appealed to in behalf of Capital Punishment. So, we have the Bible produced as a distinct authority for Slavery.41 So, American representatives find the title of their country to the Oregon territory distinctly laid down in the Book of Genesis.42 So, in course of time, we shall find Repudiation, perhaps, expressly commanded in the Sacred Writings.

           It is enough for me to be satisfied, on calm inquiry and with reason, that an Institution or Custom is wrong and bad; and thence to feel assured that IT CANNOT BE a part of the law laid down by the Divinity who walked the earth. Though every other man who wields a pen, should turn himself into a commentator on the Scriptures – not all their united efforts, pursued through our united lives, could ever persuade me that Slavery is a Christian law; nor, with one of these objections to an execution in my certain knowledge, that Executions are a Christian law. My will is not concerned. I could not, in my veneration for the life and lessons of Our Lord, believe it. If any text appeared to justify the claim, I would reject that limited appeal, and rest upon the character of the Redeemer, and the great scheme of His Religion, where, in its broad spirit, made so plain – and not in this or that disputed letter – we all put our trust. But, happily, such doubts do not exist. The case is far too plain. The Rev. Henry Christmas,43 in a recent pamphlet on this subject, shows clearly that in five important versions of the Old Testament (to say nothing of versions of less note) the words, “by man,” in the often-quoted text, “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed,”44 do not appear at all. We know that the law of Moses was delivered to certain wandering tribes, in a peculiar and perfectly different social condition from that which prevails among us at this time. We know that the Christian Dispensation did distinctly repeal and annul certain portions of that law.45 We know that the doctrine of retributive justice or vengeance, was plainly disavowed by the Saviour.46 We know that on the only occasion of an offender, liable by the law to death, being brought before him for His judgment, it was not death.47 We know that He said, “Thou shalt not kill.”48 And if we are still to inflict capital punishment because of the Mosaic law (under which it was not the consequence of a legal proceeding, but an act of vengeance from the next of kin, which would surely be discouraged by our later laws if it were revived among the Jews just now) it would be equally reasonable to establish the lawfulness of a plurality of wives on the same authority.49

           Here I will leave this aspect of the question. I should not have treated of it at all, in the columns of a newspaper, but for the possibility of being unjustly supposed to have given it no consideration in my own mind.

           In bringing to a close these letters on a subject, in connection with which there is happily very little that is new to be said or written, I beg to be understood as advocating the total abolition of the Punishment of Death, as a general principle, for the advantage of society, for the prevention of crime, and without the least reference to, or tenderness for any individual malefactor whomsoever. Indeed, in most cases of murder, my feeling towards the culprit is very strongly and violently the reverse. I am the more desirous to be so understood, after reading a speech made by Mr. MACAULAY in the House of Commons last Tuesday night,50 in which that acccomplished51 gentleman hardly seemed to recognise the possibility of anybody entertaining an honest conviction of the inutility and bad effects of Capital Punishment in the abstract, founded on enquiry and reflection, without being the victim of “a kind of effeminate feeling.” Without staying to enquire what there may be that is especially manly and heroic in the advocacy of the gallows, or to express my admiration of Mr Calcraft,52 the hangman as doubtless one of the most manly specimens now in existence, I would simply hint a doubt, in all good humour, whether this be the true MACAULAY way of meeting a great question? One of the instances of effeminacy of feeling quoted by Mr. MACAULAY, I have reason to think was not quite fairly stated. I allude to the Petition in Tawell’s case.53 I had neither hand nor part in it myself; but, unless I am greatly mistaken, it did pretty clearly set forth that Tawell was a most abhorred villain, and that the House might conclude how strongly the petitioners were opposed to the Punishment of Death, when they prayed for its non-infliction even in such a case.

CHARLES DICKENS.

• 1. The editor of the Daily News at this time was John Forster (1812–76; Dictionary of National Biography), historian and man of letters, CD’s closest friend, and his literary and legal advisor. CD had been the inaugural editor of the Daily News, until his resignation on 9 Feb 1846.
• 2. Published under the title "Letters on Social Questions. Capital Punishment”. This was the last of five letters CD penned to the Editors of the Daily News on the topic of capital punishment; see To The Editors of the Daily News 23 and 28 Feb, and 9 and 13 Mar 1846. He had intended to write an additional letter dealing with secondary punishments, but this was not completed (see Michael Slater, Charles Dickens: A Life [New Haven: Yale UP, 2009], p. 249. The writer Douglas Jerrold, who had acted as sub-editor and contributed two leader articles during CD’s brief tenure as editor of the Daily News, suggested that the new Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment (which had CD’s support at this time) coordinate its initial preparations with the publication of CD’s articles (see James Gregory, Victorians Against the Gallows: Capital Punishment and the Abolitionist Movement in Nineteenth Century Britain [London: Bloomsbury, 2012], p. 61). CD had initially proposed an article on the topic of capital punishment to Macvey Napier for the Edinburgh Review after failing to deliver a promised paper on Ragged Schools in 1843; for a detailed description of the proposed topic, intended to focus not on sympathy for the person to be executed but on the negative effects of public executions, see To Macvey Napier, 7 Aug 1845 (Pilgrim Letters 4, p. 349).
• 3. Sir John Taylor Coleridge (1790-1876; Dictionary of National Biography); judge and nephew of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The full statement was reported in the Hertford Mercury (12 July 1845).
• 4. See CD's extensive quotation from the return laid before the House of Commons on executions for murder in England and Wales, in To The Editors of the Daily News, 13 Mar 1846.
• 5. Charles Abbott, first Baron Tenterden (1767-1832; Dictionary of National Biography); Lord Chief Justice. Misspelled as ‘Tenderden’ in printed source.
• 6. To the Editors of the Daily News, 13 Mar 1846: “The same Lord Tenderden [sic] manfully said, on another occasion and another question, that he was glad the subject of the amendment of the laws had been taken up by Mr. Peel, ‘who had not been bred to the law; for those who were, were rendered dull, by habit, to many of its defects!’“. This quotation was reported by many sources, credited to Tenterden during a debate in the Lords on 13 June 1827. CD most likely copied it from Basil Montagu’s Thoughts on the Punishment of Death for Forgery (London: William Pickering, 1830), p. 27.
• 7. “The general good of the community; public welfare or interest” (Oxford English Dictionary).
• 8. From the first book of Utopia (1516) by Thomas More ('Utopia', Three Early Modern Utopias, ed. Susan Bruce [Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999], p. 30). The words are spoken by the lawyer in response to the arguments of Raphael Hythloday against capital punishment.
• 9. Sir John Silvester, first Baronet (1745-1822) was Recorder of London from 1803-22. The role is an ancient legal office in the City of London.
• 10. From Report from the Committee of the State of the Police of the Metropolis (London: William & Charles Clement, 1816), p. 331.
• 11. John Scott, first Earl of Eldon (1751-1838; Dictionary of National Biography); Lord Chancellor. In response to the bill proposed by Sir Samuel Romilly (1757-1818; Dictionary of National Biography) bill to abolish the death penalty in cases of shoplifting up to the value of 5 shillings, Lord Eldon claimed "[i]f the present bill be carried into effect, then may your Lordships expect to see the whole frame of our common law invaded and broken in upon" (qtd. in Charles Noble Gregory, “Sir Samuel Romilly and Criminal Law Reform”, Harvard Law Review 15.6 (1902), p. 464.
• 12. Edward Law, first Earl of Ellenborough (1790-1871; Dictionary of National Biography), politician and later Governor-General of India.
• 13. Edward Burtenshaw Sugden, Baron St Leonards (1781-1875; Dictionary of National Biography). Most likely quoted from Basil Montagu’s Thoughts on the Punishment of Death for Forgery (London: William Pickering, 1830) pp. 145-6.
• 14. This number clearly drawn from Basil Montagu’s Thoughts on the Punishment of Death for Forgery (London: William Pickering, 1830, p. 139). Montagu quotes Sir William Blackstone (see note 17).
• 15. Given the chronological order of the other names listed, and CD’s heavy reliance on Montagu in this article, this is most likely Francis Bacon, Viscount St Alban (1561-1626; Dictionary of National Biography), whose works Montagu edited in sixteen volumes between 1825 and 1837, and who is quoted in Montagu’s The Opinions of Different Authors Upon the Punishment of Death (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1813), pp. vi-vii.
• 16. Thomas More (1478-1535), English lawyer, philosopher, author and statesman. He served King Henry VIII as Lord High Chancellor of England from 1529 to 1532.
• 17. Sir William Blackstone (1723-80; Dictionary of National Biography), a jurist, judge, and Tory politician.
• 18. Sir Samuel Romilly (1757-1818; Dictionary of National Biography) a lawyer and politician who introduced a bill to abolish the death penalty in cases of shoplifting up to the value of 5 shillings, and stealing in dwelling houses and on navigable rivers up to the value of 40 shillings. The bills relating to houses and ships were defeated, and that dealing with shops was passed in Commons but lost in the House of Lords. The bills were brought again in 1811, alongside an additional bill to remove the death penalty from the crime of stealing from bleaching yards. All of these bills passed the Commons, but only the new bill relating to bleaching yards passed the Lords. The shoplifting bill faced a further defeat in 1813. Romilly is also named in the letter To The Editors of the Daily News, 28 Feb 1846.
• 19. Basil Montagu (1770-1851; Dictionary of National Biography), jurist, barrister, writer and philanthropist who co-founded the Society for the Diffusion of Knowledge upon the Punishment of Death in 1808; CD also cites him in the second letter on capital punishment to the Daily News (23 Feb 1846).
• 20. The black cap was worn by a judge when passing a sentence of death; it originated in the headwear in court in Tudor times.
• 21. Wigs and robes trimmed in ermine formed part of a judge's dress.
• 22. Elizabeth Fenning (1792-1815), a domestic servant, hanged on 26 June 1815 for the attempted murder of the Turner family, who had been poisoned by dumplings laced with arsenic. Fenning insisted on her innocence, and several newspapers campaigned to save her life. CD later wrote that he believed the arsenic was administered by the family’s apprentice, Roger Gadsden (To Walter Thornbury [? July 1867], Pilgrim Letters 11, p. 392).
• 23. John L. O’Sullivan, Report in Favour of the Abolition of the Punishment of Death by Law, Made to the Legislature of the State of New York, April 14, 1841 (New York: J. & H. G. Langley, 1841). See To The Editors of the Daily News, 28 Feb 1846.
• 24. Thus in the Daily News. Changes have also been made to the punctuation throughout the quotation.
• 25. Opening double quotation mark for this phrase missing in printed source.
• 26. Every regiment, with the exception of rifle regiments, had a pair of colours (i.e. flags): the Queen's colours and the regimental colours.
• 27. O’Sullivan, pp. 118—20. The case described is that of William Shaw of Leith, executed 1 Nov 1721 for the murder of his daughter Catherine. She had formed an attachment of which her father did not approve, and he had pressured her to marry a man of his choosing, confining her to her room. In Aug 1722, a note was found in the daughter's room indicating that she had committed suicide.
• 28. Daniel O’Connell (1775-1847; Dictionary of National Biography), barrister and Irish nationalist leader. This example is also drawn from O’Sullivan’s report (p. 123); O'Connell is quoted (from a speech at Exeter Hall, June 1832) describing the case of three brothers tried at Cork on 10 Apr 1824: Patrick, Maurice and John Cremins (or Cremin) were executed 12 Apr 1824 for the murder of the Franks family, who had been killed by a group of men dressed in women’s clothing.
• 29. Sir (Jonathan) Frederick Pollock, first baronet (1783-1870; Dictionary of National Biography); judge. Reference untraced.
• 30. Dealt with in detail in the letter to the Daily News of 28 Feb 1846.
• 31. Paroissien identifies this as Thomas Wicks, who murdered the brass and gun-mental founder James Bostock, to whom he was apprenticed, on 16 Feb 1846. “[A]fter murdering his master early in the morning [he] returned to the scene of the crime, where police arrested him” and acted as if “he were fully justified in murdering his employer” at his trial (p. 229). Wicks was hanged 30 Mar 1846.
• 32. These executions were Martha Browning, executed at Newgate on 5 Jan 1846; Samuel Quennell, hanged by the same executioner outside Horsemonger Lane Gaol on the same day (5 Jan 1846); and Joseph Connor, hanged outside Newgate on 2 June 1845.
• 33. Maximilien Robespierre (1758-94); French lawyer and statesman who was one of the most influential figures of the French Revolution.
• 34. Macbeth III. iv. 135-36.
• 35. At Newgate Prison, murderers were typically hanged on Mondays.
• 36. As Paroissien notes, “[o]pponents of the death penalty frequently alluded to the fact that a decrease in the frequencies of executions in several European countries was attended with no increase in crime” (p. 237). John L. O’Sullivan’s Report in Favour of the Abolition of the Punishment of Death by Law, Made to the Legislature of the State of New York, April 14, 1841 (New York: J. & H. G. Langley, 1841) considers global statistics relating to capital punishment; CD quotes at length from the report in To The Editors of the Daily News, 28 Feb 1846.
• 37. Sir James Mackintosh of Kyllachy (1765-1832; Dictionary of National Biography); political writer and politician. Recorder of Bombay from 26 May 1804 until his return to England in Nov 1811. CD has clearly taken this example from O’Sullivan’s report (p. 102).
• 38. Introduced in 1634, the death penalty for forgery was abolished in 1832. CD discusses executions for forgery and coining in detail in the letter to the Daily News of 28 Feb 1846. O'Sullivan's report provides an account of these years (pp. 65-66).
• 39. O’Sullivan, p. 66.
• 40. William Lamb (1779-1848; Dictionary of National Biography), second Viscount Melbourne; prime minister 1834, 1834-41). Quotation is untraced.
• 41. Supporters of slavery drew on Genesis 9:18-27; Ephesians 6:5-7.
• 42. John Quincy Adams (1767-1848), president of the United States, 1825-29, had given a speech in the House of Representatives in early 1846 quoting Genesis (1:26-28) as part of America’s claim to the whole of Oregon in the Oregon boundary dispute.
• 43. Henry Christmas (later Noel-Fearn) (1811-68; Dictionary of National Biography). His Capital Punishments Unsanctioned by the Gospel and Unnecessary in a Christian State (London: Charles Gilpin, 1845) sold widely.
• 44. Christmas analyses the original Hebrew and subsequent translations of Genesis 9:6 in Capital Punishments Unsanctioned by the Gospel and Unnecessary in a Christian State, pp. 10—12.
• 45. Christmas, p. 18.
• 46. Matthew 5:38-39.
• 47. John 8:1-11.
• 48. Matthew 5:21.
• 49. Deuteronomy 21:11-15.
• 50. Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron Macaulay  (1800-59; Dictionary of National Biography), historian, essayist and poet; MP for Edinburgh 1839-47. On 10 Mar 1846, Macaulay spoke against a motion in the Commons made by Thomas Slingsby Duncombe, MP for Finsbury. Duncombe brought forward a motion, the first of several, to ask the Queen to pardon John Frost, Zephaniah Williams and William Jones, leaders of a group of Chartists who had marched on Newport, South Wales, 4 Nov 1839. Frost, Williams and Jones were sentenced on 16 Jan 1840 to be hung, drawn and quartered for High Treason; this sentence was commuted to transportation for life. In Mar 1854, Duncombe succeeded in obtaining a pardon for the men, conditional on Frost leaving British territory. He went to America in 1855, and, after receiving a free pardon in May 1856, returned to Britain. For Macaulay’s objections, see Paroissien p. 247 and Hansard 84.
• 51. Thus in printed source.
• 52. William Calcraft (1800-79); the most famous hangman of the nineteenth century, who held his post for forty-five years and executed an estimated 450 people between 1829 and 1874. Calcraft gained a reputation for being clumsy and inept, particularly in calculating the correct length of rope for each individual, which resulted in slow deaths or the need for the executioner to rush below the scaffold to pull on the victim’s legs.
• 53. John Tawell (1784-1845), executed 28 Mar 1845 at Aylesbury for the murder of his mistress Sarah Hart, who bore him two children, and for whom Tawell provided financially. Tawell had previously been transported for forgery; see Paroissien, p. 222. The case was also notable for the police’s use of the telegraph to apprehend Tawell after he fled by train. The petition, framed in abolitionist terms rather than sympathetic to Tawell’s case, was supported by Lord Nugent, whom CD references directly in the letter of 13 Mar 1846 (see James Gregory, Victorians Against the Gallows: Capital Punishment and the Abolitionist Movement in Nineteenth Century Britain [London: Bloomsbury, 2012], p. 61).