The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To THE EDITORS OF THE DAILY NEWS,1 28 FEBRUARY 1846

Text from the Daily News, 28 Feb 1846, p. 6.2

Gentlemen,

           In the very remarkable Report made to the State Assembly of New York, in 1841,3 by a select committee of that body, who arrived at the conclusion, “that the punishment of death, by law, ought to be forthwith and for ever abolished” in that part of America, there is the following suggestion:

           “…Whether there sleep within the breast of man, certain dark and mysterious sympathies with the thought of that death, and that futurity which await his nature, tending to invest any act expressly forbidden by that penalty, with an unconscious and inexplicable fascination, that attracts his thoughts to it, in spite of their very shuddering dread; and bids his imagination brood over its idea, ’till out of those dark depths in his own nature, comes gradually forth a monstrous birth of Temptation. ….”4

           Strongly impressed by this passage when I first read the report; and believing that it shadowed out a metaphysical truth, which, however wild and appalling in its aspect, was a truth still; I was led to consider the cases of several murderers, both in deed, and in intent, with a reference to it; and certainly it gathered very strong and special confirmation in the course of that inquiry. But, as the bearing, here, is on capital punishment in its influences on the commission of crime; and as my present object is to make it the subject of one or two considerations in its other influences on society in general; I, for the present, defer any immediate pursuit of the idea, and merely quote it now, as introducing this lesser and yet great objection to the punishment of death:

           That there is, about it, a horrible fascination, which, in the minds – not of evil-disposed persons, but of good and virtuous and well-conducted people, supersedes the horror legitimately attracting to crime itself, and causes every word and action of a criminal under sentence of death to be the subject of a morbid interest and curiosity. Which is odious and painful, even to many of those who eagerly gratify it by every means they can compass; but which is, generally speaking, irresistible. The attraction of repulsion5 being as much a law of our moral nature, as gravitation is in the structure of the visible world, operates in no case (I believe) so powerfully, as in this case of the punishment of death; though it may occasionally diminish in its force, through strong re-action.

           When the murderers HOCKER6 and TAWELL7 had awakened a vast amount of this depraved excitement, and it had attained to an unusually indecent and frenzied height, one of your contemporaries, deploring the necessity of ministering to such an appetite, laid the blame upon the caterers of such dainties for the Press, while some other newspapers, disputing which of them should bear the greater share of it, divided it variously. Can there be any doubt, on cool reflection, that the whole blame rested on, and was immediately and naturally referable to, the punishment of death?

           Round what other punishment does the like interest gather? We read of the trials of persons who have rendered themselves liable to transportation for life, and we read of their sentences, and, in some few notorious instances, of their departure from this country, and arrival beyond sea; but they are never followed into their cells, and tracked from day to day, and night to night; they are never reproduced in their false letters, flippant conversations, theological disquisitions with visitors, lay and clerical: or served up in their whole biography and adventures — so many live romances with a bloody ending. Their portraits are not rife in the print-shops, nor are their autographs stuck up in shop-windows, nor are their snuff-boxes handed affably to gentlemen in court, nor do they inquire of other spectators with eye-glasses why they look at them so steadfastly, nor are their breakfasts, dinners, and luncheons, elaborately described, nor are their waxen images in Baker-street8 (unless they were in immediate danger, at one time, of the gallows), nor are high prices offered for their clothes at Newgate, nor do turnpike trusts grow rich upon the tolls that people going to see their houses, or the scenes of their offences, pay. They are tried found guilty, punished; and there an end.

           But a criminal under sentence of death, or in great peril of death upon the scaffold, becomes, immediately, the town talk; the great subject; the hero of the time. The demeanour in his latter moments, of Sir THOMAS MORE9 – one of the wisest and most virtuous of men – was never the theme of more engrossing interest, than that of HOCKER, TAWELL, GREENACRE,10 or COURVOISIER.11 The smallest circumstance in the behaviour of these, or any similar wretches, is noted down and published as a precious fact. And read, too – extensively and generally read – even by hundreds and thousands of people who object to the publication of such details, and are disgusted by them. The horrible fascination surrounding the punishment, and everything connected with it, is too strong for resistance; and when an attempt is made in this or that gaol (as it has been sometimes made of late), to keep such circumstances from transpiring, by excluding every class of strangers, it is only a formal admission of the existence of this fascination, and of the impossibility of otherwise withstanding it.

           Is it contended that the fascination may surround the crime, and not the punishment? Let us consider whether other crimes, which have now no sort of fascination for the general public, had or had not precisely the gross kind of interest which now attaches to Murder alone, when they were visited with the same penalty. Was Forgery interesting, when Forgers were hanged?12 and is it less interesting now, when they are transported for life? Compare the case of Dr. Dodd,13 or Fauntleroy,14 or the Reverend Peter Fenn,15 or Montgomery,16 or Hunton,17 or any other generally known, with that of the Exchequer-Bill forgery in later times, which: with every attendant circumstance but death, or danger of death, to give it a false attraction, soon dwindled down into a mere item in a Sessions’ Calendar. Coining, when the coiner was dragged (as I have seen one) on a hurdle to the place of execution;18 or Burglary, or Highway Robbery – did these crimes ever wear an aspect of adventure and mystery, and did the perpetrators of them ever become the town talk, when their offences were visited with death? Now, they are mean, degraded, miserable criminals; and nothing more.

           That the publication of these Newgate court-circulars19 to which I have alluded, is injurious to society, there can be no doubt. Apart from their inevitable association with revolting details, revived again and again, of bloodshed and murder (most objectionable as familiarising people’s minds with the contemplation of such horrors), it is manifest that anything which tends to awaken a false interest in great villains, and to invest their greatest villanies20 and lightest actions with a terrible attraction, must be vicious and bad, and cannot be wholesome reading. But it is neither just nor reasonable to charge their publication on the newspapers, or the gleaners21 for the newspapers. They are published because they are read and sought for. They are read and sought for: not because society has causelessly entered into a monstrous and unnatural league on this theme (which it would be absurd to suppose), but because it is in the secret nature of those of whom society is made up, to have a dark and dreadful interest in the punishment at issue.

           Whether public executions produce any good impression on their habitual witnesses, or whether they are calculated to produce any good impression on the class of persons most likely to be attracted to them, is a question, by this time, pretty well decided. I was present, myself, at the execution of Courvoisier. I was, purposely, on the spot, from midnight of the night before; and was a near witness of the whole process of the building of the scaffold, the gathering of the crowd, the gradual swelling of the concourse with the coming-on of day, the hanging of the man, the cutting of the body down, and the removal of it into the prison. From the moment of my arrival, when there were but a few score boys in the street, and those all young thieves, and all clustered together behind the barrier nearest to the drop – down to the time when I saw the body with its dangling head, being carried on a wooden bier into the gaol – I did not see one token in all the immense crowd; at the windows, in the streets, on the house-tops, anywhere; of any one emotion suitable to the occasion. No sorrow, no salutary terror, no abhorrence, no seriousness; nothing but ribaldry, debauchery, levity, drunkenness, and flaunting vice in fifty other shapes. I should have deemed it impossible that I could have ever felt any large assemblage of my fellow-creatures to be so odious. I hoped, for an instant, that there was some sense of Death and Eternity in the cry of “Hats off!” when the miserable wretch appeared; but I found, next moment, that they only raised it as they would at a Play – to see the Stage the better, in the final scene.

           Of the effect upon a perfectly different class, I can speak with no less confidence. There were, with me, some gentlemen of education and distinction in imaginative pursuits, who had, as I had, a particular detestation of that murderer; not only for the cruel deed he had done, but for his slow and subtle treachery, and for his wicked defence.22 And yet, if any one among us could have saved the man (we said so, afterwards, with one accord), he would have done it. It was so loathsome, pitiful, and vile a sight, that the law appeared to be as bad as he, or worse; being very much the stronger, and shedding around it a far more dismal contagion.23

           The last of the influences of this punishment on society, which I shall notice in the present letter, is, that through the prevalent and fast-increasing feeling of repugnance to it, great offenders escape with a very inadequate visitation. Only a few weeks have elapsed since the streets of London presented the obscene spectacle of a woman being brought out to be killed before such a crowd as I have described, and, while her young body was yet hanging in the brutal gaze, of portions of the concourse hurrying away, to be in time to see a man hanged elsewhere, by the same executioner.24 A barbarous murderer is tried soon afterwards, and acquitted on a fiction of his being insane – as any one, cognisant of these two recent executions, might have easily foreseen.

           I will not enter upon the question whether juries be justified or not justified in evading their oaths, rather than add to the list of such deeply degrading and demoralizing exhibitions, and sanction the infliction of a punishment which they conscientiously believe, and have so many reasons for believing, to be wrong. It is enough for me that juries do so; and I presume to think that the able writer of a powerful article on Johnstone’s trial in THE DAILY NEWS,25 does not sufficiently consider that this is no new course in juries, but the natural result and working of a law to which the general feeling is opposed. Mr. ABERCROMBIE,26 five-and-thirty years ago, stated it in the House of Commons to have become a common practice of juries, in cases of Forgery, to find verdicts “contrary to the clearest and most indisputable evidence of facts;”27 and cited the case of a woman who was proved to have stolen a ten-pound note, which the jury, with the approbation of the judge, found to be worth only thirty-nine shillings. Sir SAMUEL ROMILLY,28 in the same debate, mentioned other cases of the same nature; and they were of frequent and constant occurrence at that time.

           Besides – that juries have, within our own time, in another class of cases, arrived at the general practice of returning a verdict tacitly agreed upon beforehand, and of making it applicable to very different sets of facts, we know by the notable instance of Suicide. Within a few years, juries frequently found that a man dying by his own hand, was guilty of self-murder. But this verdict subjecting the body to a barbarous mode of burial,29 from which the better feeling of society revolted (as it is now revolting from the punishment of death), it was abrogated by common consent, and precisely the same evasion established, as is now, unfortunately, so often resorted to in cases of murder. That it is an evasion, and not a proceeding on a soundly-proved and established principle, that he who destroys his own life must necessarily be mad, – the very exceptions from this usual course in themselves demonstrate.

           So it is in cases of Murder. Juries, like society, are not stricken foolish or motiveless. They have, for the most part, an objection to the punishment of death: and they will, for the most part, assert it by such verdicts. As jurymen, in the Forgery cases, would probably reconcile their verdict to their consciences, by calling to mind that the intrinsic value of a bank note was almost nothing, so jurymen in cases of Murder probably argue that grave doctors have said all men are more or less mad, and therefore they believe the prisoner mad. This is a great wrong to society; but it arises out of the punishment of death.

           And the question will always suggest itself in jurors’ minds – however earnestly the learned judge presiding, may discharge his duty – “which is the greater wrong to society? To give this man the benefit of the possibility of his being mad, or to have another public execution, with all its depraving and hardening influences?” Imagining myself a juror, in a case of life or death: and supposing that the evidence had forced me from every other ground of opposition to this punishment in the particular case, as a possibility of irremediable mistake, or otherwise: I would go over it again on this ground; and if I could, by any reasonable special pleading with myself, find him mad rather than hang him – I think I would.

CHARLES DICKENS.

• 1. The editor of the Daily News 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 second 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 Feb, and 9, 13 and 16 Mar 1846. 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). As David Paroissien notes, until the publication of this letter in The Law as Literature anthology (ed. Louis Blom-Cooper, London: Bodley Head, 1961) and Kathleen Tillotson’s publication of the letter of 23 Feb (“A Letter from Dickens on Capital Punishment”, Times Literary Supplement 12 Aug 1965, p. 704), scholars believed CD had contributed only three letters, beginning with the letter of 9 Mar 1846 (Selected Letters of Charles Dickens [London: Macmillan, 1985], p. 216). 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. 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).
• 4. Incorrectly cited by CD; the correct quotation describes “a monstrous Frankenstein birth, of Temptation” (O’Sullivan, p. 69).
• 5. Philip Collins suggests that “the attraction of repulsion” was “a favourite expression” of CD’s  (“Dickens and London”, The Victorian City: Images and Realities vol. 2, eds. Jim Dyos and Michael Wolff [London: Routledge, 1973], p. 537). Often incorrectly attributed to CD himself, the phrase was used by John Fisher Murray in an article published in Blackwood’s Magazine as part of a series of essays, appearing monthly between Apr 1841 and July 1842. It then appeared in a collection titled The World of London, published in 1843 (Edinburgh & London: Blackwood); see Rick Allen, “John Fisher Murray, Dickens, and ‘the Attraction of Repulsion’“, Dickens Quarterly 16.3 (1999), pp. 139-59.
• 6. Thomas Henry Hocker (1823-45) was executed on 28 Apr 1845 for the murder of James Delarue (or de la Rue) on 21 Feb 1845. Paroissien provides an overview (see Selected Letters of Charles Dickens [London: Macmillan, 1985]); known as the ‘Hampstead Murder’, there was a great deal of public interest in the case. Hocker “exhibited ‘a very extraordinary degree of audacity, and of misdirected talent’ during his trial by attempting to impute false crimes to his victim and make the murder seem almost an act of justice” (p. 213). Hocker lured Delarue to Belsize Park to murder him for making his lover pregnant. CD discusses Hocker’s behaviour in the next letter of the series (To The Editors of the Daily News, 9 Mar 1846). For analysis of Hocker's execution and its influence on CD, see Claire Wood, Dickens and the Business of Death (Cambridge: CUP, 2015). For details of Hocker's trial see Proceedings of the Old Bailey, April 1845: https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=def1-821-18450407&div=t18450407-821.
• 7. 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.
• 8. In the 'Chamber of Horrors' at the waxwork museum of Marie Tussaud, which first opened in London in 1802.
• 9. Thomas More (1478-1535), an English lawyer, philosopher, author and statesman. He served King Henry VIII as Lord High Chancellor of England from 1529 to 1532.
• 10. James Greenacre (1785-1837), the ‘Edgware Road Murderer’, was executed 2 May 1837 for the murder of his fiancée Hannah Brown. 20,000 people attended his execution (Paroissien, p. 222). See Proceedings of the Old Bailey, April 1837: https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=def1-917-18370403&div=t18370403-917.
• 11. François Benjamin Courvoisier (1816-40), a Swiss valet found guilty on 6 May 1840 and hanged 6 July 1840 for the murder of his master, Lord William Russell. See Proceedings of the Old Bailey: trial of Francois Benjamin Courvoisier, June 1840; https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?div=t18400615-1629. CD hired a room that faced the gallows, and watched Courvoisier’s hanging with Daniel Maclise and Henry Burnett (Paroissien p. 222).
• 12. Introduced in 1634, the death penalty for forgery was abolished in 1832.
• 13. William Dodd (1729-77; Dictionary of National Biography), nicknamed ‘the Macaroni Parson’. Dodd discounted a bill of exchange allegedly drawn by the Earl of Chesterfield through a broker. He was executed 27 June 1777.
• 14. Henry Fauntleroy (1784-1824; Dictionary of National Biography) was a banker and partner in Marsh, Sibbald & Co. (his father’s bank) who appropriated trusts and securities deposited by customers, forging powers of attorney. He was executed 30 Nov 1824.
• 15. Rev. Peter Fenn, a schoolmaster, who was sentenced to death 11 Sep 1828 for “uttering forged bills of exchange” (Paroissien p. 223) but had his sentence commuted to transportation for life after a petition in The Times (29 Nov 1828, p. 3).
• 16. John Burgh Montgomery (who used the aliases Colonel Wallace and Colonel Morgan), convicted of issuing forged notes. Montgomery committed suicide in his Newgate cell using prussic acid on 3 July 1828, the night before his execution.
• 17. Joseph Hunton, a wealthy Quaker who committed a series of forgeries and was executed 8 Dec 1828.
• 18. Paroissien notes that the first capital statute for coinage “was passed in 1350; in 1832 Parliament abolished the death penalty for all coinage offences. Between 1820 and 1830, 73 offenders were sentenced to death under the old statutes, ten of whom were hanged” (p. 223). The hurdle was “a kind of frame or sledge on which traitors used to be drawn through the streets to execution (Oxford English Dictionary). Coining was still seen as an act of treason in the 19th century; the last man to be executed for this offence was James Coleman, hanged at Newgate on 21 Jan 1829. CD may have witnessed this execution, or that of Hambry Price on 13 May 1828; both offenders were brought to the scaffold on a hurdle.
• 19. See, for example, The Newgate Calendar, or The Malefactors’ Bloody Register. Originally a monthly bulletin of executions produced by the Keeper of Newgate Prison in London, the Calendar's title was appropriated by other publishers. In 1774, a five-volume, bound edition was started. A new edition appeared in 1824, with a second edition in 1826 published under the title The New Newgate Calendar.
• 20. Thus in printed source.
• 21. I.e. those finding stories for the newspaper.
• 22. When stolen articles of plate were recovered partway through the trial, Courvoisier admitted his guilt to his lawyers but told them he had no intention of pleading guilty, and expected his defence to continue. Attorney Charles Phillips thus continued to implicate another of the servants, Sarah Mancer. After the trial, it became publicly known that Courvoisier had admitted his guilt to his legal counsel, and Phillips was castigated in the press.
• 23. The author William Makepeace Thackeray was also present, and wrote of his own revulsion at the spectacle; see "Going to See a Man Hanged", Fraser’s Magazine 22 (Aug 1840), pp. 150-58.
• 24. Paroissien identifies this example as the hanging of Martha Browning outside Newgate, and Samuel Quennell outside Horsemonger Lane Gaol, 5 Jan 1846 (p. 223). For an account of Browning’s crime, see Paroissien, p. 224. Browning is also mentioned in the next article in the series (To the Editors of the Daily News, 9 Mar 1846).
• 25. Captain George Johnstone of the Tory, who was arrested in Nov 1845 and charged with committing atrocities against his crew, and the grisly murder of three crew members (Rambert, Reason and Mars). The trial took place from 5-6 Feb 1846; Johnstone was initially found guilty of murder, before the jury reconsidered, finding him not guilty on the ground of insanity (Paroissien p. 217). Detailed reports of the two day of the trial appeared in the Daily News (6 Feb 1846, p. 7; 7 Feb 1846, p. 7-8).
• 26. James Abercromby (or Abercrombie) (1776-1858; Dictionary of National Biography), first Baron Dunfermline; barrister and Whig politician.
• 27. The passage cited by CD is based on Abercromby’s speech in support of Romilly’s bill, 29 Mar 1811 (Dwelling House Robbery Bill, Hansard 19); Abercromby “cited official figures to show how juries often declined to prosecute those charged with stealing when the statutory penalty specified hanging” (Paroissien, p. 223). The official record gives the quotation as “The verdict, therefore, was contrary to fact” (column 653). As such, CD very likely copied this quotation from one of Basil Montagu’s many publications on the topic of capital punishment; Montagu published several pamphlets of quotations on the subject including The Opinions of Different Authors Upon the Punishment of Death (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1813. p. 84) and Thoughts on the Punishment of Death for Forgery (London: William Pickering, 1830, p. 120), both of which include the quotation as given here by CD. Basil Montagu (1770–1851) was a jurist, barrister, writer and philanthropist who co-founded the Society for the Diffusion of Knowledge upon the Punishment of Death in 1808; CD cites him directly in the letters of 23 Feb and 16 Mar 1846.
• 28. 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.
• 29. Prior to the Burial of Suicide Act of 1823, suicides could either be declared insane or pronounced felo-de-se, i.e. a self-murderer. In the latter case, the person would be buried at a crossroads with a stake through the heart. The 1823 Act still included punitive measures: those found to have committed suicide had to be interred without Christian burial rites, between 9 p.m. and midnight (see Barbara Gates, Victorian Suicide: Mad Crimes and Sad Histories [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988]).