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One: From Scaffold to Law Court, from Criminal Broadsheet and Biography to Newspaper and Novel
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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Du r i n g t h e e r a stretching from the English novel’s eighteenthcentury beginnings up to its establishment as the nation’s ascendant literary form in the Victorian period,the gallows,which was both a public,physical site around which the climax of justice was focused and a central symbolic figure in the culture, was gradually supplanted by the criminal trial as both the actual public climax of state justice and its imaginatively defining scene. As a part of this shift in the form of justice, the literary genre of criminal biography, closely allied with the scaffold scene, was reconceptualized as a genre allied with the law courts and tied to the expanded publication of trial reporting in the newspapers. This change in narrative form began as punishment in England became increasingly private and hidden over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with the gallows finally, rather belatedly, disappearing behind prison walls in 1868. As punishment moved out of sight, the long-standing public process of the courtroom trial, itself freshly amplified as a mode of retelling narratives, came to occupy a newly central place both in the process of state justice and in a marketplace that turned the materials of state justice into print products. The newspapers (publishing trials as they happened) and the o c h a p t e r o n e ] From Scaffold to Law Court, from Criminal Broadsheet and Biography to Newspaper and Novel novel (tapping this culture and marketplace of trial narratives) together replaced the older genre of criminal broadsheets and biography. I For most historians the history of how punishment changed from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century is still told primarily in terms of a decrease of physical violence by the state against bodies.According to Leon Radzinowicz, the history of punishment recounted the progressive enlightenment of British society. Since Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975) this history has been retold, somewhat more accurately, as the deployment of discipline by other—micro and mental—means. Yet two subsequent works, one by J.M.Beattie,concerned with secondary punishments,and one concerned with capital punishment,by V.A.C.Gatrell,together suggest that the history of punishment in this period might also be better understood as a decline in punishment as spectacle. Together these works—Beattie’s Crime and the Courts in England (1986) and Gatrell’s The Hanging Tree (1994)—suggest that public punishment, more than physical punishment, was disappearing in England from the eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century.As John Stuart Mill observes in 1836, “the spectacle, and even the very idea, of pain, is kept more and more out of the sight of those classes who enjoy in their fulness the benefits of civilization.”¹ AsMill’sobservationsuggests,asubtlereconceptualizationofourtraditional history of punishment has long been in order. Beattie formulates a summary of the history of punishment accordingly: “In the first half of the eighteenth centuryfewquestionedtherightnessofthemassivephysicalterrordeployedbythe State to punish convicted criminals and to discourage others.By the early nineteenth century,[however,] . . . all physical punishments—hanging,public flogging , the pillory—were being widely questioned” (139). This summary would, at first glance, hardly raise the eyebrows of students of either Radzinowicz or Foucault, but notice that Beattie focuses on what people “questioned,” that is, on an attitudinal shift,not an actual shift.He is right to do so.The level of state violence is an elusive statistic to gauge. The violence or suffering inflicted by new punishments, such as solitary confinement, cannot be defined. Moreover, the newly central “nonphysical” punishments of transportation and imprison8 t h e a r t o f a l i b i [54.158.138.161] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 09:28 GMT) mentwereoftendefactodeathsentencesandgenerallythemselvesinvolvedbrutal and repeated corporal discipline,such as starving,whipping,or sleep deprivation .Michael Ignatieff’s study of the rise of the penitentiary from 1750 to 1850 makes it only too clear that, in the tighter web of the bureaucratic disciplinary regimen devised in the nineteenth century, the ordinary criminal was not necessarily better off than his eighteenth-century predecessor.² Thus, we find in Beattie that society’s general “rejection of physical violence as an acceptable means of punishment”corresponds to “the decline of physical violence [being used] as a penal weapon” (614), but we must be careful not to confuse this explicit change in penal weapons—official punishments—with a decrease in “violence” by the...