Victorians Against the Gallows: Capital Punishment and the Abolitionist Movement in Nineteenth Century Britain by James Gregory (review)

Mid-nineteenth-century Britain saw a sustained debate, both in Parliament and in print media, over the abolition of the death penalty. In 1850 a petition in favor of abolition secured over one million signatures. Capital punishment was the focus of two parliamentary committees and sparked serious debate in the House of Commons. The practice was, James Gregory tells us, a “troubling question of the day” (241). Yet by 1870 the cause of abolition was in decline. It was dismissed by leading publications as one of a number of fads promoted by a minority of cranks who displayed their ignorance of the real world. While much has been written about the practice and culture of the gallows over the long eighteenth century, the mid-Victorian chapter of the controversy has secured less attention. Gregory’s book is a worthy effort to remedy this situation. “This study,” he writes, “has examined a movement which was more extensive and elaborate than previous accounts of the capital punishment question have suggested” (229).

Victorians Against the Gallows presents us with a rich survey of sources which permit Gregory to explore the nature and progress of the abolition movement. His extensive footnotes are a valuable resource for anyone writing about crime and punishment in the period. Gregory exploits the digitalization of nineteenth-century print sources to investigate the topic with an attention to detail no other scholar has approached. Among his more interesting discoveries is his exploration of the role of fiction “in imagining or debating the question of capital punishment” (191). He carries us beyond the works of Charles Dickens to more obscure poems, plays, and novels that addressed the issue. He also makes a valiant effort to provide us with an imperial context to the debate over the gallows. He notes not only the status of the question in the colonies, but also the ways in which disputes over the treatment of subjected peoples influenced the controversy at home.

Gregory’s central focus, however, is on the organization, founded in 1846, which spearheaded the push for abolition: the Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment (S.A.C.P.). He employs what he calls a “movement perspective” to chart the progress of the cause (1). He has examined the biographies of some four hundred of the Society’s members, seeking to discover their professions, their denominational affiliations, and their geographical distribution. He discusses the important if subsidiary role of women in the organization. He charts some of the connections to other causes such as the attack upon the Corn Laws, temperance, and vegetarianism. Gregory devotes several chapters to a discussion of the tactics adopted by the abolitionists. He explains the ways in which they sought to use the press to exploit unease aroused by sensational murder cases.

Gregory acknowledges, however, that the anti-death penalty movement never secured the kind of support or attention devoted to the Corn Laws, anti-slavery, or even temperance. The S.A.C.P. does not appear to have been a particularly successful pressure group; the gallows remained the cause of a dedicated minority. “As an election issue,” Gregory concedes, “it was not high up on the agenda” (146). Even devoted abolitionists like the Quaker Charles Gilpin rarely mentioned the topic when they addressed their electors. The S.A.C.P. failed to be imaginative or sophisticated in its attempts to produce symbols or narratives that captured sustained public attention. It displayed “clear weaknesses—tactical, numerical, and financial.” Ultimately, it failed because “support of the gallows was always too strong” (229).

Gregory has given us a work that focuses narrowly if intently upon the S.A.C.P. as if the history of this organization tells us all we need to know about the significance of the cause in mid-Victorian Britain. Yet he fails to resolve the tension between his...