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Ordering the Mob: London's Public Punishments, C Ordering the Mob: London’s Public Punishments, c. 1783-1868 Matthew Trevor White A thesis submitted to the University of Hertfordshire in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy April 2009 Abstract This thesis explores the crowds that attended London‟s executions, pillories and public whippings during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It aims to reappraise a literature describing the carnivalesque and voyeuristic nature of popular behaviour, and to trace a continuum in the public‟s active engagement with the criminal justice system between 1783 and 1868. By employing a range of little used sources to examine the biographical, geographical and social texture of punishment audiences, it details the lives and motivations of the men, women and children who assembled to watch these often brutal events. In the process, this thesis significantly revises our received understanding of the troublesome punishment „mob‟, the unruliness and low character of which has been frequently assumed on the basis of uncritical reading of contemporary sources inveighing against plebeian behaviour. It reveals a more stable picture of public participation, and argues that this experience was characterized by the remarkable social diversity and relative good order of the crowd. This study in consequence problematizes teleological narratives of social „improvement‟ and a putative „civilizing process‟, which have traditionally described the fall of public punishments as a product of changing urban sensitivities. In analysing the crowd‟s structure and responses to public punishments over time, the thesis demonstrates how popular expectations surrounding older forms of public justice remained essentially unchanged, and continued to speak forcefully to the metropolitan conscience. ii To explain the undoubted changes in punishment policy in the period, in the absence of a clear teleological narrative of attitudes towards public punishment, the thesis in turn argues that the decline of the pillory, whippings and public executions in London was driven by elite fears regarding mass behaviour, particularly in the wake of the Gordon Riots of 1780, and suggests that public punishments disappeared not because of their dwindling moral relevance or failing penal utility, but as a result of the middle class‟s increasingly nervous perceptions of urban mass phenomena. The thesis argues that the decline of public punishment did not result from „squeamishness‟ about judicial murder and corporal punishment, but from anxiety about the authority and power of the crowd. iii Table of Contents Acknowledgments ....................................................................................................... vii Tables and Illustrations ................................................................................................. ix Abbreviations ................................................................................................................. x Chapter One: Introduction ............................................................................................. 1 Control and prosecution ............................................................................................. 6 Crowds, punishment and space ................................................................................ 14 Habermas and the public sphere............................................................................... 25 Sensitivity and squeamishness ................................................................................. 29 Rethinking the crowd ............................................................................................... 34 Chapter Two: The Problem with Crowds .................................................................... 43 Tyburn lore ............................................................................................................... 45 Execution and the law .............................................................................................. 58 The Gordon Riots ..................................................................................................... 64 How to execute? ....................................................................................................... 73 Hanging localized ..................................................................................................... 81 Predicting behaviour ................................................................................................ 86 Control and manipulation ......................................................................................... 96 Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 101 Chapter Three: Reforming the Spectacle ................................................................... 106 West End expansion ............................................................................................... 107 Ending the procession ............................................................................................ 113 The Old Bailey gallows .......................................................................................... 121 Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 126 Chapter Four: The Spectacle Renewed ...................................................................... 129 Reforms adrift? ....................................................................................................... 130 The crowd revealed ................................................................................................ 140 iv The spectacle „reborn‟ ............................................................................................ 160 Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 171 Chapter Five: The „Norway Neckcloth‟: London‟s Pillory Punishments ................. 173 Collective action ..................................................................................................... 174 Crowd behaviour .................................................................................................... 183 Geographies of pain ............................................................................................... 190 Charing Cross ......................................................................................................... 195 Public disorder........................................................................................................ 202 Composition ........................................................................................................... 210 Reform and afterlife ............................................................................................... 216 Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 221 Chapter Six: „Shoving the Tumbler‟: Public Flogging .............................................. 224 Whipping and the courts ........................................................................................ 225 Ubiquity .................................................................................................................. 233 Soldiers and slaves ................................................................................................. 239 Revival ................................................................................................................... 246 The domestic sphere ............................................................................................... 251 Public responses ..................................................................................................... 257 Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 268 Chapter Seven: 1800 to 1830: Hanging in Context ................................................... 270 A „social revolution‟? ............................................................................................. 271 Execution culture.................................................................................................... 290 Juvenile delinquents ............................................................................................... 297 Publicity of crime ................................................................................................... 304 Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 308 Chapter Eight: The Victorian Execution ................................................................... 313 Murder sensations .................................................................................................. 315 Public consensus .................................................................................................... 319 Crowds and the middle classes............................................................................... 325 Realities .................................................................................................................. 333 v New concerns ......................................................................................................... 345 Conclusion .............................................................................................................
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