Scaffold Fiction: Execution and Eighteenth-Century British Literature Jody Cooper Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the PhD degree in English Literature Department of English Faculty of Arts University of Ottawa © Jody Cooper, Ottawa, Canada, 2012 Scaffold Fiction: Execution and Eighteenth-Century British Literature Before the age of sensibility, the literary scaffold was a device, albeit one with its own set of associations. Its purpose was to arrest plot, create tension, and render character. Fictional representations of execution typically did not question the place of capital punishment in society. They were heroic events in which protagonists were threatened with a judicial device that was presumed righteous in every other case but their own. But in the eighteenth century, the fictional scaffold acquired new significance: it deepened a Gothic or sublime tone, tested reader and character sensibility, and eventually challenged the judicial status quo. The reliance on the scaffold to generate atmosphere, to wring our compassion, or to examine the legal value of the individual resulted in a new type of literature that I call scaffold fiction, a genre that persists to this day. Representations of execution in eighteenth-century tragedy, in Gothic narratives, and in novels of sensibility centered more and more on a hero’s scaffold anxiety as a means of enlarging pathos while subverting legal tradition. Lingering on a character’s last hours became the norm as establishment tools like execution broadsheets and criminal biography gave way to scaffold fictions like Lee’s The Recess and Smith’s The Banished Man—fictions that privilege the body of the condemned rather than her soul and no longer reaffirm the law’s prerogative. And because of this shift in the material worth of individuals, the revolutionary fictions of the Romantic era in particular induced questions about the scaffold’s own legitimacy. For the first time in Western literary history, representations of execution usually had something to imply about execution itself, not merely the justness of a particular individual’s fate. The first two chapters of my study are devoted to close readings of Georgian tragedy and Gothic novels, which provide a representative sample of the kinds of tropes particular to scaffold fiction (if they exist before the eighteenth century, they are less vivid, less present). The negotiation of a sentence, the last farewell, the lamentation of intimates, the imagined scaffold death of a loved one, and the taboo attachment of a condemned Christian to his flesh became more sustained and elaborate, opening up new arguments about the era’s obsession with sublimity, imagination, and sympathy, which in turn provide me with critical frameworks. The last two chapters pull back from the page in order to examine how literary representations of execution shifted as perspectives on the death penalty shifted. Anti-Jacobin fictions that feature the scaffold, for instance, were confounded by the device’s now vexed status as a judicial solution. Challenging the supposed authoritarian thrust of texts like Mangin’s George the Third and Craik’s Adelaide de Narbonne, the anti-Jacobin scaffold was swept up in a general reimagining of the object and its moral implication, which by extension helps to dismantle the reductive Jacobin/anti-Jacobin binary which critics increasingly mistrust. My final chapter devotes space to William Godwin, whose novels underscore the moral horror of the scaffold not just as the ultimate reification of the law’s power but, more interestingly, as the terminus of the “poor deserted individual, with the whole force of the community conspiring his ruin” (Political Justice). Godwin, a Romantic writer who anticipates Victorian and twentieth- century capital reforms, brings the scaffold fiction of writers like Defoe and Fielding into fruition as he wrote and agitated at the height of the Bloody Code, creating a template for Dickens, Camus and a host of modern authors and filmmakers. 2 Table of Contents Acknowledgments 5 Introduction 7 Tragedy, Materiality, and the Sublime Scaffold 1: The Scaffold Death Differentiated 16 2: The Sublime Scaffold (So Far) 36 3: The Sublime Scaffold (On Closer Examination) 50 4: Taboo Substance, or, The World of Flesh and Oranges 59 Imagining the Scene: The Fancied Scaffold, Unwilled 1: Imagined Death as Intrusive Fancy 76 2: The Fancied Scaffold and the Gothic Imagination 88 3: Intrusive Fancy and the Spectre of the Axe 100 4: The Intrusive Scaffold and Sympathetic Imagination 118 Scaffold Anxiety, Humanitarianism, and the Revolutionary Debate 1: “Death is a fearful thing”: The Scaffold, Altered 142 2: The Anti-Jacobin Scaffold, Confused 153 3: The Confounding Guillotine 183 4: Humanitarianism Pruned and Forced 199 3 Godwin’s Moral Horror and the Perfection of Scaffold Fiction 1: Scaffold Fiction’s “Process”: Defoe, Fielding, and Godwin 226 2: A Bloody Different Code 257 3: “Poor Deserted Individual” 279 4: Conclusion 311 Works Cited 314 4 Acknowledgements This project could not have happened without the support of the University of Ottawa’s English Department, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and the Ontario Student Assistance Program (OGS). My gratitude to these entities cannot be overstated. I am also indebted to the guiding enthusiasm of my supervisor, Frans de Bruyn, and to my readers: Ian Dennis, Ina Ferris, and April London (University of Ottawa), and Jack Lynch (Rutgers University). I was blessed with one of the most thoughtful and rigorous teams a doctoral student could ask for. Thank you all. Thanks also to the scholars who provided me with reading suggestions. My colleagues at the University of Ottawa, such as Diane Duflot, Sean Moreland, Morgan Rooney, and Natalia Vesselova, gave me text suggestions, while the following members of the C18-L listserv answered my call for titles that feature representations of execution: Judith Anderson Stuart, Lisa Berglund, Joel S. Berson, Theodore Braun, David A. Brewer, Andrew Brown, Sam Cahill, Frank A. Felsenstein, Stephan Flores, Patsy Fowler, Amy Garnai, James D. Jenkins, Jim Kilfoyle, Mary Kline, William Levine, Christopher F. Loar, Sean D. Moore, Mary Ann O'Donnell, Jared Richman, Betty Rizzo, Kristen Saxton, Manuel Schonhorn, and Richard Woodfield. Your insights helped get me started and made an enormous topic appear less daunting. I must acknowledge my debt to historians of the British capital code and execution culture, whose work made my own project possible. Studies by J.M. Beattie, V.A.C. Gatrell, Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh, Randall McGowen, and Andrea McKenzie are just a few scholars who provided me with essential historical, cultural, and socio-political frameworks. Lastly, I wish to acknowledge the support of my husband, Dr. Jeffrey F. Wheeldon, who never complained about the unholy spread of books and papers that made our dining-room table unusable for two years. I can’t imagine how one completes thesis work without such a champion by her side. 5 “The inquisitor only tortures those who are at least reputed criminals; whereas the writer generally chooses the most excellent character in his piece for the subject of his persecution.” John and Anna Laetitia Aikin An Enquiry into Those Kinds of Distresses Which Excite Agreeable Sensations (1773) 6 Introduction Inquiries into the phenomenon of execution in eighteenth-century Europe tend to open with a report of the scaffold death of a particular individual, then segue into a broader cultural commentary delivered in a progressive tone. These introductions are so common that “writing execution” has almost become a genre in and of itself in the last few decades. The template is appropriate: most of these inquiries constitute historical or sociological scholarship rightfully undertaken by historians, sociologists, and sometimes criminologists. As a result, the English- language documents referenced in these studies tend to be what J.A. Sharpe1 calls the "ephemeral literature" of the scaffold: broadsheets, dying speeches, sermons, criminal biographies and ordinaries’ accounts—that is, texts made available on the occasion of their subject’s execution relaying “true” events in order to improve the morals of their readers. Also discussed at length, in these studies, are essays by Mandeville, Fielding, Boswell, and Burke; letters by Walpole; journal entries by Evelyn and Pepys; contributions by Blackstone and Eden; and reformist writings by Romilly and Godwin. When modern scholars of the history of execution consider the novels, poems, and plays of the long eighteenth century—what we loosely consider to be fiction, however problematic the term—they usually approach them in a sidebar fashion, and they tend to refer to the same handful of canonic texts, such as The Beggar's Opera or Moll Flanders. 1 See Sharpe’s “’Last Dying Speeches’: Religion, Ideology and Public Execution in Seventeenth-Century England,” p. 148 7 Though some literature scholars, such as Lincoln Faller and Miriam Jones,2 have taken a look at criminal biography and execution broadsheets, and while Regina Janes and Monika Fludernik3 have written about representations of execution in more “fictional” texts (e.g. The Prelude and Caleb Williams), a comprehensive study of such representations in eighteenth-century British fiction has not been undertaken until now. Considering the presence of the scaffold in the lives and literature of eighteenth-century Britons, it is a curious oversight, though a handful of scholars have certainly prepared the way for me. Yet unlike Janes, I am not solely concerned with beheadings; unlike Fludernik, I am interested in how the trope of sublime execution functions in the works of more than one author. Nor do I confine myself to discussions of sublimity, but also consider the place of imagination, sensibility, and revolutionary politics in the era’s scaffold fiction, and give Gothic expressions of execution their proper due. In short, my study aspires to fill the gaps left in the socio-historical work produced by J.