MDMD2: Tyburn

[Dave Monroe]

   "'You'd appreciate Wapping High Street, then,-- and, and Tyburn, of 
course! put that on your list.'
   "'Alluring out there, is it?'
   "Mason explains, though without his precise reason for it, that, for the 
past Year or more, it has been his practice to attend the Friday Hangings at 
that melancholy place [...].  Mason has been shov'd about and borne along in 
riots of sailors attempting to wrest from bands of medical Students the 
bodies of Shipmates come to grief ashorem too far from the safety of the 
Sea,-- and he's had his Purse, as his Person, assaulted by Agents public and 
private,-- yet, 'There's nothing like it, it's London at its purest,' he 
cries, 'You must come out there with me, soon as we may.'" (M&D, Ch. 3, p. 
15)

And who said there were no sports in Pynchon ...

>From James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (New York: Penguin, 1979 
[1791]), "Part IX: 1782-3," pp. 281-309 ...

"He said to Sir William Scott, 'The age is running mad after innovation; and 
all the business of the world is to be done in a new way; men are to be 
hanged in a new way; Tyburn itself is not safe from the fury of innovation.' 
  It having been argued that this was an improvement,--'No, Sir, (said he, 
eagerly,) it is not an improvement; they object, that the old method drew 
together a number of spectators.  Sir, executions are intended to draw 
spectators.  If they do not draw spectators, they don't answer their 
purpose. The old method was most satisfactory to all parties; the publick 
was gratified by a procession; the criminal was supported by it. Why is all 
this to be swept away?'  I perfectly agree with Dr. Johnson upon this head, 
and am persuaded that executions now, the solemn procession being 
discontinued, have not nearly the effect which they formerly had." (pp. 
291-2)

http://www.andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/tyburn.html

>From Lisa Picard, Dr. Johnson's London: Coffee-House and Climbing Boys, 
Medicine, Toothpaste and Gin, Poverty and Press-Gangs, Freakshows and Female 
Education (New York: St. Martin's, 2001), Ch. 14, "Amusements," pp. 123-32 
...

   "But undoubtedly the best amusements were executions.  Eight times a 
year, the carts left the gates of Newgate and bumped their way slowly along 
Holborn and Oxford Street to Tyburn, just outside the turnpike gate, between 
yelling, cheering, booing, catcalling crowds....  Sometimes the execution 
was arranged in the place where the crime had been committed, which made a 
nice change of scene for the crowd....
   "The fun was not only in watching the prisoners dying, but in assessing 
their demeanor.  They varied from the blase to the terrified....  Sometimes 
the mob was cheated by a 'reprieve under the gallows.'  Sometimes it 
attempted a rescue.  Sometimes it was more terrifying than the hangman 
himself...." (p. 129)

And from Chapter 15, "Crime and Punishment," pp. 133-49 ...

   "If the prisoner was tried and found guilty, and there was no pardon 
forthcoming, what happened next?"
   "If he had been condmened to death, he was put into the condmened cell to 
await his trip to Tyburn.  By tradition he tried to look his best on that 
occasion....  The death cell, which measured 9 feet by 6 feet, sometimes 
became so crowded with well-wishers that the prisoner had to appeal for a 
little peac.  Fashionable ladies enjoyed the sensation of seeing a man so 
near death, especially a handsome highwayman...." (p. 143)

"In 1752 the authorities thought of a new twist.

"'Whereas the horrid crime of murder has of late been more frequently 
perpetrated than formerly [...] be it enacted ... that all persons who shall 
be found guilty of willful murder shall be exceuted according to the law, 
... [and] that the body of such murderer shall [...] be imeeditaely conveyed 
... to the hall of the Surgeons Company and shall be dissected and 
anatomised by the said Surgeons...'" (p. 144)

And cf. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 
trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977), Part I, "Torture," Section 
1, "The Body of the Condemned," pp. 3-31 ...

"Among so many changes, I shall consider one: the disappearance of torture 
as a public spectacle.  Today we are rather inclined to ignore it; perhaps, 
in its time, it gave rise to too much inflated rhetoric; perhaps it has been 
attributed too readily and too emphatically to a process of 'humanization,' 
thus dispensing with the need for further analysis. And, in any case, how 
important is such a change, when compared with the great institutional 
transformations, the formulation of explicit, general codes and unified 
rules of procedure; with the almost universal adoption of the jury system, 
the definition of the essentially corrective character of the penalty and 
the tendency, which has become increasingly marked since the nineteenth 
century, to adapt punishment to the individual offender?  Punishment of a 
less immediately physical kind, a certain discretion in the art of 
inflicting pain, a combination of more subtle, more subdued sufferings, 
deprived of their visible display, should not all this be treated as a 
special case, an incidental effect of deeper changes? And yet the fact 
remains that a few decades saw the disappearance of the tortured, 
dismembered, amputated body, symbolically branded on face or shoulder, 
exposed alive or dead to public view. The body as the major target of penal 
repression disappeared." (p. 8)

http://icdweb.cc.purdue.edu/~felluga/punish.html

And thank you, Professor D.F. Felluga (Department of English, Purdue 
University), for doing a little typing for me here ...

http://icdweb.cc.purdue.edu/~felluga/index.html

A site well worth exploring, by the way.  Okay, Chapter 2, coming right up 
...

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