"Hanging not Punishment Enough": The Murder Act of 1752
The rise of crime in London during the eighteenth century was of great concern for members of society that felt particularly threatened by it. This preoccupation reflected in the constant debate on punishments that could be more severe than death in texts such as Hanging Not Punishment Enough (1701) and George Ollyffeβs Essay β¦ to Prevent Capital Crimes (1731) in order to lessen the amount of crime that was happening at the time. A correspondent of Wye's Letter expressed, "Daily experience shows us that hanging only signifies nothing, therefore the law in that particular is frustrated, and should be amended" (quoted in King 35). Of course, William Hogarth was also one of the figures involved in this discussion and published The Four Stages of Cruelty (1751), in which he depicts the life of a man whose cruelty increases and goes from hurting animals to people, including his lover; in the last plate, the body of the man is being publicly dissected. This form of punishment was greatly encouraged by the people engaged in this debate who thought, like Hogarth depicts in his series, that criminals had to paid for the cruelty with which they acted.
In this way, in his book Punishing the Criminal Corpse, 1700β1840 Aggravated Forms of the Death Penalty in England, Peter King makes an examination of all the other forms of punishment that 29 writers (including Daniel Defoe) suggested at the time. This includes post-execution or aggravated pre-execution punishments for non-treasonable offences which are the following: Dissection of corpse post-execution, breaking on the wheel, Lex Talionis (execution mirrors violence victim suffered), burning at stake (whether dead or still alive), gibbeting (post-execution only), gibbeting (alive and starving to death), fed to the lions/tigers in the tower, gibbeting (alive after cords wound around arms/legs), gibbeting (alive after limbs broken), death on rack under weights, whipping to death, execution as if treason (disembowelled, beheaded, etc.), death by bite from Mad Dog (32). These accounts were gathered from articles and pamphlets published during particular periods of time in which crime and violence would get worse around 1694β1701, the 1730s, and the final three years before the Murder Act in 1752 (King 34).
Finally, in March 26th, 1752, the Murder Act was approved after panic surged among the citizens of London regarding the murders and robberies that were getting more and more violent by the day, which was intensified by the exaggerations made on printed media. (King 52). Although pre-execution punishments were widely incentivized by many, the Murder Act only enforced "speedier executions, solitary confinement on bread and water,...dissections and hanging in chains" (King 52).
The desperate measures people were willing to take regarding the punishment of criminals is a clear signal of the degree of violence that could be witnessed at the time. This speaks of the great destabilization that permeated England's society as it reflects a fragmentation of its parts, from which only violence and chaos can result.
Works cited:
King, Peter. Punishing the Criminal Corpse, 1700-1840: Aggravated Forms of the Death Penalty in England. Springer Open, 2017.
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