The night before an execution, outside Newgate, all the paraphernalia of execution-the gallows, the barriers, the platforms-had to be set up. These preparations naturally attracted a crowd of idle or interested observers. The “low taverns and beer-houses about Newgate Street, Smithfield, and the Fleet district, are gorged with company, who sally out at intervals to see how the workmen get on” and “knots of queer-looking fellows form here and there” to discuss the following morning’s proceedings. The police moved them on, but they clustered elsewhere. Just after midnight on Sunday, when most of the night-revellers had been cleared, the gin shops and coffee houses opened their doors and hired out their rooms-“Comfortable room!,” “Excellent situation!,” “Beautiful prospects!,” “Splendid view!” Both roofs and windows in the vicinity were hired out; five pounds were “given for the attic storey of the Lamb’s Coffee House” and a first-floor front could command five times as much. The crowd began to assemble at four or five in the morning, and the whole area in front of Newgate was packed by seven o’clock. By the time of the ceremony itself some of the spectators, pressed up against the barriers for several hours, had “nearly fainted from exhaustion.”
When Governor Wall was marched from the press yard towards the place of execution, he was greeted with howls of abuse and execration from the other prisoners of Newgate. While the governor of Goree, in Africa, he had been responsible for the death of a soldier by excessive flogging-one of those abuses of authority which Londoners most detest. His appearance on the scaffold was then accompanied by three harsh and prolonged shouts from the crowd assembled in Newgate Street. After the hanging was over the yeoman of the halter offered portions of the rope for sale at one shilling per inch; a woman known as “Rosy Emma,” rumoured to be the yeoman’s wife, “exuberant in talk and hissing hot from Pie Corner, where she had taken her morning dose of gin-and-bitters,” was selling parts of the fatal cord at a cheaper rate.
Governor Wall met his fate with fortitude and in silence. Arthur Thistle-wood, condemned as one of the Cato Street conspirators in 1820, ascended the scaffold and exclaimed, “I shall soon know the last grand secret!” Mrs. Manning, convicted in 1849 of a more than usually unpleasant murder-with the connivance of her husband she had murdered her lover with a ripping chisel-appeared upon the scaffold in a black satin dress; her “preference brought the costly stuff into disrepute, and its unpopularity lasted for nearly thirty years.” It is curiously reminiscent of the case of Mrs. Turner, a notorious poisoner in the reign of James I; she was a woman of fashion who had invented yellow-starched ruffs and cuffs. Hence her sentence was to be “hang’d at Tiburn in her yellow Tinny Ruff and Cuff, she being the first inventor and wearer of that horrid garb.” To emphasise the moral the hangman on that day “had his hands and cuffs” painted yellow, and from that time the coloured starch, like Mrs. Manning’s black satin, “grew generally to be detested and disused.” It is a measure of the central importance of this ritual of execution that Newgate, and Tyburn, could affect the fashions of the day. Once more the idea of the city as spectacle asserts itself. Hanging, then, was essentially a form of street theatre. When five pirates were hanged for mutiny in front of Newgate, the Chronicles record that “the upturned faces of the eager spectators resembled those of the “gods” at Drury Lane on Boxing Night … The remarks heard amongst the crowd were of course ones of approval. ‘S’help me, ain’t it fine?’ a costermonger was heard to exclaim to his companion.” Theatricality and savagery are subtly mingled.
The “unceasing murmur” of the crowd broke into “a loud deep roar” as the condemned man appeared; there were calls of “Hats off!” and “Down in front” as he approached the halter. There followed a moment of silence, abruptly broken by the drop itself. At the moment of descent “every link in that human chain is shaken, along the whole lengthened line has the motion jarred.” The silence was replaced, after that sudden “jarring” of the body of the city, by a noise from the crowd “like the dreamy murmur of an ocean shell.” And then, more distinctly, the familiar cries of the sellers of “ginger-beer, pies, fried fish, sandwiches and fruit,” together with the names of famous criminals whose tracts were still being advertised on the spot where they, too, once fell. With these were soon mingled “oaths, fighting, obscene conduct and still more filthy language,” together, perhaps, with the faintest note of disappointment. There was always the hope or expectation that something might go wrong-that the condemned man might fight for his liberty or the engine of death might not function satisfactorily. Charles White, condemned for arson in 1832, sprang forward at the exact moment the trap was opened and balanced on its edge while “the crowd roared their encouragement as he struggled furiously with the executioner and his assistants.” He was eventually thrown down the drop with the hangman clinging to his legs. In these instances, the sympathy of the London crowd flooded instinctively to the condemned, as if they were watching their own selves in the act of being despatched by the authorities of the state.
There were occasions when death upon the scaffold was accompanied by death upon the streets. The execution of two murderers, Haggerty and Holloway, took place in February 1807; the anticipation was so great that close to 40,000 people were packed in front of the prison and its vicinity. Even before the murderers appeared upon the scaffold, women and children were trampled to death amid cries of “Murder.” At Green Arbour Court, opposite the debtors’ door of the prison, a pieman stooped to pick up some of his broken wares and “some of the mob, not seeing what had happened, stumbled over him. No one who fell ever rose again.” Elsewhere a cart filled with spectators broke down, “and many of those who were in it were trampled to death.” And yet amid these scenes of chaos and death the rite of execution continued. Only after the gallows had been taken down, and the mob partly dispersed, did the officers find the bodies of twenty-eight dead and hundreds injured.
Two great nineteenth-century novelists seemed implicitly to recognise the emblematic significance of these Monday mornings, when the city gathered to acclaim the death of one of its own. William Makepeace Thackeray rose at three on the morning of 6 July 1840, in order to witness the hanging of a manservant, Benjamin Courvoisier, convicted of killing his master. He recorded the scene in an essay, “Going to See a Man Hanged.” In a carriage bound for Snow Hill, Thackeray followed the crowd intent upon seeing the execution; by twenty minutes past four, beside Holy Sepulchre, “many hundred people were in the street.” Here Thackeray registered his “electric shock” when he first caught sight of the gallows jutting from the door of Newgate. He asked those around them if they had seen many executions? Most assented. And had the sight done them any good? “For the matter of that, no; people did not care about them at all,” and, in a transcription of genuine London speech, “nobody ever thought of it after a bit.”
The windows of the shops were soon filled with dandies, and with “quiet, fat, family parties,” while from a balcony an aristocratic rowdy squirted those assembled with brandy and soda from a siphon. The crowd grew more eager as the hand of the clock came closer to eight. When the bell of Holy Sepulchre tolled the hour, all the men removed their hats “and a great murmur arose, more awful, bizarre and indescribable than any sound I had ever before heard. Women and children began to shriek horribly” and then “a dreadful quick, feverish kind of jangling noise mingled with the noise of the people, and lasted for about two minutes.” This was a scene of fever and alarm, as if the whole body of London was starting up from an uneasy sleep. It was the noise, almost inhuman, which Thackeray immediately noticed.