Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (37 page)

Thackeray attended one such public execution of François Courvoisier in 1840. Like Scott, he purchased a window view. He was appalled by the merriment of the crowd, but transfixed by the grisly ‘second murder’. Courvoisier, a valet who had cut his master’s throat, claimed to have been inspired to his crime by reading Ainsworth’s novel,
Jack Sheppard
, which climaxes with the hero being publicly hanged where Courvoisier himself would swing. A passing remark in Thackeray’s ‘On Going to See a Man Hanged’ (1840), about how the doxies serving spectators in back-alleys around Courvoisier’s execution did not exactly remind him of Dickens’s virtuous Nancy, sparked off a furious row with the other novelist. Dickens was also fascinated by hanging (in
Oliver Twist
both Fagin and Sikes are ‘stretched’) and wrote about the repulsive but irresistible attraction of public execution. He introduces a hangman – who ends up hanged – in
Barnaby Rudge
.

Great Expectations
opens with the encounter between Magwitch and Pip, which will determine Pip’s life, on the Romney marshes. An image forecasts the future of both the escaped convict (ultimately sentenced to hang) and Pip (‘born to hang’, as Mrs Joe thinks):

On the edge of the river I could faintly make out the only two black things in all the prospect that seemed to be standing upright; one of these was the beacon by
which the sailors steered, – like an unhooped cask upon a pole, – an ugly thing when you were near it; the other, a gibbet, with some chains hanging to it which had once held a pirate. The man was limping on towards this latter, as if he were the pirate come to life, and come down, and going back to hook himself up again.

George Eliot’s first novel,
Adam Bede
, climaxes at the scene of a public hanging. One could go on – and doubtless, in a Ph.D. dissertation, some scholar has. But of all the great novelists of his time, Hardy qualifies as the most thoughtful, and most morbidly sensitive, spectator of hangings. They feature prominently in his fiction. Hanging is central to the short stories ‘The Withered Arm’ and ‘The Three Strangers’. Once read, one will never forget the rabbit (‘hanged by the leg’) squealing night-long in
Jude the Obscure
, nor Little Father Time and his two siblings hanged by the neck, on the clothes-hook in the lodging-house wardrobe. In
Far from the Madding Crowd
, after shooting Troy, Boldwood rings the bell-pull at vast red-bricked Dorchester Gaol, alongside the gateway where he expects to meet his end. Boldwood is actually reprieved – unusual in Victorian England – perhaps because the young Hardy was prevailed on to sweeten his ending by his editor.

Tess of the d’Urbervilles
is the story of a murderess who is hanged at Wintoncester, the ancient capital of Wessex, after preparing herself (‘pure woman’ that she is) on the sacrificial slab at Stonehenge:

Upon the cornice of the tower a tall staff was fixed. Their eyes were riveted on it. A few minutes after the hour had struck something moved slowly up the staff, and extended itself upon the breeze. It was a black flag.

‘Justice’ was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Æschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess. And the d’Urberville knights and dames slept on in their tombs unknowing. The two speechless gazers bent themselves down to the earth, as if in prayer, and remained thus a long time, absolutely motionless: the flag continued to wave silently. As soon as they had strength they arose, joined hands again, and went on.

This is a long shot – just as memorable are Hardy’s close-ups of the hanged body; ‘the line the colour of an unripe blackberry’ on the corpse’s neck, for example. Hardy knew what he was writing about. He had witnessed two hangings in his youth that stayed with him all his life and the more famous of the two inspired Tess Durbeyfield. When he was sixteen, as Hardy recalled, seventy years later: ‘I am ashamed to say I saw [Martha Browne] hanged, my only excuse being that I was but a youth and had to be in the town at that time for other reasons … I remember what a fine figure she showed against the sky as she hung in the misty rain, and how the tight black silk gown set off her shape as she wheeled half-round and back.’

The recollection was inspired by a visit in 1926 to the area where Browne had lived, and some inquiries he made there as to whether ancient locals had information about her. In a letter, at the same time, Hardy’s second wife, Florence, recorded that watching Browne’s execution gave ‘a tinge of bitterness and gloom to his life’s work’.

More than a tinge, one ventures. The circumstances of Browne’s crime and execution – the last public hanging of a woman in Dorset – were memorable. Her hanging was in Dorchester, where the young Thomas had just begun his apprenticeship as an architect. The structure on which the scaffold was erected was the new archway to the prison, facing the North Square, in whose construction the young man’s eye would have taken a professional interest (he describes it in detail in
Far from the Madding Crowd
). There was a long tradition of public hangings in Dorchester. They were the occasion of what were bluntly called ‘hang fairs’. As with other fairs, open spaces were required. Eventually the prison gateway was settled on as ideal, to give a better view for the crowd. In mid-Victorian cities, such as Glasgow, the crowds could be vast – as many as 100,000. Martha Browne pulled some 4,000, effectively a full house.

The town had been the scene of an orgy of hangings following the Monmouth uprising in 1685: some seventy-five locals were hanged by Judge Jeffreys on his Bloody Assizes. There were those still living in Hardy’s day who retailed the legends of these primeval hangings which took place in the amphitheatre, Maumbury Rings, where Henchard summons Farfrae for a gladiatorial struggle, to the death if necessary. Mary Channing, who had poisoned her husband, was hanged, drawn and quartered in the ring in 1705. The event is recalled in
The Mayor of Casterbridge
:

in 1705 a woman who had murdered her husband was half-strangled and then burnt there in the presence of ten thousand spectators. Tradition reports that at a certain stage of the burning her heart burst and leapt out of her body, to the terror of them all, and that not one of those ten thousand people ever cared particularly for hot roast after that.

Hardy claimed to have had the story from an ‘ancestor’. His father (another Thomas) recalled seeing four rick-burners, convicted after the Swing riots, hanged all together, like apples on the bough. There had, however, been no public hangings between 1833 (a fifteen-year-old, feeble-minded arsonist) and Martha Browne in 1856. The revival of the hanging fair added to the excitement. So too did the fact that she was a local woman, whose story was well known and argued over. Martha had been a housekeeper at a local farm. She had married a fellow servant, John Browne, twenty years her junior. She was forty-four years old, beyond childbearing,
but generally agreed to be a handsome woman, with a fine head of hair. She brought £30 to the marriage, on the proceeds of which she and her husband set up a small shop. It was a violent marriage – particularly after she found him in bed with a younger woman. Rows followed in which Martha was quite likely beaten. Finally, she caved in her husband’s head with an axe. Like Tess (who used a carving knife to similar effect on Alec), the weapon argued a degree of premeditation rather than self-defence. Fatally, Martha insisted that John had been kicked in the head by one of his horses (he had a sideline as a tranter, or carter), although medical evidence contradicted this.

There was sympathy for Martha in the town. The mid-Victorian mood was less vengeful, and less jubilant, about hanging than in earlier times. When the ‘other woman’ in the affair, Mary Davies, turned up to view the execution, the crowd hissed the hussy away. After the event, the
Dorset County Chronicle
went so far as to argue for the abolition of the death penalty – something that would not happen for a century, after the not dissimilar execution of Ruth Ellis.

Browne’s execution was set for 9 o’clock on 9 August. It turned out a drizzly day. Browne had dressed herself in her best black Sunday gown, and her hair was shown to good effect. Accompanied by two (friendly) wardresses, and her clergyman (an antiquarian, who may have inspired Tringham in
Tess
), she shook hands with the officials and displayed a marble-calm composure. Having ascended the eleven steps of the scaffold, over the gateway, her gown was tied round the ankles, to prevent indecent exposure (of, among other things, the special underwear to soak up involuntary defecation). A white hood was placed over her head. The rain (as Hardy noted) meant that her facial features, as she attempted to suck in breath, were clearly visible through the muslin.

In charge of the spectacle was William Calcraft, the most famous hangman in England since Jack Ketch. Calcraft specialised in ‘the short drop’, which meant death by strangulation rather than a mercifully snapped spine. The dangling victim could take up to four minutes to stop ‘dancing’. For the further delectation of the crowd, the body was left, at the end of the rope, for an hour. Calcraft had the right to the victim’s clothes and rope, which he routinely sold on to Madame Tussaud’s ‘Chamber of Horrors’. This state-appointed sadist also earned a second income as prison flogger, wherever he happened to be passing.

The sixteen-year-old Hardy, with a friend, got an early place, virtually under the gallows. Given the thousands’ strong crowd, he presumably arrived hours before. He was, he later said, close enough to hear the ‘rustle’ of Martha’s ‘thin black gown’. In conversation, sixty years later, he recalled: ‘The hanging itself did not move me at all. But I sat on after the others went away, not thinking, but looking at the figure
… turning slowly round on the rope. And then it began to rain, and then I saw they had put a cloth over the face how as the cloth got wet, her features came through it. That was extraordinary. A boy had climbed up into a tree nearby, and when she dropped he came down in a faint like an apple dropping from a tree. It was curious the two dropping together.’

Was it more than ‘curiosity’ which anchored him to the spot? Biographers quarrel on the subject. Some, like Robert Gittings and Michael Millgate, deduce that hanging was for Hardy obscurely ‘erotic’. Gittings, for example, points to ‘Hardy’s obvious sense of enjoyment and anticipation, followed by a sensation of calm that seems to give the whole experience a sexual character.’ Orgasm, in other words. This perverse ‘enjoyment’ is connected, it is suggested, with Hardy’s supposed ‘impotence’ (another area of hot dispute). Claire Tomalin protests that there was nothing sexually exciting for Hardy in the hanging of Martha Browne. His comments on her dress (the ‘rustling gown’, ‘fine’ figure, writhing, etc.) merely observe that – stoic woman that she was – Martha Browne intended to leave the world head held high and ‘respectable’. It was ‘touching’, not aphrodisiac.

Browne’s was the last public execution of a woman in England, and the last but one public execution in Dorchester. Hardy went out of his way to watch that as well. James Seale was hanged on 10 August 1858, for cutting the throat of a young woman, and attempting to disguise the act by arson. It was a squalid crime. On the morning of the execution, Hardy rushed home and picked up his father’s telescope. He then took up a position on one of the hills around Dorchester from where he could observe Seale, clad in a white smock, drop and ‘dance’. As the body fell, Hardy, in his shock, involuntarily dropped the telescope.

There were no more executions in Dorchester, public or secluded. In 1868 the Capital Punishment Amendment Act ended public hanging altogether. If
Tess
had been set in the historical period of
The Mayor of Casterbridge
(mid-1840s) rather than the 1870s, she – like her progenitor Martha Browne – would have swung, danced and dangled in front of a crowd of thousands. It is odd, and perhaps significant, that Angel does not take up his right, as husband of the condemned woman, to be a witness. As it is, he and Liza-Lu (his deceased wife’s sister and future bedmate, we apprehend) attend the execution outside Wintoncester prison’s walls. Victorian fiction’s love affair with public execution had come to an end.

Philosophy: A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.
One of the definitions from
The Devil’s Dictionary

The eccentricity in Bierce’s life and works begins with his name. His father Marcus Aurelius gave all his children (of whom Ambrose was the tenth) names beginning with ‘A’. Ambrose was, perhaps, lucky not to get ‘Aristodemus’. Bierce Sr could trace his pedigree back to the American Revolution. The family had long-established maverick political views. Ambrose was born in Ohio but brought up in Indiana. He earned his first dollar working on an abolitionist newspaper,
The Northern Indianan
. For a short period in his late youth he attended the Kentucky Military Institution, and on the outbreak of the Civil War, Bierce enlisted, serving as an engineer. He saw action in a number of bloody battles and was wounded; on another occasion he was captured and escaped. This inspired ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’ (1890), his best-known short story. It opens with Peyton Farquhar, a Confederate spy, being sentenced to death by hanging. The opening is done in Bierce’s masterly sketch-stroke fashion:

A man stood upon a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, looking down into the swift water twenty feet below. The man’s hands were behind his back, the wrists bound with a cord. A rope closely encircled his neck. It was attached to a stout cross-timber above his head and the slack fell to the level of his knees. Some loose boards laid upon the ties supporting the rails of the railway supplied a footing for him and his executioners – two private soldiers of the Federal army, directed by a sergeant who in civil life may have been a deputy sheriff.