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Review
[a] classic study (The Sunday Times Culture Magazine )
There is plenty to incite horror, but the cleverness of the book is the way it puts the English way of execution into a political context (Jeremy Paxman, Independent )
monumental in the subtlety and richness of the argument ... a rare combination of pellucid clarity and passion that carries the reader on to the final chapter without a single longeur. (John Adamson, Sunday Telegraph )
A quite outstanding book, moving, perceptive ... richly imaginative. (Linda Colley, Observer )
There is plenty to incite horror, but the cleverness of the book is the way it puts the English way of execution into a political context (Jeremy Paxman, Independent )
monumental in the subtlety and richness of the argument ... a rare combination of pellucid clarity and passion that carries the reader on to the final chapter without a single longeur. (John Adamson, Sunday Telegraph )
A quite outstanding book, moving, perceptive ... richly imaginative. (Linda Colley, Observer )
Linda Colley, Observer
"A quite outstanding book, moving, perceptive ... richly imaginative."
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First Sentence
THE WAYS IN WHICH PEOPLE WERE KILLED ON PUBLIC SCAFfolds have always been shrouded in euphemism. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
THE WAYS IN WHICH PEOPLE WERE KILLED ON PUBLIC SCAFfolds have always been shrouded in euphemism. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
38 of 41 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This book is as compelling as it is horrific as it draws the reader into the blood soaked wretchedness of 18th and 19th Century London. Using eyewitness accounts, pamphlets and broadsheets of the time Gattrell vividly depicts what life was like for those witnessing or awaiting execution.
With morbid fascination you learn of the appalling torture of condemned souls by bungling executioners, the blood-lust of the baying mob, and the sad lack of regard placed on human life.
This book enables you to almost feel what it must have been like to be at Tyburn or Newgate on hanging day, and how executions rose to almost epidemic proportions in the 1770's for a vast range of crimes that today would warrant no more than a period of community service.
Saddened and sickened, but always morbidly inrigued, this book once started is hard to put down. If you want to know what London was really like 200 years ago this goes some way to opening your eyes. Brillian read!
With morbid fascination you learn of the appalling torture of condemned souls by bungling executioners, the blood-lust of the baying mob, and the sad lack of regard placed on human life.
This book enables you to almost feel what it must have been like to be at Tyburn or Newgate on hanging day, and how executions rose to almost epidemic proportions in the 1770's for a vast range of crimes that today would warrant no more than a period of community service.
Saddened and sickened, but always morbidly inrigued, this book once started is hard to put down. If you want to know what London was really like 200 years ago this goes some way to opening your eyes. Brillian read!
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
"The Hanging Tree -- Execution and the English people, 1770-1868" isn't really for the sensation-seeker or the ghoulish -- despite its rather lurid title (although, that said, its detailed descriptions of many of the condemned's last days could best be described as "unflinching"!).
Rather, it's a long and fairly academic review of capital law under the penal codes pertaining from the late 18th century until the abolition of public executions in the 19th.
My only criticisms of the book are that it is, at times, a little repetitive (although it would be hard to be otherwise, given that the book is 619 pages long); that it deals with rather few cases -- although these are gone into in great detail -- and that there are, at least to my way of thinking, a superfluity of bibliographical and academic references. Not a page can be turned without several! No matter, this is, at heart, more of an academic study than a populist one, so perhaps that is to be expected.
For me, its real interest lies in the commentary it presents upon the social mores and changing attitudes of the period and, for anyone interested in the history -- either social or political -- of the century covered, it goes a long way to explaining many underlying attitudes which might otherwise be almost incomprehensible to people today.
I think it's well worth reading.
Rather, it's a long and fairly academic review of capital law under the penal codes pertaining from the late 18th century until the abolition of public executions in the 19th.
My only criticisms of the book are that it is, at times, a little repetitive (although it would be hard to be otherwise, given that the book is 619 pages long); that it deals with rather few cases -- although these are gone into in great detail -- and that there are, at least to my way of thinking, a superfluity of bibliographical and academic references. Not a page can be turned without several! No matter, this is, at heart, more of an academic study than a populist one, so perhaps that is to be expected.
For me, its real interest lies in the commentary it presents upon the social mores and changing attitudes of the period and, for anyone interested in the history -- either social or political -- of the century covered, it goes a long way to explaining many underlying attitudes which might otherwise be almost incomprehensible to people today.
I think it's well worth reading.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
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1 review
7 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Leaves all others on the subject in its wake
17 July 2002
Format:Paperback
Forget the rest this book leaves all others on the subject for dead. Having read more than 20 books on hanging through the ages this one tells it as it was, warts and all. Clearly the author is a true master and has done the research necassry to produce such a fine work and historical review.
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