London and Its Asylums, 1888-1914: Politics and Madness by Robert Ellis (review)

Abstract

court, the criminal trial) became increasingly important venues to watch the play of justice and the reactions of the condemned. Their readings, combined with Low’s analysis of the tensions between local and national authorities, remind us that the elimination of public hanging created new issues even as it purported to solve old ones. Finally, Stephanie Emma Brown (in a study of Wales) demonstrates the complexity of national and racial issues by demonstrating that there was no simple creation of a so-called Other in the depiction of the condemned according to national, ethnic, and racial categories. As mentioned above, Execution Culture offers a series of intriguing case studies in the ways that an absence becomes present in a culture. Although hangings were always, in part, mediated through description and debate (after all, not everyone attended every hanging), with the passage of the Capital Punishment Amendment Act that mediation assumed even greater importance. Without denying the continued materiality of executions (Low’s essay is particularly strong on this issue), the contributors force us to contend with the possibility that the transfer of the hanging behind prison walls may have increased the cultural presence of the execution within British culture even as it went, as the volume’s title has it, “from public spectacle to hidden ritual.” In his introduction, Low rehearses the ongoing debate among scholars about Michel Foucault and Pieter Spierenburg’s explanations for the decline of public executions. In this debate the usual reference is to Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977). But I wonder if the lesson of Execution Culture is that we should look elsewhere: to Foucault’s History of Sexuality, volume 1 (1978). After all, a central theme of that book was that repression led not to silence but rather to a proliferation of discourse, with the Victorian period as a crucial moment for this proliferation. We need histories of the death penalty that will link its privatization with the larger discourses around crime, sexuality, disease, and crisis. The chapters in Execution Culture in Nineteenth Century Britain may not provide that history, but they do point a way toward it with careful research and argumentation. Michael Meranze University of California, Los Angeles