The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People 1770-1868 - Softcover

V. A. C. [Vic] Gatrell

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0192853325 ISBN 13: 9780192853325

Publisher: Oxford University Press, U.S.A., 1996

Synopsis

Hanging people for petty crimes as well as grave, the Bloody Penal Code was at its most active between 1770 and 1830. Some 7,000 men and women were executed on public scaffolds, watched by crowds of thousands. This acclaimed study is the first to explore what a wide range of people felt about these ceremonies. Gatrell draws on letters, diaries, ballads, broadsides, and images, as well as on poignant appeals for mercy which, until now, have been largely neglected by historians. Panoramic in range, scholarly in method, and compelling in style and in argument, this is one of those rare histories which both shift our sense of the past and speak powerfully to the present.

About this title

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)

From the Publisher

Winner of the Whitfield Prize of the Royal Historical Society

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press, U.S.A.
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0192853325
• ISBN 13: 9780192853325
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 660