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.
The man about to be hanged emerged from the prison door. His arms were tied in front of him but “he opened his hands in a helpless kind of way, and clasped them once or twice together. He turned his head here and there, and looked about him for an instant with a wild imploring look. His mouth was contracted with a sort of pitiful smile.” He walked quickly beneath the beam; the executioner turned him round, and put a black nightcap over “the patient’s head and face.” Thackeray could look no more.
The episode left him with “an extraordinary feeling of terror and shame.” It is interesting that, apparently inadvertently, he uses the word “patient” to describe the condemned; it was the same term applied to the prisoners of Bridewell about to be flogged. It is as if the city were a vast hospital, filled with the diseased or the dying. Yet the city is also a surgeon’s hall, where the novelist and the crowd were all the spectators of the doomed and the dead. Thackeray described it as a “hidden lust after blood.” He was suggesting that there were permanent and atavistic forces at work.
Charles Dickens had gone down to Newgate early that same morning. “Just once,” he told his friends, “I should like to watch a scene like this, and see the end of the Drama.” Here a great London novelist instinctively reaches for the appropriate word to mark the fatal occasion. He found an upper room in a house close to the scene, and paid for its hire; from there he eagerly watched the movement of the London crowd, which he was soon to revive in his account of the Gordon Riots in
Nine years later, on a cold November morning, he rose from his bed to watch another execution. The Mannings were to be hanged outside Horsemonger Lane Gaol in Southwark, and immediately after the event Dickens wrote a letter to the
