Swinging London

THERE is a tendency to regard public hangings in the 18th century as some kind of carnival. The handsome highwayman goes cheerily to his death, blowing kisses to the pretty women in the crowd. The rabble shouts encouragement, aware that it is participating in a ritual act designed to re-affirm community bonds. The dreadful deed done, the bad man hanged, the Hogarthian throng of cheerful tradesmen and naughty 'prentice boys return, refreshed and reassured, to their daily grind.

Nothing could be further from the truth, says Peter Linebaugh, in a reissue of his meticulously researched 1991 classic. The author has studied the ghastly sprees of “legal massacre” (Dr Johnson's phrase) that took place in London—at Tyburn, Kennington and Newgate. He links the periodic hunger for public hangings with the ups and downs of trade cycles and corresponding shifts in semi-migrant labour; all too often the gallows became the place where the waste and nuisance products of mercantilism—the hungry, poor and far-from-home—were efficiently dispatched.

“The London Hanged” is intent on commemorating the thousands of virtually anonymous individuals who were hanged in Europe's most violent city during one of its more prosperous centuries. There is Patrick Brown, a spalpeen, or immigrant farm worker from Ireland, who retaliated against his dismissal from the hay harvest in Hampstead in July 1841 by stealing his employer's silver spurs. The gentleman had him hanged, but not until much later, the death being carefully timed so that it would act as a warning to the next season's spalpeens. Then there was Joseph Philip, who stole simply because he was so tired of the periodic famines that were part and parcel of being a silk weaver that “he mightily long'd to die”.

Mr Linebaugh's passionate engagement with Homo faber—the making class—of the 18th century bears all the hallmarks of the years he spent working with E.P. Thompson, an eminent socialist historian and anti-nuclear campaigner. Nor does he keep his anger safely in the past, dressed up in breeches and bonnets. In a new introduction, Mr Linebaugh argues that the upsurge in the use of the death penalty since the 1970s is linked to the growth in global capitalism. Just as 18th-century workers found themselves falling foul of rapidly changing definitions of property, rights and labour so, Mr Linebaugh argues, do the mobile work-forces of post-colonial Africa and Asia—exactly those people who are most likely to be executed in the 21st century. Even if you find this implausible, there is no denying the weight and breadth of Mr Linebaugh's research, which puts to shame much recent work on the 18th century. Add the fact that he writes as stylishly as a novelist, and you have a book of rare worth—and one which richly deserves to garner a fresh set of admirers.