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Untitled Article
Facts relating to the Punishment of Death in the Metropolis . By E . G . Wakefield . Second Edition . With an Appendix , concerning Murder fir the Sale of the Dead Body . London . Wilson , 1832 . E vei | . y legislator , every magistrate , every philosopher , every philanthropist * should study Mr . Wakefield ' s book ; and every one also who feela any interest in knowing how young children are entrapped by old
thieves into the commission of crime ; what time , pains , and money are expended in their seduction ; what instruction they get in Newgate and its sphool ; what becomes of them when they are turned , out pennyless and characterless into the world again ; how long an average career of plunder lasts ; what proportion of the sexes , and of different ages , is engaged in the profession of thievery ; how the chances of impunity are calculated ; what a total absence of prevention
there is all through ; how prosecutors , judges , and juries , are managed ; what a lottery of life and death follows capital conviction ; how humanity appears in the condemned cells , and on the scaffold ; and what a disgusting travesty of religion introduces the final scene- All this , and more , Mr . Wakefield has told , interspersing facts , which are not less important or authentic from having been unknown and unsuspected , with most judicious reflections and most graphic descriptions .
The Appendix to this edition consists only of a few pages , but they are well timed and well written . For the last seven or eight years resurrection-men have been hunted by the public much in the same way that cats used to be by mischievous schoolboys and their dogs . The old winking system has vanished , and , from the watchman to the justice , all have been on the alert . Schools of anatomy have been treated as if they were the world's deadly enemies ; and subjects being
necessary for their usefulness , the war has been waged in the most efficient way , by cutting off their supplies . Surgeons have been criminally convictedjof endeavouring to qualify themselves for their vocation , and found guilty of compassing the preservation of their patients' limbs and lives . The agents—bad enough , no doubt , — whom the state of the law compelled them to employ , have been
pursued with the utmost fury for , probably , the most beneficial act they ever did . The prejudice—not an unnatural one , but which might have been mitigated— -has been ministered to by senators , magistrates , and newspaper-writers , till it became perfectly insane . Not the murderer himself passed from the police-office to the gaol amid deeper bowlings or fiercer peltings than the detected body-snatcher . —As might have been expected , he became a murderer .
The Times of the 13 th of January copies the following paragraph from the Dublin Freeman ' s Journal : —> * On Saturday night , a resurrectionist , who went to pillage the graves in the churchyard of Hollywood , was shot dead , in the act of raising the body of Mr . Fitzgerald of Ardenode / The resurrectionist , had he decoyed Mr . Fitzgerald of Ardenode , a month before , into some lonely place , and there suffocated him , might still have been a living man , with some remains of the ten guineas in tyis pocket , With spnie friendless wretch , who has no name .
Untitled Article
140 Critical Notices- !—Political Economy and iLegw \ ation .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Feb. 2, 1832, page 141, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1806/page/70/
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