Jamail Center for Legal Research
Tarlton Law Library

     Critics of Thackeray generally assign him a negative role in the history of crime literature. Major emphasis is placed on his persistent and resourceful opposition to the crime fiction of the 1830s and 1840s, the so-called Newgate novels. The Newgate controversy is certainly an attractive phenomenon, since it not only brought into conflict some of the leading literary figures of the early Victorian period, but also illumined fundamental disagreements as to the scope of subject matter appropriate for fiction and the responsibility of the author to define his relationship to his immoral characters. However, the customary portrayal of Thackeray as savage critic of crime fiction should not be permitted to obscure his own interest in crime or his affirmative contributions to the literature of crime, particularly his writings against capital punishment, "The Case of Peytel" (1839) and "Going to See a Man Hanged" (1840).
     The "Newgate" tag was intended to disparage a number of novels, published in England between 1830 and 1847, which in the view of their critics presented crime and criminals in an appealing or sentimentalized manner. In Professor Keith Hollingsworth's words, "a Newgate novel was one in which an important character came (or, if imaginary, might have come) out of the Newgate Calendar." The Newgate Calendar, which had appeared in various versions since the early eighteenth century, was a collection of biographies of English criminals, including many famous in legend and literature, such as the highwayman Dick Turpin, the burglar and jailbreaker Jack Sheppard, and the fence and informer Jonathan Wild. However, the common denominator of a Newgate or pseudo-Newgate character brought together under the guns of Thackeray and other critics very disparate works. The Newgate novels of Harrison Ainsworth, Rookwood (1834), featuring Turpin as its hero, and Jack Sheppard (1839), romanticized highwayman and thief in narratives highly charged with Gothic elements and spiced by the author's concoction of underworld or "flash" dialect. The principal target of the anti-Newgate critics was a series of novels by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, including Eugene Aram (1832), a sympathetic portrait of a brilliant scholar who murders out of utilitarian impulses. The book was loosely based on the career of a schoolteacher who was executed in 1759 for a murder committed many years before. Unlike Ainsworth's mindless romances, many of Bulwer's crime novels, notably Paul Clifford (1830), were intended as critiques of social injustice and a legal system that was structured and administered in favor of the privileged class. However, Bulwer's books were marred by an overblown style and pretensions to 

intellectual and philosophical realms beyond the author's powers of flight.
     Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist (1838-1839) was also treated by Thackeray as a Newgate novel, although it appears to keep strange company with the works of Ainsworth and Bulwer-Lytton. The reading public, apparently in accord with Dickens's intention, identified Fagin with a notorious pickpocket, Isaac or Ikey Solomon, but Dickens, not only in the heat of the critical controversy that ensued, but in the pages of the novel itself, took pains to disassociate Oliver from Newgate fiction. Unlike Ainsworth or Bulwer, Dickens did not evoke sympathy for his criminals. Bill Sikes is a horror, and if Fagin is occasionally appealing in his relations with Oliver and the other boys in his gang, he is only so in contrast to the more brutal keepers of the workhouse in which Oliver spent his first years. Moreover, in two passages, one serious and one satiric, Dickens separates the real lives of his characters from the bloody histories of the Newgate Calendars. It will be recalled that Fagin frightened Oliver at bedtime by having him read "a history of the lives and trials of great criminals" and that Oliver thrust the book from him and "prayed Heaven to spare him from such deeds." In a humorous vein, Dickens later has Charley Bates express concern that the Artful Dodger's trial record will not accurately reflect the Dodger's professional competence. "How will he stand in the Newgate Calendar?" laments Charley. "P'raps not be there at all."
     Thackeray's role in the Newgate controversy was decisive. By a series of literary assaults, he put an end to the spate of Newgate novels. Ainsworth and Bulwer-Lytton turned to other subjects. Although Dickens continued to use criminal subject matter throughout his works, including his last, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, he was too strong a writer to succumb to Thackeray's campaign, and in any event, many of Thackeray's criticisms did not find a mark in Dickens's treatment of crime. Thackeray's anti-Newgate writings included a number of critical barbs and satires directed against Bulwer, culminating in his parody of Eugene Aram, entitled "George de Barnwell," published in Punch in 1847. Thackeray's major attack on Newgate fiction was made through his comic novel Catherine, which appeared in installments in Fraser's Magazine, 1839-1840. In this novel, Thackeray, instead of parodying a work of a Newgate adversary, dipped into the pages of the Newgate Calendar to find a criminal who would be much more revolting than any whom Ainsworth or Bulwer had glorified. He hit on Catherine Hayes, wife of a London tradesman, who conspired with two lodgers, including one who may have been her illegitimate son, to murder her husband. This lurid biography, which features beheading and dismemberment of the victim, and burning of Catherine alive at the 

stake, is described in the 1828 edition of the Newgate Calendar as "altogether too shocking for a single comment." Thackeray's budding skill as a novelist overcame his original satiric intent and the plot of Catherine is elaborated far beyond the facts of the case. But Thackeray interspersed passages satirizing Bulwer's purple passages and Ainsworth's Gothic scenes, and to include Dickens within his sights, he published the work under the pseudonym Ikey Solomons, Esq., Jr., a slight modification of the name of Fagin's "original." As he was later to do in his mature novels, Thackeray intruded into the pages of the novel in propria persona. In his interpolated commentaries he attacked the Newgate novels by name. He ridiculed the "white-washed saint" of Oliver Twist under the nasalized epithet "poor Biss Dadsy" and criticized Dickens for using his writing power to create interest in "a set of ruffians whose occupations are thievery, murder, and prostitution."
     Enemies of Thackeray among the critical ranks (and their name is legion) often explain his anti-Newgate campaign by his personal dislike of Bulwer and his willingness to take up the cudgels of Fraser's Magazine in its quarrel with Bulwer, which had originated in the early 1830s. Such an assessment does Thackeray an injustice. The views that Thackeray expressed in the Newgate controversy are fully consistent with his strong personal beliefs as to the proper relationship between crime and literature, beliefs he voiced throughout his career and in contexts that did not involve the literary personalities whom he attacked as Newgate novelists.
     In approaching a definition of Thackeray's attitude toward crime literature, one must begin with the patent fact that Thackeray was very interested in crime. In this he was not to be distinguished from most of the literary figures of his period, including the Newgate novelists. In 1832, in the early days of his journalistic career, Thackeray wrote that to newspapermen "a good murder is a godsend," and proceeded to list their favorites among nineteenth-century murderers -- Corder, Cook, Burke, Bishop and Williams, and especially Thurtell. In rating murderers in terms of quality, Thackeray's newspapermen were following in the footsteps of Thomas De Quincey, who had given ironic sanction to the application of aesthetic standards to the study of crime in his essays "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts," of which the first appeared in 1827. Thackeray, like De Quincey, was well-versed in the criminal annals of England, from which his heroine Catherine Hayes had been drawn. Moreover, Thackeray had equal familiarity with the analogous collections of French criminal cases which were published in various series bearing the name Causes Celebres. Thackeray not only deemed criminal cases worthy of private study and enjoyment, but like De Quincey and Defoe before him, he put his hand to the recounting of 

a criminal career. Among the pieces published in his Paris Sketch Book of 1840 appears Thackeray's witty and beautifully written account of episodes from the life of Cartouche, a famous eighteenth-century French thief, murderer and confidence man. At the beginning of the essay, Thackeray deftly associates his undertaking with the popularity of the Newgate fiction in England. He observes that "as Newgate and the highways are so much the fashion with us in England, we may be allowed to look abroad for histories of a similar tendency." With a sure hand, Thackeray proceeds to sketch a succession of comic scenes from Cartouche's quicksilver career, climaxing with his wedding, in the guise of a fictitious count, with a supposedly wealthy widow, whose noble retinue is discovered to include a fence and a bordello-keeper. Unlike the passionate Newgate novelists, Thackeray, through humor, keeps himself at a distance from the crimes he is describing. In this detachment he follows the manner of De Quincey, and in his ironic ranking of Cartouche among the "great" men of history, imitates Fielding's Jonathan Wild, which he admired.
     It is also obvious that Thackeray considered criminal themes, if properly handled, an appropriate subject for novels as well as nonfiction. Almost all Thackeray's early fiction is concerned with rogues making their selfish way through society over the heads of dupes and in the shelter of social pretense and snobbery. The supreme rogue is Becky Sharp herself. It is not always remembered by the readers of Vanity Fair that Becky Sharp caps her career of knavery by the murder of Jos Sedley. The way for this ultimate crime is prepared by Thackeray in Chapter 51, describing Becky's triumph in a charade as Clytemnestra murdering Agamemnon. In a scene pictured by Thackeray in an illustration entitled "The Triumph of Clytemnestra," Becky takes her bow with a large dagger still clasped in her hand. The Clytemnestra theme is taken up again in Thackeray's illustration for the last chapter of the book, where Becky is shown lurking behind a curtain with a cruel expression on her face, eavesdropping on Dobbin's conversation with Jos Sedley. Thackeray captioned the illustration "Becky's Second Appearance in the Character of Clytemnestra." The murder accusation against Becky Sharp is made much more explicit. Dobbin had gone to see Jos Sedley, and encouraged him to leave Becky Sharp, since he had been alarmed by reports that Becky had heavily insured Sedley's life. Jos was afraid to leave Becky and shortly thereafter died under mysterious circumstances, which led the insurance company representatives to declare that they had never seen such a black case. Their attempts to resist payment to Becky are overawed by her experienced legal advisers, the firm of Burke, Thurtell and Hayes, which bears the names of three 

famous murderers of the past, including Thackeray's old favorite, Catherine Hayes.
     Thackeray's position in the Newgate controversy therefore cannot be explained by his distaste for the subject of crime or for its portrayal in literature. His attack on the Newgate writers stemmed from his disapproval of their glorification and sentimentalization of criminals, criminal acts and low life. He believed that fiction and the art of writing had an educational function. In a letter to his mother in 1839 regarding the popularity of dramatic adaptations of Jack Sheppard, he appeared to express the belief that the romantic portrayal of crime is capable of inducing imitative criminal conduct. He wrote that at one of the theaters where Jack Sheppard was playing, vendors were hawking throughout the lobbies so-called Sheppard bags, including picklocks and an assortment of burglary equipment. He added that two young gentlemen had confessed that they had been induced to take up burglary because of the attractions of the play. However, his objections to the glamorization of crime went beyond the possibility that printed or acted words can have antisocial effects on conduct. The presentation of crime and the underworld in a falsely attractive light was simply bad moral teaching. In his view, the good novelist must distinguish virtuous characters from the vicious and must make his own judgments on them plain. This stricture applied to fictional treatment not only of crime, but of sexual conduct as well, and in the latter realm Thackeray even came to find that the obvious affection of Henry Fielding for Tom Jones was a fault to be for-given in so great a master, but not to be imitated. Another basis for Thackeray's criticism of the Newgate writers was that they did not know the milieu of which they wrote from their own experience, and therefore were not equipped to add the necessary corrective elements of misery and squalor. Thackeray was prepared to admit that there were quite likely virtues in the real-life equivalents of Dickens's Nancy, but held that since Dickens could not possibly know firsthand Nancy's shortcomings and vices, he was wrong to present his public with a partial portrait.
     Thackeray's horror of glamorized crime, far from being invented to lash English competitors, was also evidenced by his responses to French fiction and drama. In 1843 he described Eugene Sue's The Mysteries of Paris as "thieves' literature" and gave thanks for the cessation of similar literature in England. Two years later he referred to Sue's novel as one of the most immoral books in the world. In his review of French drama in The Paris Sketch Book he also expressed his disgust with the murders, adulteries and other offenses which were put forward appealingly as the standard fare of the dramas of Hugo and Dumas.

     It is a paradox of literary history that at the very time Thackeray was leveling his attacks against the crime novelists, he was making his own most important contribution to crime literature and history, namely, his essays of 1839 and 1840 in favor of the abolition of capital punishment. This aspect of Thackeray's career has been relatively ignored, in comparison both with his role in the Newgate controversy and with Dickens's role several years later among the advocates of abolition. However, no other facet of Thackeray's career is more deeply rooted in his background and personality. Throughout his life, Thackeray appears to have been obsessed with capital punishment, both as a horrifying physical fact capable of arousing morbid fascination and, at the same time, as a personal issue intimately related to his own speculations about the meaning of life and death, health and illness, and divine involvement in human affairs.
     Thackeray spent several years of his London youth amid the names and symbols of butchery and hanging. When he was between the ages of eleven and seventeen, he attended the Charterhouse School, which was located close to the Smithfield Market, the principal slaughtering yards of London, and to Newgate Prison, where men were hanged, to the delectation of the public. For many years after leaving the school, and well into middle age, Thackeray was accustomed to refer to his alma mater as the "Slaughterhouse," a pun that may have been derived from the school's propinquity to Smithfield, but would also have been justified by the cruel regime imposed on Charterhouse students by whipping; the institutionalized but unregulated aggression of fellow students; and the calculated brutality of the headmaster. Fiction of Thackeray's reflects the central role of flogging in his school life, and he gives one of his fictional schoolteachers the ominous name Dr. Birch. It is not unfair to speculate as to whether the brutality of English public school life could not have combined with the institution of public hanging to contribute to the preoccupation of Thackeray and many of his contemporaries with criminal punishment.
     There is no reason to believe that Thackeray attended a public hanging during his stay at the Charterhouse School. The first references to public hangings in his correspondence are made in letters to his mother from Cambridge in 1829. In recounting the events of the week of March 22, he wrote that the assize judges had taken up their traditional residence at Trinity College and that "the court was thronged with little boys & girls to behold the mighty men as they passed to the Judgement." In an entry in the same letter made several days later, he noted that the judges had departed and that the criminals were awaiting sentence. He did not know whether any of them would be hanged, but in any event, he had not, like some men he knew, arranged for a breakfast 

party to see them hanged. This first acquaintance with the aficionados of hanging was still in his mind a decade later. In his novel Catherine the Hayes family are pictured as enthusiastic attenders of public hangings. Thackeray comments in an aside:

I can recollect, when I was a gyp at Cambridge, that the "men" used to have breakfast-parties for the same purpose; and the exhibition of the morning acted infallibly upon the stomach, and caused the young students to eat with much voracity.

that he was, was eager to attach his name to the defense of a cause célèbre, as Voltaire had done in the Calas case. To Thackeray's credit, it cannot be said that his interest in Peytel was aroused by either literary fashion or journalistic loyalty. Thackeray equivocated as to his personal belief in Peytel's innocence, but felt strongly that the evidence on which he was convicted was insufficient and unduly magnified by the force of community prejudice. He did not argue, as Balzac had done in substance, that Peytel must be innocent because he was a literary man of a sort. Thackeray had a low opinion of the letter Balzac had published in defense of Peytel. This letter, Thackeray wrote, was "so very long, so very dull, so very pompous, promising so much, and performing so little, that the Parisian public gave up Peytel and his case altogether."
     Peytel's wife had been shot on the Lyons Road during a nocturnal trip in a coach driven by her husband, and their servant, who had accompanied them in a separate vehicle, was found lying dead nearby, the victim of a proverbial "blunt instrument." It was Peytel's story that the servant, Rey, had fired at his wife from a distance in an attempt to rob the Peytels of a sum of money they were carrying with them and that Peytel had pursued the servant and struck murderous blows in retribution. Public opinion said otherwise and held Peytel guilty of the deliberate murder of an unwelcome spouse on whom he had already perpetrated financial frauds, as well as of the servant, who was reputed to have formed the third component of the family triangle so dear to French theatergoers. To Thackeray, the prosecution in the case smacked too much of the theater. The act of prosecution, from which he quoted at length in his article, was written in the spirit of a melodrama, in which Peytel emerged as the villain and the victims were romanticized. Thackeray was particularly shocked by the prosecution's references to the disbelief of Peytel's defense by the community. We know Thackeray's low opinion of crime in the French theater and he thought no better of the introduction of theater into French crime. His article contains his own mock dramatis personae, in which he lists the principal personages in the case, with a description of the stock characters the prosecution sought to assign them.
     A major portion of Thackeray's article was devoted to a point-by-point demonstration that the factual inferences on which the prosecution and conviction were based could be reversed and made to favor Peytel. Although Thackeray's argument does not appear to be completely convincing -- particularly in his overlooking the powder burns on the face of Madame Peytel, which countered Peytel's story that Rey had fired from a distance -- his performance is impressive enough to induce some regret that he never tried his hand at detective fiction. Indeed, his most ingenious suggestion -- that Rey might have shot at Madame Peytel 

mistaking her for her husband, since she was wrapped in his cloak -- anticipates quite competently the "wrong victim" formula of the modern detective story.
     Peytel was executed in October 1839, in Bourg. Thackeray did not attend the execution, but quoted a report of Peytel's last days and his execution from a French newspaper. The principal focus of Thackeray's commentary on Peytel's death is on capital punishment as the cruel result of an inflammatory prosecution that may have sent an innocent man to his death. After the quotation of the newspaper account, Thackeray broadens his attack on capital punishment. He raises the question whether any "single person, meditating murder, would be deterred therefrom by beholding this -- nay, a thousand more executions." He theorizes that capital punishment is psychologically rooted in man's blood lust and is related to other forms of entertainment providing a release for the delight in blood. He recalls the excitement the audience feels at a new tragedy on the stage and the joy at the first drawing of blood at a wrestling or boxing match.
     As his vision of the function of capital punishment widens, Thackeray remembers the carnival rabble that hunted for Fieschi's guillotine and the urchins who danced around the blood of Lacenaire. In the light of these memories, he realizes that execution proceeds not only from blood lust, but from a pleasure in the misfortunes of fellow men, a human trait that had been observed by Lucretius and la Rochefoucauld. This malicious joy leads men, Thackeray writes, to enjoy a good breakfast after an execution, to "cut jokes" upon it. He is led on to make a peroration in which the principal arguments against capital punishment are swiftly and powerfully made:

But, for God's sake, if we are to enjoy this, let us do so in moderation; and let us, at least, be sure of a man's guilt before we murder him. To kill him, even with the full assurance that he is guilty, is hazardous enough . . . What use is there in killing him? You deter no one else from committing the crime by so doing; you give us, to be sure, half an hour's pleasant entertainment; but it is a great question whether we derive much moral profit from the sight. If you want to keep a murderer from further inroads upon society, are there not plenty of hulks and prisons . . .? Above all, . . . can any man declare positively and upon oath, that Peytel was guilty, and that this was not the third murder in the family?

related to his strong anxieties about death and illness. From an early age he was the victim of apparently psychosomatic symptoms, which were followed by a series of physical ills that were only too real. While at Charterhouse School he began to suffer from severe headaches, which have been attributed by Dr. Chester M. Jones of Harvard University to a nervous origin associated with unjust treatment by the headmaster. He continued to suffer painful headaches during his lifetime, as well as a painful stricture of the urethra and digestive problems aggravated by intemperance. His concern with his own ills seemed to translate itself to an acute empathy for the physical suffering of others. This tendency can only have been sharpened by the death of his infant daughter Jane in March 1839. In addition to his physical sensitivity, he was constantly moved to rebellion against his mother's fundamentalist conviction that all ills were visited by a retributive God.
     The link of these personal preoccupations with Thackeray's developing views on capital punishment can be seen in his revealing letter to his mother written in late December 1839, one month after his article on Peytel. Thackeray begins in a melancholy mood induced by news he has received that a friend, Salt, is near death from consumption. As is his wont, he immediately thinks of his own happier state and of the religious implications of "unequal lots." He announces his belief that God represents an Abstract Good that does not determine, but transcends, defects in material things such as illness, pain, sorrow and crime. The conclusion follows that God does not repay material sin by vengeance on the immortal soul. With an ironic sideswipe at his generation's overweening faith in science, which satisfied him no more than fundamentalism, he remarked: "Judas Iscariot came into the world with diseases from his mother, and phrenological bumps -- who shall visit the sins of his carcass upon his immortal soul?" (The humor of this remark is enhanced when it is recalled that the phrenologist who examined Lacenaire had found "bumps of benevolence and religious veneration.") Applying to human affairs his doctrine that divine justice does not punish or deter crime, Thackeray expresses his view that there is no moral basis for criminal sanctions. "One act of violence is not right because it has been preceded by another," he wrote; "philosophically and religiously we have no right to retaliate but we are obliged to make such bargains and compromises for peace & quietness' sake."
     In 1840 Thackeray's tortuous path of several years was at last to lead him to a public hanging, the execution of the valet Courvoisier for the murder of his master, Lord William Russell. In May Thackeray wrote to his mother that the murder (which had occurred on May 6) was a nuisance and that "the stupid town talks about nothing else." Despite Thackeray's professed distaste for the case, he was persuaded to attend 

the execution of Courvoisier in the company of Richard Monckton Milnes, poet and member of Parliament, who had recently voted in favor of an unsuccessful motion by William Ewart to abolish capital punishment. He put on a brave front the day before the hanging, writing to Milnes declining an invitation to stay up with him all night and instead most strongly recommending "sleep as a preparative to the day's pleasures."
     Shortly after the execution, Thackeray wrote to his mother in a very depressed mood. He began his letter with a response to his mother's report of the illness of a friend, and added the insightful comment that "I am . . . always beginning speaking of myself, when another's misfortunes or danger are spoken of." He then shifts to the subject of the Courvoisier hanging, which clearly has contributed to his low spirits:

I have been to see Courvoisier hanged & am miserable ever since. I can't do my work and yet work must be done for the poor babbies' sake. It is most curious the effect his death has had on me, and I am trying to work it off in a paper on the subject. Meanwhile it weighs upon the mind, like cold plum pudding on the stomach, & as soon as I begin to write, I get melancholy.

the moment of the hanging arrives, a moment with which he had been flirting since 1836, he learns as much about himself as about the event he came to see:

I am not ashamed to say that I could look no more, but shut my eyes as the last dreadful act was going on, which sent this wretched, guilty soul into the presence of God.

I confess, for my part, to that common cant and sickly sentimentality, which, thank God! is felt by a great number of people nowadays, and which leads them to revolt against murder, whether performed by a ruffian's knife or a hangman's rope: whether accompanied with a curse from the thief as he blows his victim's brains out, or a prayer from my lord on the bench in his wig and black cap.

famous "Princess's Tragedy" chapter of Barry Lyndon, which was omitted from Stanley Kubrick's film version. In Thackeray's correspondence there are scattered mentions of hanging, generally in a light vein. It is not clear whether we should attribute callousness or embarrassment to Thackeray's letter (in French) to Mrs. Irvine in 1848, in which he apologetically reports that he is to dine at Newgate the next day with the Sheriffs of London and that they are to see the prisoners, the treadmills and the "jolis petits condamnes" who are to be hanged. Only a small portion of capital criminals were actually executed in Victorian England, but the inappropriate frivolousness of Thackeray's reference still strikes a discordant note. Later in 1848 Thackeray mentions in a letter to Reverend Brookfield his visit to a favorite haunt, the Cyder Cellars, "to hear the man sing about going to be hanged." The song to which Thackeray referred was the ballad of the condemned chimney sweep Sam Hall, which was then the rage in London. There is an intriguing possibility that even in these apparently trivial letters, as in his cheerful note to Milnes on the eve of Courvoisier's hanging, Thackeray's more troubled responses to hangings may have been close to the surface. He notes that after his entertainment by the ballad singer he returned home with a headache.
     It is justly observed of Thackeray that he was not a reformer. His sympathies were more easily engaged by individuals than by ideas or causes. During his visit to America in 1853 it was his first impression that the miseries of slavery had been greatly exaggerated by the abolitionists. But when he met Harriet Beecher Stowe he found to his surprise that she was "a gentle, almost pretty, person, with a very great sweetness in her eyes." He added, in a letter to Mrs. Baxter: "I am sure she must be good and truth-telling from her face and behaviour: and when I get a country place and a leisure hour shall buckle to Uncle Tom and really try to read it."
     Thackeray's essays on the horror of capital punishment voiced his personal distress and did not carry him into public action in support of abolition. Perhaps it was of himself he spoke when he gave Henry Esmond the lines: "I can't but accept the world as I find it, including a rope's end, as long as it is in fashion." Dickens, Thackeray's great rival, was much more committed to social reform and participated several years after the publication of Thackeray's essays in the campaigns to abolish capital punishment and public hangings. But certain points must be noted in Thackeray's favor. Dickens, in Philip Collins's words, was not "a masculine Madame Defarge," but he attended at least three, and possibly four, executions. Thackeray, though drawn powerfully by the fascination of public hanging, could bring himself, so far as we know, to attend only one execution and then he could not bear to look. While 

in Cairo in 1844 he declined an invitation to attend a public execution. He later explained his refusal in his Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo (1846): "Seeing one man hanged is quite enough in the course of a life. J'y ai ete, as the Frenchman said of hunting."
     Dickens, only a few years after ardent campaigning for total abolition of capital punishment, abandoned this position, though he remained convinced that hanging should not be conducted in public. It is doubtful that Thackeray ever qualified his beliefs, based as they were on the repugnance his flesh felt to the hanging of Courvoisier. His cousin Richard Bedingfield reports that Thackeray once deprecated his compliment on "Going to See a Man Hanged" with the remark: "I think I was wrong. My feelings were overwrought. These murderers are such devils, after all." But Bedingfield immediately adds after his recollection of this conversation that Thackeray "did not like the idea of capital punishment."
     It is ironic that Lewis Melville, one of Thackeray's earlier biographers, cites this Bedingfield passage as a basis for inferring that Thackeray's views on capital punishment changed. It is Bedingfield who, among Thackeray's intimates, most clearly saw the link that bound his hatred of hanging to his ardent anti-evangelicalism and his loathing for bullies. Bedingfield writes elsewhere in his reminiscences of Thackeray:

He hated "Jack Ketch" and his worse than "bloody trade"; he hated all things unmerciful and ruthless. He sees "no hint of damning in the universe"; he inveighs against the lash in the army; he has a loathing detestation of bullies, small and big. . . .

* This article was previously published in 48 Victorian Newsletter 15-21 (Fall 1975) and Innocence and Arsenic, pp. 33-52.