ABSTRACT
Eighteenth-century law relied on the use of bodily punishments inflicted in public for maximum effect. The demonstration that justice had been done, and the criminal punished, was made possible only by such public spectacles. Criminals’ bodies were the object of damage, mutilation or destruction through the use of whipping, branding or hanging. Only gradually were alternatives to these corporal punishments explored: policies of reforming the convicts by changing their minds through using reformative imprisonment were a late development (see Ch. 3). Opposition to corporal punishment was rare, criticism being confined to what might be called technical aspects of the process such as crowd control or the location of the event. Few late-eighteenth-century reformers rejected flogging or hanging as such: much of the discussion centred on the need to make them more effective. Others emphasized the need for public performance as a means of political accountability, an essential check on the state when it killed: otherwise, there would be secret killings or private reprieves.1 While alternatives might be praised, there were few criticisms of corporal punishment on humanitarian grounds. It was not obvious to all eighteenth-century commentators that, as a later reformer put it, it was “absurd to suppose that by tormenting the body” the law could “reform and render virtuous the mind”.2 While sensibilities slowly changed, there were no reforms in England to match those of Pennsylvania, which in 1786 abolished the public whipping-post and, in 1794, confined capital punishment to those convicted of first-degree murder. By contrast, the English clung to what John Howard called “the gothic mode of correction, viz., the rigorous severity which often hardens the heart; while many foreigners pursue the more rational plan of softening the mind in order to its amendment”3.
