ABSTRACT
Henry Mayhew’s paper on capital punishment was essentially a restatement of the Utilitarian view that capital punishment was inconsistent with the economy of bodily pain that should form one of the principal objects of progressive penal policy. Mayhew ultimately argued for the end of public executions, which were not deterrent, had no moral effect since the town became a place of drunkenness, and only glorified crime and led the condemned to assume a mantle of bravado. Mayhew’s paper is a further example of how by the mid-nineteenth century, the spectacle of public hangings was thought to be the most objectionable feature of capital punishment. The last public hanging in England, of Fenian Michael Barrett for the Clerkenwell prison bombing, took place in late May 1868. The disappearance of capital punishment behind prison walls represented the removal from public view of the last form of bodily punishment.
