ABSTRACT
In 1810 AN ANGRY London mob attacked a group of men who were being taken to the pillory after having been convicted of assault with the intent to commit sodomy in the back room of a Vere Street pub. As Louis Crompton observes in Byron and Greek Love, the journalistic reports detailing the violence wreaked by the thousands who participated in this scene prompted Louis Simond, a French visitor to England, to make the following notation in the journal he kept: “We have just read in all the newspapers a full and disgusting account of the public and cruel punishment on the pillory of certain wretches convicted of vile indecencies. I can think of nothing more dangerous, offensive, and unwise, than the brutality and unrestrained publicity of such infliction. The imagination itself is sullied by the exposition of enormities, that ought never to be supposed to exist.” 1
