A brief introduction to a few of the people who make up an account of the Midlands execution broadside trade in the early nineteenth century.
I did not realise until it was too late that execution broadsides were considered a chapter of printing history best scorned, if not forgotten. My story starts back in 1999. Loosely preparing for an MA in Library and Information Studies, I read a copy of The origins of the English Library by Raymond Irwin (London, 1958). I came across a reference to ‘execution broadsides’. Beyond realising they were printed and related to capital punishment, I was at a loss. Consequently I followed a footnote of Irwin’s to R.K. Webb’s The British working class reader (London, 1955). As Webb stated ‘The Birmingham Reference Library contains a fine collection of nineteenth century execution slips’, I speculatively wrote off to them. The few photocopied examples swiftly sent back seemed to answer the basic question of definition. An execution broadside was a short prose account of the events leading up to a hanging, printed on one side of a sheet of paper.
The Local Studies and History Services of Birmingham Central Library turned out to have preserved approximately sixty execution broadsides printed between 1806 and 1834. Looking again at the first examples sent from Birmingham, I can still detect the qualities that so intrigued me. I was transported back to early nineteenth century England, introduced to lives, deaths and society long gone. This world was enlarged when I found another collection of execution broadsides at Nottingham Central Library, consisting of sheets printed between 1752 and 1844. For the last five years I have been finding out more.
Some particulars of the life, trial, behaviour and execution of Wm. Reynolds and Wm. Marshall displays many of the typical features of the execution broadsides held at Nottingham Central Library. On August 24th 1831 William Reynolds and William Marshall were executed at Nottingham for participating in the gang rape of Mary Ann Lord. The flimsy sheet was printed by Richard Sutton and measures approximately 37 by 26 centimetres. The headline wraps itself around a woodcut of a gallows scene. Below, the biographies, crime and execution of the two men are recorded in prose. Reynolds and Marshall are presented as unremarkable characters, except for their reported indifference to their fate. Central to the broadside, in physical terms, is the trial proceedings, whilst the execution scene itself is despatched in a single paragraph at the end. The last word on the victim is given by William Marshall:
‘Beware of Mary Ann Lord!’
Needless to say, for all the ‘normality’ of Reynolds and Marshall’s broadside, there survive other sheets that do not share the same characteristics. Sutton’s combination of a woodcut, uniform type and strong narrative voice, for example, are not always found in other broadsides. In contrast to the centrality of the trial proceedings in this particular broadside, other sheets omit the court scene. Further factors such as numerous editions and the ephemeral nature of the sheets make it almost impossible to label one execution broadside as typical of its genre or period. After all, there survive at least three different versions of execution broadsides for Reynolds and Marshall; two editions from Richard Sutton.
Although the hanging of James Davis in 1819 for the rape and murder of his daughter generated an execution broadside headlined The trial, sentence, Judge’s speech, and execution, the prisoner himself has all but disappeared. In this unusually brief broadside found at Birmingham Central Library the text is almost entirely taken up recording the judge passing sentence: ‘after much attention the jury have declared you guilty of these horrid offences- against one who gave no provocation- what depravity!- how forgetful of God and the duty you owe to your fellow creatures!’
The following thirteen lines continue in the same spirit, leaving only four lines to describe Davis’ last few days of existence. The judge’s powers of speech are more prominent than the personality of the condemned. This execution broadside printed by Wood adopts the appearance of less an information medium and more a theological tract.
The condemned’s centrality normally found in their execution broadside often deflects attention away from the crimes they committed and the suffering caused. The victims had not been missed, though. Previous to the execution, broadsides were printed recounting the details of the crime as soon as it was discovered. These sheets were devoted to the misdemeanor, and therefore the victim. By the time of the execution, it was the condemned’s turn to take centre stage.
Twenty-one year old William Davies was executed at Nottingham on 26 March 1806 for forgery. As was standard practice, the event was marked by an execution broadside. In fact the local printers Burbage and Stretton produced at least two editions of their broadside, both headlined with The life, trial, and behaviour of William Davies. The probable earlier edition held at Birmingham Central Library opens with the following thunderous words:
‘In this degenerate age, when vice and profaneness stalk forth with such unblushing confidence as almost to put virtue out of countenance, it is not surprising to see men frequently of education, and possessing the clearest capacities drawn into the vortex, and by a series of dissipation and wickedness brought to an untimely end’.
The tone is unmistakably condemnatory; as a forger, William Davies violated the law and justice demands death. This judgement is then offset by recording the scaffold crowd’s sympathy for the young Davies at the end of the account. The Burbage and Stretton broadside which is a presumably later edition is preserved by Nottingham Central Library. The condemnatory opening discussed above is removed in favour of reproducing a letter handed over by Davies at the scaffold addressed to a ‘far from reputable’ acquaintance.
The two surviving execution broadsides of William Davies gives some clues towards understanding the composition process of this genre of printing. Generic blocks of text would be a useful tool for filling the page until more source material or time became available. In the same year as William Davies’ execution, Wood of Birmingham used the identical ‘In this degenerate age’ sentence as his Nottingham contemporaries. However, the partnership of Burbage and Stretton was not alone in endeavoring to include in their broadsides such source material as letters, confessions and eye-witness accounts. Newspapers were another source, especially when so many of the printers of the surviving Nottingham execution broadsides also produced news sheets.
Printers worked within a time-frame when it was often only a matter of days between the death sentence and execution. They might start preparing the broadside before the execution had taken place and some would go so far as printing them. One of the Davies sheets includes the warning: ‘Beware of purchasing a spurious edition printed two days before the execution’. It would appear a common practice, judging by the number of execution broadsides that abruptly end, after a lengthy report of the trial proceedings, with a cursory ‘launched into eternity’ sentence. However, such preemptive publications were not as misleading as might be expected. Though without the awful reality of the execution scene, the core content is the same.
A broadside at York Castle Museum records how Fanny Amlett was executed at Gloucester for drowning her new-born child. After the military officer she had eloped with left her, Fanny was left destitute and desperate. The good news for Fanny is that she was not, in fact, executed. She escaped such punishment because she never existed. It is undeniably the case that occasionally execution broadsides were completely fraudulent. Particulars were kept to a minimum so as to appeal to a wide customer base. In fact, a Mary Jones experienced a near identically worded calamity as Fanny Amlett in another surviving broadside. The only differing features of the two stories are the towns at which the women were allegedly executed. But for all the Fanny Amletts and Mary Joneses, there were many more William Marshalls and William Davies.
A common misconception about execution broadsides is that their woodcuts often bore no relation to the subject. This was, for example, recently claimed in The encyclopedia of ephemera by Maurice Rickards (London, 2000). However, it is inaccurate to assume that printers applied the same philosophy to execution broadsides as they did ballads. From the Midlands sheets studied, when a woodcut was included the image ordinarily pertained to a hanging and identified the sheet as being an execution broadside. Even the singular sheet that includes an image of a guillotine identifies the broadside’s subject, however inaccurate the mode of execution. The woodcuts may have been crude and the text may have included small errors of typography and content. However, such faults should be considered in the market context. Consumers of execution broadsides were more concerned with having up-to-date news or a memento than holding a work of art.
Just as the crowd at an execution attracted men, women and children from every socio-economic class, you might think the scene’s broadsides were read by a similarly diverse number of people. The evidence is scarce. In fact, the readers of execution broadsides are the most illusive people in this account. John Page’s The hawkers and street dealers of the north of England manufacturing districts (Manchester, 1858) sums up the still commonly held opinion about the consumers of execution broadsides:
‘The purchasers of this class of literature are the lowest order of the people; the intelligent never purchase it, knowing it is seldom to be depended on for truth, and if it is true, it has already appeared, or will immediately appear, in the daily newspapers.’
Hiding behind the pseudonym of Felix Folio, Page attacks execution broadsides for being either outmoded or guilty of deception. Even so, Henry Mayhew testifies to the universal attraction of these sheets in London labour and the London poor (London, 1862). On the occasion of William Corder’s execution, one seller remembered in Bury: ‘A gentleman’s servant come out and wanted half a dozen for his master and one for himself…’ However tantalizing this statement may be, it must not be forgotten that Henry Mayhew was not walking the streets of Nottingham or Birmingham.
Having built on the market of John Pitts, James Catnach is often used as the figurehead of the execution broadside trade. Thanks largely to Charles Hindley, a window into the Catnach press of London’s Seven Dials has been preserved. However, as with the journalism of Henry Mayhew, Hindley’s Catnach haunts research into execution broadsides. A single printer cannot represent the whole industry, especially a trade that spanned a nation. The surviving Birmingham and Nottingham execution broadsides clearly look and read differently to the sheets that James Catnach produced so successfully. The vast majority of those printed in these two Midlands towns, for example, include exact dates whilst the opposite is true for the Catnach imprints held at St Bride’s. A dated execution broadside, therefore, may indicate a local market, whilst London productions were unusually well traveled. Omitting details may not have been the result of carelessness, therefore, but an indication of sound business.
Execution broadsides could not solely keep even James Catnach in business. A receipt dated from 1838 of Thomas Kirk’s preserved at the Nottinghamshire Archives outlines the variety of printing work he undertook:
‘PRINTER BOOKSELLER, BOOKBINDER, AND STATIONER CORNER OF PECK LANE, ST. PETER’S GATE Ledgers-Day Books-Journals-Cash Books-Memorandum Books, constantly on hand.– Ruling done, and Account Books bound on the shortest notice –Wholesale and Retail Paper Warehouse. – Genuine Patent Medicines,&c. &c.’
For the printers working in the Midlands, execution broadsides were an infrequent, if profitable, sideline to their everyday trade.
The 1830s saw the Nottingham printer Richard Sutton take the inspired step of using execution broadsides to air doubts about the value and humanity of capital punishment. Richard Sutton’s 1832 gallows sheet Some particulars of the life, trial, behaviour, & execution of George Beck, George Hearson, and John Armstrong reads: ‘Never, never can we be the apologists for arson and plunder, but we had fondly hoped that the Ministers of the Crown would have supposed that the justice of the case would have been amply met, by sending the guilty parties to another country, without inflicting upon them the punishment of death: but it is not so – the die is cast!’
Sutton’s radical principles undoubtedly gave impetus to his support of a cause that would ultimately extinguish one of his own business interests. In this particular case there does appear to have been popular sympathy for the condemned rioters. Not only does Sutton note the vigorous campaign to respite the men, but the broadsides printed by Kirk and Heppel also report the unease surrounding the hangings.
There are hundreds more people from the nineteenth century execution broadside trade waiting to be introduced. The condemned, the victims, the printers, the sellers and the readers all wrestle for attention and demand further study.
Alice Ford-Smith is an Assistant Librarian at the Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine in London. In 2000 she studied for an MA in Library and Information Studies at Loughborough University where she completed her dissertation on execution broadsides. She has presented papers at the ‘Print culture in the age of the circulating library, 1750–1850’ conference in July 2001 and the Twentieth seminar on the history of the provincial book trade in Britain.