Ordered Mob - London Crowds and Public Punishment 1700 - 1868 (Paperback)

This volume is a comprehensive survey of the London punishment mob presenting substantial new material and fresh interpretations of the subject. By offering a forensic analysis of the spectators who crowded around public gallows and whipping posts during the eighteenth and nineteenth century, this study significantly reappraises our understanding of these civic events. It presents a hitherto unseen picture of the remarkable social diversity and relative orderliness of the spectators who attended, and the enduring appeal of public punishments. Using sources such as newspaper reports and coroners' inquests to present detailed case studies of the crowd at public punishments from 1700 onwards, a new picture emerges: one in which the orderly crowd acknowledged the propriety of the law in action. Crowds continued to support pillories and whippings until the very moment of their abolition, refuting claims that crowds lost interest in public punishment spectacles after 1800, or that a universal civilising process was at work. By the late 1830s only convicted homicides were executed publicly but crowds, often 50,000 strong, attended hangings during this period. >