Explore "The Night Side of London" by James Ewing Ritchie on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
I am not about to give an opinion as to the propriety or impropriety of capital punishments. On this point good men have differed, and will differ, I dare say, for some time to come. What I wish to impress upon the philanthropic or Christian reader is the horrible nature and atrocious effect of a public execution.
A few Sunday evenings since I was passing by Newgate, along the outside of which a considerable crowd had been collected. Respectable mechanics, with their wives and children, were staring at its dreary stone walls. Ragged boys and girls were romping and laughing in the streets. All the neighbouring public-houses were filled with a tipsy crowd. Here and there a few barriers had been erected, and workmen were engaged in putting up more. Why were these preparations made? For what purpose had this crowd collected? A man was to be hung, was the reply. I resolved for once to see the tragedy performed. To me or the living mass around, that man was an utter stranger. I had never seen him or heard the sound of his voice; all I knew was that he had led an outlaw's life, and was to die as outlaws ofttimes do. How strange the mysterious interest with which death clothes everything it touches! Is it that looking at a man so soon to have done with life we fancy we can better pry into the great secret? Do we deem that seeing him struggle we shall die more manfully ourselves, or is it merely the vague interest with which we regard any one about to travel into distant regions, all unknown to him or us, and the secrets of which he can never return to tell? Be this as it may, I went back at twelve. The public-houses had been closed, decent people had gone home to bed; but already the crowd had become denser, already had the thief and the bully from all the slums and stews of the metropolis been collected together. You can easily recognise the criminal population of our capital. The policeman knows them instinctively, as with their small wiry figures, restless eyes, and pale faces, they pass him by.