Download This PaperImagining Justice: Aesthetics and Public Executions in Late Eighteenth-Century England
28 Pages Posted: 24 Feb 2020
Abstract
A mid-eighteenth-century traveller noted with surprise that parents in London regularly took their children to watch hangings. Upon returning home, the children would be whipped so that they would remember the spectacle. Yet by the 1780s, such literal dependence upon the visual as part of punishment was in retreat. Increasingly, the criminal justice system relied on what remained unseen but imagined. This essay explores how eighteenth-century England discovered the importance of imagination in criminal punishment.
Keywords: Capital Punishment, History, Culture, Law
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Wilf, Steven, Imagining Justice: Aesthetics and Public Executions in Late Eighteenth-Century England. Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, Vol. 5, No. 1, 1993, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3409344
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