Under Construction @ Keele 2016 Volume 1 Issue 1 | Page 12

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Only on divine authority could that image be marred and life
extinguished.2
Religion was beginning to lose its position as the most important feature in one’s life,
this made sure that the Church remained indispensable.
Even though “England was one of the countries most loath to see the
disappearance of the public execution”, times were changing.3 As Foucault notes,
“[t]he age of sobriety in punishment had begun. By 1830-1848, public executions,
preceded by torture, had almost entirely disappeared.”4 Therefore, the role of feeding
the desire for death fell into the hands of writers. Michael Wheeler argued that, “the
authorial narrator was a God-like judge within the realist novel’s horizon of their thisworldly, who not only proposed but also disposed through the deaths of characters”.5
It is through this mode that I intend to explore the evolution of the death sentence in
this period and its relationship with religion.
“Long voyages are long consumptions, / And ships are carts for executions”
suggested John Donne in his poem ‘Elegy 10: Love’s War’. 6 The words are eerily
accurate when considering Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem The Wreck of the
Deutschland. Unlike Donne, however, in Hopkins we see glory in execution:
The Wreck of the Deutschland articulates most fully a theology of death
which is grounded in Christ’s own death and passion. Hopkins’ thinking on
death, and as the ‘beauty of suffering’ in martyrdom (a stumbling block for
many readers), is rooted in his Ignation meditations in the passion.7
Throughout the first half of the poem there are numerous references to the
physicality of the Passion: “The dense and the driven Passion, and frightful / sweat:”

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2

Harry Potter, Hanging in Judgement – Religion and the Death Penalty in England (London: SCM
Press Ltd, 1993), 55.
3
Foucault, Discipline and Punish – The Birth of the Prison, 14.
4
Ibid., 14
5
Michael Wheeler, Heaven, Hell & the Victorians (Cambridge: Cambridge Press, 1994), 109.
6
John Donne, ‘Elegy 10: Love’s War’ in John Donne 8