Under Construction @ Keele 2016 Volume 1 Issue 1 | Page 14

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brave – / He was pitched to his death at a blow” (II. 16. 123-124).15 This sailor’s
death is similar to numerous hangings when the rope was too long, and thus the
criminal’s head was severed. Also, like a criminal, the sailor’s body is left on display:
“They could tell him for hours, dandled the to / and fro” (II. 16. 126).16 Yet, this sailor
committed no crime; instead he is executed trying to help the wives of Christ, a
warning not to interfere in God’s divine judgement. Harry Potter suggests that one of
the reasons the Church supported the death penalty was that it was “unthinkable that
an innocent man might be hanged”.17 Yet here we see an innocent man hanged, and
the executioner appears to be God. It could be as Foucault suggests that “are not
such terrible sufferings a sign that God has abandoned the guilty man to the mercy
of his fellow creatures?” It is rather telling that the poem was not actually published
until 1918.18 Perhaps the poem was finally understood in 1918 because the nation
needed to believe in the glory of death.19 However, Pat Jalland states that, “[i]n the
years after 1918 repression and denial of death frequently replaced acceptance and
affirmation”.20 In 1918 the nation had seen death plough through an entire generation
without any signs of consideration. Therefore, the nation could finally accept that in
Hopkins’ poem God could allow even one of his most devoted followers to be killed
because they had experienced it first-hand.
It is surprising to consider the number of times we see Dickens visit a Morgue
throughout The Uncommercial Traveller: “Morgues were visited like picture galleries,
wax museums”, during that period.21 The right to claim access to the dead was a
way of life. Dickens describes the rush of the crowd in Paris to see a new body enter
the Morgue: “Now they turned, and we rushed! Great pressure, and a scream or two
from the front”.22 The crowd abuzz with excitement wondering “[w]as it river, pistol,
knife, love, gambling, robbery, hatred, how many stabs, how many bullets, fresh or
decomposed, suicide or murder?”23 The crowd never questions their right to be
entertained by this man’s demise, “[w]ho would have thought of public fickleness
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15

Hopkins, The Wreck of the Deutschland, 495.
Ibid., 495
17
Potter, Hanging in Judgement – Religion and the Death Penalty in England 111.
18
Foucault, Discipline and Punish – The Birth of the Prison, 46.
19
In the context of the First World War.!!
20
Pat Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 380.
21
Elisabeth Bronfen, Over her Dead Body – Death, femininity and the aesthetic (Manche