Under Construction @ Keele 2016 Volume 1 Issue 1 | Page 16

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bodies from the gallows”.31 By this period, “[t]he corpse was part of the medical field,
and this was unchallenged by religion and morality”, which enables the Coroner to
find the evidence to secure the mother’s life.32 However, as Dickens explains, “we
must commit her on one of the two issues”.33 Whilst science cannot save her from
the law, it can at least save her from the gallows. It is also worth mentioning that
“Dickens made little of the cruelty done to the criminal. He always shared the
common assumption that murderers were all vicious brutes, the Bill Sikeses of this
world”.34 The way in which Dickens “caused some extra care to be taken of her in the
prison”,35 and ensured that “her sentence was lenient”, hints at the changing
attitudes that were beginning to develop around the death sentence.36
There are signs that the power of the death sentence and its need of religion
were beginning to crack. There were other elements at its disposal which allowed the
state to maintain its control over the nation; at the heart of this was industry. Due to
the Industrial Revolution the body of the criminal no longer needed to be disposable.
Cheap or even free labour was not only needed in England but in Australia, the
building of which required the equivalent of slaves. When Britain abolished the slave
trade, a new source of free labour had to be found which led to the employment of
numerous masses of prisoners escaping prison or the gallows, working in exchange
for their deportation.37 While this meant prisoners escaped physical execution, it led
to another form of execution: spiritual execution, the death of the soul. The power of
the Church began to wane as it was replaced by Britain’s new religion, the religion of
industry.
Henry James’ In the Cage was an example of the evolution that occurred in
the system of punishing in the latter half of the Victorian era. His protagonist, like a
prisoner, is stripped of her identity and never named. James introduces her instead
as “a young person spending, in framed and wired confinement, the life of a guinea!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
31

Alison Bashford, Purity and Pollution – Gender, Embodiment and Victorian Medicine (London:
Macmillan Press Ltd, 1998), 109.
32
Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic – An archaeology of medical perception, trans. A.M.
Sheridan (London: Routledge, 2003), 155.
33
Dickens, The Uncommercial Traveller and Reprinted Pieces etc., 195.
34
Potter, Hanging in Judgement – Religion and the Death Penalty in England, 66.
35
Dickens, The Uncommercial Traveller and Reprinted Pieces etc., 197.
36
Ibid., 197.
37
For further reading into this see: Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore (London: Random House, 2010)
and Sean O’Toole, The History of Australian Corrections (New South Wales: University of New South
Wales Press, 2006). !