In this learned and deeply impassioned work, Gatrell surveys the development of executions in England from the days of the “bloody code” in the late 18th and early 19th centuries—when people were executed for petty theft—through the legal reforms that made murder essentially the only crime punishable by death and finally to the abolition of execution as a public spectacle. He begins by considering what happens to the body during an execution. Even when things went “well,” many a person executed died in prolonged convulsions, the hangman pulling on the dying person’s legs to cause a final asphyxiation. If the drop was misjudged, the victim might be decapitated. If we are going to study this mode of punishment, Gatrell suggests, its realities had better be made clear. This book’s subjects, he reminds us, ‘once lived as we do’ . Using a variety of sources—not just trial records but ballads, broadsides, diaries and letters—Gatrell re-creates the lives and experiences of those who died, those who sentenced them to death, those who watched them die and those who mourned them. This is a work driven by outrage, a narrative alive with fury but one, also, of impeccable scholarship. ( )

While one's initial reaction to Gatrell's work may be emotional, positive, and, perhaps, disbelief, when one explores the historical foundations for his arguements, they turn out to be quite flawed. While Gatrell succeeds in attakting other historians for their oversimplification of Englicsh Penal Reform, he himself is guilty of this very same mistake in his book. What is more, the emotional overtones of his book undermine his attack on the emotional experience in history. What makes everyone else's emotional experience wrong and Gatrell's right? His book does make a strong contribution to the study of English Penal reform; it is too bad he limits himself by his contradiction. ( )