Category: Execution

The Pont-Neuf: or, Mr Pickwick Attends an Execution | G.W.M. Reynolds

In 1838 Charles Dickens’s character Mr Pickwick embarked on further adventures into France, and these were published in The Monthly Magazine by a man calling himself “Parisianus.” In this story Pickwick stops to talk to a French gendarme and learns the fate of a parricide.

Criminality and Animal Cruelty in 18th-Century England

In 1824, the lawyer, Andrew Kapp, asked, “Do not these creatures, when they are bruised and wounded, shew an equal sense of pain with ourselves? Are not their shrieks and mournful cries, as so many, calls upon their tormentors for pity? And do not their dying pangs, and the painful convulsions of their tortured bodies, cause uneasiness in every human spectator?”