Crime & Punishment

Crime was steadily falling. The Metropolitan Police had been formed in 1829, and in 1839 for fear of Chartist activity, other urban centres began to create their own forces.

Until then, the Met acted as a national riot squad (although when they sent 100 constables to Birmingham in 1839, they had to be rescued after attempting to arrest a Chartist speaker).

At the same time, capital offences were steadily whittled away: in 1837 only eight people were executed, and all for murder. Property crimes no longer carried the death penalty and the last rapist was hanged in 1836.

This didn’t mean interest in executions was lessening however. ‘Famous’ murderers could expect thousands to watch their last moments. As many as 30,000 may have seen the hanging of the ‘Burkers’ Bishop and Williams in 1841 and Courvoisier, a valet who had murdered his master, Lord William Russell, had been equally ‘popular’ in death the year before.

Murder in high society was extremely rare; poverty-driven murder was more commonplace. In the 1840s a ‘poison panic’ arose: fear of women killing their families, generally for the burial club pay-out of a few shillings.

Eliza Joyce, an alcoholic, confessed to killing her three children and was executed in Boston in 1841 in front of 5,000 people. Sarah Dazely, hanged two years later with 100,000 onlookers, was said to have killed seven husbands, and was known as ‘the female Bluebeard’.

Though numbers of these cases were small, the fear was great.