Posted on 11/27/2021 12:36:45 AM PST by CheshireTheCat
On this date in 1835, John Smith and James Pratt (sometimes reported as John Pratt) were hanged outside Newgate Prison for (in the exhausting fulminations of the Old Bailey trial records) “feloniously, wickedly, diabolically, and against the order of nature, carnally … commit[ted] and perpetrate[d] the detestable, horrid, and abominable crime (among Christians not to be named) called buggery.”
These men were the last put to death anywhere in the realm under the ghastly Tudor-era Buggery Act,* and indeed among the last to die at Newgate for any crime other than murder or attempted murder.
“The grave will soon close over me,” Smith allegedly wrote to a friend before his hanging, “and my name [be] entirely forgotten.”
But that’s not altogether true.
Unbeknownst to the sufferers, they were destined for literary preservation by a young writer on the make, one Charles Dickens: Smith and Pratt make an appearance in Dickens’ Sketches by Boz, an 1836 compilation of London scenes of which “A Visit to Newgate” is perhaps the best-known.
This piece narrates a visit Dickens paid, according to William Carlton’s “The Third Man at Newgate” (The Review of English Studies, Nov., 1957), on November 5, 1835. Dickens would write in subsequent correspondence that the experience left him “intensely interested in everything I saw.”
Prisons and the threat or reality of execution would loom large in that redoubtable author’s canon. “You cannot throw the interest over a year’s imprisonment, however severe, that you can cast around the punishment of death,” the perspicacious 23-year-old told his publisher.
So too did the still-living apparitions of the condemned Smith and Pratt occupy Dickens’s reflections in “A Visit to Newgate”; they comprise a good third of the essay.....
(Excerpt) Read more at executedtoday.com ...
Another screen destroyed by a spray of coffee. Lololol! Made my day!
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We could use a Buggery Act that specifies hanging for politicians of all stripes who have been ****ing the American people for two+ centuries.
All I see is a broken image link ...
...and the initial decline of the British Empire can be traced back to just about that time.
Hanging was nothing compared to where they are now if they didn’t repent of their Sodomy and get right with God
Hmm. Yeah, it disappeared. It was a picture of an extremely gay man, festooned with rainbows saying, “Fabulous!”
😂
I thought the last two were Patrick Fitzgerald and Gerald Fitzpatrick.
That was in Ireland.
Were they in the Royal Navy?
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