“An Act of Frightful Wickedness and Violence”

THACKERAY'S APPALLED RESPONSE to the death of Courvoisier, which the young writer had agreed to witness with his friend Monckton Milnes, is well established. Courvoisier had been a valet who had murdered his elderly employer, Lord William Russell, uncle of the prominent statesman Lord John Russell, and the case had aroused a great deal of public attention. Courvoisier's execution outside Newgate Prison was attended by a crowd of approximately 40,000 people. Both Thackeray and Milnes had more or less professional excuses for deciding to join the crowd and witness the event. As a member of Parliament, Milnes had recently voted in favor of an unsuccessful motion by the reformer William Ewart to abolish the death penalty, and Milnes wished to observe the effect of a public execution on its audience. As a not-yet-famous writer with a wife and two small children to support, Thackeray planned to use the execution as the basis for an article for which he hoped some periodical would pay.¹

Prior to the execution, the pose that he adopted regarding Courvoisier's death was casual. On the day before Courvoisier's hanging, Thackeray wrote to Milnes (who had decided to spend the night sitting up at a club), “I most strongly recommend sleep as a preparative to the day's pleasures” (Letters, ed. Ray 1: 452; Letters, ed. Harden 80). After the execution, however, Thackeray wrote somberly to his mother,

Thackeray's resulting “paper on the subject” vividly expresses his unanticipated horror at what occurred before his eyes on the morning of 6 July.

Published in Fraser's Magazine in August 1840, Thackeray's essay–“Going to See a Man Hanged”–is a powerful argument for the abolition of capital punishment. In vivid detail, Thackeray records his impressions of the execution and its attendant circumstances, including his difficulty sleeping before the event, his early rising at 3 a.m., his arrival at the prison and sight of the gallows, his long wait with the crowd, and finally, at 8 a.m., Courvoisier's death. Charles Dickens also attended Courvoisier's hanging, and both writers used their experience of this execution to argue against the death penalty, although in this argument their attitude toward the vast throng of onlookers at Courvoisier's death was significantly different. Dickens (who had rented a room from which he could view the scaffold) later recalled:

In contrast, Thackeray (who stood with the crowd) had a much more positive view of his fellow onlookers. “Throughout the whole four hours,” Thackeray noted, “the mob was extraordinarily gentle and good-humoured” (3: 193).³

Despite his opposition to capital punishment at the time of publishing his remarks about Courvoisier's death, Dickens provided relatively few details about the execution itself, evidently preferring to focus his remarks on the crowd. In Thackeray's essay against the death penalty, in contrast, treatment of the scaffold scene was more explicit.

Not only does Thackeray recount what he observed of Courvoisier's death in “Going to See a Man Hanged,” but–beginning with the title of the essay–much of what Thackeray says about this death places great emphasis on the idea of seeing (or not seeing). Indeed, Thackeray explains, the first glimpse of the gallows as he approached the prison “seizes the eye at once,” causing Thackeray, a graphic artist as well as a writer, to use an illustration rather than words to complete his sentence and convey this visual impression (Figure 1). The picture that he sketches is a rough representation of what was known as the Newgate drop–a raised platform with a movable section on which the person to be hanged would stand until the executioner operated the mechanism that caused this section to fall. The executioner then typically entered the base of the scaffold and pulled on the legs of the person suspended above in an effort to hasten strangulation. After the drawing, Thackeray again emphasizes the idea of vision in his verbal description of the scaffold: “As you see it, you feel a kind of dumb electric shock, which causes one to start a little, and give a sort of gasp for breath” (3: 192). Consciously or unconsciously, Thackeray is identifying here with the soon-to-be-strangled Courvoisier. When the condemned man himself steps out on the scaffold several hours later, Thackeray's remarks reiterate this sense of fellow-feeling and again stress the notion of seeing. In Thackeray's words, “The whole of the sickening, ghastly, wicked scene passes before the eyes again; and, indeed, it is an awful one to see, and very hard and painful to describe” (3: 200). What he witnessed on this occasion makes Thackeray argue unequivocally in his essay that the death penalty should be abolished:

What Thackeray intended as a casual observation of an event of popular interest has turned into a sight of horror.

Standing near the police barriers at the front of the dense mob and (at six feet, three inches) undoubtedly towering over much of the rest of the crowd, Thackeray had only one means to escape the dreadful sight before him–to shut his eyes. After describing what he did see, he admits freely in the essay that he resorted to this method for blocking out the rest:

Nevertheless, although Thackeray himself closed his eyes, he knew only too well what others could see of the climactic activities of Jack Ketch (the popular name for the hangman) and Courvoisier: “a plank disappears from under him, and those who have paid for good places may see the hands of the Government agent, Jack Ketch, coming up from his black hole, and seizing the prisoner's legs, and pulling them, until he is quite dead–strangled” (3: 202). As Foucault has argued, public execution tends “to make the executioner resemble a criminal, judges murderers, to reverse roles at the last moment, to make the tortured criminal an object of pity or admiration” (9). Thackeray's reaction to Courvoisier's hanging clearly demonstrates this role reversal. Near the end of his essay, Thackeray writes, “I fully confess that I came away down Snow Hill that morning with a disgust for murder, but it was for the murder I saw done” (3: 204). He concludes the essay with a ringing cry for abolition and with words that once more emphasize the sight that he cannot erase from his mind: Thackeray's impression of Courvoisier's death was one of lasting horror. As his daughter Anne Thackeray Ritchie commented about this execution long after her father's own death, “he never spoke of that dreadful experience without a shudder” (Two Thackerays 162).

But while Thackeray's reaction to Courvoisier's execution is clear, the larger implications of this reaction–in terms of Thackeray's later opinions and writings–are less apparent. His eventual position on the subject of capital punishment is a matter of disagreement. Some modern writers on capital punishment have asserted or suggested that Thackeray abandoned his opposition to the death penalty.⁴

Their basis for this conclusion appears to be a sweeping statement by George Saintsbury, an early Thackeray scholar and editor, who flatly declared that “The anti-capital-punishment fad was one of the special crochets of mid-century Liberalism, and he kept to it for some time: but in his later and wiser days admitted that he was wrong” (Oxford Thackeray 3: xiv–xv). However, Harry Potter–another modern writer on the subject of capital punishment–notes that “Saintsbury himself gives no further substance for his claim, and nor do those who cite him. From the language he uses it is likely that he is imposing his own preferences on his subject, rather than accurately reflecting Thackeray's later views” (Potter 231n85). Albert I. Borowitz has also argued, in a useful article on “Why Thackeray Went To See a Man Hanged,” that “It is doubtful that Thackeray ever qualified his abolitionist beliefs” (20). In view of this striking difference of scholarly opinion, some historical/critical detective work is helpful. Although Saintsbury gives no evidence for his categorical assertion, he is probably basing it on a remark by Thackeray's distant cousin Richard Bedingfield or a statement by another early Thackeray scholar, Lewis Melville (125–27), who reached a conclusion similar to Saintsbury's on the basis of Bedingfield's remark. However, in its original context, what Bedingfield has to say about Thackeray and capital punishment is open to more than one interpretation. According to Bedingfield's reminiscences–published in Cassell's Magazine in 1869 and 1870, after Thackeray's death–when the younger man praised “Going to See a Man Hanged” to his famous relative, Thackeray replied: “I think I was wrong. My feelings were overwrought. Those murderers are such devils, after all.” Yet Bedingfield then promptly adds about Thackeray, “Nevertheless, he did not like the idea of capital punishment” (Collins, ed., Thackeray 1: 124n6). Elsewhere in his recollections, Bedingfield also comments that Thackeray “hated ‘Jack Ketch’ and his worse than ‘bloody trade’” (119). Bedingfield gives no dates for these conversations with Thackeray, and the question of whether, or when, or to what extent Thackeray changed his mind regarding capital punishment remains unsettled.

An awareness of the complex dimensions of the capital-punishment debate during Thackeray's lifetime sheds some light on this question. Although Saintsbury does not inform modern readers concerning such details, there was a third, increasingly influential, position (besides the simple anti- and pro-capital-punishment stands) in the arguments over the death penalty in mid-nineteenth-century England. This third position (that executions should be held in private–within prisons–rather than in public) may explain some of the apparent ambiguity in Bedingfield's remarks. In November 1849, in two letters to the Times following the public hanging of George and Maria Manning, Dickens significantly altered his stand on the issue of capital punishment (see Letters of Charles Dickens 5: 644–45, 651–54). He now argued in favor of conducting executions within prisons and abandoned his earlier demand for the abolition of the death penalty. In a recent detailed and provocative study entitled The Hanging Tree, V. A. C. Gatrell asserts, without providing evidence to support the claim, that Thackeray, like Dickens, eventually came to favor private executions rather than outright abolition (297).⁵

This idea is plausible, but it requires substantiation. Moreover, in view of the rivalry between Dickens and Thackeray, it is unlikely that Thackeray would simply follow where Dickens led.⁶ It seems more likely that, besides his own appalled recollection of the sight of Courvoisier's hanging, Thackeray would have been influenced by a change of mind on the part of his friend and companion at that earlier event, Monckton Milnes. However, all writers on the subject of Thackeray and capital punishment have overlooked an important shift in Milnes's position on this topic and the possible relevance of this shift to Thackeray's opinion. In the remainder of this essay, my argument will be that, like Milnes, Thackeray did indeed come to favor removing capital punishment from public view and that his change of position in this regard can be discerned from the evidence of his own writings, including his treatment of the demise of Jos Sedley in the last chapter of Vanity Fair–published more than a year before Dickens's letters to the Times.

Out of Sight

FIVE YEARS AFTER GOING WITH THACKERAY to see the hanging of Courvoisier, Milnes made a speech to Parliament, proposing a radical change in the current mode of conducting executions. In this July 1, 1845 speech, Milnes argued that public executions should be banned and that the penalty of death should instead occur away from the eyes of the public.⁷

According to Milnes, “the full ends of a public execution could be attained by an execution within the walls of a prison in the presence of properly authorized persons.” Using some semantic nitpicking, Milnes took pains to argue that such an execution would not be really “private,” since “the execution should take place in the presence of the authorities, and also…the reporters of the public press should be admitted” (Hansard, col. 1413). Nevertheless, in contrast to the current spectacular nature of public executions, events that Milnes described as “a sort of gladiatorial exhibition” (Hansard, col. 1414), any hanging held within a prison before a strictly limited audience would clearly be private in nature regardless of the terminology. To be sure, a few voices in England had been raised in favor of moving executions out of the public arena prior to Milnes's speech. Almost a century earlier, in 1751, Henry Fielding had unsuccessfully argued in favor of making executions private (169).⁸ More recently, Henry Rich had vainly tried, despite almost universal opposition, to persuade Parliament to consider a ban on public executions in 1841.⁹ Eventually, the age-old custom of public executions came to be widely seen as something that indeed belonged to a former age, rather than to the civilized Victorian present, and executions were finally officially moved out of public view and into prisons in 1868.¹⁰ In 1845, however, that change was far in the future, and public sentiment was far from agreeing with Milnes. His speech was cut short when it was discovered that merely thirty-two members of the House of Commons were in attendance for his remarks. The House adjourned, and Milnes did not address it again on the topic. Nevertheless, Milnes's speech was certainly, as he later described it, a “pioneer” attempt in the sense of being an early effort to break with long-established custom and to promote what eventually came to be seen by most Victorians as a preferable way of handling the punishment of death (Reid 2: 280).¹¹ It seems probable that Thackeray was aware of Milnes's change of sentiment–from opposing capital punishment in 1840 to tolerating such punishment if it were kept out of public view in 1845. Thackeray's own comments about the death penalty in the 1840s suggest a similar evolution in his thinking.

Although it is sometimes erroneously asserted that, after Courvoisier's death, Thackeray “never again alluded to this or any other execution” (Cooper, Lesson 9), there are actually a number of passing references to capital punishment in his subsequent works. In particular, five references published between 1842 and 1847 hint at a gradual shift in his opinion about the death penalty similar to that undergone by Milnes. In the first two of these references, Lecture 9 of Miss Tickletoby's Lectures on English History (Punch, 24 Sept. 1842), and The Irish Sketch Book (May 1843), Thackeray's attitude toward capital punishment resembles that expressed in “Going to See a Man Hanged.” As Thackeray did in his own voice in that earlier essay, Miss Tickletoby equates capital punishment with murder, and she criticizes the law that orders such killings to take place. Referring to the execution of William Wallace in 1305, Miss Tickletoby tells her pupils:

In similar terms, after reading in a local Irish newspaper that two men have been sentenced to death for murder, Thackeray comments in The Irish Sketch Book: “I confess, for my part, to that common cant and sickly sentimentality which, thank God! is felt by a great number of people nowadays, and which leads them to revolt against murder, whether performed by a ruffian's knife or a hangman's rope” (5: 17). For at least a few years after “Going to See a Man Hanged,” Thackeray's views regarding the death penalty seem to have remained very much what they were at the time of his horrified reaction to Courvoisier's death.

Nevertheless, two of his works published not long after The Irish Sketch Book contain references to capital punishment that are somewhat more equivocal. The first of these works, “The______'s Wife,” appeared in Fraser's Magazine (November 1843) as part of a series of stories by Thackeray called “Men's Wives.” In this particular story, which has a German setting, a highborn but hard-hearted woman is tricked into marrying an executioner as a means of revenge by a man whose younger brother she has financially and emotionally ruined, plunging the latter into a depression that has led to his death. The woman, ironically named Angelica, is eager to see an execution that is to be held in a nearby city and allows herself to be seated where she will have an excellent view of the spectacle. However, when she realizes that the masked executioner is her husband, she goes insane. Furthermore, this is not the only sensational episode involving capital punishment in Thackeray's writings of the period. “The Princess's Tragedy,” interpolated in chapter 13 of The Luck of Barry Lyndon, describes the private beheading of the Princess of W______for adultery by an executioner whom her husband has arranged to be secretly brought from the vicinity of Strasbourg to W______for the purpose.¹²

Published in Fraser's Magazine in June 1844 as part of the sixth installment of The Luck of Barry Lyndon, “The Princess's Tragedy” resembles “The______'s Wife” not only in the German setting of the main events but also, more importantly, in the fact that with both stories Thackeray uses a character's insensitivity toward the sight or description of an execution as a tell-tale sign of moral deficiency. In “The______'s Wife,” the “delight” (4: 501) that Angelica anticipates in watching the execution near the end of the story is an indication of her callousness. In “The Princess's Tragedy,” the most significant manifestation of callousness is that displayed by the narrator of the novel, Barry Lyndon, to whom this interpolated tale is told. While the woman who relates the story to him finds it “horrible” (125; ch. 13), Barry's reaction to this account of bygone events at the court of W______is merely one of self-interest. He appears unmoved by the tale, commenting simply that “the reader will have no difficulty in drawing from it that part which affected myself and my uncle” (130), and his indifference here seems a reflection of the gradual worsening of his character, which The Luck of Barry Lyndon as a whole unfolds.¹³ Even more intriguingly, in both short tales Thackeray uses various rhetorical devices to deflect a reader's attention from the fact of execution. In the first story, this strategy is obvious in Thackeray's deliberate withholding of the word “Executioner” from the title, as well as in his concealment from the reader of the true occupation of Angelica's husband until the story's end. With “The Princess's Tragedy,” Thackeray's approach is more sophisticated. Not only does he not reveal the princess's secret, private execution until the climax of the story, but he also further distances this event from the reader by having it described to Barry more than two decades afterwards by a former member of the court, who has herself heard the story at third hand. In these works, Thackeray seems to have shifted his emphasis from the clear-cut disapproval of capital punishment expressed in Miss Tickletoby's lecture and in The Irish Sketch Book to a more complicated and less clearly disapproving sense that executions are horrible events that people with normal, humane feelings would wish to keep at a distance.¹⁴

This desire on Thackeray's part to downplay the details of execution is even more pronounced in the parody “George de Barnwell,” published in Punch, April 3–17, 1847, as part of the series called “Punch's Prize Novelists” (later reprinted by Thackeray as “Novels by Eminent Hands”). As scholars have often pointed out, “George de Barnwell” illustrates Thackeray's long-standing hostility to the Newgate novel, a type of fiction dealing with criminals that was popular in the 1830s. In particular, this parody is a skillful attack by Thackeray on the style and subject matter of a favorite target, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, author of several Newgate novels.¹⁵

However, although scholars have not explored this point, “George de Barnwell” is also especially interesting in terms of what it suggests about Thackeray's current handling of the topic of capital punishment. The parody reworks the plot of The London Merchant (1731), a highly popular domestic tragedy by the eighteenth-century playwright George Lillo. In Lillo's play, which would have been well known to Thackeray's readers, the London apprentice George Barnwell falls in love with a wicked woman called Millwood, who incites him to rob his employer and kill his uncle. In the parody, Thackeray uses Lillo's familiar story line to mock Bulwer-Lytton's inflated style and the criminal material of his Newgate fiction. Yet, although the murder of Barnwell's uncle is an essential part of both the original play and Thackeray's parody, the difference in how Lillo and Thackeray present the murder and its consequences is striking. Lillo devotes an entire scene to this murder, showing the killing and Barnwell's subsequent confession to his dying uncle in detail. In contrast, although Thackeray provides an illustration of Barnwell, armed with an enormous dagger, confronting his astonished uncle, Thackeray gives almost no details about the actual killing. The dissimilarities between the way in which the two authors treat the consequences of Barnwell's actions are even more conspicuous. Lillo concludes The London Merchant at the gallows (in a scene that was originally written as part of the play but not published until the fifth/sixth edition of 1735 [Lillo ix–x, 82]). According to the stage directions, this last scene is to occur at “The place of execution. The gallows and ladders at the farther end of the stage. A crowd of spectators.” The directions further specify that “officers, and executioner” enter with Barnwell and Millwood (Lillo 83), who make their final remarks before going toward their deaths. Thackeray's parody, however, does not show anything of the impending execution. Instead, “George de Barnwell” ends in “The Condemned Cell” (Thackeray's parodic title of “Vol. III”) and gives no details about the coming execution, although Thackeray's prison chaplain observes that “the Tragedy of To-morrow will teach the World that homicide is not to be permitted even to the most amiable Genius” (8: 94, 97–98).

The evident evasiveness on Thackeray's part in depicting the details of murder and execution in “George de Barnwell” cannot be explained as simply an antipathy on his part toward the material of Newgate fiction. Catherine, an earlier work by Thackeray that was also designed as a Newgate parody, showed no such reluctance. Serialized in Fraser's Magazine from May 1839 to February 1840, that novel featured an unpleasant female protagonist who participated in a brutal murder of her husband and eventually suffered a brutal penalty–burning at the stake. Written before Thackeray had actually witnessed an execution and based on the most nauseating real-life history that he could find in the reports and compilations of crime that he consulted (see Goldfarb's “Historical Commentary” in Catherine 138–40), the 1839–40 version of Catherine included detailed, gruesome information from published eighteenth-century accounts of the murder and Catherine's subsequent punishment. Clearly a significant change in Thackeray's thinking about executions, as well as the related subject of homicide in general, occurred between 1839 and 1847. With Catherine, in February 1840, it seemed desirable to describe the fulfillment of the death penalty in lurid detail. With “George de Barnwell,” in April 1847, it seemed best to keep such details out of sight.

Concealment of the Horrible in Vanity Fair

THACKERAY'S EVIDENT GROWING CONVICTION that executions, if they occur, should take place away from public view has clear relevance to the demise of Joseph Sedley in the final chapter of Vanity Fair. Serialized from January 1847 to July 1848, the novel overlapped with “George de Barnwell.” The evasiveness with which that brief parody handles the topics of murder and execution is consistent with Thackeray's evasive treatment of the death of Jos in the longer and more important work. To be sure, unlike the unfortunate uncle in both Thackeray's parody and Lillo's familiar plot, there is no unequivocal indication that Jos is actually a victim of foul play. The company with which Jos's life has been insured is suspicious and initially unwilling to pay the money left by the policy to beneficiaries, one of whom is Becky. The firm of solicitors employed by Becky to establish her right to the insurance money bears the names of three infamous murderers, Burke, Thurtell, and Hayes. Even more ominously, Thackeray depicts the final interview between Dobbin and Jos in an illustration that depicts an eavesdropping Becky lurking behind a curtain with a sinister expression on her face and an indistinct something, which could be a dagger or a bottle of poison, held in her hand (Figure 2). Thackeray captions this illustration “Becky's second appearance in the character of Clytemnestra” (686; ch. 67), an allusion to her earlier performance of the role of Clytemnestra (who killed her husband Agamemnon, according to Greek legend) in the charades at Gaunt House in chapter 51. Nevertheless, there is nothing in Vanity Fair specifically stating that Jos meets his death at the hands of Becky. When asked by an inquisitive reader, J. E. Cooke, whether Becky killed him, Thackeray reputedly replied, “I do not know.”¹⁶

However, Thackeray gave a different answer to Bedingfield. As the latter recalled, “When I asked him what he meant in a certain illustration in which ‘Becky’ is ‘Clytemnestra,’ he replied, ‘I meant she had committed murder; but I didn't want anything horrible’” (Collins, ed., Thackeray 1: 114). Although what has been termed “the intentional fallacy” is a dangerous line of argument to pursue, it seems likely that Thackeray would have been more candid regarding his artistic method and authorial purpose to a young member of his own family circle and an aspiring writer (Bedingfield), whom Thackeray elsewhere advised on the craft of fiction, than to an American novelist (Cooke), whom Thackeray met briefly on his second visit to Virginia in 1856.¹⁷ If Bedingfield is correct and Thackeray did indeed privately conceive of Becky as killing Jos, then there is a path of mental associations that one can follow, leading back to Thackeray's firsthand observation of a deliberate public killing in 1840.

Thackeray's remarks in “Going to See a Man Hanged,” as well as in Miss Tickletoby's lecture and The Irish Sketch Book, indicate that in the early 1840s he had made a strong mental connection between capital punishment and murder. His refusal to elaborate on both Barnwell's act of murder and subsequent execution in “George de Barnwell” in 1847 suggests that Thackeray continued at the time of Vanity Fair to associate both types of homicide in his mind. The word “horrible,” used by Thackeray in his assertion to Bedingfield that Becky murdered Jos, offers a further clue to a perhaps unconscious but significant link between this death and the death of Courvoisier. In The Luck of Barry Lyndon, the woman who recounts the princess's execution to Barry similarly describes it as “horrible.” Even more revealingly, Thackeray uses a cognate of the word “horrible” in a poignant episode in the penultimate paragraph of “Going to See a Man Hanged.” Leaving the scene of the execution and making their way through the crowd, as Thackeray explains in that essay, he and Milnes “came upon two little girls of eleven and twelve years: one of them was crying bitterly, and begged, for Heaven's sake, that some one would lead her from that horrid place” (3: 204). Kindhearted Thackeray (the father of two young daughters) responded to the girl's request and helped the children to a place of safety, but the word “horrid” lingers in the reader's mind at the end of “Going to See a Man Hanged” as the term probably lingered in Thackeray's own. The fact that Thackeray echoed that word later in referring to the death of Jos contributes to the likelihood that, as a result of his experience with and reflections upon capital punishment, Thackeray had come to believe that calculated killings of all kinds should not be shown to the public.

In addition, there are more subtle but still revealing suggestions that Thackeray may be echoing aspects of Courvoisier's execution in the treatment of Jos's death in Vanity Fair. That death under mysterious circumstances in the last chapter of the novel appeared in the July 1848 installment, the same month in which, eight years earlier, the horror-struck Thackeray had shut his eyes in an attempt to avoid seeing Courvoisier hanged. The parallel of the two dates may be simply a coincidence, but there are certain details in Thackeray's illustration of the final conversation between Jos and Dobbin that recall aspects of Thackeray's account of those parts of the execution that he did see. In keeping with the usual custom, Courvoisier's arms were bound, but he remained able to clasp his hands as he approached his death. In the description of Courvoisier on the scaffold in “Going to See a Man Hanged,” in the moment before Thackeray shut his eyes, his gaze seemed fixated on Courvoisier's hands, which “[h]e opened…in a helpless kind of way, and clasped…once or twice together,” as well as on the man's “wild, imploring look” (3: 201). Similarly, in Thackeray's illustration of “Becky's second appearance in the character of Clytemnestra,” Joseph Sedley is shown clasping his hands and, with a look of desperation on his face, vainly appealing to Dobbin, who declines to settle near Jos in Brussels and thus protect him from Becky. In a state “of pitiable infirmity” (685; ch. 67) in this illustration, Joseph also wears both a dressing gown and a close-fitting cap, the latter of which is reminiscent of the so-called “night-cap” that Thackeray saw being “pulled…tight over the patient's head and face” in the instant before Courvoisier was hanged.

Furthermore, both men die apart from family and genuine friends, in a foreign land. Courvoisier was a French-speaking native of Switzerland when he was hanged in London.¹⁸

According to Thackeray's description of Courvoisier's last morning, based on accounts that were published before Thackeray wrote his own essay, the doomed man asked to be wakened early because Pathetically, the friends (amis) to whom Thackeray describes Courvoisier as making the final disposition of his possessions are individuals who have a vested interest in his death: “He has a token for his dear friend the jailer; another for his dear friend the under-sheriff.” Thackeray underscores this desperate clinging to others in a summary of Courvoisier's last days: “As the day of the convict's death draws nigh, it is painful to see how he fastens upon everybody who approaches him, how pitifully he clings to them and loves them” (3: 190–91). In parallel fashion, after his effort to cling to Dobbin and persuade the latter to remain near him fails, Jos Sedley dies far from his native country, in this case in a Prussian city with a French name, Aix-la-Chapelle. Jos also perceives as a friend and names as a beneficiary a person who attends him at the end of his life, even though it is apparent to others that this person (Becky) has a clear interest in his death: “All his available assets were the two thousand pounds for which his life was insured, and which were left equally between his beloved ‘sister Amelia, wife of, &c., and his friend and invaluable attendant during sickness, Rebecca, wife of Lieutenant-Colonel Rawdon Crawley, C.B.,’ who was appointed administratrix” (687; ch. 67). Taken together, such similarities suggest a circumstantial trail of evidence linking the death of Jos Sedley in Thackeray's thoughts with what he saw and tried not to see at 8 a.m. on July 6, 1840.

Moreover, even the pictorial capital of chapter 67 of Vanity Fair indicates a possible link between this last chapter and the idea of capital punishment in Thackeray's mind. Modern scholarship has called attention to the importance of Thackeray's illustrations.¹⁹

As Joan Stevens has pointed out, the illustrated capital letters with which Thackeray begins each chapter of Vanity Fair, as well as some of his other novels, often “make a witty allusion of some kind, by creating a visual embodiment of the metaphor implied in the chapter title, or the opening words, or, more thematically, in the content of the chapter itself” (114). However, the somewhat strange illustrated capital for Vanity Fair's chapter 67, which shows a boy about to be flogged by a black-faced, goggle-eyed, thick-lipped schoolmaster in academic or clerical attire, has received comparatively little attention (Figure 3).²⁰ In keeping with Thackeray's own early experiences with harsh school discipline, this illustrated capital seems intended to evoke the idea of retributive punishment. The idea superficially appears appropriate to the final chapter of a novel–a chapter that, as its title explains, “Contains Births, Marriages, and Deaths.” Yet in Thackeray's unconventional novel, the prospect of conventional reward and punishment elicited by the pictorial capital at the beginning of the last chapter is ironically unfulfilled.

If Becky is indeed a murderess, she is one who escapes detection. She ends the novel smilingly ensconced in “A booth in Vanity Fair,” as described in Thackeray's caption for the last full-page illustration (688; ch. 67). The first part of that caption, “Virtue rewarded,” is ironic–not only in reference to Becky's position in her “booth” but also in reference to Thackeray's deliberate refusal to fulfill the apparent promise of retributive punishment suggested by the pictorial capital at the start of chapter 67. Instead, Thackeray shows leniency toward Becky, a quality of mercy for which the schoolboy in the illustrated capital appears to plead in vain. As John R. Reed has pointed out (307, 327), such leniency is a characteristic of Thackeray's fiction. This tolerant attitude eventually forms the subject of the Roundabout paper entitled “On Being Found Out” (Cornhill Magazine, May 1861) in which Thackeray argues that it is just as well for all of us that we are not hunted down and punished for every wrong action that we have committed: “Ah, what a lucky thing it is, for you and me…that we are not found out in all our peccadilloes; and that our backs can slip away from the master and the cane!” (17: 495). At the end of Vanity Fair, Becky's financially comfortable position–in which she is active “in works of piety” and strongly defended by some people, who “consider her to be a most injured woman” (689; ch. 67)–merely seems one of many instances of the lack of retributive consequences in Thackeray's fictional world.

Thackeray's remarks in “On Being Found Out” also make a noteworthy connection between schoolboy flogging and capital punishment. The passage from this Roundabout paper quoted above continues: “Just consider what life would be, if every rogue was found out, and flogged coram populo! What a butchery, what an indecency, what an endless swishing of the rod!” (17: 495). As the phrase “coram populo” (in the presence of the public) suggests, schoolboy flogging appears to have been a public event, according to Thackeray's early experience. The watching pupils that are sketched in the background of the pictorial capital for the last chapter of Vanity Fair reinforce this sense of the public nature of this kind of schoolboy punishment.²¹

In other words, at the time that he was writing Vanity Fair, both capital punishment and the flogging that Thackeray remembered from his school days were publicly punitive rituals.²² Indeed, Thackeray calls attention to this link between pedagogical flogging and the death penalty in the next two paragraphs of “On Being Found Out” (published when executions still occurred in public): In a possible cryptic allusion to Becky's avoidance of punishment for Jos's death, Thackeray teasingly refers in this essay to cases where “murders are committed, and nobody is the wiser” (496). The essay as a whole is thus relevant to Becky's scot-free situation at the end of Vanity Fair. However, the essay's link between flogging and Jack Ketch is also relevant to Vanity Fair in the sense that this Roundabout paper offers further evidence of a possible association in Thackeray's mind between the child about to be flogged in the pictorial capital that begins the last chapter of the novel and the demise of Jos, with its overtones of Courvoisier's hanging, near the chapter's end.

Even the arrangement of the central figures in the illustrated capital is remarkably like those in the foreground of “Becky's second appearance in the character of Clytemnestra.” In the pictorial capital, the child clasps his hands and raises his face imploringly to the schoolmaster, just as Jos in the “second appearance” illustration clasps his hands and looks imploringly at Dobbin. The schoolmaster's posture also parallels that of Dobbin, who steps forward with his right foot and rests his right hand on his cane in a manner that echoes the way in which the schoolmaster steps forward and grasps his bunch of birch twigs. To be sure, Dobbin appears genuinely concerned about Jos both in the text and in the illustration. However, the fact remains that, unlike the Good Samaritan in the picture that hangs over their heads in Thackeray's illustration, Dobbin fails to rescue “the unfortunate man” (685; ch. 67) who needs his aid. Dobbin's reason for this failure is his adherence to society's code of respectability. When Dobbin, now retired from the army and married to Amelia, visits Jos in Brussels and the latter begs him to “come and live near me, and–and–see me sometimes,” Dobbin refuses, explaining that “[c]onsidering the circumstances, Amelia can't visit you” (685). The problem, from Dobbin's point of view, is that Jos's close association with Becky (still married to Rawdon, although separated from him) is “disreputable” (687). Upright, respectable Dobbin has no intention of allowing his wife to visit her brother in such scandalous circumstances. He offers to take Jos away from Brussels and Becky immediately, but the cowardly Jos is unable to agree to such precipitous action and tells Dobbin to depart until the next morning. Dobbin does not insist on seeing Jos again. In this rigid respectability, Dobbin is upholding the norms of society, regardless of the cost to the pleading man before him, just as the flogging schoolmaster upholds school norms regardless of the pain to be experienced by the pleading child, and just as the executioner on July 6, 1840 carried out the mandate of society regardless of the desperation on Courvoisier's face. The day after the execution, Thackeray wrote to a friend, “the poor wretch's face will keep itself before my eyes, and the scene mixes itself up with all my occupations” (Letters, ed. Ray 1: 454; Letters, ed. Harden 80). In his treatment of the end of Jos Sedley eight years later in Vanity Fair, there is persuasive evidence that, although Thackeray may not have been fully conscious of the connection at this point, “the scene” of Courvoisier's death was still “mix[ing] itself up with” Thackeray's work.

Implications

THERE ARE PERHAPS THREE IMPORTANT IMPLICATIONS of this link between the death of Courvoisier, as Thackeray experienced it, and the death of Jos. First of all, the link makes Thackeray's treatment of the demise of Joseph Sedley part of a far-reaching debate concerning capital punishment in the 1840s and indicates that Thackeray's position in this debate at the time of Vanity Fair was similar to that expressed by Milnes in 1845 in the House of Commons–the position that the penalty of death should occur away from public view. In this context, Bedingfield's seemingly contradictory remarks about Thackeray and capital punishment make sense. Thackeray could withdraw his opposition to the death penalty yet still find it repugnant, as Bedingfield reported that Thackeray did. By the time of Vanity Fair, Thackeray appears to have been able to tolerate the death penalty as long as he and society at large did not have to see it carried out. Of course, part of the point in Vanity Fair is that pathetic Joseph Sedley does not deserve to die and is not guilty of any crime. His worst flaws are selfishness, vanity, gluttony, and cowardice–flaws that many other individuals in this novel share in varying degrees. However, at the moment of Courvoisier's execution, as Thackeray recognized in “Going to See a Man Hanged,” Courvoisier also seemed like a victim of crime rather than a criminal. One argument that some Victorian social theorists offered for moving hangings into prisons was that privatizing executions would eliminate this kind of confusion between guilt and innocence in the mind of the public.²³

Nevertheless, Thackeray's reason for wishing to move cold-blooded killing off stage seems to have been fundamentally a desire to keep something “horrible” out of sight. Thus, in his case as in that of many of his contemporaries who reached a similar position regarding capital punishment, in Gatrell's words “squeamishness…won the day” (297).

Yet Thackeray also seems to have recognized that there is something akin to viewing pornography in the public's fascination with capital punishment. Corroboration of this analogy between gazing at deliberately inflicted homicide and looking at sexually provocative material is a second implication of the link that he suggests between the hanging of Courvoisier and the death of Joseph Sedley in Vanity Fair. In “Going to See a Man Hanged,” Thackeray perceptively calls attention to the way in which an execution inflames the senses of its spectators:

Thackeray's use of sexually connotative language–“debauchery,” “tickled,” and “lust”–evokes the idea of erotic stimulation. As Martin J. Wiener has pointed out, Thackeray is describing Courvoisier's hanging “in terms of a pornographic exhibition, a public loss of control over the passions, and an invasion of the integrity of the body, incited by government itself” (153–54).²⁴ However, it is this kind of frank exhibition of sexually explicit material that Vanity Fair deliberately refuses to make. In a famous passage in chapter 64, the narrator asserts to the reader about Becky: In context, this description of Becky as mermaid refers to her possible sexual escapades, about which the narrator repeatedly hints but never makes explicit. Nonetheless, the allusion to “corpses,” like the mention of “dead men” in the next sentence and the even more graphic subsequent reference to “the fiendish marine cannibals, revelling and feasting on their wretched pickled victims” (638; ch. 64), also tantalizingly looks forward to the death of Joseph Sedley in chapter 67 (published at the same time as chapter 64, in the July 1848 double number with which Thackeray concluded Vanity Fair). In other words, in explaining his method in Vanity Fair, Thackeray is vetoing any outspoken treatment of Becky's sexuality and suggesting that the issue of whether she eventually kills Jos is included in this ban. Thackeray is also implying that any explicit depiction of such a killing would be as inappropriate to display to the public as Thackeray felt the earlier, sensually inflaming public exhibition of Courvoisier's hanging had been.

A third implication of this link between the death of Courvoisier and the death of Joseph Sedley is a confirmation that Thackeray conceived of Becky as not only a morally ambiguous but also a culturally equivocal figure. Although some recent criticism has stressed what it has perceived as the latent feminism in Becky's conduct, seeing her, in Maria DiBattista's words, as “an…image of demonic womanhood” (827), my reading of the novel views Becky in less attractive terms as performing the role of Jack Ketch.²⁵

In this role as executioner, she is both supported and shunned by the culture in which she lives. Like Jack Ketch carrying out the sentence imposed by respectable society, she ends the life of Joseph Sedley after respectable Dobbin leaves Jos to his fate. As in the case of Jack Ketch, at least some members of respectable society also try to avoid close contact with her. At the end of Vanity Fair, young Rawdon Crawley pays his mother an allowance but declines to see her, and Dobbin and Amelia recoil from Becky when they come upon her unexpectedly in the Fancy Fair stall from which she is selling charitable goods. Yet, like Jack Ketch, Becky is viewed by many in her society as integral to it. We see Becky at the conclusion of the novel supported by “a very strong party of excellent people” (689; ch. 67) and comfortably ensconced in her “booth.” A morally ambiguous figure–a murderer who is yet at the heart of Vanity Fair–that, in this reading, is the essence of Becky's position at the end of the novel. Her position is analogous to that of “[t]he tall, grave man in black” (3: 201) whom Thackeray saw, on the scaffold in front of a crowd of 40,000, pulling the night-cap over Courvoisier's face.

Enigmas, by definition, resist explanation. Since Thackeray in Vanity Fair never explicitly states that Becky murders Jos and never explicitly refers to Courvoisier's execution, it is certainly possible to resist the argument that I have proposed. Nevertheless, the echoes between Thackeray's appalled reaction to the sight of Courvoisier's death and Thackeray's later, oblique treatment of the death of Joseph Sedley seem too provocative to ignore. These echoes contribute to our understanding of why Thackeray chose to handle the death of Jos in such enigmatic terms. Thackeray himself may not have been fully conscious of the degree to which his experience of Courvoisier's hanging entered into his later treatment of the demise of Jos. As Freud has taught us, “the great subterranean pool of the subconscious” gives rise to many activities, including many creative accomplishments, of whose origins we may be only dimly aware.²⁶

In any case, Thackeray's decision in 1848 to keep the “horrible” details of Jos's death out of sight is in keeping with Milnes's 1845 speech in favor of moving fulfillment of the death penalty out of public view. Thackeray's own references to capital punishment between 1842 and 1847 also suggest an evolution in his thinking from the clear-cut abolitionism of “Going to See a Man Hanged” to a position consistent with that of Milnes in 1845. The subtle but significant connections between Thackeray's thinking about capital punishment and his handling of Jos's death situate this episode in Vanity Fair in the context of an important debate regarding capital punishment in the 1840s and help us understand Thackeray's position in this debate. These connections between fact and fiction also have important implications in terms of Thackeray's understanding of “the obscenity hidden under the verbal cloak” (as Camus has described the death penalty, 133) and in terms of our own understanding of Becky's role in Vanity Fair. As Shakespeare's Julius Caesar declares, “death, a necessary end, /Will come when it will come.” However, if Thackeray had not been deeply troubled by the idea of public execution, Joseph Sedley might have come to a less mysterious end.