On Easter Monday, 1849, James Landick was famously, publicly executed for highway robbery. He was hung high on the scaffold at Exeter Gaol and an estimated forty thousand people turned up to watch.
A correspondent, a respectable person, joined the crowd and wrote at length his impressions to The Western Times, (14th April, 1849). He was particularly struck by the number of women who turned out for what was essentially a public holiday. This is what he wrote:
"I looked in vain for a serious or thoughtful expression: the people were out to enjoy a holiday and a sight.
"Near to the gallows tree there were but a few females, but in Queen-street, straw bonnets were the principal covering: the women were chiefly coarse and ill-looking, but I did see some faces in which I should have recognised in another place, the charms of respectable female loveliness; but in that place, a young, gentle, beautiful woman was, of all others, the most digusting object; one could think of her only as the most successful and accursed bait of the tempter "a lovely apple rotten at the core."
"The poor prostitutes were, of course, out in grand state in their best attire, and fresh paint, loud in their laughter, and bold in their address, painful were they to look at, for sad is their fate; let us in pity suppose that they were there in the way of business, and not from choice.
"I did not see any respectable people, although I had the honour of conversing with a clergyman of the Established Church, who had come 'to see the fellow scragged.' "
This correspondent, who called himself SUM ULTOR (I am the Avenger (?),) might well, I feel, in our time, have ended up in a psychiatric secure unit, certainly on a psychiatrist's couch. But in 1849 his view of women would have been standard.
The word 'scrag', here meaning to hang, was a precise, if vulgar, usage. Charles Dickens thus uses the word.
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