Elizabeth Martha Brown, a victim of “justice”
After describing the execution by hanging of Elizabeth Martha Brown, the anonymous reporter of the Dorset County Chronicle and Somerset Gazette asked in despair “do these horrible sights tend to demoralise or deter”?
The Hangman’s noose
The execution had taken place in full view of a large crowd, not far from the gaol where Elizabeth had spent her final days.
The reader was left in no doubt of the reporter’s view: too many of those before the scaffold had come merely “to glut their morbid curiosity” in seeing a woman being hanged.
They came “laughing and jeering and full of no pleasant sentiments towards the human victim offered up (to) … their gaze”.
They left the tragic and terrible scene not to “retire and meditate” but to “drink and carouse, to riot and blaspheme and keep the town all day in a state of perturbation and misery”. (1)
What the young Thomas Hardy saw
The young Thomas Hardy was present in the crowd.
Seventy years later, the memory was still there, still fresh, still strange and terrible.
He wrote in a letter in 1926 how he had seen Elizabeth hanged, and how he had remained “after the others went away, not thinking, but looking at the figure … turning slowly on the rope”.
Thomas Hardy
He added, disturbingly, “I remember what a fine figure she showed against the sky as she hung in the misty rain … they had put a cloth over her face … as the cloth got wet her features came through it … A boy had climbed up into a tree nearby, and when she dropped, he came down in a faint like an apple dropping from a tree”. (2)