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The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770-1868

By: V. A. C. [Vic] Gatrell
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Oxford Paperbacks
ISBN: 0192853325
ISBN-13: 9780192853325
Released: 17 Oct 1996
RRP: £34.00
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Customer Reviews

morbidly fascinating. - By: rory.stephens@ntlworld.com, 01 May 2002
This book is as compelling as it is horrific as it draws the reader into the blood soaked wretchedness of 18th & 19th Century London. Using eyewitness accounts, pamphlets & broadsheets of the time Gattrell vividly depicts what life was like for those witnessing or awaiting execution.
With morbid fascination you learn of the appallling torture of condemned souls by bungling executioners, the blood-lust of the baying mob, & the sad lack of regard placed on human life.
This book enables you to almost feel what it must have been like to be at Tyburn or Newgate on hanging day, & how executions rose to almost epidemic proportions in the 1770's for a vast range of crimes that today would warrant no more than a period of community service.
Saddened & sickened, but always morbidly inrigued, this book once started is hard to put down. If you want to know what London was reallly like 200 years ago this goes some way to opening your eyes. Brillian read!