Polly Iyer has won a copy of Poisoned Ground by Sandra Parshall. Congrats to Polly!
Thanks to Sandra Parshall for showing us the history of destruction in Appalachia. Thanks, also, to everyone who visited and commented on Relevant History this week. Watch for another Relevant History post, coming soon.
Did you like what you read? Learn about downloads, discounts, and special offers from Relevant History authors and Suzanne Adair. Subscribe to Suzanne’s free newsletter.
Relevant History welcomes Sandra Parshall, the author of six Rachel Goddard mysteries, set in current-day Virginia. Her 2006 debut, The Heat of the Moon, won the Agatha Award for Best First Novel. Her latest title is Poisoned Ground (March 2014). A longtime member of Sisters in Crime, she has served on the national board and managed the SinC members online community for many years. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband, Gerald Parshall, a veteran Washington journalist. For more information, visit her website.
*****
The fight over a development project in my latest novel, Poisoned Ground, mirrors events taking place throughout the U.S. today, but for Appalachia it’s nothing new. The history of the southern mountains—southwestern Virginia, West Virginia, eastern Kentucky and Tennessee—where my series is set, is a long, sad tale of exploitation and degradation, with large corporations protected by government as they forced people off their land and destroyed the environment in pursuit of natural gas, timber, and above all, coal.
When big companies moved into Appalachia in the nineteenth century to exploit its mineral wealth, they paid farmers and homesteaders a pittance for “mineral rights” and assured them they would continue to own the surface land. However, the contracts authorized the companies to do whatever was necessary to extract the minerals, and that usually meant making the surface land uninhabitable for its “owners.” Corporations, which literally owned entire towns, put friendly politicians into local and state offices, and legislatures traditionally defended the companies against complaints and attempts at regulation.
Until the mid-20th century, underground coal mining provided the most secure employment for the men of Appalachia, although those jobs came at a huge cost to personal health: lung disease, injured backs, the constant specter of possible death in a cave-in or a fire ignited by a gas explosion. As many deep underground mines played out, companies increasingly went after the coal in seams inside the towering mountains.
(Photo credit: National Resources Defense Council) Strip mining had been practiced for a hundred years, but in the 1970s a method even more devastating was adopted: mountaintop removal mining (MTR). The tops of the mountains are blown apart with explosives, and the resulting rubble is bulldozed out of the way. Today more than a million acres and more than 500 mountains, once densely forested havens for wildlife and people alike, have been reduced to wasteland by MTR mining, surrounding homes are buried under rubble, and streams run red with toxic chemicals draining from mine sites.
Times have changed, and citizens have risen up in protest against this wholesale destruction of the region, but so much damage has been done that no hope remains of returning the mountains to anything resembling their former pristine beauty. The cherished jobs are vanishing along with the landscape as machines replace men. Only two percent of Appalachia’s population is now employed in mining.
In the past the Melungeon people—who would have been ancestors of some of my characters—suffered in additional ways. Because they were mixed race and denied the rights of pure Caucasians, Melungeons were unceremoniously relieved of their farmland by any whites who wanted it, and were pushed up onto the highest, poorest mountain ridges to eke out a living. Many left the region in hope of better lives elsewhere, and to a large extent the group lost its identity until recent years, when people of Melungeon heritage began to rediscover their roots.
In today’s world we have civil rights laws to protect racial minorities, but landowners are still in for a battle when a big company sets its sights on their property. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that local governments can take private land by imminent domain and turn it over to corporations if the planned development will benefit the larger community’s economy. Individual property owners have no choice but to yield.
(Photo credit: Sandra Parshall) The plot of Poisoned Ground was inspired by Disney’s attempt in the 1990s to turn 3,000 acres of Virginia countryside into a massive theme park and housing development. A little community named Haymarket was at the center of the controversy. Family farms still exist out that way, a short driving distance from Washington, DC, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge and within the Appalachian geographical region. Because of its proximity to the nation’s capital, Disney thought the Haymarket area was the ideal spot for “Disney’s America,” which would supposedly celebrate our history while providing the usual moneymaking components of an amusement park.
Like the community in my story, the people of Haymarket and the surrounding area were fiercely divided over Disney’s proposal. Many thought it was a great idea that would bring jobs and modern development to an area languishing in the past. An equal number were appalled by this threat to their peaceful way of life. They lived in the countryside because they loved it and wanted their children to experience it. Even if their own property were left untouched, the Disney theme park would bring millions of tourists into the county every year, clogging the narrow roads and destroying a cherished bucolic lifestyle. Committees were formed, raucous meetings took place, lawsuits were threatened. In the end it became obvious that a majority of the residents opposed the project, and Disney gave up.
The Disney battle tore the small community apart. To this day, anger and resentment persist, and when the press does follow-up stories, plenty of residents are willing to re-debate the issue.
An article in the Washington Post about lingering bad feelings made me wonder what would happen if a big company proposed an intrusive development in my fictional community, set in far southwestern Virginia where placid farms exist alongside surface mines and logging operations. In Poisoned Ground I explore the personal cost of such a controversy, as it tempts some residents with the promise of jobs or big payoffs for their land and threatens a way of life that others hold dear. Families are divided, neighbors become enemies, old grudges and bad memories rise to the surface again—and several people are murdered.
My story is fiction. But sometimes when I read the news I can easily imagine protest demonstrations and petitions turning violent as ordinary citizens try to hold back rampant development and keep what they thought was theirs.
*****
A big thanks to Sandra Parshall. She’ll give away a hardcover copy of Poisoned Ground to someone who contributes a comment on my blog this week. I’ll choose the winner from among those who comment by Friday at 6 p.m. ET. Delivery is available within the United States and Canada.
Did you like what you read? Learn about downloads, discounts, and special offers from Relevant History authors and Suzanne Adair. Subscribe to Suzanne’s free newsletter.
Terrie Farley Moran and Pam De Voe have won copies of A Ballad for Sallie by Judy Alter. Congrats to Terrie and Pam!
Thanks to Judy Alter for a look at the not-so-Wild West. Thanks, also, to everyone who visited and commented on Relevant History this week. Watch for another Relevant History post, coming soon.
#RelevantHistory Terrie Farley Moran + Pam De Voe are #winners of A BALLAD FOR SALLIE by @judyalter #histfic http://bit.ly/1ejRssH
Did you like what you read? Learn about downloads, discounts, and special offers from Relevant History authors and Suzanne Adair. Subscribe to Suzanne’s free newsletter.
Relevant History welcomes Judy Alter, who writes the Kelly O’Connell and the Blue Plate Café mystery series—but for many years she wrote historical fiction and nonfiction for adults and children, mostly about women in the American West. She is the winner of two Spur Awards from Western Writers of America, two Western Heritage (Wrangler) Awards from the National Cowboy Museum and Hall of Fame, and the Owen Wister Award for Lifetime Achievement from WWA, among other honors. These days Judy’s western works are categorized as western historical romance although that wasn’t her intent when she wrote them. For more information, check her blog, and look for her on Facebook, Twitter, and Goodreads.
*****
My career as a western writer began with a chapter in an anthology. When the women of Western Writers of American decided to put together an anthology about women who won the West, I volunteered to write about Georgia Arbuckle Fix, a pioneer woman physician on the prairies of western Nebraska.
Her life as a doctor was filled with adventure—she had to learn to “read” the prairie so she wouldn’t get lost in those vast open spaces. Once she was called to repair a hole in a young man’s skull—he had been hit by the spinning handle of a water bucket rope. Dr. Fix sewed a flattened half dollar over the hole, and that man was still riding in the rodeo parade when he was seventy-five. Another time she was called to a birth in a filthy house with five raggedy, hungry children and the father gone off somewhere. During the two days she spent cleaning the house and children, she found the father’s stash of liquor and poured it on the ground. Rumor is that nothing would ever grow in that spot.
All of this was fact, supported by articles about Dr. Fix in reputable sources, but it was great fodder for historical fiction. And I eventually turned it into a novel called Mattie, blissfully unaware that Mari Sandoz had written the same story in Miss Morissa. My career writing about women of the West was launched.
It was easy to avoid the western myth in that book because I had facts—and no cowboys and Indians. But in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, the western myth was born and fostered by such artists as Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell and novelists like Owen Wister, author of The Virginian, who created the image of the silent, strong, flawless cowboy, the eastern schoolteacher come West, the shootout, the uncivilized Indian, and other stereotypes. Eastern publications such as Leslie’s Illustrated, Harper’s Weekly, and Harper’s Monthly strengthened those stereotypes, and easterners saw an American Wild West that never existed. Eventually, in the early twentieth century, that mythic West showed up on movie screens.
For the novelist writing about the American West, separating fact from myth may be the greatest challenge. Writing about the realistic West requires research and the ability to resist the West of novels, paintings, and movies. I often found it both fascinating and more accurate to fictionalize the life of a real woman, and thus I wrote about Libby Custer, Jessie Benton Frémont, Etta Place of the Hole in the Wall Gang, and a cowgirl named Lucille Mulhall, though she became Cherokee Rose in my book.
The real lives of some women of the West were so fascinating they didn’t need the embellishment of the myth. Did you know, for instance, that General Custer delighted in quirting his wife’s horse until it bolted and ran off across the prairie with her clinging to its back? Or that Lucille Mulhall could rope multiple horses with one loop? Or that Etta Place rode on robberies with the gang, riding hard for days in the getaway?
For most women of the American West, in that time period life was hard, with physical labor from dawn to night—tending children, making a home in a sod hut, cooking over a fire fueled by prairie chips (buffalo droppings) and collecting those chips in a wheelbarrow. Their complexions were ruined by sun and wind, they lost too many children in infancy and youth, and they themselves died young. That is not the stuff of storytelling.
But there were and still are fascinating stories of women who lived with optimism and a certain freedom from restraint that their eastern sisters didn’t enjoy. Their stories should be told in fiction. Novelists need to explore the real women of the historical West or create their own characters who take advantage of the opportunities of the new land.
As recently as the early twenty-first century, publishers didn’t get the idea. Covers resorted to the mythic West—for instance, the original cover of Libbie shows her standing in a field of prairie grass beside a barbed wire fence—barbed wire had barely been introduced by the time Custer was killed. In the background was a stockade—when the text made clear forts were not fenced, let alone with sturdy logs in the treeless West. The cover of Sundance, Butch, and Me shows men robbing a train—nary a woman in sight. And the cover of Ballad for Sallie, a novel about a street orphan in Fort Worth, shows a man dismounting a horse while his gun blazes away.
Unfortunately the myth lives on. Only accurate research will counter its effects.
*****
A big thanks to Judy Alter. She’ll give away trade paperback copies of Ballad for Sallie to two people who contribute a comment on my blog this week. I’ll choose the winner from among those who comment by Friday at 6 p.m. ET. Delivery is available within the continental United States only.
Did you like what you read? Learn about downloads, discounts, and special offers from Relevant History authors and Suzanne Adair. Subscribe to Suzanne’s free newsletter.
Anna Castle has won a copy of Ten for Dying by Mary Reed. Congrats to Anna Castle!
Thanks to Mary Reed for the interesting look at spontaneous combustion. Thanks, also, to everyone who visited and commented on Relevant History this week. Watch for another Relevant History post, coming soon.
Did you like what you read? Learn about downloads, discounts, and special offers from Relevant History authors and Suzanne Adair. Subscribe to Suzanne’s free newsletter.
Relevant History welcomes back Mary Reed. She and Eric Mayer contributed several stories to mystery anthologies and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine prior to 1999’s One For Sorrow, the first novel about their protagonist John, Lord Chamberlain to Emperor Justinian I. Ten for Dying, the latest entry in a series Booklist Magazine named as one of its “Four Best Little Known Series,” will be published in March 2014 by Poisoned Pen Press. Find out more about the authors on their web site.
*****
As Two for Joy opens, our protagonist Lord Chamberlain John sees a remarkable sight during a thunderstorm in Constantinople: a stylite, one of those holy men who spend their lives perched atop a column, bursts into flames.
Argument about the cause of spontaneous human combustion has raged in scientific publications and the public prints for at least the past couple of centuries. In Familiar Letters On Chemistry, In its Relations To Physiology, Dietetics, Agriculture, Commerce, and Political Economy (1861), Justus Liebig observed with some irritation that a cause not understood is used to explain an occurrence also not understood, the theory being disease causes accumulation of combustible gas in cellular tissue which “when kindled by an external cause, by a flame, or by the electric spark, effects the combustion of the body.”
Another “electric spark” theory was earlier advanced by F. J. A. Strubel in an 1848 work, The Spontaneous Combustion of the Human Body, With Especial Reference to its Medico-legal Significance, which speculates if electricity is accumulated in the body and subsequently discharged, spontaneous combustion may occur.
J. G. Millingen’s Curiosities of Medical Experience (1839) covers several of the better known cases, among them a priest whereby circumstances “…would seem to warrant the conclusion that the electric fluid was the chief agent in the combustion.” Millingen mentions hydrogen gas, which one expert notes can develop in those who suffer certain diseases, with combustion resulting from a uniting of hydrogen and electricity, presumably meaning static electricity as sometimes occurs when we disrobe.
Tipplers beware!
A remarkable letter to the editor from one A. Booth of Colchester in the September 15, 1832 issue of The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction links drinking to spontaneous combustion via witchcraft.
Citing the 1744 case of Grace Pitt, an Ipswich fishmonger’s wife, Booth states Grace was said to be a witch, adding it was well-known witchcraft could only destroy certain parts of bodies and some members could be protected against such spells. That Grace’s hands and feet were not consumed when she caught fire was attributed by country people to just such a spell—did he mean dueling witches were involved? He further opines old ladies said to be witches were so-called from “…their excessive devotion to spirituous liquors, which…[in every case has] been found to predispose to spontaneous combustion…”
An unsigned article on Temperance and Teetotal Societies in the April 1853 issue of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine relates John Anderson, a carrier, was found burnt to death in a roadside field. He was last seen in an extremely intoxicated state smoking a pipe. It is conjectured a spark from his pipe ignited alcohol fumes from his drinking and thus combustion occurred.
A letter in the October 6, 1832 issue of the same magazine from W.A.R. of St Pancras, London, argues calling such cases spontaneous is incorrect, mentioning Pierre Aimee Laire’s Essay on Human Consumption from the Abuse of Spirituous Liquors, which states such cases occur when an imbibing individual’s breath came into contact with a flame. W.A.R’s theory is since Grace enjoyed an evening pipe and having lately consumed spirits, while lighting her pipe her breath caught fire and set fire to her spirit impregnated body.
The connection between death by burning and drinking, leading to carelessness with lamps and so forth, is so obvious it’s hardly worth mentioning, but what about someone known to eschew all spirituous liquors? The insinuation given is the victim was probably a secret tippler.
Used as defense in murder trial
In possibly the most inventive pleading heard in a criminal case, spontaneous combustion was advanced as causing the death of a countess in June 1847. A household servant eventually confessed to strangling her when discovered stealing her jewels, surrounding her with inflammable material, and setting it alight. Convicted of robbery, murder, and arson, he later obtained a free pardon—on condition he emigrated to America, according to Sabine Baring-Gould’s Historic Oddities and Strange Events (1889).
An anonymous article in the April 1861 issue of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine points out actual evidence of the phenomenon was not known because all cases occurred when the person was alone and therefore nobody could know what had happened. However, attempts to explain the phenomenon continue.
The debate continues
In 2012 Professor Brian J. Ford of Cambridge University suggested acetone as a feasible cause of spontaneous combustion. It seems under some conditions such as diabetes, alcoholism, certain diets, or teething, the body creates the highly inflammable substance. He reports acetone-soaked pork tissue was used to make scale models of humans that were dressed and set alight, being reduced to ashes within thirty minutes.
Another explanation was advanced by Dr Matthew Ponting of the University of Liverpool in a TV documentary last year. He investigated Tutankhamun’s mummification, and it appears those carrying out the process did not follow the correct procedure or else made a mistake. Examination of the pharaoh’s skin under a scanning electron microscope showed carbonization, thought to be the result of a combination of oxygen, the linen used in the process, and embalming oils. As a result, he said, Tutankhamun’s body appears to have “cooked” soon after it was mummified.
Moving from science and crime to spontaneous human combustion as a plot device, the best known instance is the fiery death of the tippler Krook, collector of rags, papers, etc., as described in Dickens’ Bleak House. Given our stylite was unlikely to be drinking spirituous liquors, we provided a different explanation for his terrible death in keeping with the limitations of the era.
*****
A big thanks to Mary Reed. She’ll give away a .pdf copy of Ten for Dying to someone who contributes a comment on my blog this week. I’ll choose the winner from among those who comment by Friday at 6 p.m. ET.
Did you like what you read? Learn about downloads, discounts, and special offers from Relevant History authors and Suzanne Adair. Subscribe to Suzanne’s free newsletter.
JJ Toner has won a copy of The Long Shadow by Loretta Proctor. Congrats to JJ Toner!
Thanks to Loretta Proctor for the sad story about Victorian artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Thanks, also, to everyone who visited and commented on Relevant History last week. Watch for another Relevant History post, coming soon.
Did you like what you read? Learn about downloads, discounts, and special offers from Relevant History authors and Suzanne Adair. Subscribe to Suzanne’s free newsletter.
Relevant History welcomes Loretta Proctor, who has always had a love of the art of the Pre-Raphaelite painters. This led to writing The Crimson Bed set in Victorian London, a story of two failed artists, partly based on the life and character of Rossetti. She began writing in the 1970s, had poems and articles published, winning a prize with a one-act play. She left writing to bring up a family and took up counseling work. After retiring to Malvern, UK she began to write again and has had four books published, one of which is to be translated into Greek this year. For more information, check her web site and blog, and look for her on Facebook.
*****
There is something about the art of Dante Gabriel Rosetti which captivates the viewer, drawing them into a magical world. His first paintings—small, intimate, intense—are filled with meaning and mystery, exuding a sense of enthralment, drawing us into an enigmatic archetypal land, long forgotten yet strangely familiar. His favourite subjects at that time were myths and heroic stories, in particular Le Morte d’Arthur and the poetry of Tennyson. These subjects haunted this romantic young man; tales of knights, troubadours and their ladies, ideals of pure, untainted love.
The Pre-Raphaelite Movement
Rossetti, Millais, and Holman Hunt began the movement which they named the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood intending to challenge the stultified, colourless art which abounded at the time in the Royal Academy in London. To have one’s paintings hung at that grand institution was the acme of every painter’s efforts; it meant prestige, acceptance and fame. With the fire and idealism of youth, these young men chose not to follow the trends of their time.
Their aim was to paint straight from nature, including every detail as they saw it. They wanted to return to the golden age of fresh, vibrant painting that existed before the art of Raphael. In order to achieve this luminosity in their work, the artists prepared their canvas with white paint and then slowly and painstakingly painted thin layers onto this so that the underlying white raised the colours and shone through. Their pictures appeared so radical at the time that the art world was horrified and they were mocked, derided and insulted.
A Knightly Love
The ideal of a pure love always fascinated Rossetti. Rossetti was a cultured, educated man whose father brought him up on the classics. He was named Gabriel Dante after the great philosopher and writer from Florence, Dante Alghieri, the writer of The Divine Comedy and the Inferno. Rossetti identified himself with his hero and altered his names, giving preference to Dante. The famous meeting of Dante Alghieri with young Beatrice Portinari on a bridge in Florence was to become something of a leitmotif for Rosetti’s own life and loves.
When Rossetti met his Beloved in the shape of Lizzie Siddal, he loved her with the passion of an Italian soul. Lizzie herself was a rather prim, cold looking, delicate, fragile being. Something in her stirred the heroic masculinity in Gabriel, the need to protect and adore. They met in 1849 and became engaged in 1851, but it was ten years from their first meeting and first flush of passionate love for one another before they eventually married.
It has often been questioned as to whether they became intimate sexually. We assume so with our modern minds because sex seems to be an obvious when two people are together. In the mid-Victorian times, engagements could be very long and often were not consummated sexually for fear of pregnancy and compromising a ‘decent’ woman. The couple was expected to remain chaste, a girl to be a virgin when she did eventually make it to the altar. There are many indications that their love was never really consummated until their marriage in 1860 when Lizzie fell pregnant quite quickly. It’s true, contraception was known in some form or other then, but everything in Rossetti’s nature tended toward a disinterest in sexuality. He never frequented the cigar divans like his friends and if he did, sat and smoked, simply looking on with a detached curiosity.
Rossetti’s Reluctant Marriage
Lizzie was a rather sickly woman who suffered from her nerves, scarcely helped by Rossetti’s reluctance to be tied down in marriage. Her reputation was already ‘lost’ through becoming an artist’s model, frequently alone with him in his studio. Eventually, Rossetti realised that he no longer loved his ‘Beatrice,’ that the ideal was unsustainable by the normal human soul. Lizzie also knew this, and there were frequent rows over frequent but unresolved promises that they would marry. Rossetti even borrowed £10 from Ford Madox Brown in order to marry Lizzie, but the money was somehow spent and the marriage never took place.
His friends simply couldn’t understand what he was up to. Lizzie was by now twenty-nine years old, penniless and more or less an invalid of her nerves, not a happy position for a woman in those days. Rossetti hadn’t the heart to cast her aside but wasn’t dishonest enough to marry without love. They were both deeply unhappy and it showed in many of his pictures. His muse still flowed, but they are melancholic statements of separation and parting.
Paintings depicting Sadness and Separation
Jan Marsh, in her brilliant biography of Rossetti, points out that this showed clearly in many of the paintings he executed at the time. One of the most striking is The Tune of Seven Towers where two lovers sit together apparently lost in music but both sunk in their thoughts, the companion beside the lady immensely sad. Across the lovers is a weird lance which seems to negate and separate the whole picture.
Rossetti and Lizzie parted eventually but Lizzie fell so ill that Gabriel, in a fit of guilt, rushed to her side and married her quietly on Friday April 13th, a peculiarly inauspicious date. There was little joy in it, and he became less and less seen at home. Lizzie suspected him of infidelity. This may or may not have been true but there is no doubt that his thoughts and love were no longer with her. In a fit of darkness and depression, she eventually took her own life. A sad ending to a great love but also a moral tale that human beings cannot sustain ideals but need to relate to their own humanity. Rossetti was incapable of doing this and lived his life in a slowly dissolving, slowly darkening dream filled with guilt and self-doubt.
*****
A big thanks to Loretta Proctor. She’ll give away a trade paperback or electronic copy of The Long Shadow to someone who contributes a comment on my blog this week. I’ll choose the winner from among those who comment by Friday at 6 p.m. ET. Delivery for the trade paperback is available within the UK only.
Did you like what you read? Learn about downloads, discounts, and special offers from Relevant History authors and Suzanne Adair. Subscribe to Suzanne’s free newsletter.
Lynn Demsky, Mary Ann, and M.E. Kemp have won copies of The Executioner’s Heir by Susanne Alleyn. Congrats to all!
Note: For a limited time, The Executioner’s Heir is available for only 99 cents. Look for it in Kindle format, or for other formats, use the code “YB49W” at Smashwords. Hurry. This offer expires within a few days!
Thanks to Susanne Alleyn for a look inside the souls of historical executioners. Thanks, also, to everyone who visited and commented on Relevant History this week. Watch for another Relevant History post, coming soon.
Did you like what you read? Learn about downloads, discounts, and special offers from Relevant History authors and Suzanne Adair. Subscribe to Suzanne’s free newsletter.
Read Part 1 of Susanne Alleyn’s post here.
*****
In the midst of the Terror in 1794, why, consumed by guilt, didn’t executioner Charles-Henri Sanson simply quit his job and honorably retire, as he did do a year later, well after the Terror had ended?
The easy answer was that, as he himself seemed to believe, he had grown hardened to horrors by decades in the profession—or that if he had given up his title, he would have found no other work or income elsewhere. And during the Terror, the revolutionary government found it all too convenient to “forget” to pay a civil servant who had no choice but to stay in his job. If Sanson had quit, he would have had neither a job nor any hopes of reclaiming his back pay.
But I felt that the answer was not that easy. The honorable and conscientious Charles Sanson I had come to know through his diary and through others’ opinions of him—the Charles Sanson whose obvious shame and self-loathing during the worst of the Terror was making him physically ill—would have been guided by something far more than a desire to recover his back wages.
I had already often considered these issues when I read British hangman Albert Pierrepoint’s autobiography and discovered statements in it that explained his own attitude toward his role in the twentieth-century British system of capital punishment. The British prided themselves on making judicial hanging a decorous, humane, quite painless procedure, streamlined to reduce the duration of the actual process—from condemned cell to noose and drop—to no more than twenty seconds. Pierrepoint took this swift process to its height, usually managing to trim the time down to eight or ten seconds while offering a reassuring word or two, if necessary, to the prisoner. To Pierrepoint, his hangman’s craft was about professional detachment and expertise, always “getting it right” and getting it over with quickly so that the victim didn’t suffer mentally or physically—and this attitude, he stated, was always combined with respect toward the victim, even after death.
Albert Pierrepoint, probably 1950s
“As the executioner,” Pierrepoint wrote, “it has fallen to me to make the last confrontation with all the condemned. . . . And it is at that moment, with their eyes on mine . . . that I have known that any previous emotional involvement I may have had with them [from reading about the criminal case in the newspapers] is to be regretted. There is only a final relationship which matters: in Christianity this is my brother or sister to whom something dreadful must be done, and I have tried always to be gentle with them, and to give them what dignity I could in their death.”
Later in his autobiography he added: “I have gone on record and been many times quoted with apparent irony as saying that my job was sacred to me. That sanctity must be most apparent at the hour of death. A condemned prisoner is entrusted to me, after decisions have been made which I cannot alter. He is a man, she is a woman, who, the Church says, still merits some mercy. The supreme mercy I can extend to them is to give them and sustain in them their dignity in dying and in death. The gentleness must remain.”
Pierrepoint’s views on his “craft”—which clearly became very important to him as a task he could perform swiftly and expertly every time—exactly represented how I thought Charles Sanson had managed to cope with his always distasteful and sometimes horrible duties. During the ancien régime when criminal justice was often subjective and brutal, and even during the Terror, he must have relied on maintaining the same professional detachment, mingled with compassion, toward the condemned as Albert Pierrepoint would exhibit a century and a half later. And I came to the conclusion that Sanson, in the end, remained in his position as public executioner throughout the Terror because he, just like Pierrepoint, felt it was his duty—not to the law but to the victims, and even more so if they were the victims of injustice.
Pierre-Antoine Demachy, Une exécution capitale, place de la Révolution, detail (1793). The master executioner, respectably dressed in a cutaway coat, knee breeches, and white stockings—presumably Charles Sanson, or one of his brothers, who sometimes filled in for him—is at far right on the scaffold.
Sanson could not save the men and women—whether guilty or innocent—whom he was ordered to execute by both royal and revolutionary authorities, any more than Pierrepoint, by refusing to carry out an execution, could have saved a prisoner sentenced to death for a murder he or she might not have committed. Sanson knew that if he resigned his title, another of France’s many professional executioners would have swiftly taken his coveted place, and that the newcomer might not have been as considerate as he toward the dying. And because he could not save the victims, he must have felt strongly that it was, at the very least, his lifelong duty to offer them some final kindnesses: to carry out any last wishes; to be sure that the guillotine always worked without a hitch; to ensure that his assistants always treated the condemned with respect; to keep their last hours or moments from being any more dreadful than they had to be.
“I see [the condemned prisoner] as a person who has a fixed and stony path decreed before him from which I cannot divert him, and therefore all I can do is to help him tread it as gently as possible.”
The words are Pierrepoint’s, but they could just as easily have been Charles Sanson’s.
*****
A big thanks to Susanne Alleyn. Remember, she’ll give away three electronic copies of The Executioner’s Heir to someone who contributes a comment on my blog this week. I’ll choose the winner from among those who comment by Saturday at 6 p.m. ET.
Did you like what you read? Learn about downloads, discounts, and special offers from Relevant History authors and Suzanne Adair. Subscribe to Suzanne’s free newsletter.
