Frankenstein: Texts and Contexts

From Henry Mayhew's 'London Labour and the London Poor.'

This overview of British law in the second half of the 18th century appeared in the Manchester Review of Law, Crime and Ethics.

On legislative attempts to extend anatomical dissection, as a postmortem punishment, to crimes other than murder.

Sarah Tarlow examines the various uses to which the bodies of executed criminals were put: uses both practical and mystical.

On the ethical concerns surrounding the sale and display of human bodies and parts; in this case, the skull of a criminal hanged in 1813.

Contains segments on The Bloody Code and execution in 18th century England.

An online exhibition of digitized British crime broadsides collected from 1820-1840 in a scrapbook. Visitors may view more than 280 broadsides and newspaper articles from this collection.

A statistical analysis of the death penalty.

Gibbeting, or hanging the bodies of executed criminals in chains, was practiced from the Murder Act of 1752 until the Anatomy Act of 1832.

This popular publication recounted the crimes and executions of prisoners held at Newgate in London.

In this excerpt, taken from a publication of 1786, Lord Loughborough describes the effect that the sentence of dissection after death has had upon condemned criminals (vol. 3; pp. 180-181).

Searchable access to the criminal proceedings of London's central court.

Historian Peter Linebaugh's 1975 Ph.D. thesis. See chapter 13 (p. 569) on the spectacle and rituals of executions at Tyburn, and chapter 14 (p. 583) on the anatomical dissection of murderers in the 18th century.

A history of England's most notorious gallows.

Hogarth's famous engravings on the street education, cruelties, and punishment of a criminal in Georgian England.

An article on the once-popular belief that the touch of a hanged man could cure certain diseases and physical conditions.