When Form Meets Desire: The Transformation of the Early Nineteenth-Century Gallows Broadside

Abstract

Formerly a relatively stable genre, the format of the British gallows broadside underwent a transformation in the early half of the nineteenth century. A collision between external forces and the desires of a burgeoning working class manifested on the page as a veritable Frankenstein’s monster, stitched together within a “more is more” framework. My thesis explores this period of transition, beginning with the traditional ballad format of prior centuries before analyzing a hybrid prose/ballad broadside published around 1815. By 1825, a new mise en page emerges that minimizes the ballad in favor of assigning valuable real estate to sensational headlines, custom woodcuts, and detailed accountings of the events surrounding the crime, trial, and/or the execution itself. The tumultuous alterations mirror a similarly tumultuous alteration of the working classes via their forced exodus from the countryside to the city in search of work. The revised layout reveals influences from both the newspapers that were under assault from the “taxes on knowledge” as well as the increasingly popular (but expensive) novel and its preference for Gothic content. Compellingly, we also see the emergence of working-class resistance with doomed convicts brashly challenging the authority of the state. And all the while, profit-driven printers jumped at the opportunity to satiate the demands of their customers (in exchange for a mere penny or two). The gallows broadside thus mediates the social and economic transformations of nineteenth-century England, providing critical cultural insights on the plight of the working classes.