Bernard Mandeville - An Enquiry into the Causes of the Frequent Executions at Tyburn (1725)

Richard C. Boys, University of Michigan
Earl R. Miner, University of California, Los Angeles
Maximillian E. Novak, University of California, Los Angeles
Lawrence Clark Powell, Wm. Andrews Clark Memorial Library

John Butt, University of Edinburgh
James L. Clifford, Columbia University
Ralph Cohen, University of California, Los Angeles
Vinton A. Dearing, University of California, Los Angeles
Arthur Friedman, University of Chicago
Louis A. Landa, Princeton University
Samuel H. Monk, University of Minnesota
Everett T. Moore, University of California, Los Angeles
James Sutherland, University College, London
H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., University of California, Los Angeles

Edna C. Davis, Clark Memorial Library

The Enquiry into the Causes of the Frequent Executions at Tyburn was originally published as a series of letters to the British Journal. The first letter appeared on February 27, 1725;

The timeliness of Mandeville's pamphlet extends, of course, beyond its interest in Jonathan Wild, who after all receives comparatively little of Mandeville's attention. The spectacle of Tyburn itself and the civil and moral failures it represented was one which Londoners could scarcely ignore and which for some provided a morbid fascination. Mandeville's vivid description of the condemned criminal in Newgate, his journey to Tyburn, and his "turning off," must have been strikingly forceful to his contemporaries, who knew all too well the accuracy of his description.

"Tyburn Fair" was a holiday. Apprentices deserted their posts, pickpockets, dram-dealers and other free-lance caterers, prostitutes, grub-street elegiasts armed with dying speeches or commemorative verses, went to theirs, to swell the enormous and unruly holiday mob, a mob given a certain tone by the presence of the respectable or aristocratic curious (Boswell says "I must confess that I myself am never absent from a public execution") who came in their coaches or even rode along with the condemned in his cart. The mob at Tyburn reached enormous proportions. Thirty thousand people witnessed an execution in 1776; eighty thousand an execution in Moorfields in 1767. Richardson, in Familiar Letters on Important Occasions (Letter CLX) refers to the "pressure of the mob, which is prodigious, nay, almost incredible."

When such popular madness was climaxed by the generally unrepentant criminal's drunken bravado (Richardson's criminals "grew most shamefully daring and wanton.... They swore, laugh'd and talked obscenely"), serious-minded men rightly wondered what valid end the execution of the law served. And of course it was not merely that the criminal died unrepentant or that the spectators remained unedified and undeterred. The scene at Tyburn also reflected society's failure to utilize a significant portion of its "most useful members," a failure disturbing to the dominant mercantile attitude of the time which valued "the bodies of men" as potential sources of wealth (Mandeville's concern with the usefulness of the lower class is obvious throughout the first part of the Fable of the Bees and in the Essay on Charity, and Charity-schools).

Mandeville's subject, then, was one familiar to his readers and one whose importance they recognized. His attitude toward his subject was for the most part a thoroughly conventional one. For instance, his primary assumption that the penal code must be harsh since its function is to deter, not to reclaim, pervades eighteenth-century thought on the subject and is clearly reflected in the number of offences carrying the death penalty (160 when Blackstone wrote; 220 in the early nineteenth century). Its logical culmination may be found in arguments such as George Ollyffe presented in 1731. Ollyffe, noting that the frequency of the death penalty was not deterring criminals, suggests that more horrible forms of punishment be devised, such as breaking on the wheel, "by which the Criminals run through ten thousand thousand of the most exquisite Agonies ... during the unconceivable Torture of their bruised, broken, and disjointed Limbs," or "twisting a little Cord hard about their Arms or Legs," which would produce the "keenest Anguish." Ollyffe's public-spirited ingenuity should be a warning to modern readers who assume that Mandeville's attitude is unusually harsh and unfeeling.

Most of Mandeville's specific proposals too may be paralleled in the many pamphlets of the time concerned with the criminal and the lower class. To point out some of the similarities between Mandeville's and Fielding's proposals (which he states most fully in An Enquiry into the late Increase of Robbers, 1751) is not to posit direct influence but to suggest the uniformity of opinion on these matters during many years. Both Mandeville and Fielding argue for closer control over receivers of stolen goods, against advertising in the paper to recover stolen goods, against the false compassion of the tender-hearted who fail to prosecute or of juries which fail to convict the guilty, against the indiscriminate imprisonment of young with old, hardened criminals with first offenders, men with women, and against frequent pardons. They agree in demanding that the condemned should meet his death, soberly, shortly after his conviction.

Mandeville's suggestion that the bodies of the executed be turned over to surgeons for dissection is not to be found in Fielding's pamphlet. It does, however, become a part of the "Act for preventing the horrid Crime of Murder" (25 Geo. II. c. 37), an act for which Fielding is often given credit. This suggestion, and that in Chapter VI to trade felons into slavery (which as far as I know is Mandeville's own), clearly stem from the impulse to increase the deterrent power of the law by making it more terrible.

What distinguishes Mandeville's pamphlet (in addition to the characteristically hard-headed bluntness of its author) is a quality present in one degree or another in all his work: an exuberant delight in creating scene. Throughout the Fable of the Bees, for example, but especially in the first part, the argument is punctuated by vivid scenes in which an idea is acted out or illustrated. Invariably these scenes have a merit and interest beyond that owing to their function in the argument. They are lively, vivid, picturesque, humorous or touching in their own right. The reader can scarcely doubt that Mandeville enjoyed composing themhe admits as much in the Preface to the Enquiry when he acknowledges, in defending the "lowness" of his subject, the "Pleasure there is in imitating Nature in what Shape soever."

The gusto and vitality of the description of the events at Tyburn well illustrate Mandeville's art. He puts us on the scene, lets us see and hear the various actors, gives us telling detail: a bully rolling in the mire; a putrified wig; a drunken old woman on a bulk; refuse flying through the air; trollops in rags; a gin seller "squeez'd up in a corner"; carcasses of dogs and cats. The scene is filled with objects and has movement as well: the mob is a torrent which "bursts through the gate," a "floating multitude." There is "jostling," "kicking dirt," "rolling"; peddlers "stir about," and one who has "ventured in the Middle of the Current" is "fluctuating in the irregular Stream." The air is filled with "oaths and vile expressions," and "loud laughter"; a peddler "tears his Throat with crying his commodity." Mandeville orders his scene spatially and chronologically, and he enforces its vividness by relating the action in the present tense. Its basic unity, however, is owing to the evaluation and control provided by the various tones of the narrator's voice, which is alternately scornful and disgusted ("abandoned Rakehells") and almost playfully ironic ("he is the prettiest Fellow among them who is the least shock'd at Nastiness"; "their darling Cordial, the grand Preservative of Sloth, Jeneva").