The Death Penalty in Dickens and Derrida: The Last Sentence of the Law by Jeremy Tambling (review)

Reviewed by: The Death Penalty in Dickens and Derrida: The Last Sentence of the Law by Jeremy Tambling Carolyn Vellenga Berman (bio) Jeremy Tambling. The Death Penalty in Dickens and Derrida: The Last Sentence of the Law. Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. Pp. xv + 203. 115. 00; £85. 00. ISBN 978-1-350-35455-5 (hb). Jeremy Tambling's suggestive study places Charles Dickens's writings on public execution in conversation with Jacques Derrida's reflections during the war on terror at the turn of the millennium. It takes as its point of departure Dickens's extended grappling with the question of capital punishment in six long letters to the Daily News in 1846, treating this body of work as a counterpart to Derrida's seminars on the death penalty in 2001, published posthumously in three volumes. This pairing allows Tambling to reopen the schematic story told by Foucault in Discipline and Punish about the end of spectacular public hangings in nineteenth-century France (and Britain), asking: What is wrong with the death penalty? How does it shape criminality? What are the impediments to abolishing it? And how does literature intervene in – or illuminate – these debates? The result is neither a Derrida-inflected reading of Dickens, as in Bove, nor an offbeat comparison of two unrelated figures, as in Hornby. Instead, the book proceeds like a seminar, first considering one writer (Dickens) and then another (Derrida) as an advocate against the death penalty. As Tambling explains in a preface, the book continues a conversation begun with Derrida after a lecture on capital punishment, shortly after the 9/11 attacks in the United States (xii) ; it builds on the author's own previous studies of Dickens, violence and the state, Kafka, and Foucault. Derrida, interestingly, never mentioned Dickens, though he analyzed the works of End Page 408 related English-language writers from Shakespeare to Edgar Allan Poe, along with French contemporaries like Victor Hugo, a well-known critic of capital punishment (19). This book thus begins by implicitly introducing Dickens's writing on capital punishment to a ghost reader: Jacques Derrida. The bipartite structure of the book seems to echo – or be shadowed by – A Tale of Two Cities. The first part, "Dickens – and the Eighteenth Century, " examines the hundred years "from 1764, when Beccaria published his abolitionist treatise Dei delitti e delle pene (Of Crimes and Punishments), to 1868, when Britain moved hanging to the inside of jails" (4). This frames a key question for Tambling: how advocates against the death penalty in Dickens's time accepted the compromise of merely moving it indoors. Tambling begins with Dickens's powerful letters to the Daily News, reading them carefully along with his other public and private writings, including his response to witnessing the hanging of Frederick and Maria Manning in 1849 (41). He stresses the particular history of execution in England, e. g. , the village of Tyburn functioning as the "main theatre" for London executions until 1783 (27). This history proves fertile ground for uncovering the subtexts in a wide range of Dickens novels. The next two chapters unfold a cluster of contexts for Dickens's writings about capital punishment. Tambling finds "the very spirit of Dickens's letters" in the novelist and magistrate Henry Fielding's 1751 Enquiry into the Late Increase of Robbers (53). Though Fielding supported capital punishment, he stressed its failures of deterrence, regretting "the little Force which such Examples have on the Minds of the Populace" (qtd. 53). "The Thief who is hanged today hath learned … from the Example of his hanged Predecessors, " he observed, and "no good Mind can avoid compassionating a Set of Wretches, who are put to Death we know not why, unless, as it almost appears, to make a Holiday for, and to entertain the Mob" (qtd. 51). Tambling similarly traces the significant influence on Dickens of William Hogarth's visual depictions and William Godwin's novel Caleb Williams. The final chapter in this section turns to Barnaby Rudge, Dickens's novel of the Gordon Riots of 1780, with its depiction of the hangman, criminals and mob. Tambling finds "one of the best testimonies to the need for abolition, and to Dickens as an. . .