"Every Man Who Is Hanged Leaves a Poem": Criminal Poets in Victorian Street Ballads

Victorian trial and execution broadsheets included "copies of affecting verses" or "last lamentations," purported to be written by the criminals themselves, which linked the sentimental poet and the violent murderer. 2 Said to be "written from the depths of the condemned cell, with the condemned pen, ink, and paper" and discovered by the guards on the floor of the empty cell shortly before the execution, lamentation ballads sold as records of the convict's overflow of powerful feeling on the eve of death (Hindley, Life, p. 76). The notoriety of this publisher's trick led one Victorian commentator to proclaim, "Every man who is hanged leaves a poem" (cited in Shepard, John Pitts, p. 48). These ballads thus secured the persona of the criminal poet in hundreds of stylized laments by supplying the condemned criminal with sensibility and a poetic voice. As Foucault has argued, last lamentations posit the "lyrical position of the murderous subject"; they "[mark] the place--fictitious, of course--of a subject who both speaks and is murderous" (Foucault, p. 208).