Molly Guinness

Ghoulishness, gawking and vile gratification

James Foley’s family has begged people not to share images of him being beheaded. The Met has warned that watching and disseminating the film of the murder could constitute an offence under terrorism laws. The Spectator of 1886 would have approved of the ISIS media blackout hashtag.

A General Order was issued last week to the Army in India, announcing that the Viceroy had been satisfied that the charges brought against Colonel Hooper, late Provost-Marshal at Mandelay, of photographing condemned criminals at the moment of execution, and of causing a prisoner to confess under threat of death, had been established, and that such conduct reflects discredit upon the British Army…The former offence is more one against good feeling and taste than against any more substantial principle; but it revolts so much against good feeling and taste, that we rather wonder that any officer of distinction should have sanctioned it. To extract its secrets from the anguish of death, so far as that is possible, and to extract them so that they may be recorded permanently, implies surely a sort of moral pruriency from which instinctive reverence naturally shrinks.

A deeply sarcastic article from one of the first few issues of the magazine took exception to ghoulishness of another sort. The notorious William Corder had just been tried for murdering a young woman, and the so-called Red Barn Murder had caught the public’s imagination. Corder had advertised for a wife, received dozens of replies, picked one and arranged a meeting. Maria Marten’s body was found much later at the rendez-vous and Corder was hanged. The papers followed every turn in story:

We hope the public feel the better for the fine lessons which its best possible instructors the Newspapers have extracted from the life, crimes, conversation, manners, habits, death, and dissection of Corder.

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