Guides to the gallows
On Nov. 30, 1824, a London banker named Henry Fauntleroy was hanged in public outside Newgate Prison, one month after being sentenced to death for embezzlement. There were 100,000 onlookers. Many of those watching paid a penny each for a broadside printed just that morning. The single sheet describes Fauntleroy’s reaction when his appeal was denied. At the top of the broadside is a crude woodcut of a well-dressed man dangling from the gallows. The Harvard Law School Library owns a copy of that broadside, along with four others about Fauntleroy, including an account of his execution. They are among 500 such artifacts in “Dying Speeches & Bloody Murders,” a collection of what scholars now call crime broadsides. It is among the largest collections of its kind and the only one to be fully digitized. (That work was completed in 2007.) “It’s wonderful that people can sit anywhere in the world and look...