James and John: A True Story of Prejudice and Murder by Chris Bryant - Hanged for the unmentionable crime of sodomy

On November 5th, 1835, a young journalist named Charles Dickens filed a report for London’s Monthly Magazine. The terrifying scene was the city’s dankly medieval Newgate prison, and Dickens was visiting this fearful place for a sight of James Pratt and John Smith, who were due to be executed imminently for the “unnatural crime” of sodomy, a vice so unmentionable it could never be formally named in the judicial records.

“The light fell full upon him,” Dickens wrote of one of the men, “and communicated to his pale, haggard face, and disordered hair, an appearance which, at this distance, was ghastly.” Dickens could not tell James from John, and this note of anonymity – of identity stripped from a quaking human frame – speaks volumes. For by this point in the process, both prisoners were beyond hope: their sentences would not be commuted – and the two men were hanged just a few weeks later, on November 27th.

Fifty-six men were executed for the crime of sodomy in England in the opening decades of the 19th century. James and John would be the last to go to the gallows, and so are remembered as legal and cultural curiosities. But lives amount to more than academic footnotes. To be sure, Naomi Wolf recently drew wider attention to contemporary societal attitudes to homosexual acts – but not in any useful way: she misinterpreted the sources, claiming wrongly to have discovered that “several dozen” executions of gay men took place in England after 1835. Thankfully, Chris Bryant does a rather better job of assessing source material, with this book upending the rules of silence and shame so as to bring the case, the lives bound up with it, and the society, politics and culture that enabled the executions, to startling and vibrant life. In particular, he locates James and John against the widest possible context, introducing their places of birth, their families, jobs, and personalities – and in so doing, he works against the flattening effects of notoriety.

This is a vibrant and honourable retelling of early 19th-century gay history. Bryant simply and clearly underscores the essential humanity of James and John – and in so doing emphasises our common dignity in the face of overwhelming and anonymizing systems of power and governance.