Thus, though they escaped the hand of human justice (which seldom happens in such a case), yet the Invisible Hand found them out, even in this world. How true then it is, that He art about our path, and about our bed, and spiest out all our ways!
Evans, Printer, Long Lane.
THE LIFE, TRIAL, CHARACTER, AND CONFESSION
OF
The Man that was Hanged
IN FRONT OF NEWGATE, AND WHO
IS NOW ALIVE!
WITH FULL PARTICULARS OF THE RESUSCITATED.
“There are but two classes of persons in the world—those who are hanged, and those who are not hanged; and it has been my lot to belong to the former.”
There are few men, perhaps, who have not a hundred times in the course of their life, felt a curiosity to know what their sensations would be if they were compelled to lay life down. The very impossibility, in all ordinary cases, of obtaining any approach to this knowledge, is an incessant spur pressing on the fancy in its endeavours to arrive at it. Thus poets and painters have ever made the estate of a man condemned to die one of their favourite themes of comment or description. Footboys and prentices hang themselves almost every other day, conclusively—missing their arrangement for slipping the knot half way—out of a seeming instinct to try the secrets of that fate, which—less in jest than in earnest—they feel an inward monition may become their own. And thousand of men, in early life, are uneasy until they have mounted a breach, or fought a duel, merely because they wish to know, experimentally, that their nerves are capable of carrying them through that peculiar ordeal.
Now I am in a situation to speak from experience, upon that very interesting question—the sensations attendant upon a passage from life to death. I have been HANGED, and am ALIVE—perhaps there are no three other men at this moment, in Europe, who can make the same declaration.
Before this statement meets the public eye, I shall have quitted England for ever; therefore I have no advantage to gain from its publication. And, for the vanity of knowing, when I shall be a sojourner in a far country, that my name—for good or ill—is talked about in this,—such fame would scarcely do even my pride much good, when I dare not lay claim to its identity, But the cause which excites me to write is this—My greatest pleasure, through life, has been the perusal of any extraordinary narratives of fact. An account of a shipwreck in which hundreds have perished; of a plague which has depopulated towns or cities; anecdotes and inquiries connected with the regulations of prisons, hospitals, or lunatic receptacles; nay, the very police reports of a common newspaper—as relative to matters of reality, have always excited a degree of interest in my mind, which cannot be produced by the best-invented tale of fiction. Because I believe, therefore, that to persons of a temper like my own, the reading of that which I have to relate will afford very high gratification;—and because I know also, that what I describe can do mischief to no one, while it may prevent the symptoms and details of a very rare consummation from being lost; for these reasons I am desirous, as far as a very limited education will permit me, to write a plain history of the strange fortunes and miseries to which, during the last twelve months, I have been subjected.