The Good Old Days? Our Ancestors Were Just As Messed Up, Drugged Up And Homicidal As Us

I was passing time in a shopping centre at the weekend when I had a look in a bookshop. I wasn't planning on buying anything but one book jumped out at me: The Encyclopaedia of Executions. I have a strange interest in morbid things like this. Among some of the more interesting books I remember reading over the years were The Fireside Book of Death, The Hangmans Tale – Memoirs of a Public Executioner, Gin – The Much-Lamented Death of Madam Geneva and The Real Oliver Twist.

The Encyclopaedia of Executions was just as good as I was expecting it to be. It gives a short one or two page biography of each person hung in Britain in the 20th century with the details of the case and some background history of the killer and the murder victim.

I'm reading the book chronologically and so far I'm only at 1903. The pattern so far is of men being executed for killing their wives or girlfriends and women being executed for killing children, their own and others. Most of the killings seem to have been the result of relationships going bad with money being the second motivating factor.

For example, take the case of George Place. He was a 28-year-old miner who found accommodation with Eliza Chetwynd in 1901. Eliza (60) had a daughter (20) of the same name. After some time George and the younger Eliza began to get close to each other and within a year they were living together as a couple.

Things changed between them after Eliza became pregnant and gave birth to a boy on August 13th, 1902. Eliza took out a Bastardy Order against George which was a form of child maintenance. George became angry at this and stormed out of the house on August 21st.

He returned to the house early in the morning of August 24th and went to the room where the two Elizas and the still unnamed baby were sleeping and shot all three of them dead.

There's very little in the above story that couldn’t have happened today. Except of course that there would be an outcry if a piece of legislation were called something so offensive as a Bastardy Order!

In the first four years of the 20th century, two men were executed for the abduction, rape and murder of children. Since the book only deals with cases where people were executed it's possible as far as I know that there were other child rape and murder cases in that time.

Gin – The Much Lamented Death of Madam Geneva is about the Gin Craze which struck London in the 18th century, causing devastation and misery at least the equal of that caused by heroin or any other drug in our own times.

There were the same dreadful consequences for the addicts who would kill or steal anyone or anything to raise the money for their drug. Gin "was implicated in the abuse of social security – gin-drinkers sold clothes given them by the parish 'and cheat . . . by all the ways and means they can devise to get money to spend in this destructive liquior, which generally ends in the husband’s being thrown into a jail, and his whole family on the parish.' Gin, the Committee reports, was 'one of the principal causes of the great increase of beggars and parish poor.'"

What interests me about books like this is that they tell me that things are no worse now than they ever were. It is tempting when we watch the news and see all the terrible things happening to think that these are problems of the modern age. The fact is that these types of terrible things always happened. In a way that thought comforts me.

In almost every way life is better now than it ever was at any time in the past. A way to test this is put forward in the Progress Paradox, How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse by Greg Easterbrook: Ask yourself, if you could travel back in time to any period of your choosing and live the rest of your life there as an ordinary person (not as a King or some other rich and privileged person) would you do it? Would you put aside your conveniences, your health care, your longer life span, your shorter working days, your plentiful food and your nicer clothes?