more on bakhtin and public sphere - roberts 2004 aplicacion dialogismo

FROM POPULIST TO POLITICAL DIALOGUE

IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE

A Bakhtinian approach to understanding

a place for radical utterances in London,

1684�/1812

By drawing upon the insights of the Bakhtin Circle, this paper explores the extentto which the public sphere can open up possibilities for resistance to dominantsocial relations through ‘traces of meaning’. The author wishes to show how apublic space for execution in seventeenth and eighteenth century London opened upa place at different levels of abstraction for a popular plebeian public sphere toflourish. When this public sphere disappeared in 1783, it is shown how its tracesof meaning still survived in popular culture. These traces of meaning werere-combined through a royal crisis by more political labouring movements in theearly nineteenth century that, in the main, unintentionally re-accentuated thesame seventeenth- and eighteenth century-public space in London. By exploringthe changing form of this public sphere it is shown how a dominant discoursechanges over time and how this dominant discourse can be rendered in the words ofMikhail Bakhtin as ‘heteroglossic’ and refracted into modes of public resistance inspecific spaces. To demonstrate this, the ideological form of the public sphere inearly nineteenth century Britain is outlined and is then shown how it becamerefracted within the royal scandal which, in turn, came to be refracted within aspecific space in London.

Keywords public sphere; dialogue; the Bakhtin Circle; London;death; speech performances

Introduction

His procession to Tyburn , and his last Moments there, are all triumphant;attended with the Compassion of the meek and the tender-hearted, andwith the Applause, Admiration, and Envy of all the bold and hardened.

John Michael Roberts

Cultural Studies Vol. 18, No. 6 November 2004, pp. 884�/910ISSN 0950-2386 print/ISSN 1466-4348 online – 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/0950238042000306918

His Behaviour in his present Condition, not the Crimes, how atrocioussoever, which brought him to it are the Subject of Contemplation. And ifhe hath Sense enough to temper his Boldness with any Degree ofDecency, his Death is spoke of by many with Honour, by most with Pity,and by all with Approbation

So wrote the English magistrate and novelist, Henry Fielding, in 1751(Fielding 1988, p. 167). Fielding was describing a public display that hadbecome so etched within the fabric of London’s mixed culture that itspopulation were no longer traumatized by what they witnessed. Or rather,trauma had been translated into something more incredible. The place that sotransfixed Fielding’s gaze was Tyburn, situated in the royal park of Hyde Park,London, and a space known throughout the land where a person could meettheir maker. What was truly horrific about this particular space in London,however, was that one did not go voluntarily to Tyburn to inhale his or her lastbreath. A person did not enter its confines feeling content with life’s journey,now wishing nothing more than to simply and quietly pass over. This was notthe purpose of Tyburn. The purpose, rather, was to make death a shamefulevent. In the heart of a city whose veins had started to pump out commerce,money and profit throughout the world, this small and seemingly insignificantspace made an abiding impact upon those spellbound by what they saw.Tyburn was a place of public execution, an open-air extravaganza that seducedhundreds and thousands to turn up and watch their fellow city dwellers beingstrung up to dangle and dance by their necks.

Knowing this it would be reasonable to expect that Fielding, as amagistrate, would use every means at his disposal to enforce law and order.Yet, when reading the quote by him regarding Tyburn, one is lead somewhatto the opposite conclusion. The tone of his words is one of sadness, perhapseven exasperation. Not a sadness of the thought that human beings were beingpublicly murdered by a state that cannot bring itself to forgive the often-pettycrimes of those in need. No. Fielding’s sadness is one directed more at thebelief that Tyburn just did not work. If early modern public execution was, asFoucault (1975) maintains, deemed necessary by those in command to enactspectacular violence and so ensure the longevity of a recognizable sovereignpower, then Tyburn for Fielding had by the time he was writing long outlivedits usefulness. The problem, as Fielding saw it, was that Tyburn aroused notterror and fear in the populace of London, but rather sympathy andcompassion towards the condemned. Fielding’s dilemma was to work outhow this topsy-turvy logic had been borne.

So, what was special about Tyburn that opened up a public space to invertthe rule of law? During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, London wasslowly undergoing a changing identity. London was a unique place in the worldat this time because it was in the midst of transforming itself, consciously and

R A D I C A L U T T E R A N C E S 8 8 5

unconsciously, into a capitalist city. Based around both industry and trade,these new social relations came as a bewildering experience for many.Whereas in previous years, for example, it had been a customary right to takegoods from a workplace and use them as a monetary means of exchange toobtain other goods, by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries all of this wascoming to an end. Private property, embodied most exquisitely in the abstractrule of money, was gradually making in roads into people’s everyday lives. Totake goods from the workplace was now to steal somebody else’s privateproperty. If caught the penalty for such a crime was death. But like many sitesof public execution during the day, felons at Tyburn were legally allowed tomake ‘last dying speeches’. Situated within this particular place, however, lastdying speeches at Tyburn carried with them distinct ideological accents.Reports of last dying speeches, embodied in cheap pamphlets and written byapologists of the powerful, certainly sought to justify the ideology of adeveloping capitalist state. Yet, the speech performance of felons to theTyburn crowd frequently used the public spectacle of their last dying speechesto resist this textual ideology. Condemned they may have been, but silent theywere not. Utterances sometimes spilled from their mouths that spoke outagainst the ideological reasons for their punishment. A topsy-turvy logic mayhave been present within the Tyburn, but such logic was based within apopulist rationality that brought with it a sense of fortitude. Sympathy andcompassion for the condemned meant in equal measure from many in theTyburn crowd contempt and disdain towards new ways of living. Thus, duringthis period Tyburn internalized the changing relationship between emergingcapitalist forms of law, crime and the public sphere in a particularly acutemanner.

Fielding recognized the opportunities that this theatre of oppositionrepresented, and he along with others advocated more sedate and privatespaces to execute people, away from the prying eyes of ‘subaltern’ publicspheres. But while Fielding and his like got their way, this is not the end of thestory. The lost identity of spaces can haunt the present and words once utteredcan give credence to future actions. These traces relate to an otherness thatescape confinement within a past experience and come to be embedded withinthe present (cf. Derrida 1988). Even so, traces can never be reproduced intheir past completeness. After all, all we see are traces passed from onegeneration to the next and, like a game of Chinese whispers, their meaning istransformed. This mediation of traces can nevertheless regenerate a particularspace, imbue it with another identity, and present a new generation with apublic sphere with which to articulate their own grievances.

Such is the story of the space that was once Tyburn. For while it is truethat Tyburn had disappeared by 1783, its traces came to be refracted into aroyal scandal in early nineteenth century Britain. The scandal at hand was thedisastrous marriage between King George IV and his wife, Queen Caroline.

8 8 6 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

The royal scandal is interesting in a cultural sense to the extent that it becameembedded in popular and radical working class public opinion. Working classradicals supported Caroline because the royal scandal opened up a publicsphere in British society that enabled a set of popular radical utterances to bearticulated. Thus, when Caroline finally died in 1821 her funeral processionbecame a symbolic rallying point for radical sentiment. Passing through thepublic space where Tyburn once resided, namely the small corner in HydePark, the themes of ‘death’ associated with the funeral procession connectedup with the meaning of death associated with Tyburn.

In this article, I want to explore in some detail the changing meanings andthemes of this public space, or, more specifically, public sphere, in Londonduring these periods. But to make the case for some theoretical originality inwhat I will attempt to carry out here I need to make two preliminary points.First, it is certainly true to say that public sphere theorists have been concernedto show how ‘subaltern groups’ articulate their interests within particularpublic spaces. Yet, there has been less concern to show how ‘traces ofmeaning’ articulated by past ‘subaltern’ dialogue can be re-combined bydifferent social groups in different historical times to develop new themes ofresistance in the same public sphere. In other words, little attention has beengiven to over to explaining the qualitative identity of a public sphere basedupon distinctive meanings that are relatively autonomous of individuals butwhich can nevertheless be re-combined into new unique themes in the future.Second, it is my belief that much public sphere theory is hampered by aconceptual weakness. On the one hand public sphere theorists often constructa transcendental normative account of public dialogue which is then simplyimposed on concrete examples of the public sphere ‘in action’, so to speak (seeHabermas 1999). On the other hand public sphere theorists often construct aconcrete account of public dialogue that avoids abstract normative explanationin favour of concepts and categories that can explore the ‘day-to-day’utterances evident within particular public spheres (see Bohman 1996; forother perspectives, see Calhoun 1992, Hill & Montag 2000, Crossley &Roberts 2004). In both cases, insufficient attention is paid to the complexmediations of the public sphere at various levels of abstraction as these levelsreflect and refract the historical and ideological totality of a specific set of socialrelations like capitalist social relations.

In this paper, I want to explore these two missing links in public spheretheory in relation to Tyburn hanging tree and the royal scandal surroundingQueen Caroline. Theoretically speaking, my guide in undertaking this task willbe the dialogic theory of the Bakhtin Circle, in particular the social theoristsMikhail Bakhtin, Pavel Medvedev and Valentin Voloshinov. As I have explainedat much length elsewhere (see Roberts 2003, 2004), the Bakhtin Circle isuseful in this respect because they represent an attempt to explore howdialogue is mediated at different levels of abstraction through different


contradictory ‘accents’ in both space and time. Thus, while the Bakhtin Circleinsist that dialogue is always situated in real concrete and everyday spaces, theyalso argue that dialogue is overdetermined at various levels through specifichistorical forms of social mediation. These processes give a word a uniqueideological form that is both unique to the place in which it is uttered andunique to the historical processes that have also given it life. To say more aboutthe usefulness of the Bakhtin Circle’s insights here, the next section expandsupon some of their main ideas.

Abstraction, dialogue and the sound of speech: towards aBakhtinian theory of the public sphere

In Marxism and the Philosophy of Language , Voloshinov (1973, p. 71) takes totask those theorists who explore language through a system of ‘normativelyidentical forms’ which are seen to mediated through the everyday creativity ofindividual speakers. According to Voloshinov, this approach constructs whatmight be termed as a ‘chaotic abstraction’ (see Marx 1973, p. 100 ff.) thatleaves us with a one-sided picture of dialogue. In the case of ‘creativeindividuality’ utterances are viewed as a purely individual act, ‘the expressionof an individual consciousness, its ambitions, intentions, creative impulses, andso on’ (Voloshinov 1973, p. 84). In the case of an abstract language system,utterances are divorced from their ‘verbal and actual context and standingopen not to any possible sort of active response but to passive understanding’on the part of the theorist (Voloshinov 1973, p. 73).

In The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship , Bakhtin and Medvedev (1991)argue for an alternative method of abstraction. They say:

It is necessary to be able to isolate the object of study and correctlyestablish its boundaries in such a way that these boundaries do not severthe object from vital connections with other objects, connections withoutwhich it becomes unintelligible. The setting of boundaries must bedialectical and flexible. It cannot be based on the crude external data ofthe isolated object.

(Bakhtin and Medvedev 1991, p. 77)

Elsewhere in The Formal Method , Bakhtin and Medvedev (1991, p. 14) insistthat these ‘vital connections’ are internally connected, or overdetermined,through the totality of contradictory social relations of which an object is aspecific concrete moment. Yet Bakhtin and Medvedev also maintain that it ispossible to detect a determining contradiction, at a high level of abstraction,that shapes and bestows a certain form upon other social relations at lowerlevels of abstraction. This determining contradiction relates to the form that


labouring activity assumes through socio-economic relations that, in turn, reactupon other social forms of life and vice versa (see Bakhtin and Medvedev 1991,p. 3; see also Voloshinov 1973, p. 17ff.). A simple example to illustrate thispoint would be to say that at a high level of abstraction the concrete totality ofcapitalism is determined by the capital-labour relation. This relation is basedupon the contradiction of labour’s freedom from ownership and control of themeans of production and freedom to sell labour power to whoever willpurchase it. As the determinative contradiction of capitalism free labour powernot only assumes specific forms at lower levels of abstraction, but it alsogenerates specific ‘non-economic’ capitalist forms of life at different levels ofabstraction (e.g. the capitalist state, capitalist forms of knowledge, thecapitalist public sphere, etc.). While these social forms enjoy their own uniquecontradictory identity they do so by internalizing the more abstractdeterminative contradictions of capitalism (for a further discussion, seeRoberts 2001, 2003 and Taiwo 1996).

That the Bakhtin Circle endorse this dialectical method can seen by theirrejection of a ‘mechanical causality’ that lowers social life to a simple one-to-onerelationship with the socio-economic base. On the contrary, the Bakhtin Circleargue that each social form is a historical and unified contradictory whole in itsown right that nevertheless refracts (internalizes) the contradictory determina-tions of socio-economic relations (Voloshinov 1973, p. 23, Bakhtin 1981, p. 326,Bakhtin and Medvedev 1991, p. 16ff.). ‘Therefore any explanation mustpreserve all the qualitative differences between interacting domains and must traceall the various stages through which change travels’ (Voloshinov 1973, p. 18).Changes within socio-economic relations and changes in the form and content ofan object is a mediated process that involves many social forms. The foregoingdiscussion of refraction is summarized by Bakhtin and Medvedev through fourmoments of abstraction.

. Isolate a material object within its empirical conditions of existence(Bakhtin and Medvedev 1991, p. 7).

. Abstract the mediations of the form and content of this empirical object atvarious levels through the determining contradiction(s) evident withinsocio-economic relations. Thus, the ideological specificity of contradictionsand determinations are known through determining contradictionsembedded within socio-economic relations (Bakhtin and Medvedev1991, pp. 3�/4). An empirical object of investigation therefore exists asa contradictory refraction (internalization) of wider determinations.

. Understand how an object exists in a wider social field within which itshares a number of common elements with other concrete objects. Eachsocial field necessarily provides a means of ideologically mediating anobject in respect to (1) the characteristic form and content of organizedideological material and (2) the characteristic form and content of socialdiscourse by which this meaning is realized (Bakhtin and Medvedev 1991,


p. 9). For example, the material object of a novel is mediated through thesocial field of literature, the latter of which has its own ‘literary discourse’.

. Analyse how different forms of ‘social relations’ interact with the object inquestion and its related social field. Here we discover a constant process ofdialectical regeneration, contradiction and conflict between different socialforms (see Bakhtin and Medvedev 1991, p. 14). For example, literature ismediated through the print media, the public sphere, ‘literary taste’, andso on.

Contradiction is a key component of the Bakhtin Circle’s dialogic method. Thisis the idea that two opposing views exist in the same utterance as a necessaryand essential mode of dialogue within a particular context. At the same time, asingle utterance is a relatively autonomous ideological unit that has beenmediated and structured through ‘differently orientated accents’ at variouslevels of abstraction (Voloshinov 1973). That is to say, utterances areconstructed through the sedimented and ideological expression of pastinteraction between a community of speakers located in a temporal andspatial context. These utterances have a particular meaning that is dislodgedfrom a dialogical context to be transformed into ‘public property’ to theextent that past accents can be appropriated by a new community of speakersand ‘re-accented’ to gain new themes within a present social context. Dialogue,therefore, carries with it a series of ‘traces of meaning’ from the past that canbe re-combined in the present in the guise of themes. Traces of meaningthereby signify what Ricoeur (1988) terms as both a ‘mark’ and a ‘passage’.The former, a mark, relates to the visible expression of the past in the presentand its ‘thing-like’ substance in the ‘here and now’. In relation to the publicsphere, a mark might include a pamphlet or a book. The latter, a passage,relates to the idea that ‘something passed this way’ �/ ‘something didsomething’ (Ricoeur 1988, p. 119). Again, in relation to the public sphere, apassage might include stories, narratives and folk tales about a particular eventthat evoke certain emotions. Dialogue around traces of meaning can thenbecome re-accented during the present in order to provide new sites ofthematic struggle.

However, the Bakhtin Circle also argue that meanings and themes aremediated through specific speech performances and speech genres evidentwithin a specific social context. Speech performances are those ‘typical’ actions‘of identifying oneself and of identifying one’s position in society, and so on’(Voloshinov 1973, pp. 19�/20) within a social context. Speech genres arethose ‘typical form of utterance’ embedded within ‘a certain typical kind ofexpression’ (Bakhtin 1986, p. 87; see also Voloshinov 1973, p. 20). Speechperformance and speech genre express social hierarchies between individualsin a particular social context. This being the case, the combination of allof these dialogic forms will produce expressive words based within intona-tions that produce socially meaningful sounds directed at particular audiences.


‘Freedom’, for example, is transformed into an ‘expressive exclamatoryutterance’ that has a specific meaning and ‘sound’ that is socially organizedwithin the confines of capitalism. This ‘sound’ is directed at particular‘audiences’ (labour or capitalists) and thus intrinsically expresses a social andhierarchical relationship depending upon who is uttering the word and who itis uttered to (see Bakhtin and Medvedev 1978, p. 102).

If a particular social group wishes to gain hegemony it must therefore seekto ‘to impart a supraclass, eternal character to the ideological sign, toextinguish or drive inward the struggle between social value judgements whichoccurs in it, to make the sign uniaccentual’ (Voloshinov 1973, p. 23). It is thisability of a dominant group to render dialogue ‘uniaccentual’ that the BakhtinCircle refer to as ‘monologic’ discourse. According to Bakhtin, monologicdialogue must always work within the confines of ‘heteroglossic’ utterances ofsubordinate groups (see Bakhtin 1981, p. 291). The constant confrontationbetween monologic and heteroglossic dialogue opens up gaps for subordinategroups to publicly question the ideological themes embedded within particularwords. Such dialogue arrives in its most potent form during times of crisis(Voloshinov 1973, p. 24). At this moment, dialogue is transformed intodialogism . Often confused with dialogue, dialogism signifies the BakhtinCircle’s attempt to show how everyday dialogue can be pieced together in amanner that renders precise its social, historical and ideological nature.Accordingly Hirschkop (1992, p. 109) claims that dialogism ‘provides aninsight into language which is not immediately available’. In the rest of thepaper, I apply these theoretical remarks to explore the ideological themesentrenched within the public sphere at Hyde Park, London during the period1684�/1812. As indicated in the introduction I begin by abstracting theempirical object of Hyde Park and Tyburn hanging tree.

London, Hyde Park, Tyburn: a public sphere for ‘last dyingspeeches’

Abstraction 1: Hyde Park and Tyburn

During the completion of the Doomsday Book, Hyde Park was known as theManor of Eia and was divided into three manors: Hyde, Elbury and Neate. InAD 960, Geoffrey de Mandeville gave the Manor of Eia to the Monks ofWestminster as a gift. They held it until 1537 when an Act of Parliamentconferred the Manor to Henry VIII for hunting (Ashton 1896, pp. 2�/9). By1645, the Puritans had banished Royalist military spectacles in Hyde Park(Williams 1978). By closing Hyde Park, Cromwell could transform this grandgarden into a major line of communication and defence by establishing amilitary fort within its grounds (Braybrooke 1959, Smith & Kelsey 1997).


The Restoration of 1660 was believed by some sections of society thatthe monarchy brought with it a restoration of stability and law the aftermathof the civil war (Mooers 1991). Suffuse with an array of Royal symbolicimages, the consolidation of the Crown was accompanied by the opening ofHyde Park. Once more Hyde Park became a place for royal benefaction,pageantry and hegemony (Dancy 1937, p. 48). Those who favoured theRestoration were delighted at the King’s decision to go ‘public’ in Hyde Park.John Evelyn wrote in his Diary on 1 May 1661 that Hyde Park was witness tothe enjoyable spectacle of ‘his Majesty and an innumerable appearance ofgallants and rich coaches, being now a time of universal festivity and joy’ (citedin Williams 1978, p. 69). These public displays were themselves inscribedwith the potency of a more abstract bourgeois civility in the eighteenthcentury. London witnessed a rapid succession of ‘pleasure gardens’ where thewell-to-do could walk within green public spaces, stop to listen to orchestras,enjoy newly erected statues and rest and eat (Brewer 1997, p. 65). However,many of these ‘civil’ public spheres were themselves embedded within‘uncivil’ practices. In the case of Hyde Park, civility was entwined withincriminality in the appearance of Tyburn hanging tree.

Established with any certainty in the early twelfth century (see Marks1910), Tyburn was located in the northeast corner of Hyde Park. Like manyplaces of public execution, crucial to the spectacle of Tyburn was the right ofthe condemned to make a ‘last dying speech’. First entering English cultureduring the early reign of Henry VII, the ‘last dying speech’ was justified as ameans to make each felon publicly castigate their recklessness andsimultaneously reinforce an ideological adherence to an increasingly unifiednational state (Sharpe 1985). At Tyburn, this ‘sound’ of death wasencapsulated in two interconnected material forms. The first was theproduction by the prison chaplain, the Ordinary of Newgate, of the famousbroadsheet Accounts which documented the ‘behaviour’, ‘confession’ and‘dying words’ of felons at Newgate prison before they were lead away to be‘launched into eternity’. Enjoying one of the widest circulation of printingprose in the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century, the Accounts soldinto their thousands (see also Linebaugh 1977). The second was the materialform of actual hanging day itself. Here the felon, while standing on the hangingplatform, would often use the performative spectacle surrounding publicexecution as an opportunity to speak out against the government andauthorities of the day. In order to understand the themes of both materialforms I concentrate in the first instance upon the literary public sphere of theAccounts . I then return to the performance of Tyburn after I have shown howthe Accounts were mediated through more complex levels of abstraction.

As the seventeenth century was coming to an end, the range of conductconsidered ‘immoral’ was rapidly changing. During this period, the vastnumber of ‘petty’ crimes for which a person might hang at Tyburn were those


which were once deemed customary rights such as ‘clipping’ �/ the popularterm for altering coins to change their monetary value. In December 1684, forexample, a Daniel D’Coisnon was executed at Tyburn for this practice.D’Coisnon was ‘a French Gentleman’ who revolved around clipping but alsoselling coins at under their value (The Ordinary of Newgate 1684a). Interestingly,the Ordinary comments upon D’Coisnon’s ‘character’. Apparently D’Coisnonhad told the Ordinary that he had been persuaded by ‘a Gentleman who was atutor to a person of quality’ to start a school for languages. On this adviceD’Coisnon established himself as a ‘Master of the Language to a YoungNobleman of this Kingdom at Oxford ’. However, D’Coisnon soon fell into ‘badcompany’ and gained considerable debts through various ventures. His schoolclosed down and he took to ‘the art of guilding’. D’Coisnon had grownacquainted with several clippers, some of whom ‘had been notorious Highway-men’, and embarked on the counterfeiting trade himself. D’Coisnon claimedthat although he did engage in clipping, ‘he never abused his Art to theImbasement of his Majesties Coin, or the Counterfeiting any Guineys as he wasAccused of’. To this the Ordinary replied that ‘he [the Ordinary] could give noCredit to this Denial . . . and thereupon acquainted him with the greatness ofhis Crime, how greatly the same was detrimental to all Trade in general, andmore particularly made High-Treason by the Laws of England ’. During his lastdying speech at Tyburn, according to the Ordinary, D’Coisnon attempted torepent for his crime. His desire was that ‘all good People to avoid those Snaresthat attend them in evill and loose Company; whereby they are drawn fromtheir employments and so become liable to the Temptations of Sathan, whoalwayes watches his advantage over such as mispend their precious hours in Sinand Vanity’ (The Ordinary of Newgate 1684b).

Here then we see how the Ordinary constructed a monologic discourse ofD’Coisnon’s downfall into a cesspool of immorality on three thematic levels.First, the Ordinary associated clipping with ‘sinning’ against trade andemployment. To engage in this sinful activity was not only ‘evil’ but was alsoto entertain ‘loose company’. Second, the Ordinary’s dialogue implies that themoral downfall of criminals was an individual act and that no account should betaken of the social circumstances that might have moved the felon to take partin criminal activity. If a prisoner had fallen into ‘loose company’ then it wastheir own choice that they had done so. Indeed, the Ordinary often suggestedthat criminal acts occurred after the felon had left lawful employment. In Maythe following year, for example, a James Latchford was condemned to hang forstealing. The Ordinary was at pains to point out that Latchford was given theopportunity of employment as a weaver by his father. Yet Latchford wasdiverted into ‘ill Company’ and became addicted to ‘Gaming and Swearing’.The Ordinary noted that Latchford had willingly confessed that this was hisown wrong-doing which was made all the worse for failing to ‘Pray that Godwould guard him from Temptation to Sin’ (The Ordinary of Newgate 1685).


Third, the example of D’Coisnon highlights an association betweenmorality, being a gentleman, crimes against trade and the time of death. Byclipping coins D’Coisnon had relinquished his gentlemanly status which, theOrdinary implied, could only be regained in death. Here the thematic dialogueof the Ordinary situates death within a temporally empty ‘eternity’ separate tothat of life. Once dead, a person existed in an unalterable state. So thateternity could be meaningful memory served as a mechanism for repentanceand thereby to grant value to eternity. Conduct in the present life therebybecame the means of gaining absolution. The personal value gained throughdeath was based upon the understanding that God was the ultimate regulator oflife because He existed outside of the everyday constraints of time and space.Many social commentators reinforced this image. For example, Defoe gloriedin the knowledge that ‘God Himself . . . existed before all Being, Time, orPlace’ (cited in Alkon 1979, p. 92). Thus, D’Coisnon’s memory of his crimeopened up a space for public repentance and for a chance to gain eternalcivility through the ultimate sacrifice. In the next section, I begin to analysethis new civilized dialogue by focusing upon more complex levels ofabstraction.

Abstraction 2: socio-economic relations in late seventeenth and eighteenth centuryLondon

Unlike other European countries (on which see Mooers 1991), the rise ofcapitalism in England first emerged in the countryside. With the break up oflarge demesnes, the increasing financial power of sections of the peasantry andan easing of legal restrictions on copyholds, a new class of yeomenconsolidated their economic power through a round of land enclosures(McNally 1988, p. 2 ff.). By the sixteenth century, a large number of poorerpeasants found themselves dispossessed of their land. An indigenous ruralproletariat was beginning to appear which had to sell its labour power in orderto survive. The relative autonomy of the economy through the following yearswould propel many to argue that trade should be allowed to ‘find its ownlevel’ (Hay 1999, p. 147).

During the late-seventeenth century and mid-eighteenth century, wagelabour in London had been bolstered through both industry and, moreimportantly, a growing market trading in textiles, spices, gunpowder, tobacco,calico, indigo and the like (Weinstein 1996, p. 31; see also George 1966,p. 16). The growth of secondary and tertiary employment (e.g. contractors,clerks, public bodies and charitable institutions) as well as a growth inconsumption (Wrigley 1967, pp. 60�/61) along with vast immigration helpedto treble London’s eighteenth century population from 200,000 to 600,000making it the hub of all sorts of leisure and consumption pursuits (Chalkin1980, p. 51, Porter 1990, p. 39). As a result distinctive ‘class cultures’ were


more readily identifiable in London than was the case in other areas of Britain(Rude 1971, Harris 1989). This is not to suggest that London was the home ofsimple and clear-cut divisions between social classes. But it is to suggest thatthe discursive construction of distinct social classes, like the word ‘middleclass’, was frequently used as a means to identify and represent social groups(Wahrman 1991). In order to understand how these divisions came to berefracted into ‘non-economic’ social forms, we need to move to another levelof abstraction. Of special importance for the task at hand is the establishmentof the bourgeois legal form and the public sphere.

Abstraction 3: the refraction of the bourgeois legal form and public sphere

During this period, law was being transformed into ‘a power with its ownclaims, higher than those of prosecutor, lawyers and even the great scarlet-robed assize judge himself’ (Hay 1975, p. 33; see also Beattie 1986). Nowherewas this truer than in the case of punishment. Increasingly characterized as ajuridical relationship, punishment was constructed as a public legal codethrough legal documents, legal statements and texts like the Accounts . Thiscode was embedded in a new socially constructed criminalization by whichfelons were treated as ‘voluntary criminals’ (Marx 1988, p. 896). Implicit inthis type of criminal moral subjectivism was the monologic idea that felonsreceive a ‘fair and equal opportunity’ with which to alter their behaviour. Ifthey failed to take this opportunity, it was through their own fecklessness thatthey did so. Thus in the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-centurycriminal behaviour started to be refracted through discourses about ‘civilized’moral behaviour. Those who transgressed civilized behaviour were thoseassociated with ‘loose, unsupervised living . . . (and a) festering disrespect forthose in higher station’ (Cornish and Clark 1989, p. 546).

This new ‘public-private’ distinction encouraged the development of self-regulatory public spheres, like public parks, for the imposition of the ‘civilizedlegal form’. Even so, the morality underpinning these public spheres was itselfdialogic. Money was increasingly assuming an abstract and universal form ofcirculating commodities. By acquiring this abstract power in one’s wallet, onecould gain access to a range of luxury goods flowing through the streets ofLondon and elsewhere. While nobody wished to permanently stop the surge inthese goods, there was a concern by some that conspicuous consumption wasleading to the moral corrosion of the population. A peculiarly ‘aesthetic’solution was discovered to this predicament. If one was to consume luxurygoods then they should do so through refined manners, customs and habits(McNally 1988, pp. 158�/161). At the heart of this aesthetic was the idea ofjoining ‘beauty with productivity and profit’ (Wood 1991, p. 111) for thegood of society, principally by cultivating ‘landscapes pleasing to the eye’through one’s industrious efforts. Those who were the most vocal champions


of this vision came from a patrician class who had retreated to their estates tolive off the income from tenants, commerce and taxation (see Thompson1974).

Vocal in their tastes they may have been, the patrician class did not have itall their own way. Also during this period, a new bourgeois dialogue wasemerging around an urban elite who had made money through state holdingrather than from agriculture. The key utterance for this class was one of‘politeness’. To be polite was a sign that one was both virtuous and free.‘Polite people’, as Klein (1989) notes, eschewed an independent, frugal andpublic-minded standpoint for one that was ‘sociable, conversible, urbane,decorous, and, in their own way, virtuous . . . ’ (Klein 1989, pp. 586�/7). Thethird earl of Shaftesbury, for example, trained himself in the traits of‘gentleman-like’ characteristics that would then be displayed in public settings.Politeness, according to Shaftesbury, was based upon an ‘amicable collision’ offriendly interaction between people of good taste. Liberty bred politenessbecause it implied the freedom to develop one’s rhetorical sensibilities. Andthe socially diverse nature of London made the capital the centre of politepublic civility (see La Volpa 1992, pp. 110�/11, Munck 2000, p. 66). In thenext sub-section, I return to Tyburn in order to understand how last dyingspeeches were refracted by the mediations of the social processes identifiedabove. In particular, I argue that a public sphere opened up around the ‘sound’and speech performances of Tyburn that transformed a space within Hyde Parkinto a heteroglossic public sphere that enabled populist radical utterances to beheard. The heteroglossic form of these sounds and performances inverted themonologic themes associated with both refinement and politeness.

Abstraction 4: returning to the dialogic form of last dying speeches

Tyburn represented one of those rare occasions in the seventeenth andeighteenth century for the new social classes to mix, where social distinctionsno longer carried precedent, where the rich heard and felt the moralclaims of the labouring classes (McLynn 1991, pp. 266�/7). But unlike themonologic form of death inscribed within the Accounts , the material practiceassociated with scaffold culture was not embedded within the ‘eternal time’ ofa civilized dead body. Death at Tyburn was rather associated with populistthemes surrounding time and death. For example, the body of a felon bothbefore and after death was believed to possess special healing powers. Suchpowers signified for friends, relatives and other onlookers the chance to liveagain. If the dead body could be captured from the clutches of the medicalprofession it had the power to embellish life with value (Gatrell 1994, pp. 82�/

3). Many of those watching a public hanging believed that one’s ‘goodcharacter’ was a collective sign in the ‘here and now’ that continued afterdeath.


This heteroglossic theme was bound up with wider populist thematicforms concerning time. Certainly it is true to say that rioters in London oftenused calendar events like royal anniversaries or ‘free time’ during the workingday like lunch-hours to make their voices heard publicly (Rogers 1978,Harrison 1986). But Tyburn was temporally unique in the sense that it was aregular event throughout the year. This meant that Tyburn transgressed yearlyepisodes associated with calendar and work time. Declared a public holiday,executions were simultaneously declared leisure time �/ time away from workand time for the possible reassertion of plebeian culture (see Hatcher 1998,pp. 79�/80). These contradictory processes opened up a gap for the dialogicperformance of an alternative aesthetic theme of ‘honour’ by the condemned.As we have seen, Henry Fielding was dismayed that the public spectacle ofexecution itself enabled criminals to be judged honourable. But more than this,because Fielding saw that the main cause of this re-appropriation lay in thetemporal framework of Tyburn. Frequent public executions enabled theTyburn crowd to reinvest the spectacle of Tyburn with a new meaning.Realizing this, Fielding sighed: ‘This Effect in Time becomes a Cause; andgreatly increases that very Evil from which it first arose’ (Fielding 1988,p. 168).

Honourable death at Tyburn meant that criminals would often conductparodic dialogue with the crowd so that the solemnity of the occasion wasmomentarily turned around (Gatrell 1994, pp. 32�/3). And once standingupon the platform many ‘damned the government and the regime’ forsentencing them to death for crimes once deemed customary rights (McLynn1991, p. 268; see also Szechi 1988, Laqueur 1989, Lake and Questier 1996).Thus, the aesthetic of the ‘cultivated mob’ gained a populist public voice thatwas neither ‘refined’ nor ‘polite’. Instead, dialogue was frequently fuelled byanger and resentment at a new form of legal regulation that, in the eyes of theTyburn crowd, constructed innocent customary practices as being illegal.Dialogue at Tyburn was thus transformed into dialogism and this opened up aspace for those watching to invert the performative spectacle of hanging.Mandeville (1964) was particularly upset by the carnival sounds he heard atTyburn. In 1725, he wrote:

(W)hat is most shocking to a thinking Man, is, the Behaviour of theCondemn’d, whom (for the greatest Part) you’ll find, either drinkingmadly, or uttering the vilest Ribaldry, and jeering others, that are lessimpenitent.

(Mandeville 1964, p. 19)

What disturbed Mandeville is the blurring of the boundary we see herebetween respectable and intolerable and audience and performer. This blurringreached a crescendo through the body and heteroglossic sound of the crowd.


Consisting of ‘Trollops, all in Rags’ and ‘Whores and Rogues of the meanerSort’, the sound of the crowd became enmeshed in ‘Oaths and vileExpressions, with Wishes of Damnation at every other Word’ (Mandeville1964, p. 22). The loudest laughter was reserved for the sight of ‘a good suit ofCloaths spoiled by this Piece of Gallantry, is the tip-top of their Diversion,which they seldom go home without enjoying’ (Mandeville 1964, p. 22). Thelaughter of the Tyburn crowd was of the type frowned upon by the moreprivate humour of the polite and civil. As Chesterfield said of raucous laughterin 1748: ‘It is the mirth of the mob, who are very pleased with silly things; fortrue wit or good sense never excited a laugh’ (cited in Brewer 1997, p. 103).

Due in part to this alternative public aesthetic that refused to separatecivility from law, elite sentiments finally conceded to the opinion that if publicdisplays of pain were not effective then remedies had to be sought in theprivate sphere of the prison (McGowan 1987). As I demonstrate in the nextsection, however, such was the dialogism and localized legitimation crisisembedded within public execution at Hyde Park that the traces of meaning ofdying speeches ensured that a radical public sphere at Hyde Park could beinvested with new themes.

The transformation of the public sphere at Hyde Park

Abstraction 1: traces of the meaning of Hyde Park as a public sphere

Tyburn had left its trace of meaning at Hyde Park and within British societymore generally. The ‘mark’ of Tyburn related to the rich popular cultureencapsulated in those nineteenth century public spheres of ballads, pamphlets,books, plays and music-hall performances which celebrated the exploits ofTyburn criminals (cf. Gatrell 1994, pp. 144�/8). The ‘passage’ of Tyburnrevolved around the hanging tree as an emotionally charged form of platformpolitics. In an era when plebeian protest often assumed the guise of morallyconstructed though infrequent and sporadic riots (Dickinson 1994), Tyburndisclosed a regular type of plebeian politics and foreshadowed moreconventional working class public meetings and political rallies. After all,during the eighteenth century, platform politics was often known as scaffoldpolitics (Jephson 1968, vol. 1, p. xx.). The traces of meaning associated withTyburn had effectively transformed Hyde Park into a populist public sphere forprotest. And yet Hyde Park was not, explicitly, a political public sphere. Inspite of everything, the space within which Tyburn dwelt had no organizedpolitical group to direct the flow of anger against the state. All of this was tochange on 7 August 1821. On this day Queen Caroline, wife to George IV,died.

Caroline had made it clear that she wished to be buried in her nativeBrunswick. The government was concerned that the City would make the


funeral procession into a pageant. Sensing trouble the government decided torush the corpse abroad on 14 August. The press, however, publicized protestsagainst the government for their handling of the funeral. Even so, thegovernment went along with the plans it had set, keeping the proposed routesecret until the night before the 14th (Prothero 1979, p. 147). The queen’sbody was laid at rest at Brandenburgh House. Crowds had already gatheredthere early in the morning of the funeral procession. Crowds had also gatheredat Hyde Park Corner. The vast amount of people effectively barricaded theprocession’s intended route. Missiles were launched at the Life Guards who bynow accompanied the procession. Eventually the procession took an alternativeroute through Hyde Park. At this point, a riot erupted. Life Guards respondedby lashing out with their sabres while others fired shots. Two men in thecrowd were killed. Foots Guards soon arrived and the Riot Act was promptlyread. The procession finally managed to leave Hyde Park (Prothero 1979,pp. 150�/1). This riot is interesting to the extent that the traces of meaningattached to Tyburn were re-combined at Hyde Park so as to develop newpolitical themes, performances and sounds. However, in order to understandthis transformation it is important to abstract the socio-economic relations inBritain during this period along with the changing form of the public sphere.

Abstraction 2: socio-economic relations

As Britain entered the nineteenth century, employers slowly began to achievehigh levels of productivity by getting large numbers of workers into industry(Belchem 1990, p. 9) thereby paving the way for the destruction of corporatistand paternalist institutions by, amongst other things, imposing the standardizedwage form (Clarke 1988, pp. 156�/61). While this was a somewhat unevenand protracted process, it is nevertheless true to say that work was shiftingfrom the home to the factory ensuring that labour owned only its own labour-power (Hobsbawn 1968, p. 43). Thus, Britain had a sizeable number of peoplewho now gained their living through a wage. This is not to suggest that wagestook an exclusive monetary form (many were paid in kind in the form of cideror grain for example) (Schwarz 1992, p. 167). Nevertheless, the reality ofcapitalist production was becoming increasingly apparent in many localities.Workers were now paid only for work actually carried out. In manyindustries, the result was to intensify labour (Rule 1986, p. 107 ff.). This neweconomic form was refracted in its own unique way into the early nineteenthcentury public sphere.

Abstraction 3: the changing public sphere

By the time the nineteenth century arrived, a more clearly defined middle classwas emerging (see Harris 1989, Wahrman 1991). Indeed, changing socialconditions invigorated sections of the middle class to organize themselves


politically against the notorious ‘Old Corruption’ of the patrician class, themost notable example being the London Corresponding Society (LCS) (seeBelchem 1996, p. 21). However, it would be wrong in two respects to believethat what might be termed as ‘the middle class’ represented a homogenousgroup. First, the emergence of groups like the LCS created tension and conflictwith more established elite political groups. This reached a crescendo on 18December 1795 when the government passed the Treasonable Practices andSeditious Meetings Acts (the so-called ‘Gagging Acts’). Amongst other things,the first Act stipulated that written or spoken words could be defined astreason. The second Act prohibited the holding of meetings of more than fiftypersons without the permission of local magistrates (Hone 1982, p. 11). Thus,the Acts represented the monologic material by which the state sought tocurtail the sound of nascent middle class radical utterances.

Second, the aspirations of the newly emerging middle class did create, inmany ways, an ‘inner dialectical’ relationship with emerging working-classpublic spheres. Many middle-class radicals, most notably Sir Frances Burdettand Thomas Spence, sought to articulate ideas for an equal order by takingseriously populist beliefs (Dinwiddy 1980, Thompson 1984, Claeys 1987).The radicalism that middle-class public spheres represented therefore assumeda new generic and performative dimension as it became entangled in a growingworking-class culture. In many respects, it was through the adoption of middleclass forms that the lower orders began incorporating their right claims intomore overtly political demands. Election rituals, for example, wouldsometimes involve thousands of people accompanying a candidate in anelaborate procession. Such grand displays encouraged voters and non-votersalike to treat their superiors with little more than disdain. The lower orderscould articulate their own sounds through heckles, interruptions and insultsto those who governed (see Storch 1982, O’Gorman 1992). The use ofpetitions also grew steadily between 1778 and 1830, while the expansion ofnewspapers was equally impressive. The radical agitator Cobbett claimed tohave sold 44,000 for the first edition of the Political Register in 1816 (Cannon1981, p. 110).

Parliament was certainly aware of the radical intent of labouring publicspheres. In 1817, for example, the Lords’ Committee reported that the leadersof the ‘labouring class’

address the multitude in terms of unprecedented licence and violence,amounting even in some instances to an open declaration that, in thecase of non-compliance with their Petitions, the Sovereign will haveforfeited his claims to their allegiance. These proceedings are subse-quently printed and circulated, and thus become a fresh vehicle forsedition and treason.

(Parliamentary Debates 1817, vol. 35, p. 416)


Such was the impact of these alternative public spheres that one famousmiddle-class radical, the independent landowner Henry Hunt, consciouslysought to establish links with them. By so doing, he drew upon themes inspeech genres embedded within the monologic discourse of elite politicalparties, but imbued them with a heteroglossic meaning. For example, Huntespoused a constitutional idiom mediated through a nationalist discourse. Yet,Hunt capitalized upon the inner dialectical quality of growing nationalistfeeling by portraying the radical platform as the true heir to constitutionalfreedom and the rule of law. In effect, the radical platform sought tore-articulate meaningful traces of a legal history based upon struggles againstabsolutism, struggles that had become enshrined in the Magna Carta, HabeasCorpus, Bill of Rights and the Act of Settlement (Belchem 1978, 1981, Colley1986). These heteroglossic themes came to be reinforced at radical publicspheres through material objects such as the cap of liberty. Arriving in Englandin 1688 as part of William of Orange’s campaign of liberation, the cap ofliberty came to represent sympathy for the traces of the Jacobin cause. Atradical meetings, the cap of liberty signified the endeavour to control publicspace by opening up the right of public assembly, freedom of expression andpopular sovereignty (Epstein 1989).

After the death of eleven people by the yeomanry at a radical meetingattended by Hunt at St Peter’s Fields in Manchester on 9 August 1819, theTory government took the lead and asserted its monologic authority onceagain. On 29 November 1819 the notorious ‘Six Acts’ were passed thatincluded an Act for the more effective prevention of seditious meetings and anAct to subject certain publications to the duties and stamps upon newspapers(see Jephson 1968, vol. 2, pp. 503�/4). Be this at it may, radical leadersmanaged to circumvent the Six Acts by using utterances and traces embodiedin other public spheres to articulate their own agenda. One of the most potentmaterial expressions for this was the royal scandal between Queen Carolineand George VI.

Abstraction 4: the dialogic form of Queen Caroline, death and Hyde Park

When Queen Caroline arrived in London to claim her proper rights as queenconsort in London on 7 June 1820, her route was blocked with well wishersand supporters. Sensing popular support, she courted the radical leaders of thecapital (Plumb 1956, McCord 1991). In the same year, the Cabinet issued adivorce through a Bill of Pains and Penalties in the House of Lords. Designedboth to dissolve the royal marriage and to deprive the Queen of her rights andprivileges as queen consort, the Bill became the hub of political factionfighting. Intimate details of the trial were constantly communicated to acountry willing to engage in public discussion about the whole affair. Inparticular, news of the King’s many affairs during his marriage helped to win


public sympathy for Caroline’s cause (Fulford 1967). The governmentminister, Charles Cavendish Fulke Greville, viewed this excitable sound andintonation with some anxiety:

The discussion of the Queen’s business is now become an intolerablenuisance in society. No other subject is ever talked of. It is a great evilwhen a single subject of interest takes possession of society; conversationloses all its lightness and variety, and every drawing-room is convertedinto an arena of political disputation. People even go to talk about it fromhabit long after the interest it excited has ceased.

(Greville 1875, p. 26)

For radicals the trial was a moment to wax lyrical about the injustice of OldCorruption and a moment to universalize such injustice to the wholepopulation. George IV was perceived by many as a somewhat indulgent andextravagant monarch who sat at the head of an austere Tory government.Resentment from the labouring poor and middle class towards the monarchymeant that writers no longer felt the inhibitions that had constrained theirforebears when writing about the king (see, for example, Cannon 1981).Themes surrounding the royal scandal had become politicized (Laqueur 1982,p. 434).

The unique geography of London meant that the relationship between eliteand plebeian sentiments were more complex and diverse than was the caseelsewhere. Members of the plebeian class would sometimes join the consciouseffort of the government in engulfing members of the royal family in nationalspectacles (Colley 1984, pp. 94�/124). At other times they would defendmiddle-class radicals who had been taken to court for High Treason (Belchem1990, pp. 67�/8). Dialogue about the royal family was saturated with bothheteroglossic and monologic moments. Yet, it was the intensity of thepublicness between both that produced fault lines of ambiguity between them.Indeed, it was at this line of ambiguity that Cobbett sought to disentangle theheteroglossic from the monologic themes of the royal scandal by claiming thatthe plight of the Queen was the plight of the people. He wrote in the PoliticalRegister on 29 July 1820:

But, the fact is, that the Queen’s cause naturally allies itself with that of theRadicals. They are complainants , and so is the Queen. They have had andhave their dungeonings; and the Queen has her prosecution. They arethreatened and her Majesty has been threatened. They have had theirpetitions rejected, so has the Queen her’s . . .(cited in Calhoun 1982, p. 110; see also Stevenson 1977, Clark 1990)

Cobbett was certainly justified in his belief that the Queen’s plight had a greateffect upon popular culture and upon the public sphere. Sounds of alternative


renditions of the national anthem could be heard from the streets criticizingthe King and praising the queen. These were encapsulated in material forms.For example, George IV’s reign more commemorative pottery was made insupport of the queen than the king (Cannadine 1993, pp. 114�/20). Between1815 and 1820, a growing number of caricatures from respected quarters likeThe Times mocked the Prince Regent for his many love affairs and ignominiousbehaviour (Hunt 1991). With opposition from so many public spheres, theCabinet decided to stop divorce proceedings and drop the Bill. Nonetheless,such was the heteroglossic nature of the radical public sphere surrounding theroyal scandal that when Caroline eventually died on 7 August 1821, radicalutterances became even louder. Of special importance in this regard was theability of radicals to construct a ‘chain of utterances’ about the meaning ofdeath, most notably the death of Caroline and the death of working people.

The traces of Tyburn’s meanings had meant that reformers like Mandevillewanted death to be less a theatre of opposition and more a means of‘improving’ the psychology of individuals. These traces were re-combined andgiven a more coherent form by humanitarian reformers in the early nineteenthcentury. Arriving at the conclusion that public execution was not only brutalbut also hardened the indifference by the crowd towards punishment,reformers believed that sympathy from onlookers should allow one to inquireinto one’s own emotions whilst providing a base to understand the emotions ofanother (McGowan 1986). This individualist ethos pervading state executionwas refracted into the ever more commodified status of the dead body. By1821, bodysnatching was fast approaching the status of a commercial trade.For example, market terminology was being applied to the transaction inhuman corpses within medical circles. With the decline in public executionsand fearful of punishment and riot, surgeons would pay bodysnatchers, or‘resurrectionists’, for fresh bodies. The dead body could now be privatelyowned (Richardson 1988, p. 57, p. 72).

The commodity status of the dead body, reinforced by the fact thatexhumation from particular burial grounds was not seen to constitute theft,meant that corpses buried in consecrated ground were protected byecclesiastical law, a recognized legal precedent as early as 1644. Bodiesfrom poorer families, however, were buried in non-consecrated ground anddeclared nullius in bonis �/ the property of nobody (Skegg 1975, Smith 1976).Cobbett attacked this loophole in the legal status of the dead body when hewrote in 1822:

To steal the body of a sheep, or pig, or calf, or ox, or fowl of any sort, isa capital felony, punished with DEATH; and . . . to receive any suchbody, or to have it in your possession, knowing it to be stolen, is also afelony, punished with TRANSPORTATION.

(cited in Richardson 1988, pp. 58�/9)


Cobbett reflected the anxieties and fears of many. Abused by bodysnatchers,the sanctity of the grave gave way to the circulation of money. Withoutrecourse to legal rights, the poor had to act communally to protect their dead(Richardson 1988, p. 83).

Set within this context the reaction to the death of Caroline seems lessproblematic. In many ways, the response of the crowd can be seen asemblematic of a response to their own dead. The Caroline affair had become arallying point for the body of a popular culture ever subject to the valorizationof capital. The funeral momentarily captured an animosity to the increasingcommodification of labour, particularly the commodification of the body, andengendered a protest of sorts against the changing forms of law associated withpunishment by death. By empowering the rioters in this way the funeral also,though unintentionally, enabled a set of rights to be articulated which attackedthe role of the state in legitimizing the commodification of life and death. Atthe same time, such hostility connected up with the moral space already carvedout by Tyburn. The Tyburn riots against the medical profession, where friendsand relatives of the hanged would fight with anatomists and dissectionists forthe dead body, had formed a precedent for the articulation of the rights of thedeceased body of the lower orders. By 1821, death became a more potentpolitical theme because the right of the corpse was fast becoming a politicalissue in a climate of growing working class politics. Consequently, the riotaround the Queen’s dead body folded into Hyde Park and momentarilytransformed this royal park into a more political public sphere.

Conclusion

The aim of this paper has been to chart the changing accents, meanings andthemes of a public sphere at various levels of abstraction. The ‘meta-trace’ thatconnects all of these levels relates to the determinative contradictoryrelationship of the capitalist mode of production that is reproduced intospecific contradictory social forms. But within this ‘meta-trace’ is the‘refracted trace’ of the space of Hyde Park. Thus, as we have seen, therioters of 1821 built upon the multiaccentual nature of the royal scandal, butdid so by both refracting the scandal through early nineteenth capitalist socialrelations and by refracting the scandal through the traces of meaning associatedwith the nascent capitalist form of Tyburn. By so doing, the rioters achievedtwo important tasks. First, they redefined the public sphere at Hyde Park forsocial protest by translating that specific ideological place into a morepolitically pronounced public sphere. Second, the rioters articulated a set ofrights that temporarily challenged the rational legitimacy and monologic natureof the state. After the final hanging at Tyburn in 1783, the state hoped thatthemes of resistance surrounding death would be forgotten. However, these


traces came to be appropriated by early nineteenth century radical politicalgroups and re-accentuated into new meanings. Thus, the death of a queen wasfundamental to the changing form of this particular public sphere. Deathmomentarily brought together diverse interests of the lower orders andenabled the temporary establishment of solidarity between them. The sign‘speech’, as embodied in ‘last dying speeches’, was now politically accented.The space in Hyde Park and sign of ‘speech’ was to be appropriated once againby radical political groups throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries(see Roberts 2000) and would eventually be re-combined into the sign ‘freespeech’ and the name Speakers’ Corner; a space, moreover, whose identitytoday revolves around being the most well known place in Britain to practice apopulist form of free speech. But that is another story.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the comments by the external referees. The usual disclaimersapply.

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