When
we speak of the “criminal classes” we ordinarily include college faculties only
by way of metaphor, but the erudite malefactor is by no means missing from the
annals of crime.
One
of Dr. Johnson’s frequently quoted—and perhaps yet more frequently misquoted—aphorisms is this: “Depend
upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it
concentrates his mind wonderfully”*. It was not merely a theoretical speculation, but arose
from Johnson’s empirical experience of counseling his fawning admirer, the
Reverend Doctor William Dodd, who was convicted of forgery and hanged at Tyburn
on June 27, 1777.
Dodd
(born 1729) rose from modest origins to become a very successful society
preacher in London. He was known
as the “Macaroni Parson”—the word macaroni
here having its old meaning (as in the early American song “Yankee Doodle
Dandy”) of ostentatious foppishness of manner and dress. Along with his social pretensions and
aspirations, Dodd had considerable erudition and affected even more. Doctoral degrees didn’t always mean too
much in those days either, but he had one.
There are some two hundred titles under his name in the catalogues of
large libraries. He was an editor
of Shakespeare, and the compiler of a best seller called The Beauties of Shakespeare.
In
earlier times Dodd had earned his bread as a tutor to the rich and famous,
especially the youthful Lord Chesterfield: but he always needed more bread, and
he didn’t have tenure. Later, when
an attempt to bribe his way into a lucrative post was exposed, he fled to the
Continent and lay low for a couple of years. He now got a new nickname—“Doctor Simony”. Returning to London and needing to
clear his debts he borrowed £4000 (about a million dollars in today’s money)
from his old student Chesterfield.
The only trouble was that he didn’t tell Chesterfield about it, finding
it more expeditious to write the check himself. When the old schoolboy did find out about it, by mere
chance, the noble lord was not amused.
Even less forgiving was King George III.
No
American is likely to praise this monarch, but I shall try. True enough he was a blockhead even
before going mad. But he was
actually something of a stickler for public morality, and a sincere one. In particular he took the view that in
a country that prospered by trade no vows could be more sacred than those
involved in credit and banking.
Since the broad social consensus of the age agreed that hanging a man
for stealing a sheep was just, Doctor Dodd was in deep doodoo. The mores of the time are perhaps also
suggested by the fact that a young man scheduled to die with Dodd was being
punished for a failed attempt at suicide!
Medieval “benefit of clergy”, though still not totally abolished, was so
weakened as to offer Dodd no comfort.
He
did have friends and supporters.
They wrote letters, and they signed petitions. Pundits like Dr. Johnson lamented the prospective loss to
the Republic of Letters. Some of
the more practically minded among his friends put together a considerable purse
with the thought of bribing one of his jailers to allow him to escape, but the
Death Machine was not to be so easily defeated. His cell at Newgate was triple guarded. So they designed a new tactic. Dr. Dodd would hang, but he would not
die.
The
plan was this. Though they could
not effectively corrupt the prison guards, they hoped for better results with
the actual executioner—generally known as “Jack Ketch” in honor of the
celebrated hangman of the previous century who had established the gold standard
of barbarism in his line of work.
They would pay this man a hefty sum not to let the body long dangle from
the rope. Instead, he was quickly
to relieve the dead weight, so to speak, from the tension of gravity and then
to join with others in moving the body as expeditiously as possible to a
waiting coach. That was Phase One
of the Plan. Phase Two, of which
Jack Ketch had no knowledge, was to rush the body by cab from Tyburn to certain
rooms in Goodge Street where a team of Resurrectionists would be awaiting it. This was a group of medical men, hardly
more crackpot than most of their professional peers, who thought that with the
help of salves, ointments, an experimental air-pump, and perhaps a particularly
adroit application of the Heimlich Maneuver, they might be able to revive the
Unfortunate Doctor Dodd (his last nickname, and the one that stuck.)
The Tyburn "Tree"
Forget
the fact that Phase Two was nutty to begin with. Unfortunately, it could not be implemented in any event on
account of the intervention of Fleming’s Second Historical Law: Nothing fails like success. The learned William Dodd eschewed the
role of the cloistered scholar. He
sought fame in the public arena, and lots of it. For his final gig he enjoyed a success beyond his wildest
dreams. People used to turn out in
significant numbers to listen to his sermons or his lectures on Shakespeare,
but those crowds were as nothing compared with the throng that turned out to
watch him swing. You can easily
grasp the problem presented by thousands of milling Doddheads. The hearse was supposed to make its way
swiftly from Tyburn (roughly where March Arch is today) to a place near today’s
British Museum, moving through streets approximately as clogged as Times Square
on New Year’s Eve. The plan might
have been cool, but unfortunately Dr. Dodd’s body was even cooler.
*Boswell's Life of Johnson (Oxford English Classics, 1826), under September
19, 1777 (vol. 4, p. 150)
