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Foreign Crimes Hit British Shores

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Part of the book series: Crime Files Series ((CF))

Abstract

The story of England’s mid-Victorian moral panic of garotting began with the gruesome death of an insurrectionist in Havana on 1 September 1851, thousands of miles from Britain. An anti-Spanish filibuster, General Narciso Lopez, had invaded the island in the summer of that year with the intention of severing Cuba from Spanish rule. However, lacking vital local support, his troops were surrounded and he was arrested and put to death by a ‘Spanish’ method of execution. He was seated on a wooden chair attached to a column against which his head rested, while an iron collar was passed around his neck and his face was covered. As he sat before a public audience, he would have felt the collar around his neck be screwed ever tighter and his windpipe eventually crushed. The lengthy article in the emerging American Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in 1854 described the method of torture as ‘the hateful collar’, the ‘fatal screw’ or, as the New York Times called it, an ‘infernal machine’.

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Notes

  1. Neil R. Storey, The Grim Almanac of Jack the Ripper, London 1870–1900 (Stroud: Sutton, 2004), p. 37.

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  2. Mike Dash, Thug: The True Story of India’s Murderous Cult (London: Granta Books, 2005), p. 289.

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© 2011 Emelyne Godfrey

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Godfrey, E. (2011). Foreign Crimes Hit British Shores. In: Masculinity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature. Crime Files Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230294998_2

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