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The trial and execution of the Mannings.

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Herman Melville recorded in his travel journal (1) that on the afternoon of November 12, 1849, he had felt homesick and unhappy as he listened to the chanting in the choir of St. Paul's in London. His spirits rallied, however, as he walked "down Ludgate Hill to the London Coffee House to dine according to appointment with Captain Griswold" (18). Here he would join his new friends the German scholar George Adler, the erudite, but fun-loving, Dr. Franklin Taylor, William Mulligan, and young Theodore McCurdy. It was the sort of all male social occasion which the thirty-year-old Melville most enjoyed--an evening of good conversation with a group of compatible men whom he had recently met on shipboard. Their host, Captain R.H. Griswold, was commander of the square-rigged sailing ship Southhampton on which the young diners had recently spent twenty-five days crossing the Atlantic. Initially Melville had "formed a poor opinion" of the captain, but later in the voyage he acknowledged that he was actually "a very intelligent & gentlemanly man." (2) The captain had favored the already well-known author from the beginning, placing him in the ship's only private stateroom.

Melville's journal is often as tantalizing for its omissions as it is informative. He does not record the conversation at dinner that night, but there is little doubt but that one of the topics would have been the hanging of the Mannings scheduled for the following morning at Horsemonger Lane Gaol across the Thames in Southwark. It was the talk of all London. Not just the lower classes were excited by the hanging; entire memberships of many of London's most fashionable clubs were hiring rooms and housetops to get the best views of the "drop" set up on the roof of the gaol. The date of the execution had been announced in the Times on November 8, and by November 12, the Times reported that great crowds had been gathering outside the gaol for the past two days. No one seemed worried by the paper's warning that many of the makeshift stands set up in front of nearby houses were unsafe, and that landowners would be held liable for manslaughter if anyone should be killed in the collapse of the rickety structures. The city was full of excitement:

Each public house was all alight, the place just like a fair; Ranting, roaring, rollicking, larking everywhere Boosing [sic] and carousing, we passed the night away, And ho to hear us curse and swear, waiting for the day. (3)

The young friends must have been caught up in the feverish activity of the city when at 10 p.m. they left the coffee house for the "Judge and Jury" at the Garrick's Head near Drury Lane. The "Judge and Jury" presented extemporaneous mock trials burlesquing events of the day. Melville had a fondness for such trials, so it is not surprising that Melville...