Our present is built upon our past. And while we may not like the looks of where we’ve come from, our history is nevertheless a fundamental part of who we are now. However, as the famous opening of L P Hartley’s novel The Go Between remarked: ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’ A glance at a legal self-help manual from 1908 would confirm. For the 45th edition of Every Man’s Own Lawyer (EMOL) (coyly authored by A Barrister), in describing the laws of the day, starkly illustrates how social mores have changed.
For example, on the punishment of traitors, EMOL tells us that: ‘Up to a few years ago—until as recently as 1870 [the year that Charles Dickens died]—the punishment of a convicted traitor was that he be drawn on a hurdle to the place of execution; be hanged by the neck until dead; and that his head be then severed from his body, and his body divided into four
