In England, public trials and executions had become, as noted above, a national form of barbaric entertainment. Not coincidentally, many of the first penal reforms in England, begun just before and during Dickens’s lifetime, were led by Christians. Christians were among the first to question widespread application of the death penalty as well as its treatment as a form of public entertainment. Dickens himself contributed to a developing consciousness of the depravity of such excessive punishment and the injustices that cultivated the criminal element in the underclass. Dickens feared that
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