On 13 November 1849, Charles Dickens witnessed the execution of Marie and Frederick Manning at the Horsemonger Road Goal in Southwark, South London. He had rented a flat with a good view for the purpose, he claimed, of observing the responses of the thirty thousand people who had gathered together to watch the occasion – and he described what he saw in a letter to The Times later that day:

He describes the ‘screeching, and laughing, and yelling in strong chorus of parodies on negro melodies, with substitutions of “Mrs Manning” for “Susannah”, and the like’, and the ‘fightings, faintings, whistlings, imitations of Punch, brutal jokes, tumultuous demonstrations of indecent delight when swooning women were dragged out of the crowd by the police, with their dresses disordered, [which] gave a new zest to the general entertainment’.