But I agree with Rogue, those spikes wouldn’t do anything to stop a nice length of piano wire. If anything they would actually harm the wearer, if he or she tried to pull the cord away from their throat.
Oh, THANK YOU for this link, now we can tackle @muslimgamer‘s request for a garrote essay, which will probably disappoint him. 😛 May also be of interest to @mendeviancrusader, who said:
So no, it turns out that the anti-garrotting cravat and similar ideas/contraptions were not in response to an actual killing-by-garrote
spree, but to a moral panic.
Victorian London
excelled in moral panics. For starters, “garrotting” in this case wasn’t a method of murdering people, it referred to choking someone with your arm or a scarf or something, for the purpose of keeping him occupied and defenceless long enough to take his stuff. It was violent, and it definitely came with the risk of injuring the victim, but no deaths were ever reported.
The Garrotting Panic of 1862 is now seen as a classic example of a
‘moral panic’, that is, a hyperbolic reaction to a perceived but
evidentially baseless increase in criminality. It was sparked initially
by the mugging and chokingof Hugh Pilkington, M.P. on 17 July 1862. [note: they didn’t kill him, they just temporarily incapacitated him and stole his watch]
This quite minor incident became the focus of a considerable amount of
public anxiety, whipped up by newspapers such as the Sun, The Times, and the Observer, and periodicals such as Punch, and the Saturday Review
about the end of transportation to Australia… as
well as the apparent ineffectiveness of reform programmes for criminals.
The idea of a dangerous criminal class preying on respectable society,
became increasingly popular during the panic. Legislative measures were
taken quickly to reduce that perceived threat. In 1863 Parliament passed
the Garrotters Act, which reintroduced corporal punishment for armed or
violent robbery [note: up to fifty lashes…], and in 1864 the Penal Servitude Act… increased
the length of penal servitude. [x]
And Punch had a fucking field day:
(This Sir Joshua Jebb in the last cartoon was
the Director of Convict Prisons, who “came in for
much criticism for the apparent softness of his penal regime”.)
As for the anti-garrotting cravat with the spikes, as far as I can tell it’s just a patent. Patents are a dime a dozen, it doesn’t mean this contraption was ever constructed or put to use. And if you were wondering “how will spikes prevent a wire from strangling you”, well there you have it, people weren’t anxious about wires, but about arms around their throat. And their anxiety was absolutely baseless.
This is the stupidest freaking thing I love it so much!
Thankee, Rogue! Now go write the other 9000 words. :V
This comes from a period when a cosh made of steel wire with lead knobs at the end was called a ‘life preserver’… {8-P
I always wondered what that line in Pirates of Penzance about “here is your life preserver” was about.
Mooncustafer 