Race, Gender and Bourgeois Respectability

The execution of Percy Clifford, 1914

Historical Criminology Network Members Lizzie Seal and Alexa Neale were recently published in Volume 60 of the peer-reviewed academic journal The Irish Jurist.

Their article ‘Race, gender and bourgeois respectability: the execution of Percy Clifford, 1914’ is the first output to be published from the Leverhulme Trust funded project ‘Race, Racialisation and the Death Penalty in England and Wales, 1900-1965’. 

You can access the article via Westlaw.ie and Westlaw UK. Find out more about the project on the website here, including a post about Percy Clifford. Feel free to share your thoughts on the article or the case by commenting below.

Abstract: ‘This article is a microhistory of the capital case of Percy Clifford, a man of colour who was hanged for the murder of his wife Maud in England in 1914. It examines both what this case reveals about his life as a man of colour in Edwardian England and the racialised ways in which he was portrayed in the criminal justice system. It argues that understandings of bourgeois respectability, which were interwoven with notions of race, gender, class and sexuality, were significant to how the case was portrayed and interpreted.'

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