Complete and unabridged, with 60 full-page plates by Philip Burne-Jones, Frederic Leighton and Frank Bernard Dicksee. Famous executions from the 1750s to the 1820s - Mary Blandy the poisoner, the forging Perreau brothers, the king's engraver Ryland, Governor Wall and the banker Fauntleroy - with what led each to the scaffold and how each behaved on it. Bleackley wrote from the Newgate records and the newspapers of the day. Sixty plates of painting, from Turner to Doré, range across the centuries to set these grim English scaffolds against a wider European stage.