Trolling, 1890s-style in the Maitland Mercury

Trolling is a feature of today’s online environment. Often it is personally abusive, insulting and delivered sarcastically to somebody the troll disagrees with. Often when trolls exchange verbal blows on social media and in comment threads on online news commentary sites, they do so anonymously.

The language they use is rarely subtle. Typically it is harsh, provocative, inflammatory and designed to offend, and trolls usually ensure that they cannot be identified by their targets. Sometimes this looks like cowardice, and some trolls might be seeking to avoid being tangled up in allegations of libel. Usually newspapers insist on self-identification, but this is difficult to mandate in the online environment.

The language of the troll is not all new, of course, and its spirit goes back well before the online era. In the nineteenth century it was regularly seen in newspapers, for example in Letters to Editors. It was on show in the Maitland Mercury, often effusively and at length, sometimes wittily and in the flowery verbal style of the times. Readers were no doubt entertained by the exchanges between correspondents and sometimes they joined in with contributions of their own. A particular topic might be open to debate indefinitely, or at least until the editor deemed the discussion no longer worthy of being continued.

Holden v ‘Observer’ on punishment in 1893

There was an exchange in 1893 when two letter writers, John F Holden and ‘Observer’, traded verbal blows on the question of flogging and execution as punishments in civil society. At that time the punishments that were used were coming under question on humanitarian grounds and their effectiveness was being challenged. But opinions were divided, and society was only beginning to move away from them.

Holden, evidently a humanitarian, opposed these ‘corrections’. He thought ‘making butchers’ chopping blocks of human backs’ was both barbaric and ineffective, and execution unchristian and used disproportionately against the poor and wretched. Better, he thought, that governments invest in the ‘instruction’ - today we would call it education - of those who are ‘bred up without morals and cast upon the world without a prospect’.

The ‘cat-o-nine tails’, favoured instrument for flogging in Maitland Gaol in the 1800s (Wikipedia)

The circumstances of the poor, Holden was saying, encouraged criminality and thus exposed them to society’s retribution by the brutal means of the time.

‘Observer’ took a different stance. He wrote sarcastically of Holden’s ‘ridiculous effusions’ and went on:

Although I do not intend to notice any future personal letters of your correspondent, I will, nevertheless, continue to watch his newspaper contributions, and when I think fit, criticise them when they deserve it, which I conclude will be pretty often, unless he greatly improves, and manages to shake off his antediluvian impressions, which are wholly unsuited to this nineteenth century.

So there, Holden, take that!

‘Observer’ even resorted to verse:

Behold a man who loves to prate

On all affairs of Church and State

Proud owner of a clever pate

Infallible as sure as fate.

And:

I long have marked his bold career

And far be it from me to jeer

Although his logic’s rather queer

And scarcely that of Sage or Seer ꟷ So farewell, Johnny Holden.

The sarcasm was inescapable.

Holden shot back: ‘Observer’ had ‘again escaped from his keepers’. He ‘sheds the luminous refulgence of his lofty intellect upon my humble expression of opinion’.

‘Observer’ came again. Holden’s tactics, he said, had been ‘

… abuse in lieu of arguments, entirely ignoring the opinions of those who differ from him, forgetful of the fact that they may possibly be right and himself wrong. But his egregious egotism will not allow him to see this’.

And on they went, seemingly without moderation being brought to bear by the editor of the Mercury. Meanwhile, at Maitland Gaol the last flogging was administered in 1905 when Henry Clark was given ten lashes for ‘attempting to commit an un-natural [presumably sexual] act’. The last hanging there took place in 1897, when Charles Hines was ‘hurled into eternity’ for the rape of his stepdaughter.

The entrance to Maitland Gaol, where 16 men were hanged and many more flogged

(Picture Maitland)

John Holden would have seen the end of such punishments, still years away in the justice system of New South Wales, as progress. ‘Observer’ would have disagreed. We can be sure their disagreement would not have been respectful or conducted in civil tones. In the Mercury, they were the trolls of their day.

The abandonment of capital and corporal punishment

Long after the deaths of Holden and ‘Observer’, it appears that Holden’s views have become mainstream in Maitland as elsewhere in Australia. Nowadays, schools are not permitted to administer corporal punishment in forms far milder than those employed in Maitland Gaol little more than a century ago, and floggings are well in the past in our institutions of correction. Execution has long since been abandoned as a punishment in all states and territories. The last person executed in Australia as a result of a court decision was Ronald Ryan in Melbourne in 1967.

References

Keys, Chas, ‘Our past: Maitland and District Historical Society takes us back to the days of feuds in the newspaper letters sections’, Maitland Mercury, 20 March 2021.

Letters to the Editor of the Maitland Mercury, 1893.