Bury St. Edmunds Jail was opened in 1787 and closed 1878, in the middle of the Victorian period. It was located in Southgate Green, near London, in Suffolk County. Bury St. Edmunds was one of the many prisons to hold many public executions in its day. However, with the decline of the approval of public executions during the Victorian period, that number decreased. Dissatisfaction began to grow as people started to express deep concerns about these horrific events. Despite this growth, public executions were still held with thousands in attendance. One of the last of these occurred in April of 1847. Catherine Foster was executed for poisoning her husband. They were married for a few months before she laced his dumplings with arsenic. The seventeen year old girl was one of the very few women to be publicly executed. It was for this reason that led the public to be horrified and fascinated—over 10,000 people attended. 

The gallows in Bury St. Edmunds Jail was one of the many in London during the Victorian period—and existed years before. The gallows play a significant role in the novel, Great Expectations. It is that place that not only reminds Pip of his guilt and the constant mistakes that haunt his mind, but it reveals the darker, more sickening, side of London. Public executions, among other objects of punishment, is the kind of justice that society approved of for hundreds of years. It wasn’t until the Victorian period, with books like Great Expectations and authors like Charles Dickens, that people started to really question and criticize this kind of punishment and justice. People started questioning the moral lessons and reasoning behind public executions. It was the beginning of this movement and realization that led to executions being banned from being public in 1868.