Race, gender and bourgeois respectability: the execution of Percy Clifford, 1914

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.