Charles Dickens (1812-1870) in the nineteenth century backed the cause of abolition of the death penalty, and wrote comprehensively about it, in public letters, and in his novels. At the end of the twentieth century, Jacques Derrida (1930-2003) ran two years of seminars on the subject, which were published posthumously. What the novelist and the philosopher of deconstruction discussed independently, this book brings into comparison. Dickens's novels Barnaby Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities are given detailed readings, alongside work on Oliver Twist and Bleak House, and there is consideration of those who influenced Dickens; Hogarth, Fielding, Godwin and Edgar Allan Poe. Derrida's work, taking in Freud and Nietzsche, Foucault and Blanchot, includes the study of terrorism and the USA as the only major democracy adhering to the death penalty and there are deft analyses here of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song to illustrate the mentalities which perpetuate such cruelty, a keyword in Derrida's analysis. Written as a comprehensive study and analysis of Dickens on crime and punishment, and taking off from Derrida's insights by commenting on Shakespeare and blood, revenge, the French Revolution, and the enduring power of violence and its fascination, this book is a major contribution to literary criticism as well as an approach to Derrida's thought. All readers interested in literature, criminology, law, gender, and psychoanalysis will find it an essential intervention in a topic still rousing intense argument and unlikely to die out.