Feeling Suicidal in England, c.1750-1850

Abstract

This thesis examines the experience of feeling suicidal in England, between c.1750 and 1850. During this time, suicide was an act with immense religious and legal significance, and historians have done much to examine how attitudes to self-killing developed over this important period of change. However, in concentrating chiefly on others’ views, scholars have consistently neglected the most important person in this history: the person who sought to die. By refocusing attention onto the suicidal, this thesis proposes that some established narratives become richer and more complex, while others collapse. In particular, it challenges the idea that suicide was ‘secularised’ during the eighteenth century. It also builds upon the notion that suicide was ‘medicalised’ over this period, revealing that medical discourses became increasingly significant to discussions of suicidality, while emphasising that suicidal people did not necessarily see their deaths through the lens of ‘lunacy’. Using 2,008 coroners’ inquests, this thesis explores how suicidality was affected by gender, age and social status. Complementing this with evidence from 217 suicide letters, as well as from other correspondence and diaries, it illuminates how suicidality was manifested in people’s bodies and minds, as well as in the spaces they occupied and the materials they used. In so doing, it emphasises that suicide was not a constant or transhistorical experience, but one situated in specific medico-social cultures. In providing a new history of suicide, this thesis also engages with broader questions within the history of emotions. It challenges the theory that emotions are always experienced in ‘emotional communities’, instead proposing that suicidal feelings could lead to emotional alienation. This is not another study focused on the press, the church or the law – this thesis tells a new history of suicide, which puts suicidal individuals, and their emotions, at the centre of its analysis in a way never attempted before.