Unfortunately reform was slow and the awful practice continued. Public attention was alerted in the 1890s to such cases as those of Joseph and Annie Roodhouse where it is known that at least ten children died in their care. Another was Alice Reeves from Lambeth. Upon investigation, the clothes of over three hundred children were found in her house. Asa Chard Williams was tried and executed for throwing a baby into the Thames in 1900. At least two more executions for infanticide followed in the next seven years.
By the turn of the century a whole range of developments began to take place such as the changes to the Infant Protection Act in 1897, a more systematic approach to child protection, a decline in child poverty and a decline in births.
Until the Suicide Act of 1961 abrogated a law that had been in force in England and Wales since 1554, it was a crime to commit suicide and anyone who attempted and failed could be prosecuted and imprisoned. For centuries suicide was considered to be a mortal sin in the eyes of the Church and was punished by a refusal to bury the victim in consecrated ground. Until 1823 the bodies of suicides were buried at crossroads with a stake through the heart. Burial at a crossroads was chosen for two particular reasons: not only did the sign of a cross have religious connotations, but burial there also made sure that the ghost of the deceased would be kept firmly in its place by the constant passing of traffic, or would be confused, not knowing which direction to take. In addition to the denial of burial in consecrated ground, the property and goods of the deceased was forfeited until the law was repealed in 1870. This had been a product of early English laws governing the punishment of suicide and developed by medieval judges to enrich the royal treasury.
More men committed suicide than women and this has been consistent throughout the centuries. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, men still account for the greater number of suicides across all age groups, but particularly the 25–44 age range where men are almost four times more likely to kill themselves than women.
The word suicida was in use from at least 1178 although it was a term not generally used in the Middle Ages. Details for suicides in the medieval period are limited by the absence of the sources associated with later periods such as censuses, registers of deaths or burials, bills of mortality and newspaper reports. What records do survive tell us that hanging was the most common form of suicide and drowning the second most frequent method. A high number of suicides resulted among those with mental illness as the later Bills of Mortality testify. Suicide was a very private act which was often difficult to prove and equally difficult to talk about. In England suicide was unique in that it was considered a crime against the monarch and a matter for royal justice. Suicides in the period prior to 1500 were predominantly from among the poor and destitute and the reasons for this were madness, disease, imprisonment or fear of punishment. From the sixteenth century there was a dramatic rise in suicides although this is mainly a result of recording them more efficiently. It could also be related to the social tensions of the time, a fall in living standards and the impact of the Reformation. However it was still the poor who made up the vast majority of reported suicides, particularly during the hungry months of late winter and early spring.
The Bills of Mortality for London from the seventeenth century show the number of people committing suicide in London each year. For example, in 1632 the Bills record that fifteen people ‘Made away with themselves’, whilst in 1775 there were twenty-nine deaths by suicide for London. It was not always easy to determine the cause of death, however, and many suicides might have been categorised under ‘drowned’ (104 in 1775), ‘fools, etc.’, ‘Lunatick’ (the combined figure for deaths of fools and lunatics in 1775 was 136), ‘found dead’, ‘kil’d by several accidents’ (74 recorded for 1632) or ‘dead in the street’. In 1839 the Journal of the Statistical Society of London recorded 656 suicides in Westminster between 1812 and 1836. This was about twenty-five per cent of the annual total for Great Britain in that period.
Throughout the eighteenth century, newspapers regularly reported on deaths by suicide. In April 1701, the London Post noted that a ‘sober and honest’ old man hanged himself in his lodging room near Whitechapel Church. In 1718 the Weekly Journal told of a porter who hanged himself by the church in Stepney because he had been dismissed from his job. A barber from the Strand in 1719 committed suicide in a terrible fashion when he cut open his body with razor blades, ‘then cut off his privy parts, and at last cut his throat from ear to ear’. In 1722 the Daily Post reported that John Moor of Paternoster Row was so reduced to poverty that he hanged himself at the Bear Alehouse in Covent Garden. Three years later in Eagle Court, St John’s Lane, a quack doctor cut his throat but took three days to die. A rat-catcher from Cripplegate in 1726 had the means of death at his disposal and took a dose of rat poison to commit suicide. An apprentice from Smithfield in the same year took the advice of a girl literally when she told him to go and hang himself. In 1730 the mother of a one-year-old child was found hanging from a tree near Woolwich.
It was common practice for condemned inmates in Newgate and other prisons to commit suicide – often to the disappointment of the scaffold crowd who waited in anticipation, eager to see them executed. The murderer, John Williams, committed suicide by hanging himself in the House of Correction in Cold Bath Fields in 1811. The authorities were not to be outdone, however, and the following day the body of Williams was dressed in blue trousers and a white and blue striped waistcoat, placed in open view on a cart and taken through the streets of London. Thousands turned out to view the procession which ended at the intersection between St George’s Turnpike and Cannon Street. There, he was lowered into a grave and a stake was driven through his body.
In Old and New London (1878), Walter Thornbury stated that ‘certain spots in London have become popular with suicides. Waterloo Bridge is chosen for its privacy; the Monument used to be chosen for its height and quietude.’ Waterloo Bridge was certainly a popular choice providing privacy with its one-penny toll. Olive Anderson in her book on Victorian and Edwardian suicides noted that, ‘In 1840 around 30 suicides a year, about 15 per cent of London’s registered suicides were committed from this bridge.’ Thomas Hood’s 1844 poem The Bridge of Sighs was based on suicides from Waterloo Bridge:
One more unfortunate,
Weary of breath,
Rashly importunate,
Gone to her death!
Take her up tenderly
Lift her with care;
Fashion’d so slenderly,
Young, and so fair …
Who was her father?
Who was her mother?
Had she a sister?
Had she a brother?
Or was there a dearer one
Still, and a nearer one
Yet, than all other?
Visitors seeking reasons for London’s high suicide rate often commented that depressing conditions such as the ‘fogs’ contributed to the extent of self-slaughter. The writer Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) commented that the ‘gloom never forsakes’ the Londoner.
The Monument provided a pretty foolproof setting for some dramatic suicides. Between 1750 and 1842 a number of people jumped from the top and succeeded in killing themselves. They included William Green in 1750. He was a weaver and wearing a green apron he arrived at the door of the Monument, left his watch with the doorkeeper and a few minutes later was heard to fall. Thomas Craddock, a baker, fell to his death in July 1788 while Lyon Levi, a diamond merchant in ‘embarrassed circumstances’, killed himself in January 1810. Two well-reported cases were those of Margaret Moyes, daughter of a baker who committed suicide on 11 September 1839, and fifteen-year-old Richard Hawes in October 1839.
In the tradition of Victorian sensationalism, the broadsheets and other cheap literature reported on suicides in melodramatic fashion. Broadsheets, which were often single sheets, were sold in the streets and public houses. The most popular was the ‘gallows literature’ which gave vivid, even lurid, accounts of crimes
and the punishments they attracted. Headings such as ‘Dreadful Suicide of a Young Woman by Throwing Herself off the Monument’ (1839), ‘Another Dreadful Suicide at the Monument, by a Young Woman’ (1842) and ‘Another appalling catastrophe at the Monument!!, horrible suicide of a youth’ (1839) helped to excite and titillate curiosity. One particular example of this type of a single-sheet Broadside, ‘Copy of verses on the melancholy death of Margaret Moyes, who committed suicide by throwing herself off the Monument on Wednesday, September 11, 1839’, read:
From strangers oh! What awful shrieks.
When she let go her hold,
Like lightning she descended.
T’was dreadful to behold;
With a heavy crash upon the rails,
The shock was most severe,
Which cut off her arm and it was found,
Near the centre of the square.
Margaret Moyes’s ‘extraordinary suicide’ received wide coverage. She was twenty-three years of age when she went to the Monument from Charing Cross to meet friends. After waiting some twenty minutes she paid her sixpence, and then ascended the Monument stairs alone. Reports stated that her ‘fall ended miserably’. The case caught the imagination of the public as well as tapping into a particular Victorian psyche of the fear of suicide. The day after her death crowds flocked to the scene and Monument Yard was packed with people attempting to gain access to the stairs of the Monument. Similar scenes took place for the inquest at the Swan Tavern, Fish-Street Hill, where people were desperate to hear any morsel of information they could get. The newspapers cashed in on the public thirst for knowledge of Moyes’s suicide. Even though the cheap press of the day had been criticised some years previously for pandering to a readership with graphic accounts of suicides and ‘tales of wonder and horror’, it was not only the cheap press that satisfied the appetites of people. On 15 September 1839 the Observer reported:
Her left arm, near the shoulder, came in contact with the bar, and was so violently severed that the part cut off flew over the iron railings several yards into the square. After striking the bar, the body fell onto a tub containing a lilac plant, which it broke in pieces, as well as several flower-pots, placed on the right side of the door. Not a sign of life, except some contortions of the muscles of the legs and arms, was discernible on the body when it was picked up.
The Registrar-General, William Farr, appealed for some control of the sensationalised tales of murder and suicide in the newspapers. This fell on deaf ears when the year following Moyes’s death, a fifteen-year-old boy leapt to his death from the top of the Monument. Richard Hawes was clearly imitating Moyes’s suicide as he had often spoken about her death and had threatened to commit suicide. Hawes’s father had committed suicide and on the morning of his own death Richard had been sacked from his job for being idle whereupon he threatened to jump out of a window. At the inquest many details of Hawes’s life were revealed. He was quiet and impressionable, could be violent and he read widely – particularly the Bible, which he had with him when he jumped to his death. All of this information found expression in the press which did not spare any salacious detail of Hawes’s death and his motives. A Middlesex Magistrate and Lord Mayor of London, Sir Peter Laurie, campaigned against suicide. He took a hard line on sentencing those who had attempted suicide. In 1841 he said: ‘I shall look very narrowly at the cases of persons brought before me on such charges [of suicide].’ He favoured imprisonment and a month on the treadmill for such attempts.
Pleas of insanity persisted in the case of attempted suicides. On 9 March 1894, The Times reported that James Doggrell and his wife, of Acton Lane in Willesden, were found with their throats cut. Doggrell survived to be charged with attempted suicide and murder. After he had cut his wife’s throat he cut his own but failed to kill himself. Doggrell claimed that he was not in his ‘right mind’.
The last suicide from the Monument was that of a seventeen-year-old servant girl, Jane Cooper, from Hoxton. In August 1842, Jane climbed over the top of the iron railings, tucked her clothes between her knees and jumped headlong. One broadsheet recorded:
It is with feelings of horror we have to give publicity to another dreadful affair … At about half-past ten o’clock the neighbourhood of Fish Street Hill, Eastcheap, and their Vicinities, were thrown into a state of the greatest alarm and agitation, in consequence of a report having been circulated that a young woman had committed suicide by throwing herself off the Monument. It added that Jane, ‘in her descent struck the coping stone with her head, and fell into the street, a little beyond the curb.’
The issue of the disposal of the body of the victim of suicide took on a particularly controversial dimension in 1822–3 and effectively led to legislation which stopped the practice of burying the deceased at a crossroads. On 12 August 1822, Viscount Castlereagh, the Foreign Secretary and leader of the House of Commons, committed suicide by cutting his throat with a letter opener. By law he should have been buried at a crossroads with all the indignity that went with such a ritual. However there were always exceptions to the rules, particularly when it came to a leading member of the establishment. It was announced that he had been under such ‘a grievous disease of mind’ that a ‘state of mental delusion in manner, led him to kill and destroy himself.’ The British establishment could retire having resolved this moral dilemma of what to do with one of their own. Public outrage followed with demands insisting that no suicide victim could be buried in Westminster Abbey. Lord Byron wrote in savage terms of the hypocrisy of it all in the preface to cantos VI–VIII of Don Juan:
Of the manner of his death little need be said, except that if a poor radical had cut his throat, he would have been buried in a cross-road, with the usual appurtenances of the stake and mallet. But the minister was an elegant lunatic – a sentimental suicide – he merely cut the ‘carotid artery,’ (blessings on their learning!) and lo! the pageant, and the Abbey! and ‘the syllables of dolour yelled forth’ by the newspapers – and the harangue of the Coroner in the eulogy over the bleeding body of the deceased … and the nauseous and atrocious cant of a degraded crew of conspirators against all that is sincere and honourable. In his death he was necessarily one of two things by the law – a felon or a madman – and in either case no great subject for panegyric.
Insult was added to injury by the fact that Castlereagh was a deeply hated political figure by many. His funeral on 20 August was greeted with jeering and insults along the processional route to Westminster Abbey. Lord Byron’s Epitaph to Castlereagh summed up the level of hatred:
Posterity will ne’er survey
A nobler grave than this:
Here lie the bones of Castlereagh:
Stop, traveller and piss.
A year later Abel Griffiths, a twenty-two-year-old law student, committed suicide after murdering his father. A witness told the coroner that Griffiths had been suffering from a ‘depression in the brain’, however, the jury concluded that Griffiths had killed himself ‘in a sound state of mind.’ He was interred at the crossroads of Eaton Street, Grosvenor Place and the King’s Road. The undignified ceremony, in which constables and watchmen were stationed about the neighbourhood to keep back the crowds, involved Griffiths being wrapped in a piece of Russian matting, his bloodied and unwashed body being dropped into a hole about five feet deep. The Annual Register for 1823 reported that ‘the disgusting part of the ceremony [was the] … throwing [of] lime over the body and driving a stake through’. Abel Griffiths was the last known London suicide to have been buried at a crossroads as the law made it illegal for coroners to issue a warrant for burial in a public highway; suicides were henceforth allowed to be interred in a churchyard or public burial place.
However, old superstitions persisted and the 1823 Act contained punitive clauses which made clear that anyone dying through an act of suicide must still be buried without Christian rites and at night, between the hours of nine and midnight. Their goods and chattels still had to be turned over to the Crown.
Middle-class families were at pains to conceal suicide because, as it was illegal, they stood to lose their property to the Crown. In addition, a suicide’s body could not be buried in consecrated ground so clergy became complicit in certain cases in the cover-up.
The controversy regarding insanity in relation to suicide continued. As the nineteenth century progressed, the definitions of physicians in the cases of suicide led to a whole range of debates while Victorian literature found an outlet for many melodramatic tales involving suicide. For example, Mr Merdle’s suicide in Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1857); in Jane Eyre, Jane’s cousin, the cruel John Reed takes his own life; Captain Brierly in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim (1899) commits suicide by jumping overboard from his ship; a striking worker commits suicide in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1854); after the disappointment of his bitter first marriage, Jude hears of his mother’s suicide by drowning and tries to imitate her in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895); Tom Jarndyce attempts suicide in Bleak House (1852) by Charles Dickens.
The term ‘assisted suicide’ has been often been used in relation to euthanasia. However, the history of euthanasia presents difficulties because the term previously meant something different to how it is commonly understood today. In the thirteenth century Henry de Bracton, an English judge and writer, observed in the Laws and Customs of England, that ‘just as a man may commit felony by slaying another so may he do so by slaying himself.’
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