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Overview
Exposing a rich area of interaction between history and literature, and utilizing the methodology of the new historicism, Gates discusses topics ranging from the plot for Wuthering Heights to Victorian shilling shockers. Among other findings she includes evidence that Victorian middle-class men, particularly, tended to make suicide the province of other selves—of men belonging to other times or places, of "monsters," or of women.
Originally published in 1988.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691630397 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/19/2016 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #920 |
| Pages: | 210 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.00(w) x 10.10(h) x 0.70(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Victorian Suicide
Mad Crimes and Sad Histories
By Barbara T. Gates
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1988 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-09437-3
CHAPTER 1
Verdicts
Consider the dilemma of a coroner's juryman in North Cray, Kent, on the afternoon of 13 August 1822. The previous morning, Lord Londonderry, Viscount Castlereagh — architect of the Grand Alliance, shaper of post-Napoleonic Europe, Foreign Secretary, and leader of the House of Commons — got up from his bed, complained of his breakfast, walked to his dressing room, summoned his physician, and then slashed deeply into his own neck with a pen knife. The doctor arrived only in time to catch the sinking lord, who had severed his carotid artery, and to hear him murmur, "Bankhead let me fall upon your arm. 'Tis all over." What our juryman and eleven others had to decide was whether his lordship was insane at the time of his death or was felo-de-se, a self-murderer. These were the choices for the legal verdicts in 1822, but to dub such an eminent man insane was to help label British power at its highest level as mad, and to pronounce Castlereagh felo-de-se was still worse. A sane and deliberate suicide in 1822 was subject to even greater ignominy: he or she could be buried at a cross-roads with a stake through the heart. As Lady Londonderry still had hope of a state funeral and interment in Westminster Abbey for her lord, a verdict of felo-de-se seemed unthinkable. In deference to her, our juryman suggested that he and his fellows take off their shoes and tiptoe past the grieving lady's bed-chamber to view the ill-fated dressing room and corpse. All were deeply affected. In yet further deference to Lady Londonderry, the coroner uncharacteristically led his jury. First he delivered the usual formal charge, then added a qualifying "I think." Next, evidence was heard, and finally, the verdict was given
that an inquest taken at the house of the late most noble Robert, Marquis of Londonderry, at North Cray, in the county of Kent, on Tuesday the 13th August, on view of the body of the said Marquis, we, the jurors, on our oaths, say that the said Marquis of Londonderry, on the 12th of August, and for some time previously, under a grievous disease of mind, did labour and languish, and by reason of the said disease, became delirious and not of sound mind; and that on the said 12th of August, in the said parish, while labouring under such disease, did, with a certain knife of iron or steel, upon himself make an assault and did strike and cut and stab himself on the carotid artery; and gave himself one mortal wound of the length of one inch and the depth of two inches; of which said wound he did then and there instantly die; and being under a state of mental delusion in manner aforesaid, and by the means aforesaid, did kill and destroy himself, and did not come by his death through the means of any other person or persons whatsoever.
Our juryman signed the legal document that carried the verdict, was thanked by the coroner, and then heard a letter from the Duke of Wellington attesting to Castlereagh's recent delusions. His moral dilemma resolved, the juror could head home with his job completed, his charge met.
What followed was public outrage. Placards were raised insisting that no suicide could be buried in the great Abbey. Crowds congregated outside Lord Londonderry's house in St. James Square. Byron would neatly but cruelly summarize radical sentiment at the time in his 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 — (an Anthony worthy of such a Caesar) — 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.
Actually the pageant on August 20 was curtailed. Because of the protests, the funeral procession was limited to friends and relatives. When the pallbearers bore the body into the Abbey to be placed between those of Pitt and Fox, members of the crowd that had gathered there cheered Castlereagh's death and had to be hushed by the Duke of Wellington. And John Cam Hobhouse discreetly wrote in his journal for 1822 that "many sober persons thought that, considering the manner of his death, it would have been more judicious to give him a private funeral at Cray."
Clearly, much of the hostility toward Castlereagh's funeral and burial was political. For many, Lord Londonderry had become a symbol of privilege, rigidity, conservatism, and collaboration with the ancien regime. He was an emblem of the Old Europe. But some of the hostility was moral and marked contemporary feeling about injustice in ignominious disposal of suicides. In June of 1823, less than a year after Castlereagh's death, there was another, sorrier burial of a suicide in London. Abel Griffiths, a twenty-two-year-old law student, clad only in drawers, socks and a winding sheet, was interred at the cross-roads formed by Eaton Street, Grosvenor Place and the King's Road. Wrapped in a piece of Russian matting, his bloodied, unwashed body was quickly dropped into a hole about five feet deep. The Annual Register for that year reports that "the disgusting part of the ceremony of throwing lime over the body and driving a stake through it was dispensed with." Griffiths had killed himself after having murdered his father. A chemist with personal knowledge of Griffiths, presumably a reliable witness, told the coroner's jury that Griffiths had had a "depression in the brain" and had inquired about leeching; he was certain that Griffiths was suffering from mental disease. But Griffiths's jury consulted for two hours and pronounced that Abel Griffiths "killed himself in a sound state of mind." Resistance to this seemingly unfair verdict was expected but did not develop. Nevertheless, on the morning of the interment, constables and watchmen were stationed about the neighborhood of the deceased to keep an eye out for protestors.
They would be the last such watchdogs ever needed, for Griffiths was the last London suicide known to have been buried at a cross-roads. Glaring legal inequities, like those apparent in the Londonderry and Griffiths cases, were to come to an end in mid-1823, with the passage of 4 George IV.c 52. This law made it illegal for coroners to issue a warrant for burial of a felo-de-se in a public highway. Within twenty-four hours of the inquest, the suicide was to be interred in a churchyard or public burial place. Superstitions and the desire to punish self-murderers remained, however. Suicides had been buried at cross-roads because these were signs of the cross; because steady traffic over the suicide's grave could help keep the person's ghost down; and because ancient sacrificial victims had been slain at such sites. Since they were considered the ultimate sinners, suicides had been staked to prevent their restless wanderings as lost souls. If life was a gift from God, the taking of it was God's prerogative only. This latter belief died hard, and the 1823 law contained punitive clauses. A felo-de-se must still be buried without Christian rites and at night, between the hours of nine and midnight, and his/her goods and chattels must still be turned over to the Crown.
Ambivalence in this law mirrored the ambivalence of English public opinion from the late eighteenth century throughout much of the nineteenth. Forfeiture was generally waived by the Crown in cases in which a suicide was not committed in order to avoid conviction for another felony, and temporary insanity was returned as a verdict far more often than felo-de-se. It became an aphorism to say that in England you must avoid suicide on pain of being regarded as a criminal if you failed and a lunatic if you succeeded. Thus by the 1820s there was considerable support for liberalizing an antiquated law dating from the tenth century. In 1820, a letter writer to the London Times felt it necessary to contend that "a jury is fully warranted in bringing in a verdict of insanity in such cases, unless there be clear and decided proof to the contrary; and that to err on that side, if we are to err, is more just than on the other." Yet this view, like that of Castlereagh's coroner, was countered by its opposite. Two years before publication of the letter to the Times, in a sermon entitled "Suicide: An Atrocious Offence against God and Man," the Reverend Henry George Watkins railed uncharitably that verdicts of insanity "rather palliate the crime than prevent its increase."
Religious sanctions against suicide would remain strong throughout the nineteenth century, but by 1823 many legal authorities, moralists, and parliamentarians did support reform. Most of them realized that earlier laws governing the punishment of felonia-de-se were developed by medieval judges to enrich the royal treasury. Thomas De Quincey refined contemporary thinking by arguing that it was necessary to distinguish between justifiable self-homicide and culpable self-murder. The first should apply whenever interests of others were involved, the second when simple personal interest was the motivating factor. Then, on 26 May 1823, Sir James MacKintosh, an impassioned parliamentarian, rose to the floor of the House of Commons. He labeled those who could approve of impaling bodies of other human beings, "Cannibals," and then called for an end to forfeiture. Not for a moment did he think that the penal laws against suicide were representative of current public conscience. Nor was there fairness in verdicts:
Verdicts of insanity were almost always found in the cases of persons in the higher stations of life: where self-slayers were humble and defenceless, there felo-de-se was usually returned. This might perhaps be accounted for, without any imputations upon the impartiality of juries. First, because persons in high life had usually better means of establishing the excuse for the criminal act. Secondly, because suicide was rarely the crime of the poorer classes occupied with their daily labours. It was the effect of wounded shame; the result of false pride, and the fear of some imaginary degradation. Thirdly, the very barbarity of the law rendered it impotent; for juries would not consent that the remains of the dead should be thus outraged if they could find any colour for a verdict of insanity.
Cheers went up from the House as MacKintosh seated himself after this speech. On 4 July, the new law passed, replacing a custom that the Annual Register termed "revolting to every natural feeling."
Even though Westminster moved to lay them to rest, ghosts and atrocities at cross-roads would continue to haunt fiction and the British popular imagination. Published just a year after the passage of the new English law and capitalizing on public interest throughout Britain, James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner contains a macabre, fictional letter recounting the exhumation of a suicide. Purportedly from Blackwood's in August of 1823, it describes the perfectly preserved body of a supposedly devil-assisted suicide, dead for over one hundred years and interred at a cross-roads. Hogg concludes his imaginative book by noting that "in this day, and with the present generation, it will not go down that a man should be daily tempted by the Devil, in the semblance of a fellow-creature; and at length lured to self-destruction." Yet some twenty years later, in Emily Bronte's day, devils, crossroads, and suicides continued to spellbind readers.
Brontë's Wuthering Heights, set in 1771–1803 but published in 1847, alludes both to pre-1823 burial customs and to those of 1823. Bronte seems to have felt free to use both the laws in effect during the time of her story and those governing early Victorian times. In narrating the details surrounding Hindley Earnshaw's death (1784), for example, she draws upon the earlier statutes. Although the exact cause of Hindley's death is never determined, all who saw him at the end claim that he died in a state of drunkenness. Mr. Kenneth, who tells Nelly about the death, says that he "died true to his character, drunk as a lord." And Heathcliff, when Nelly asks if she may proceed with suitable arrangements for Hindley's funeral, retorts that "correctly ... that fool's body should be buried at the cross-roads, without ceremony of any kind. I happened to leave him ten minutes, yesterday afternoon; and, in that interval, he fastened the two doors of the house against me, and he has spent the night in drinking himself to death deliberately!" (WH, 153).
The precise circumstances of Hindley's death, which are reported in considerable detail, have important implications for the course of Bronte's novel. For if Hindley did die drunk and debauched, as both Kenneth and Heathcliff indicate he did, in the eighteenth century he would automatically have been considered a suicide, exactly as Heathcliff suggests. Even more importantly, in that case his property could legally have been forfeited to the Crown, with nothing left for Hareton and hence nothing left for Heathcliff to employ as a tool in his revenge. It is probably for this reason that Heathcliff allows Nelly to perform proper burial rights for Hindley, thus relinquishing a more immediate revenge upon Hindley's dead body while gaining a long-term hold on the entire Earnshaw family.
Earlier, just before coming to the Heights, Nelly had consulted with Linton's lawyer about Hindley's death and had requested that the lawyer come to the Heights with her. His refusal is telling, for he advises that "Heathcliff be let alone, affirming that if the truth were known, Hareton would be found little else than a beggar" (WH, 153). The "truth" here may be that Heathcliff is Hareton's only hope because he is Hindley's creditor; or that the lawyer, probably Mr. Green, is already under Heathcliff's influence. But it may also be that Hindley's death as a suicide is better left ignored, primarily because of the possibility of forfeiture.
Catherine Earnshaw's death precedes her brother's by only half a year, and it too can be considered suicidal. There is little doubt that Catherine knows how to induce her own ill health, even though she does not intend suicide when she first embarks upon her fast in Chapter 11. At this point, totally breaking her own body and heart is, for Catherine, still "a deed to be reserved for a forlorn hope" (WH, 101). What happens, however, is that Catherine's body only partially cooperates with her will, and Nelly's assumption that Catherine is in total control of her situation is a tragic miscalculation. After only three days' fast, Catherine is already past saving. When she realizes that neither Linton nor Heathcliff has become genuinely alarmed and then chooses not to die, she cannot reverse her headlong journey toward destruction.
The important scene before her mirror (WH, 106) already spells this doom for Catherine, as Q. D. Leavis has realized. Catherine is shocked when she sees her own reflection because she seems to understand what Yorkshire folklore dictates: that sick people should never look at themselves in a mirror. If they do, their souls may take flight from their weak bodies by being projected into the mirror, and this can cause their death. In accordance with this belief, immediately after she sees her reflection in the mirror, Catherine is convinced that she really will die. Leavis suggests that this realization replaces Catherine's fear of ghosts, anxiously expressed just before: "I hope it will not come out when you are gone! Oh! Nelly, the room is haunted!" (WH, 106). I believe, however, that the realization and the fear are even more closely related. For Catherine actually seems to consider herself to be the ghost once she recognizes that the face in the mirror is her own. " 'Myself,' she gasped, 'and the clock is striking twelve! It's true then; that's dreadful!'" (WH, 106). Catherine's utter horror here stems from her superstitious belief that suicides become restless ghosts. She now assumes herself to be a suicide, and it is this aspect of Catherine's unnerving realization before the mirror that incites her subsequent raving about the ghosts at Gimmerton Kirkyard.
After this scene, there is only one more meeting between Catherine and Heathcliff before her actual death. On that occasion their dialogue is filled with allusions to Catherine's suicide and her would-be haunting of Heathcliff. Catherine now feels that she will never be at peace; while Heathcliff repeatedly expresses regret over what he feels is Catherine's self-murder and his relationship to it. In desperation, Heathcliff can forgive Catherine her murder of him but not her own willed death, which she in turn blames on him. All this seemingly metaphorical talk of murder reflects suicide law. Any accomplice of a suicide was legally considered his/her murderer, so that, ironically, the protagonists' accusations of one another could, were they true, carry the weight of law, as well as of guilt.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Victorian Suicide by Barbara T. Gates. Copyright © 1988 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- Contents, pg. vii
- List of Illustrations, pg. ix
- Preface, pg. xi
- Introduction, pg. xiii
- Abbreviations, pg. xvii
- I. Verdicts, pg. 1
- II. Willing to Be, pg. 23
- III. Cases and Classes: Sensational Suicides and Their Interpreters, pg. 38
- IV. Bad and Far Better Things, pg. 61
- V. Other Times, Other Cultures, Other Selves, pg. 82
- VI. Monsters of Self-Destruction, pg. 101
- VII. Suicidal Women: Fact or Fiction?, pg. 125
- VIII. Century's End: "The Coming Universal Wish Not to Live", pg. 151
- Notes, pg. 169
- Index, pg. 185