Barbara T. Gates. Victorian Suicide: Mad Crimes and Sad Histories

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Barbara T. Gates. Victorian Suicide: Mad Crimes and Sad Histories. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988.

In Mad Crimes and Sad Histories, Barbara Gates proves that the subject of suicide was no less problematic for the Victorians than it remains in our own day. Beginning with the controversy surrounding the burial of Viscount Castlereagh in 1822, when laws against the crime of self-murder (felo-de-se) were still in place, and ending in 1898 with the suicide of Eleanor Marx, Gates charts the shift in attitudes toward self-destruction which took place in the intervening years. It is her contention that the framework within which people interpreted suicide broadened considerably as the century progressed. Where Castlereagh's critics blamed him for the moral weakness he displayed in choosing to end his own life, …