Suicide in Victorian and Edwardian England

Suicide in Victorian and Edwardian England PDF Author: Olive Anderson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 494

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Book Description
Using different combinations of historical techniques and sources (including coroners' private case papers), this examines four major elements of suicide in Victorian and Edwardian England: suicide rates and distribution; individual experiences; social attitudes; and efforts at prevention.

Suicide in Victorian and Edwardian England

Suicide in Victorian and Edwardian England PDF Author: Olive Anderson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 494

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Book Description
Using different combinations of historical techniques and sources (including coroners' private case papers), this examines four major elements of suicide in Victorian and Edwardian England: suicide rates and distribution; individual experiences; social attitudes; and efforts at prevention.

Victorian Suicide

Victorian Suicide PDF Author: Barbara Gates
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400859565
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
When Viscount Castlereagh, leader of the House of Commons and architect of the Grand Alliance, committed suicide in 1822, the coroner's inquest could consider only two legal verdicts: insanity or self-murder. Public outrage greeted his burial in Westminster Abbey; the tradition lingered that a suicide's burial place be at a crossroads, with a stake through the heart to keep the lost soul from wandering. Probing a remarkable variety of sources and individual cases, Barbara Gates shows how attitudes toward suicide changed between Castlereagh's death and the end of the century. By 1900 the Victorians' moral censure of suicide and the accompanying denial that it was a widespread problem had been replaced by a more compassionate response--and also by an unfounded belief in a "suicide epidemic," which Thomas Hardy described as a "coming universal wish not to live.". 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.

Death at the Priory

Death at the Priory PDF Author: James Ruddick
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 9780802139740
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Details the unsolved murder of successful attorney Charles Bravo, a cruel man who tormented his wife Florence, in a mystery that paints a portrait of Victorian culture and one woman's fight to exist in this repressive society.

Art of Suicide

Art of Suicide PDF Author: Ron Brown
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1861896867
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
The Art of Suicide is a history of the visual representation of suicide from the ancient world to its decriminalization in the 20th century. After looking at instances of voluntary death in ancient Greece, Ron Brown discusses the contrast between the extraordinary absence of such events in early Christianity and the proliferation of images of biblical suicides in the late medieval era. He emphasizes how differing attitudes to suicide in the early modern world slowly merged, and pays particular attention to the one-time chasm between so-called heroic suicide and self-destruction as a "crying crime". Brown tracks the changes surrounding the perception of suicide into the pivotal Romantic era, with its notions of the "man of feeling", ready to hurl himself into the abyss over a woman or an unfinishable poem. After the First World War, the meaning of death and attitudes towards suicide changed radically, and in time this led to its decriminalization. The 20th century in fact witnessed a growing ambivalence towards suicidal acts, which today are widely regarded either as expressions of a death-wish or as cries for help. Brown concludes with Warhol's picture of Marilyn Monroe and the videos taken by the notorious Dr Kevorkian.

Death in the Victorian Family

Death in the Victorian Family PDF Author: Patricia Jalland
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780198208327
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 500

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Book Description
This engrossing book explores family experiences of dying, death, grieving, and mourning in the years between 1830 and 1920. So many Victorian letters, diaries, and death memorials reveal a deep preoccupation with death which is both fascinating and enlightening. Pat Jalland has examined the correspondence, diaries, and death memorials of fifty-five families to show us deathbed scenes of the time, good and bad deaths, the roles of medicine and religion, children's deaths, funerals and cremations, widowhood, and mourning rituals.

The Good Death

The Good Death PDF Author: Ann Neumann
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807076996
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
Following the death of her father, journalist and hospice volunteer Ann Neumann sets out to examine what it means to die well in the United States. When Ann Neumann’s father was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, she left her job and moved back to her hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She became his full-time caregiver—cooking, cleaning, and administering medications. When her father died, she was undone by the experience, by grief and the visceral quality of dying. Neumann struggled to put her life back in order and found herself haunted by a question: Was her father’s death a good death? The way we talk about dying and the way we actually die are two very different things, she discovered, and many of us are shielded from what death actually looks like. To gain a better understanding, Neumann became a hospice volunteer and set out to discover what a good death is today. She attended conferences, academic lectures, and grief sessions in church basements. She went to Montana to talk with the attorney who successfully argued for the legalization of aid in dying, and to Scranton, Pennsylvania, to listen to “pro-life” groups who believe the removal of feeding tubes from some patients is tantamount to murder. Above all, she listened to the stories of those who were close to death. What Neumann found is that death in contemporary America is much more complicated than we think. Medical technologies and increased life expectancies have changed the very definition of medical death. And although death is our common fate, it is also a divisive issue that we all experience differently. What constitutes a good death is unique to each of us, depending on our age, race, economic status, culture, and beliefs. What’s more, differing concepts of choice, autonomy, and consent make death a contested landscape, governed by social, medical, legal, and religious systems. In these pages, Neumann brings us intimate portraits of the nurses, patients, bishops, bioethicists, and activists who are shaping the way we die. The Good Death presents a fearless examination of how we approach death, and how those of us close to dying loved ones live in death’s wake.

Victorian Suicide Notes

Victorian Suicide Notes PDF Author: Various Authors
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
All of these letters-written in some cases over two centuries ago by people from all walks of life-share one vital thing-they speak a common language; one that is bereft of all hope. For some, the language spoken here may be all too familiar. To you, I hope that you may find some solace in knowing that your pain is shared; that you are not alone. For the uninitiated, consider this a glimpse into a world of hurt that I pray you never experience. I hope that you may leave here with an understanding of what it means to be truly hopeless, and that perhaps you might recognize its cold notes the next time you hear it spoken.

This Republic of Suffering

This Republic of Suffering PDF Author: Drew Gilpin Faust
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0375703837
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • An "extraordinary ... profoundly moving" history (The New York Times Book Review) of the American Civil War that reveals the ways that death on such a scale changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation. An estiated 750,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be seven and a half million. In This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust describes how the survivors managed on a practical level and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the unprecedented carnage with its belief in a benevolent God. Throughout, the voices of soldiers and their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, nurses, northerners and southerners come together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War's most fundamental and widely shared reality. With a new introduction by the author, and a new foreword by Mike Mullen, 17th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

‘This Rash Act’

‘This Rash Act’ PDF Author: Victor Bailey
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804731249
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
What made some 700 men and women in the Yorkshire town of Kingston-upon-Hull in the years 1837 to 1900 take their lives? This book attempts to answer this question and also to study how suicide was understood by victims, families, and friends; how the causes of suicide changed over time; and what coroners' inquests can tell us about Victorian life, beliefs, and values in general.

A Beautiful Blue Death

A Beautiful Blue Death PDF Author: Charles Finch
Publisher: Minotaur Books
ISBN: 1429955333
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
Equal parts Sherlock Holmes and P.G. Wodehouse, Charles Finch's debut mystery A Beautiful Blue Death introduces a wonderfully appealing gentleman detective in Victorian London who investigates crime as a diversion from his life of leisure. Charles Lenox, Victorian gentleman and armchair explorer, likes nothing more than to relax in his private study with a cup of tea, a roaring fire and a good book. But when his lifelong friend Lady Jane asks for his help, Lenox cannot resist the chance to unravel a mystery. Prudence Smith, one of Jane's former servants, is dead of an apparent suicide. But Lenox suspects something far more sinister: murder, by a rare and deadly poison. The grand house where the girl worked is full of suspects, and though Prue had dabbled with the hearts of more than a few men, Lenox is baffled by the motive for the girl's death. When another body turns up during the London season's most fashionable ball, Lenox must untangle a web of loyalties and animosities. Was it jealousy that killed Prudence Smith? Or was it something else entirely? And can Lenox find the answer before the killer strikes again—this time, disturbingly close to home?