A Suicide Crisis in Britain's Age of Reform, 1815-1830

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History (research) (MA)

Molto, Joseph (2020)

A Suicide Crisis in Britain's Age of Reform, 1815-1830

Research master thesis | History (research) (MA)

This paper plugs a gap in the history of suicide in England, between the end of the Early Modern Era and the beginning of the Victorian Period. I argue, using mainly newspaper reports as a representation of popular currents of thought among the growing literate classes, that the prominent suicides of foreign secretary Lord Castlereagh and other politicians in the Regency Period constituted a suicide ‘cluster’ which provoked imitators and a heightened anxiety over the issue. Further, that this suicide crisis, responding to charges of élite hypocrisy and building on shifts in language initiated by the Romantic Movement, and in opposition to perceived secularist and evangelical threats, helped to generate a new code of social mores. This code was a retrenchment of traditional Christian morals for a new bourgeois and scientific age; it was, in short, the birth of Victorian middle-class morality.

British political history

post Napoleonic