A newspaper without an account of one or more accidents…is scarcely ever taken up.
-Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, 1854
As the case of whiplash in the modern world demonstrates, ideas of "common accidents" are culturally dependent in a couple of important ways: first, they differ across time and space according to the availability of the circumstance for a type of accident/injury; second, they depend on the popularity of public knowledge and information (or entertainment) about various types of accident.
So parents in 14th-century European towns worried about pigs: they worried that their neighbor's pig wandering the streets to forage for food would blunder into their house and eat their infant instead. They worried that a horde of pigs would trample their toddler in the street. Parents traveling the Oregon Trail in the mid-19th century U.S. write heartwrenching diary entries about their youngest being crushed under the relentless rolling wheel of their wagon. Women in late 19th-century Mozambique waited nervously for news of their husbands pressed (financially or otherwise) into working in South Africa's mines, fearful of news about falling rocks or accidents with explosives.
But if there was ever a place obsessed with accidents--that has almost seemed to some scholars to define itself through talking about and learning to manage accidents--it was Victorian England. Thus, when studying accidents in 18th century England, Craig Spence turns to the so-called "Bills of Mortality," or weekly registrations of new burials in and around London, to tabulate frequency of causes of accidental death:
| Type of death | Frequency |
|---|---|
| Drowning | 42.4% |
| Falls | 11.8% |
| Unknown ("found dead") | 18.1% |
| Struck by objects, not homicide | 5.8% |
| Vehicle-related | 5.4% |
| Animal-related | 3.3% |
| Fire | 3.1% |
| Sharp objects | 2.4% |
| Asphyxiation | 1.8% |
| Scalding/boiling water | 1.2% |
| Miscellaneous | 4.7% |
On the other hand, Witmore, Fyfe, Bartrip, Luckin, Lane, and others working on 19th-century accidents get to draw deeply on newspaper accounts (and court cases related to industrial accidents...often reported in those newspapers).
Some of the patterns that emerge won't surprise you at all. As already evident in medieval coroners' reports and true today as in this very question, moving vehicles were a major source for accidents in nineteenth-century England. On 25 May 1843, the Times' column on recent accidents included two vehicular ones. A woman passenger in a horse-drawn cab was killed when the coach lost a wheel and flipped over. A man fell off the back of a wagon but got tangled up in some dangling ropes; he would have been dragged to great injury and near death if a quick-thinking pedestrian hadn't stopped the wagon (possibly drunk) driver.
Designers and sellers of new steam-powered omnibuses and carriages tried to market their vehicles as a safer alternative to horses and horse-drawn ones. No steam engine would get startled and tear down a road out of control, crushing a child beneath its hooves (or, as in the medieval case I'm thinking of, be purposefully goaded to tear down a street whilst escaping after a crime); steam carriages had brakes that actually braked; steam carriages were much less likely to suffer rollover accidents like the one mentioned above.
But I'm sure it will shock you to learn that whatever the marketing campaigns of the new technological wonders, it was their dangers that caught the attention of newspaper editors and readers. "The [Railway, Steamboat, Bus, Hot Air Balloon] Accident," Paul Fyfe observes, was an utterly ubiquitous headline in the 1860s and 70s, in contrast to earlier headlines which preferred the evocation ("Wonderful Escape," "Fatal Accident", the latter of which was about an explosion...talk about buying the lede).
In fact, you could say that from the very beginning of passenger railroad service, accidents dominated discussion of railways and railways dominated discussion of accidents: the ceremonial "opening" of the 1830 Liverpool-Manchester Line turned less ceremonial when one of its biggest supports, MP William Huskisson, was accidentally bumped onto the tracks just as an engine barreled down. (To add insult to tragic death, in unrelated accidents that same day one engine lost a wheel and another one got rear-ended. Yes, rear-ended by a train).
But as Wolfgang Schivelbusch and others have argued, the heavy link between railroads and accidents in the Victorian public imagination was no, er, accident: it was an important way people coped with feelings of disorder and lack of control over the urban environment, especially with respect to time. Trains afforded people a schedule, which was excellent for setting up a nicely ordered life--but promised ruin in a whole new way when something went wrong. Riding in a carriage or a collective steambus rather than mounting one's horse put someone else in the position to, ultimately, determine departure and arrival time and place.
Fire, too, was a spectacular (spectacle-ular) source of accident reporting in the 19th century. Here we can really see the importance of feeding public voyeurism. The 26 August 1843 report of the fire at St. Olave Church of course had to discuss the fire itself (of course!), but for that proper injection of Human Interest Pathos, subscribers also read about the wedding that had continued taking place as the church burned. Novelist Elizabeth Gaskill has the characters in Mary Barton eagerly flock to gape at a burning cotton mill in Manchester. This was one area where "accident" was measured in human lives, but also in money.
The other big concentration of accidents as reported in 19th-century media and courts was, of course, related to work. This was no new development. Irina Metzler points out that work-related accidents are probably the most significant reported cause of acquired disability in medieval sources. Spence calculates that in 1700 London, it was more dangerous to work in the alcohol industry than in construction (a lot of those scalding/boiling water deaths in the table above relate to brewing; the use of heavy carts to transport massive loads of beer also led to brewing industry-related vehicular accidents).
For the 19th century, though, it's probably also the most-studied category of accidents. Those of us who read in horror the description in Changes for Samantha (fiction, but I MUST cite an American Girl book here, I MUST) about a girl working in a 1904 factory whose long hair got loose and got stuck in machinery gears, ripping off half her scalp? We're the modern heirs of 19th and early 20th century juries, judging "fellow-servant" cases where an employer could be excused from financial and legal responsibility for a workplace accident if the worker or a co-worker should have known better.
And we're the heirs of the Welsh miners crossing the Atlantic who brought their ballad "The Miner's Doom" with them to the coalfields of Pennsylvania. Or who read the catalogue of horrors in Jack Johnson's 1884 poem "The Miner's Life": rocks falling on top of you, rocks falling behind you and trapping you, gas igniting accidentally from a torch into an inescapable fireball, pockets of water gushing out of the rock and drowning you. And not incidentally, company ownership, money, and lobbying/bribery of government officials keeping conditions dangerous.
So the next time you rubberneck a massive accident on the highway, remember: you're simply keeping up a long tradition of people being fascinated/horrified by accidents...as long as they happen to someone else.