This is a fascinating, albeit tragic, topic which is helpful for us to unpick our own stereotypes of Victorian morality and life of the poor as well as explore the dynamics of gender and working class identity in the period. In reality this is a subject one could spill much more of the proverbial ink over, however I have limited amounts of time until my next meeting so I will happily give a ‘broad brushstrokes’ answer until you get a fuller one!

So, we tend to reduce (and lord do we reduce!) Late 19th/early 20th century English society we have a picture of prim, proper, self-restrained, moralistic, religious, ‘pre modernity’, hyper-conformist, hierarchical stuffed shirts. Now this worldview is often defined in terms as a ‘middle class phenomena’, with working class values often reduced to either: put upon by the politically and culturally dominant wealthier classes, or a pale imitation of said values. In reality the era is much more interesting that this, and while there is certainly a truth to this it is also a significant simplification, and removes a lot of the complexity and change over time in values, norms, and working class identity.

So, naturally if one takes this reductionist view of Late-Victorian England suicide can be seen in religious and reputational terms as a cardinal sin, and this something one would expect a great deal of disapproval and social policing around. Thus it would follow that we would not necessarily find such representations commonly. In reality the era’s attitude towards suicide was significantly more complex, and work in the recent couple of decades have suggested that how it was viewed by the public varied significantly on how it was conceptualised through a broader social lens. Suicide was understood through the much broader prism of contemporary ideas of gender, concerns around urbanisation and social change, debates of the nature religious authority, and the increasing virtue of science in and of itself as a rationalist enterprise. These all combined to mean that particularly as we enter the late Victorian and Edwardian era there really is not one way suicide is viewed, indeed the responses to suicide varied so significantly due to the interaction of individual held belief and circumstance of suicide we cannot even talk of a dominant view per se.

There is however an overarching trend to categorise suicides, and the Victorian public were, in general, happy to moralise suicide, with little relativist self-consciousness about deeming particular suicides as good or bad. Naturally, like all systems of valuation there were a number of social rules which while certainly not universally agreed upon (see above) were significant among various communities and milieus to guide what made a ‘good’ and what made a ‘bad’ suicide. This is where response to suicide becomes particularly instructive as a vector to explore identity by what rules are held and applied when conceptualising suicide. Now in reality what there ‘rules’ (and lets not get too carried away by the phrasing there) were varied, and contestable, and in reality I have… oh dear… not long, so I will pick a few overarching ones.

One particular point is just to highlight the concept of respectability among the working class in this period, as it is the group you mention. There is no agreed consensus on what respectability in this period means or what is even is. There is a further debate I alluded earlier about whether it existed as a separate working class value system, particularly among artisan and the upper working class. However, despite this I think it is a useful thing to consider when understanding suicide, as in its broadest term it is a culturally sourced set of norms and behaviours with cultural cache. Suicide is understood through the prism of, rather than in opposition to respectability. The rules governing respectability seem to weigh in (or coincide) with those around suicide. I am personally of the belief that there is a sense of working class respectability which is held in some form among sections of the working class in the period. A respectability which exists in reference to, but different from broader social determination, representing a subset of beliefs genuinely held rather than the product and exercise of culture weaponised for class ends by the wealthier classes. We can differ on how and why, and reasonable minds can disagree on this, however I would contend that these social rules are genuinely held as part of a world view among significant sections.

Firstly, lets get religion off the plate…. In like… oh dear I really need to be going soon … a paragraph. Suicide (I am given to understand – everything pre-mid 1700s is a familiar but hazy!) was understood in a myriad of complex ways even prior to the period, however by the start of the 1800s the view (insofar as it was held) that suicide was (to steal Barbara Gate’s phrasing) ‘a challenge to the will of God’ was becoming a little unstuck. Until the 1820s the punishment for suicide, or felo-de-se, involved the burying in a public highway crossroads with a stake driven through the deceased, with their lands surrendered, all performed in the utmost secrecy. The logic behind this formulation is beyond the question (and I am given to understand a little more varied than sometimes presented). Although Abel Griffiths was the last to have such a fate in 1823 in reality the consistency and zeal of this application of punishment had been much more uneven for decades before (one could contend even longer). A classic example is the case of Viscount Castlereagh, an member of the government around the time, whose 1821 suicide escaped such a plebeian fate becoming felo-de-se ‘convicts’ through the finding of insanity by the jury, thus a loophole in the felo-de-se charge. The (fascinating) agitation this suicide created, drawing up a sense of perceived elitism and protecting one’s own, whiff of corruption in the coroner’s court, and fact Castlereagh was to be buried in Westminster Abbey (!) despite his suicide all drew significant complaints among the radical and radicalising forces of the 1820s…. is all yet again beyond the question, so I will leave it mentioned in case you wish to go down that rabbit hole!

Damn, its going to be two paragraphs. So, obviously among sections of the Anglican and Catholic communities suicide continued to be seen through a particular religious lens, although more mixed among the non-conformists among whom numbered the working class significantly this attitude was less pronounced. Whether this was a theological or political position among the non-conformist is a big question and varied by group and circumstance. However, in society at large there was a tendency to move away from this position, and see suicide as a social or medical phenomena. This shift can be seen among Coroner’s courts and their juries, who by the time we enter the late Victorian era are only returning felo-de-se verdicts in the case of suicide in around 3% of cases in areas of the North East investigated by Anderson. The distaste for the absolute moral judgement implied in the statistics reflects in analysis of these coroner’s investigations, which show a significant prevalence of expert witnesses and emphasis on the social and mental conditions of the deceased, as opposed to religious forms of conceptualising the suicide. Although it was only until the 1870s where the forfeiture of property was repealed, in reality coroner’s informed by such understandings of suicide had been characteristically been using devices such as insanity to evade the applications of such punishments for the deceased (and more precisely their inheriting families) for decades and decades prior.

This tendency to seek explanations and understanding beyond the religious mirrored the increasing disciplinary robustness and position of those involved in the study, warehousing, and treatment of mental illness throughout the period. With the 1850s and 60s being a particular pivot point where suicide was seen along these (certainly not free of moralism!) terms. Therefor,e while religious arguments around suicide persisted and indeed sharpened in response to their loss of ground in the debate, the scientific ‘progress’ (treatment of ‘madness’ in England is a rough one to characterise) and religious balkanisation of the period generally came to dominate the conceptions of suicide in their period of narrowly religious ones.

However also existed a third argument beyond mental illness (yes, I am being reductive) to understand suicide in the era. This was particularly prominent among the Chartist and social reformers of the era, who for a myriad of reasons took a myriad of positions against the social knock-on effects of industrialising England. Little unites these reformers aside from their tendency towards socioeconomic critique of the status quo, however within the larger debates about extreme poverty, as well as moral and social collapse in England suicide became conceptualised in these terms. This is not necessarily ‘progressive’, and suicide was conceptualised by some as an evidence of the moral decay of England wrought by the socioeconomic changes. However, overall this ‘sociological’ line of understanding of suicide located the forces driving the suicide beyond the individual to their circumstance – a distinction which is about to be important.