ABSTRACT
Historically, suicide was a sacrilege, and suicides were staked through their hearts and buried at crossroads. “Self-murder,” as the Victorians called it, meant shameful burial, loss of property to the Crown, and stigmatization of surviving family. Nonetheless, representations of suicide fascinated a Victorian public and sold copy. Spectacle, celebrity status, shame, temporary insanity, and condemnation are elements of early-to-mid-nineteenth-century suicides in newspapers, broadsides, illustrated fiction, and drama, making suicide the stuff of “scandal” as the OED defines it. This chapter looks at representations of suicide from Victorian life and art that spawned subsequent portrayals that gave more attention to this dark form of entertainment. Examples include the split-throat of Viscount Castlereagh, Leader of the House of Commons, which Cruikshank caricatured, and Byron put into verse; the forlorn daughter in Cruikshank’s series The Drunkard’s Children, whose fateful plunge was quickly reenacted on the London stage; and the self-inflicted gunshot of Seymour, Dickens’s Pickwick illustrator, whose death became subject for scandal. At the fin de siècle, the scandalous edge of suicide dulled and evoked compassion in the suicide of social reformer Eleanor Marx whose self-poisoning recalls Emma Bovary’s in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary —a novel Marx translated.
