ABSTRACT
Solomon Piggott, who served as the rector at Dunstable for two decades, enjoyed a productive career as a religious writer publishing close to two dozen texts ranging from sermons and collections of lectures to books of moral instruction and, finally, a lengthy poem entitled Noah and his Days; or, The Time of the Millennium, published posthumously in 1851. As Piggott relates in his preface to the work, Suicide and its Antidotes had its origins in the attempted suicide of one of his own parishioners while Piggott was a curate at St James Church in Clerkenwell, London. In similar fashion, the remainder of the text consists of a collection of anecdotes and narratives of suicide and attempted suicide which Piggott compiled from first and second-hand accounts as well as from a variety of historical, literary and medical sources.
