ABSTRACT
Published in 1833, the following two texts record the exchange between a clergyman and coroner over the order to bury a suicide found to be temporarily insane by the coroner’s jury. The debate between these two writers – Arthur Phillip Perceval (1799–1853), the rector of East Horsley in Surrey, and Henry Woods, the elected county coroner for Surrey – articulates the tension between civil and ecclesiastical authority over the burial of suicides, which itself reveals the friction between popular and clerical attitudes towards the act of self-destruction. The immediate issue in this conflict was the verdict of the coroner’s jury which sat over the body of John Day. Clergy who refused to carry out a coroner’s warrant for burial were subject to suspension for three months.
