Introduction

In the wake of the 2008 financial crash, the UK witnessed a steady rise in suicide rates, but male suicide rates in particular became a matter of public concern in 2013, when suicides amongst men hit their highest in just over a decade. While the most recent report on suicide statistics, produced in 2018, indicates that the male suicide rate is now at its lowest in thirty years, the peak of 2013 ignited popular debate over the state of modern masculinity, raising concerns that expectations of masculinity are damaging men’s mental health.¹ This public discourse has blamed a rigid model of masculinity – which puts pressure on men to perform, succeed and remain strong and emotionally reticent – for damaging men’s health and pushing them to the edge. Journalists, charities and sociologists feel that this emphasis on male success and strength leaves little space for men to open up about personal and emotional struggles for fear of being branded as weak, and campaigns such as the Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM) have attempted to ‘challenge male stereotypes and encourage positive behavioural change and help-seeking behaviour’.² This is something scholars from a variety of fields have been doing since the 1980s, when Raewyn Connell first introduced the analytic frame of ‘hegemonic masculinity’, used to distinguish a dominant societal ideal that suppresses marginalized masculinities from everyday practice.³ Turning focus to the nineteenth century, scholars such as James Eli Adams, John Tosh and more recently Holly Furneaux and Joanne Begiato have done much to demonstrate that the traditional model of masculinity is not a true representation of nineteenth-century masculine experience.⁴

This current ‘crisis of masculinity’ has a long history. While the twentieth century saw a steady drop in male suicide rates (with the exception of peaks during the Great Depression, the 1950s and the 1980s), the 1990s saw them return to levels not seen since the nineteenth century.⁵ Then, as now, men killed themselves three to four times more frequently than women, and many of our contemporary conceptions of masculinity as outlined above can be traced back to this same period. Yet, men have largely been left out of historical studies of suicide, which have either primarily focused on the apparent feminization of suicide in the nineteenth century or constitute broad statistical or geographical studies lacking deeper analyses of gender.⁶ When Olive Anderson published one of the first historical studies of suicide, Suicide in Victorian and Edwardian England (1987), she acknowledged that undertaking separate histories of men’s and women’s suicides provides ‘hints on the changing significance in Victorian and Edwardian England of being male or female’.⁷ However, few historians have continued where Anderson left off, and suicide, particularly men’s suicide, continues to be an under-researched field within history.

Informed by Anderson’s approach and using suicide as a lens upon Victorian society, here I turn to the narratives and stories that were told about male suicide as sites of historical enquiry, which reveal the expectations and pressures of masculinity upon the individual in the nineteenth century. These stories of suicide and suicidal motive, as told through the coroner’s courts and retold in newspapers about real deaths and their motives, offered explanations and made judgements about behaviours deemed unusual or unacceptable. As Kali Israel has recognized, stories are more than just windows into the past; they ‘do’ history through the way in which ‘they organise perception and delineate possible ways of thinking, acting and being’.⁸ These sources have allowed me to move beyond the archetypes of nineteenth-century masculinities upon which previous histories have relied and towards a more nuanced study of the experiences of ‘everyday’ men. What becomes clear in these narratives of suicide is that, despite the hegemonic ideal of the male breadwinner being largely unattainable for many working-class families, it was still a powerful ideology of respectability, and having work was central to a man’s identity.

The stories included here are of the overbearing pressures of hegemonic masculinity, often exacerbated by unemployment or financial strife, and the resultant feelings of shame, guilt and failure engendered by the rampant individualism of the nineteenth century. This individualism, championed by those such as Thomas Malthus and Samuel Smiles, was enshrined in the New Poor Law system of 1834, which sought to emphasize that financial security ‘was an individual obligation in the natural order of the economic market’. This new system aimed to lessen the ‘burden’ of poor relief for the parish and ratepayers by reducing the scope of outdoor relief and requiring the able-bodied poor to enter the workhouse in order to receive it. Workhouse conditions were purposely harsh in order to deter parishioners from resorting to state welfare; families were separated and lodged in crowded dormitories; inmates were put to useless work like picking oakum and made to wear the workhouse uniform. Entering the workhouse, as David Englander highlights, was seen as ‘a public admission of personal and moral failure’.⁹ This cultural climate measured masculinity and men’s worth by their productivity and utilized a language of burden in discourses of unemployment and poverty, a language still present in contemporary debates around austerity and suicide.¹⁰

As a social emotion, shame was key in enforcing these utilitarian principles, even on those who found themselves unemployed through no fault of their own. Shame, as Jennifer Biddle discusses, is a learned emotion, and these suicide narratives provide a stark demonstration of this fact.¹¹ Not only is this shame taught and learned through the language of burden used in utilitarian discourses of poverty, but the shame of unemployment was acted out again and again in the pages of the press, in showing suicide as a rational response to such hardship. As Kali Israel notes, ‘people enact as well as write the stories they inherit’,¹² and so, in turning to look at these narratives of poverty and suicide, we see how the shame of unemployment and poverty was learned and reinforced. But these stories also reveal the ways in which suicides were politicized through the adoption of melodramatic narratives, or used in calls for social reform, offering an alternative language with which to highlight the suffering of the poor and alleviate these feelings of shame and moral failure.

A Malthusian framework for suicide: utilitarianism, individualism and the language of burden

In his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population, Thomas Malthus raised concerns over a population that appeared to be growing at an unsustainable rate and criticized the Poor Laws for encouraging the working classes to produce families beyond their ability to provide for them. Malthus’s conceptual conflation of population and labour and his idea of surplus population, both of which are central themes throughout his essay, are key to reading the narratives of these suicides.¹³ The implication of his essay was that only those who were useful to society were deserving of financial aid, and that this was to be given as benevolent charity rather than being a human right. In the controversial ‘Nature’s mighty feast’ passage, which was removed in later editions,¹⁴ Malthus wrote:

Man who is born into a world already possessed, if he cannot get subsistence from his parents on whom he has a just demand, and if the society do not want his labour, has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food, and, in fact, has no business to be where he is. At nature’s mighty feast there is no vacant cover for him. She tells him to be gone, and will quickly execute her own orders, if he do [sic] not work upon the compassion of some of her guests.¹⁵

In Malthus’s theory, nature executes her orders through ‘positive checks’ on population: disease, famine, war and other causes of premature death. He also identified ‘preventative checks’ which he considered to be a form of moral restraint, such as delaying marriage and having children.¹⁶

Although Malthus never wrote explicitly on the issue of suicide, his principles pervade the welfare provision of the New Poor Law and offer a framework through which to interpret suicide as a response to unemployment. In a utilitarian context, those who committed suicide because they were unable to find unemployment can be considered part of the surplus population: those whose labour society does not appear to need or want. While at ‘Nature’s mighty feast’ nature executes her own orders, the suicide obeys these orders and carries them out himself. Here, suicide can be seen as another Malthusian ‘check’ on population.

The best-known example of such suicide is that of Jude Fawley’s son, Little Father Time, who kills himself after having murdered his two siblings in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895). The episode is described by Gillian Beer as a ‘late-Malthusian tragedy’¹⁷ and the note left by Father Time, ‘Done because we are too menny’,¹⁸ explicitly frames the suicide in Malthusian terms. Father Time’s actions operate as a ‘positive check’ on the family’s population where the ‘preventative check’ – in this case, moral restraint and celibacy – has failed. The Malthusian sentiment is recognizable even to readers who are only ‘passingly familiar’ with Malthus’s work.¹⁹ The incident comes after a failed search for lodgings with his adoptive mother, Sue Bridehead, because ‘Every householder looked askance at such a woman and child inquiring for accommodation.’²⁰ As well as being a demonstration of the suicidal implications of Malthusian sentiment, the incident also brings the social and contagious aspects of shame into sharp relief, which Biddle suggests is particularly felt between parent and child.²¹ As an extension of the parent, Father Time feels his part in the shame of their situation, and takes on the guilt of his involvement in that.

This narrative was more than just a fictional plot; many real suicides had felt themselves to be an unnecessary burden upon families by the time Jude the Obscure was published. When Walter Swallow, who had been out of work for four months, cut his throat in 1886, his letter revealed that he felt he ‘were only a burden to my mother’, with whom he had been living.²² Similarly, a note left by John Joseph Perkins after his suicide on 8 September 1891 explained how he could not ‘be a burden’ on his family any longer. He believed that they would ‘get along better’ without him, as he had been suffering from crippling pains in his limbs, which prevented him from working and left him and his children entirely dependent on the earnings of the woman with whom they had been living for eleven years.²³ Others felt the burden they would incur on the wider population by depending on the parish in times of unemployment. William Lenny, who was seventy-two and had been a farmer in Romford, died by suicide after coming into serious pecuniary difficulties. The Chelmsford Chronicle reported that, as his circumstances became more embarrassed, he had had to borrow ‘various sums of money’ from his neighbours, and ‘after being reduced to great distress’ he ‘determined to commit suicide, rather than become a burden to the parish, which must have been the result had he survived’.²⁴ In this rhetoric of burden, people’s worth was measured in terms of productivity and their ability to contribute to society.

Malthus’s views on the right of the people to subsistence reinforced the notion that an individual’s value is intrinsically linked to their labour power. In his view, the laws of nature did not allow for a universal right to subsist because nature was unable to provide unlimited resources. Refuting Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791), Malthus declared that ‘there is one right which man has generally been thought to possess, which I am confident he neither does nor can possess, a right to subsistence when his labour will not fairly purchase it’.²⁵ When those without labour power claimed from the Poor Laws, they were directly or indirectly interfering with their neighbours’ rights to live. This point is made by implication in a passage analogizing the right to subsist to the right to live indefinitely: ‘Undoubtedly he had then, and has still, a good right to live a hundred years, nay a thousand, if he can, without interfering with the right of others to live; but the affair in both cases is principally an affair of power, not of right.’²⁶ What this makes clear is that power was also linked to labour; those without labour had no power and no right to claim from the state. As Gregory Claeys neatly summarizes the argument: ‘No “right to charity” consequently existed, separate from the ability and willingness of the poor to make a contribution to common produce.’²⁷ The suicides in this chapter, according to Malthus, would have had no right to subsistence because of their state of unemployment; unable to find employment, suicide became their last perceived option.

These sentiments were even used by those wishing to defend their right to choose death in light of religious arguments against suicide, which often emphasized each individual’s duty to their neighbour and the potential utility that a suicide denied society.²⁸ David Hume’s essay On Suicide, published posthumously in 1777, defended the right to suicide along such utilitarian and Malthusian grounds:

suppose that it is no longer in my power to promote the interest of society; suppose that I am a burden to it; suppose that my life hinders some person from being much more useful to society. In such cases, my resignation of life must not only be innocent, but laudable.²⁹

According to this rationale, those unable to find work would be justified in, or even lauded for, dying by suicide if they required subsistence without being able to contribute in return. In such circumstances, suicide might even become a moral duty. This was the belief of Thomas Owen Bonser, a proponent of Malthus’s work and the author of a paper defending suicide. In his paper The Right to Die (1885), he maintained that ‘in many cases it is justifiable, or even a moral duty, to retire from life’ and challenged the religious notion that life, in itself, is sacred.³⁰ Echoing Malthus, he wrote that nothing in nature was cheaper or incurred more waste than life, and that the rate of population growth far exceeded any increase in the provision of sustenance. Bonser concluded that ‘the places at the board of life are quite insufficient for the number brought in. The superfluous lives come simply to be eliminated’.³¹ In accordance with this rationale, those who were found to be superfluous were morally justified, if not morally obliged, to choose suicide. In utilitarian terms, unemployment constituted a justifiable reason for suicide.

These narratives of suicide suggest that many were unable to reconcile this contradiction between the work ethic that Smiles described as ‘that honest and upright performance of individual duty, which is the glory of manly character’ and the inability to find work that suggested that his labour was not needed, that there was ‘no room’ for him.³² In these stories suicide becomes an emotional performance of poverty and the masculine shame engendered by the language used to describe it acted out again and again in the pages of the press. In understanding suicide as an emotional performance, I am drawing on Monique Scheer’s use of practice theory in understanding emotions as embodied. Practice theory, as Scheer points out, is concerned with social scripts of acceptable behaviour, through which community expectations ‘are implicated through learned habits of feeling’.³³ Through the repetition of these stories of suicide and discourses of poverty as shameful, the self-inflicted death becomes an appropriate response to poverty and an embodied practice of shame.

An alternative form of knowing: reclaiming respectability through melodramatic narratives

Based on the ideal of the male breadwinner, work has been seen as a central component of masculine identity, both as a signifier of masculine status and as a site of masculine identity formation. Having work meant a man would be able (ideally) to support himself and even provide for a family. Of course, this was not always the case, and for the many who lived on the borderlands of poverty, it was an impossibility. For the working-class man, (un)employment could be a constant source of anguish. Reports of working-class suicides often detailed the length of time workers had been without employment, which for some was as long as eight years.³⁴ For many, though, even just a few weeks was enough to plunge the family into dire straits. Sixty-two-year-old George Saville had been a foreman for the Midland Railway, but for the month before his suicide he had found himself without work and with no prospects of finding any. After just one month of unemployment Saville and his wife were destitute and their furniture was seized and sold, causing Saville to ‘become gloomy and desponding’. The article in the Sheffield and Rotherham Independent signed off by declaring that, ‘It is generally stated in … the neighbourhood that the deceased committed suicide because of being in want; but as he had only been out of work a month his condition could hardly have been that of absolute want.’³⁵ Implicitly, the apparent ignorance of the emotional and material experience of poverty reflects Samuel Smiles’s expectation that the respectable and honest working man would possess sufficient savings to protect himself and his family in hard times.

A second report of Saville’s suicide in the same paper also pointed to a history of drinking, acknowledging that although recently he had not been drinking heavily, he ‘used to drink a great deal’.³⁶ This comment acted as a clear moral judgement in line with Smilesian ethics, which saw alcohol as an irresponsible use of money. Saville’s history of drinking makes the suggestion that he was guilty of an excessive and frivolous misuse of money during a time when expectations of respectable working-class masculinity encompassed saving and frugality. A lack of such forward thinking inevitably led to failure.³⁷ The use and misuse of money was a topic to which Samuel Smiles devoted an entire chapter in his 1859 work Self-Help. Smiles lamented ‘the readiness with which so many are accustomed to eat up and drink up their earnings as they go’. Men who failed to provide a safety net for themselves and their households in times of unemployment, sickness or death lacked self-respect, as well as respect from their neighbours, independence and manly character. The failure to live honestly within his means also meant that ‘he must necessarily be living dishonestly upon the means of somebody else’. The comment on past drinking habits here served to admonish Saville for his failure to live up to expectations of respectable masculinity. Saville had expected to get fresh employment a few days prior to his suicide, but this had fallen through and served the final blow to his character. The article concluded that ‘There was nothing to throw light upon the reason for the deceased laying violent hands upon himself’, yet the narrative clearly indicated that lack of work, and its consequent poverty, had been the cause of his suicide. This failure to acknowledge the narrative of unemployment and poverty as a viable motive to suicide served to reinforce the individualistic principles that blamed poverty on individual moral failing. The jury reached an open verdict of suicide, with no evidence accounting for his state of mind at the time.³⁸

While such heavy moral judgement was common in the stories told about working-class men’s suicides, depositions and reports could also invoke melodramatic narrative devices to bring attention to the blameless suffering experienced by the poorest in society. By invoking the images of families broken up, men’s tireless searches for work or the sacrifices made for families, these narratives make use of key plot devices of melodrama to tell their stories. As David Mayer describes it, melodrama is

a theatrical or literary response to a world where things are seen to go wrong, where ideas of secular and divine justice and recompense are not always met, where suffering is not always acknowledged, and where the explanations for wrong, injustice, and suffering are not altogether understandable. Melodrama provided emotional answers to a world where explanations of why there is pain and chaos and discord are flawed or deeply and logically inconsistent.³⁹

The melodramatic mode was not only confined to literature and the stage but permeated wider culture, acting as a tool for expression, understanding and meaning-making. As Rohan McWilliam argues, it also shaped journalism, which used the ‘language and categories of the stage’ to make sense of events and scandals.⁴⁰ In an age when unemployment was structural and cyclical, the melodramatic mode in suicide narratives offered reassurance that those in dire straits were not suffering on account of their own moral failings. Instead, as Martha Vicinus suggests, melodrama made the moral visible through the passive suffering of virtuous characters.⁴¹ Many of the stories told about suicide and unemployment emphasized the good character of those at the heart of these domestic tragedies, telling of their tireless searches for work, their hardworking nature when employment could be found and the personal sacrifices they made so that their children might not go without. J. Challiner, who had suffered constitutional fits that prevented him from working and died by suicide in 1845, was described as bearing ‘a very good character’;⁴² George William Short, who died by suicide in 1879, had been unemployed for nearly nine months but ‘had tried to get work every day’ without success;⁴³ and George William Lock had ‘striven hard to earn a livelihood’.⁴⁴ The stories of Challiner and Short both attest to the shame of their situations. Challiner wrote in his suicide note that he was ‘ashamed to be beholden’ to his friends, while Short had told his wife that he was ‘ashamed of walking about the streets’.

While these narratives did not necessarily offer clear answers as to why poverty happened, they went some way towards showing others that it was not necessarily through any fault of their own – for being lazy, or wasteful with money, as Smilesian doctrine might suggest. Melodrama, as Vicinus argues, appeals to those who feel powerless, ‘who feel that their lives are without order and that events they cannot control can destroy or save them’,⁴⁵ and, as McWilliam suggested, it could offer ‘a form of psychic healing by dramatizing anxieties such as the fear of not being able to pay the rent’.⁴⁶ Reports of suicide could provide evidence of the blameless suffering which often went unacknowledged in the nineteenth-century climate of individualism. The melodramatic narrative, then, served to politicize working-class suicides by acknowledging that the suffering which the Poor Law system blamed on individual failure was often unaccountable, and offered an alternative form of knowledge to Malthusianism, utilitarianism and individualism.⁴⁷

Where these narratives differed from stage melodrama is in the absence of a clear, identifiable villain. While traditionally the villain of melodrama was an embodied representation of a larger problem projected onto a middle-class figure, the villain in journalistic suicide narratives was more often the abstract external force itself, such as capitalism, the competitive individualism it engendered or the structural nature of unemployment, all of which threatened domestic peace.⁴⁸ This threat to domesticity was a key part in evoking sympathy in melodrama, and the most alarming manifestation of this threat to domestic peace was the murder of an entire family by the father who should have protected them. On Sunday 10 March 1895, Reynolds’s Newspaper reported just such a tragedy.⁴⁹ Frank Taylor awoke at an early hour on Thursday March 7 and proceeded to cut the throats of his wife and six of their children before taking his own life in the same manner. The eldest boy, only fourteen, survived his father’s attempt at murder and rushed to his neighbours to raise an alarm. The police were sent for and arrived almost immediately. Upon entering the house, the scene was described as ‘having the appearance more of a slaughter-house than a human habitation, the furniture and walls being splashed with blood, while pools of it lay upon the floor’.⁵⁰

In the reports that followed, Frank Taylor was praised as a ‘kind father’, an ‘affectionate husband’, ‘hard working but very unfortunate’ and a ‘steady, industrious man’.⁵¹ But despite being ‘active and willing to work’,⁵² he had been unemployed since Christmas and the family had been ‘plunged into distress’. They subsisted on what they could grow in their allotment but had to rely on the penny dinners provided at the local church and the charity of clergymen.⁵³ Taylor had recently found some work at Tooting Junction, and the papers reported that as soon as he had been paid he ‘stocked the larder and purchased boots for some of the children’. Unfortunately, only a week after resuming work he was taken ill with influenza, once again throwing him out of work. The day before the tragedy occurred, he returned to work and, although not fully recovered, witnesses and the jury believed there was no reason to suspect that his illness had affected his mind.⁵⁴

This was a sensational case that garnered national attention and was laced with the trappings of domestic melodrama, through the detailing of the household, family circumstances, the threat to domesticity unemployment posed and even the narrative flow of events. It was the kind of narrative repeatedly attributed to men who killed themselves while out of work and appealed to the rhetoric of hegemonic masculinity and readers’ domestic sensibilities. Taylor was clearly framed as a devoted, hard-working and industrious family man, seeking employment when he could find none, which, combined with his sober habits, made the family part of the ‘deserving poor’ who qualified for the sympathy of the public.

Although domesticity has predominantly been associated with the middle-class idea of ‘separate spheres’, it occupied a central place in working-class rhetoric. As Anna Clark has shown, Chartists used images of domesticity in their political rhetoric, drawing on melodramatic plots that shifted the blame of poverty and domestic misery from the immorality of the working-class individual to ‘the aristocratic libertine, symbolizing capitalism and corruption’.⁵⁵ For working-class readers, this domestic tragedy would have been equally distressing. As a patriarchal figure, it should have been Taylor’s duty to protect and care for his family, not be the one to destroy it, and the fact that the tragedy took place inside the home is significant in this way. The sanctity of the home occupied an important part of the ideological space of the home as a sanctuary away from the outside world of competition and business. In her work on domestic violence, Shani D’Cruze has discussed how domestic murders that took place in the home threatened the middle-class ideology of the home as a safe haven.⁵⁶ While D’Cruze talks more explicitly about the middle-class home, it is equally applicable to the working-class one: Taylor was represented as possessing characteristics lauded as respectable across all classes – family devotion, industriousness and sobriety – and thus the murder within the working-class home appears just as threatening to the ideological conception of domesticity. The description of the Taylor residence gives a vivid illustration of this: ‘The bedding in the front room was saturated with blood, and the apartment was bespattered with it in all directions’;⁵⁷ Mrs Taylor’s ‘thumbs were nearly cut off’⁵⁸ and:

More revolting still was the sight of six children lying lifeless, four of them upon the floor, and two of them, both girls, hanging over the side of the bed with their heads nearly severed from their bodies. It was only too apparent that the little victims had put forth all their feeble strength to resist the furious onslaught of their murderer, and had died struggling hard against dreadful odds.⁵⁹

Viewed in the context of domestic melodrama, although Taylor was not turned into the melodramatic villain, he represented the wider social issues threatening working-class domesticity. Low wages and the precarious nature of many working-class jobs – which were often vulnerable to the changing nature of industry or the weather – meant that unemployment threatened not just a man’s masculinity but the welfare of the entire household. According to the melodramatic narrative, it was unemployment, and by implication individualistic capitalist society, that killed the Taylor family.

Moreover, the way Taylor’s story was marked by distinct periods of employment, unemployment, sickness and health reflects the pacing of melodramatic performances. Juliet John describes ‘the emotional economy of melodrama’ as ‘best figured in a series of waves’,⁶⁰ alternating, literally, between music and pictures, music and speech, but also between movement and stasis.⁶¹ To this we can also add calm and crisis. The Taylor case, for example, alternated between relative calm and security and moments of crisis. We learn that Taylor had been a hard worker when in work, but thrown out of work the family was plunged into crisis; Taylor again found work but was again thrown into a crisis when he contracted influenza. He returned to work despite not having fully recovered, and the ultimate crisis came with the murder of his family. The narrative itself follows the form of melodramatic performance.

‘Death before the workhouse’: suicide and masculine shame

Despite these attempts to relieve the blame of poverty from the working classes, the sense of shame that surrounded the experience of poverty was felt keenly. Vivienne Richmond’s study of working-class clothing has shown how important appearances (cleanliness and clothing) were in creating and maintaining respectability. The Sunday best, for example, was held up as the ‘sartorial barometer’ of respectability, and those without might even keep themselves and their children inside all day long for fear of disgrace.⁶² It was better to not be seen at all than to be seen to be without. With his first new wages, the papers reported how, in addition to stocking the larder, Frank Taylor had immediately bought new boots for some of the children, shining boots being a ‘blazon of family respectability’.⁶³ Richmond’s evidence of the unwillingness of families to be seen without the right clothing could also shed light on a comment made in some reports that Taylor had been summoned and fined for failing to regularly send his children to school.⁶⁴ If the children had had few changes of clothes, or their clothing was ragged and dirty, it is feasible that Taylor’s neglect to send his children to school was in fact an evasion of shame. This, again, attests to Biddle’s suggestion that shame was keenly felt between parent and child, when the latter acts as representative or an extension of the former.⁶⁵ In this way, ensuring the children were respectably dressed (or keeping them out of the public eye if they were not) was an important protector against the shame of poverty. The clothing which bore the most shame, however, was the workhouse uniform.

The workhouse and its uniform acted as part of a ritual of public shaming, which aimed to regulate moral behaviour.⁶⁶ The workhouse coat was seen as a ‘slothful, degrading badge’⁶⁷ and shattered any ambition of respectability, stripped men of their civil rights, broke up families and cast shame over generations to come.⁶⁸ Even more, in the context of Smilesian self-help and Malthusian utility, the workhouse engendered feelings of individual moral failure. So shameful was this Victorian institution that headlines such as ‘Death before the Workhouse’ were not uncommon in narratives of men’s suicides.⁶⁹ The suicide of Benjamin Klimcke, a watchcase polisher from Coventry, gained national attention and was used to comment on the ‘false pride’ of the working classes, the workhouse system and the distress and suffering that pervaded in Coventry at the time.⁷⁰ Klimcke had been out of work for six months before taking his own life and had been surviving on only bread. According to the letter he left on the table in his sitting room, Klimcke had become ‘almost wild through no work’ and seeing no prospects of finding employment in the near future, he wrote, ‘I prefer death to the workhouse.’⁷¹ Twelve out of the fifteen papers reporting Benjamin Klimcke’s suicide added the following paragraph to the end of their reports:

It adds a touch to the pathos of the story to learn on the authority of Alderman Worwood that Klimcke, who was a member of a local ‘Early Morning Class,’ would have been relieved had he made his case known. Some feeling of false pride had restrained him from telling his sorrows to the outside world.⁷²

But dependence on parish relief was antithetical to working-class respectability, and above all to masculinity. A letter to the editor of Reynolds’s Newspaper, decrying the Poor Laws and the Charity Organization Society, used Klimcke’s suicide to highlight the degradation that accompanied entry into the workhouse and call for reform. The author lambasted ‘the gentlemen of the Charity Organization Society’ for failing to understand why the working classes refused to apply for relief. The anonymous author outlined how ‘before he could do that he would have to conquer that curious pride which makes decent and honest men shirk the workhouse’; this aversion to the workhouse was a result of the simple fact that ‘the workhouse is a badge of disgrace’ and branded them as paupers.⁷³ As Claudia Klaver has noted, there was an important distinction between pauper and labourer. ‘Pauperism’, Klaver points out, ‘entailed laziness, drunkenness, and thriftlessness.’⁷⁴ This distinction engaged with the individualistic and utilitarian conflation of labour and morality where independence represented a high moral character and dependence was a sign of immorality. For the working man, the workhouse was a profound symbol of masculine shame as it represented the loss of independence that was an important marker of manhood and masculinity.⁷⁵

Conclusion

While the workhouses of the nineteenth century have long disappeared, stories of suicide from poverty, unemployment and overwork have not. However, with strict media guidelines on the reporting of suicides, the social causes of suicide have been obfuscated.⁷⁶ In recent years, suicidological work has attempted to highlight the impact of government policies on increasing suicide rates and to challenge the pathologization and internalization of suicide which distances it from ‘other cultural meanings’ and wider social causes.⁷⁷ Looking at economic crises throughout the twentieth century to the present day, David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu have demonstrated how austerity measures have a direct impact on suicide rates across the world, while China Mills has drawn on reports of suicides directly linked to the UK government’s austerity measures and benefit cuts to demonstrate how benefit claimants are made to feel they are a burden by ‘neoliberal market logic’.⁷⁸ This was a familiar feeling to the working-class men of the nineteenth century who, after losing employment, being unable to support their families and refusing to degrade themselves and their families by submitting to the workhouse, chose to take their own lives. These stories of hardship were picked up and amplified by radical papers such as Reynolds’s who utilized melodramatic tropes to provide recognition to the blameless suffering that many experienced.

The liberalism of the nineteenth century embraced utilitarian measures of value which conflated moral worth with labour power, while Tory paternalism reconceptualized the helping of the poor as a benevolent act of charity rather than a moral obligation. This was also the ethos of the individualism captured in Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help, which placed responsibility for one’s situation on the individual.⁷⁹ As Peter Mandler has highlighted, the elites came to see free markets ‘as Providentially-designed mechanisms for the cultivation of true morality’, which, he notes, Boyd Hilton has attributed to Evangelical influences that placed faith in a ‘natural order’ to ‘discipline the weak and punish the vicious’.⁸⁰ As a result, the unemployed, who were unable to make a contribution to general utility, were deemed to be less worthy of help, idling rather than working, a burden on the state and parish.

Although these suicide narratives were mediated by editors and journalists, the fact that inquest proceedings were often printed verbatim offered a way for the working classes to regain some control over their identities. By recounting the tireless searches and miles walked by many in desperate attempts to find work, and the recognizable appeals made to symbols of respectability, the narratives help to challenge the idea espoused by Thomas Malthus and Samuel Smiles that the unproductive were immoral. The melodramatic language and motifs found in the reports also offered a way to acknowledge and understand the suffering experienced by these working-class men that might otherwise go unacknowledged; they allowed them to see that they were suffering through no fault of their own but were rather victims of the changing social and economic landscape.

Notes

1. 1.  E. Scowcroft and C. Simms, Suicide Statistics Report 2018 (Samaritans, December 2018), p. 11.

2. 2.  ‘What Is CALM?’, Campaign against Living Miserably, www.thecalmzone.net/what-we-do; D. Lester, J.F. Gunn III and P. Quinnett (eds.), Suicide in Men: How Men Differ from Women in Expressing Their Distress (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 2014); D. Coleman, M.S. Kaplan and J.T. Casey, ‘The Social Nature of Male Suicide: A New Analytic Model’, International Journal of Men’s Health, 10 (2011), 240–52.

3. 3.  R.W. Connell, Gender and Power: Society, the Person, and Sexual Politics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987); R.W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

4. 4.  J.E. Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); J. Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Essays on Gender, Family, and Empire, Women and Men in History vol. 1 (Harlow: Routledge, 2005); H. Furneaux, Military Men of Feeling: Emotion, Touch, and Masculinity in the Crimean War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); J. Begiato, ‘Between Poise and Power: Embodied Manliness in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Culture’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 26 (2016), 125–47.

5. 5.  K. Thomas and D. Gunnell, ‘Suicide in England and Wales 1861–2007: A Time-Trends Analysis’, International Journal of Epidemiology, 39 (2010), 1464–75 at pp. 1467, 1474.

6. 6.  For example, B.T. Gates, Victorian Suicide: Mad Crimes and Sad Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); Margaret Higonnet, ‘Suicide: Representations of the Feminine in the Nineteenth Century’, Poetics Today, 6 (1985), 103–18; O. Anderson, Suicide in Victorian and Edwardian England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); V. Bailey, This Rash Act: Suicide across the Life Cycle in the Victorian City (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); R. Houston, ‘Fact, Truth, and the Limits of Sympathy: Newspaper Reporting of Suicide in the North of England, circa 1750–1830’, Studies in the Literary Imagination, 44 (2011), 93–108.

7. 7.  Anderson, Suicide in Victorian and Edwardian England, pp. 44–5.

8. 8.  K. Israel, Names and Stories: Emilia Dilke and Victorian Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 14.

9. 9.  D. Englander, Poverty and Poor Law Reform in Britain: From Chadwick to Booth, 1834–1914 (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 38, 44 (quotes on p. 44).

10. 10.  C. Mills, ‘ “Dead People Don’t Claim”: A Psychopolitical Autopsy of UK Austerity Suicides’, Critical Social Policy, 38 (2017), 302–22.

11. 11.  J. Biddle, ‘Shame’, in J. Harding and E.D. Pribram (eds.), Emotions: A Cultural Studies Reader, vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 2009), p. 115.

12. 12.  Israel, Names and Stories, p. 14.

13. 13.  B. Shenton, ‘Suicide and Surplus People/Value’, Identities, 18 (2011), 63–8 at p. 64.

14. 14.  G. Claeys, ‘Malthus and Godwin: Rights, Utility and Productivity’, in R.J. Mayhew (ed.), New Perspectives on Malthus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 66.

15. 15.  Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population: Or. A View of Its Past and Present Effects on Human Happiness (London: J. Johnson, 1803), p. 53.

16. 16.  Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, pp. 15–21.

17. 17.  G. Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 240.

18. 18.  T. Hardy, Jude the Obscure (London: Oxford World’s Classics, 1998), p. 336.

19. 19.  E. Steinlight, ‘Hardy’s Unnecessary Lives: The Novel as Surplus’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 47 (2014), 224–41 at p. 224.

20. 20.  Hardy, Jude the Obscure, pp. 332–3.

21. 21.  Biddle, ‘Shame’, p. 116.

22. 22.  ‘Attempted Suicide in Sheffield’, Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 2 August 1886, p. 3.

23. 23.  ‘A Suicide’s Letter’, Huddersfield Daily Chronicle, 10 September 1891, p. 4.

24. 24.  ‘Melancholy Suicide’, Chelmsford Chronicle, 23 April 1858, p. 3.

25. 25.  Malthus, Principle of Population, p. 306 (emphasis added).

26. 26.  Malthus, Principle of Population, p. 307.

27. 27.  Claeys, ‘Malthus and Godwyn’, p. 68.

28. 28.  For example, Sydney Smith, ‘On Suicide’, in Two Volumes of Sermons, vol. 2 (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1809), p. 11; George Gregory, A Sermon on Suicide (London: J. Nichols; sold by C. Dilly, Messrs. F. and C. Rivington, J. Johnson and J. Hookham, 1797), pp. 12–13.

29. 29.  D. Hume, ‘Essay I. On Suicide’, in Essays on Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul (Basel: Printed for the Editor of the Collection of English Classics, 1799), p. 12.

30. 30.  T.O. Bonser, The Right to Die (London: Freethought Publishing Company, 1885), p. 3.

31. 31.  Bonser, The Right to Die, p. 7.

32. 32.  S. Smiles, Self-Help: With Illustrations of Character, Conduct, and Perseverance (London: John Murray, 1868), p. xi.

33. 33.  M. Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (And Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion’, History and Theory, 51 (2012), 193–220 at pp. 202, 216.

34. 34.  ‘Double Murder and Suicide’, Belfast News-Letter, 22 January 1895, p. 5.

35. 35.  ‘The Distress in Brightside’, Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 19 January 1878, p. 3.

36. 36.  ‘The Suicide at Brightside’, Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 26 January 1878, p. 12.

37. 37.  Smiles, Self-Help, pp. 291–7.

38. 38.  ‘The Suicide at Brightside’, Sheffield Independent.

39. 39.  D. Mayer, ‘Encountering Melodrama’, in K. Powell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 148.

40. 40.  R. McWilliam, ‘Melodrama’, in P.K. Gilbert (ed.), A Companion to Sensation Fiction, Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture, 75 (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), p. 59.

41. 41.  M. Vicinus, ‘ “Helpless and Unfriended”: Nineteenth-Century Domestic Melodrama’, New Literary History, 13 (1981), 127–43 at p. 137.

42. 42.  ‘Shocking Case of Suicide’, Berrow’s Worcester Journal, 14 August 1845, p. 4.

43. 43.  ‘Distressing Suicide through Want of Work at Neepsend’, Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 2 June 1879, p. 3.

44. 44.  ‘Suicide through Poverty’, North-Eastern Daily Gazette, 3 November 1886, p. 4.

45. 45.  Vicinus, ‘ “Helpless and Unfriended”’, pp. 131–2.

46. 46.  R. McWilliam, ‘Melodrama and the Historians’, Radical History Review, 78 (2000), 57–84 at p. 72.

47. 47.  McWilliam, ‘Melodrama and the Historians’, p. 74.

48. 48.  Mayer, ‘Encountering Melodrama’, p. 151; K. Leaver, ‘Victorian Melodrama and the Performance of Poverty’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 27 (1999), 443–56 at p. 444.

49. 49.  ‘A Tooting Horror’, Reynolds’s Newspaper, 10 March 1895, p. 1.

50. 50.  ‘Terrible Tragedy in London’, Liverpool Mercury, 8 March 1895, p. 5.

51. 51.  ‘Terrible Tragedy in London’, Liverpool Mercury; ‘Terrible Tragedy in London’, Northern Whig, 8 March 1895, p. 5; ‘Terrible Tragedy in London’, Yorkshire Herald, 8 March 1895, p. 5; ‘The Tooting Tragedy’, Liverpool Mercury, 11 March 1895, p. 5.

52. 52.  ‘Murder of a Wife and Six Children’, The Standard, 8 March 1895, p. 3.

53. 53.  ‘Terrible Tragedy in London’, Liverpool Mercury.

54. 54.  ‘Murder of a Wife and Six Children’, The Standard; ‘Terrible Tragedy in London’, Liverpool Mercury.

55. 55.  A. Clark, ‘The Rhetoric of Chartist Domesticity: Gender, Language, and Class in the 1830s and 1840s’, Journal of British Studies, 33 (1992), 62–88 at pp. 62–4; Kristen Leaver also identifies a shift from the upper-class villain to a middle-class one. See Leaver, ‘Victorian Melodrama’, p. 444.

56. 56.  S. D’Cruze, ‘The Eloquent Corpse: Gender, Probity, and Bodily Integrity in Victorian Domestic Murder’, in J. Rowbotham and K. Stevenson (eds.), Criminal Conversations: Victorian Crimes, Social Panic, and Moral Outrage (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2005), p. 181.

57. 57.  ‘Terrible Tragedy in London’, Yorkshire Herald.

58. 58.  ‘The Murders at Tooting’, The Standard, 11 March 1895, p. 2.

59. 59.  ‘Terrible Tragedy in London’, Yorkshire Herald.

60. 60.  Juliet John, quoted in C. Williams, ‘Melodrama’, in K. Flint (ed.), The Cambridge History of Victorian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 193.

61. 61.  Williams, ‘Melodrama’, p. 193.

62. 62.  V. Richmond, Clothing the Poor in Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 132–3.

63. 63.  R. Roberts, The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1971), p. 23.

64. 64.  ‘The Tooting Tragedy’, The Globe, 8 March 1895, p. 7.

65. 65.  Biddle, ‘Shame’, p. 116.

66. 66.  D. Nash and A. Kilday, Cultures of Shame: Exploring Crime and Morality in Britain 1600–1900 (Basingstoke: Springer, 2010), pp. 4–11; M. Doolittle, ‘Fatherhood and Family Shame: Masculinity, Welfare and the Workhouse in Late Nineteenth-Century England’, in L. Delap, B. Griffin and A. Wills (eds.), The Politics of Domestic Authority in Britain since 1800 (Basingstoke: Springer, 2009), p. 87; P. Fox, Class Fictions: Shame and Resistance in the British Working-Class Novel, 1890–1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), p. 15.

67. 67.  Quoted in Richmond, Clothing the Poor, p. 274.

68. 68.  Doolittle, ‘Fatherhood and Family Shame’, p. 96.

69. 69.  For example, ‘Distressing Suicide in a Workhouse’ Morning Post, 7 May 1841, p. 2; ‘Suicide in the Work-House’, Yorkshire Gazette, 23 June 1821, p. 3; ‘Death before the Workhouse’, North-Eastern Daily Gazette, 27 August 1892, p. 2; ‘Death before the Workhouse’, South Wales Daily News, 30 March 1899, p. 8; ‘Death before the Workhouse’, Gloucester Citizen, 26 January 1895, p. 4.

70. 70.  ‘A Victim of Free Trade’, Lincolnshire Chronicle, 24 November 1893, p. 6; ‘Death Rather than the Workhouse’, Reynolds’s Newspaper, 26 November 1893, p. 2.

71. 71.  ‘Starvation and Suicide’, Yorkshire Evening Post, 22 November 1893, p. 3; ‘Death Better than the Workhouse’, Dundee Evening Telegraph, 23 November 1893, p. 2; ‘A Pathetic Story of Depression’, Nuneaton Advertiser, 25 November 1893, p. 2.

72. 72.  ‘Starvation and Suicide’, Huddersfield Chronicle.

73. 73.  ‘Death Rather than the Workhouse’, Reynolds’s Newspaper.

74. 74.  C.C. Klaver, A/Moral Economics: Classical Political Economy and Cultural Authority in Nineteenth-Century England (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2003), p. 114.

75. 75.  Doolittle, ‘Fatherhood and Family Shame’, pp. 88–90; J. Bailey, ‘ “A Very Sensible Man”: Imagining Fatherhood in England c.1750–1830’, History, 95 (2010), 267–92 at p. 291.

76. 76.  The World Health Organization discourages framing suicide as a ‘constructive solution to problems’. WHO, Preventing Suicide: A Resource for Media Professionals (Geneva: WHO, 2017), p. 6. Earlier editions of these guidelines more explicitly discourage depicting suicide as a method of coping with personal problems, such as financial trouble or relationship breakdown. WHO, Preventing Suicide: A Resource for Media Professionals (Geneva: WHO, 2008), p. 7; WHO, Preventing Suicide: A Resource for Media Professionals (Geneva: WHO, 2000), pp. 7–8.

77. 77.  See particularly chapter 3 of I. Marsh, Suicide: Foucault, History and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), quote on p. 47.

78. 78.  Mills, ‘Dead People Don’t Claim’, p. 317.

79. 79.  Smiles, Self-Help, pp. ix, 6–7.

80. 80.  P. Mandler (ed.), Liberty and Authority in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 5, 9.

References

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• Anderson, O., Suicide in Victorian and Edwardian England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
• Bailey, J., ‘ “A Very Sensible Man”: Imagining Fatherhood in England c.1750–1830’, History, 95 (2010), 267–92.
• Bailey, V., This Rash Act: Suicide across the Life Cycle in the Victorian City (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).
• Beer, G., Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
• Begiato, J., ‘Between Poise and Power: Embodied Manliness in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Culture’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 26 (2016), 125–47.
• Biddle, J., ‘Shame’, in J. Harding and E.D. Pribram (eds.), Emotions: A Cultural Studies Reader, vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 2009).
• Bonser, T.O., The Right to Die (London: Freethought Publishing Company, 1885).
• Claeys, G., ‘Malthus and Godwin: Rights, Utility and Productivity’, in R.J. Mayhew (ed.), New Perspectives on Malthus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
• Clark, A., ‘The Rhetoric of Chartist Domesticity: Gender, Language, and Class in the 1830s and 1840s’, Journal of British Studies, 31 (1992), 62–88.
• Coleman, D., Kaplan, M.S. and Casey, J.T., ‘The Social Nature of Male Suicide: A New Analytic Model’, International Journal of Men’s Health, 10 (2011), 240–52.
• Connell, R., Gender and Power: Society, the Person, and Sexual Politics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987).
• Connell, R.W., Masculinities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
• D’Cruze, S., ‘The Eloquent Corpse: Gender, Probity, and Bodily Integrity in Victorian Domestic Murder’, in J. Rowbotham and K. Stevenson (eds.), Criminal Conversations: Victorian Crimes, Social Panic, and Moral Outrage (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2005).
• Doolittle, M., ‘Fatherhood and Family Shame: Masculinity, Welfare and the Workhouse in Late Nineteenth-Century England’, in L. Delap, B. Griffin and A. Wills (eds.), The Politics of Domestic Authority in Britain since 1800 (Basingstoke: Springer, 2009).
• Englander, D., Poverty and Poor Law Reform in Britain: From Chadwick to Booth, 1834–1914 (London: Routledge, 1998).
• Fox, P., Class Fictions: Shame and Resistance in the British Working-Class Novel, 1890–1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994).
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• Richmond, V., Clothing the Poor in Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
• Roberts, R., The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1971).
• Scheer, M., ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (And Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion’, History and Theory, 51 (2012), 193–220.
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• Smith, S., ‘On Suicide’, in Two Volumes of Sermons, vol. 2 (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1809).
• Steinlight, E., ‘Hardy’s Unnecessary Lives: The Novel as Surplus’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 47 (2014), 224–41.
• Thomas, K., and Gunnell D., ‘Suicide in England and Wales 1861–2007: A Time-Trends Analysis’, International Journal of Epidemiology, 39 (2010), 1464–75.
• Tosh, J., Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Essays on Gender, Family, and Empire, vol. 1 (Harlow: Routledge, 2005).
• Vicinus, M., ‘ “Helpless and Unfriended”: Nineteenth-Century Domestic Melodrama’, New Literary History, 13 (1981), 127–43.
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