"This Rash Act": Suicide across the Life Cycle in the Victorian City (review)

Suicide is unusual in that it is self-determined and self-inflicted, unlike disease, accidents, or other involuntary deaths. The motives of people driven to commit suicide are usually impenetrable. In researching "This Rash Act" Victor Bailey located suicide notes from only 10% of male suicides and 6.6% of females among the 729 Hull inquests he examined. One quarter of the notes acted like wills in giving instructions for property and burial, while one-fifth attributed blame to relatives or circumstances. Most interesting was the one-third of the notes which offered some explanation for their writers' desperate actions. A constable with influenza complained that "life is such a misery and burden to me—forgive me for doing this rash act" (57). Amy Cullen, aged thirty-six, poisoned herself because she could not live without the fiancé who broke their engagement. Some notes were doubtless intended to influence coroner and jury, and safeguard reputations, but many reveal raw emotional agony and despair.

But suicide notes were too rare and too ambiguous to reveal more than a fragment of the stories behind the statistics. The meanings of suicide are further obscured because official suicide rates depend as much on coroners' definitions of suicide as on what actually happened. Bailey's response to these challenges is to adopt "a modified Durkheimian approach" (16) which "unites the individual motives for suicide with a historical- material account of social structure" (28). His chosen methodology has two aspects. Firstly, he examines a long unbroken run of neglected coroners' inquest case papers in a specific local historical context. He draws on 604 inquests held in Kingston upon Hull between 1837 and 1899, which returned a suicide verdict, and adds 125 open verdicts, such as drowning, where the result was unclear. He makes a strong case that his base of 729 inquests over sixty- two years is systematic and representative, while also removing the focus from London and from national statistics: "The Hull documents, in their compass and completeness, are unique—I have been able to get closer to both the experience of suicide and its social construction than any previous study" (5-6). Secondly, he adopts a life-cycle model as his framework for evaluating individual cases of suicide.

Supported by a clear and well-organised structure, this methodology works very effectively. Thus chapter 1 offers a highly informative review of the most significant texts on suicide while also defining Bailey's own contribution. Chapters 2 and 3 provide an illuminating account of the operation of the coroners' court in Victorian England and explore the implications of the various jury verdicts for popular attitudes to suicide. Increasingly in the nineteenth century attempted suicide was interpreted as evidence of insanity, by medical as well as popular opinion; in Hull after 1855 there were no felo de se or self-murder verdicts, which were replaced by "medium" verdicts noting insufficient evidence of the mental state, to spare families from social disgrace. Mere mention of depression or emotional dislocation was sufficient to guarantee verdicts of non compos mentis for 85% of suicides.

Chapter 5 examines the social and economic characteristics of the port city of Kingston upon Hull in East Yorkshire to provide the urban context for the life-cycle study. Chapter 6 provides the statistical basis for Hull's suicide rate according to sex, age, occupation, and habitat, aiming to reveal the social and economic features of suicide-prone groups. More than half of Hull's total suicides were among the elderly of both sexes, over forty-five years. Men were more vulnerable and suicide-prone than women in the forty- five to sixty-four age group; women over sixty-five were more vulnerable than men.

The most fascinating chapters are the final four exploring suicide across the life cycle. Throughout these chapters Bailey shows that female suicides were...