Fact, Truth, and the Limits of Sympathy: Newspaper Reporting of Suicide in the North of England, circa 1750-1830

In a recently completed study of suicide in England and Scotland, 1500-1850, I used all types of non-fictional documentation, including sermons, in order to give a textured understanding of how survivors handled its practical, spiritual, and ideological aftermath. These included coroners' inquests, financial account books, estate papers, legal texts, civil and criminal court records, and asylum case notes. Among these sources newspapers stood out as the most important mass medium that shaped changing representations of self-murder in the Georgian era. The accepted version of their role stems from Foucault, who proposed that eighteenth-century papers offered increasingly bland "factual" accounts of crime that were dry, unemotional, and lacking social depth: "les silences de la chronique" (Ambroise-Rendu; Foucault 59-69). They substituted a minimal amount of vicarious knowledge for direct and textured experience obtained through personal interchange. The leading historians of English suicide, Michael MacDonald and Terence Murphy, followed this line, while arguing that newspapers were instrumental in promoting a more matter-of-fact, secular, and sympathetic understanding of self-murder among their readerships: a modern medium promoting a modern message in MacDonald and Murphy's extended narrative of modernization, Sleepless Souls. Instead, I have followed the line so brilliantly set out by Kathleen Wilson in her study of the eighteenth-century provincial press:

Newspapers were ... central instruments in the social production of information. Both representing and verifying local experience, they refracted ... events into socially meaningful categories and hierarchies of importance, bestowing order on the disordered and coordinating the imagination of social time and space.

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My project is explicitly British, comparing northern English and Scottish newspapers from the early eighteenth century to the 1820s. Because of the remit of "Beyond Depression," I discuss only the north of England in this article. In my study, I compare coverage of suicide in newspapers from contrasting parts of the north: the bustling commercial and industrial city of Newcastle and the commercially important, but more rural and stable county of Cumberland and Westmorland. The Newcastle Courant fulfilled the need for a paper with an early start (1711), steady publication, and regional readership in the northeast. The northwest did not have its own newspapers until relatively late, but the Cumberland Pacquet, or Ware's Whitehaven Advertiser, published consistently from 1774. I pored through a total of 7,681 numbers of the Courant and 2,620 copies of the Pacquet, starting from first publication and finishing in 1824, just after the law on the burial of English suicides was changed to prevent the notorious practices of staking and highway burial. Local and regional suicides can be found at the beginning or the end of the section of local news headed "Newcastle" or "Whitehaven," which in the second half of the eighteenth century comprised about 15% of the two papers' four pages of three columns each. The few suicides lifted from London papers were usually in the main part of the paper on pages two or three.

The question I asked of these newspapers was simple: how did they make suicide look? The first thing to notice about northern English newspapers is that suicide reporting was unusual until the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Runs of months or even years during the eighteenth century are innocent of suicides: a finding that distances the north of England from MacDonald and Murphy's claim that references appeared "several times a week" in the southeastern papers they skimmed (303). It was not until the 1750s that suicide reporting was anything other than occasional in the Courant and not until the 1790s that it became a regular feature of local news for that paper. On average after 1800, local suicides appeared in one out of eight for each of the northern-English weekly papers. In the whole 50 years of the Pacquet, the ratio is one in eleven. I located a total of 470 local and regional reports, plus a small number of others lifted from London papers.

So what was reported? The handful of cases in the northeast during the...