Using different combinations of historical techniques and sources (including coroners' private case papers), this examines four major elements of suicide in Victorian and Edwardian England: suicide rates and distribution; individual experiences; social attitudes; and efforts at prevention.

This book shows how interpretations of suicidal motives were guided by gendered expectations of behaviour, and that these expectations were constructed to create meaning and understanding for family, friends and witnesses. Providing an insight into how people of this era understood suicidal behaviour and motives, it challenges the assertion that suicide was seen as a distinctly feminine act, and that men who took their own lives were feminized as a result. Instead, it shows that masculinity was understood in a more nuanced way than gender binaries allow, and that a man's masculinity was measured against other men. Focusing on four common narrative types; the love-suicide, the unemployed suicide, the suicide of the fraudster or speculator, and the suicide of the dishonoured solider, it provides historical context to modern discussions about the crisis of masculinity and rising male suicide rates. It reveals that narratives around male suicides are not so different today as they were then, and that our modern model of masculinity can be traced back to the 19th century.

Of all eras of London’s history, the Victorian and Edwardian city continues to stimulate the literary, visual, and popular imaginations like no other. This collection explores the unique relationship between the literary, and more broadly, artistic imagination and experience of the Victorian and Edwardian city. It includes some major figures such as Wordsworth, Dickens, and James, but also other writers and artists who are all but forgotten. Bringing together some of the leading scholars working on representations of Victorian and Edwardian London, this collection will be of interest to scholars, researchers and students working on literary London and more broadly the urban in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries.

A study of expression of grief among the working class in Victorian and Edwardian Britain.

Each chapter of this stimulating book collects a wide variety of images show the different ways that historical events can be represented. Metal and wood engravings, lithographs, woodcuts, etchings, watercolors, and drawings all reflect changing attitudes towards gender, politics, the family, education, and industrialization. This revised second edition has many new illustrations which further assist the interpretation of popular graphic images from the 18th and 19th centuries.

DEATH BY SUGGESTION gathers together twenty-two short stories from the 19th and early 20th century where hypnotism is used to cause death-either intentionally or by accident. Revenge is a motive for many of the stories, but this anthology also contains tales where characters die because they have a suicide wish, or they need to kill an abusive or unwanted spouse, or they just really enjoy inflicting pain on others. The book also includes an introduction which provides a brief history of hypnotism as well as a listing of real life cases where the use of hypnotism led to (or allegedly led to) death.

This book is open access under a CC BY license and charts the rise and fall of various self-harming behaviours in twentieth-century Britain. It puts self-cutting and overdosing into historical perspective, linking them to the huge changes that occur in mental and physical healthcare, social work and wider politics.