Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Introduction: A Genealogy of Suicide
- 1 Suicide and Spectrality in Eliza Haywood's Amatory Fiction
- 2 Mors Voluntaria: Clarissa and the Agency of Martyrdom
- 3 English Maladies and Material Culture at Mid-Century
- 4 The Pathology of Sentiment: Politics, Sacrifice and Wertherism in the English Novel of Sensibility
- 5 ‘The Death of Reason’: Vitalism, Transnational Identity and Frances Burney
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - English Maladies and Material Culture at Mid-Century
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Introduction: A Genealogy of Suicide
- 1 Suicide and Spectrality in Eliza Haywood's Amatory Fiction
- 2 Mors Voluntaria: Clarissa and the Agency of Martyrdom
- 3 English Maladies and Material Culture at Mid-Century
- 4 The Pathology of Sentiment: Politics, Sacrifice and Wertherism in the English Novel of Sensibility
- 5 ‘The Death of Reason’: Vitalism, Transnational Identity and Frances Burney
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Although suicide was never deemed a wholly personal affair, as attested by the post-mortem desecration of the suicide's corpse, which persisted in Britain as a practice up until 1834, the act became increasingly the ‘nation's business’ in direct proportion to England's increasing derivation of its character from suicide. By mid-century, the English Malady – the notion that the English suffered inordinately from melancholy and that as a result the per capita rates of suicide were much higher in this country than elsewhere – emerged as a complex, troubling and often contradictory index of national character. Each instance of suicide confirmed popular opinion regarding the pathological character of the nation, while England's attempt to define a national identity necessarily foregrounded certain critical issues of the period. By 1791, the persistently suicidal poet William Cowper could lament that he ‘should be born in a country where melancholy is the national characteristic’ and subsequently confide, ‘To say the truth, I have often wished myself a Frenchman’. Cowper is just one of many writers in the eighteenth century to attach a degree of determinism to national character: one is melancholy because one is English, according to this view. However, other writers downplayed this sense of fatalism by representing melancholy as an affectation.
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- Information
- Dying to be EnglishSuicide Narratives and National Identity, 1721–1814, pp. 89 - 114Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014