TO BE OR NOT TO BE

TO BE OR NOT TO BE
Suicide in the writings of continental travellers to Britain

“Suicide des Anglais” est le titre d’une des Lettres sur l’Angleterre, l’Écosse et l’Ollande que Luigi Angiolini écrivit après son voyage diplomatique dans le nord de l’Europe en 1787-88. Cet exposé vise à ramener ce texte au cœur du background culturel du XVIIIe siècle, une époque où les discours concernant le suicide intéressent plusieurs genres, du récit de voyage à l’essai philosophique et théologique au roman. Au lieu de relier le suicide à l’univers des passions, comme à l’époque romantique, les écrivains des lumières étudient le suicide en rapport aux concepts de liberté et démocratie, selon une perspective qui par certain traits se rapproche du débat contemporains sur l’euthanasie.

When Luigi Angiolini arrived in Great Britain, where he travelled between December 1787 and July 1788, he was only twenty-seven. This young man of liberal tendencies, who had been born near Lucca, was taking part in a diplomatic mission organised by the court of Naples. Drawing on his experience, Angiolini started to write a three-volume account of his journey - Lettere sopra l’Inghilterra, Scozia e Olanda (1790, Letters Concerning England, Scotland and Holland) - that was actually left unfinished after the publication of the first two volumes in 1790.^[1] Angiolini’s Letters cover a wide range of subjects, including aspects of British society as different as the constitution, the political system, the administration, education, religious creeds, geography and manufactures, as well as the most interesting customs of Britons.

While reading this travelogue I was struck by a letter that is entitled “Suicidio degl’inglesi”, i.e. “Suicide of the English”. Far from being an isolated case, Angiolini’s treatment of such a controversial issue can be regarded as a contribution to a wider debate on suicide involving not only travellers but also theologians, philosophers, essayists and novelists from all over Europe. This paper aims to highlight the links between Angiolini’s text and its cultural background, contextualising the traveller’s reflections within this late eighteenth-century debate on the social phenomenon of suicide.

As we know, the pagan world had a respectful attitude towards suicide, which could take on a heroic status, as in the cases of Socrates and Cato.

 Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Socrates (1787)

On the other hand, early and Medieval Christians regarded self-murder as a capital sin, that is to say as an infringement of the Commandment “You shall not kill”. From a Christian perspective, life does not belong to human beings, but to their creator, and suicide was considered as a denial of God’s providence. Moreover, the death of Judas - which was associated with his betrayal of Jesus - took on the value of the prototypical suicide. The cultural attitude to self-murder became more complex in the early-modern period, when time-honoured beliefs were scrutinised with a critical spirit. Both the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries were marked by a heated debate on suicide. In the meantime an interesting phenomenon was taking place in countries such as Britain. While suicides were punished with great severity by the law - their property was confiscated, they were buried in unconsecrated ground and their corpse was the object of a macabre ritual - only a minority of them were recognised as such, and therefore met with this punishment, for in most cases those persons who had taken their life were declared insane and therefore escaped such fate.

As we shall see, this is the state of things Angiolini described in his essay, which needs to be set against the backdrop of a new rationalist interest in crime and justice. Already in 1764 Cesare Beccaria had dealt with suicide in Dei delitti e delle pene (Of Crimes and Punishments), where he argued against the common practice of punishing suicides, since in this case punishment can only be inflicted either “on the innocent, or upon an insensible dead body”. Beccaria also contested the criminal nature of self-murder, which rested on the assumption that this loss of a life damaged society, by drawing a comparison between this act and the choice to abandon one’s country in order to settle elsewhere: “If it be demonstrated that the laws which imprison men in their own country are vain and unjust, it will be equally true of those which punish suicide”.^[2]

Due to its ‘objective’ intent and analytical character, Angiolini’s letter on suicide can be considered as a typical product of the Enlightenment, but we should not forget that the increasing centrality suicide acquired in late eighteenth-century culture was also due to its association with the pre-Romantic and Romantic emphasis on passion, suffering and solitude. As we know, this interest in self-willed death had a European dimension. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie: ou, la nouvelle Héloïse (1761, Julie: or, The New Eloise) characteristically includes two letters on suicide (114 and 115). In England, poet Thomas Chatterton committed suicide in August 1770, thus becoming a Romantic icon.

 Henry Wallis, The Death of Chatterton (1856)

Only four years later, Johann Wolfgang Goethe published Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther; 1774), which soon achieved international fame.

 S. Armand, Lolotte and Werther

Suicide is also one of the subjects Madame de Staël addressed in her celebrated De l’influence des passions sur le bonheur des individus et des nations (1796, Treatise on the Influence of the Passions upon the Happiness of Individuals and of Nations), a classic of the Romantic movement. Moreover, the authoress tackled the same topic in her subsequent “Réflexions sur le suicide” (1812, “Reflections on Suicide”).

Last but not least, at a European level suicide was widely regarded as characteristic of English society and associated with the melancholy that - in the eyes of many - marked life in England, notably in London, due to the influence of the climate. As the Italian traveller Alfonso Bonfioli Malvezzi wrote in 1772, “A climate that weakens the humours and an enfeebled body turn the English into indolent and melancholy beings, causing them to grow old before time.”^[3] The English themselves regarded melancholy - and the concomitant phenomenon of suicide - as typical of their society, as is proved by George Cheyne’s The English Malady (1733), where the increase of suicides is related to the spread of atheism and to the gloomy climate of England.

 Title Page of The English Malady (1733)

1. Luigi Angiolini’s “Suicidio degl’inglesi”

Angiolini’s Letter XIX (April 1788) is devoted to the “Suicidio degl’inglesi”. The letter was occasioned by a piece of news, i.e. the suicide by drowning of a general - Benjamin Carpenter, who had lost his son two years before and moreover had recently incurred the displeasure of the king. These two events are briefly mentioned as possible reasons for his gesture. Starting from Carpenter’s case, Angiolini analysed the way in which British law punished this crime, i.e. “by confiscating the properties of suicides and by burying them in the middle of a public highway after piercing their body with a wooden stake.”^[4] The link between this custom and the rituals people used in various European countries to prevent the return of vampires is apparent. The cruelty of this posthumous punishment, however, contrasted with the leniency of the juries that were created to verify if suicide had actually been committed. As Angiolini explained, a suicide was seldom recognised as such by the twelve people that were appointed by the coroner to judge on the case, since they usually labelled the deceased as a lunatick, thus enabling the relatives to avoid both the social stigma and material damage.

Angiolini then expanded on the great number of suicides that took place in Britain and on the possible causes of this social phenomenon. Since the people who ultimately committed suicide had been neither invariably tormented by misery or remorse nor invariably oblivious to the idea of a life after death, but were common human beings, Angiolini argued that “this deadly disposition derives from the two great principles that influence and act upon the great majority of human actions all over the world, that is to say the quality of the climate and the nature of government.”^[5] According to Angiolini, the influence of the climate was proved by the fact that most of the suicides occurred in London, a city that at the time counted almost a million inhabitants and was already plagued with a strong pollution due to the use of coal. London is described in the book as steeped in a “perennially murky and heavy air, which numbs and dulls the humours, causing the spirit to be low and melancholy.”^[6]

Angiolini went on to examine the social and political factors that likewise contributed to the frequency of suicides. “Here people talk about freedom all the time”, and “as a consequence there is not an Englishman who does not believe himself to be entitled to do whatever he wants”.^[7] In the eyes of this traveller, the love of freedom and the political passion that marked English society explained the extreme eccentricity of a country “where individual behaviour is never modelled on that of others, but everybody believes that, being free, they should be able to act out in public whatever they believe in private”.^[8] This widespread indifference to public opinion and social norms, this radical individualism is regarded by Angiolini as a further cause of the English tendency to suicide:

Since these people are used, from their tender age, to regard themselves as free and as their own absolute masters […] it does not come as a surprise that when a train of accidents leads them to think of self-destruction […] these people kill themselves.^[9]

Angiolini finally mentioned another social factor that might induce people to self-murder, i.e. “the immeasurable passion of the English for riches”, which was the source of so much social disparity.^[10] The letter ends with an admission of impotence to tackle what the writer regarded as a necessary evil, for Angiolini considered suicide as a side-effect of the freedom that characterised British society: “I will therefore gather within myself and conclude with a sad meditation on our destiny, for in this world it is indispensable to suffer from certain evils in order to enjoy the highest good.”^[11]

2. Hume, suicide and national characters

As we have seen, Angiolini regarded suicide as a virtually unavoidable aspect of British society that was linked both to the climate of the country and to the nature of its government. An interesting parallel can be drawn between the causal pattern Angiolini traced in his letter and the essays philosopher David Hume devoted respectively to national characters and suicide.^[12]

 Allan Ramsay, Portrait of David Hume (1766)

In “Of National Characters” Hume developed a clear-cut thesis. While the “vulgar” often carry their belief in the existence of national characters to the extremes, and generalise superficially, cultivated people tend to discriminate and to be wary of such stereotypes, although they may allow that each nation has “a peculiar set of manners”.^[13] The main body of the essay is devoted to the analysis of what are commonly regarded as the causes of these differences in national characters, i.e. moral causes, such as the nature of the government, and physical causes, such as the nature of the climate. Although Hume did not believe that “men owe any thing of their temper or genius to the air, food, or climate”, he showed a much deeper interest in the “moral” environment of a nation, since “The human mind is of very imitative nature” and frequent intercourse within a community inevitably engenders “a similitude of manner”.^[14] As regards the English nation, Hume considered it as peculiar due to the “wonderful mixture of manners and characters” that coexisted in it, and offered the following explanation to account for its diversity:

the English government is a mixture of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. The people in authority are composed of gentry and merchants. All sects of religion are to be found among them; and the great liberty and independency which every man enjoys, allows him to display the manners peculiar to him. Hence the English, of any people in the universe, have the least of a national character, unless this singularity may pass for such.^[15]

Given the emphasis Hume placed on English freedom, which enabled single individuals to express themselves more openly than elsewhere, it does not come as a surprise that in his essay on suicide the philosopher defended this act precisely on the ground of individual freedom:

Let us endeavour to restore men to their native liberty, by examining all the common arguments against Suicide, and showing that that action may be free from every imputation of guilt or blame, according to the sentiments of all the ancient philosophers.^[16]

In his essay, Hume set out to disprove the idea that by committing suicide an individual may either infringe on the designs of providence or do harm to society. Hume’s defence of suicide rests both on the classical notion of suicide and on a rationalist approach to life and death: “That Suicide may often be consistent with interest and with our duty to ourselves, no one can question, who allows that age, sickness, or misfortune, may render life a burden, and make it worse even than annihilation.”^[17] Briefly, what the philosopher argued is that human beings should be free to dispose of their own life according to “human prudence”.^[18]

3. Conclusion

The texts we have read take us to a time of transition in the cultural representation of suicide.^[19] While nowadays - broadly speaking - we still tend to think of suicide according to its nineteenth-century Romantic and medical stereotypes as an expression of individual alienation, unbearable passion or mental illness, in the eighteenth-century climate of Enlightenment suicide was discussed in relation to different issues such as democracy and freedom, as is shown both by Angiolini’s description of suicide as a side-effect of the English government and by Hume’s defence of suicide as a civic act that is dictated by “prudence”. The emphasis was not on the emotional causes that might lead a person to despair and suicide, but rather on the legitimacy of this act. This possibly explains why the suicide of the English acquired such a paradigmatic value as a deliberate act and as an extreme assertion of individual freedom, although the common verdict of lunacy denied precisely this element of self-assertiveness.

This rational attitude to suicide is apparent also from a later travelogue - A.J.B. Defauconpret’s Quinze jours à Londres, à la fin de 1815. Par M*** (1816, Fifteen Days in London at the End of 1815), which includes a chapter on suicide (XXIX). I will not expand on the structure of this narrative, which is strongly reminiscent of Angiolini’s, but I will focus on the message the suicide - a mechanic who worked in a factory - allegedly wrote to explain his gesture: “‘Nobody should be accused of my death. I am tired of living. What is life? Working and resting, eating and sleeping. I find this uniformity boring: I want a change of scen^[20]e.’” This chapter on suicide pivots on a message that reinforces the view of enlightened thinkers such as Beccaria and Hume, i.e. the idea of suicide as a flight towards ‘another country’.

Interestingly, neither Angiolini’s nor Defauconpret’s description of suicide address great existential questions or expand on the unbearable weight of passion, which is at the heart of Rousseau’s letters 114-115 in The New Eloise and of Madame De Staël’s treatise on passions. On the other hand, these travelogues draw our attention to the individual response to social phenomena such as sovereign power, the rampant capitalism of the modern age and the new urban environment. As we have seen, in the past Carpenter had lost a son, but he had also recently incurred the displeasure of the king, while the mechanic claimed he wanted to escape from the oppressively boring routine of his London life.

What is more, these two stories - where the emotional dimension of narrative is skilfully interwoven with analysis - offer a precious insight into the late eighteenth - and early nineteenth-century discourses of suicide, which anticipated some key issues of our own times. As we know, today suicide is no longer regarded as a crime - although in England it was de-penalised only in 1961! - and even the Churches’ attitude towards suicides has deeply changed. Yet society is still striving to come to terms, by means of its laws, with the ethical dimension of the new frontier of the will to die, i.e. euthanasia or assisted suicide. When thanks to scientific and technological progress the life of individuals can be prolonged in highly artificial condition, altering the course of life towards its natural ending, the will to death takes new forms and new ethical dilemmas arise. As Hume provocatively wrote in his essay on suicide, while arguing against the opinion that by taking one’s life one sins against God’s providence:

Were the disposal of human life so much reserved as the peculiar province of the Almighty, that it were an encroachment on his right for men to dispose of their own lives, it would be equally criminal to act for the preservation of life as for its destruction. If I turn aside a stone which is falling upon my head, I disturb the course of nature; and I invade the peculiar province of the Almighty, by lengthening out my life beyond the period, which […] he has assigned to it.^[20]

These words can be regarded as a rather eccentric contribution to the current debate on euthanasia, but after delving into the eighteenth-century discourses of suicide one can hardly deny that by looking backward we can acquire useful critical tools to deal with our present.

 Maurizio Ascari