Beyond despair: British suicide letters in the long eighteenth century

Writing suicide letters was a significant cultural practice in the British long eighteenth century, the result of a confluence of social and historical conditions including a burgeoning print culture, increasing literacy rates, unprecedented levels of public emotional discourse, and the criminal status of suicide. Suicide letters of the period were thus highly social documents, often both private and public, frequently addressing a proliferating audience, and reflecting and prompting emotional experiences and situations considerably different to prevailing conditions today or any time since. This chapter considers this cultural practice by examining the wide variety of emotions encapsulated and elicited by suicide letters, and how these letters functioned in the social and emotional worlds they inhabited by virtue of their literariness, their materiality, and their engagement with the popular press.