Before Depression
1660 - 1800

THE LIMITS OF SYMPATHY: NEWSPAPERS REPORTING OF SUICIDE IN THE NORTH OF ENGLAND, c.1750-1830

R. A. Houston

Newspapers are arguably the most important mass medium of the last half millennium and their treatment of suicides is vital to understanding how self-murder was construed in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. The accepted version of their role stems from Foucault, who proposed that they offered increasingly bland 'factual' accounts of crime that were dry, unemotional and lacking social depth. They substituted a minimal amount of vicarious knowledge for direct and textured experience obtained through personal interchange and were thus instrumental in promoting a more matter-of-fact, secular and sympathetic understanding of self-murder among their readership. The lecture uses 7,681 numbers of the Newcastle Courant (1711-1824) and 2,620 numbers of the Cumberland Pacquet, or Ware's Whitehaven Advertiser (1774-1824) to demonstrate that reporting was in fact both socially selective and morally judgmental: presenting suicide as a social problem that affected the lower orders, those in dependent positions, and the young. Far from being inclusive, later Georgian newspapers of the north of England drew limits around the boundaries of its community of readers by pathologising suicide, not normalising it. Their narratives of suicide followed the rules of classical rhetoric rather than the apparently new sensibilities displayed in Enlightenment writing. Apparently neutral statements about causation and the location of suicides were in reality loaded with moral equivalence. Reporting was 'sympathetic' only in the restricted sense meant by Enlightenment thinkers like Adam Smith rather than the universalism of David Hume, which forms the core of modern understandings.

Now available as an audio-recording (mp3)