Contents

Barbara T. Gates, Alumni Distinguished Professor of English, University of Delaware

[Victorian Web Home —> Authors —> Social History]

List of Illustrations

Preface

Introduction

Abbreviations

I. Verdicts

II. Willing to Be

III. Cases and Classes: Sensational Suicides and Their Interpreters

IV. Bad and Far Better Things

V. Other Times, Other Cultures, Other Selves

VI. Monsters of Self-Destruction

Varney the Vampire, or The Feast of Blood (1847)

John Merrick, the Elephant Man

Nell, Quilp, and Accidental Suicides in Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

The Divided Self and Self-Destruction in Tennyson's Idylls of the King

Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray

VII. Suicidal Women: Fact or Fiction?

VIII. Century's End: "The Coming Universal Wish Not to Live"

---

Victorian
Web

Social
History

Included on this site 10 April 2001; last modified 12 May 2023