Volume 35, Number 10 · June 16, 1988
The Secret House of Death
By David Cannadine
Suicide in Victorian and Edwardian England
by Olive Anderson
Oxford University Press (Clarendon Press), 475 pp., $84.00
Only during the twentieth century have most people in the West (but not, alas, elsewhere) begun to die in old age and from natural causes, with the result that any death that does not conform to this comforting and conventional image now seems more than usually shocking. Since 1945, those who die young or in middle age, from incurable illness or by accidental violence, are seen as having drawn the short straw in the lottery of life. Even more atypical is the small minority of people who do away with themselves. Suicide, self-destruction, auto-annihilation: these are not pretty words. But then, the deed they describe is not pretty either. On the contrary, the willful (or irresponsible) act of entering what Shakespeare called 'the secret house of death' is something to which that overused word 'tragedy' may quite correctly be applied, since it arouses feelings of pity and terror among those many people for whom life is an infinitely precious thing.
Review, 4069 words
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