Sleepless Souls

Suicide was regarded as a terrible crime in Tudor and Stuart England, and was subject to savage punishments: Those who succeeded had their property forfeited to the crown; their bodies were denied Christian burial and desecrated. Yet in Georgian England suicide was in practice de-criminalized, tolerated, and even sentimentalized. In this, the latest in the Oxford Studies in Social History series, Michael MacDonald and Terence Murphy use a wide variety of sources to trace the causes of dramatically changing attitudes to suicide, providing a history of social and cultural change in English society over three centuries.