Although suicide was never deemed a wholly personal affair, as attested by the post-mortem desecration of the suicide's corpse, which persisted in Britain as a practice up until 1834, the act became increasingly the ‘nation's business’ in direct proportion to England's increasing derivation of its character from suicide. By mid-century, the English Malady – the notion that the English suffered inordinately from melancholy and that as a result the per capita rates of suicide were much higher in this country than elsewhere – emerged as a complex, troubling and often contradictory index of national character. Each instance of suicide confirmed popular opinion regarding the pathological character of the nation, while England's attempt to define a national identity necessarily foregrounded certain critical issues of the period. By 1791, the persistently suicidal poet William Cowper could lament that he ‘should be born in a country where melancholy is the national characteristic’ and subsequently confide, ‘To say the truth, I have often wished myself a Frenchman’. Cowper is just one of many writers in the eighteenth century to attach a degree of determinism to national character: one is melancholy because one is English, according to this view. However, other writers downplayed this sense of fatalism by representing melancholy as an affectation.