I

In a satirical piece entitled ‘A Receptacle for Suicides’, a contributor to Adam Fitz-Adam's periodical The World (1756) outlines his scheme to ‘sanitize’ the experience of ‘self-killing’ by supplying not only the venue for individuals seeking to end their lives, but also the means by which they might achieve their goal. Remarking on ‘the number of sudden deaths that abound in this island’, ‘John Anthony Tristman’ invokes England's eighteenth-century reputation as a suicidal nation afflicted by a kind of cultural death drive. The aptly named Tristman helpfully proposes to ‘remedy th[e] inconveniencies’ encountered by ‘all such of the nobility, gentry and others as are tired of life’ by providing ‘convenient apartments’ and expeditious methods of self-disposal less shocking to the ‘delicacy’ of such individuals than popular means of suicide. The author concludes his macabre, semi-Swiftian excursus by claiming only the heads of suicides as his ‘constant fee, that by frequent dissections and examinations into the several brains, [he] may at least discover the cause of so unnatural a propensity’. Paradoxically, the contributor suggests a biological cause for suicide even while identifying the act as unnatural, thereby reinforcing the divide between the body and nature that was already conceptualized in the mechanistic philosophy of the period.

In this satire, suicide is denoted by the euphemism ‘sudden death’, reflecting the Christian concern with the abridgement of and interference with time that the individual's act of ‘rushing into eternity’ ostensibly involved.