Grub Street and Suicide: A View from the Literary Press in Late Eighteenth‐Century France

Abstract

This article investigates the manner in which the French press of the late eighteenth century treated the suicides of Grub Street writers. The main argument is that the secularisation of suicide allowed for new attitudes toward self-inflicted death. One finds that the underground press callously mocked the suicides of hack writers. Secondarily, the article challenges the notion that suicide became 'medicalised' in the eighteenth century, and that contemporaries viewed it solely as an act of insanity.

Testing for the human capital value of daily newspaper journalists in the era of newsroom downsizing

“…Most lived hand-to-mouth as they hawked their freelance writings to the publishing houses in and around Grub Street (Clark, 1983; Clarke, 2004; Rogers, 1980). Paris, too, had its own cadre of “literary proletariat(s)” (Caradonna, 2010; Darnton, 1982, p. 38). Over time, the “hacks” became the newsworkers who produced and packaged content for the burgeoning newspaper industry (Splichal, 2015).…”

Explanations for death by suicide in northern Britain during the long eighteenth century

“…There are, however, other fora for representations of the link between madness and suicide that probably had a much wider constituency. Thus, for example: Gates (1988), a literary scholar, has examined factual and fictional representations of suicide during the Victorian period; Andrew (2004) has looked at how the death of Sir Samuel Romilly appeared in the press; MacDonald and Murphy (1990: 301–37) have sampled southern English newspapers to assess how understandings were created in the new ‘public sphere’ of the eighteenth century; and an exciting new article by Caradonna (2010) opens up French newspapers to scrutiny (2010). For both Scotland and England, newspaper reports allow understandings of madness and suicide to be analysed at two levels.…”