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Following the recent spate of suicides in Bridgend, the British government today outlined plans to prosecute websites which offer tips on how to commit suicide – an approach founded upon a fundamental misunderstanding of how the internet works (i.e. it is not all British). Many of the parents of the twenty-three young people who chose death rather than life in Bridgend have blamed the media for glamorising suicide. One is not envious of those counselors and social workers whose job it is to persuade Welsh teenagers that life is worth living:

“Choose life!”

“Why?”

“Because there is so much that you can achieve…!”

“I don’t believe you.”

Defending the merits of life is like trying to champion the achievements of Gordon Brown’s cabinet. Life is an absolutely ghastly thing – a baby which we are only left holding due to the thoughtlessness and selfishness of our parents – and nobody in their right mind would choose life, had they a choice. The obvious approach, therefore, would be that of websites like this one, which insist that the human body cannot be killed without severe pain and distress, and that following a new direction in life such as meditation or aromatherapy is marginally less unpleasant than the consequences of a failed drug overdose (brain damage, blindness).

Dr. William Maginn turned his attentions to suicide in the August 1824 edition of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Anthony Jarrells, a modern editor of the Blackwood’s contributions, has noted that Maginn’s “The Suicide” makes light of “the rather large place the subject occupied in the public discourse of the 1820s.” Edward Young’s Night Thoughts and the death of the Romantic poet Thomas Chatterton had helped to stoke a cult of suicide, although after the death of the wretched Viscount Castlereagh in 1822, suicide rapidly became unfashionable. Lord Byron observed that Castlereagh “was necessarily one of two things by law – a felon or a madman – and in either case no great subject for panegyric.” Castlereagh was ruled insane so that he could be buried in Westminster Abbey and not, as tradition dictated, in an unmarked grave at a crossroad. Maginn was thus reflecting a change in the public mood when presenting the readers of Blackwood’s with his hapless would-be suicide:

I’ll think no more about it. I have closed the accounts, and bring myself in debtor to death. All that remains to be considered is, how I am to do the business. I have been reading all the suicides I could gather, during the last week, and I do not find one exactly comformable to my ideas of the subject…

Further contradicting his opening resolution to “think no more about it,” Maginn considers shooting himself:

Shall I blow my brains out? – It is well my uncle Nicholas is not present, for the old rogue used always to say that I had none… No, I shall not blow my brains out, even supposing I have any. It is a dirty way: a man’s collar is quite disarranged, and his shirt most disagreeably stained with batter and blood. Then you are quite a disgusting-looking devil, actually a bore to a sensitive coroner and a sympathetic court of pie-powder.

Slitting his throat is equally unsatisfactory:

Does not the notion of bedaubing myself hold here also? O surely, and in a tenfold degree: you must, besides, give yourself the trouble of taking off your cravat; and you may miss there too. I have known people to slit the weasand, and yet have the wound cobbled up by some tailoring surgeon, and live, as the newspapers have it, respectable members of society. I never could hit the carotid, for I do not know where it is; and if I did, there would be some cit lying perdu with his jest, ready to call me “Carotid-artery cutting so-and-so.” I am moreover of opinion that it must hurt a man sadly to cut his throat. I remember once a time how a barber cut me into the bone while shaving me, and I was so stung with the pain that I knocked him down. Should not I then be a jackass of the first ear to hurt myself ten times worse than a knight of the pole? Just think of a jagged razor goring through your windpipe! The mere thought is hideous. Razor, avaunt! I’d not cut my throat for a thousand pounds.

The prospect of poisoning is also discounted. Maginn imagines a newspaper report of his death if by poisoning: “… the unfortunate gentleman was blown up like a tun, and there were livid and pea-green spots all over his countenance. His right eye was drawn down to his mouth, and his left twisted up over his eyebrow.” Maginn has no appetite for disembowelment (“Faugh! a man to die with his puddings out”) and hanging “does not accord with a gentleman’s ideas” (Maginn was, of course, a suave, gentlemanly Tory). As one who rarely passed a day sober, Maginn was suspicious of the idea of drowning: “you are choked with water, and I never could prevail on myself to swallow as much as a half pint of that liquid.” He also objected to the inevitable fate of the drowned: “A crab has eaten out your eyes – a cod is fattening his sounds on the drums of your ears – and a turbot has revenged himself for all the liberties you have taken with his tribe, by making your face as flat as his own spine.” “Nor would starvation at all agree with me. I fasted one day on a pound of beef and a half quartern, and I could have cried when evening came on. Oh, no! whenever or however I die, let me go out of the world with a full stomach.”

Maginn’s essay ends with the rather fortunate conclusion that the best method of suicide is drinking oneself to death. Drink certainly had a hand in Maginn’s own financial ruin and premature death. Perhaps an implication of Maginn’s logic can compensate today’s hordes of suicidal teenagers: that if lived properly, life will soon enough kill you.