Eleanor Fitzsimons examines female suicide by drowning in the Victorian era. The words of medical doctor and coroner William Wynn Westcott, articulated in 1885, still hold true today: ‘In every age of the world, and in the history of every country, we find instances more or less numerous of men and women who, preferring the … Read more
A spate of suicide attempts among prostitutes in Galway followed the death of Mary Kate Costelloe, who drowned herself on 20 September 1888. Two days later, Mary Reilly jumped into the same river shouting Costelloe’s name. She was rescued and jailed for 30 days. Later that same week Kate Dolan jumped in, declaring that she … Read more
Dickens showed genuine concern for London’s prostitutes and other ‘fallen women’. In 1847, along with his good friend the philanthropist Angela Georgina Burdett-Coutts, he established Urania Cottage as a place of refuge and rehabilitation for these unfortunates. Here the regime was at variance with traditional houses of reform such as the Magdalen Hospitals for penitent … Read more
W.B. Yeats described the author William Carleton (1794–1869) as ‘a great Irish historian’. According to Yeats, ‘the history of a nation is not in parliaments and battlefields but in what the people say to each other on fair-days and high days, and in how they farm, and quarrel, and go on pilgrimage’, and these were … Read more
Dr Dominic Corrigan was technically incorrect when he stated that famine and fever were cause and effect, and so, by extension, was Carleton. What we now know, but which Corrigan and his professional colleagues in the pre-Famine period did not, is that fever is caused by germs, specific micro-organisms, and that human head and body … Read more