Taking one’s own life was, until 1961, a crime, but in the period covering the Victorian and Edward years, the reasons for suicide usually throw up interesting and informative elements of social history: the plain fact is that an act of taking one’s own life always highlights something in the immediate social context. This is often a case of ‘something rotten in the state of Denmark’ as Shakespeare’s Hamlet puts it. Some of the commonest reasons are logically concerned with the social consequences of some intolerable guilt or culpability for a particular wrong. Often, it is a case of disgrace, pure and simple. An individual has done something wrong and the consequences will be too hard to bear.