In Male Suicide and Masculinity in 19th-Century Britain, Lyndsay Galpin makes a powerful case for bringing histories of gender and suicide together in a sustained and meaningful way. Given that, for well over three-hundred years in Britain, men have been approximately three times more likely to end their own lives than women, Galpin invites readers to consider whether current gendered suicide rates really signify a contemporary crisis in masculinity, or whether they are rooted in more historic trends and issues.

Galpin’s book is organized around four key narratives of male suicide which appeared in the nineteenth-century British press: suicide instigated by love and jealousy; by poverty and unemployment; by fraud and speculation, and by military dishonor. This structure works well, and opens up insights into a variety of different historiographies. Her examination of the relationship between male suicide and romantic difficulties in chapter 1 is very strong. Galpin demonstrates that men who were “othered” for their suicidal feelings—especially if they were instigated by problems in love—were not inherently feminized, but marginalized in different ways. Following Kelly McGuire (Dying to be English: Suicide Narratives and National Identity, 1721–1814, 2012), she shows that Wertherian love-sickness was construed as a foreign, European mode of behavior, in contrast to a steady, reasoned British masculinity, well into the nineteenth century.

Chapter 2, which examines poverty and unemployment, is also very interesting. Although historians have demonstrated that “alternative models of masculinity” (65) existed during this period, Galpin reveals that anxieties about being an unproductive man, who was unable to demonstrate his independence as a breadwinner, were persistent in reports of men’s economically motivated suicides in nineteenth-century Britain. She deftly situates these narratives within contemporary political thought, particularly Thomas Malthus’ Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). Her discussion of military dishonor, in Chapter 4, is similarly compelling. She convincingly shows that, rather than being conceptualized as the product of trauma, military suicides were usually portrayed as the result of dishonor, within the context of evolving shame and honor systems over this period.

Galpin’s book is excellently researched and makes a valuable contribution to the existing literature. Her discussion of the ways in which narratives shape identities and “become points of reference for others who find themselves in the same circumstances” (8) is nuanced and thought-provoking. Her reflexivity is also refreshing, with Galpin being up-front about the ways in which her choices, as a researcher, have inevitably shaped the narratives which receive notice in this book. Her considerations of the contemporary relevance of her work can also be compelling. While written with sound intentions, she notes that current media guidelines, which stipulate that suicides must be portrayed as the result of individual pathology, can encourage people to overlook many of the social and economic issues which contribute to people’s suicidality.

There are some aspects of the book which would have benefitted from more consideration. Galpin might have reflected more on the language which she uses about suicide. Many suicidologists and activists agree that we should move away from the term “commit suicide,” as it implies that someone committed a crime, but it appears frequently throughout the book. There is undoubtedly debate about terminology, and suicide was indeed a crime in nineteenth-century England, but more discussion of language might have been helpful. While suicide was illegal in the nineteenth century, a more neutral term (e.g. “ended his/her life”) would have been preferable. Additionally, Galpin often refers to individuals who ended their own lives as “suicides,” in a way that implies that a person was a suicide. She talks of “looking back through a suicide’s life” (8); of the fact that “many real suicides had felt themselves to be an unnecessary burden” (62), and of instances “where the suicide had suffered bankruptcy” (99). Though this language has been regrettably used by other historians, it serves to reduce a multifaceted human being to their final act in this world, suggesting that they were, in their essence, “a suicide,” rather than a person. Of course, regardless of the book’s focus, a person was always much more than the way in which they died.

Galpin can also, at times, overstate the nineteenth century’s significance within the history of suicide. In reference to press coverage and growing reports of suicide statistics, she argues that, in the nineteenth century, “suicide was more visible than ever” (2). Given the anxious debates around English people’s supposed propensity toward suicide from at least the 1710s, and frequent discussion of suicide and Wertherism in the press from the 1770s, the newness of people’s interest in suicide should not be overplayed. Relatedly, the years before 1830 receive somewhat limited notice, and more consideration might have been given to the ways in which attitudes and narratives around suicide developed over the course of the nineteenth century. Despite acknowledging that her book is “not the first cultural history of suicide” (6), it is also strange that Galpin makes no reference to Terence Murphy and Michael Macdonald’s seminal work on the subject seminal work on the subject in Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England (1990). This is despite the fact that many of her observations—for example, about the perception of suicide as a “rational path out of hardship” (79)—add interesting nuance to \ idea that suicide was essentially “medicalized” by the early nineteenth century. Lastly, while Galpin hopes that she might “reconstruct” the “lived experience(s)” of those who ended their own lives (14), as she herself acknowledges, her focus remains chiefly on the ways in which suicide was narrated in the press: she believes that “rarely do we hear the voice of the suicide himself” in these sources (163). More could, perhaps, have been done to reconstruct these experiences, and more reflection might have been given to the suicide letters which Galpin frequently quotes in this book. The field, at large, suffers from a lack of engagement with historical experiences of suicide and suicidal feelings, in favor of approaches which focus on the development of cultural attitudes.

These thoughts are offered as potentially constructive reflections upon what is otherwise an excellent and important book. As Galpin notes, while it is a study of nineteenth-century suicide, “it is ultimately a history of nineteenth-century moral values and attitudes towards masculinity” (164), and it will be extremely interesting to historians of gender, masculinity, class and the press, as well as historians of suicide.