Battle of the Books: Charles Moore’s Full Inquiry into the Subject of Suicide (1790) versus Subversive Narratives of Suicidal Distress

Abstract

ABSTRACT Published in 1790 by the prestigious Rivington brothers, Charles Moore’s Inquiry forms a dynamic intervention in the eighteenth-century suicide debate. In this text, Moore attempts to disgrace not only the act of suicide itself but, more strikingly, the texts that so powerfully defend it, with a view to quelling the “bloody business” of modern self-murder. This article considers Moore’s censure of the works he deems most responsible for apparent rising suicide rates, namely David Hume’s “Of Suicide” and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. Moore “reads” these works in order to dissect, deride, and ultimately discount their arguments. In an effort to guard against the dangers of associating with subversive material, he rewrites the central premise of “Of Suicide” and seeks to remove the central protagonist from Werther. The Inquiry thus becomes a space where fears surrounding suicide, sympathetic identification, and textual contagion are negotiated and contested. Yet Moore’s unparalleled, even erratic, engagement with these works ultimately signals his downfall. In warning readers against the perils of textual contagion, Moore’s text becomes an inadvertent instrument of contagion itself.