‘No future to look forward to’, Suicide Pacts, Intimacy and Society in 1920s and 1930s Britain

Abstract

Abstract In the years after the First World War, a worrying legal and cultural phenomenon appeared in the English criminal court, something that would captivate the reading public throughout Britain. Young people, specifically young couples, were agreeing to die together, in what would become known as a ‘suicide pact’. This article examines the curiously brief life of the suicide pact as a legal, social, and cultural problem in Britain. It contends that the suicide pact became a site through which the scale and pace of modern life, and particularly intimate life, was debated and judged. The suicide pact, this article argues, provides another vantage point to unpack the fraught twentieth-century relationship between individual freedom in sexual life, and the norms, values and patterns of community and the family. In exploring this tension, this article also presents a new way of thinking about the history of both intimate and social life in twentieth-century Britain.