Previously: Things women in literature have died from.
- Disappointed hopes
- Navy fever
- Northern air
- This last winter was too hard for young Master Jamesington
- Unanswered letters
- Insufficient dueling
- He never will see the sea now, more’s the pity, Miss Georgiana
- Strange desires
- Bad companions
- Visited a sunny, majority-Catholic country and stayed longer than three weeks
- Clenching his fists in manly vexation
- His great heart burst
- He never was the same after that girl, if you’ll pardon my saying so, missus
- Frustrated nighttime moor-walking
- ‘Twas the mines
- Cuckoldry-induced lung troubles
- His best friend held the knife!
- Unspecified moral turpitude
- Things never were like they ought to have been round here ever since he came back from the War so changed, mum
- Never went to Eton but tried to be friends with men who went to Eton
- His secrets, what only the boy he brought back with him from Cairo knew the likes of
- The pitiless Sea!
- Jumped off a waterfall
- Wanting something too much until he caught a fever
- Sternness
- What have I done?
- Not talking about his feelings
- Too sensitive to class differences, also a bookcase fell on him
- The sight of how much it still pained her even after all this years
- Fell off a horse for reasons of overweening pride
- Unable to forgive
- Chaste homoeroticism for a schoolfellow who died in the trenches
- That surprise in the corridor
- Patriotism
- He always said he never would survive her and ’twas only yesterday she returned his ring to him, I never saw the like of his face when he saw it
Tags: books, death, literary deaths, literature
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Fragile little things. Men.
I heard this in my head followed by Lucille from Crimson Peak scraaaaaaaaping a spoon across porcelain.
AUUGHHHHH such an amazing scene but I was literally shuddering dramatically straight through ut
That scene was fuuuuucked uuuuuuup.
AAAGH so horrible. Also squelching the spilled breakfast around in her bare hands.
And it’s hardly ever the ones you wish *would*.
Brain fever! This seemed to happen a lot in Frances Hodgson Burnett books, and it sounded terrible.
Between brain fever and typhoid, nobody was safe.
I would say the consumption as well, but that was definitely just for the ladies.
No, no, Emily of New Moon’s father, Douglas Starr, died of consumption.
Oh, I should have known! I have read those books numerous times. I guess there was a line about “her father died of consumption.” And when I think back, he did fade gently and slowly away in the proper manner. I believe poor Ruby Gillis in “Anne” gets “galloping consumption” — meaning it was acute.
I remain surprised that neither Anne’s parents nor Matthew died of consumption.
The excessively-flirtatious ladies, in particular. Virtuous ladies get scarlet fever.
What the heck was brain fever? People used to die of things I still can’t figure out.
Historians/Doctors aren’t quite sure. I’ve seen a few possibilities named: meningitis, encephalitis, scarlet fever or cerebritis. All of which are infectious in nature, but some argue that intense stress/grief would possibly make you more susceptible to illness.
Lots of people in Sherlock Holmes stories contract brain fever. As far as I can tell, it’s cause by being Very Upset.
More-than-chaste homoeroticism for one’s best bro who himself bites it after he takes a stupid risk for one in battle.
Alternately, youthful idealism. Or excessive dueling. Or, if you’re a Hamilton, both.
TOO SOON 🙁
I’m sorry to break this to you, but it’s been 211-214 years. I think you can work through the unimaginable at this point.
*choked sob* *listens to compilation of Daveed Diggs saying “What?” to recover*
Oh my gosh is this a thing? For real? Link please?
THE BOOKCASE THO
There was a winter where my mother and I almost exclusively watched Merchant and Ivory films. It was WONDERFUL.
Also, the bookcase. But really it was the third upstairs maid having too bright a ribbon in her hair so as he walked by he was FORCED to notice her low class presence as she obsequiously averted her gaze to the floor as she polished the 2,137th spindle in the staircase. Oh and then also, the 6 shelf English Oak bookcase filled with large leather volumes of Ovid crashed on his head, but it was MOSTLY his sensitivity to the classes.
What book is this?
If you want it spoiled, look below…..
…Howards End
-The Heath
-Expecting glory in the battlefields of WWI
-Patriotism to a country other than England
-Cyanide
– Nonspecific vexation
– Specific vexation about a thing WHICH MUSN’T BE REVEALED
I am greatly enjoying the last point, in light of the author.
I try to stay on-brand.
Riding a rocking horse to climax … (okay, that’s the Freudian interpretation, and he wasn’t a grown-up, but still …)
Wait, is that what happened?
Finally given one white feather too many and joined army despite fragile health/general over-sensitivity
Finally fulfilled overweening desire for REVENGE, nothing left to live for
Couldn’t escape damp moldy climate of England/hot stifling climate of India
oh, walter.
Putting his pistol to his own head rather than submit to the ignominy of handing his sword over to some blasted Frenchman.
Delicious timing! I am re-reading Daniel Deronda and have just gotten to the part when Gwendolen rejects Rex Gascoigne’s offer of marriage, and he takes to his bed. A man named Rex! Who is described by the novel as a paragon of youthful manliness! He takes to his bed and doesn’t get up for weeks, and when he does he wanly suggests that he is too broken to return to Oxford and probably ought to just move to America.
It’s George Eliot, though, so he doesn’t die, just takes an embarrassing tumble from a horse.
The only thing I know about Daniel Deronda is that Hugh Dancy starred in the miniseries (or is it a movie?) and therefore I must watch it immediately
It is a mini-series, and Hugh Dancy is pristinely beautiful and virtuous with in it, and Romola Garai is appropriately breathy, beautiful, and begowned. A plus, would watch again if it were still on Netflix.
Hugh Dancy has built a career playing characters who can only be described as “beautiful and virtuous but in a way that makes you want to pile-drive him into the mattress.”
…this is not the time or place for my Hugh Dancy problems. I’ll see myself out.
*gestures to fresh pot of tea* Come sit by me. I ALWAYS have time for Hugh Dancy problems.
Scarlet Unrequited Love Fever
Vellum ratchets that one up to 11, as I recall it was chaste homoeroticism for a fiancee’s brother he had to execute in the trenches. he may have merely gone mad and fallen through infinite mirrorworlds, though. making him a DOUBLE sissy.
Unspecified moral turpitude is just something we all need to engage in more often, if you ask me.
I like to think I’m doing my part.
Personally, I feel that it’s very important, in these uncertain times, to be very specific about one’s moral turpitude. Lack of specificity is one of the many ailments plaguing our world.
Not going to lie, my friends and I (honorary Toasties) were literally doubled over laughing.
Especially after I showed them the original, which I had all but forgotten. They decided that any of those could be appropriate substitutes for “that time of the month”.
BUT THIS ONE THO.
“Also a bookcase fell on him”
I’m just going to go cry now.
mancold
ETA: sorry, meant to file under “things men IRL have died from, probably”
Too sensitive to class differences, also a bookcase fell on him
I am a lady, but this will def be my epitaph.
I didn’t need a bookcase to fall on me once I got to this one, because I nearly died of laughter
– Gangrene contracted from being shot in the foot by the starter’s pistol at a public school Sports Day
I was just re-reading that the other day. I love Waugh when he’s being funny (not so much when he’s being serious).
<3 Although he was a boy really… but still hilarious.
Snake.
Tied for first place in completing hedge maze.
Evil spirit forcibly removed from back of head.
Fell through a curtain.
I see what you did there
I did not until your post caused me to take a second look at the original post, and I am ashamed of myself.
“Fell through a curtain.”
…I know it’s been years but that will always be TOO SOON for me. 🙁
I was forced to bid farewell to the part of my 21-year-old self that swore she would never love again as I hit “submit” on that comment.
A Fruitless and Futile Quest For Revenge (see also: Seine, the).
I recently reread The Princess of Cleves and was surprised anew at how many people were becoming ill from jealousy in that book. No wonder there were so many wars in Olden Days, people needed some distraction from sleeping with each others’ spouses.
That was the first book I studied for my French degree. I have no idea at all what happens in it.
Lots of sighing and swooning as I recall. Mostly over portraits. Plus the chivalric French version of stiff upper lip. They definitely died from that in those days.
Everyone bangs everyone else, except the title character. She is considered weird and eventually retires to a convent. That part I wouldn’t mind. The Prince of Cleves actually DOES die of a jealousy-induced fever.
A combo of “Cuckoldry-induced lung troubles” and “Visited a sunny, majority-Catholic country and stayed longer than three weeks” is I believe what did in the bro from He Knew He Was Right. Although in his case it was more “perceived cuckoldry induced lung troubles.” What an insufferable ass that character was.
If ever a woman was Well Out Of That!
Maybe’s she’s tied with Dorothea from “Middlemarch”?
Oh she and poor Dorothea should start a club.
Laudanum (too much, or too little, ’tis not my place to say, sir)
-tuberculosis
-besmirched honor
-disillusion
-a flesh wound
“failed to apply himself with sufficient vigor to a class-appropriate ambition”
Too many French novels and cigars
There’s also “drank gin so much and so constantly that he literally burst into flames,” but he was no sort of gentleman, so it hardly bears remarking on.
Ha, I was just going to post “SPONTANEOUS COMBUSTION.”
– Read receipt for a text message which never received a reply.
This reads like a list of things Weekend Update’s Stefon says after “This club has everything:”
Yesyesyesyesyesyesyesssss
Too sensitive to class differences, also a bookcase fell on him
I AM STILL MAD ABOUT THIS THOUGH
Is Navy Fever a sexually transmitted fever? Or is it what happens when you sail to Spain, but the Navy blocks your port and you can’t leave within three weeks?
Or just being too excited about taking to the sea?
It’s part of the spectrum of fevers, approx four fevers after scarlet fever.
“Visited a sunny, majority-Catholic country and stayed longer than three weeks” does not discriminate by gender. Also, *failing* to visit a sunny, etc. country when the winter comes on for the good of one’s lungs has also been known to take a man down.
Then there’s general malaise of fin-de-siecle Europe…
Pinned all his hopes on a Chancery lawsuit which drained the entire estate without being resolved.
Supporting a large family on a curate’s salary.
New Year’s calling.
Everybody lost interest in him after he sent his children to his sister-in-law’s school.
Maybe in a shipwreck. Or maybe not.
Having a cousin of the same name.
“Frustrated nighttime moor-walking” … he would been all right if he’d just worn his hat like his mother told him to.
“Everybody lost interest in him after he sent his children to his sister-in-law’s school.”
I see what you did there. And I appreciate it.
Poor stupid Richard Carstone.
Is ‘he never was the same after that girl’ code for ‘STD?’
These are all just syphilis right?
Honest Lewis adds “The Horror.”
“Fell off a horse for reasons of overweening pride”
Also:
Reckless narcissism
As a student at the superior half of Oxbridge I can confirm “Never went to Eton but tried to be friends with men who went to Eton” could easily be the death of many a man (or woman tbh)
As a former student, I agree and without trying I can think of 4 people currently afflicted.
I presume the next installment in this series will be “things children in literature have died from”, and will include such famous ailments as “excessive jump-roping”, “ennui”, “whining too much in the car”, and “driven off a cliff by your grandmother”?
See: Gorey, Edward
“driven off a cliff by your grandmother”
What book is this I must read it.
Er, it would spoil the ending a bit…
Too much OR too little honour.
Was always a sickly type, as you well know, Mi’lady. Always wanted to do more than he could, more’s the pity. Just so fearful thin and pale.
So completely, recklessly in love with his beautiful young fiancée, that he was by her side constantly throughout her slow, painful death from her VERY contagious disease.
Also, this list would double for “what caused Men in historical romances to be completely, hopelessly debauched” …if they survive, of course, they tend to be ruined but for the love of a (new) woman.
Anyone else remember “died from a gentle bump from falling off a ladder that turned into stomach cancer?”
No, actually. Elucidate, please?
built a train track too quickly
had to use a crutch
coughed at any time
survived a plane crash but did not die until 10 years later
fell on his sword
I’ll second cyanide and add strychnine. It seems half the people in old mysteries die of these two. Were there just jars of these kept under everyone’s kitchen sink or something?
re: cyanide and strychnine – are we doing things wrong by not having jars underneath the sink?
Horrible but unspecified poison delivered via ear canal
Dismemberment and cannibalization
Old age + grief + probably also the strain of carrying his daughter’s body onstage
Scratched with a poisoned sword during a “friendly” fencing bout
Birnam Wood came to Dunsinane
Whole lotta stab wounds
Long-overdue comeuppance
…one could go on and on with Shakespeare’s tragedies, really. And let’s not even get started on some of his contemporaries.
Fell off a horse for reasons of overweening pride
-Can confirm a horse will happily throw a man who is exhibiting overweening pride. Man: “Horse you will do as I say for I am the superior creature with my words and civilization etc.” Horse: “Hahaha nope”
Or kick. Or both.
Horses invented kicking men while they’re down
misandry!
So THAT’S what “he saith Ha, ha! among the trumpets” is all about.
Ahaha so good
Was a brilliant, sensitive poet who was Too Fine For This World, and whose will to live was crushed by the horrors of trench warfare.
Poor Walter. I’m still sad/mad about that one.
Me, too. Also sad/mad about poor Una. At least Walter was immortalized for having written the fictional equivalent of “In Flanders Fields.” All Una gets is Walter’s last letter, with only a spinster’s life and a Household Science course to look forward to.
I prefer to believe that Una goes to England, meets Dickon/Colin from The Secret Garden, and has a great time.
(Because really, Montgomery: you were usually more sensible than “this guy you were in love with died when you were twenty, ALONE FOREVER.”)
I’m reading Rainbow Valley RIGHT NOW and am already bummed anticipating Poor Walter’s untimely demise in the following book. Though he is a bit of a sop, isn’t he? Funny how my impressions of these books change over the years.
The problem with attaining dueling sufficiency, for health, is can you ever really have ENOUGH dueling?
(No, of course not.)
Tirant Lo Blanc, a book that predates and receives a glowing review from within Don Quixote, sees a strapping young man get so angry that his bile rises up through his throat and chokes him to death.
That’s an excellent one.
Really, Italy’s just a very dangerous place for the morally upright.
Doing a far far better thing than he had ever done.
Lived Too Rashly and Burned Too Brightly (this one crosses gender!)
If I don’t die “clenching my fists in manly vexation” I will feel profoundly cheated.
I have read a book in which a man’s death is described in very similar terms to “His great heart burst”. It’s a thing!
Oh my gosh is this a thing? For real? Link please?
So is the audience for this blog entirely out of work literature and art Ph.D.s? (I am- 19th century British Literature Ph.D.) Or is everyone reading lesser-known Wilkie Collins novels these days?