What is it with historical writers and carriage accidents? Every time I turn around, a writer kills off a character via carriage accident- or in one memorable case, an exploding carriage. Just, going along, and KABOOM! Carriage explodes and everyone’s dead. The story didn’t even take place in Northern Ireland.

… That was a joke, people. Car bombs are bad.

And they become stupid when they’re placed in the wrong context. There are so many ways to kill off a character in a historical fiction book; you don’t need to reach for an unrealistic or unusual method.

Yes, I did say unusual. Because carriage accidents did happen, and I’m not trying to claim they didn’t. Vehicles of all kinds are complex machines with lots of moving parts, and a horse-drawn vehicle is subject to the vagaries of a flight animal in addition to driver stupidity and mechanical failure. Exploding carriages, on the other hand… probably not.

So, what was the most common way for someone to die in Regency England? Well, disease was a huge killer, especially of children. About a third of children died before they turned five. No vaccines, no antibiotics, no central heating, and often not enough food meant that people did die of ‘trifling colds’. Mrs. Bennet is vindicated, and it’s a darned good thing Jane happened to feel the effects of her cold while at Netherfield. TB, leukemia, various wasting diseases, etc.- often lumped together under the heading of ‘consumption’- and smallpox were the other major killers. Between 22 and 25 percent of deaths were attributed to consumption; about 10 percent were from ‘fever,’ which included all kinds of infections; and smallpox caused another 10 percent of deaths. Smallpox inoculation was just starting to become an accepted preventative, but it wasn’t in widespread use.

Tooth infections were a surprisingly common way to die- and by ‘common’, I mean, a few percent of people died from them, which is appallingly high by modern standards. The combination of poor quality food and limited options for dental care meant that a lot of people lost their teeth fairly early in life, and in the process, could succumb to an infection that turned into sepsis. Lethal tooth infections might be lumped in with ‘fever’, because that’s one of the most obvious signs of sepsis.

Contrary to popular belief, women were not dying in childbirth every five seconds. The official statistics counted about one percent of women dying in that manner, and the real number might be slightly higher because if the woman died a little while after giving birth, it was hard to tell what the actual precipitating event was- did she die of sepsis that didn’t take hold until a few week after giving birth, or did she die of another infection? That one percent is a decrease from earlier statistics, which are less exact but usually show a maternal death rate of about two percent.

Some causes of death were more or less common in particular social classes. The wealthy upper class were much less likely to die of starvation, but poor people sometimes did. Wealthy people were more likely to fall off a horse and break their neck or die of a TBI, because saddle horses were expensive- and taxed- so poor people were less likely to be on the back of a horse in the first place- though stagecoach travel was relatively cheap, so if one must have a carriage accident in a book, it could plausibly affect people of all social classes, provided you get the details right. Wealthy people were also more likely to die from diseases associated with too much good food and too little exercise- heart problems, stroke, gout- which admittedly doesn’t usually kill the person but it makes life really unpleasant. Working class people were more likely to die from lung diseases, between the dust from mines and the dust from textile mills.

Going back to carriage accidents. Yes, they did happen- broken harness or wheels, horses going lame, bad driving and worse roads land the carriage in a ditch or cause a rollover on a tight corner- and authors who use them as a plot device are probably trying to invoke the same feelings we modern readers have when we hear that someone’s died in a car accident. It’s also tidier than having someone die of consumption; the reader doesn’t have to think about a character wasting away and coughing up blood. Fair enough; no one needs that kind of mental images ruining the mood of their light, fluffy, cotton candy romance novel.

So there are reasons to kill a character via an unusual way like a carriage accident. But just because you saw it in a book- or ten- doesn’t mean it was common for the time or place portrayed. As with so many aspects of life, if you’re going to break with reality, have a good reason for doing so, and either go the whole hog, or do it as surreptitiously as possible. There’s no time to be wishy-washy when you’re assassinating a character in an exploding carriage.