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.
Mad Genius Club 
18 responses to “Bring Out Your Dead!”
Statistically, famine, plague, and violence would tend to be more historically accurate, true. But modern writers with modern sensibilities and modern inattention to niggling little details tend to reach for expedience rather than methodical sense when reaching for the metaphorical axe.
An even larger factor than either of those was that anything involved with heating, cooking, and lighting involved burning something, and the poorer you were, the more smoke you probably got from the fuel used for all of them.
The infamous London fogs so beloved by mystery writers were literal killers as a result.
I think it’s an Eric Flint/David Weber collaboration where Charles I and his wife are leaving London after a nasty sleet/snow storm so the roads are slick, and the king (who is portrayed as an idiot) screams at his driver to “huur,” because there are men assembling on the street and he and his equally idiotic queen have panicked. So the horses run, the carriage skids and slides into the side of a building, and history is further changed because the Queen is killed and the King crippled. With the escort muttering to themselves about how easily the wreck could have been avoided.
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Something else you might try, per TV Tropes:
There was a time, back before anesthesia and asepsis, when most cancers were never diagnosed. Doctors could easily recognize breast, cervical, and vaginal cancers from an external examination, but without surgery, X-rays, or medical laboratories, they couldn’t detect internal cancers.
So your poor doomed character just gets progressively weaker and thinner, with no one able to explain why.
Which would also get lumped under “consumption”.
In my own series of historicals, I had made reference to a woman widowed and raising four sons as her husband had died of consumption. When I came around to writing that sequence in another book, I just didn’t want to have to write all the lurid and vivid details of what ‘dying from consumption’ would entail – so I had a brilliant notion to have him die off-stage as it were, and another brilliant notion for a turn of plot which would make that logical. (As well as setting up a story arc for another later book).
The survival rates for children are heartbreaking, though. A couple of years ago, I visited the old Catholic cemetery in Fredericksburg – it was only in use for about 15 years, around the time of the American civil war. There were about sixty graves in it – and all but about a dozen were for children and babies, some of which (to judge from the names and dates) were siblings and died within days of each other. There was a horrific diphtheria epidemic around 1864.
I’ve seen that in some of the older local cemeteries in SE Pennsylvania. One right by me not only has well over a dozen headstones for young children dating from the mid-19th century down to the 1940s, usually from the old regular Summer and Winter childhood disease epidemics, it has a “Poor Sinners’ Corner” just outside of what used to be a back corner where they buried several infants who died before they could be baptized, as well as one adult man who I suspect was a suicide.
They could also die at sea pretty routinely, if they traveled somewhere that required it.
There’s a Father Brown story that turns on the way it was written before naval ships were routinely fitted with radio — which, of course, it doesn’t mention.
But the great clue is that when you hear that a ship has returned, and that the Admiral who sailed on it has drowned, you would naturally assume that he drowned at sea, and very likely his body was lost.
In Leo Frankowski’s ‘Cross-Time Engineer’ series, Conrad was shocked at how common death was in the 13th century. “People just got a belly-ache and died.” One whole family was just found dead. Somebody from the advanced time-traveling civilization watching over him investigated and found the cause — onion mold.
Think about something like appendicitis. Oldest child had it at 14. Today, it’s outpatient surgery. Then, it was a death sentence.
Blood poisoning or tetanus or falling badly; how did Regency surgeons set a hip?
The most likely way to get killed in a carriage accident would be to get run over by one. Like Pierre Currie. Not being in one when it crashes.
” Smallpox inoculation was just starting to become an accepted preventative, but it wasn’t in widespread use.”
Also, it, too, was lethal. Its proponents would offer in its favor that it was only lethal in about 2% of the subjects, which was better than the survival rate from smallpox.
A day or two ago
I thought I’d take a ride
And soon, Miss Fanny Bright
Was seated by my side,
The horse was lean and lank
Misfortune seemed his lot
He got into a drifted bank
And then we got up sot
They clearly didn’t die, but there was definitely a wreck.
How does one die quickly if a carriage is not available. After all starvation doesn’t happen in a day and one’s plot needs to move.
Jolie LaChance KG7IQC
First question: how many characters do you want to kill?
One is easier: have him clutch his chest and fall down from a heart attack. (For a large number of heart problems to this day, the first symptom is death.) Stroke can also kill quickly.
If I had to kill more than one at a time, I would consider food poisoning, the collapse of a bridge while they were on it, or a fire.
I thought of others after I posted. Lost in the woods/exposure. Dysentery. Bandits. Punting accident. Thrown from a horse. So it’s not as tough as it looks after all if you set your mind to it.
hmm — if it’s a Regency, it’s a highwayman.