Last time, I pontificated about how carriage accidents are not the same as car accidents, and if you need a character dead in a regency novel, having them catch a ‘trifling cold’ is one of the most realistic ways to get rid of them. A lot of you had good comments, but I was traveling and didn’t have regular internet access.
So I’m going to revisit some of those remarks, and add a few more of my own.
One of you pointed out that traffic laws were not a thing, and it was often more dangerous to be traveling crossways to a carriage than inside of it. This is true; right of way was mostly determined by the status of the carriage, not by its size or how difficult it would be to stop it once it was in motion. It was less of a problem in the countryside, but larger towns, and especially London, were very scary places if you needed to get from one street to the next on foot. They still are, to be fair; the roads haven’t gotten any straighter, and one of the underrated benefits of driving or riding with horses is that they won’t usually choose to stand on a person if they can avoid it. Ever stepped on a mouse by accident?- it’s a great way to make oneself levitate; horses feel the same way about humans under their feet. Cars don’t care, and the driver of a car is relatively shut in, which makes it harder to hear someone yelling, “Look out!” right before the crash.
It didn’t help matters that people of the past tended to live more of their lives outdoors. In rural areas, that meant spending a lot of time in the fields. In towns, people often took their work and sat outside their home, on the edge of the street. The light was better, for one thing, and as crowded as it was, it was still less crowded than sitting indoors for most people. Door to door salesmen were more common in regency (and Victorian) cities, and a whole host of people went from house to house as part of their work- the rag and bone man came to collect kitchen waste, gongfermers and nightsoil men cleaned out the cesspits, the knocker-upper tapped on his clients’ bedroom windows every morning.
All that time outside, in all weathers, leads us back to the spread and severity of diseases before modern medicine. People also died of the cold; regency England was beset by harsh winters, and 1816 was known all over the West, including the fledgling United States, as the year without a summer, because of a volcanic eruption in Indonesia the year before.
Death by drowning also got a mention; well spotted. Sailors at sea are at highest risk, of course, and given the severity and magnitude of storms at sea, it’s a miracle anyone survived long enough to get back to land. Captain Wentworth accurately assesses the risks in Persuasion when he remarks that, had his ship returned to port twenty-four hours later, it would’ve been caught in a gale that blew up, leaving him to a watery grave and a small paragraph in the newspaper noting his death.
People also drowned at home, especially in rural areas. Men and boys were more likely to bathe by swimming in a convenient river- probably not the Thames, but it was relatively safe if you lived in a small village- and women and girls had to fetch all of the household’s water by hand; it was easy to slip and fall into a stream or well. There doesn’t seem to be a concerted effort to teach children to swim, and historical clothing was fairly heavy, and became incredibly heavy when saturated; the weight would be enough to drag the person under.
On the other end of the spectrum, fire was also a major danger. There were very few closed stoves in 1800, and no central heating. Any heat came from an open fireplace, and in most households, all the cooking and water heating was done over that fire, so you couldn’t have a screen even if there’d been the money to buy one. As people switched over from wool clothing- warm and fire resistant- to cotton- cooler, washable, but flammable- the danger, particularly to girls and women, grew worse. There are a lot of unfortunate accounts of people’s clothes or hair catching from a stray spark, and no way to put them out. Houses also burned down more frequently than we’re used to; many rural houses were thatched with straw, and with no running water, the fire brigades were basically useless at putting fires out; their main utility came from pulling down the houses next to the one on fire, so it didn’t spread.
Obviously, people found ways to mitigate the danger of death whenever they could- the London statistics in 1810 indicate that about 2 percent of deaths were caused by ‘accidents’- else the human race wouldn’t have survived long enough to produce you, me, and everyone else alive today. Life expectancy at birth was low by our standards, but if you take out the incredible numbers of children who died from ordinary diseases, the numbers begin to look a little better. A little. Staying alive was a hard slog for most of human history, and our ancestors were a lot tougher than we give them credit for.
Mad Genius Club 
19 responses to “More Ways to Die in Regency England”
While researching a review for a film showcasing the larger world surrounding Jane Austen, I came across this amazing tidbit, which I incorporated into my review of Master and Commander:
“Here’s a fun fact from Charles Lagerbom, who wrote Maine to Cape Horn: The World’s Most Dangerous Voyage for you to consider while you watch the Surprise navigate around Cape Horn. He estimated that 10,000 sailors died sailing this route by the 20th century.”
In this one area!
A modern audience really doesn’t understand how many sailors die at sea, including in places where everyone KNOWS the risks are awful, yet ships must sail that deadly sea nonetheless. The Panama Canal changed shipping around the world. Passengers, if their ship sailed around the Horn, were at some risk although not as much as the sailors in the rigging.
And yes, I know that Master and Commander was written generations after Jane. It’s a great film that shows — quite well — life on board one of his majesty’s vessels during George III’s reign.
The other sailing flicks we chose are The Bounty (1984) which isn’t as slanted against Captain Bligh as usual and HMS Defiant (1962) which, while fictional, involves the Spithead mutiny and the realities of press gangs.
If we ever have grid failure, I predict that fire will kill a LOT of people. We – and I definitely include myself – no longer know how to live with it.
People will be starting fires in their gas fireplaces, leaving candles burning, trying to cook on a grill inside, etc… And that’s without any purposefully set mostly peaceful fires.
It doesn’t take a lot to start an apartment on fire. And then the whole building goes up. And then the one next to it. And then the one two blocks away because the apartment building is tall and it’s windy.
Fire is probably the easiest way if you want to kill off both the parents, which is a frequent use of “carriage accidents.”
The problem with fire, though, it that it leaves our plucky heroine/dashing romantic love interest without the large, luxurious manor house that’s a big part of the appeal for many of these authors.
You have the fire and the parents in another house. There’s enough hospitality to account for it.
The large luxurious manor is often the love interest’s responsibility rather than the parents 😉
Yes! And if the main character’s home burned down, that contributes to the disaster from which the love interest saves him!
Many people, especially women with long flowy sleeves and big skirts brushed up against a candle flame or the hearth fire and were horribly burned, often dying right away or lingering for days. Henry Longfellow’s first wife died of an infection following a miscarriage. His second wife’s sleeve caught a candle flame and she burned nearly to death. Eventually she died from her burns. Longfellow was severely burned himself trying to put out the fire on her clothes.
Per Mary Catelli above, a big advantage of the car accident in the modern story/the “carriage accident” in the Regency is that you can kill off as many inconvenient relatives as you need to in one go. Parents? Both in the car. Need to get rid of any siblings? Also in the car. Great-Aunt Susie, who had all those royal connections that would solve this problem in an instant? Tragically in the backseat.
Without that, you have to invent a separate cause of death for each relative. And while, in the actual Regency, that wasn’t much of an issue (hence the reason Austen didn’t even bother to explain how Darcy came to be head of household and guardian of his sister while he seemed to be still in his twenties), the modern reader starts to think like Lady Bracknell that, “To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”
The 19th century was a time of great transition in safety. It is very difficult to convey to modern readers how routinely people died, especially since the characters, logically, would take it for granted.
Hmmmm —
Perhaps they went away for a trip, and there was a disease outbreak in the location. Or the hero and any other desired survivors were away for a trip.
Disease was a perennial killer, and if a minor cut got infected, there wasn’t much treatment available. Rotten teeth could be life-threatening. By the Regency period they at least knew about germs, but sanitation was still kind of spotty.
Working with large domestic animals was hazardous. Gored or trampled by a bull, kicked by a cow, crushed by a horse were all common fates. There were wild animals, too — wolves, bears and foxes got a lot of folks killed.
Foxes got a lot of people killed? How, getting bitten by one that was rabid? Foxes never impressed me as especially dangerous animals to a healthy adult or even most children.
I think the leading cause of death by fox was breaking your neck in a horse fall while hunting them, followed by starvation caused at least partially by losing too many chickens to them.
This sounds right. Horsemen riding hell for leather after a fox — while drinking heavily! — seems tailormade for accidents.
Wild animal bites and scratches frequently got infected.
And on disease being a perennial killer – my parents were both born about 1930. Even as late as then it was considered normal to lose at least one young friend or relation to polio, measles, or whooping cough. Go look at any local (Southeast Pennsylvania) cemetery that’s at least a century old, sometimes less, and check out the headstones. More than a few are for children.
Infection in a wound was a big killer. A crushed limb could do the same. Tetanus was a serious killer. Appendicitis and strokes were also untreatable, though a stroke might result in serious impairment. There was no good treatment for cataracts, and ear infections could destroy hearing in the affected ear. Falls can cause internal bleeding, effectively untreatable. And treatments based on opium or codeine could lead to addiction. For that matter, drugs in use included some based on arsenic, mercury, and antimony.
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