11. Suicide was all too common, especially among women desperate for a way out of the slums.
The author Charles Dickens was fascinated by London life, especially the lives of its poor. He would base his characters on the occupants of the city slums, and one of his most unpleasant creations was Gaffer Hexham in the novel Our Mutual Friend. Gaffer makes his living fishing bodies out of the River Thames, going through their pockets for any loose change or stripping their bodies of rings or other pieces of jewelry. Tragically, this was a real job in the Victorian era. And, in many cases, the bodies were of the men and women of the slums, people who had killed themselves rather than face another day of misery.
A disproportionately high proportion of the suicides were young women from the slums. In particular, historians of the era note that young women forced to work as prostitutes were most likely to throw themselves into the fast-flowing river in despair. However, it wasn’t just the bridges over the Thames that were popular suicide spots for fed-up slum-dwellers. Police reports from the time also reveal that Hyde Park was also a top suicide spot, with poor people drowning themselves in the Serpentine boating lake at night. The bodies would rarely be identified, and in most cases were sent straight to London’s universities and hospitals to be dissected by medical students.