Cross-post from H-Urban (boy, Sungloss is going to be sorry he missed this
one!!):

I'm looking for information about turn-of-the-century suicides by gas;
I've found two pieces of fiction (O. Henry's "The Furnished Room" and
Dreiser's Sister Carrie) in which characters typically shut the windows,
stuff paper under the door, and turn on the gas. I'm curious about whether
this was a particularly "city" kind of death, or whether this was literary
shorthand for "city" types of death. (I'm aware that gas lines were less
likely to serve the countryside.) Are there other pieces of
turn-of-the-century literature with this sort of death? Real-life sources?
Was this by necessity a death of the poor? I'm turning up very little in the
usual databases.

Denise Tanyol
Temple Univ.