On Fri, 16 Apr 1999, Met History wrote:

> 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.

She's speaking, of course, of manufactured coal gas, which was
considerably more deadly than today's natural gas, because of higher
carbon monoxide content.  It was used in the 19th and early 20th centuries
for lighting and maybe cooking, not for heating (since it was more
efficient to just burn the coal directly for heat).

I first became aware of this issue in a book about the 19th century hotel
business, title now forgotten, but published in the 1960s.  The hotels of
the 19th century had the problem of rural-origin guests, accustomed to
candles and lanterns, who had to be constantly warned "DO NOT BLOW OUT THE
GAS" (i.e., you should close the valve on the gaspipe rather than
extinguish the flame).  Apparently quite a few people died this way, and
it wasn't necessarily clear whether it was accidental death or suicide.

A lot of 19th century technology was pretty dangerous stuff.

---
Lawrence Kestenbaum, [log in to unmask]
The Political Graveyard, http://politicalgraveyard.com