‘No future to look forward to’, Suicide Pacts, Intimacy and Society in 1920s and 1930s Britain

Abstract In the years after First World War, a worrying legal and cultural phenomenon appeared in English criminal court, something that would captivate reading public throughout Britain. Young people, specifically young couples, were agreeing to die together, what become known as ‘suicide pact’. This article examines curiously brief life of suicide pact legal, social, problem It contends became site through which scale pace modern life, particularly intimate was debated judged. The pact, this argues, provides another vantage point unpack fraught twentieth-century relationship between individual freedom sexual norms, values patterns community family. exploring tension, also presents new way thinking about history both social