"To Be or Not to Be": suicide in the writings of continental travellers to Britain

“Suicide of the English” is the title of one of the "Lettres Concerning England, Scotland and Holland" that Luigi Angiolini wrote after his diplomatic journey to the North of Europe in 1787-88. My paper aims to contextualise this text in the cultural background of the eighteenth-century, a time when the discourses concerning suicide crossed the borders between various literary genres - from travelogues to philosophical and theological essays, from poetry to the novel. Instead of linking suicide to the domain of passions, as the Romantics would do, the writers of the Enlightenment dealt with suicide in relation to the concepts of freedom and democracy, according to a perspective which reminds us of the contemporary debate on euthanasia.