In recent decades, it has become common for human-rights scholars to refer to social rights – such as those to work, welfare, education and healthcare – as ‘second generation rights’, as twentieth-century ‘socialist’ additions to the ‘liberal’ corpus of civil and political rights bequeathed by Age of Democratic Revolutions of the eighteenth century.

Legally and morally, early modern English society abhorred suicide. Suicide was a crime for which one would be posthumously tried. It was also an act which, for Protestants, consigned an individual to hell forever. Non-fatal self-harm was no less discouraged, as permanent mutilation of oneself went against God.