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THE MEDIA "FRENZY" In the days after Edna Farnsworth's death, three newspaper
articles appeared in The Daily Colonist and one in The San Francisco Chronicle.
Accounts of the scandalous manner in which inhabitants of the red light
district lived were "flaunted across the newspaper in front of Victoria's
citizens." For a woman to shoot herself in the head, let alone a 19 year- old prostitute, was indeed big news in 1890's Victoria and for the newspapers to allot a relatively large amount of coverage to the case suggests that there was a high level of interest in Edna Farnsworth and the tragic circumstances surrounding her life and death. For comparison's sake, an account of a Chinese man's suicide a few days before that of Edna was given around a quarter of the space that just one article on Edna was allotted. On Tuesday, June 25, 1889, two articles appeared in The Daily Colonist entitled "A Sunday Tragedy: Death of Edna Farnsworth in a Broughton Street Bagnio-A Suicide's Grave the End of a Young Girl's Ruined Life- "The Inquest" and "The Suicide". Both articles are clothed in melodramatic rhetoric as is exhibited in the first paragraph of the first article: "The tradegy [sic] of a ruined life in which shame
and pathos were pitifully blended, furnished an all-absorbing topic for
gossips to talk over on Sunday last. The victim of the affair, whose wretched
life had become so loathsome as to induce her to launch her young spirit
into the great unknown world beyond and whose body will today be consigned
to a suicide's grave, was, as the popular voice pronounced her, only "another
unfortunate"…the masked misery becoming greater than she could
bear, she sent a revolver bullet crashing through her brain, and thuis
made an end of her unhappy life." Click HERE to go to the basic facts of the Belle Adams case. |
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