Law treating attempted suicide as a felony

The Law treating attempted suicide as a felony makes Anna Wetherell answerable to the courts after she is found unconscious following heavy opium use. The novel shows the rule through its consequences rather than through statutory language: Anna is charged, tried, and fined, while the question of whether she meant to take her life remains disputed. Her case makes the law’s blunt classification collide with an uncertain account of what happened.

The Charge and Its Enforcement

After Anna’s collapse, Aubert Gascoigne tells her that she will be tried for attempted suicide and that the gaoler has confirmed the charge. Anna is surprised by the accusation; she had understood that her public intoxication would result only in a fine. The exchange establishes that the authorities interpret her condition not simply as disorderly conduct or a medical emergency, but as a possible felony.

The prediction is borne out at the petty court on the day after Crosbie Wells’s burial. Anna refuses to plead. The court nevertheless fines her five pounds for the attempted felony and reprimands her for wasting the Magistrate’s time. The account gives no detailed statutory wording or explanation of how the court determines intent. What it does show is the practical sequence: official confirmation of the charge, a trial, a monetary penalty, and a public rebuke.

Intent in Dispute

The accusation rests on an event whose meaning is not settled. Anna says she did not intend to take her life, and Joseph Pritchard believes her account may be honest. He regards her as someone accustomed to opium and cannot readily imagine her choosing suicide. At the same time, he knows that she remained unconscious for more than twelve hours, an extreme episode he doubts could have happened by accident.

Pritchard considers two possibilities: someone may have drugged Anna and abandoned her, or she may be concealing the truth to protect another person. These remain his suspicions, not established findings. He also suspects that the drug may have been altered, but Ah Sook refuses to give him the remaining resin to examine after their dispute. The uncertainty matters to the law’s operation: the court imposes a penalty, while the narrative leaves open what Anna intended and whether another person contributed to her condition.

Formal Law and Frontier Justice

Anna’s prosecution occurs in a settlement where formal law exists alongside older expectations of informal justice. George Shepard describes how people accustomed to Digger’s law may resent civil proceedings when they feel their own claims have been refused. In his account, that resentment can turn into anger directed both at the law and at the person who sought its protection; a crowd may then rally around the offender in the name of the rights it believes have been affronted. His argument is not a description of Anna’s trial, but it sets out the unstable legal environment in which her charge is heard.

Shepard insists that Digger’s law is base and that the settlement must do away with the old order. Yet his own examples reveal that formal justice does not simply replace informal codes: people may invoke whichever system seems to serve them and reject the other when it does not. The attempted-suicide charge belongs to this broader movement toward civil authority, but the episode offers little account of Anna’s circumstances beyond the court’s penalty and reprimand.

Unequal Exposure to Law

The novel also places legal protection and legal exposure in an unequal society. Ah Quee describes being struck, insulted, and threatened without consequence, and argues that other residents will side with Dick Mannering because Ah Quee is Chinese. He calls for solidarity in the face of a law he experiences as aligned against men like himself. This is a separate conflict from Anna’s prosecution, not evidence that the attempted-suicide rule is applied differently by race; together, however, the episodes show that the presence of formal law does not guarantee equal protection or a uniform experience of justice.

Anna’s later circumstances underline how money and dependency shape access to freedom. After her reunion with Emery Staines, she remains in custody at the Police Camp gaol-house, with bail set at eight pounds, a sum she cannot pay without help. This later detention is not presented as a consequence of the earlier five-pound fine: Staines is also held on separate charges, and the account does not identify Anna’s attempted-suicide case as the basis for her continued imprisonment. The distinction keeps the charge’s documented outcome clear while showing the wider material pressures surrounding her encounters with law.