David Wallechinsky - The Book of Lists

Her husband walked out on her and joined the British army. To find him, Hannah Snell also enlisted, posing as a man. During surgery her true sex was discovered. She became a celebrity, and once out of the army she performed in public houses as the Female Warrior. On December 10, 1779, when she was 56, she opened a copy of the Gentlemen’s Magazine and read her own obituary, which informed her that she had died on a Warwickshire heathland. Perhaps she was superstitious, because reading her death notice snapped something in her mind. Her mental health slowly deteriorated, and in 1789 she was placed in London’s Bethlehem Hospital, where she remained insane until she expired in 1792.

The great American frontiersman had retired and settled down in Missouri. In 1818 an American newspaper in the eastern US trumpeted the news that the renowned hunter had been found dead near a deer lick, kneeling behind a tree stump, his rifle resting on the stump, a fallen deer a hundred yards away. The obituary was picked up across the nation. Daniel read it and laughed. Although he could still trap, he was too old and weak to hunt, and could no longer hit a deer even close up. Two years later, aged 86, Boone finally did die. His best-known obituary was seven stanzas devoted to him in Lord Byron’s Don Juan .

She was one of the most beautiful and sexual women in all history. Her name was Jane Digby. At 17 she married Lord Ellenborough, Great Britain’s lord of the privy seal, then left him to run off with an Austrian prince. During her colourful career she was the mistress of novelist Honoré de Balzac, King Ludwig of Bavaria and Ludwig’s son, King Otto of Greece. Her last marriage of 26 years was to Sheik Medjuel, an erudite Bedouin, head of the Mezrab tribe in the Syrian desert. Returning from a desert trip with Medjuel, the 66-year-old Lady Ellenborough learned that she was dead. Her obituary appeared prominently in La Revue Britannique , published in Paris in March 1873. It began: ‘A noble lady who had made a great use — or abuse — of marriage has died recently. Lady Ellenborough, some 30 years ago, left her first husband to run off with Count von Schwarzenberg. She retired to Italy, where she married six consecutive times.’ The obituary, reprinted throughout Europe, called her last husband ‘a camel driver’. The next issue of the publication carried a eulogy of Lady Ellenborough written by her friend Isabel Burton, the pompous and snobbish wife of Burton of Arabia. Mrs Burton claimed she had been authorised to publish the story of Lady Ellenborough’s life, based on dictated notes. Appalled, Lady Ellenborough vehemently wrote to the press denying her death — and having dictated an ‘authorised’ book to Mrs Burton. Lady Ellenborough outlived her obituary by eight full years, dying of dysentery in August 1881.

In March 1873 ‘Wild Bill’ Hickok, legendary sheriff and city marshal in the Midwest and a constant reader of Missouri’s leading newspaper, the Democrat , picked up a copy and learned that he was a corpse. Hickok read: ‘The Texan who corralled the untamed William did so because he lost his brother by Bill’s quickness on the trigger.’ Unsettled by his supposed demise, Wild Bill took pen in hand and wrote a letter to the editor: ‘Wishing to correct an error in your paper of the 12th, I will state that no Texan has, nor ever will, “corral William”. I wish to correct your statement on account of my people. Yours as ever, J.B. Hickok.’ Delighted, the editor of the Democrat printed Hickok’s letter and added an editorial: ‘We take much pleasure in laying Mr Hickok’s statement before the readers of the Democrat , most of whom will be glad to read from his pen that he is “still on the deck”. But in case you should go off suddenly, William, by writing us the particulars we will give you just as fine an obituary notice as we can get up, though we trust that sad pleasure may be deferred for years.’ Three years later Hickok was murdered while playing poker.

As the inventor of dynamite, Alfred Nobel, a moody yet idealistic Swede, had become a millionaire. When Nobel’s older brother, Ludwig, died of heart trouble on April 12, 1888, a leading French newspaper misread the report and ran an obituary of Alfred Nobel, calling him ‘a merchant of death’. Upon seeing the obituary, Nobel was stunned, not by the premature announcement of his passing but by the realisation that in the end he would be considered nothing more than a merchant of death. The printed summary of his life reflected none of his hopes for humanity, his love of his fellow beings, his generosity. The need to repair this false picture was one of several factors that led him to establish, in his will, the Nobel Prize awards to be given to those who did the most in advancing the causes of peace, literature and the sciences.

At 80, the great American was ailing and knew that death was near. From his sickbed, he told a friend that he would be happier if he had ‘the chance to see what sort of lines’ would be written about him after he was dead. The friend relayed this wish to the editor of the Evening Sun of New York City. On March 24, 1891, Barnum opened his copy of the Evening Sun and read: ‘Great and Only Barnum. He Wanted to Read His Obituary; Here It Is.’ According to the preface, ‘Mr Barnum has had almost everything in this life, including the woolly horse and Jenny Lind, and there is no reason why he should not have the last pleasure which he asks for. So here is the great showman’s life, briefly and simply told, as it would have appeared in the Evening Sun had fate taken our Great and Only from us.’ There followed four columns of Barnum’s obituary, illustrated by woodcuts of him at his present age, of him at 41, of his mother, of his deceased first wife Charity, and of the Swedish singer Jenny Lind. Two weeks later, Barnum was dead.

This police commissioner’s son, born in Galicia, raised in Austria, was fascinated by cruelty and loved pain and degradation. His first mistress, Anna von Kottowitz, birched him regularly and enjoyed lovers that Sacher-Masoch found for her. His second mistress, Fanny Pistor, signed a contract with him agreeing to wear furs when she beat him daily. She fulfilled the contract and treated him as a servant. He had become a famous writer when he met and married a woman named Wanda. She thrashed him with a nail-studded whip every day of their 15-year marriage and made him perform as her slave. After she ran off, Sacher-Masoch married a simple German woman named Hulda Meister. By now he was slipping into insanity and he tried to strangle her. In 1895 she had him secretly committed to an asylum in Mannheim and announced to the world that he had died. The press published obituaries praising his talent. Undoubtedly, in lucid moments, he read some of his death notices. He finally did die 10 years later in 1905. Because of Sacher-Masoch’s life, psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing coined the word ‘masochism’.

In 1897 the noted American author and humorist was in seclusion, grieving over a death in his family, when he learned that he, too, had been declared dead. A sensational American newspaper had headlined his end, stating that he had died impoverished in London. A national syndicate sent a reporter to Mark Twain’s home to confirm the news. Twain himself appeared before the bug-eyed reporter and issued an official statement: ‘James Ross Clemens, a cousin of mine, was seriously ill two or three weeks ago in London, but is well now. The reports of my illness grew out of his illness. The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.’ Twain finally lived up to his premature obituaries in 1910.