Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde 1908 -

Then he tore it up.

Hyde discovered that cruelty was a music. He found a blind beggar in Seven Dials and, instead of giving him a coin, stole the tin cup and listened to the man’s fingers scrape the cobblestones for ten minutes. He attended a bare-knuckle fight in a basement near the docks and, when the loser begged for mercy, kicked him once in the ribs—not hard enough to kill, just hard enough to feel the bones shift. He wrote a letter to a respectable widow, pretending to be her dead son, and posted it just to imagine her opening it. Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde 1908

He laughed. It was not a pleasant sound. It was the laugh of a man who has just realized that God is either absent or indifferent, and that the only difference between a saint and a sinner is the quality of their excuses. Then he tore it up

He looked again. It was only himself. But that, he realized with a cold and absolute certainty, was no longer a comfort. The fog lifted on the morning of April 8th, 1908. The newspapers called it the Miracle of Marylebone—a pale, watery sun that turned the city the color of old bone. He attended a bare-knuckle fight in a basement

Not a physical death. Worse. A death of the permissible.