Penning Poison: A History of the Anonymous Letter (2023) by Emily Cockayne

This is a slightly unusual choice for my blog, as it is a history book, but I felt its topic was one which could be of interest to many of my readers, especially those who enjoy vintage crime fiction. The poison pen letter is a trope commonly associated with interwar crime fiction, especially village and small community set ones like Ethel Lina White’s Fear Stalks the Village (1932) and Good by Stealth (1936) by Henrietta Clandon. However, this trope’s longevity exceeded those years, and it is surprisingly common in mysteries from the 1950s, such as Edmund Crispin’s The Long Divorce (1951) and The Clock That Wouldn’t Stop (1952) by Elizabeth Ferrars, which interestingly combines the trope with an agony aunt column. Poison pen letters were not confined to villages either as Exit Laughing (1954) by Stuart Palmer, sees a poison pen writer at work in Hollywood, whilst June Wright’s Reservation for Murder (1958) is set at a working women’s hostel. The trope is used in a variety of ways as well, as Clandon’s book sees a protagonist take to letter writing as a form of retribution for the wrongs she has suffered from her local community; an idea which chimes in with Cockayne’s book. Moreover, poison pen letters are also shown to lead to suicide in mysteries such as Agatha Christie’s The Moving Finger (1942). The ineffectual or fallible detection of poison pen writers is a further idea which is often incorporated into such stories, with unpopular people or relatively recent newcomers becoming prime suspects. Given how often this trope is used in the mysteries I read, and in a variety of different ways and settings, I was intrigued to find out more about their real-life counterparts.

Synopsis

‘Receiving an unexpected and unsigned note is a disconcerting experience. In Penning Poison, Emily Cockayne traces the stories of such letters to all corners of English society over the period 1760-1939. She uncovers scandal, deception, class enmity, personal tragedy, and great loneliness. Some messages were accusatory, some libellous, others bizarre. Technology, new postal networks, forensic techniques, and the emergence of professional police all influence the phenomenon of poison letter campaigns. This book puts the letters back into their local and psychology context, extending the work of detectives, to discover who may have written them and why.

Emily Cockayne explores the reasons and motivations for the creation and delivery of these missives and the effect on recipients – with some blasé, others driven to madness. Small communities hit by letter campaigns became places of suspicion and paranoia. By examining the ways in which these letters spread anxiety in the past Penning Poison grapples with the question of how nasty messages can turn into an epidemic. The book recovers many lost stories about how we used to write to one another, finding that perhaps the anxieties of our internet age are not as new as we think.’

Overall Thoughts

The author makes effective use of real-life cases in her introduction, beginning with an example from1894 in which an anonymous letter casts doubt upon whether Mary Dorothea Cokayne’s son was truly dead, warning her not to bury him prematurely. The examples play such an important role in this book, fulfilling several purposes. One of these is that they are a real reminder of the way anonymous letters intrude upon private and painful moments. The writer balances the puzzle aspect of such letters (bringing up for instance the questions Cokayne’s letter raised), with the need to be compassionate and remember the real feelings involved. One of these questions was:

‘Why did Mary Dorothea Cokayne retain it? It must have brought her sadness. Was it kept as evidence, in case future letters arrived? The vast majority of such messages, throughout time, were destroyed or hidden. The reason why certain letters appear in the historical record at all if often an important one.’

The introduction does a good job of outlining how anonymous letters differ from other forms of written communication and the psychological impact they are able to have. I also found it interesting how Cockayne adds a personal note to the opening chapter, recounting an experience from her childhood: ‘Back in the 1980s I anonymously sent a single Rolo […] through the post to a boy I liked. It was my last Rolo: a gesture of my fondness for him.’ The boy never mentioned receiving the item to anyone and she notes how this lack of a response ‘left’ her ‘hungry for a reaction.’ However, looking back on it she opines that: ‘In retrospect, receiving a crushed or melted Rolo anonymously in the post could have been more frightening than charming.’ I felt this personal example was helpful in giving the topic some immediacy and to make it more relatable. It definitely prevents the topic from becoming too abstract.

Anonymous letters make for an interesting, yet challenging topic to research, it would seem, as the author notes how access to relevant material is more limited, as most of these letters get destroyed. Cockayne is careful to note how this impacts what conclusions can be drawn and throughout her book, she evaluates previous work in the field, to highlight the research bias they might have had. Understanding the psychology of the different types of people who wrote anonymous letters, is another key feature of this study, yet I appreciated that the author did not make broad and sweeping statements in this area. Penning Poison ‘focuses on letters sent between 1760 and 1939’ and Cockayne writes that this is because:

‘Study of anonymous communications after 1940 is increasingly complicated by burgeoning methods of dispatch: the telegram, the telephone, and, much later, the Internet. Additionally, there was such an efflorescence of anonymous letter-writing from the late 1930s that the subject in those years probably warrants a separate study. in the early mid-twentieth century there seemed to be a “plague” or “epidemic” of these letters.’

Chapter1: Gossip – Major Eliot’s Maiden Sisters

Most chapters in this work begin with a real-life example, which demonstrates the theme or type of anonymous letter under discussion. This first chapter ‘examines some roles played by the anonymous letter in gossip, secrecy, scandal, and marriage in the late Georgian and early Victorian years.’ The author further adds that: ‘An obsession with privacy, secrecy, and revelation created a natural breeding ground for anonymous letters and their malicious abuses of information.’ Various cases are explored, including a blackmailing one, which affected more than one generation of a family. One difficulty looked at in this chapter is the problem of restoring someone’s reputation even after court vindication. The issue of fake news was a big issue then as it is now.

Chapter 2: Tip-Offs – Undermined Coalmasters in Staffordshire

The main focus in this chapter is on events in the 1840s but it does also touch upon activities from the 1850s-60s. As the title anticipates, the opening example is an anonymous letter from 1849 warning someone that a coal mine is being extended under someone else’s property and that the parties involved are trying to hide the fact by blocking off the tunnels. The aim of this chapter is to explore:

‘[…] how anonymous letters in the nineteenth-century Black Country interacted with emerging cultures of expertise, trust, and class or socio-economic status in an area of Britain that was undergoing rapid change.’

A key idea running through this study is how the type of anonymous letter produced reflects the wider social and cultural changes going on around it. Cockayne further writes that:

‘As we shall see, part of the potency or potential potency of anonymous letters […] arose from the fact that landowners were losing touch with what was going on underground. In the eighteenth-century, aristocratic landowners tended to oversee directly the exploitation of resources on their property. By the early nineteenth-century, there was a growing tendency across the country for landowners to give over control of coal extraction to lessees.’

Like a dedicated coalminer, the author delves into this case and other similar mining situations and I think it is this consistent engagement with historical examples, which aids this book in not becoming too academic. The latter part of this chapter expands its scope to survey other ‘public interests’ based anonymous letters such as those concerned with coroners or officials involved in the poor law union not doing their jobs properly.

Chapter 3: Threats – Lord Dorington’s in Danger

Death threats are the next theme, and the author looks at how in the past these incidences of the anonymous letter have been too readily assigned purely political motives. That is not to say such letters lacked that motive, but Cockayne argues for the need to recognise the tension and ambiguity in the purposes behind anonymous letter writing, seeing them as communications which intersect the private and public spheres. She furthers adds that:

‘The most influential historical works on anonymous threatening letters tend to read them always as expressions of wider social movements, and by implication as manifestations of class identity and incipient class consciousness. Yet the reasons for writing anonymously in a paternalistic and deferential society were manifold. Anonymity was a reasonable precaution for many. These letters formed part of the arsenal available to the subordinate members of society.’

In addition, Cockayne elaborates on this latter point:

‘As a tool of protest and grudge, such letters long possessed great power and potential. Many of the anonymous letters sent during the first half of the nineteenth-century were threats written by people (usually men) with relatively little power, to people (usually men) in positions of power. Most of these letters expressed resistance to social change of various kinds, but especially developments that posed threats to livelihood […]’.

Nevertheless, the author complicates this picture proposing that:

‘Anonymous letters are not easy to classify. The protest genre could be manipulated for social gain in numerous and complex ways. Letters were not only tools used by the weak […] they were also open to manipulation by the powerful to shore up or defend their interests.’

The difficulties of classifying anonymous letters are best explored in the conclusion of this study, but it was interesting seeing how the changes the industrial revolution wrought provoked the writing of anonymous letters. This chapter perhaps could have been shortened a little as at times it did feel like a lot of examples were being used to demonstrate points and I am not sure this added as much to the wider discussion.

Chapter 4: Obscenity – Peer’s Perversion Uncovered

The emergence and development of the post office is unsurprisingly a key part of the history of anonymous letters and one of things this chapter unpacks are the pros and cons of the postal system becoming more depersonalised e.g. the introduction of pre-paid stamps and post boxes. Victorian and Edwardian concerns over sending of obscene material and how it was perceived and dealt with in Law, are also explored. This is also one of the chapters in which we see factors such as class and gender impact how well or poorly a defendant was treated. It is when themes such as this are examined, that the author is able to begin challenging the mental picture the reader might have of what an anonymous letter writer might be like:

‘Although it was feared that poorer people with ill intent […] would abuse the halfpenny post, or be more liable to send abusive anonymous mail, most perpetrators in this chapter were in fact fairly affluent men. They appeared, outwardly at least, to be respectable members of their communities. The types of people who were in control of the medium: the male, the respected, and the rich, were those who appeared to abuse it.’

It was during reading this chapter that it dawned on me that so far in the book only a couple of female anonymous letter writers had been mentioned. Yet culture and society have deemed the poison pen letter as the prerogative of women and it is this mismatch of fact versus perception which is explored in the second half of the book, being most fully dealt with in the conclusion.

Ah the days when you could send a letter for a penny…

An example of a female anonymous letter writer from 1890 is examined in this chapter. Elizabeth Sarah Brown was ‘found guilty of sending offensive and obscene postcards […]’. However, ‘unlike the many cases involving men […] Brown did not claim mental defect or similar excuse. Instead, she claimed to be seeking justice on her own terms,’ which reminded me a little of Henrietta Clandon’s novel. This gender difference interested me, especially when Cockayne further adds that:

‘Brown’s sanity was judged according to her ability to meet gendered expectations (moderating her language; keeping a good house). Over the next century, writing obscene, malicious letters would come to be thought of as a characteristically female crime. However, in most of those cases the obscene element was included by the writer so as to throw suspicion onto another. That third party was usually considered less respectable than the sender, and the question of sexual gratification appears somewhat more obscure.’

The author throughout this book makes the case well for trying to understand anonymous letters within their original contexts.

Chapter 5: Libels – ‘er at number 14 is dirty

In this chapter we arrive at the anonymous letter we are probably more familiar with, that of the poison pen letter. Cockayne reveals the history behind the coining of this term:

‘In the early twentieth century one genre of anonymous letter became so prominent it was given a name: the “poison pen” letter. Coined in America, the term “poison pen” was first used in 1911 in a headline for an article in the Maryland Evening Post. The press popularised the term in Britain in the 1920s. Poisoning was the form of murder most connected to women, and these letters were regarded as a form of social poisoning more often than not perpetrated by women.’

Moreover, the author examines why there seemed to be an increase in anonymous letters written by women:

‘By the start of the twentieth century, female literacy rates had increased to almost match those for men, especially outside rural areas. Chapter 3 demonstrated some ways in which men without authority attempted to gain power through anonymous letters at the start of the nineteenth century. An apparent increase in women writing anonymously at the start of the twentieth century may have followed similar lines: a weapon in the arsenal of the weak. However, anonymous letters written (mostly) by men in the eighteenth century were generally dispatched to male social superiors and contained threats. The letters sent by women in the early twentieth century, by contrast, were mostly sent to their social peers, people within their immediate community. Often next-door neighbours, often women. These letters were more obviously connected to the frustrations of community life for women who felt trapped in particular roles […]’

Yet the author is careful to remind us of the bias inherent in collected anonymous letters:

‘Once again, the only letters for which we have records were those which were taken seriously and became the focus of investigation. It is possible that lots of anonymous letters written by men were, for some reason, not taken seriously, and never became the focus of investigation, with the gender of the author therefore never exposed.’

Cockayne notes that ‘societies determine their own preoccupations’ and later in her conclusion she argues that ‘the unbalanced fascination [newspapers had] with female letter-writers had more to do with a wider cultural and social fascination with deviant women than with any single practical concern.’ I felt this was a very important point in challenging why there is the common assumption that most poison pen letters are written by women.

This chapter discusses five cases involving female anonymous letter writers, which took place during the 1910s and 20s. One of the key similarities between several of these cases was that the genuine anonymous letter writer made a scapegoat of another person. These scapegoats were eventually proven innocent, but my heart went out for one of them especially, Mary Johnson, who was wrongfully convicted on multiple occasions of sending threatening letters to her neighbour, Eliza Woodman. It was Woodman who was sending the letters and claiming that stones were being thrown at her over her garden wall. What makes you want to time travel and rescue Mary is that she could have been spared years of stress and punishment in prison if the case had been properly investigated and she had been given legal aid. Cockayne writes that women ‘often lacked counsel’. The police were so convinced that Woodman would be incapable of writing such things to herself, that it seems as though they may have even perjured themselves when giving evidence. Such fixed ideas and assumptions about how certain types of women behave, was detrimental to this case and others such as the Edith Emily Swan case in which Swan managed to get Rose Gooding wrongfully imprisoned for writing poison pen letters she never wrote.

This level of societal bias is demonstrably shown in the “justice” the wronged women received:

‘What is a person worth? Home Office records show how the figure of £250 for compensation offered to Rose Gooding was arrived at in 1921. In their assessment, they weighed up her moral worth; reread disparaging letters sent from Rose’s former employee, in which it was suggested that Rose ‘would be capable of writing abusive letters.’ Her case compared to others, including Adolf Beck […] who had initially been offered £2000, but refused this, eventually settling for £5000. But Beck was a man. Mary Jonhson, charged four times, thrice convicted, for a total of fifteen months’ hard labour, plus eighty-six days awaiting trial, received £500 for her wrongful convictions […] Rose Gooding was awarded a measly £250 as compensation for her 255 days in prison, 144 of which were with hard labour. This was £12 less than Inspector Nicholls was awarded after being libelled about the case in articles published by John Bull […]’.

I should warn you that by the end of this book you might be finding the urge to storm a barricade or two…

Chapter 6: Detection – Detectives Say

The focus shifts to looking more at how anonymous letter writers were detected, homing in on handwriting experts, in particular examining how the profession developed, what sort of backgrounds such people tended to have and then evaluating how successful they were in helping to solve crimes.

Chapter 7: Media – Herbert Austin robs men’s brains

I think this chapter’s title was the most intriguing as you definitely want to start the chapter pronto in order to figure out what anonymous letter it is pertaining to. The answer lies in a postcard sent to the aforementioned Herbert Austin and it seems it is linked to the legal battle he was involved in at the time, a matter of stealing intellectual property concerning car sunroofs. Other types of poison pen letters explored in this chapter include those sent to footballers and ones with anti-German feelings sent in the run up to and during WW1.

I think the direction of this chapter is not so quickly evident, in comparison to some of the others. It felt like the focus was more implied or inferred and therefore the chapter came across as moving more tangentially. Nevertheless, it is concerned with the role of newspapers in enabling and encouraging poison pen letters. Letters involved in cases concerning animal cruelty are discussed as well as some cases concerning clergymen marrying much younger wives:

‘Clergyman had long been the target of anonymous letters by the 1930s, and they were highly visible characters in their parish. The 1930s saw more attention on the behaviour of individual clergymen, and when the stories were reported by the national press, the men of the cloth became the recipients of anonymous letters.  These stories show the interplay between the national media and anonymous writers – how each could feed the other.’

I found the newspaper focus of the chapter diminished in the final section and I came away feeling the thematic elements were less unpacked. The end of chapter touches upon Richard Llewellyn’s 1937 play Poison Pen and Dorothy L. Sayers’ Gaudy Night (1935). In some ways I would argue literary depictions of anonymous letters needed its own section, as squashing it in at the end of the chapter meant there was not as much discussion as I would have liked. This is a shame as I feel there is more to say about this topic, as at the start of my review the examples I cite only scratch the surface on the matter. However, I do appreciate that this is a history focused book.

The 1939 film version Poison Pen.

Chapter 8: Local Reaction – And Winifred Simners sows discontent

This chapter starts off well by describing the case of Winifred Ava Simner, who lived in Wimbledon and was charged in 1938 ‘with publishing defamatory libels’ about, and to, local councillors and other public officials. The author really digs into her life to see what motivated her writing campaigns: thwarted potential and a lack of role for her being two factors. The chapter then opens out to consider the effect of poison pen letters on whole communities and how such epidemics were responded to. In particular the writer notes that in many cases there is ‘a sense of a phenomenon with roots in community being transformed into the mystery of individual madness.’ I felt this was a less successful chapter and perhaps a weaker one to end on, as I only really got a good sense of what it was exploring after I had read the conclusion, which really consolidates the ideas brought up here.

Conclusion

How should anonymous letter writers be regarded? That is one of the key questions raised in the conclusion, as is the theme of not pigeon-holing the authors of such missives. Cockayne writes that:

‘In the previous chapter, I suggested that something like what social psychologists call “the fundamental attribution error” always pushes us to seek individual psychological explanations for letter-writing campaigns when social contextual explanations may be much better.’

The conclusion also sets out to question the ways in which anonymous letter writers have been classified in the past, highlighting Letitia Fairfield’s 1943 typology, in particular. The primary issue being contended here is that such profiling systems are too simplistic and therefore can be misleading. For example:

‘There were numerous, unsubstantiated assertions from “experts” in the early twentieth century about the likely authors of libellous letters. One declared that these were “almost invariably …the work of a middle-aged woman”. Did women write a certain type of anonymous letter (the “poison pen letter”), and men other types of anonymous letters? This relies on a dilemma: we don’t know who wrote most of the anonymous letters sent […] The assumed characteristics of “poison pen” writers – unmarried, middle-aged women – do not bear scrutiny for very long […]’.

This leads into the main thrust of the conclusion which is to sum up the different ways male and female anonymous letter writers have been perceived and treated. For instance:

‘Hormonal explanations were less commonly sought when it came to the mystery of why men wrote such letters – despite the fact that some were found guilty of writing obscene letters when their wives were pregnant, and so might have been less inclined to have sex.’

Furthermore:

‘Male anonymous writers were treated differently: there was less focus on their appearance in court; less salacious attention to the content of their letters (even when these were obscene); and they appeared to be pursued less determinedly by the police. Their offences were excused in ways that women’s crimes were not.’

One example which is particularly riling is the case of a man whose anonymous letter writing campaign may have been going on for 12 years was only fined £10 and told to not do it again. This is despite his lack of contrition in the dock, refusing to apologise for his behaviour. Moreover, a key reason why he was deemed to be a respectable individual was that he had travelled to Canada three times. Anyone else boggled by this? Cockayne also mentions that:

‘Obscene letters written by men were more often explained as the consequence of physical or mental disorders or external factors, rather than moral failure. By contrast, women were stereotyped as the “sex perverts”.’

In addition, when it came to female anonymous letter writers, she argues that life circumstances were ‘rarely considered’ (such as overcrowding or the loss of a child), whilst ‘by contrast, men could be provoked’. The examples used in the conclusion and elsewhere within the book help build a powerful argument for re-evaluating anonymous letter writing in terms of who sent them and for what purposes. All in all, I would say the author delivers a very meaty conclusion, bringing together all of her ideas effectively and I would say this is one of the best conclusions I have read in a non-fiction publication, for quite some time. I came away with a clear and strong sense of what this study was trying to communicate and I would definitely recommend this book.

Rating: 4.25/5

Source: Review Copy (Oxford University Press)