“Now before I leave off I must just remind you that I mean to blow your – brains out.” As sign-offs go, this is one of the more tonally confusing, at once chatty and murderously threatening. The author’s cryptic signature, “Iky, one-eyed woman,” is scarcely less bizarre. Both occur at the end of a rambling, expletive-ridden missive delivered in the summer of 1912 to a Mrs. Eliza Woodman, of 52 St. John’s Road, Earlswood, a few miles south of London. The letter was one of a bundle, all similar, presented before magistrates in the trial of Woodman’s neighbor, Mary Johnson.
Johnson was found guilty of sending malicious letters and served six months in prison. When she returned to Earlswood, however, the campaign against Woodman started up again. Another trial, another prison spell for Johnson, and once again, when she came out, the letters to Woodman recommenced: “I am going to burn you all out. I was quite happy at Holloway (Prison). I shall kill you burn you out. I shall come and settle you, you shall surely suffer death.” This time, however, the evidence looked shaky. Johnson had an alibi – she had not been staying in Earlswood – and her husband, suggested as a possible accomplice, proved to be illiterate and incapable of having written the letters.
Review
“Penning Poison: A History of Anonymous Letters”
By Emily Cockayne
Oxford University Press. 320 pages.
$25
Suddenly, the spotlight of suspicion fell on Eliza Woodman. Could she have written the letters to herself? Traps were laid. Woodman was supplied with stamps and notepaper marked with invisible ink, which, sure enough, resurfaced in incriminating correspondence. She was tried, convicted and sentenced to 18 months of hard labor, but the lives of Johnson and her husband had been irrevocably affected. They had moved away, their grocery business ruined by the scorn and gossip the case had generated. In a memoir written many years later, the lawyer who had wrongly and repeatedly sent Johnson to prison would reflect on the matter: “People who appear to be sane occasionally do such very odd things.”
Emily Cockayne’s “Penning Poison: A History of Anonymous Letters” is full of the very odd things that people do by means of unsigned mail. The anonymous letter, Cockayne points out, creates an asymmetrical relationship, an imbalance of information – I know who you are, but you don’t know who I am – that is unsettling and confers a kind of power on the sender. Sometimes this allows for a leveling up of already unbalanced relations, as in this letter of 1767 that threatens an armed uprising if food prices are not brought down: “‘dis is give Notice that if you do not make the farmers bring the Grain to Markey and Sell it a 5 Shillins a Bushell that we shall destroy both them and you … for we Cant live if such Villiany is carried on for to Starve and famish us.” The threat is a righteous one, and the medium of the anonymous letter is what allows the necessary to be said. Letters like this, common in the 18th and 19th century, are, as Cockayne puts it, “part of the arsenal available to the subordinate members of society.”
But of course the format can be used for nefarious ends, too – blackmail, gossip-spreading or malign entertainment. In Agatha Christie’s “The Moving Finger,” an anonymous letter campaign disrupts the little town of Lymstock. The insinuations are scattergun, speculative, largely baseless, but still they set the town on edge. “You see,” explains the country doctor, “crude, childish spite though it is, sooner or later one of these letters will hit the mark. And then, God knows what may happen!” After all, a discomfiting accusation does not need to be true, but only close enough to snag on some guilt or secret we would rather keep private.
The same novel also includes the best advice on how to deal with a poison-pen letter: “The correct procedure is to drop it in the fire with a sharp exclamation of disgust.” It is likely that this, or similar, is the fate of the vast majority of this type of correspondence, and consequently there is no way of knowing exactly how common it is, though Cockayne quotes a British parliamentary report that concludes vaguely that receipt of an anonymous letter is “by no means a rare event.”
Certainly, “Penning Poison” positively bulges with evidence of the phenomenon. Cockayne, a historian whose previous works include “Cheek by Jowl: A History of Neighbours” (2012) and “Rummage: A History of the Things We Have Reused, Recycled and Refused to Let Go” (2020), has trawled a vast number of local archives and regional newspapers to find her unsigned letters, though organizing this trove proves something of a problem, and sometimes it feels that we are lost in a sea of unmanaged material. “Penning Poison” is at its most readable when Cockayne plays detective, dwelling on a single case, filling us in on the background, the characters, the investigation and trying to understand what drove the letter writer.
Which is not to say that a motive can always be easily assigned. “Penning Poison” ends by thinking about how these letters prefigure our own digital forms of poison pen – the wild, disinhibited trolling that goes on under anonymized social media handles or in below-the-line comment sections. Cockayne is careful not to over-egg the connection, but it is a wonderful conclusion, and one that throws the preceding material into a new light. One thinks, for example, of Edith Emily Swan, who wrote a series of anonymous letters in the early 1920s. Swan’s story still fascinates, and in February it will be the subject of “Wicked Little Letters,” starring Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley. One hopes the film will not shy away from Swan’s fabulously baroque swearing, a reminder that the flame game was just as strong a century ago.
Dennis Duncan is a lecturer in English at University College London and the author of “Index, A History of the.”
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