Think online trolls are nasty?
Letter writers throughout history were just as mean
Penning Poison A History Of Anonymous Letters Emily Cockayne
Oxford €23.50
Picture the scene. One morning in Surrey, southeast England, during the summer of 1912, Eliza Woodman rises from her sleep to find a parcel on her doorstep. Inside is a dead, skinned kitten and a letter stating, ‘I will blow you and your lot to blazes’.
More letters are sent to the Woodmans over the next two years, threatening death by drowning and arson. Suspicion falls upon the couple’s neighbour, Mary Johnson, an apparently harmless greengrocer’s wife. In court, she’s found guilty of the outrage and imprisoned for six months but, after her release, more nasty letters are sent, to her neighbours, a policeman and a rival grocer. She’s imprisoned twice more. A judge sums up: ‘To send anonymous letters was the meanest thing anyone could do. It was cowardly, it was low and it was cruel.’
It certainly was, especially when Mary was innocent – it turned out that the poison-penwoman was Eliza Woodman all along – and the case is just one of thousands of historical incidents which this book painstakingly investigates.
A few letters were attempts to help. On October 26, 1605, Catholic peer Lord Monteagle was anonymously warned not to attend the opening of England’s Parliament on November 5, as it was about to receive ‘a terrible blow’. He warned the king, helped find Guy Fawkes’s gunpowder stash, and was rewarded with £500.
But the majority of these letters reek of petty malevolence. In 1938, a woman in London was told, ‘You are lowering the value of our property by hanging out washing on the Sabbath. Unless you cease, we, the neighbours, will inform the borough council or your landlord, and you would not like him to know’. The recipient was shocked into miscarrying her baby.
The author, Emily Cockayne, has two connections with secret missives. One is a namesake, Mary Dorothea Cokayne, who, three days after her son’s death in 1894, received a note suggesting she was about to bury him alive (‘Perhaps in a trance or coma, don’t bury yet’).
The other is her charming admission that once, inspired by the TV ad campaign ‘Do you love anyone enough to give them your last Rolo?’ she posted one as an anonymous love token to a male friend she fancied. When the recipient didn’t mention the toffee, she was surprised how fervently she longed to know his reaction.
Her eight chapters range from tittletattle (‘Sir, a gentleman on Blackheath is just returned from Brighton where he heard a Certain Lady spread a report that your… family endeavours to marry into Families to spunge on them’) to mean-spirited libel (‘Will the sanitary inspector, when he has time, have a look through 14 Myrtle Road?’), but some represent more serious scandals.
As the Industrial Revolution spread, unsigned missives complaining about proposals for ‘enclosing’ publicly owned land and making it into private fields for local landowners were sent to local bigwigs. John Edward Dorington, the lord of the manor in Gloucestershire, southwest England, was told, ‘Instead of trying to do good for the working people of this Parish, you want to deprive them of the little benefit they have… if I have one chance of you I will shoot you dead as mortal’. Minding his manners, the would-be assassin signs off, ‘I remain, sir, your obedient servant’.
Ms Cockayne is a dogged researcher into obscure byways of English social history. Though poison-pen letters can be seen as legitimate ‘weapons of the weak’ against the powerful, this book shows them more truthfully as the work of malcontents and pathological busybodies.