Penning Poison: A History of Anonymous Letters
by Emily Cockayne (Oxford, $25)
Anonymous poisonpen letters belong in a category of human behavior that’s “probably as old as human frailty,” said Anna Mundow in The Wall Street Journal. In her “strikingly original” new book, British historian Emily Cockayne looks closely at nearly two centuries of such correspondence and winds up with a collection of true stories that’s “not only fascinating but subtly affecting.” Each tale, after all, has an aggressor and a victim, pulling our sympathies in unexpected directions. At times, the unidentified letter writers were men asserting power over women with obscene accusations or threats. In other cases, the letter writer was the weaker party, threatening exposure of abusive misbehavior that might topple the recipient. As Cockayne writes: “Shame—most of it hidden—may be the real subject of this book.” Only the causes of that shame and the means of spreading it change over time. “Lack of power has played a major role in the history of this weird subgenre of literature,” said Miranda Seymour in the Financial Times. Cockayne focuses on England from 1760 to 1939, so her history tracks the expansion of mail service and opens with anonymous threats written by victims of bread shortages and by weavers put out of work by mill owners’ adaptation of mechanized looms. Vicars, who held a different sort of power, were frequents targets as well. Still, some of Cockayne’s most fascinating case studies are frauds: In 1912, one Eliza Woodman accused her neighbor Mary Johnson of sending her a skinned cat followed by a series of abusive letters. Only after Johnson served 18 months in prison was it discovered that the cat horror and the letters were Woodman’s own handiwork.
By caring enough to explore why each writer resorted to an anonymous attack, “Cockayne has produced something thought-provoking and humane, the opposite of a poison-pen letter, really,” said Sadie Stein in The New York Times. It barely matters that she draws parallels to today’s online trolling without diving deeply into the subject. “Needless to say,” that choice “also spares writer and reader the impossible job of wading through the bottomless mire of digital poison.”