An interview with Emily Cockayne
By: Communications
Emily Cockayne is Associate Professor of Early Modern History in the School of History at the University of East Anglia. She has very kindly found time in her diary to talk to us about her new book Penning Poison: A history of anonymous letters. The book has just been published by Oxford University Press.
Q Emily, many congratulations indeed on the publication of your new book, and thanks for agreeing to speak to us! Could you begin by introducing our readers to the idea of Penning Poison’s premise?
Penning Poison focuses on anonymous letters sent between the 1760s and the 1930s. Some were sent as threats, some as tip-offs, some were obscene, some libellous, and occasionally letters take more than one of these characteristics. Each chapter starts with a letter, and then the context for the letter being sent, or the reaction of the receiver, is considered. The writers of most anonymous letters are unknown, but for those rare cases where we have an obvious suspect, I also explore various motivations for writing anonymously. I consider over one hundred specific letters or letter campaigns.
Q That’s really helpful – thank you! What convinced you that now was the right time for this book about the history of anonymous letter writing?
There has not been a book about the history of anonymous letter writing since 1930, and it seemed a good time to consider the topic, in the context of modern online anonymity and concern about the perceived rise of internet trolling. Anonymity creates disinhibition – people feel freer to write because they are less likely to be challenged about their words. Many of the letters in Penning Poison show the author to be play-acting a role – as a member of a gang or even as the moral voice of the community itself. Social psychologists call this deindividuation. In a number of the cases discussed in Penning Poison, the writers lived marginalised lives. Not signing their name permitted them to create a new persona for themselves: they became powerful not powerless; popular not lonely; racy not mousy. They had (in their own imaginations) a crew, a gang, a village, a housing estate, behind them. Seen this way, anonymous letters share many similarities with online anonymity, apart from the potential size and scope of the audience.
Q Your book encourages us to think more carefully about anonymity in letter-writing. Why is this important? And why hadn’t it been done before?
It is important to try to understand why people used to write anonymously to seek some sense of how modern anonymity might speak to older processes while taking new forms. Something like what social psychologists call ‘the fundamental attribution error’ pushes us to seek individual psychological explanations for letter-writing campaigns, but my research showed that social contextual explanations may be much better.
Part of the reason this work has not been done before is that it requires difficult research. It took more than a dozen years to research and write the book. Historians often work systematically through one type of document in a limited number of archives, but for this book that approach would not have worked. Each local archive has one or two examples in their catalogue (they likely have several uncatalogued letters also). It took many years to gather a cache of two hundred examples, and then hone these down to a manageable sample – then much more time in the archives to sleuth the context to each specific letter case in every chapter. Two of the letters in Penning Poison each took more than a year of research to understand. I ended up using material from a couple of dozen archives, and hundreds of local newspapers.
Q Thank you! This all sounds fantastically interesting, and clearly at the cutting edge of historical research. Could you tell us a little about how you became interested in this area in the first place?
My second monograph, Cheek by Jowl (2012), was about the history of neighbouring. For that book I selected five case study streets across England and traced their developments over decades or centuries. One of these streets, Western Road in Littlehampton, West Sussex, was selected because there was a ‘poison pen’ letter case there in the 1910s and 1920s, one that caused a press sensation at the time because an innocent woman twice went to prison, having been falsely accused of being the writer. The actual writer was her neighbour, who wrote ‘decoy’ letters to herself to throw the police off her scent. I could not let that story go, so continued to research it, and wanted to embed it in a wider context of letter writing.
Q Presumably your thinking evolved as you were working on the book: did any of your findings surprise you?
Yes! I was not prepared for a stark gender divide. The first part of the book, up until 1895, is concerned for the most part with letters sent by and to men. Everything changed at the end of the nineteenth century with the rise of a cultural preoccupation with ‘poison pen’ writers. Poisoning was the form of murder most connected to women, and these letters were regarded as a form of social poisoning usually perpetrated by women, and often sent to neighbours. An epidemic of ‘poison pen’ letter cases was perceived, invariably with a woman suspect. Theirs were not the letters that women were expected, or ever thought capable, of writing. Cases that targeted neighbours were seen to be corrosive to a whole community – a huge amount of police resourcing was spent trying to establish guilt. Women behaving against type confused investigators and delighted reporters.
Q That’s very interesting – thank you! Looking to the future, then, what is the next project on your research agenda? Will you be building on this work going forward?
I am still working on one of the cases in Penning Poison, the letters written by Annie Tugwell between 1903 and 1913: Annie and her extended family will likely be part of the focus in my next book. Alongside this I will be writing some journal articles to attempt to learn more about her milieu and the lives of the people she mixed with. Along the way I have developed an interest in the social history of adoption; perhaps this will become more central in my research over time.
Q One final question, if we might? Now that Penning Poison has been published, what are your hopes for the book? What would you like readers to take away from it, and what impact would you like it to have on the world?
I was so pleased to see it receive warm reviews: it was included in the Financial Times list of best history books for 2023 and was selected as one of the best academic books of the year by New Statesman. The research that started the book – the Western Road case from 1919—1923 – has been developed by StudioCanal into a feature film, Wicked Little Letters: it’s due for release early next year. I was engaged as the historical consultant for this project. It would be lovely if some of the other cases I include in my new book found their way to the big screen! Certainly Penning Poison is full of intrigue and drama.
Emily, thank you very much indeed for your time. Penning Poison: A history of anonymous letters is out now and available to buy from Oxford University Press.
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