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The Trials and Tribulations of Edith Thompson: The Capital Crime of Sexual Incitement in 1920s England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2012

Lucy Bland
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Journal of British Studies , Volume 47 , Issue 3 , July 2008 , pp. 624 - 648
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Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2008

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References

1 “Weird Vision of Mrs Thompson,” Empire News, 28 January 1923, 5; and see “Dressed Up for Suicide,” Daily Chronicle, 24 January 1923, 1.

2 See Oram, Alison, “Her Husband Was a Woman!” Women's Gender-Crossing and British Popular Culture, 1900s–1960 (London, 2007)Google Scholar.

3 “Weird Vision of Mrs Thompson,” 5.

4 “Edith Thompson's Ordeal,” Daily Express, 7 December 1922, 1; and see “Unpublished Scenes at the Old Bailey,” News of the World, 10 December 1922, 9; “Life Story of Passionate Edith Thompson,” World's Pictorial News, 16 February 1923, 1. For example, see the press in relation to the Maud Allan libel case of 1918: Bland, Lucy, “Trial by Sexology? Maud Allan, Salome, and the ‘Cult of the Clitoris’ Case,” in Sexology in Culture, ed. Bland, Lucy and Doan, Laura (Oxford, 1998), 183–98Google Scholar.

5 Unlike later in the century, when there was likely to be a gap of many months between the committing of a crime and the final court hearing, in the interwar years cases tended to go to an upper court a couple of months after the event. One effect of this was that the reported circumstances of the case were still relatively fresh in people's minds. Another effect was that, given the case was rarely out of the news, the press needed to come up with new angles in order to maintain public interest.

6 Walkowitz, Judith, City of Dreadful Delight (London, 1992), chaps. 3 and 4 passimCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Williams, Raymond, The Long Revolution (London, 1961), chap. 3Google Scholar; Jeffery, Tom and McClelland, Keith, “A World Fit to Live In: The Daily Mail and the Middle Classes, 1918–1939,” in Impacts and Influences: Essays on Media Power in the Twentieth Century, ed. Curran, James, Smith, Anthony, and Wingate, Pauline (London, 1987), 27–52Google Scholar; Nead, Lynda, “Visual Cultures of the Courtroom: Reflections of History, Law, and the Image,” Visual Culture in Britain 3, no. 2 (2000): 119–41Google Scholar; Bingham, Adrian, Gender, Modernity, and the Popular Press in Inter-war Britain (Oxford, 2004)Google Scholar.

8 Cicely Hamilton quoted in “Will the Public Save Him?” Daily Sketch, 13 December 1922, 19. Hamilton had had a huge impact in 1909 with the publication of her biting critique of marriage: Marriage as a Trade.

9 Quoted in “Woman as Dominant Partner in Ilford Murders,” Daily Chronicle, 7 December 1922, 1.

10 See Broad, Lewis, The Innocence of Edith Thompson: A Study in Old Bailey Justice (London, 1952)Google Scholar; Weis, Rene, Criminal Justice: The True Story of Edith Thompson (London, 1990)Google Scholar. Weis campaigned for Edith's posthumous pardon.

11 Young, Filson, “Introduction,” in Trial of Frederick Bywaters and Edith Thompson (Edinburgh, 1923)Google Scholar. At the time of the trial there were voices of opposition to capital punishment, although they were not necessarily claiming Edith's innocence, e.g., Cicely Hamilton quoted in “Is Edith Thompson to Live? Save Young Bywaters,” Daily Sketch, 13 December 1922, 2; letters in the Manchester Guardian, 9 January 1923, 4, and 10 January 1923, 5; editorial “Capital Punishment,” Vote, 19 January 1923, 20.

12 In the early 1950s, Broad's Innocence of Edith Thompson was serialized in the Sunday Dispatch and contributed to the contemporary debate on the abolition of capital punishment. A Royal Commission on Capital Punishment sat from 1949 to 1953, and the death penalty was finally abolished in 1965.

13 Wild, Roland and Curtis-Bennett, Derek, “Curtis”: The Life of Sir Henry Curtis-Bennett KC (London, 1937), 149Google Scholar.

14 Robb, George and Erber, Nancy, eds., Disorder in the Court: Trials and Sexual Conflict at the Turn of the Century (London, 1999), 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For another exploration of sensational trials, see Mclaren, Angus, The Trials of Masculinity (Chicago, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On French trials, see Harris, Ruth, Murders and Madness: Medicine, Law, and Society in the Fin de Siècle (Oxford, 1989)Google Scholar.

15 D’Cruze, Shani, Walklate, Sandra, and Pegg, Samantha, Murder: Social and Historical Approaches to Understanding Murder and Murderers (Devon, 2006), 4Google Scholar.

16 See Robb and Erber, Disorder in the Court; Cook, Matt, “Law,” in Palgrave Advances in the Modern History of Sexuality, ed. Houlbrook, Matt and Cocks, H. G. (London, 2005), 64–86Google Scholar.

17 Melman, Billie, Women and the Popular Imagination in the Twenties (New York, 1988), 28–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Beddoe, Deirdre, Back to Home and Duty: Women between the Wars, 1918–1939 (London, 1989), 23–24Google Scholar. The term “flapper” was in part a media construct. Hall, Lesley, Sex, Gender, and Social Change in Britain since 1880 (London, 2000), 99Google Scholar.

18 Dobbs, S. P., The Clothing Workers of Britain (London, 1928)Google Scholar, refers to “the fashionably attired ‘flappers’ in the millinery and dressmaking workshops of famous London houses.” Quoted in Breward, Christopher, Fashioning London: Clothing and the Modern Metropolis (Oxford, 2004), 103Google Scholar.

19 Quoted in Weis, Criminal Justice, 134.

20 ibid., 116. The bob first appeared during the war but only reached the height of fashion in 1924. Doan, Laura, Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of the Modern English Lesbian Culture (New York, 2001), 234Google Scholar. In having a bob cut two years before this high point, Edith was a fashion forerunner.

21 For example, see Edith Thompson to Freddy Bywaters, 15 May 1922, and Edith Thompson to Freddy Bywaters, 14 June 1922, in Young, Trial of Frederick Bywaters and Edith Thompson, 189, 201. See McKibbin, Ross, “Working-Class Gambling in Britain, 1880–1939,” in his The Ideologies of Class: Social Relations in Britain, 1880–1950 (Oxford, 1991), 101–38Google Scholar, for a discussion of the “creative” thrill of gambling. “Sex novels” were condemned by moralists; see Robert Beresford, “Did Bywaters Really Love Mrs Thompson?” Illustrated Sunday Herald, 7 January 1923, 8; James Douglas, Daily Express, 29 November 1927, quoted in Melman, Women and the Popular Imagination in the Twenties, 44.

22 On women, modernity, and mobility in urban space, see Wilson, Elizabeth, The Sphinx in the City (London, 1991)Google Scholar; Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight; Felski, Rita, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, MA, 1995)Google Scholar; Vadillo, Ana Parejo, “Phenomena in Flux,” in Women's Experience of Modernity, 1875–1945, ed. Ardis, Ann L. and Lewis, Leslie W. (Baltimore, 2003), 205–20Google Scholar; Matthews, Jill Julius, Dance Hall and Picture Palace: Sydney's Romance with Modernity (Sydney, 2005)Google Scholar.

23 Matthews, Dance Hall and Picture Palace, 93; see Houlbrook, Matt, “‘The Man with the Powder Puff’ in Interwar London,” Historical Journal 50, no. 1 (2007): 169CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Adrian Bingham suggests that the amount of press attention devoted to the young modern woman after 1918 was exceptional. Bingham, Gender, Modernity, and the Popular Press, 45–49.

25 See Graves, Robert and Hodge, Alan, The Long Weekend (1940; repr., New York, 1963), 113Google Scholar. The press overall tended to be slightly more in favor of the modern woman than against her. See Bingham, Gender, Modernity, and the Popular Press.

26 “New Letters in Ilford Case,” Daily Express, 24 November 1922, 5.

27 “The Dramatic Stories of Mrs Thompson and Bywaters,” Daily Express, 9 December 1922, 4.

28 “Wife's Story of Stabbed Clerk,” Daily Mirror, 7 October 1922, 2.

29 Horwood, Catherine, Keeping Up Appearances: Fashion and Class between the Wars (Gloucestershire, 2005), 137Google Scholar.

30 “Ilford Crime,” The Times, 12 October 1922, 12; “Ilford Murder Sensation,” Daily Express, 18 October 1922, 4; “After Tonight I Put on a Mask,” World's Pictorial News, 4 November 1922, 2; “Edith Thompson's Ordeal,” 1.

31 Connor, Liz, The Spectacular Modern Woman (Bloomington, IN, 2004), 2.Google Scholar

32 See, e.g., Mrs.Pritchard, Eric, The Cult of Chiffon (London, 1902)Google Scholar.

33 “Midnight Murder Arrests,” Daily Express, 6 October 1922, 1.

34 “Life Story of Passionate Edith Thompson,” 1.

35 Quoted in Breward, Fashioning London, 111.

36 See Langhamer, Claire, Women's Leisure in England, 1920–1960 (Manchester, 2000), 58Google Scholar; McKibbin, Ross, Classes and Cultures: England, 1918–1951 (Oxford, 1998), 395CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Matthews, Dance Hall and Picture Palace.

37 Weis, Criminal Justice, 264; a lifelong friend of Mrs. Thompson, “Edith Thompson: Remarkable Interview at Holloway,” Lloyd's Sunday News, 24 December 1922, 5.

38 “Midnight Murder Arrests,” 1; and “Life Story of Passionate Edith Thompson,” 1.

39 Weis, Criminal Justice, 12. She had started work on leaving school, aged fifteen.

40 In the words of her boss, Mr. Carlton, “She did the work of three clerks.” “More about the Secret Life of Edith Thompson,” Reynolds's Newspaper, 24 December 1922, 9.

41 See Zimmeck, Meta, “Jobs for the Girls: The Expansion of Clerical Work for Women, 1850–1914,” in Unequal Opportunities, ed. John, Angela V. (Oxford, 1986), 153–77Google Scholar.

42 “Midnight Murder Arrests,” 1.

43 “Life Story of Passionate Edith Thompson,” 1–2, refers to her French as “fluent”; Weis, Criminal Justice, 16, describes her French as “quite competent.”

44 There was also an unfounded claim that she was “a woman fond of the Bohemian way of life.” Special commissioner, “Edith Thompson's Life in the West End,” Empire News, 7 January 1923, 1.

45 For example, see “Dancing Away Their Beauty,” Daily Sketch, 13 December 1922, 17.

46 Langhamer, Women's Leisure in England, 117, 137, 167. Edith Thompson must have also been thought on the old side to be dancing, for most women who danced regularly were under twenty-four years old. McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, 394.

47 Weis, Criminal Justice, 211.

48 Richard H. Thompson (brother of the murdered man), “Amazing Habits of Edith Thompson,” Lloyd's Sunday News, 31 December 1922, 7.

49 W. E. Graydon, father of Edith Thompson, “When the Thompsons First Met,” Weekly Dispatch, 17 December 1922, 7.

50 For example, “Married Life of the Thompsons,” Empire News, 17 December 1922, 7.

51 Thompson, “Amazing Habits of Edith Thompson,” 7.

52 For example, James Douglas, “The Pale Woman,” Daily Express, 7 December 1922, 1.

53 Graves and Hodge, Long Weekend, 39; see Houlbrook, “Man with the Powder Puff”; Bingham, Gender, Modernity, and the Popular Press, 173.

54 Thompson, “Amazing Habits of Edith Thompson,” 7.

55 An intimate friend of Mrs. Thompson, “Two Hats in an Afternoon,” Lloyd's Sunday News, 7 January 1923, 5.

56 “Edith Thompson's Life in the West End,” 7. Despite the title, the text barely mentions the West End at all. It was another attempt to cast aspersions on Edith, implying a “wild life up West.”

57 The average annual earnings across seven occupational classes for 1922–24 were £180 for men and £103 for women. In 1924 the average pay for “lower professionals” was £320 for men and £214 for women. Routh, Guy, Occupation and Pay in Great Britain, 1906–1979 (London, 1980), 120, 70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

58 Weis, Criminal Justice, 16.

59 Horwood, Keeping Up Appearances, 135. The middle classes did much better after the First World War than the working classes, despite a widely held belief to the contrary. McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, 52; Jackson, Alan, The Middle Classes, 1900–1950 (Nairn, 1991)Google Scholar.

60 Graves and Hodge, Long Weekend, 27.

61 Sally Alexander, “Men's Fears and Women's Work: Responses to Unemployment in London between the Wars,” Gender and History 12, no. 2 (July 2000): 401. On male literary resentment toward women, see Gilbert, Sandra M., “Soldier's Heart: Literary Men, Literary Women, and the Great War,” Signs 8, no. 3 (Spring 1983): 422–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

62 Weis, Criminal Justice, 48.

63 Western Mail, 17 February 1920, quoted in Beddoe, Back to Home and Duty, 84, and see 49 on the aggression toward women who held onto their wartime jobs. See Kent, Susan Kingsley, Making Peace: The Reconstruction of Gender in Interwar Britain (Princeton, NJ, 1993)Google Scholar, and Gullace, Nicoletta F., “The Blood of Our Sons”: Men, Women, and the Renegotiation of British Citizenship during the Great War (New York, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, on gender conflict engendered by the war.

64 Beddoe, Back to Home and Duty, 82; Oram, Alison, Women Teachers and Feminist Politics, 1900–1939 (Manchester, 1996), 45–72Google Scholar.

65 Thompson, “Amazing Habits of Edith Thompson,” 7.

66 Young, Trial of Frederick Bywaters and Edith Thompson, 9.

67 “Mrs Thompson's Married Life,” Reynolds's Newspaper, 17 December 1922, 9.

68 See Soloway, Richard Allen, Birth Control and the Population Question in England, 1877–1930 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1982)Google Scholar.

69 Anne Sumner Holmes, “The Double Standard in the English Divorce Laws, 1857–1923,” Law and Social Enquiry: The Journal of the American Bar Association 20 (1995): 601–20. See Hall, Sex, Gender, and Social Change in Britain since 1880, 105.

70 Sumner Holmes, “Double Standard in the English Divorce Laws, 1857–1923,” 620.

71 Wild and Curtis-Bennett, Curtis, 149. There was a famous precedent: the conviction of Florence Maybrick in 1889 for the murder of her husband, chiefly on the grounds of her adultery. Unlike Edith, Florence's case was taken up widely, especially by women, and the petition for commutation of the death penalty to life imprisonment was successful. Hartman, Mary S., Victorian Murderesses (1977; repr., London, 1985), chap. 6Google Scholar; George Robb, “The English Dreyfus Case: Florence Maybrick and the Sexual Double Standard,” in Robb and Erber, Disorder in the Court, 57–77.

72 The Man in the Street, Daily Sketch, 12 December 1922, 7.

73 Weis, Criminal Justice, 188. The year after Edith's execution, E. M. Delafield wrote a novel based on the case, called The Messalina of the Suburbs, under her real name: Esmee de la Pasture ( The Messalina of the Suburbs [London, 1924]).

74 Radice, Betty, Who's Who in the Ancient World (London, 1973), 164Google Scholar.

75 Men who acted violently toward adulterous wives were generally treated leniently in the 1920s. See Allen, Judith A., Sex and Secrets: Crimes Involving Australian Women since 1880 (Melbourne, 1990), chap. 6, for the Australian equivalenceGoogle Scholar.

76 “Closing Scenes and Speeches,” The Times, 11 December 1922, 12.

77 “Ilford Murder,” The Times, 12 December 1922, 8.

78 James Douglas, “Love Letters,” Sunday Express, 29 October 1922, 8.

79 James Douglas, “The Late Mr Thompson,” Sunday Express, 17 December 1922, 8, and “Mrs Thompson and the Decision,” Daily Express, 6 January 1923, 4.

80 For example, see “Life Story of Passionate Edith Thompson,” 1.

81 Baxter, Beverley, Strange Street (London, 1935), 154Google Scholar.

82 See, e.g., Edith Thompson to Freddy Bywaters, 18 May 1922, in Young, Trial of Frederick Bywaters and Edith Thompson, 195, 196.

83 Matt Houlbrook, “‘Women Who Always Act’: Culture, Fiction, and Selfhood in the Letters of Edith Thompson” (paper presented at Modernity and Self-Fashioning in Post–World War One Britain panel, North American Conference on British Studies, Boston, 17 November 2006).

84 Edith Thompson to Freddy Bywaters, 17 March 1922, in Young, Trial of Frederick Bywaters and Edith Thompson, 246.

85 Houlbrook, “Women Who Always Act,” 10.

86 Quoted in Weis, Criminal Justice, 247 and 315.

87 Alexander, Sally, “The Mysteries and Secrets of Women's Bodies,” in Modern Times, ed. Nava, Mica and O’Shea, Alan (London, 1996), 161–75Google Scholar; Porter, Roy and Hall, Lesley, The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain, 1650–1950 (New Haven, CT, 1995), 209Google Scholar. See also Hall, Lesley, ed., Outspoken Women: An Anthology of Women's Writing on Sex, 1870–1969 (London, 2005), chap. 3Google Scholar.

88 Edith Thompson to Freddy Bywaters, 1 April 1922, in Young, Trial of Frederick Bywaters and Edith Thompson, 181.

89 Edith Thompson to Freddy Bywaters, n.d. [2 October 1922], in Young, Trial of Frederick Bywaters and Edith Thompson, 214.

90 Although her description of an orgasm is uncannily similar to that given in Stopes's, MarieMarried Love (London, 1918)Google Scholar.

91 Thompson, “Amazing Habits of Edith Thompson,” 7.

92 Lifelong friend of Mrs. Thompson, “Edith Thompson: Remarkable Interview at Holloway,” 5. Other newspapers also see Edith as having “two sides”; see, e.g., Rebecca West, “Edith Thompson's Soul: Rebecca West Explores the Day-Dream Theory,” Reynolds's Newspaper, 17 December 1922, 2.

93 A lifelong friend of Mrs. Thompson, “Mrs Thompson's Career from Schoolroom to Prison,” Lloyd's Sunday News, 17 December 1922, 5.

94 See Carey, John, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice amongst the Intelligentsia (London, 1992)Google Scholar; Felski, Rita, Doing Time (New York, 2000), chap. 1Google Scholar; A. James Hammerton, “The Perils of Mrs Pooter: Satire, Modernity, and Motherhood in the Lower Middle Classes in England, 1870–1920,” Women's History Review 8, no. 2 (1999): 261–76.

95 Light, Alison, Forever England (London, 1991)Google Scholar.

96 Delafield, E. M., The Suburban Young Man (London, 1928)Google Scholar; Carey, Intellectuals and the Masses, 52. And see Early, Julie English, “Keeping Ourselves to Ourselves: Violence in the Edwardian Suburb,” in Everyday Violence in Britain, 1850–1950, ed. D’Cruze, Shani (London, 2000), 170–84, including her discussion of the representation of Dr. Crippen's wife, Cora, as sluttish and vulgarGoogle Scholar.

97 Breward, Fashioning London, 100.

98 James Douglas, “Three Clerks,” Sunday Express, 10 December 1922, 8.

99 This was something that Edith's father, William Graydon, took issue with, in his (ghosted) article “When the Thompsons First Met,” 7.

100 Douglas, “Late Mr Thompson,” 8.

101 Harrison Owen, “Mushy Sentimentality about Edith Thompson: Reply to Miss Rebecca West,” Reynolds's Newspaper, 24 December 1922, 2.

102 Thompson, “Amazing Habits of Edith Thompson,” 7, and see Empire News, 17 December 1922, 7.

103 Melman, Women and the Popular Imagination in the Twenties, 46–47. See also Smith, H. Llewellyn, ed., The New Survey of London Life and Labour (London, 1930), 171Google Scholar, on transportation and the suburbs.

104 Lifelong friend of Mrs. Thompson, “Mrs Thompson's Career from Schoolroom to Prison,” 5.

105 ibid., 17.

106 Ellis, Markman, The Politics of Sensibility (Cambridge, 1996)Google Scholar; Flint, Jane, The Woman Reader, 1837–1914 (Oxford, 1993)Google Scholar.

107 McAleer, Joseph, Popular Reading and Publishing in Britain, 1914–1950 (Oxford, 1992), 72–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

108 For the leading contemporary critique of cheap literature, see Leavis, Q. D., Fiction and the Reading Public (London, 1932)Google Scholar. Many women writers and feminists were appalled by the popularity of romantic fiction. See Trodd, Anthea, Women's Writing in English: Britain, 1900–1945 (London, 1998), 120. The popular press, however, in their attempts to expand their female readership, regularly serialized romance novelsGoogle Scholar.

109 See Houlbrook, “Women Who Always Act.”

110 Huyssen, Andreas, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Post Modernism (London, 1986), 44–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Flint, Woman Reader, 140.

111 “Bywaters in the Box,” The Times, 8 December 1922, 17.

112 “The Dramatic Stories of Mrs Thompson and Bywaters,” 4.

113 “Ilford Trial Closing,” The Times, 11 December 1922, 19.

114 Written in 1909, this best seller was part desert romance, part thriller. The Empire News cynically began the serialization of this book on 7 January 1923, despite having so criticized Edith.

115 “Bywaters in the Box,” 17, and other newspapers for that day.

116 Lifelong friend of Mrs. Thompson, “Edith Thompson: Remarkable Interview at Holloway,” 5.

117 Flint, Woman Reader, 4, 38. Various other commentators referred to Edith as “neurotic,” e.g., Douglas, “Three Clerks,” 8; West, “Edith Thompson's Soul,” 2. See Chris Waters, “The Perils of Excessive Introspection: Psychoanalysis, Sexuality, and Selfhood in Britain in the 1920s” (paper presented at Modernity and Self-Fashioning in Post–World War One Britain panel, North American Conference on British Studies, Boston, 17 November 2006). The term “war neurosis” had developed during the war as an alternative to “shell-shock.” See Longhran, Tracey, Shell-Shock in Britain, circa 1860–1920 (PhD diss., London University, 2006)Google Scholar; “neurosis” without the qualifier of “war” was now being widely applied to women.

118 See Twining, William, Rethinking Evidence (Oxford, 1990), chap. 8Google Scholar.

119 Ballinger, Anette, Dead Woman Walking: Executed Women in England and Wales, 1900–1955 (Aldershot, 2000), 226–27Google Scholar.

120 Young, Trial of Frederick Bywaters and Edith Thompson, 17.

121 See Ballinger, Dead Woman Walking, 227.

122 Shapiro, Ann-Louise, “‘Stories More Terrifying than the Truth Itself’: Narratives of Female Criminality in Fin de Siècle Paris,” in Gender and Crime in Modern Europe, ed. Arnot, Margaret L. and Usborne, Cornelie (London, 1999), 207Google Scholar.

123 Filson Young, writing the year of the executions, was aware of what these references really referred to: “measures to counteract the results of intercourse.” Young, Trial of Frederick Bywaters and Edith Thompson, xxv. On abortion in this period, see Barbara Brookes, Abortion in England, 1900–1967 (London, 1988).

124 “Bywaters Cross-Examination,” Daily Mail, 9 December 1922, 5.

125 See “Bywaters in the Box,” 17.

126 See Young, Trial of Frederick Bywaters and Edith Thompson, xiv, for the way in which the criminal lawyers resorted to melodrama.

127 “Bywaters and a Rosegrower,” World's Pictorial News, 23 December 1922, 10.

128 “Edith Thompson's Ordeal,” 1. And see World's Pictorial News, 16 December 1922, 2. Not everyone was so praising. Beverley Nichols later referred to him as “an amiable ape,” “rigid with sex” (The Sweet and Twenties [London, 1958], 67).

129 See Bourke, Joanna, Dismembering the Male: Men's Bodies, Britain, and the Great War (London, 1996)Google Scholar.

130 Weis, Criminal Justice, 27.

131 “Accused Wife's Collapse,” Daily Mail, 18 October 1922, 10.

132 ibid. Once the verdict was passed, however, the Daily Mail took a hard line, condemning both the prisoners. Poet T. S. Eliot congratulated the paper, seeing it “in striking contrast with the flaccid sentimentality of other papers I have seen.” Letter from T. S. Eliot, Daily Mail, 8 January 1923.

133 “Bywaters, in Defence, Suggests Suicide-Pact,” Daily Sketch, 8 December 1922, 2.

134 Gibbs, Philip, Now It Can Be Told (London, 1920)Google Scholar, quoted in Kent, Making Peace, 99. Freddy had not actually fought in the war, although that may have not been clear to readers and spectators. Newspapers carried many accounts of violence committed by men upon women in the immediate years after the war, yet convictions were low and sentences lenient. See Allen, Sex and Secrets, chap. 6, for the parallel Australian situation.

135 “Society Woman's Poison Secret,” Daily Sketch, 18 December 1922, 2.

136 See “Murder and the Law,” The Times, 6 January 1923, 9; editorial, “An Ordinary Charge,” Manchester Guardian, 12 December 1922, 8.

137 Carey, Intellectuals and the Masses, 7–8.

138 See, e.g., press response to the 1857 murder trial of Madeleine Smith and the 1889 murder trial of Florence Maybrick in Hartman, Victorian Murderesses, 84, 251. And see Altick, Richard, Victorian Studies in Scarlet (New York, 1970), 42Google Scholar.

139 “Closing Stages of Ilford Drama,” Weekly Dispatch, 10 December 1922, 1; special correspondent, “Judge Warns Jury,” Sunday Express, 10 December 1922, 1.

140 Robb and Erber, Disorder in the Court, 7; Frost, Ginger, Promises Broken: Courtship, Class, and Gender in Victorian England (Charlottesville, VA, 1997)Google Scholar.

141 “Death Sentences Passed on Mrs Thompson and Bywaters,” Daily Mirror, 12 December 1922, 2.

142 Douglas, “Pale Woman,” 1.

143 “Morbid Sightseers in All-Night Queue,” Daily Chronicle, 11 December 1922, 7.

144 Lloyd's Sunday News, 10 December 1922, 1.

145 A woman reporter, Daily Graphic, 7 December 1922, 3.

146 “Morbid Sightseers in All-Night Queue,” 7.

147 Hartman, Victorian Murderesses, 268. Working-class women attended local courts as spectators, however. D’Cruze, Shani, Crimes of Outrage: Sex, Violence, and Victorian Working Women (London, 1998)Google Scholar. Special commissioner, “The Woman on the Rack,” Illustrated Sunday Herald, 10 December 1922, 8.

148 Nead, “Visual Cultures of the Courtroom,” 122.

149 Quoted in McAleer, Popular Reading and Publishing in Britain, 248–49.

150 Robb and Erber, Disorder in the Court, 4.

151 Editorial, “An Ordinary Charge,” 8.

152 Routh, Occupation and Pay in Great Britain, 1906–1979, 120.

153 Alexander, Sally, Becoming a Woman and Other Essays in 19th and 20th Century Feminist History (London, 1994), 203Google Scholar.

154 Lady Diana Cooper, “Passion the Mother of Tragedy,” Weekly Dispatch, 17 December 1922, 8.

155 Huyssen, After the Great Divide, 47, 52. Fear of young women was apparent in the war too. See Angela Woollacott, “‘Khaki Fever’ and Its Control: Gender, Class, Age, and Sexual Morality on the British Homefront in the First World War,” Journal of Contemporary History 29 (April 1994): 325–47.

156 “Is Edith Thompson to Live? Save Young Bywaters,” 2.

157 West, “Edith Thompson's Soul,” 2.

158 “Is Edith Thompson to Live? Save Young Bywaters,” 2; Cicely Hamilton quoted in “Should Capital Punishment Go?” Lloyd's Sunday News, 14 January 1923, 10; editorial, “Capital Punishment,” 20.

159 “Petition for Reprieve of Bywaters,” Daily Sketch, 14 December 1922, 3.

160 W. L. George, “Hypnotised and Unlucky,” Daily Sketch, 15 December 1922, 13.

161 “Society Woman's Poison Secret,” 2.

162 Nichols, Sweet and Twenties, 67.

163 Weis, Criminal Justice, 255–56.

164 “Big Rush to Sign Petition,” Daily Sketch, 15 December 1922, 2.

165 “Bywaters' Gratitude,” Daily Sketch, 16 December 1922, 2.

166 “Women and the Thompson Case,” World's Pictorial News, 16 December 1922, 2.

167 Graydon, “When the Thompsons First Met,” 7. The paper published three installments by her father, ghosted by Beverley Nichols, who had just begun work as a journalist. Weis, Criminal Justice, 353–54; Nichols, Sweet and Twenties, 75–78.

168 Cicely Hamilton quoted in “Should Capital Punishment Go?” 10. A woman had not been hanged in Britain since 1907—many women had been reprieved.

169 West, “Edith Thompson's Soul,” 2.

170 See Dijkstra, Bram, Evil Sister: The Threat of Female Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Culture (New York, 1996)Google Scholar. The vamp was epitomized by the silent screen Hollywood actresses Theda Bara and Pola Negri. See Golden, Eve, Vamp: The Rise and Fall of Theda Bara (New York, 1997)Google Scholar.

171 Lifelong friend of Mrs. Thompson, “Edith Thompson: Remarkable Interview at Holloway,” 5.

172 Curtis, L. Perry, Jack the Ripper and the London Press (New Haven, CT, 2001), 9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.