Edith Thompson as a Modern Woman

Edith, in many ways, was thought to epitomize the “modern woman” and indeed the “flapper,” for in this period the two terms were often used interchangeably. The term “flapper” described a young woman, still disenfranchised (i.e., under age thirty), who was “fast” in her leisure pursuits and lifestyle; the “modern woman” extended the age range somewhat.Footnote 17 Edith could be identified as either or both.Footnote 18 She was notably fashionable; over sixty years after the trial, one of Edith's acquaintances could still remember the visual impact she made: “she was very smart, she loved clothes, she knew how to dress.”Footnote 19 Edith's hairstyle, too, was at the cutting edge of fashion, for she sported a fringed bob the last six months of her life.Footnote 20 Although married, in many ways Edith pursued the lifestyle of an unmarried young woman, untrammeled by child care (she was childless) or many domestic duties and committed to the pursuit of pleasure: she smoked, danced, bet on the horses, and read an inordinate amount of books, mostly what would be termed middlebrow, such as romances and thrillers (although she was not a reader of the new “sex novels” that were causing such a stir, preferring prewar romances).Footnote 21 She moved confidently through urban space, commuting daily from the suburbs (where she lived) to the city (where she worked as a successful businesswoman) and on to the West End, where she regularly attended plays, shows, and the dance halls where she danced in a very public display of her physical prowess.Footnote 22 The modern woman-cum-flapper, supposedly a figure found across all classes, although most associated with the lower-middle class, represented modernity, new opportunities, a brave new world, and a break with the prewar world of chaperones and restrictive clothing; she also represented immorality and the erosion of stability, particularly in regard to gender relations and the family. And she dangerously blurred the boundaries between respectable women and women of a “certain class.”Footnote 23 Unsurprisingly, while there was much interest in the modern woman-cum-flapper, there was also a deeply felt ambivalence.Footnote 24 In the press, positive commentary sat side by side with more negative sentiments, even in the same publication, where opinion pieces or fashion pages, for example, might stand in contradiction to editorials.Footnote 25

Many of the descriptions of Edith Thompson in the earlier part of the trial were sympathetic, even positive. To the Daily Express, “The woman in the dock was without question the personality of the court, attractively feminine in every way.”Footnote 26 When the trial transferred to the Old Bailey, the Daily Express was still waxing lyrical: “A thrill passed through the court as Mrs Thompson walked slowly down the steps of the dock.”Footnote 27 It was as if she was a starlet making an entrance on stage. The positive press representations of Edith chiefly involved her stylishness and elegance, her prowess as a dancer, and her capability as a businesswoman. Each day that she appeared in court, the popular press relished every detail of her ever-changing attire. One day in the Police Court, she was wearing “a brown coat with mole fur collar and cuffs, a hat also of fur, and plain white gloves. Beneath her brown coat was a grey crepe de chine dress trimmed with black silk.”Footnote 28 (Gloves and hats were essential wear for respectable middle-class women in the 1920s.)Footnote 29 Although Edith's coat generally appeared to be the same from day to day, the hats changed: “a large velour hat,” “a small hat and veil,” “a velvet Tam-o-Shanter,” and “a black velvety hat with black quills.”Footnote 30

While the press was attentive to the details of Edith's dress, so too was she. Although positioned as a largely mute witness to her and Freddy's trial, apart from the agonizing moments of cross-examination, her careful dressing spoke loudly of her respectability and her femininity. It does not sound as if her trial clothes were the height of fashion; they were “lady-like,” set on conveying a particular impression to the onlooker. As historian Liz Connor observes, with the rise of modernity, and particularly by the 1920s, “women were invited to articulate themselves as modern subjects by constituting themselves as spectacles.”Footnote 31 But of course women had long taken care over how they dressed, for they learned the (class-specific) codes as to the signification of different outfits and combinations.Footnote 32 In relation to Edith, she occasionally wore black in court (she was, after all, a recent widow) but more usually gray, brown, navy blue, cream, or white. She does not appear to have worn bright colors, which presumably would have been seen by her and the court spectators as inappropriate.

As a manifestation of her mobility—mobility was a key trope of the flapper—Edith's love of dancing was frequently commented upon. The comments were benign, even flattering. For example, the Daily Express noted that she “was fond of dancing and other forms of harmless gaiety.”Footnote 33 The World's Pictorial News reported that she was “an exquisite dancer. … Night after night she went to dances.”Footnote 34 The New Survey on London Life and Labour of 1930 reported that “people drop into a palais [dance hall] after the day's work or on Saturday evenings as casually as they go to the cinema.”Footnote 35 Dancing, along with the cinema (the “pictures”) and romantic fiction, were young women's key leisure pursuits in this period.Footnote 36 Edith did not attend night clubs but frequented the respectable dance halls and dances taking place in hotels. Edith's close friend since childhood, Bessie Aitken, writing in Lloyd's Sunday News anonymously as “a Lifelong Friend of Mrs Thompson,” mentioned the many trophies Edith had won in competitions, noting that “above all she was a superb waltzer.”Footnote 37 Waltzing, unlike the tango or the foxtrot, was respectable and traditional. Thus, her dancing was presented as an innocent pleasure (“harmless gaiety”) and a skill—she was “an exquisite dancer.”Footnote 38

Edith was also presented as a committed and talented businesswoman who had done very well for herself and was much respected in the firm she worked for, Carlton and Prior, a wholesale milliners in Aldersgate Street in the city. She had started working there in late 1911, aged nearly eighteen, having worked previously as a junior clerk in a couple of wholesale clothiers.Footnote 39 Such was her flair for the work that she had risen rapidly to the positions of manageress and chief buyer, in addition to that of bookkeeper.Footnote 40 (Bookkeeping had, until recently, been a male preserve, as was the city.)Footnote 41 The Daily Express quoted the manageress of a neighboring firm: “Mrs Thompson is one of the keenest business women in the City. … Her engaging manner has undoubtedly contributed to her success in business.”Footnote 42 Edith traveled to Paris on a number of occasions as a buyer for her firm; it helped that she spoke good French, which she must have taken the initiative to study, for her elementary school would not have taught languages.Footnote 43 She used her maiden name, Graydon, at work—another aspect of her unmarried, independent, flapper persona.

These representations of Edith as well dressed, professional, and highly dance proficient had their negative counterparts, which in relation to Edith took the form of accusations of extreme extravagance and indulgence and overcommitment to work at the neglect of marital duties.Footnote 44 There was no direct attack on her dancing, although at the same time as the trial, the press was publishing articles castigating “the dance craze.”Footnote 45 There was, however, a hint of disapproval, for in noting that her husband did not dance, the press implied that she danced with other men. For a married woman to dance without her husband was thought not quite “proper.” Indeed, on marriage most women stopped dancing altogether because women of the period saw dance halls as potential “pick-up” places.Footnote 46

The most vitriolic account of Edith came from her husband's brother, Richard Thompson, who clearly hated his sister-in-law. (He is described by Edith's biographer as of a “vindictive disposition.”)Footnote 47 In Lloyd's Sunday News Richard Thompson narrated how Edith was “a flighty, forward flirt, pleasure-loving and extravagant … untruthful … loud and vulgar.”Footnote 48 (This was in blatant contradiction to a [ghosted] article by Edith's father, William Graydon, which had appeared two weeks earlier in the Weekly Dispatch, claiming that “she was never a girl to flirt. … Her husband and Bywaters were the only two men who ever played a part in her life.”)Footnote 49 Poor, dull, slow Percy (for even his own brother, in his depiction of the man who longed for nothing but a “humdrum,” “quiet, steady home life,” did not disguise the dullness) was no match, Richard argued, for his hard-drinking, hard-gambling, extravagant wife, who surrounded herself with male admirers, covered herself in expensive scent, wore endless new hats, and dressed in clothes well beyond her means. Even the less antagonistic accounts stressed the couple's incompatibility.Footnote 50 Richard claimed that prior to the trial he had never seen Edith without overt makeup; “the woman who stood in the dock, with white face and pale lips, was a new creature to me.”Footnote 51 (Edith's paleness—and frailty—was widely commented upon by the press.)Footnote 52 Makeup was only just taking hold in Britain in the early interwar years, but its immediate effect was to erode the boundaries between different types and classes of women. According to Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, “The course was from brothel to stage, then on to Bohemia, to Society, to Society's maids, to the mill-girl, and lastly to the suburban woman.”Footnote 53 But according to Richard, Edith (a “suburban woman” in that she lived in the suburbs) had long used makeup: “I had always known her as a woman with bright pink cheeks and carmined lips.” If this implied that Edith was akin to a prostitute (although it could also be read as a sign of her modernity), the connotations of prostitution went further: “I do know that at times she had more money than could be accounted for by her office salary. … Edith had a mind very far from pure.”Footnote 54

In the same newspaper the following week, Edith's friend Bessie Aitken rallied to her defense, emphasizing that she was not a woman of loose morals, barely drank alcohol, only bet in moderation, and “wore a lot of hats as advert for her millinery business.”Footnote 55 Yet, the same day as this article appeared, a rival Sunday paper, the Empire News, presented a counternarrative, one that reinforced the Richard Thompson line. This was not surprising, since the paper's so-called commissioner had been talking to the Thompson family. (By claiming to be a commissioner, he suggested the authority of this private investigation.) As the Empire News alleged, “Edith Thompson was a woman passionately fond of money, not for the purpose of hoarding it up, but for what it would bring. … It was a perpetual mystery to her relations, especially those on her husband's side, who did not like her, where she found the money to buy the endless number of new things she was always wearing. … She received money from other men. … Everybody who knew her said she dressed like a woman with £2,000 a year to spend, while her husband went about like a poor man.”Footnote 56

Edith did not earn anything like £2,000 a year, but with her access to a regular supply of hats, and her excellent “dress sense,” she might indeed have masqueraded as a high earner. Although not rich by any means, her wages were good, double the country's average.Footnote 57 She had done well all through the war—her income rising steadily as she rose in the firm. She earned more than her husband, her lover, and her father (and had done so in relation to her father since 1913): £6 a week plus a £30 annual bonus, that is, £342 a year.Footnote 58 Her husband earned the same but without the bonus; Freddy earned considerably less. She was a woman who had “made good”; it helped of course that her field of work was booming. As historian Catherine Horwood points out, “The trade in women's hats … was robust between the wars.”Footnote 59 Edith's work had not been war work but the production of “unnecessary” hats. When men returned, a million found their prewar jobs held by someone else, sometimes a woman.Footnote 60 Working women were frequently taunted by men.Footnote 61 The economic crisis of 1921 exacerbated the situation, and in 1922 male unemployment had passed 2 million.Footnote 62 Some of these demobilized men queued all night outside the Old Bailey during the trial in order to sell their places the next morning—frequently to women. There was widespread resentment of women who had prospered in the war yet had “done nothing for their country,” to quote a letter from “Disgusted,” published in the Western Mail.Footnote 63

If the working woman was married, the resentment was greater still. In fact the 1921 economic crisis had led many local authorities to introduce a marriage bar, especially in relation to teaching and the civil service.Footnote 64 A married woman who was voluntarily childless, as in Edith's case, was also deemed unacceptable. To Richard Thompson, Edith had selfishly deprived her husband of children because they would have interfered with her business career.Footnote 65 The prosecuting solicitor general's unnecessary comment that “perhaps because there were no children, perhaps for other reasons, she was carrying on her employment” could be read as criticism of her status both as a working wife and as a wife who remained childless.Footnote 66 The press asserted that she “steadfastly declined to have any children.”Footnote 67 It was implicitly a comment on her selfishness and her unnaturalness. Since the 1870s there had been national concern with the falling British birthrate, an anxiety that had intensified after the carnage of the Great War. Proponents of eugenics noted with anguish that the fall was class specific, being far greater among the middle and upper classes. It was middle-class women—women such as Edith—who were seen as the most blameworthy.Footnote 68

Edith Thompson as Modern Sexual Woman

Arguably, the aspect of the modern woman that was most contentious was her sexuality, both in the sense of her appearance as sexual spectacle and in the sense of her capacity for sexual agency. Edith was of course immediately read in sexual terms, not simply because she was attractive but also because she was engaged in an adulterous relationship. Edith claimed that despite much pleading, Percy had adamantly refused to give her a divorce. The 1857 Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act codified the double moral standard that a woman's adultery was more serious than a man’s. This stipulated that a wife's adultery was sufficient cause for divorce, while the woman required proof of an additional matrimonial offense. The 1912 Royal Commission recommended the equalizing of men and women's access to divorce, a recommendation brought into effect in the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1923, the year of Edith Thompson's execution. But as historian Anne Sumner Holmes convincingly argues, this did not represent a lessening of the idea that a woman's adultery was a serious offense.Footnote 69 Rather, it reflected a shift in thinking about a man's adultery, namely, the growing belief that men's infidelity contributed to such national problems as prostitution, illegitimacy, and the spread of venereal disease.Footnote 70

As mentioned earlier, Barrister Curtis-Bennett believed that “Mrs Thompson was hanged for immorality.”Footnote 71 By “immorality” he meant adultery, a “crime” magnified further by the age difference between the two culprits. Bywaters was characterized as an innocent young “boy” led astray by an older, predatory, sexual seductress. Edith's behavior was deemed triply inappropriate and unacceptable: initiating, adulterous, and cross-generational. The judge was openly disapproving of what he called their “sordid affair”; the Daily Sketch, likewise: “Human life is sacred. … But sacred also are ‘household laws’ and marital faith. … The ‘right’ to love anyone and anywhere is the spear-head of social anarchy.”Footnote 72 (Ironically, the Daily Sketch had been Edith's favored newspaper.) In several papers Edith was referred to as the “Messalina of Ilford.”Footnote 73 (Messalina, the wife of the Roman emperor Claudius, had been notorious for sexual profligacy and was put to death for plotting against her husband.)Footnote 74 In the early 1920s there was still much hostility toward the adulterous wife.Footnote 75

If Edith as sexual subject was on trial for adultery, it was because of her passionate, extraordinary letters. There was mixed reaction to these letters. Curtis-Bennett described them as containing “the most beautiful language of love.”Footnote 76 In contrast, the judge referred to them as “full of the outpourings of a silly, but at the same time wicked affection.”Footnote 77 Once deemed admissible, some of the letters were first read out in Stratford Police Court on 24 October and were immediately printed in all the newspapers. James Douglas, Ulsterman, high moralist, and editor of the Sunday Express, headed his editorial “Love Letters,” and gushed in his usual excessive, bombastic manner: “Like all the world, I have been amazed and astounded by the letters. … No novelist could imagine or invent letters like these. The subtlest literary art could not put into words a tithe of the emotion with which they pulse and throb in every line.”Footnote 78 Later, Douglas turned violently against Edith, supporting the guilty verdict and her death penalty, but later still he shifted yet again, declaring, three days before her death, that “the hanging of Mrs Thompson will be a miscarriage of justice.”Footnote 79 The swings in Douglas's verdict paralleled the vicissitudes of the public response. Many other journalists were likewise impressed by Edith's letters.Footnote 80 Beverley Baxter, editor of Douglas's sister newspaper, the Daily Express, noted later, “She wrote as if she were the first woman and Bywaters were the first man. She raised the love of her suburban self and the wandering steward to the level of an epic.”Footnote 81 Yet, this was a woman who had left school at only fifteen.

Edith's letters are wonderfully expressive, written with great feeling and verve. She viewed them as her way of “talking” to Freddy; it was in fact often her only way of talking to him, given that he was away at sea for long periods of time. The letters contain passionate declarations, witty observations, and details of the plays and dances she had attended, the bets she had placed on the horses, and the clothes she had been wearing and buying, for Freddy was very interested in what she wore and had strong likes and dislikes.Footnote 82 There is also the odd incriminating remark about Percy.

She and Freddy devoted greatest space to lengthy and perceptive literary criticism of the various books that they were currently reading. Their elaborate discussion of the books—it is clear that Freddy also engaged in such discussion, although only three of his letters to Edith have been discovered—offered a shared language, referred to by historian Matt Houlbrook, in his brilliant paper on Edith Thompson's letters, as “an intimate trans-national dialogue.”Footnote 83 Books were a central part of Edith's life—and she inhabited them, identifying with specific fictional characters: “Aren’t books a consolation and a solace? We ourselves die and live in the books we read while we are reading them.”Footnote 84 This is not simply about escapism; as Houlbrook perceptively remarks, “Moving into a fictional life affords an opportunity to find subjective composure. The act of writing temporarily allows Edith to resolve deep psychic fears and secure a reassuring sense of self as spiritual, selfless and heroic.”Footnote 85 Part of her analysis of books involves considering the morality of their characters—not dissimilar, ironically, to the way in which her own and Freddy's characters were later dissected by the press.

What possibly greatly scandalized some readers were the references to sexual behavior and desire, oblique though they were. One jurist, writing to the Daily Telegraph thirty years after the trial, reflected back on the letters: “‘Nauseous’ is hardly strong enough to describe their contents. … Mrs Thompson's letters were her own condemnation.”Footnote 86 For women to be “knowing” about sex and, worse still, to take the sexual initiative was unacceptable. Indeed there was still much sexual ignorance across all social classes, despite the fact that Marie Stopes's 1918 Married Love, a purveyor of basic sex education for married couples and advocate of mutual sexual pleasure, had sold over half a million copies by 1925.Footnote 87 In one letter Edith reflects back on her and Freddy's urgent lovemaking in an empty railway carriage and her active participation: “Darlingest boy you said to me ‘Say No Peidi’ [his nickname for her] say ‘No’ on Thursday didn’t you—but at that very moment you didn’t wish me to say ‘No’ did you? You felt you wanted all me in exchange for all you. I knew this—felt this—and wouldn’t say ‘No’ for that very reason.”Footnote 88 (She said no to Percy however, writing to Freddy on several occasions of her resistance to Percy's sexual advances.) Edith even gives a description of what sounds like an orgasm: “It seems a great welling up of love—of feeling, of inertia, just as if I am wax in your hands—to do with you as you will. … Its physical, purely, and I can’t describe it. … You say you knew it would be like this one day.”Footnote 89 Unlike some letters that were withheld, this one formed part of the evidence presented at the trial and was reproduced by the press; readers must have been surprised, possibly shocked, by the audacity of a woman writing in such terms.Footnote 90

To her brother-in-law, Richard Thompson, her letters “finally confirmed her as ‘a moral pervert.’”Footnote 91 Even her friend Bessie Aitken, despite her affection for Edith, had to distance herself from Edith's sexuality. In what was very probably a ghostwritten account, or at least a response to leading questions, Bessie accepted the guilty verdict as correct and wrote of it, formulaically, in terms of a body and soul dichotomy: “There were two Edith Thompsons … the Edith Thompson of the Body and … the Edith Thompson of the Soul. … Between the two the battle was waged. The Soul fell and was trampled; the Body triumphed.”Footnote 92 The soul was destroyed by bodily lust, or what was here termed “gratification of her illicit love.” Such was its power that “at the last, the old Edith that we knew and loved, was dead.”Footnote 93

Edith Thompson as Modern Suburban Woman

Edith was also vilified because of her class and geographical location. This may seem a strange assertion; after all, she was earning a good salary, which enabled her to buy an expensive lawyer for her defense. However, in terms of the dominant beliefs of the period, her membership in the lower-middle class opened her to ridicule. She was the daughter of a clerk, married to a clerk, in a job on par with that of a clerk, and living in the suburbs. The Thompson murder took place a short distance away from Edith's home in the suburb of Ilford; in the press reportage it was always referred to as the “Ilford murder,” an epithet that was meant to convey, I think, more than a mere geographic location. Late Victorians, Edwardians, and on into the 1920s and ’30s closely identified the lower-middle classes and the suburbs. The suburbs were seen as dreary and unsightly. To some, the lower-middle classes might have signified respectability, but those who saw themselves above this class location, namely, the upper and upper-middle classes, viewed the lower-middle classes as vulgar, pretentious, narrow-minded, philistine, and mediocre. They were also disturbingly proliferating in numbers.Footnote 94

While the lower-middle-class suburban male (a man such as Percy) was depicted by the intelligentsia as pottering about in the garden or sitting around aimlessly in his slippers—an image at the heart of the new, more domestic Englishness of the interwar that is so convincingly discussed by Alison Light—his female equivalent was the worse offender.Footnote 95 She was cast as sluttish, pleasure seeking, without morals, and engaged in sensational reading, consumption, and cheap thrills. For example, in the 1920s novel The Suburban Young Man by well-known diarist and novelist E. M. Delafield, Norah, the eponymous hero's sister-in-law, is depicted as greedy, lazy, stupid, vulgar, and fond of shopping and frivolous pursuits.Footnote 96 No one called Edith stupid, but her brother-in-law called her vulgar and extravagant, and all commentators remarked on her penchant for pleasure seeking. As cultural theorist Christopher Breward notes, there was an interwar (upper-middle-class) anxiety about young lower-middle-class women adopting new products and lifestyles and refusing to accept that “access to pleasure and luxury” should be “stratified.”Footnote 97 Indeed newspaper editor James Douglas found it hard to reconcile Edith's “illicit passion” with her class position: “It would not surprise us in the higher strata … where luxury and self-indulgence have sapped the will. … But it is staggering to discover it in the underworld of the humdrum clerks and humdrum milliners.” It was the equivalent, as he stated so wonderfully, of “Madame Bovary in a bunshop!”Footnote 98 Edith was not in fact a milliner—a more lowly post than her position of bookkeeper, buyer, and manageress—but the press was always referring to her as such.Footnote 99 If not a milliner, then she was referred to in the press as a “suburban housewife.” Both were persistent misrepresentations (and attempts to fit her into specific cultural frameworks) that indicated both an inability to accept her as a successful businesswoman and the level of anxiety surrounding the social mobility of women.

Reflecting on why Edith and Freddy had not simply gone away together and let Percy live, Douglas suggested it was because “they were too respectable! They wanted to keep their posts and their reputations. They preferred the risk of murder to the risk of scandal!”Footnote 100 (Douglas always made prolific use of exclamation marks.) Writer Harrison Owen, in Reynolds's Newspaper, remarked, “Reading these remarkable letters … one might imagine her to be a woman … ready to risk anything to be with her lover. Actually she would not even risk the displeasure of Ilford society.”Footnote 101 (“Ilford society” suggests mockery: a juxtaposition of suburban Ilford and high society.) Richard Thompson likewise argued that the reason that Edith had never left Percy was her love of “ostensible respectability” and her fear of job loss, penury, and ostracism.Footnote 102 Thus, lower-middle-class respectability was turned against Edith; her desire to retain her professional life and standing in the community was presented as the reason why she chose murder as the preferred option.

Modern Woman as Consumer of Cheap Fiction

London suburbs grew hugely in the interwar years, accelerated by expansion in transportation. The inhabitants of “commuterland,” as they sat daily in trains and buses on their way to work, represented a sizable number of the consumers of not simply the expanding daily popular press but also cheap, easy-to-read novels, so-called railway fiction.Footnote 103 According to Bessie Aitken: “Day by day, sitting on the crowded third-class carriage that took her to work, she [Edith] read omnivorously”; in contrast, “her husband never opened a book.”Footnote 104 Edith often read a book a day, generally romantic fiction.Footnote 105 If part of Edith's vilification involved ambivalence toward her suburban lower-middle classness, another contributor to this vilification, one inherently interlinked, was her love of romantic fiction.

By the interwar years, in addition to the new body of commuters, young women from the lower-middle and working classes (often indeed part of the commuting body, as in Edith's case) were seen as central to the rising demand for cheap literature. Women readers of fiction from the eighteenth century onward had been accused of indulging in unhealthy sensationalism.Footnote 106 Reading “light” literature during the war had been seen as understandable: a way to escape the anxieties of the times and an available form of leisure in the face of few alternatives.Footnote 107 But out of wartime, the middle-class intelligentsia singled out romantic fiction, the main staple of Edith's literary taste, as especially undesirable.Footnote 108 The literature was characterized as “cheap” in more senses than one: inexpensive to buy and worthless in its content. But it was deemed more than worthless: it appealed to “base” emotion over reason, and it encouraged dangerous fantasy.Footnote 109 Madame Bovary, to whom Edith had been compared by Douglas, was a lover of romantic fiction, embracing its delusions as a way of sidestepping the banality of everyday life.Footnote 110

During the trial, Edith's love of reading was presented as a crucial element in both her defense and her prosecution. When Cecil Whiteley, Bywaters's counsel, asked Bywaters whether he believed that Edith had in fact given poison to her husband, Bywaters replied, “No, it never entered my head at all. She had been reading books.”Footnote 111 The next day he elaborated: “She read a book and had a way of imagining herself as a character in the book.”Footnote 112 (No mention was ever made of the fact that Freddy had also been reading books.) Throughout the trial Edith's defense lawyer stressed that she inhabited a world of fantasy, fostered by the reading of novels: “She was a woman who lived an extraordinary life of make-believe.”Footnote 113 But whereas the defense counsel argued that the “make-believe” remained at the level of pure fantasy, the prosecution claimed that it was acted upon: the fiction had “given her ideas,” and she had overidentified. Much was made by the prosecution of her letter discussion of Robert Hichens's Bella Donna, a novel whose plot in part involves the slow poisoning of a husband by his wife.Footnote 114 While the prosecution suggested that the book was read as an aid to her murderous intentions, the defense countered with the claim that it simply fed her vivid imagination.Footnote 115

Commentators on the trial either thought that books contributed to the murder by suggesting, even inspiring, the idea in Edith or implied that books fed a fantasy life in Edith that did not spill over into reality but yet had given an unfortunate impression to the readers of her letters. What appeared to unite the two positions was a belief in the dangerous power of cheap fiction. Even Edith's old friend Bessie Aitken appeared to agree (although words might have been put into her mouth): she held that books, along with plays, had “worked upon a mind neurotic and unbalanced.”Footnote 116 It was the familiar trope of the woman reader as highly impressionable, but now there was a new element drawn from the budding science of psychoanalysis, namely, “neurosis.”Footnote 117

Edith Thompson as Poisoner and Inciter

Books and their influence were central to Edith's trial because books featured so prominently in her letters and were thought a crucial element in her thoughts about poisoning. As I have stated, Edith's letters to her lover Freddy were the key evidence used in her conviction, held not simply to reveal her murderous intent but also to constitute incitement to murder. If the books that Edith read were held to have incited her to evil thoughts, she in turn was thought to have incited Freddy. The prosecutor argued that she had tried to persuade Freddy to kill Percy by continuous innuendo and suggestion and by claiming that she was prepared to risk trying to kill him herself.Footnote 118 Not only do the letters involve discussion of poisoning incidents in books such as the above-mentioned Bella Donna, but a number mention her attempts to poison Percy. As criminologist Anette Ballinger points out, a false impression as to the centrality of these passages in the correspondence was created through their being endlessly repeated, despite constituting only 1 percent of the entire correspondence. In addition, only half the letters were entered as evidence, and they were presented out of sequence, further creating the potential to confuse the jury. What is more, the fact that the poison and glass references (in her letters she claims to have put ground light bulbs in his food) occur five months prior to the murder was not clarified in court.Footnote 119 And the prosecuting solicitor general sowed further doubt in the minds of the jury by disingenuously stating that “a post mortem examination showed that there were practically no traces of any poison.”Footnote 120 Edith also sent with her letters a few newspaper cuttings about poisonings. Although the other cuttings she enclosed had nothing to do with poison at all (and there were over fifty cuttings in all) these poison cuttings were singled out and helped predispose the audience to reading something sinister into various innocuous phrases in her letters, such as, “If I do not mind the risk why should you?”Footnote 121 Poisoning was a quintessentially “female” crime, and the wife who poisoned her husband's food committed a kind of domestic treason—a deadly reversal of her traditional role as carer and nurturer.Footnote 122

Edith and Freddy also had great difficulty in explaining the letters’ references to “bitter tea” and Percy getting the “wrong porridge.” Ironically, these incidents referred not to any attempt to poison Percy but to Edith's attempts to take an abortifacient.Footnote 123 This was never admitted in court; the defense feared that it would stain her moral character still further (and indeed procurement of abortion was a crime), but their failure to explain these references reinforced the image of Edith as poisoner. Had she not entered the witness box, as Curtis-Bennett strongly advised, she would not have been questioned as to the meaning of these and other various passages in the letters, and conviction would have been a great deal harder. In court, Edith explained the references to poisoning as a pretense, in order to keep Bywaters's love: “I wanted him to think I would try to help him in order to keep him to me.”Footnote 124 But Bywaters said that he never for a moment thought she was actually engaged in poisoning: he read it as fantasy, make-believe, and what he called “melodrama.”Footnote 125

If Bywaters, and indeed Curtis-Bennett, thought of Edith as spinning tales of melodrama, the popular papers were not adverse to spinning such tales themselves.Footnote 126 The ways in which Edith, Freddy, and husband Percy were presented were in terms of classic melodramatic narrative, with victim (Percy), villain (femme fatale Edith), and hero (Freddy). True, Percy did not inspire huge sympathy; typically, the World's Pictorial News characterized him as “simply a plodding, uncommunicative clerk.”Footnote 127 But Freddy in many ways represented a kind of hero. He was good-looking: to the Daily Express, for example, he was “a handsome youth, with a clear skin, a keen, finely carved profile, a trenchant, high forehead, brilliant eyes … virile and vigorous in his gait.”Footnote 128 (Given the large number of demobilized men in Britain who were physically or psychically disabled, there was a general tendency to fetishize vigorous young men.)Footnote 129 Freddy was also seen as brave and patriotic, for it was noted that although underage (only fifteen) he had joined up as a sailor in February 1918. His father was gassed in the war and subsequently died, and Freddy, although still only a teenager, had become head of the household. (In contrast, Percy had been discharged from the army as unfit, never seeing active service.)Footnote 130 Freddy's bravery could be seen in his bearing: “Bywaters … stood like a soldier on parade, head up, eyes steady, and never flinched.”Footnote 131 The press was effectively elevating his status to that of an officer or gentleman. Like all true heroes, Freddy loved his mother: “Bywaters’ affection for his mother is one of the most touching incidents in this dramatic case,” opined the Daily Mail.Footnote 132 His virility was never in doubt: his “well-cut lounge coat, double collar and neat tie bespoke carefulness rather than dandyism.”Footnote 133 Yes, he had been violent—the size of the knife he used had clearly shocked the jury—but there was a popular “understanding” of violence in men who had been through the war and had had brutality “unleashed” “for the purpose of killing Germans.”Footnote 134 He evoked such affection in Rev. Hugh Chapman that, in his sermon to Chapel Royal, the Savoy, he confessed that he wanted “to go to that boy, put my arms round his neck, kiss him on the forehead.”Footnote 135

An Incited Audience

Broadsheets criticized the popular press for the “whipping up of public emotion.”Footnote 136 To many male intellectuals, the “mass media,” like “cheap” literature, catered to the lowest common denominator, namely, women searching for quick thrills.Footnote 137 However, the heaviest criticism from many quarters was reserved for the female audience attending the trial, deemed as sensation seeking as Edith in her consumption of popular fiction. (Disapproval of female trial audiences was nothing new: the Victorian press was full of similar admonishments.)Footnote 138 Cheap literature incited Edith, Edith incited Freddy, and their tale—as narrated in court and in the popular press—incited the general public, above all, women (and also the wretched Gilbert Wickham, who, according to the press, desired to live out Edith's fate, such was his overidentification). Despite the judge's reprimand that “this is a vulgar and common crime. You are not listening to a play from the stalls,” the parallels to the theater were obvious.Footnote 139 The very layout of the courtroom echoed a theater's stage and audience, with the principal actors playing out their parts “in the dock” or “on the bench.”Footnote 140 The Daily Mirror noted that “the diffused electric lights round the oak-panelled room and the presence of hatless but well-dressed women, chatting and munching chocolates, were reminiscent of a theatre scene between the acts.”Footnote 141 To James Douglas, “It was like sitting through a series of putrid plays, drenched with stale melodrama.”Footnote 142 The Daily Chronicle spied “a woman in furs smiling … as if she were going to see a music comedy at a West End theatre.”Footnote 143 Men were present in court in equal if not greater number, but it was women who were singled out for special condemnation, such as the “many women of fashion … [who] followed with breathless interest … driven by morbid curiosity … by a lust for the sensational.”Footnote 144 The concept of “women of fashion” had negative connotations at the time, implying ostentation and conspicuous consumption—an affront to a world of male unemployment and war-inflicted disabilities. “One woman in a fur coat never took her lorgnette from her keen dark eyes. She looked the kind of person who would bully her maids and nag her husband.”Footnote 145 Such women were compared to those who during the French Revolution “knitted peacefully while the guillotine cut off … heads.”Footnote 146

Unlike the Victorian period, when female spectators in the high courts were largely restricted to “fashionable” ladies, women of all classes were apparently now present: “matrons of Mayfair swaddled in costly furs, trim young typists or dressmakers, a blue-stocking or two, haggard and eager-eyed.”Footnote 147 The products of modernity, they were all part of the new public audience keen to consume the drama of the court.Footnote 148 Writing in the 1930s, author and journalist Rose Macaulay suggested that the reading public had long had an obsession with the three “S’s,” “sensation, sentiment and the sordid”: “Most of us like to enjoy with our reading a shudder of excitement, a tear and a smile of sympathy, and a feeling of superiority to the sordid persons read about.”Footnote 149 This could plausibly be extended to the viewing public: the audience at Edith's trial, as well as the readers of the newspaper reports, commentaries, letters, editorials, and interviews, had no difficulty in finding all the ingredients to satisfy this so-called pleasurable obsession. As historians George Robb and Nancy Erber note, “Sensational trials could keep a nation spellbound for weeks or even months.”Footnote 150 If these reports of women's attendance at the trial are anything to go by, then it appears that despite their condemnation of Edith for her incitement of Bywaters, women received much pleasure in Edith's incitement of them: the thrill of the sexually and morally illicit.

Condemning the “goggling at monsters as an entertainment,” the Manchester Guardian had “a good deal more sympathy with the unemployed workmen who exploited the decadence of public taste by holding places in the line, which they sold for £5.”Footnote 151 (Quite a sum, given that the average weekly wage was about £3 10s.)Footnote 152 The newspaper was referring to the lengthy queues waiting outside the court every night of the trial. The implicit juxtaposition of unemployed workmen on the one hand and the “trim young typists or dressmakers” on the other resonates with historian Sally Alexander's observation of the “two visual images of the working-class [that] vie for attention in the popular memory of the inter-war years: the cloth cap and spare frame of the unemployed man … and the young working girl—lipsticked, silk-stockinged, and dressed, in the phrase of … J. B. Priestley ‘like an actress.’”Footnote 153 One could add that at the time of the trial, the former of these two gendered images was linked to the tragedy of the recent past (the war), while the latter spoke of the future, of modernity, and of the allure of popular culture.

Society beauty Lady Diana Cooper defended the public's keen interest in the Thompson and Bywaters case: “People are not reproached for going to ‘gloat’ over the suffering of Lear; not taunted with morbid curiosity for studying the criminal psychology of Macbeth. … Those were poetic dramas, we may be told, and this was merely an ordinary vulgar crime. But … the insight of a poet can detect the germ of beauty where the lawyer's eye sees nothing but the squalor of crime.”Footnote 154 But although Diana Cooper may have credited the ordinary man and woman with the “insight of a poet,” to the majority of commentators, women's consumption of court-as-theater was indicative of a growing sensationalism, linked to the rise of mass culture. Mass culture and the “masses” were associated with women; “real” culture was the preserve of men. Andreas Huyssen suggestively proposes that the fear of the crowd-as-mass was indistinguishable from a male fear of women—of raging, hysterical, uncontrollable, engulfing femininity.Footnote 155

Freddy as Incited Boy

Immediately following the trial's verdict, the Daily Sketch chose to publish an anonymous letter calling for Bywaters's reprieve: Freddy was “just a boy … swayed by the love of a woman many years older, a woman who knew how to … mould his passion into a slave of her every impulse. … But when he might have cried out ‘She, the woman tempted me!’ … he cried out instead: ‘She, the woman, is innocent!’ … Will the Daily Sketch lead the way?”Footnote 156 The letter contained the three elements that were endlessly to occur in all subsequent Daily Sketch reporting, namely, Bywaters's youth, his chivalry, and Edith Thompson's ultimate responsibility for the murder. Freddy as “boy” did not of course quite fit with the melodramatic narrative in which he was heroic, virile, and soldierlike. The “boy” epithet did not fit either with what one knew of him from Edith's letters as a “man of the world,” dominant, and aggressive. However, these contradictory representations seem to have gone unnoticed.

As the letter requested, the Daily Sketch did indeed “lead the way,” launching a nationwide campaign on behalf of Bywaters. No public steps were taken at the time on behalf of Edith. Feminists did not rally to her defense, although well-known feminist, novelist, and journalist Rebecca West pronounced in the popular press that she did not believe Edith had tried to poison her husband (the claims “were simply day-dreams”).Footnote 157 And although Cicely Hamilton and the feminist journal the Vote were both against her execution, it was on grounds of opposition to capital punishment, rather than her innocence.Footnote 158 From the start of the Daily Sketch campaign, the grounds for Freddy's reprieve rested on Edith's culpability. The paper undertook an opinion poll of a “random” cross-section of people “in the City and suburbs, the region of the clubs, and the poorer households of the East.”Footnote 159 (The “City and the suburbs” were probably used to denote Edith's dual identity as a woman of both Aldersgate and Ilford.) Three out of four of these people favored a petition. The reasons they gave were in terms of one, two, or all three of the above-mentioned representations of Bywaters (his youth, chivalry, and lack of responsibility for the killing). A waitress, for example, was reported to have said, “She instigated him to the crime,” while a shop assistant commented, “He proved himself such a man in standing by his sweetheart at all costs.” To three soldiers, “It was the woman who was to blame. … He was coerced. He proved himself a man afterwards.” Author W. L. George suggested that the older woman with her powerful personality “may have reduced Bywaters to … a state of mental slavery,” akin to hypnotism.Footnote 160 And it was reported that Rev. Chapman pleaded for Bywaters's reprieve in his sermon on the grounds that Freddy was “a youth subject since boyhood to the influence of an hysterical … unbalanced self-centered woman.”Footnote 161 Beverley Nichols, journalist and writer, later referred to Edith as “the suburban syren [sic].”Footnote 162 In classical mythology, sirens—half woman, half bird—lured sailors to death with their songs of enchantment.

The Daily Sketch claimed that requests for the petition, said to be available in all cinemas, theaters, and principal shops, were overwhelming. By the end of the campaign the paper had procured over a million signatures—the largest petition for a convicted prisoner that Britain had ever seen.Footnote 163 The desire to sign apparently came from all classes: “quiet, unemotional City men, clerks in offices, burly carters, mothers from the suburbs, shopkeepers and typists,” and ladies who “stepped from their limousines.”Footnote 164 Indeed women in particular were making the campaign into what the Daily Sketch termed a “veritable crusade.”Footnote 165 The World's Pictorial News asserted, “Tens of thousands of women declare they would ‘hang her and not him.’”Footnote 166 The irony of this crusade was that Bywaters had explicitly directed his counsel not to argue his defense in court in terms of the mitigating circumstances of incitement. He had always claimed sole responsibility for the murder. Yet now the campaign for his reprieve was predicated on precisely that which he had repudiated, namely, that Percy's death had been stage-managed by the femme fatale mistress.

The Cost of Female Modernity

One refrain running through all the reporting of and reflections on the case was the preoccupation with morbidity. One of Edith's greatest friends (Bessie Aitken) and one of her greatest foes (Richard Thompson) argued that she was suffering some kind of “morbidity.” In contrast, Edith's father, William Graydon, in a ghostwritten account in the Weekly Dispatch, was a lone voice of denial: “There was never anything morbid in her tastes. She was too healthy and high-spirited for that.”Footnote 167 The spectators in court, especially the women, were labeled “morbid,” and the broadsheets accused the tabloids of encouraging the “morbid appetite” of the general public. To Cicely Hamilton, one of the reasons to oppose capital punishment lay in “the unhealthy morbid excitement which is created amongst a section of the public.”Footnote 168 An extreme example of this “gripping” “morbid excitement”—and indeed of incitement—was that of Gilbert Wickham. We cannot understand the specificity of Wickham's obsession with Edith, but in a sense he was trying to inhabit her story in a manner parallel to how commentators depicted her as inhabiting the stories that she herself read. Wickham's desire to become Edith Thompson in her and his final moments echoes a controversial statement that Rebecca West had written about Edith the previous month: “There is nothing in her that is not in us, and if we … gave ourselves up to morbid day-dreaming we might find ourselves where she is.”Footnote 169

That morbidity was spoken of so frequently possibly had much to do with the problem of how to come to terms with the deaths of millions of young men in the recent war. Thus, a further part of the vilification of Edith Thompson, I would suggest, related not simply to what she did or might have done but to what she stood for in the postwar world: a successful businesswoman, acting above her station, who had supposedly done well out of the war, while young men fought and died, and who had both calculatingly seduced and brought about the downfall of a young man in his prime (the cream of what was left of British youth), while sadistically encouraging the killing of her unwanted husband. The murder of Percy Thompson in a London suburb might have meant little to a country still grieving the loss of so many. But the subsequent killing of a fit young man with his future ahead of him (Bywaters) had resonances of the killing of the millions of fit young men on the fields of Flanders. In the case of Thompson and Bywaters, the blame for the killing of both men was laid at the feet of the ideological scapegoat, the femme fatale. Edith Thompson might also have brought to mind the more recent construct of the vampire woman, or “vamp.” The vamp figure was prominent throughout popular culture during this period, especially in pulp novels and the cinema. She represented an immoral, predatory, sexual woman who seduced innocent men and left ruined lives and homes in her wake.Footnote 170

On the face of it, Edith Thompson was a young, good-looking, lower-middle-class, married woman with a successful career, who dressed fashionably and well and lived respectably. But behind the “facade”—behind the lace curtains of suburbia—there was the “other” Edith (referred to by Bessie Aitken or her ghostwriter as “the Edith Thompson of the Body”)Footnote 171 who lived a double life, a female Jekyll and Hyde. Here was a woman who made her own choices and acted on her own desires and whose pleasure seeking entailed not just the refusal of children, the reading of sensational literature, and the purchase of fashionable clothes but also cross-generational sex, adultery, even incitement to murder. Edith represented the danger of the postwar sexual modern woman. It has been noted that “implicitly or explicitly, feature stories about homicide convey powerful messages about morality, respectability and normality.”Footnote 172 In relation to the Thompson and Bywaters case, the most powerful message conveyed was about the undesirability of women's sexual agency. As a “woman of the world,” Edith had seduced a far younger man—a mere “boy.” She had inflamed his passions and, in remaining with her husband, had unforgivably inflamed his sexual jealousy too. In the end, I would suggest, Edith was on trial (in the law courts, in the press, in the pulpit, in the discussions of the general public) not simply for incitement to murder but also for sexual incitement—inappropriate incitement to, and expression of, dangerous, indeed deadly, sexual passion. And possibly too, the anxiety prompted by the trial as to how to “know” and “read” the ordinary “modern woman” in the ordinary suburbs related to deep anxiety about the erosion of social boundaries in the aftermath of the war and the rapidity of modernity. Arguably, Edith became a (transitory) hate object who carried and reflected these fears—until the next sensational trial came along.