Emily Cockayne’s Penning Poison: A History of Anonymous Letters surveys the history of anonymous letters in Britain from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. This book contributes to our understanding of the history of epistolary practice while also helping the reader grasp the emotional complexities associated with writing and receiving anonymous letters. While anonymous letters could be positive (think secret admirer love letters or anonymous donations to charity), Cockayne focuses most of her attention on those that were negative. Letters that were threatening, shaming, obscene, or extortionist unsettled their recipients and their communities, often contributing to or reflecting social, political, and personal conflicts and divisions. A major takeaway is that the very fact of a letter being anonymous is troubling, almost regardless of its content. If a writer’s identity could be ascertained, then the emotional burden of receiving the letter could be lessened.

Cockayne reminds us regularly that our picture is incomplete. Many people, upon receiving an anonymous letter, would have destroyed or hidden it because it brought shame and fear to them. The ones that we know about either were preserved for some reason or brought to the police and therefore became part of the public record, usually by sparking a court case, a public discussion, or both. Because of the spotty nature of this archive, it makes sense that Cockayne does not try for any statistical analysis. There are no attempts to classify the types of anonymous letters numerically or to come to any kind of statistical conclusions about who anonymous letter writers or their recipients were. Cockayne does divide her book into chapters about different categories of anonymous letters, including gossip, threats, obscenity, and libel, among other things. These categories are overlapping and not easily distinguishable from one another, so at times it is easy to lose track of what kinds of letters are being discussed. Often the content does not seem as important as the logistics of sending and receiving. The chapter about libels, for example, moves away from the question of what counts as libel to focus on women who were accused of writing anonymous letters to themselves, possibly for attention or in order to frame others as criminals.

Penning Poison is also organized chronologically, with chapters dealing with moments such as the early industrial era, the late Victorian period, and the early twentieth century. Working on such a long period inevitably means that Cockayne’s knowledge of some periods is deeper than others, so sometimes the specific historical contextualization is lacking. Cockayne also has a chapter on detection methods, which like many things became supposedly more scientific in the late nineteenth century with the use of strategies like forensics and handwriting analysis. While in an earlier period postal employees were considered natural handwriting experts, by the late nineteenth century there was a professionalized aspect to those considered experts of various kinds who investigated anonymous letters.

Cockayne discusses the senders as well as the receivers of letters, and a question that runs through all of the examples is motive. Often, this was determined at the time to be insanity, which was also frequently used as a defense when cases made it to court. Cockayne also speculates about social, gendered, political, and other reasons for people to write anonymous letters. For example, women may have had reasons to challenge gendered expectations about appropriate letter-writing styles and topics. Whether female letter writers were really insane or not, they were also challenging social norms by writing obscene letters (usually assumed to be written by men to women). Sometimes women were judged to be insane simply because they were not meeting societal expectations. In the chapter on threats, Cockayne engages with E.P. Thompson’s work on anonymous letters (“The Crime of Anonymity,” in Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Douglas Hay, et al. [1975], 255–308), arguing that his focus on anonymity as a political tool of the weak and oppressed needs more investigation. She points out that sometimes letter writers took advantage of social or political conflicts to achieve personal goals, and she therefore suggests that letters need to be read individually, rather than assumed to be part of larger social campaigns. This is the only chapter that engages in sustained historiographical analysis. Cockayne also says surprisingly little about the Post Office. She does tell us that there is a difference between putting a letter in the post and sliding it under someone’s door, and she explains that anonymity at the post office became easier once there were prepaid postage stamps. We also learn that anonymous letters allowed critics of postal reform to point out problems with cheap postage and pillar boxes. But there could be more discussion of privacy and the role of the Post Office in managing the question of anonymity.

Ultimately, the goals of this book are somewhat disjointed. Cockayne’s methodology relies largely on case studies of particular anonymous letter-writing incidents. Sometimes she uses the anonymous letters to gain insight into other topics in social or political history, such as the dislocation arising from new industrial conditions in the 1830s and 1840s. But in some cases, the fact that the letters were anonymous becomes less relevant as the discussion proceeds. Are anonymous letters threatening because they are anonymous or simply because they are making threats? The book is also very speculative. In many cases, letters were nonsensical or obscure as well as being anonymous, and in order to figure out what they were about and to whom or what they were referring, Cockayne relies on elaborate guesswork that is not always entirely convincing. Often the stories are also so confusing that they are hard for the reader to follow. Sometimes there is not enough evidence for Cockayne to identify the letter writer, leaving the investigation to trail off, making it hard to see the purpose of the example. Overall, this book about an interesting topic adds to our picture of the history of letter-writing, but its meandering approach contributes to the sense that the examples are somewhat arbitrary, making the takeaways hard to pin down.