Yes, we are both going to fight until we win – darlint, fight hard, in real earnest – you are going to help me first and then I am going to help you and when you have done your share and I have done mine we shall have given to each other what we both ‘desire most in the world’ ourselves, isn’t this right, but darlint don’t fail in your share of the bargain, because I am helpless without your help – you understand.
It would be difficult to recognise this as coming from the same pen as Julia. Yet opinions of Thompson’s letter writing differed almost as widely as views of her innocence. The judge in the case called them ‘gush’ and the editor of the Sunday Express described the letters as ‘reveal[ing] a neurotic pseudo-romantic personality, nourished on melodramatic novels’. On the other hand, Filson Young noted her ‘quite remarkable fluency in writing’ and ‘passages of actual beauty’ in his introduction to the 1923 Notable British Trials book on the case, a series to which Tennyson Jesse frequently contributed.
Ultimately, of course, Edith Thompson was found guilty. The Daily Chronicle saw it as a uniquely British conclusion, and said so with some patriotism:
We are inclined to think that only a British jury would have had the strength to find both Mrs Thompson and Bywaters guilty of murder. The verdict shows how little the jury was influenced by the unwholesome glamour which Mrs Thompson’s very remarkable love-letters had thrown over the case, that the average English jury-man, unlike the Frenchman, is quite unwilling to condone crime because it sprang out of an overmastering passion of love or lust.
Having been found equally guilty of the murder, Thompson and Bywaters faced an equally inevitable death sentence. Though no woman had been hanged in Britain for fifteen years, and only eight women would be hanged in the UK between Thompson’s execution and the removal of the death sentence for murder in England, Scotland and Wales in 1969 (and 1973 in Northern Ireland), in law women and men were treated no differently when it came to sentencing. Civil servant Sir Ernley Blackwell, weighing the case for a reprieve, wrote:
The only possible argument that could be urged for the reprieve of this woman may be summed up in the expression ‘We don’t hang women nowadays’. This is an entirely fallacious idea.
For some, Thompson’s guilt and sentencing betokened equality. The Times rather optimistically referred to the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919 as having ‘removed, as thoroughly as legislation could remove, all the disadvantages, or supposed disadvantages, which women suffered merely by reason of their sex’, and saw it as correspondingly fair that women should be no less vulnerable to hanging than men.
Significant sections of the public apparently agreed. By the time A Pin to See the Peepshow was published, there was some evidence of a softening towards Thompson in the general consensus – but in 1923 there was more outcry about Bywaters’ sentence. Sir Ernley Blackwell said there wasn’t ‘a single application from any one of the women’s societies in favour of the reprieve of Mrs Thompson’ while, on the other hand, the Daily Sketch organised a petition for Bywaters’ reprieve which was apparently signed by 900,000 people. The line of argument seemed to be that a young (and attractive) man with his future before him had been ruined by a woman. In A Pin to See the Peepshow, Julia senses the same attitude: ‘She felt that there was not a woman in the court who was not sorry for Leo, and who was not blaming her.’
Tennyson Jesse wasn’t the first to novelise the Thompson/Bywaters case. Ten years earlier, E.M. Delafield’s Messalina of the Suburbs was an equally sympathetic portrait of Edith – sympathetic, that is, in terms of her innocence in the criminal case. Delafield’s version is closer to reality, in some details. She retains the sister; she retains the murder weapon. But her Edith – named Elsie in this novel – has much less natural sophistication than Tennyson Jesse’s Julia. She is closer to the description that the novelist Rebecca West made of Thompson in 1922: ‘a shocking little piece of rubbish, and her mental furniture was meagre.… She is a poor, flimsy, silly, mischievous little thing.’
On this, observers were divided. The writer Beverley Nichols, who was sent to interview Thompson’s father after her sentencing, wrote that she had ‘anything but a lower-middle class mind, and had not a lower-middle class appearance’. Filson Young’s Notable Trials introduction said she was ‘remarkable’ – a word that kept recurring in descriptions of her – and ‘quite above her station in life, quite beyond the opportunities of her narrow existence’.
In A Pin to See the Peepshow, meanwhile, Julia’s counsel says: “This isn’t an ordinary woman. She is one of those amazing personalities only met with once in a generation. You cannot judge her as an ordinary woman.” It is clearly based on what Thompson’s own counsel, Sir Henry Bennett, said: “This is the woman you have to deal with, not some ordinary woman. She is one of those striking personalities met with from time to time who stand out for some reason or another.”
Was Thompson an ‘everywoman’ or was she something spectacular and set apart? What Tennyson Jesse captures brilliantly in her creation of Julia is that Edith Thompson was somehow both. This is hinted at when Julia first meets Leonard as a child in the opening pages of the novel – where we also find the origin of the novel’s curious title. Julia must pay Leonard a token pin to look into the toy peepshow he is carrying:
The floor of the box was covered with cotton-wool, and a frosting of sugar sprinkled over it. Light came into the box from the red-covered window at the far end, so that a rosy glow as of sunset lay over the sparkling snow. Here and there little brightly-coloured men and women, children and animals of cardboard, conversed or walked about. A cottage, flanked by a couple of fir trees, cut from an advertisement of some pine-derivative cough cure, which Julia saw every day in the newspaper, gave an extraordinary impression of reality and of distance.
Why did Tennyson Jesse choose this image to reverberate throughout the novel? Perhaps because it shows Julia’s imaginative nature and her longing to escape the ordinary. But she also becomes the peepshow that the prurient public pay their token pin to gawp at. Her story and her fate gave the 1920s public that ‘extraordinary impression of reality and of distance’ – a woman who had the limited paths of her period and class and was conceivably just like them and their neighbours, but whom they must also think of as somebody set apart. Somebody whose fate they could never share. And yet, with poor luck and one or two poor choices, conceivably could.
Simon Thomas
Series consultant Simon Thomas created the middlebrow blog Stuck in a Book in 2007. He is also the co-host of the popular podcast Tea or Books? Simon has a PhD from Oxford University in Interwar Literature.
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