Affecting Evidence: Edith Thompson's Epistolary Archive

Abstract

In December 1922, London was enthralled by a sensational murder trial at the Old Bailey. The 28-year-old woman at the centre of the scandal, Edith Thompson, came to notoriety when her lover, 20-year-old Freddy Bywaters, a merchant seaman, murdered her husband, Percy Thompson, when the couple was returning home from the theatre late one evening. When 62 of her letters were found on his ship, he confessed, but insisted that she had no part in the crime. In her letters, she claimed that she put ‘something into Percy's tea’ and put ‘big pieces’ of light bulb in his porridge, and there were ambiguous passages about ‘taking risks’ and their future together. Thompson's letters were entered into the trial as evidence of incitement and conspiracy. Their melodramatic structure and rhetoric made it difficult to extract stable meaning. It was, however, precisely the melodramatic attributes and intimate details of her letters — with their expressions of psychic pain, longing, desire, frustration, boredom, and the material details of private lives — that made them irresistible to the public and the media. In the first part of this paper, I examine the discourses that were used to interpret the letters in the trial, and render their author culturally intelligible. In the second part, I analyse the affective mediation of the case — including the trial, the verdict, the executions, and the controversy about the death penalty — in the media, and the role of the media in producing public feelings. I argue that the concept of melodrama, understood not as a genre but as a mode which names heightened emotion, acted like a contagion, spreading affect from the letters to the courtroom and the media. What conclusions can we draw — about law and affect, evidence and intimacy, public archives and private lives — from this case that are relevant for feminist critical legal scholarship today?