Boekhandel Douwes Den Haag

Penning Poison

A history of anonymous letters

Cockayne, Dr Emily (Associate Professor in Early Modern History, Associate Professor in Early Modern History, University of East Anglia)

Penning Poison

Penning Poison

A history of anonymous letters

Penning Poison

 

This book is about anonymity, emotion, and detection. Gathering surviving anonymous letters penned in England between 1760-1939 together, it identifies possible authors and explores the impact they had on individuals and communities, charting how developments in postal services, detection, and the media influenced writers and their targets.


Leverbaar

€ 28,00

Levertijd: 5 tot 10 werkdagen


Beschrijving Penning Poison

Accusatory, libellous, or just bizarre, Penning Poison unveils the history of anonymous letter-writing.

'er at number 14 is dirty

Receiving an unexpected and unsigned note is a disconcerting experience. In Penning Poison, Emily Cockayne traces the stories of such letters to all corners of English society over the period 1760-1939. She uncovers scandal, deception, class enmity, personal tragedy, and great loneliness. Some messages were accusatory, some libellous, others bizarre. Technology, new postal networks, forensic techniques, and the emergence of professional police all influence the phenomenon of poison letter campaigns. This book puts the letters back into their local and psychology context, extending the work of detectives, to discover who may have written them and why.

Emily Cockayne explores the reasons and motivations for the creation and delivery of these missives and the effect on recipients - with some blasé, others driven to madness. Small communities hit by letter campaigns became places of suspicion and paranoia. By examining the ways in which these letters spread anxiety in the past Penning Poison grapples with the question of how nasty messages can turn into an epidemic. The book recovers many lost stories about how we used to write to one another, finding that perhaps the anxieties of our internet age are not as new as we think.


ISBN
9780198795056
Pagina's
320
Verschenen
NUR
840
Druk
1
Uitvoering
Hardback
Taal
Engels
Uitgever
OUP Oxford

Onderwijs