Poison and romance: Oscar Wilde and the strange case of Edith

Thompson

1

John Wilson Foster*

Department of English, University of British Columbia, Canada

Oscar Wilde considered crime and sin no impediment to art or culture, as the case of the
poisoner-artist-critic Thomas Wainewright (1794 – 1847) allowed him to demonstrate.
English society of the time, as George Orwell famously declared, was as fascinated by
poisoning as was Wilde. One of Orwell’s cases was that of Edith Thompson who, along
with her young lover, was convicted in 1922 in London of conspiracy to murder her
husband whom it was alleged she had tried to poison. She and her lover were hanged in
early 1923. Thompson’s preoccupation with poison was entangled with her
preoccupation with popular romance fiction of the day which she read copiously and
discussed perceptively with her lover in the letters that helped to convict her. Her
favourite novelist was Robert Hichens, the acquaintance, imitator and caricaturist of
Wilde. She quoted Hichens’s novel Bella Donna (1909) in letters to her lover,
including on the practical matter of poison, which helped convince the jury of her guilt.
Her trial, like Wilde’s trials – all involving sexual transgression – raised the difficult
question of whether literature could poison and influence for the worse its readers or
whether it lay outside both morality and the world of action. Moreover, were
Thompson’s own letters literature and fantasy or were they oblique discussions of
practical intent, including the intent to murder? As in the case of Wilde, a larger
question supervened. In part through her reading, in part through her own experience,
Edith came to believe, even before the murder, that freedom is an illusion, fate an
inescapable reality.

Keywords:

Wilde; crime; sin; culture; art; poison; literature; morality

Wainewright and Wilde

When Oscar Wilde declared with characteristically provocative eloquence and assurance
in 1889, ‘The fact of a man being a poisoner is nothing against his prose’, he might, out of
context, have been saying something commonplace, even obvious.

2

But what followed

must have raised a few Fortnightly Review readers’ eyebrows: ‘There is no essential
incongruity between crime and culture.’ In his essay ‘Pen Pencil and Poison: A Study in
Green’, Wilde was singing in an uncharacteristically robust and earnest prose style the
praise of Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, the London forger, artist, art critic and murderer
(by poison) of the Romantic period.

Criminals, like tyrants and human monsters, pass (in Wilde’s words) into the

unthreatening ‘sphere of art and science, and neither art nor science knows anything of
moral approval or disapproval’ (121). What he says in defence of Wainewright in 1889 he
was to rephrase as an epigram in his own pre-emptive and prefatory defence when after its

ISSN 0967-0882 print/ISSN 1469-9303 online

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2012 Taylor & Francis

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Irish Studies Review
Vol. 20, No. 4, November 2012, 353–365

serialisation in 1890 he published The Picture of Dorian Gray as a book the following year
– ‘There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well-written, or badly
written. That is all.’

3

The amorality of art he was to reassert when he took the stand in his libel action against

the Marquis of Queensberry in 1895. Indeed, one wonders whether when he took this
otherwise foolish action he remembered his own description of how Wainewright – guilty
of murder and fraudulence, having poisoned his uncle, mother-in-law and sister-in-law,
the latter two for insurance policy settlements – nevertheless instigated an action against
an insurance company – ‘with curious courage’, in Wilde’s words (116). In the midst of it,
the plaintiff (as Wilde was not to do) fled to France to avoid arrest. But like Wilde after
him, Wainewright lost the lawsuit, set in train hostile forces, was later arrested – as a
forger – and convicted; he was then deported to Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania). Just
as Wilde before and after his first trial refused to flee England for safety in France, so
Wainewright returned to England from France, knowing an old forgery of his had been
discovered in London, another instance of the ‘curious courage’ Wilde may have been
emulating when he refused to take up Frank Harris’s offer of passage by steam yacht to
France. (In Harris’s account, though, Wilde is merely too stunned and frightened to flee.)

4

It wasn’t Wainewright’s being a murderer and forger that alone intrigued Wilde but

that into the bargain Wainewright was something of a dandy (whose ‘curious love of
green’ betokened the artistic temperament),

5

and a master of disguises (a wearer, if you

will, of masks). More importantly, Wainewright was an artist in crime by dint of being in
Wilde’s estimation one of the most subtle dispensers of poison in history (he favoured
strychnine). His subtlety and secrecy made of his crime ‘a strange sin’, in Wilde’s phrase
(115), and sin, Wilde tells us, can create an intense personality and transfer that personality
to the sinner’s art. Wilde repeats this idea of the highly individualistic (and therefore
progressive) enterprise of sinfulness in ‘The Critic as Artist’, a dialogue published
alongside ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’ in the volume Intentions the same year as Dorian Gray.
In Wilde’s curious hagiography, Wainewright’s poisoning infects in a fascinating way his
art criticism, which Wilde believes he pioneered as a nineteenth-century genre.
Wainewright may have been eventually convicted of forgery but Wilde considers this of
less moment than (and how far is Wilde’s tongue in his cheek here?) Wainewright’s ‘fatal
influence on the prose of modern journalism’ (119).

Sinfulness and crime are accomplices in some of the most famous fictions of late

Victorian Britain, including Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jeykll and Mr Hyde
(1886), Wilde’s Dorian Gray (1890) and Stoker’s Dracula (1897), all combining moral
and physical horror with the supernatural, and all involving dual or multiple personalities
and masks. Detective fiction itself was preparing for its heyday around the same time, and
we remember that Arthur Conan Doyle offered his second Sherlock Holmes story, The
Sign of Four, to the same publisher as Wilde offered Dorian Gray (in some sense itself a
crime novel), and at the same London dinner party in 1889.

6

As the story of the pursuit of a

species of murderer, Dracula too is a detective novel and the murder weapon is poisoning
by blood: the poisoned blood is extracted vampirishly but also injected, this made obvious
when one character, Mina Harker, is in one disturbing scene compelled to drink Dracula’s
blood.

So poison was in the literary air – and, more effectively, in the food or drink.
Curiously, it was also in popular Victorian and Edwardian English culture. George

Orwell famously reckoned the period 1850 – 1925 the Elizabethan or golden period of
English murder (the epithets invoking literature as well as national glory). Accounts of
these murders gave English newspaper and magazine readers great pleasure, in part

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354

because they were domestic homicides and thus in uncomfortably but thrillingly
horrifying contrast to the lives of the Sunday readers of the scandal-mongering News of the
World newspaper. Most of the eight murders that Orwell elevates to iconic status – as we
would say today – had sex as a motive and almost all of the criminals were middle class;
the background was almost always domestic. (Orwell exempts Jack the Ripper from his
pantheon on this score and indeed on any score.)

7

In her recent study of Victorian murder,

Judith Flanders devotes an entire chapter to ‘middle-class poisoners’ and begins with our
mutual friend Wainewright.

8

On the strength of the cases he offers as exhibits, Orwell

decides that the perfect English murder involves poison as the means, in line with these
‘domestic poisoning dramas’ (101) that he sees, with possibly ironic nostalgia, as patriotic
events occurring before the Americans seriously intruded into English culture (and crime)
during the Second World War. His latest exhibit in time, and therefore a crime ending the
golden age of English murder, is the Thompson – Bywaters case of 1922 – 23.

Thompson and Hichens

Edith Thompson, a successful milliner’s saleswoman aged 28 and Freddy Bywaters, a
ship’s writer aged 20, were hanged in London in January 1923 for the murder of
Thompson’s husband, a shipping clerk aged 32. The husband had been stabbed to death by
Bywaters in the street in Ilford (Greater London) on the night of 3 October 1922 – in the
presence of the wife who was, in fact, in the company of her husband, Percy, returning
from a West End theatre. Edith Thompson would not have hanged had Freddy Bywaters
destroyed the sixty-two letters Edith wrote him at those times he was at sea during the
sixteen months of their affair: they alone incriminated her and it was on the basis of the
letters that the two accused were convicted of conspiracy to murder. For those letters
allegedly revealed not only that the lovers wished Percy Thompson out of the way but also
that his wife had been trying to poison him in a variety of unsuccessful ways before her
lover resorted to a knife.

These are the bare bones of the matter and they disguise the fact that both of the

accused were remarkable people, especially the woman. Her defence counsel reminded the
jury:

This is not an ordinary charge against ordinary people. It is very difficult to get into the
atmosphere of a play or opera, but you have to do it in this case. Am I right or wrong in saying
that this woman is one of the most extraordinary personalities that you or I have ever met? . . .
a woman who lived . . . an extraordinary life of make-believe, and in an atmosphere which
was created by something which had left its impression on her brain. She reads a book and
then imagines herself one of the characters of the book. She is always living an extraordinary
life of novels. Have you ever read, mixed up with criticisms of books . . . , more beautiful
language of love? Such things have been very seldom put by pen upon paper. This is the
woman you have to deal with, not some ordinary woman.

9

Yet these extraordinary letters were as self-incriminating when read aloud in the
inhospitable setting of an Old Bailey courtroom as Wilde’s letters to Lord Alfred Douglas
read aloud by Edward Carson in the same place. And they prove the accuracy of her
counsel’s reference to novels. The sixty-two letters discuss, some at length, at least thirty
novels, by the most popular authors of the day, including Robert W. Chambers, Edward
Phillips Oppenheim, Claude and Alice Askew, Robert Hichens, W.J. Locke and Jeffrey
Farnol. Thompson and Bywaters were at first glance a kind of two-person book club, with
Edith the chief procurer of the books and chair of the proceedings, though since she wisely
destroyed each letter from Freddy as she received the next one, we can’t be sure of this.

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But hers appears to have been the imagination-in-chief. ‘I’ve sent you a parcel to

Plymouth containing 2 books “The Fruitful Vine” and “Bella Donna”. Read “Bella
Donna” first will you please whilst you are in England if possible and keep “The Fruitful
Vine” until we are parted again’ (195 – 6). In apparently the next letter, she repeats the
schedule of reading: ‘I’d like you to read “Bella Donna” first you may learn something
from it to help us, then you can read “The Fruitful Vine” . . . Darlingest, you must really
tell me all and everything you think about the book and the characters and especially the
motive’ (197, my emphasis).

As the letter-writing and the novel-reading proceed, she is increasingly drawn to

novels of love triangles, of infatuation, even fixation, novels that involve painful and life-
altering choices, particularly for women, novels whose themes are freedom and self-
realisation, thwarted or achieved. If these issues and concerns are set in exotic lands, Italy,
say, or the Middle East, so much the better. Edith Thompson was the kind of reader for
whom reading is a form of travel – the ideal reader for the popular romances that she did
not simply consume but tasted and relished and, unusually, thoughtfully pondered and
weighed as she consumed. Freddy may have been sailing in the Mediterranean as far as
Egypt but Edith was travelling just as far in what appears to have been a great deal of her
spare time, at work and home. But it is facile to call her reading merely escapism. Or
rather, the critic Claud Cockburn was surely right in 1972, in his account of British
bestsellers of 1900 – 39, when he says that their readers may not merely be escaping from
life but escaping to life imagined as fuller and therefore more real than the workaday world
in which the readers suffered alienation and boredom.

10

Edith Thompson did not need to like a novel to recommend it to Freddy or discuss it at

length with him. What counted chiefly was the applicability of the plot and characters to
her own predicament; as she tells Freddy: ‘every passage in any book I read that strikes me
as concerning 2 pals I mark’ (208; ‘pals’ had a special meaning for her as we shall see). Of
one novel, Felix: Three Years in a Life, she tells Freddy: ‘It’s weird – horrible and filthy –
yet I am very interested’ (167). Perhaps with one part of her brain (a part exercised by the
genuine – or perhaps merely posed – problem of how to extricate herself from her
unhappy marriage and be with her young lover), she approached novels in a way detached
from value or pleasure: regarding them instead as manuals to life – and to death. So the
prosecution claimed, at any rate, when they fastened on the issue of poison. But more
certainly, she entered the novels and shouldered the problems of their chief characters in
order to solve them as she thought they should be solved in the real world, so urgently
empathetic was her act of reading. All the while, she judged the heroes and villains as she
would judge real people and as she was herself to be judged in the summing-up of counsel,
in the judge’s charge to the jury at the Old Bailey, and in the jury’s verdict. In this regard,
novels were for her psychological and moral case studies. If the characters’ problems
approximated her own, or what she construed as her own, her interest was the more
intense.

But most certainly, novels were a form of infatuation or addiction with her, and this

was fed best by those novels that conjured ‘strangeness, mystery, romance’, things we are
told that the materialistic and cynical English villainess of the novel Bella Donna (1909)
had dismissed before succumbing to them when she travels to Egypt, in part to escape the
scandal attaching to her name in England as an adulteress.

11

Indeed, the novels of Robert

Hichens, who wrote Bella Donna and Felix (1902), were those that most fascinated Edith
Thompson. On the day she and Bywaters declared their love for one another – on a seaside
excursion – Thompson was reading The Garden of Allah, another novel by Hichens of

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356

1904. (There were forty-two editions of this novel by 1928 which gives an indication of
the long-lived popularity of such bestsellers.)

One of her favourite Hichens novels was The Fruitful Vine (1911), set in Rome, in

which the beautiful, childless thirty-year-old Lady Dolores, married for ten years, takes an
Italian lover, Cesare, less to satisfy her yearnings for romantic love (though this strand
would have appealed to the reader of popular fiction) than to have a child (her husband
cannot give her one) but also, we are asked to believe, to recapture her husband’s love; she
succeeds in retrieving his love for her but dies in childbirth, her third goal achieved, at least
in her husband’s memory. Thinking of Dolores’ yearning for love and her taking action in
the matter – to wit, taking a lover (younger than her husband), Edith writes to Freddy who
is in Egypt:

In a book I have just read which I am going to lend you there are two characters – whom you
and I must copy – only if things are never got to be right darlint if they are always as they are
now – I want you to remember what I have written. I shall be like and do what Dolores does
and you must do what Cesare does – Of course what I do will be from a different motive from
Dolores and you must fight like Cesare – but darlint don’t ever let go – keep tight hold –
bring up and take care of pour moi and then it won’t matter much what happens. I shall have
given you something for you only – my all. (190)

Freddy clearly thought it was Cesare whom Dolores in the novel truly loved but Edith, no
doubt resisting the temptation to agree (thereby seeing Dolores and Cesare like herself and
Freddy), puts him right: it was her husband, not Cesare, Dolores truly loved. But Edith still
saw herself (as a wife in a loveless marriage who must occasionally submit to her
husband’s sexual rights) in what Dolores did by giving herself to Cesare: ‘darlint’,
Thompson explains, ‘it is the supreme sacrifice to give yourself to someone you don’t
love’ (241). Female love for a man so great that it motivates noble self-sacrifice is narrated
not once but twice in The Way of These Women (1915), a novel of adultery, murder, and
true enduring love by the prolific E. Phillips Oppenheim that Thompson read. (The edition
of this novel I read advertises forty-one other novels from Oppenheim’s prolific pen –
there was a high critical mass of literary romance in Thompson’s day.) I suspect Edith
Thompson rationalised her loveless marriage to Percy (or, perhaps, melodramatised it) as
her self-sacrifice, by one means or the other – thereby making it bearable. To what extent
she exaggerated and melodramatised the lovelessness in the first place (perhaps under the
influence of popular literature, thinking such lovelessness superior to ordinary or modest
domestic contentment) I do not know. At any rate, she wrote to Freddy: ‘nothing is too
much to do for the man you love’ (241) – and that ‘nothing’, underlined and repeated,
reads ominously in the context of her trial for murder.

Yet Edith might merely have meant that no emotional self-sacrifice is too much for the

woman in love to perform. In 1921 she and Freddy had gone to see a film called Romance
in London. This was the 1920 silent-movie version of an immensely successful play by the
Chicago dramatist Ned Sheldon, first performed in 1913. In it, a beautiful opera singer
renounces her love for a young clergyman so that he may continue his vocation. (The older
woman – younger man love affair from Thompson’s own life.) Thompson reminds
Bywaters of this exactly a year later; she remembers it perhaps because it reminds her of
one alternative to physical intimacy. Her letter is characteristically laden with ambiguity:

Last Friday last year – we went to see ‘Romance’ – then we were pals and this year we seem
no further advanced. Why arnt you sending me something – I wanted you to – you never do
what I ask you darlint – you still have your own way always – If I don’t mind the risk why
should you? whatever happens cant be any more than this existence – looking forward to
nothing and gaining only ashes and dust and bitterness. (206)

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What is the something she refers to that he ought to send her? She told the court she meant
anything at all. But does the letter’s postscript give the clue? It reads: ‘Have you studied
“Bichloride of Mercury”?’ (The judge naturally pounced on this postscript in his charge to
the jury.)

Incidentally, I quote this passage also because her term ‘pals’ here suggests soul-

mates, intimates and outsiders holding tight against the world whereas elsewhere in her
letters it can mean friends and not lovers, a relationship with Bywaters she resists or agrees
to (or pretends to agree to) for a time only. ‘You say “Can we be Pals only, Peidi [Peidi was
his – and her – nickname for her], it will make it easier.” Do you mean for always?
Because if you do, No, No a thousand times’ (210 – 11). It was passages like this, read
aloud in court, that helped depict Edith as an older scarlet woman poisoning the mind of a
younger man and imposing her will on him, making her as guilty as the actual wielder of
the murder weapon. Even though we have just heard Thompson complain that Freddy
always has his way, one English newspaper nevertheless called Edith ‘The Messalina of
Suburbia’, a reference to Valeria Messalina, Roman empress, third wife of Claudius, a
strong and influential woman with a reputation for promiscuity who conspired against her
husband and was executed for it.

12

‘Nothing is too much to do for the man you love.’ It certainly reads ominously once

you read the Hichens novel that most fascinated Edith Thompson and that played a
literally fatal part in her conviction – Bella Donna. This is a novel about a woman who
slowly poisons her husband, and almost succeeds in killing him, in order to free herself of
her second husband that she may go off with a rich Graeco-Egyptian businessman who has
cast the spell not just of wealth but of the East on this shallow, materialistic woman once so
beautiful she was called ‘Bella Donna’ in England. But Bella Donna is also an Old World
poisonous plant of the nightshade family so that when she sets about her subtle and secret
business she earns her nickname with a vengeance. ‘I hate her’, Edith wrote of Mrs
Chepstow (Bella Donna): ‘she doesn’t seem a woman to me – she seems abnormal – a
monster utterly selfish and self-living’ (207 – 8). Thompson’s defence lawyer encouraged
her to repeat this assessment in court in order to deflect the prosecution allegation that
Edith had emulated Mrs Chepstow in waging a campaign of poison to emancipate herself
from her marriage, but the deflection failed.

But why, then, was Thompson so immersed in Hichens’s novel? Bella Donna’s second

husband had been a young man whom she had seduced as an older woman (shades of Edith),
but she had married, it transpires, not for love, and so had trapped herself in a dull marriage
– (shades of Edith again where the dull marriage is concerned). Bella Donna needed money
to live the life to which she was accustomed and which Edith envied – Edith repeatedly saw
lack of money as an obstacle in the path of her and her lover. And Mrs Thompson must have
felt the pangs of Mrs Chepstow’s anxious hunger for freedom, that grew as time passed –
Edith was only twenty-eight but by the measurement of the day she was no longer a girl and
one senses a ticking, if not of the reproductive clock (she doesn’t seem to wish for children
with her lover), then of the clock of real-life romance. Her fear that Freddy will tire of her is
part of the adrenalin flow of her letters. Moreover, Edith must have vicariously experienced
the strange infatuations and fixations that trouble Bella Donna’s life. And there was, of
course, the plot of silently removing the irksome marital impediment by undetected poison.

Hichens and Wilde

Robert Hichens first drank of Egypt’s fin de sie`cle allure in 1894 or 1895. Frank Harris in
his 1916 book about Wilde (written in 1910) asked Wilde about the rumours that much of

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358

Esme Amarinth’s and Lord Reggie Hastings’s dialogues in Hichens’s recent and
bestselling first novel, The Green Carnation (1894), had been almost verbatim transcripts
of Oscar’s talk. ‘True enough, Frank’, Wilde answered,

Hichens got to know Bosie Douglas in Egypt. They went up the Nile together, I believe with
‘Dodo’ Benson. Naturally Bosie talked a great deal about me and Hichens wanted to know
me. When they returned to town, I thought him rather pleasant, and saw a good deal of him.
I had no idea he was going to play reporter; it seems to me a breach of confidence –
ignoble.

Harris thought that The Green Carnation poisoned Wilde’s reputation, and the art
historian William Gaunt thought it held Wilde up to ridicule and innuendo: tellingly,
Harris includes the above exchange in a chapter of his Wilde book entitled ‘Danger
Signals’.

13

Yet Hichens never shook off the genuine influence of Wilde; when he rewrote Bella

Donna as a stage play, a producer complained that his dialogue was too much like Oscar’s!
But more than that, Hichens was a writer who paddled in the Decadent end of an Aesthetic
movement that reached beyond the usual writers and works of the anthologies and literary
histories. In the 1900s and teens of the twentieth century, Hichens was writing novels that
still offered the after-imagery of the 1890s, and these were the novels that Edith Thompson
read avidly. Hichens was not alone. The essential book on the Bywaters – Thompson case
was edited by the London-Irish writer Filson Young and it appeared just after the
conviction and execution of the two lovers. Filson Young had published a novel in 1905,
The Sands of Pleasure, set partly in bohemian Paris, and it became a succe`s de scandale,
carrying as it did the imprint, like Hichens’s novels, of Oscar Wilde.

14

Almost twenty years after The Green Carnation, when Hichens had become a wealthy

bestselling novelist and playwright, the American journal The Bookman subjected
Hichens’s success to analysis and found that

his interest is always in the exceptional, rather than in the average, type. Strange people,
bizarre customs . . . men and women vainly struggling against some overmastering obsession

. . . underneath the surface impersonality of the realist, one discerns a spirit of prying and

unwholesome curiosity.

15

Edith Thompson was no suburban housewife (despite a book about her that uses this
phrase in its title) but was instead a woman in full-time professional work. But her fine if
modestly educated mind and her independence of thought and opinions made her an
oddity in her time and place, and one can readily imagine her being drawn to Hichens’s
fiction that The Bookman characterises: she too was nothing ordinary (an idea that she
actually and ironically denies time and again in her letters) and so her predicament
became nothing ordinary either: a passionate intensity with little room, to steal twice from
W.B. Yeats.

But I quote The Bookman to import the literal and figurative notion of poison in

Hichens’s fiction. And in his life: for he tells us in his late, rather self-congratulatory
memoir, Yesterday: The Autobiography of Robert Hichens (1947), that he has been four
times accidentally poisoned.

16

(One might have thought that this would have cued a

reminiscence of the Bywaters – Thompson case, but the case is resolutely passed over in
his memoir.) The first time he was poisoned, as it happens, was at a dinner in London in
honour of the German ambassador to Britain, attended among many others by Oscar
Wilde, James McNeill Whistler, and Frank Harris. It was the ortolans, Hichens later
decided, that exotic dish that helps the scene be reminiscent of The Picture of Dorian
Gray, a novel whose heels The Green Carnation followed hard upon.

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Thompson and Wilde

And so it seems appropriate that poison, literal and figurative, features prominently in
Wilde’s work. Having been cast aside by Dorian Gray, poor Sibyl Vane kills herself by
swallowing what Lord Henry Wotton fancies must have been prussic acid. By doing so,
Sibyl ‘passed . . . into the sphere of art’ (the phrase Wilde used of Wainewright) and
beyond the jurisdiction of morality, and thus Dorian Gray’s culpability.

17

But Gray had

already poisoned Sibyl’s mind and sense of self. The night he met her, as he wandered into
east London through ‘a labyrinth of grimy streets’, he tells Lord Henry, ‘There was an
exquisite poison in the air’ (73). But he in turn had been poisoned by Lord Henry who,
when with his ‘subtle smile’ and ‘dreamy languorous eyes’ (43) he watches Dorian Gray,
having with insinuating eloquence denounced self-denial in favour of hedonism, is like
Milton’s serpent whose mellifluent guile seduced Eve; Lord Henry is content to watch like
a predator while his influence takes effect on his prey. Lord Henry exults in the ‘subtle
magic’ of words that are his chosen instrument of influence, and therefore shaping power.
Gray is aware of entirely fresh influences ‘at work within him’ (42), as though he had
ingested some pleasing, disturbing and venomous substance.

Lord Henry’s influence is a kind of malign nurture, poison rather than nourishment.

But Gray’s nature cannot combat this evil nurture since he is already a specimen of flawed
heredity, having inherited his mother’s beauty and passion and the character poverty of his
male forebears – ‘the still more poisonous influences that came from his own
temperament’ (149) as he himself acknowledges. In De Profundis, that extraordinary letter
from gaol, Wilde was later to transfer with bitterness this predicament from Dorian Gray to
Lord Alfred Douglas; a refrain in the letter from prison is the flawed heredity of the
Douglases, ‘the fatal Douglas temperament’.

18

Like his creator, Lord Henry had ‘always

been enthralled by the methods of natural science’ and because of this he knew that ‘there
were poisons so subtle that to know their properties one had to sicken of them’ (82). It is
here that literal poison becomes figurative without losing its potency. Lord Henry recalls
the book he read at sixteen that changed everything and had the effect of a drug or poison
ingested.

This is presumably the yellow-bound book he leaves for Gray to read, and it has been

identified as, in part, A Rebours by J.-K. Huysman. ‘It was a poisonous book’, Gray (or the
impersonal narrator) tells us. ‘The heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its pages
and to trouble the brain’ (156). Frank Harris may have thought Dorian Gray a book of pure
champagne, wittier than, and as intellectual as, anything by Congreve, but the influential
Daily Chronicle turned the novel’s phrase against itself, denouncing it as ‘a poisonous
book, the atmosphere of which is heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual
putrefaction’.

19

Among its effects is an encouragement of Dorian Gray to become more

self-enamoured and self-involved, and to combine a romantic desire for extremes of
experience with a self-serving scientific curiosity.

It would be too much to suggest that Edith Thompson, like Dorian Gray, combined

romantic desire with a scientific curiosity, but she was driven by an increasingly anxious
and authentic erotic passion while pumping her lover for information about chemical
processes and various poisonous substances. It would be too much even to suggest that she
was entirely under the unwholesome influence of the dozens of second-rank novels she
read, thereby troubling her brain. She was an often clear-headed reader who could parse
and analyse the novels with, on occasions, an impressive mixture of objectivity and
involvement. As such, she was a victim of her time: a generation later she might have been
a university undergraduate studying English or creative writing, or a drama student at

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360

some academy, and might have met (and perhaps married) someone more suited to her
than Percy who seems not to have opened a book at all. Or perhaps not. She may have set
to with a will (like the businesswoman she was) but she interacted with the books in a way
most novelists only dream of having their readers do: the novels she read were for her, to
borrow a title from one of those novels, ‘the business of life’ – or death.

20

Writing to

Freddy, she turns crisply to a 1914 novel by the pseudonymous Joan Sutherland:

Now I’ll talk a bit about the book ‘Beyond the Shadow’. I did like very much, only it was
hardly a possible story do you think. Marian was an ideal woman and under her circumstances
too ideal too unnatural too careful of others’ opinions. It reminded me of the book you lent me
‘The Way of these Women’ [the Oppenheim novel]. Do you remember the man and the
woman who didn’t take their fate into their own hands although they could have done so
easily. Too careful of the opinions of their so called friends and the world . . . Geoffrey . . .
should have taken her away mastered all her protests and carried her off. They were made for
each other, he was married to another through no fault of his own. (192, originally underlined)

Sometimes, however, the resolution of the novels did not point in the right direction for her
own life’s purposes and, perhaps, her plans for it (as the prosecution insisted). But that
didn’t matter, she told Bywaters. ‘I agree with you about Chambers endings darlint but the
endings are not the story’. (She read attentively at least three novels by Robert
W. Chambers: The Firing Line (1908) and The Common Law (1911) as well as The
Business of Life.) She explained and advised:

The end is written to please nine out of ten people who read his books. You and I are the tenth
and he doesn’t cater for us darlint, we are so few. Do as I do. Forget the ends lose yourself in
the characters and the story and, in your own mind make your own end. Its [sic ] lovely to do
that darlint – try it, and you must not be scathing about a particular author that I like. I won’t
have it you hear me – I’m bullying you now. I’ll ruffle all your hair darlint until you’re really
cross. (192)

At times she bullies the novels she reads, too, even bullies life in an attempt to shape it to
her ends, but if so, is it because of (as in the case of Trabb’s boy in Dickens’s Great
Expectations) an excess of vivacity or of an iron will behind the flirtatious love-talk?

By her method of reading, the novel’s artistry, such as it is, is subordinated to its

applicability to life; it was such a method that Wilde’s enemies used when they ignored the
artistic whole that was The Picture of Dorian Gray in favour of its characters’ motives and
its story’s tendencies, which were immoral and disgusting in their eyes. But Wilde
himself, though he claimed artistic perfection (and therefore amorality) for the novel,
simultaneously worried that the morality of the ending blemished the book and set its
philosophy at naught. Gray was, after all, punished for his shallowness and callousness; in
short, for his Decadence and Aestheticism, and worse, and Wilde has Gray remind Lord
Henry that he, Lord Henry, poisoned his young friend with a book.

21

Perhaps Wilde added

the defiantly aesthetic Preface to counter this conventional moralism and to stake the claim
that the novel and its immorality had passed safely into the sphere of art.

Those who tried Edith Thompson, like those who tried Wilde, were convinced that

books, like criminals, could poison people. Lord Henry answers Dorian: ‘As for being
poisoned by a book, there is no such thing as that. Art has no influence upon action’ (257).
(We remember a famous later version of this: W.H. Auden’s ‘Art makes nothing happen’.)
The truth of this in the case of Edith Thompson lay at the heart of her trial. Did the novels
she read inspire her to take action? Or instead inspire merely the fantasy of taking action?

Was art exempt from morality as Wilde had insisted, existing for its own sake,

intending to make nothing happen in the real world and ideally rendering the artist immune
from morality’s (and the law’s) exactions? But even if it were amoral, that meant, by an

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appearance of paradox, that literature could in effect be immoral as well as moral, that it
could influence wicked behaviour in its readers (poison them, as it were). The possibly
immoral influence of literature was the prosecution’s case in both the Wilde trials and the
Thompson – Bywaters trial. (Though in the case of Thompson – the apparent victim rather
than the culprit, i.e. the immoral writer – it was also argued that Edith sought that
influence out: she, after all, and not Hichens, was on trial.) The wicked behaviour in the
case of both Wilde and Thompson was sexual transgression. Thompson was also accused
of murder, with poison as a potential and attempted murder weapon, not just a figure of
speech meaning malign influence. For his part, Wilde in ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’ lauded
several instances of murder through poisoning, or at best showed moral indifference.
(Simultaneously, Wilde believed in the amorality of art and its capacity to influence and
even poison.)

22

Or was art a case of imagination only (rather than of formal and ontological autonomy

as in the case of Art for Art’s sake), incapable of immorality by making nothing outside
itself happen in effect? This was the case for the defence in the Thompson trial: the
apparently wicked intentions were inside her head (mere daydream), inside the pages of
the romantic novels she read, and inside those overwritten letters (that were actually
literature) between ‘Peidi’ and ‘darlint’. (Wilde’s testimony from the witness stand and
then the dock made such a defence impossible in his case.)

The incontrovertible fact in the Thompson – Bywaters case was that Freddy had knifed

Percy to death. The alleged additional reality was that the murder was the culmination of a
conspiracy to murder, originally by poisoning. There are passages in Edith’s letters which
seem to recount failed attempts to poison her husband Percy with quinine in his tea, ground
glass and another unidentified drug in his porridge. One of Thompson’s advocates
debatably believes the porridge was meant for Edith herself, containing an abortifacient,
but that her husband unintentionally ate it.

23

On the witness stand Bywaters spoke of

Edith’s wish to commit suicide by poisoning (like Sibyl Vane who also, it might be argued,
fatally confused art and life), while Edith spoke of a suicide compact between the two of
them. But there were news-cuttings in the letters that Edith sent Freddy about English
murders (not suicides) in which poison was involved. And most worrying for the defence,
one of her letters to Freddy began:

‘It must be remembered that digitalin is a cumulative poison, and that the same dose harmless if
taken once, yet frequently repeated, becomes deadly’. Darlingest Boy, the above passage I’ve
just come across in a book I am reading ‘Bella Donna’ by Robert Hichens. Is it any use(191).

(In the novel, the character learns about digitalin when he happens on ‘a book of poisons
and their treatment’ (81).)

The prosecution fastened on this and worried at it. Bywaters testified that he

understood suicide to be Edith’s topic here, but the jury would hardly have bought this far-
fetched explanation. (And attempted abortion was not raised as a possibility by the defence
or prosecution, perhaps, bizarre though it seems, out of delicacy.)

Bywaters portrayed the woman he loved as a mere fantasist whom he was humouring,

and her defence also portrayed her consumption of novels as evidence that she inhabited
mere make-believe. On the stand, Edith herself claimed to her defence that she recounted
imaginary incidents in order to induce Bywaters to believe that she was active in the
promotion of their relationship, as if the novels, far from stirring her to action – pursuing a
plot to kill her husband – stirred her to mere fictional plot: as if she were less like Dorian
Gray, who walked the walk, and more like Lord Henry, who mostly talked the talk.

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362

But under cross-examination Mrs Thompson confessed that a smaller plot was afoot to

hurt Percy in such a way as to weaken him through some poison or other so that should he
have a heart attack (which Percy had or affected to have, according to one letter) he would
succumb, and this, she said, was Freddy’s suggestion. Only if she made Freddy the origin
of the plot could her explanation of her imaginary action make sense. This was a dilemma
the prosecution sharply tried to resolve with reference to her Bella Donna quotation
regarding digitalin. (As it happens, in Bella Donna, Mrs Chepstow uses not digitalin but
sugar of lead, or lead acetate, supplied by her lover, to try to poison her young husband
over time.) Oddly, the prosecution failed to complete the sentence from Hichens’s novel
about digitalin and which Thompson did not quote to Bywaters: ‘this peculiarity’ (of
deadly effect through slow repeated administering) ‘is shared by all poisons affecting the
heart’ (82).

Freedom and fate

Whether we are in the presence of her fantasy and imagination or of her reality and motive,
the deepest conflict in Edith Thompson is between freedom and fate, which, of course, was
no theme for the Old Bailey. She may have denounced the lovers in Oppenheim’s The Way
of These Women for not taking their own fate in their own hands (192), but she came to see
the improbability, perhaps the impossibility, of Freddy and her doing that themselves. She
fastened on the theme of Bella Donna, which is repeated, as a motto (allegedly from the
Arabic), to which her Egyptian lover, Baroudi, introduces Mrs Chepstow: ‘The fate of
every man have we bound about his neck.’ Her seducer elaborates: ‘We are in the prison of
our lives, and we are in the prison of ourselves.’ Mrs Chepstow’s husband rejects the idea:
‘Prison! . . . I hate that word. You’re wrong, Baroudi. Life is a fine freedom, if we choose
it to be so . . . Our fate is not bound about our necks. It is only we ourselves who can bind it
there’.

24

In May 1922 Thompson writes to Bywaters:

You talk about that cage you are in . . . that’s how I feel . . . only worse if it can be so . . .
because mine is a real cage with a keeper as well . . . ‘The fate of every man have we bound
about his neck’ (I don’t know if I’ve got it quite right – you can tell me later on . . . but the
meaning is right). Have we darlint? Have we the fate of one – or we two halves I don’t know
– I darent think . . . (197)

In one of her last letters, she describes her life as a desert, like that in The Shulamite, a 1904
novel by Alice and Claude Askew: ‘the Life I & we lead is gradually drying me up – soon
I’ll be like the ‘Sahara’ . . . you must read that book, its [sic ] interesting, absorbing, aren’t
books a consolation and a solace?’ Here, books are for her escapism of an almost literal
kind. In her most poignant sentences, she writes:

We ourselves die & live in the books we read while we are reading them & then when we have
finished, the books die and we live – or exist – just drag on thro years and years, until when?
Who knows – I’m beginning to think no one does – no not even you & I, we are not the
shapers of our destinies. I’ll always love you darlint, Peidi.

Soon a real prison opened for her, in part because, as in the case of Wilde’s trials, there was
a joint indictment of two accused with therefore a terrible compound interest to pay; there
were incriminating letters; and there was a biased charge to the jury motivated by a judge’s
evident aversion. In August 1922 she acquired W.J. Locke’s recent 1920 Great War novel
The House of Balthazar. She starts to read it but life of another kind supervenes – the
murder (on 3 October), her arrest, her trial and conviction. Surprisingly, she finishes the
novel in Holloway gaol, awaiting the result of her appeal, reading to the very end. She
recounts her days to a visiting friend:

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sometimes I write, sometimes I read . . . You know, I have always loved W.J. Locke’s
romances. Well, I have been reading ‘The House of Balthazar’. It is wonderful. But
sometimes I feel I cannot read, for my mind goes back again and again to what is
going on outside – I mean the appeal . . . But there is one blessing. While I was on
remand, and during the trial, I simply couldn’t sleep . . . But now I sleep every night,
and soundly.

25

Her friend wonders how she can possibly sleep while under sentence of death. In ‘The
Ballad of Reading Gaol’, the prison warders too wondered how Trooper Wooldridge could
sleep in the shadow of the gallows:

He lay as one who lies and dreams

In a pleasant meadow-land,

The watchers watched him as he slept,

And could not understand

How one could sleep so sweet a sleep

With a hangman close at hand.

It seems that somehow the poison of sin, as Wilde calls it in the poem, is cleansed away
under sentence. Weis tells us that Thomas Hardy’s poem ‘On the Portrait of a Woman
about to be Hanged’ is about Thompson (291). Even though he has apparently heard or
read Thompson’s correspondence, the poet imagines that her pretty face belies her guilt:
Providence planted a ‘tare’, an injurious corn-weed, in her otherwise fair field. (This is
disappointing from Hardy.) Weis quotes a letter from T.S. Eliot to the conservative Daily
Mail praising it for not indulging in the ‘flaccid sentimentality’ of other papers on the
question of Edith Thompson, implying that she is guilty and should hang (292). (This is
disappointing from Eliot.) The Wilde who spent time in Wandsworth and Reading gaols
would surely have taken a different attitude. In Wilde’s ballad, it is the evil sprites and not
the humane narrator who terrifyingly sing:

And once, or twice, to throw the dice

Is a gentlemanly game,

But he does not win who plays with Sin

In the secret House of Shame.

Notes

1.

This is the annotated transcript of the 2nd biennial Clark Lecture on Oscar Wilde delivered at
the Clark Library, University of California at Los Angeles, 2 April 2011. The inaugural lecture
was given by Merlin Holland.

2.

Wilde, ‘Pen Pencil and Poison’, 121. (The serial comma is omitted in The Complete Works.)

3.

Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 21.

4.

Harris, Oscar Wilde, 141, 142, 166, 192, 197 – 9, 201 – 4.

5.

Wilde, ‘Pen Pencil and Poison’, 108.

6.

Doyle, Memories and Adventures, 73.

7.

Orwell, ‘Decline of the English Murder’, 98, 99.

8.

Flanders, The Invention of Murder, 248 – 52.

9.

Young, Trial of Frederick Bywaters and Edith Thompson, 114. Filson Young’s contemporary
account of the murder trial is the most reliable we have. Quotations from Thompson’s letters
are from this book except when indicated otherwise.

10.

Cockburn, in Foster, Irish Novels 1890 – 1940, 48.

11.

Hichens, Bella Donna, 224.

12.

Eden and Hill, Letters from a Suburban Housewife, 118.

13.

Harris, Oscar Wilde, 129; Gaunt, The Aesthetic Adventure, 142. (In the light of its many
detractors, I was delighted to come across Merlin Holland’s vigorous appreciation of Harris’s
book in the Times Literary Supplement, 24 October 1997.)

14.

I have several interests in Filson Young. He wrote the first book on RMS Titanic, which was
in the bookshops three weeks after the disaster, and it is the best-written book on the

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364

ship. I excerpted this book in my Penguin anthology, Titanic (1999). As a boy, Filson Young
summered with his family at their home in Portaferry, the County Down village where I now
live. Curiously, the ‘Robert Hichens’ who pops up on Google first was Quartermaster on
Titanic; many websites below, we find the once-popular novelist. Also curiously, there was an
officer Wilde on the doomed liner.

15.

Cooper, ‘Robert Hichens’, 473.

16.

Hichens, Yesterday, 133.

17.

Wilde, Dorian Gray, 139.

18.

Wilde, De Profundis, 526.

19.

Harris, Oscar Wilde, 85.

20.

The Business of Life (1913) by R.W. Chambers.

21.

Wilde, Dorian Gray, 257.

22.

This paradox is only one among several concerning the relationship between art and life that
are discussed by Neil Sammells (drawing on ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’ among other works) in
‘Theorizing Style: The Essays’, chapter 2 of Wilde Style.

23.

Weis, Criminal Justice, 70.

24.

Hichens, Bella Donna, 168. See also 193, 202.

25.

Weis, Criminal Justice, 263 – 4.

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———. ‘Pen Pencil and Poison’. In The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Vol. 4, Criticism ed.

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———. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Ed. Peter Ackroyd. London: Penguin, 1985.
Young, Filson. The Sands of Pleasure. London: Grant Richards, 1905.
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