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

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.