Historical Tidbits: Poison Pen Letters

Daily Diary, October 5, 2022, Day 764:

Last week I listened to an episode of the podcast, Shedunnit, about the use of poison pen letters in mysteries, and this prompted me to write this Historical Tidbits post.

The term poison pen letter refers to a communication that is sent anonymously, usually for the purpose of “damaging another’s reputation or happiness.” —dictionary.com 

An article I found that looked into where the term originated explains that the term poison pen refers to the concept “that the writer is dipping his or her pen in poison, rather than ink,” and that “the earliest published use of ‘poison pen’ was 6 Sept 1911 in The Evening Post, a newspaper in Frederick, Maryland. The headline read, “More ‘poison-pen’ letters received.” 

According to another author who wrote about poison pen letters in mysteries in CrimeReads, this sort of anonymous letter had become quite common by the 1920s.

My research suggests that, even if the term poison pen wasn’t being used in the 19th century, the concept of a person sending anonymous letters to the newspapers to get someone in trouble was certainly very familiar to people by the 1880s.

For example, as I combed the San Francisco Chronicle for stories about public school teaching, the female occupation that I feature in the third book of my Victorian San Francisco mystery series, Bloody Lessons, I stumbled across a couple of articles about anonymous letters that accused school teachers of getting their jobs unfairly.

"School Director Sullivan is in receipt of an anonymous letter, in which the author threatens that in the event he or she be injured, to expose the sisters of Mr. Sullivan, who are charged with having obtained fraudulent certificates."––San Francisco Chronicle, 1879

"...Board of Education Special Investigating Committee, met in the Supervisors' Room at the new City Hall and heard testimony in the matter of the anonymous letter heretofore received by the Committee insinuating that Miss Susie Jacobs, a teacher in the public schools, had obtained her certificate by means of having had previous access to the question being asked at the examination.”––San Francisco Chronicle, 1880

To provide some context for why such poison pen letters could be so serious, below is some information I learned while researching my doctoral dissertation, Like Machine or an Animal:’ Working Women of the Far West in the Late Nineteenth Century

Teaching positions in the late 19th century were coveted. As the number of women who attended high schools, normal schools (schools that specifically trained teachers) and colleges increased during the mid to late 19th century, teaching became one of the few professional jobs available for a woman and one that was seen as perfectly appropriate to do before they settled down to marry. In fact, it was seen as good training for motherhood. The wages for women who held public school teaching jobs in San Francisco ranged between $50 and $80 a month, and for the few women who became administrators like principals, the wages could be even higher. This meant teaching was one of the few female occupations where a woman could make enough to live on, or help support their family, without any damage to their reputation.

However, in California, to get this job, you first had to get a state teaching certificate, which was hard to obtain, and then you had to get a local school board to hire you.

In 1879, nearly two-thirds of the nearly six hundred persons who took the Los Angeles and San Francisco county certification exams were rejected. Moreover, passing the examination remained only the first step to securing a job as a teacher. This would explain why the poison pen writers in the quotes I included above would accuse the teachers of getting their certificates in a fraudulent manner.

Even with a valid certificate, there is strong evidence that getting a position as a teacher in San Francisco (as well as in other urban areas) depended a good deal on who you were (your class, religious, and ethnic background) and who you knew (for women, this often this meant who your father knew.)

“The late Victorian period in U.S. history was called the Gilded Age in part because of: the corruption within national politics, particularly at the city level.  Elected officials used their control of city jobs (police, fire, etc) and lucrative business opportunities (contracts to provide municipal services and construct public roads and buildings) to extort money and votes from city businesses and residents. The public school system proved no exception and as a result there was great competition between the parties over who was going to get elected to the local School Board. In turn, these officials were suspected (probably accurately in some cases) of misusing their power to award contracts to build schools for the expanding population, award textbook contracts, and hire teachers and administrators for their own political and monetary gain.” Like a Machine or an Animal

As a side note, this corruption in government was called the spoils system, and in 1881, President Garfield was assassinated by a man who was angry that he hadn’t gotten the government position he had felt he had been promised after helping Garfield get elected. Public outrage over this helped spur the passage of the Pendleton Civil Service Act in 1883 that was based on the idea that certain government jobs should be obtained by merit versus patronage.

Of course, as the actions of the poison pen writers above attest, even when the existence of a merit-based system (the teaching certificate) was in place, this did not mean that there wasn’t room to manipulate the system, or conversely, for perfectly innocent people to be have their reputations be damaged by anonymous accusations. Or, for the result of these letters to lead to possible suicide or even murder (smile.)

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