A Pin to See the Peep Show

Rating:
Summary: A gifted author misuses her talents to further an agenda.
Review: It is always a pity when an accomplished artist prostitutes a great talent in the furtherance of a dubious cause.

Miss Jesse was a well-known and gifted writer. She was also an opponent of the death penalty. Her novel is based upon the murder, in London in 1922, of Percy Thompson, for which his wife Edith Thompson and her lover Freddie Bywaters were hanged. The case aroused immense controversy at the time, and has continued to do so ever since. Death Penalty opponents have maintained that Edith Thompson was wrongfully executed - her conviction was based in large part on her letters, which appeared to be inciting Bywaters to murder Thompson.

It is not this reviewer's purpose to discuss the propriety of Capital Punishment, or Edith Thompson's guilt. Miss Jesse and all those who oppose hanging, and who believe her letters were nothing but a silly fantasy, are perfectly entitled to hold their views and to argue them as passionately as they wish.

But what a reputable author ought not to do is to falsify facts to further an agenda. The reader is told explicitly that A Pin To See The Peepshow is based on the Thompson-Bywaters murder. What the reader is not told, and will not know unless he or she is familiar with the case, is that while 'Leonard Carr' hits the husband on the head, in a moment of drunken fury, with a wrench he happens to have in his coat pocket, and the unfortunate man falls and strikes his head fatally on a kerbstone, the real-life Bywaters lay in wait for his victim and killed him with two savage stab wounds, inflicted with a dagger that he later attempted to dispose of. Thus not only is the tragic 'Julia' hanged for a crime she never intended, but the crime itself is hardly more than an accident. Bywaters leapt out of the shadows and struck down his victim in silence - 'Leonard' kills his man after a stand-up argument.

By blurring the fact of premeditation and thus raising questions of criminal intent that in reality never existed, Miss Jesse enlists the reader's sympathy dishonestly. If this is how the courts function, we are invited to infer, then we should not entrust them with the power of life and death!

Needless to say, there is more to the issue of Capital Punishment than the rightness or otherwise of one single verdict. But readers should be aware that in this particular instance they are being hoodwinked.

Rating:
Summary: A Pin to See the Peepshow
Review: The novel may soften the representation of the murder in the Thompson-Bywaters case it was based on but otherwise closely tracks Young's Notable British Trials account. Young too thought Mrs. Thompson innocent. What the novel most brilliantly does is show how its protagonist is executed not for murder but adultery and not so much even for adultery as for being a middle class adulteress, upper class adultery being quietly fashionable, and lower class unnoticed. Tennyson shows her character as a human sacrifice to the hypocrisies of the class system.

Rating:
Summary: A gifted author misuses her talents to further an agenda.
Review: This book is based on a celebrated scandal in England -- the Thompson-Bywaters murder. It is one of my favourite novels. Jesse creates early on a mood of brooding sexual danger without any overt sexual references at all. How this leads Julia to destroy her life makes a gripping and sad book.

Rating:
Summary: One of my favourite novels
Review: This book is based on a celebrated scandal in England -- the Thompson-Bywaters murder. It is one of my favourite novels. Jesse creates early on a mood of brooding sexual danger without any overt sexual references at all. How this leads Julia to destroy her life makes a gripping and sad book.