The Littlehampton Libels: A Miscarriage of Justice and a Mystery about Words in 1920s England

The Littlehampton Libels tells the story of a poison-pen mystery that led to a miscarriage of justice in the years following the First World War. There would be four criminal trials before the real culprit was finally punished, with the case challenging the police and the prosecuting lawyers as much any capital crime. When a leading Metropolitan Police detective was tasked with solving the case, he questioned the residents of the seaside town of Littlehampton about their neighbours' vocabularies, how often they wrote letters, what their handwriting was like, whether they swore-and how they swore, for the letters at the heart of the case were often bizarre in their abuse. The archive that the investigation produced shows in extraordinary detail how ordinary people could use the English language in inventive and surprising ways at a time when universal literacy was still a novelty. Their personal lives, too, had surprises. The detective's inquiries and the courtroom dramas laid bare their secrets and the intimate details of neighbourhood and family life. Drawing on these records, The Littlehampton Libels traces the tangles of devotion and resentment, desire and manipulation, in a working-class community. We are used to emotional complexity in books about the privileged, but history is seldom able to recover the inner lives of ordinary people in this way.

About the Author :
Christopher Hilliard is a professor at the University of Sydney, where he is currently chair of the Department of History. He grew up in New Zealand and studied at the University of Auckland before completing his PhD at Harvard. He is the author of three previous books, including English as a Vocation: The 'Scrutiny' Movement (OUP, 2012), about F. R. Leavis and his followers, and To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratization of Writing in Britain (2006), which traces a forgotten history of aspiring writers' clubs and how-to-be-an-author magazines.

Review :
"[A] dazzling work of microhistory. It uses the story of some poison pen letters in a small town to illuminate wider questions of social life in Britain between the wars..."--Bee Wilson, London Review of Books "Chris Hilliard's The Littlehampton Libels ... is a real-crime scholarly history, but Agatha Christie fans should love it. It's Christie's world, and those dogged and courteous police officers turn out to be real."--Sheila Fitzpatrick, Australian Book Review: 2017 Books of the Year "Gooding and Swan fell from posterity's view, but thanks to Hilliard we have a well-researched, thoroughly compelling contribution to the scarce library of working-class histories." -- Belinda Webb-Blofeld, Times Literary Supplement "The tale unfolds with all the fascination of a mystery thriller....[F]ew towns could offer such an extraordinary story, nor hope to find a better qualified chronicler."--Sussex Life "As an exciting experiment in merging the genre of the mystery novel with a work of historiography, Hilliard's The Littlehampton Libels succeeds in crafting an engaging, pacey, and intellectually stimulating account of an unusual criminal case in 1920s England ... The Littlehampton Libels is an engaging and ambitious work that scholars in the fields and sub-disciplines of history and English will mutually enjoy, particularly for its suggestive insights into working-class agency through literacy."--Eloise Moss, Journal of Interdisciplinary History "An absorbing book ... fascinating in its detail"--David Leafe, Daily Mail