The Littlehampton Libels

The Littlehampton Libels is an early twentieth-century micro-history. The tradition of using court evidence generated by an intensely local incident to interrogate otherwise opaque historical transitions stretches back to Montaillou. What distinguishes this enterprise is the relative modernity of the events, which began in 1920, and the absolute mundanity of the subject-matter. Here are no arguments over the fundamentals of religious belief or the structures of secular and spiritual power. Instead, the material is confined to conflicts between neighbours about the small currency of living in the humdrum backstreets of a minor seaside town. The libels are about such everyday matters as sexual misconduct, the mistreatment of children and the mismanagement of shared spaces in confined working-class housing. The success of the enterprise depends partly on the quality of the detail that can be brought to life and partly on its capacity to illuminate issues which have meaning beyond the stressed relationships between a handful of men and women living on the margins of a South Coast economy. There can be no doubt about the success of the first challenge. The astonishing capacity of the principal players to engage with the legal system, both the police up to and including a seconded Scotland Yard officer, and the courts up to and including the Court of Criminal Appeal, together with the fact that the sequence of allegations and trials eventually generated a national press sensation, means that there is an abundance of material covering the sequence of allegations and trials that began in 1920 when Edith Swan reported the conduct of her neighbour Rose Gooding to the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) and then launched a prosecution for criminal libel on the grounds that her neighbour had retaliated by sending her poison pen letters. Rose Gooding was imprisoned, released, and, as the letters recommenced, imprisoned again, and then Edith Swan was investigated and prosecuted for sending the letters to herself, acquitted, and then finally herself imprisoned after letters once more were sent, and this time a proper forensic investigation was conducted

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