The illusion of Kate Moss is an art piece first shown at the conclusion of the Alexander McQueen runway show The Widows of Culloden (Autumn/Winter 2006). It consists of a short film of English model Kate Moss dancing slowly while wearing a long, billowing gown of white chiffon, projected life-size within a glass pyramid in the centre of the show's catwalk. Although sometimes referred to as a hologram, the illusion was made using a 19th‑century theatre technique called Pepper's ghost.
McQueen conceived the illusion as a gesture of support for Moss; she was a close friend of his and was embroiled in a drug-related scandal at the time of the Widows show. It is regarded by many critics as the highlight of the Widows runway show, and it has been the subject of a great deal of academic analysis, particularly as a wedding dress and as a memento mori. The illusion appeared in both versions of Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, a retrospective exhibition of McQueen's designs.


British designer Alexander McQueen was known in the fashion industry for dramatic, theatrical fashion shows featuring imaginative, sometimes controversial designs. He was a close friend of English model Kate Moss, who had walked in several of his previous shows, including Bellmer La Poupée (Spring/Summer 1997) and Voss (Spring/Summer 2001). Moss retired from runway modelling in 2004 to focus on advertising contracts and other ventures. In 2005, she became caught up in controversy after images of her allegedly using drugs were leaked to the media, and several companies cancelled lucrative contracts with her.
McQueen actively supported Moss throughout the controversy. He argued that in his opinion, many journalists also regularly used drugs, making their criticism hypocritical. He wore a T-shirt with the words "We love you Kate!" when he appeared at the end of the runway show for Neptune (Spring/Summer 2006). As a further gesture of support, he developed the idea of projecting her into the closing act of upcoming show, The Widows of Culloden (Autumn/Winter 2006), seeking "to show that she was more ethereal, bigger than the situation she was in".


The illusion played as the finale of the runway show for The Widows of Culloden on 3 March 2006 at the Palais Omnisports de Paris-Bercy. The stage was formed by a square of rough wood with a large glass pyramid in its centre, leaving a catwalk around the outside for the models to walk. After the final model exited the runway, the lights were dimmed and the illusion was projected within the central pyramid. The illusion, sometimes inaccurately described as a hologram, used a 19th‑century theatre technique called Pepper's ghost to display a life-sized projection of Kate Moss wearing a billowing white chiffon dress. In the Pepper's ghost technique, a brightly lit figure out of sight of the audience is partially reflected on an angled pane of glass, which makes the semi-transparent figure appear to be on the stage.
The illusion was executed as a collaboration between British film director Baillie Walsh, production designer Joseph Bennett, post-production company Glassworks, and production duo Gainsbury & Whiting. Glassworks planned the illusion by creating a computer-generated render of the entire show space, including the seating and the runway. This enabled them to visualise the illusion from multiple viewpoints to confirm that it would look correct no matter where it was viewed from. The performance for Widows was inspired in part by serpentine dance, a type of stage performance from the 1890s that utilised billowing fabric and dramatic lighting, created by dancer Loie Fuller.
Filming the effect was difficult, went over budget and took two hours. Moss was suspended in a harness and wind machines were used to create the movement of her dress. The flowing material made it difficult for the production designers to conceal the edges of the illusion. Because the pyramid was visible to the audience from all angles, it was more challenging to execute than an illusion using only a single field of view. It was the first fashion show to employ this kind of effect; media theorist Jenna Ng speculated that it may have been the first such large-scale 3D projection of a performance.


The illusion of Kate Moss is regarded by many critics as the highlight of the Widows runway show. Writing for Vogue, Sarah Mower said that "only Alexander McQueen could provide the astonishing feat of techno-magic that ended his show." Robert McCaffrey, writing in The Fashion Studies Journal, called it "one of McQueen's most enduring and iconic finales". American fashion editor Robin Givhan wrote that "McQueen created a fantasy that made his audience believe in the wizardry of fashion and its ability to move the spirit." Jess Cartner-Morley of The Guardian called it a "suitably haunting finale". Lisa Armstrong at The Times was more critical, calling it "unspeakably cheesy". Kerry Youmans, a publicist for McQueen, recalled seeing audience members crying upon viewing it. Writing after McQueen's death in 2010, Lorraine Candy, editor-in-chief of Elle, said that "The hologram of Moss ... was all we talked about for months afterwards." In 2014, Jessica Andrews of Vanity Fair named it one of the most dramatic runway stunts in history.
The Victoria and Albert Museum (the V&A) in London owns a variant of the Kate Moss dress created by McQueen's assistant Sarah Burton for the 2006 wedding of another McQueen employee. Moss wore the original again on the cover of the May 2011 issue of Harper's Bazaar UK. In 2015, the Spanish 15-M movement staged a massive protest via hologram projection, taking specific inspiration from the Kate Moss illusion.
The Kate Moss illusion appeared in Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, a retrospective exhibition of McQueen's designs shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2011 (the Met) and the V&A in 2015. In the original presentation at the Met, the Moss illusion was recreated in miniature, but in the V&A re-staging, it was presented in full size in its own room. According to Sam Gainsbury, who worked on production for the illusion, McQueen had "always wanted to show [the illusion] independently as a work of art", so the team ensured that it was staged that way for the V&A's version of the exhibit.


Critics have described The Widows of Culloden as an exploration of Gothic literary tropes – particularly melancholy and haunting – via fashion, and the illusion of Kate Moss plays a significant role in this analysis. According to McQueen, the collection took inspiration from Shakespeare's play Macbeth. Cartner-Morley argued that Moss effectively played the role of Banquo, a character who haunts Macbeth as a ghost throughout the play. Literature professor Catherine Spooner connected the illusion to the visual effects used to portray spirits in the séances of the 19th century, and literary scholar Bill Sherman compared the effect on the audience to the "reverie" inspired by ghost stories of the era. Researcher Kate Bethune wrote that the collection's sense of melancholy was "consolidated in its memorable finale".
McCaffrey presented a similar analysis, writing that the illusion of Kate Moss was an example of highly staged Gothic melancholy, playing on the "tensions between beauty and heartache". He contrasted the illusion with the "spine" corset featured in Untitled (Spring/Summer 1998), viewing both as memento mori – artistic reminders of the inevitability of death. He saw the corset as an example of overt material horror, whereas the illusion functioned as an aesthetic horror that depended on the audience's emotional involvement for effect.
McCaffrey called Moss's appearance in the show a kind of resurrection following the damage done to her career by the drug allegations, which may have been a deliberate allusion: after McQueen's death, Moss recalled that when he suggested the concept to her, he said he wanted her to be "rising like a phoenix from a fire". Film theorist Su-Anne Yeo argued that the illusion was successful in helping to rehabilitate Moss's image. She wrote that the presentation of the illusion at the V&A particularly "helped to transform Moss from an object of tabloid fodder to one of legitimate critical concern". In a 2014 interview with British photographer Nick Knight, Moss confirmed that she had decided not to attend the show in person, even in disguise; she assumed it would be found out eventually and would "take away from all the magic ... the whole thing of me being a ghost".
Sarah Heaton, whose work focuses on the intersection between fashion and literature, described the illusion as evoking the Gothic trope of the barefoot "mad woman"; normally this figure would be confined to an attic or asylum, but McQueen subverts the expectation by displaying her to the public, making her ephemeral and uncontained. Fashion theorists Paul Jobling, Philippa Nesbitt, and Angelene Wong concur, arguing that the presentation demonstrated that Moss's body, as a symbol of female power, was "numinous, untouchable, and evading capture".
Moss's chiffon gown has been critiqued as an unconventional wedding dress. Cultural theorist Monika Seidl was critical of the illusion, arguing that it presented Moss as a contained female "Wiedergänger" or vengeful spirit. She did however find the dress persuasive in the way it "destabilise[s] the notion of a bride". Literary theorist Monica Germanà also took the dress to be a wedding gown, and found it an example of "the morbid coalescence of love and death", a recurring theme for McQueen.


Other authors have analysed the illusion of Kate Moss as a form of technologically altered reality, sometimes with supernatural associations. Anthropologist Brian Moeran used the illusion as an example of the runway show as a modern magical ritual, writing that the show's "magic is intimately entwined with technological sophistication". Author Genevieve Valentine described it as a science fiction element. Fashion historian Ingrid Loschek wrote that "the catwalk was transformed into a form of virtual reality" through the projection, which energised the audience. Fashion writer Nathalie Khan contrasted the illusion with a straightforward film projection, saying that unlike a film, the illusion made Moss "no longer a mortal subject, but perception made invisible". Jenna Ng described the projection of Moss, a living person, as a kind of rearrangement of physical distance: "the holographic subject appears to be virtually here amongst the present audience even as they are actually elsewhere at the time". She called it an example of the "post-screen", in which there is no barrier between the audience's space and the image. Timothy Campbell cited the illusion of Kate Moss as a literalisation, through technology, of the "fundamental spectrality of fashion". He felt that its placement at the end of the show, followed by McQueen's appearance to take his bow, was a way of making an "authorial claim to ownership" over the imagery produced in his shows.
Yeo was critical of the V&A's emphasis on the technological aspect of the illusion, arguing that it incorrectly positioned the effect as modern rather than historical. She argued that it would have been more appropriate to emphasise the connection to older forms of performance like the serpentine dance and phantasmagoria, a theatrical form that uses magic lanterns to project images. Performance theorist Johannes Birringer was critical of the entire Savage Beauty exhibit, but particularly so of the apparent reverence given to the illusion by the audience: "There was a hushed silence in that holographic room which I found pathetic."


Ove Jørgensen (Danish pronunciation: [ˈoːvə ˈjœˀnsən]; 5 September 1877 – 31 October 1950) was a Danish scholar of classics, literature and ballet. He formulated Jørgensen's law, which describes the narrative conventions used in Homeric poetry when relating the actions of the gods.
The son of Sophus Mads Jørgensen, a professor of chemistry, Jørgensen was born and lived for most of his life in Copenhagen. He was educated at the prestigious Metropolitanskolen and at the University of Copenhagen, where he began his study of the Homeric poems. In 1904, following academic travels to Berlin, Athens, Italy and Constantinople, he published "The Appearances of the Gods in Books 9–12 of the Odyssey", an article in which he outlined the distinctions in the poem between how the actions of deities are described by mortal characters and by the narrator and gods. The principles he set out became known as "Jørgensen's law".
Jørgensen gave up professional classical scholarship in 1905, following a dispute with other academics after he was not invited to join a newly formed learned society. He had intended to publish a monograph based on his 1904 article, but it never materialised. Instead, he devoted himself to teaching, both at schools and at the University of Copenhagen: among his students were the future poet Johannes Weltzer and Poul Hartling, later Prime Minister of Denmark. He maintained a lifelong friendship and correspondence with the composer Carl Nielsen and his wife, the sculptor Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen.
Jørgensen published on the works of Charles Dickens, identified artworks for the National Gallery of Denmark, and was a recognised authority on ballet. His views on the latter were conservative and nationalistic, promoting what he saw as authentic, masculine Danish aesthetics – represented by the ballet master August Bournonville – against modernist, liberalising innovations from Europe and the United States. He wrote critically of the American dancers Isadora Duncan and Loïe Fuller, but was later an advocate of the Russian choreographer Michel Fokine.


Ove Jørgensen was born in Copenhagen on 5 September 1877. He was the son of Sophus Mads Jørgensen, a professor of chemistry at the University of Copenhagen, and his wife, Louise (née Wellmann). In a 1950 obituary, Peter P. Rohde described Jørgensen's upbringing as a "strict school", and wrote that his father had intended him for an academic career. Jørgensen became a student at the prestigious Metropolitanskolen in 1895. In the same year, he made his first visit to Berlin, where he visited the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum: his student and biographer Thure Hastrup credits this experience with beginning his "love affair" with art. In 1898, Jørgensen visited Verona, Venice and Siena with his brother Einar, where he studied renaissance art, particularly the works of Lorenzo Lotto and Antonio da Correggio.
Jørgensen received his Master of Arts degree from Copenhagen in 1902, submitting a thesis in which he argued for the single authorship of the Homeric poems, based on Book 13 of the Odyssey. His university teachers included the historian Johan Ludvig Heiberg and the philologist Anders Bjørn Drachmann. The classical scholar Jørgen Mejer considers Jørgensen among the best classicists to have studied under them.


Following his graduation from Copenhagen, Jørgensen travelled to Berlin, where he spent the 1902–1903 academic year studying Homeric poetry under the philologists Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff and Hermann Alexander Diels. In a letter of November 1902 to Heiberg, Jørgensen called himself "Wilamowitz-intoxicated", having "almost daily" studied his writings over several years, though later that month he described one of Wilamowitz's seminars as "a complete farce" and an exercise in "throwing a discus in [his] own glass house". In Berlin, he began the process of writing what became his 1904 article on the invocation of the gods in the Odyssey.
Jørgensen travelled to Athens in the spring of 1903, funded by a government stipendium of 450 kroner (equivalent to 35,000 kr., or $5,000, in 2022), with his fellow Copenhagen student, the future archaeologist Frederik Poulsen. There he met the painter Marie Henriques and was a neighbour of the composer Carl Nielsen and his wife, the sculptor Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen. He became a lifelong friend of the couple, and accompanied them on a sightseeing tour to Constantinople in May 1903: Carl Nielsen mentions him sixty-three times in his diary. Jørgensen's visits to classical sites included a visit to Troy guided by its excavator, Wilhelm Dörpfeld, and with Dörpfeld to the island of Leukas, which the latter believed to be the location of Homer's Ithaca. In June 1903, Jørgensen and Nielsen travelled to Italy, visiting the sites of Magna Graecia, including Paestum and Pompeii, where Jørgensen attended eleven lectures from the site's excavator, August Mau. Jørgensen, Nielsen and Carl-Nielsen subsequently travelled to Rome, where Jørgensen cultivated an interest in Baroque art.
Jørgensen published "The Appearances of the Gods in Books 9–12 of the Odyssey", written in German, in the journal Hermes in 1904. In this article, Jørgensen observed that Homeric characters typically use generic terms, particularly θεός (theós, 'a god'), δαίμων ('a daimon') and Ζεύς ('Zeus'), to refer to the actions of gods, whereas the narrator and the gods themselves always name the specific gods responsible. This principle became known as Jørgensen's law, and the classicist Ruth Scodel described it in 1998 as the "standard analysis of ... the rules that govern human speech about the gods". It was particularly influential upon Martin P. Nilsson, who later published extensively on Greek religion. Jørgensen began work on a book-length treatment of his ideas, and wrote to Heiberg in February 1904 that he was working on an application of his work to the Iliad, but never published either. Later scholars nuanced the definition of Jørgensen's law: for instance, George Miller Calhoun observed in 1940 that the law does not apply to minor gods, nor when characters relate stories at second hand, nor when the deity involved is considered obvious because they are closely associated with the type of event that occurred.
In 1904, Jørgensen began to work as a teacher, taking a post at N. Zahle's School (a girls' school founded and led by Natalie Zahle) in Copenhagen at the instigation of Drachmann, for whom he had worked as a teaching assistant in October–November 1898. He took another in 1905 at the Østersøgade Gymnasium in the same city. He rejected professional academia in 1905, following a dispute with other classical scholars over the founding of the Greek Society for Philhellenes, a Danish learned society founded by intellectuals including Heiberg, Harald Høffding and Georg Brandes in February of that year. Although most members were qualified as doctors of philosophy, others – including Nielsen – were invited. Jørgensen was not invited, which he considered a snub, and he refused the offer of Drachmann to introduce him to the society.


Jørgensen continued to teach and publish upon the classical languages following his retreat from academic work. Among his students was the future Prime Minister of Denmark, Poul Hartling, who described Jørgensen as "the best teacher [he] ever had". Jørgensen taught an elementary Greek class for students of theology at the University of Copenhagen from 1915; Hartling studied there between 1932 and 1939. Jørgensen also taught the future poet Johannes Weltzer. Weltzer wrote in 1953 that Jørgensen's classes on Plato's Apologia, a philosophical work portraying the defence of Plato's teacher Socrates against charges of impiety, were "a matter of introducing [his students] into the Socratic way of life", and that he expected that few of those students would have forgotten them. Jørgensen maintained his friendship and correspondence with Carl Nielsen, with whom he discussed Shakespeare. In a letter of 1916, Nielsen confided in him about his abortive efforts to write an opera based on The Tempest, as well as about the precarious state of his marriage. Jørgensen also corresponded with Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen: in 1922, she wrote to him that she had reconciled with Carl and determined to remain with him.
In March 1905, Jørgensen wrote to Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen that, following a period of "mental depression" caused by the affair with the Greek Society, he was working on "a little article" about ballet. He became an authority on the subject, writing a series of essays in which he promoted what he saw as the traditional aesthetics of the Royal Danish Ballet. He asserted the importance of the Danish ballet master August Bournonville while criticising the innovations introduced into European dance by Isadora Duncan. Jørgensen called Duncan an "American dilettante", denigrated her as middle-aged and under-educated, and likened her dancing movements to those of a goose. He condemned the Art Nouveau- and symbolism-influenced style of Loïe Fuller, another American who, like Duncan, performed in Denmark in 1905, calling it "quasi-philosophical experiments". In March of the same year, he had attended a lecture by Vilhelm Wanscher, a philosopher and historian of art: Jørgensen described Wanscher's conception of the aesthetic perception of art as "a mental disorder".
The ballet scholar Karen Vedel has linked Jørgensen's opposition to Duncan, and the liberalising ideas of the Modern Breakthrough he felt she represented, to the ideology of the Danish national conservative movement. In particular, she draws attention to Jørgensen's promotion of what he saw as distinctively "Danish" ballet, and his characterisation of this as masculine and Dionysian, in contrast to his portrayal of Duncan's style as foreign, unartistic and iconoclastic. In 1905, Jørgensen wrote retrospectively in praise of the reforms introduced by Hans Beck when the latter took over the Royal Danish Ballet in 1894. Beck had insisted that male pupils adopt what he considered a more "manly" style of dance; Jørgensen considered that this reasserted the correct distinction between the "flaming power and appeal of the steel-strong male body" and the "more voluptuous and graceful suppleness of the female". Jørgensen's nationalistic ideas about ballet softened over time: in 1908, he gave a positive review of a performance of the Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova with dancers from the Mariinsky Theatre, while in 1918 he recommended that the Russian choreographer Michel Fokine be hired by the Royal Danish Theatre. In the same year, he defended Fokine against accusations that his artistic style was revolutionary in character and connected with Bolshevism.
In 1913, Drachmann wrote to Jørgensen, unsuccessfully trying to persuade him to resume his work on classical scholarship. Jørgensen's father, Sophus, died in 1914. In 1916, alongside the chemist S. P. L. Sørensen, he completed and published Sophus's unfinished manuscript of Development History of the Chemical Concept of Acid until 1830. Jørgensen's other scholarly interests included the English novelist Charles Dickens: Hartling later wrote that Jørgensen could easily have been a professor of his work. Jørgensen edited a 1930 Danish edition of Dickens's novel Great Expectations, to which he added an introductory essay. The literary scholar Jørgen Erik Nielsen later praised the essay as displaying an extensive knowledge both of Dickens and of related literature and criticism. Jørgensen once identified the subject-matter of two history paintings by the sixteenth-century artist Salvator Rosa, held by the National Gallery of Denmark, by reference to an obscure verse of late-antique Latin poetry. Around 1920, he made an identification of a painting of the Virgin Mary, also in the National Gallery, as a work of the Master of Flémalle.


The writer and opera singer Francis Lasson has identified Jørgensen, alongside figures such as Wanscher, the writer Sophus Claussen and the pianist Henrik Knudsen, as part of "a new golden age in the Danish spirit". Rohde named him, alongside Frederik Poulsen, as one of Denmark's most distinguished classicists. Poulsen, who knew Jørgensen in Copenhagen and Berlin and accompanied him to Athens, described him as "a quiet, reticent student" and a "remarkable man", whom he compared with Socrates. Vedel has named Jørgensen as an important cultural critic of his period. Quoting the Latin poet Juvenal, Jørgensen wrote in 1938 that all his writings on ballet had stemmed from anger at others' misunderstanding of the art.
Poul Hartling described Jørgensen as looking like "what a professor ... should look like according to the clichés: scruffy-stubble full beard, thin-rimmed glasses, knee flaps and button-downs". He portrayed Jørgensen's lessons as "steeped in humour", particularly Jørgensen's taste for acerbic, sarcastic comments at the expense of students who arrived late or whom he perceived to be slacking – which sometimes included Hartling. His students referred to him by the Latin title of "the magister" ('master'). Hastrup wrote that Jørgensen had lived his life by the advice given to him by Drachmann, upon his appointment at N. Zahle's School in 1904, to "always give his students the best that he had". In 1914, Jørgensen wrote to Natalie Zahle that teaching had been both the happiest and most successful aspect of his life; in November 1920, he wrote to Marie Henriques that, if he were hit on the head by a roof tile, he would "go to the crematorium an infinitely happy man" on account of his teaching. According to Rohde, he was in the habit of walking from Copenhagen to the resort town of Hornbæk – a distance of around 50 kilometres (31 mi) – and back again.
Jørgensen never married. He maintained his respect for his former teacher Wilamowitz until the First World War, writing what Mejer has termed "a virtual eulogy" of him in a Danish newspaper when Wilamowitz lectured at the University of Copenhagen in 1910, though after the war he became, in Mejer's terms, "irreconcilably opposed to things and persons German". Jørgensen died in the Freeport of Copenhagen on 31 October 1950; in his later years, he suffered from ill-health, which prevented him from working, and from financial hardship. He was buried in Copenhagen's Holmen Cemetery. Rohde wrote that he was, by this time, a little-known figure, citing Jørgensen's aversion to publicity and reluctance to put his scholarship into print.


Jørgensen, Ove (1904). "Das Auftreten der Goetter in den Buechern ι–μ der Odyssee" [The Appearances of the Gods in Books 9–12 of the Odyssey]. Hermes (in German). 39 (3): 357–382. JSTOR 4472953.
— (1904–1905). "En ny Strømning i den højere Homerkritik" [A New Current in the Higher Homeric Criticism]. Nordisk Tidsskrift for Filologi [Nordic Journal of Philology] (in Danish): 1–21. Retrieved 15 August 2024.
— (1905). "Balletens Kunst" [The Art of Ballet]. Tilskueren [The Spectator] (in Danish). 22: 338–348. Retrieved 28 January 2024.
— (1906). "Duncan kontra Bournonville" [Duncan Against Bournonville]. Tilskueren [The Spectator] (in Danish). 23: 511–520. Retrieved 28 January 2024.
— (1911). "Ἀλεξάνδρου ἀριστεία" [The Aristeia of Alexandros]. Nordisk Tidsskrift for Filologi [Nordic Journal of Philology] (in Danish): 1–47. Retrieved 15 August 2024.
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— (1918). "Fokin kontra Bournonville" [Fokine Against Bournonville]. Tilskueren [The Spectator] (in Danish).
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Jørgensen, Sophus Mads (1916). Sørensen, S. P. L.; Jørgensen, Ove (eds.). Det kemiske Syrebegrebs Udviklingshistorie indtil 1830 [Development History of the Chemical Concept of Acid until 1830] (in Danish). Copenhagen: Andr. Fred. Høst & Søn, Kgl. Hof-Boghandel. OCLC 874980879.
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Kim Kitsuragi is a character in the 2019 detective video game Disco Elysium. As a non-playable companion character, he assists the player character in solving a murder that comprises the game's main plot. Kitsuragi is defined by his Asian-inspired background, private queerness, and calm, stoic personality. He was noted by journalists and academics for his reactions to the player's choices, ranging from deadpan quips to moments of approval and vulnerability.
Kitsuragi was designed by the Estonian studio ZA/UM under the direction of Robert Kurvitz. The writer had previously developed the fictional setting for a novel and tabletop role-playing sessions. The team wanted to innovate on typical dialog trees seen in role-playing video games, deciding to only reveal aspects of Kitsuragi's character in specific situations. They decided that the character should have a "vaguely French" accent, leading them to cast the actor Jullian Champenois for his voice performance.
Kim Kitsuragi received acclaim as a standout character from Disco Elysium. Critics highlighted his subtle responses, moral integrity, and endearing presence, describing how his interactions contributed to the game's most memorable moments. Kitsuragi was celebrated as one of the best video game characters of 2019, with journalists noting his exceptional writing, design, and performance. His portrayal is recognized for reflecting Disco Elysium's themes and offering a nuanced representation of queer and cultural experiences.


Kim Kitsuragi first appeared in the 2019 detective video game Disco Elysium, with additional voiced dialog featured in the game's 2021 remastered edition, Disco Elysium: The Final Cut. Throughout the game, Kitsuragi serves as the non-playable partner to the player character protagonist, Harry Du Bois.
The story of Disco Elysium centers on an unsolved murder in Martinaise, a neglected district between two police precincts in the fictional city of Revachol. When each precinct sends a detective to investigate, Lieutenant Kitsuragi is assigned to partner with Du Bois. Kitsuragi is depicted with an orange bomber jacket, as well as a visible heritage from Seol, a fictional culture inspired by Korea and Japan. As Du Bois struggles with a hangover and memory loss, Kitsuragi guides him to the murder victim to conduct an autopsy, becoming a source of competence and advice. For most of the story, Kitsuragi remains aloof, calm, and stoic. On occasion, he expresses approval when the player forms intelligent theories about the murder case. He may respond with deadpan remarks when the player makes mistakes.
Aspects of Kitsuragi's character are incrementally revealed through numerous optional interactions with the player character. While he can grow annoyed with the player's antics, he sometimes cooperates with the player's more eccentric behaviors and may even show moments of vulnerability. If the player asks Kitsuragi about his sexuality, he confirms that he is gay with a witty remark. In another moment, Kitsuragi makes a small error and the player can decide how to react. When faced with racism directed at Kitsuragi, the player can decide whether to intervene, prompting complex reactions from Kitsuragi. The game features many small interactions with Kitsuragi, such as sharing a stolen sandwich, having a dance-off, or simply nodding at each other. At the climax of the game, Kitsuragi accompanies Du Bois to arrest the murderer. In one of the game's endings, the player can invite Kitsuragi to switch precincts and join Du Bois. However, the player can also lose Kitsuragi's trust or cause him to be shot and hospitalized.
The game's developers highlighted Kitsuragi in appearances outside the story, including the marketing and merchandise for his signature jacket in 2022, as well as a free "Collage Mode" released in 2023, wherein the player can arrange the game's characters into custom scenes.


Kim Kitsuragi was created by the Estonian game studio ZA/UM for Disco Elysium. Most of the team had never made a video game. Robert Kurvitz, ZA/UM's founder and the game's lead designer and writer, leaned into the Elysium setting he had first explored in his novel Sacred and Terrible Air, as well as a homebrew tabletop role-playing game based in the same setting. The team tried to avoid the role-playing video game convention of exploring every option in a dialogue tree, instead designing Kitsuragi to share personal details only in specific situations. Kurvitz tried to expand the game's choices and consequences through small moments of reactivity, "where your coworkers remember every embarrassing thing you said last night when you were drunk". The team decided that Kitsuragi should find the player character amusing and sometimes indulge him against his better judgment. Kurvitz commented that Kitsuragi's willingness to occasionally go against his instincts "gives him a warmth that's so endearing".
In contrast to the player character, the writers discussed Kitsuragi's potential attributes and beliefs. While these were not implemented in the game, Kurvitz assumed that Kitsuragi would score high in volition, making him resistant to personal questions. Although Kitsuragi was written as attracted to the same gender, his relationship with Du Bois remains platonic. When asked why the player cannot kiss Kitsuragi, the writer Justin Keenan argued that "the thing about desire is that it's stronger when it's not totally satisfied". Kurvitz saw Kitsuragi as a "systemic metaphor" for the game: "What he does for the officer is what Disco Elysium tries its darndest to do for the player. Let's get through this shit, it says. It's not fair, or easy, but it's not entirely impossible either ... And hey, it's not much, but you have me."
When selecting an actor to voice the character, ZA/UM decided that a "vaguely French" accent would fit Revachol. After a four-year search, they discovered the actor Jullian Champenois through a voice-over agency, selecting him for his French accent and emotional tone. Kurvitz felt that the actor embodied their intentions for the character, especially "the cool, the deadpan, and the warmth". During recording sessions, ZA/UM helped Champenois visualize and understand each scene, spending more time on the first day to find what worked. When the expanded Final Cut added voiced dialog to previously unspoken lines, Champenois became one of the few original voice actors who was not recast.


Academics have studied the importance of Kitsuragi's reactions to the player. In Games and Narrative: Theory and Practice, Leanne Taylor-Giles highlighted Kitsuragi's reactions during the autopsy sequence for reinforcing his character while giving useful feedback to the player. A qualitative study by Piotr Klimczyk found that many players felt strongly about earning Kitsuragi's approval, noting feelings of personal growth and post-game melancholy. At the 2023 Digital Games Research Association conference, Jon Stone suggested that Kitsuragi's approval served as a moral anchor for the player, granting them agency to humorously test the game's boundaries with benign violations. In a paper published in Frontiers in Virtual Reality, Lena Fanya Aeschbach and her co-authors described how bothering Kitsuragi achieves a distancing effect between the player and the protagonist, offering an alternative to player characters designed for immersion. An essay by Evan D. Bernick of the Northern Illinois University College of Law cited Kitsuragi's reactions as a moral compass in a failing legal system. In Trauma im Computerspiel, Thomas Spies similarly noted Kitsuragi's role as a moral authority and voice of reason.
Kitsuragi is often highlighted as an example of how Disco Elysium approaches its themes and ideological viewpoints. Colin Spacetwinks of Waypoint compared the concealed emotions of the game's characters to the guarded political views of the game's authors, making Kitsuragi feel unexpectedly genuine when he says "I'd rather not talk about it" when asked difficult questions. In Video Games, Crime, and Control, Edward L. W. Green remarked how Kitsuragi's stoicism mirrors other hardboiled detective fiction, which focuses more on personal ethics than ideology or justice.
Writing for NME, Georgina Young highlighted Kitsuragi as an example of the game's intelligent approach to social and cultural issues, with his fictional Seol heritage particularly relevant to real life. In Critical Theories in Dark Tourism, Florence Smith Nicholls pointed out how one character's racist assumptions leads them to treat Kitsuragi as a tourist, evoking an ironic contrast between Kitsuragi's knowledge of the city and the protagonist's amnesia. Fraser Brown of PC Gamer noted a moment where the player can attempt to challenge racism directed at Kitsuragi, describing how after "a seemingly throwaway conversation, I reconsidered the relationship between Kim and his forgetful partner, and it grounded me in the world".


Kim Kitsuragi has been frequently praised as an essential part of Disco Elysium and its critical acclaim. Lauren Morton of PC Gamer hailed Kitsuragi as the game's "breakout star", describing how "an empathetic enough detective can manage to uncover brief moments of vulnerability" in the otherwise unflappable character. GamePro's David Molke called Kitsuragi one of his favorite game heroes, highlighting his subtle reactions against the player's antics, while still showing loyalty and patience. Diego Arguello of Inverse also praised Kitsuragi for offering a compelling contrast with the protagonist, "building an unbreakable bond of kindness that persists throughout the story". Andy Kelly of PC Gamer praised the character's writing and voice performance, offering a "voice of reason" portrayed with "reassuring warmth and an endearing, deadpan cool". Cameron Kunzelman of Vice described Kitsuragi's dual role in the protagonist's professional and personal life, explaining that he was "written in such a way that I came to feel that I really knew him and why he cared about all of this in the end". Commentators frequently mentioned the character's popularity and appeal, with Sam Chandler of Shacknews declaring that "you will either want to marry Kim Kitsuragi or drown your sorrows in tequila". Madeline Carpou from The Mary Sue felt that Kitsuragi was a significant factor in making Disco Elysium one of the best-written games ever made.
Kitsuragi's reactions to the player's choices have been celebrated as highlights from the game. Joe DeVader from Nintendo World Report noted purposely annoying Kitsuragi as some of the game's best interactions. PC Gamer's Jody Macgregor highlighted the autopsy sequence, explaining how Kitsuragi's approval was "delicious", likening it to an addictive drug. Eric Van Allen of Destructoid praised the moments of "small kindness" shared between Kitsuragi and Du Bois, when the player can allow Kitsuragi to correct a minor error without embarrassment. George Foster from RPG Site highlighted Kitsuragi's role in several of his game's favorite moments. Noting his complex behavior during a racist interaction in the game, Madeline Carpou described Kitsuragi as "one of the best representations of an Asian immigrant story I've seen in a video game" and an element of the character's overall popularity. Writing for TheGamer, Gab Hernandez discussed a small interaction where Kitsuragi reveals his sexuality to the player character in a "nonchalant" and "mundane" way, making him "one of the most iconic gay characters in video games".
A promotional booth at EGX London 2022 featured a portrait of Kitsuragi, which fans transformed into a tribute decorated with fan mail and fan art of the character. When ZA/UM released the Kitsuragi-themed bomber jacket, it was praised by Renata Price of Kotaku and Noelle Warner of Destructoid. Fans were more critical of the "Collage Mode", with some suggesting that it allowed fans to contradict Kitsuragi's character, while others accused ZA/UM of exploiting his popularity to distract from the studio's ongoing litigation against the game's creators.


Kitsuragi was nominated as one of the best video game characters of 2019 by Adventure Gamers and Fanbyte. Lillian King of The Blade also praised him as their favorite game character of the year, feeling that he was "[e]xceptionally well-written ... bolstered by a myriad of fleeting interactions that let players see into the detective's inner life, rounding out his complexity with the little contradictions that make us all truly, chaotically, human". When ranking characters from video games overall, Rowan Cardosa of TheGamer declared Kitsuragi to be one of gaming's best voiced characters, with fellow TheGamer writer Jaclyn Blute hailing him as one of gaming's best gay characters. Polygon included him in their 2024 Video Game Companion Hall of Fame, with Cass Marshall describing him as "the perfect straight man for Disco Elysium's disaster protagonist". He has also been proclaimed as one of the best companions in video games by both Comic Book Resources and Shacknews, with further acclaim from Edwin Evans-Thirlwell of Eurogamer calling him "perhaps the finest companion character in a game". Ted Litchfield at PC Gamer ranked Kitsuragi's platonic relationship to the player character as one of gaming's best romances, particularly because "you have to earn Kim's trust" and "it's something you can waste away, mak[ing] his approval all the more meaningful". The ZA/UM team was surprised by Kitsuragi's popularity and acclaim, with Kurvitz stating that they "felt he's a real person and our friend".


The Littlehampton libels were a series of letters sent to numerous residents of Littlehampton, in southern England, over a three-year period between 1920 and 1923. The letters, which contained obscenities and false accusations, were written by Edith Swan, a thirty-year-old laundress; she tried to incriminate her neighbour, Rose Gooding, a thirty-year-old married woman.
Swan and Gooding had once been friends, but after Swan made a false report to the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children accusing Gooding of maltreating one of her sister's children, the letters started arriving. Many of them were signed as if from Gooding. Swan brought a private prosecution against Gooding for libel; in December 1920 Gooding was found guilty and imprisoned for two weeks. On her release the letters started again, and Swan brought a second private prosecution against Gooding. In February 1921 Gooding was again found guilty and imprisoned for twelve months.
While Gooding was in prison, two notebooks were found in Littlehampton. They contained further obscenities and falsehoods and were in the same handwriting as the letters. As a result, Gooding's case came to the attention of the Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Archibald Bodkin, who thought that there had been a miscarriage of justice. An investigation by Scotland Yard cleared Gooding of involvement in sending the letters and she was released from prison. When the letters started up again, the focus of police attention moved to Swan and she was put under surveillance. She was seen to drop a libellous letter and prosecuted in December 1921. Despite the evidence against her, the judge intervened in the prosecution's questioning and the case collapsed.
In early 1922 the letters began arriving again. By October the police and detectives from the General Post Office (GPO) were involved, all targeting Swan. GPO detectives caught Swan sending another libellous letter in June 1923. She was arrested, found guilty and imprisoned for a year. In 2023 a film about the events, Wicked Little Letters, was released; it stars Olivia Colman as Swan and Jessie Buckley as Gooding. A similar case of libellous letters being sent over several years was reported in 2024, in the village of Shiptonthorpe, East Yorkshire; parallels were observed with the events at Littlehampton.


Littlehampton, Sussex (now West Sussex), was a town of 11,000 people in the 1920s. It is on England's south coast at the mouth of the River Arun; the town includes a small port which received shipping from northern Europe and served as the home port for a fishing fleet. The town was also a thriving seaside resort. Rose and Bill Gooding lived in a rented cottage at 45 Western Road, Littlehampton. Bill was from Kent and had met Rose when he worked on barges on Sussex's River Ouse between Newhaven harbour and Lewes. She had a child, Dorothy, from a previous relationship. The couple married in Lewes in 1913 when Rose was twenty-two and he was thirty-four; they moved to Littlehampton in 1916. By 1920 the couple had a son, William. They lived in Western Road with Rose's sister, Ruth Russell and her children, Gertrude, William and Albert. Although Ruth's children had been born out of wedlock and she never married, she called herself "Mrs Russell", and she and Rose told people that her husband had died in the war. The historian Christopher Hilliard observes that at the time, unmarried mothers often referred to themselves as widows.
Rose and Bill were known to argue, and several people who knew her in Littlehampton described her as being hot-tempered. She was also known to swear frequently and was thought to be an odd character by several neighbours; she was described by a Littlehampton police constable as "rather an eccentric woman". Bill was described by one landlady as "a sober, hardworking man, who was, on one occasion only seen the worse for drink". Bill accused Rose of having an affair with another man while he was away at sea. She stayed at a neighbour's house for several days, after Bill had hit her and thrown her out of the family home; she showed the neighbour the bruises he inflicted. The couple argued and there was, according to Hilliard, "a persistent hum of conflict" between the two.
The Swan family were natives of Littlehampton and had lived at 47 Western Road for several years. Edith Swan was one of the thirteen children of Edward and Mary Ann Swan; the two parents and three of their offspring—Edith and two of her brothers—lived in the family home. The two brothers, aged 39 and 40, shared one of the bedrooms; Edith, aged 30, shared a room with her parents, both of whom were in their seventies. In 1921 Swan worked as a laundress; she had previously been a domestic servant, although she was dismissed after being accused of stealing some children's clothes. The matter was not referred to the police. According to the legal historian James Morton, Edith was highly regarded in the neighbourhood. She was engaged to Bert Boxall, a man from nearby Horsham; he had been a bricklayer before joining the army, and in 1921 he was serving in Mesopotamia.
Relations between Swan and Gooding were cordial when the Goodings first moved in. The historian Emily Cockayne describes Swan as ingratiating towards Gooding at first; Swan wrote out a recipe for marrow chutney and a knitting pattern for socks for her neighbour. She and Gooding would visit each other's houses and they lent household items between each other, including a bath, clothes and cooking equipment. The good relations between the neighbours lasted until 4 April 1920—Easter Sunday.


In May 1920 Swan wrote to the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), falsely accusing Gooding of maltreating one of Russell's children on Easter Sunday. Swan later recalled the incident to Littlehampton police, who recorded:


[Bill Gooding] took the baby away from her because she had been beating her sister's baby with the cane. He said he would not allow her to hit it with the cane. She accused Mr. Gooding of being the father of her sister's last baby.
An NSPCC inspector thought Swan's report was suspicious because of the level of detail it contained, but visited Littlehampton and interviewed the Goodings, Swan and other neighbours. None of the other neighbours corroborated Swan's claims. Rejecting the accusation, the investigator reported that he "found the home to be spotlessly clean and the children in a perfect state in every way".
Shortly after the visit, letters began arriving at the Swans' and people they knew and dealt with. These included Swan's laundry clients, the butcher, fishmonger, general store manager and dairy. The letters stated that Swan was a prostitute and said her family were drunkards. Many of the letters were signed "R—", "R. G.", "with Mrs. Gooding's compliments" and "Mrs R. E. Gooding". A letter was also sent to Boxall in Mesopotamia, stating that Constable Russell—who lived at 49 Western Road—had "gone away with Miss Swan who was expecting a baby by him". Boxall replied to Swan, breaking off the engagement. Sources differ about the eventual outcome of the relationship, with Hilliard stating that they were engaged once again after a few months, while Cockayne says that the relationship came to an end.
The letters were delivered in a variety of ways; some went through the post in the normal way, others were hand-delivered and some were posted without stamps, meaning the recipients had to pay for the delivery of the messages, which was the cost of the letter plus a fine from the Royal Mail. Some of the post was in the form of a letter, while others were written on postcards, meaning the message could be read by several people before it reached the recipient. A postcard was sent to the manager of the Beach Hotel, where Swan's brother Ernest worked. The message accused Ernest of theft from the hotel. Hilliard notes that this would have been seen by several other employees at the hotel before it reached the manager. The manager did not believe the note.


The letters continued to be received, including by Gooding's husband, who received two messages at his place of work. One said that Gooding was seeing other men at a previous employer's house, the second read "Ask your wife who she was with on Tuesday afternoon on the Common"; it was signed "V. G." A seaside postcard showing a woman in a bathing suit, and addressed to Bill was sent to the family home; it read "From your darling Sweetheart Philis". The Goodings took the libels—and the impact they had on Rose's reputation—seriously, and Bill went to many of those who received letters and asserted her innocence.


On 5 July 1920 Swan and her mother went to the justices of the peace, who advised her to seek advice from a solicitor. She visited Arthur Shelley, a local solicitor, the same day. Shelley wrote to Gooding to inform her of his involvement, then began his investigation. The letters continued, and Shelley also began receiving them. Gooding was summoned to a police court hearing, which took place in September 1920. Swan had brought a witness who swore he had seen Dorothy Gooding post a letter addressed to Swan. Swan claimed that she had seen Gooding drop one letter, which Swan then picked up and handed to her solicitor. Gooding was committed for trial and offered bail of £50, but the Goodings could not raise this, so she was sent to Portsmouth gaol for twelve weeks before her trial.
Gooding's case was heard at the Lewes assizes in December 1920, with Alexander Roche as judge. The prosecution provided no handwriting analysis to connect the letters to Gooding, something Roche criticised them for. Despite Gooding's persistent statements of innocence, the jury found her guilty and she was sentenced to fourteen days' imprisonment in Portsmouth. She was bound over to keep the peace for two years for which she had to pay £20 surety.


No libellous letters were received while Gooding was in prison, but two weeks after she was released, they began again. In early January 1921 Swan went to the police and complained that the letters had restarted. The police phoned Edward Wannop, Gooding's solicitor, who met Bill Gooding and informed him of the new letters; the two men agreed to send Rose to stay with her mother in Lewes. Neither of the Goodings had realised that the letters had begun again, and Rose left Littlehampton that day. For two weeks Bill, the children and Russell conducted a charade of pretending Rose was in the house to try and trick the Swans into thinking she was still in Littlehampton. The family would call out to Rose, the children said goodbye to her as they left for school, and any delivery men were told that she was upstairs with a headache. To build up proof that she was in Lewes, Rose was instructed to write home regularly so that they had a collection of letters with Lewes postmarks to prove where she was.
On 12 February 1921 Swan claimed to have received two letters, one addressed to "Bloody buggering old Russell", the other to "Bloody old whore Miss Swan". She gave the first to Constable Russell and took the second to her solicitor. Three days later Gooding was arrested and committed to the March assizes in Lewes; bail was not granted. The judge for the case was Horace Avory. When the jury retired to consider a verdict, they returned after eight minutes to request a sample of Gooding's handwriting; Avory said they would not be able to obtain one at this stage of the case. After further consideration the jury provided a verdict of guilty on what Cockayne describes as "weak circumstantial evidence". Gooding was sentenced to twelve months in prison with hard labour. The Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Archibald Bodkin later said he thought Avory's decision to refuse the request about handwriting was "astonishing", given it was in "a case which, from its commencement to the end of it, was a case of handwriting".
In April Gooding tried to appeal the verdict, but the application was dismissed as there were no new grounds. Bill Gooding wrote several times to the Home Secretary requesting that the case be reopened and Rose protested to the prison governor that she was innocent. Their attempts made no headway in either obtaining her release or a further trial.

More letters and a second court action, January to April 1921


In April 1921 a notebook containing obscene wording was found on Selbourne Road, which ran parallel to Western Road. It was posted anonymously to Inspector Thomas of Littlehampton police. The handwriting was the same as that of the notes. That same week a red exercise book was found in Littlehampton; it included the name of Gooding's eleven-year-old daughter in several places, and contained what Bodkin described as "filthy expressions concerning Miss Swan and in the same handwriting as the torn book of the libels". Thomas sent both books to Bodkin, who concluded that, with Gooding in prison, it was unlikely that she was responsible for the two notebooks. He considered the possibility that Gooding "has so arranged, when imprisoned on the latter occasion, that the torn book, and the red book, should be discovered so as to give rise to the observation that somebody else was responsible and not she herself". To ensure this was not the case, the governor of Portsmouth prison was asked if Gooding could have smuggled the books out of prison; the answer was no, and the governor added a note that he did not think her guilty.
Bodkin passed the file on Gooding's case to the Home Office lawyer Sir Ernley Blackwell, who noted "I have very little doubt that this woman has twice been wrongly convicted". Correspondence between Superintendent Peel of West Sussex police and A. S. Williams, the chief constable of West Sussex, showed that Sussex police still considered Gooding the guilty party; in particular, they would not entertain any suggestion that Swan could be guilty. In June 1921 Peel reported to Williams that:

Scotland Yard involvement, April to July 1921


I have made enquiries respecting the character of Miss Swan and find that she bears a very good character, She is a very hard working woman, and what I have seen of her I do not think that she would write such things about herself and send them through the post on post cards for every one to see, Mrs Gooding and her sister ... have both had illegitimate children.
Bodkin, needing an impartial investigator for the matter, requested assistance from the Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard, who provided Inspector George Nicholls. Nicholls interviewed twenty-nine people connected to the case, and spoke to many others. He travelled to Worthing—where former constable Russell had moved after retiring. He also went to Lewes, to ascertain if Gooding had been staying there in January 1921; he came away satisfied that she had been there for two weeks without leaving. Nicholls later described Swan as "not only a peculiar woman in appearance and behaviour, but would seem to have a remarkable memory—especially for filthy phrases—for she has apparently got these letters by heart and is enabled to reel them off without any hesitation".
When he had finished his investigation, Nicholls had three main suspects: Swan, her father and Ruth Russell. He obtained handwriting samples from all of them and obtained their National Registration forms that British civilians had to complete during the First World War. Nicholls also searched the Swans' and Goodings' houses and found, at the Swans' house, several sheets of blotting-paper. One of these contained the word "Local" in the same handwriting as the libels; when Nicholls asked Swan about it, she said that Gooding and Russell had both borrowed blotting-paper from her. Bill Gooding and Russell both denied ever having borrowed it from her. Nicholls compared the paper with some of the examples of the libels, and found a matching part of an address on a letter dated 1 January 1921; this was six months after Swan had loaned any paper to Gooding. Nicholls reported back to Bodkin that neither Gooding's handwriting or spelling was similar to that in the libels; he stopped short of suggesting Swan should be charged.
In July 1921 an appeal was heard before the Court of Criminal Appeal; Travers Humphreys was the barrister appearing on behalf of Gooding. He told the court that he was appearing having been personally instructed by the Attorney General and that the appeal had the approval of the Home Secretary; the court quashed both of Gooding's convictions without hearing any of the evidence. Gooding was granted £250 in compensation.


After Constable Russell had retired and moved to Worthing, his police cottage was let to Violet and Constable George May; Violet and Edith became friends. In September the Mays soon began receiving libellous notes. One was addressed "To fucking old whore May, 49, Western Rd, Local" and the message read "You and your fucking whore neybor [sic] can throw as many jeers as you like but God will punish you you foxy ass piss country whores." Another read "You bloody fucking flaming piss country whores go and fuck your cunt. Its your drain that stinks not our fish box. Yo fucking dirty sods. You are as bad as your whore neybor." Swan told Violet that Gooding was responsible, but Violet doubted that this was the case; she passed the notes to her husband. Littlehampton police assigned Policewoman Gladys Moss to investigate the matter.
On 27 September Moss was undertaking surveillance from a shed when she saw Swan drop a letter into the courtyard shared by the Swans, Mays and Goodings; Violet was also a witness to Swan dropping the letter. Violet retrieved the note, which was written as if by Gooding; it contained obscenities and accusations against Swan and one of her brothers. Moss confronted Swan about the letter, who denied it was hers. Moss went to the police station; ten minutes later Swan arrived and changed her story, saying she picked it up, saw the writing and threw it down again. While waiting for the inspector to return, Moss recalled that Swan "was moving her mouth as if she were talking to herself the whole of the time". When the inspector arrived, Swan changed her story again, saying she saw the paper, but did not know it had any writing on it. The police took no action at the time.
Over the next few weeks, during the night, the Mays found their bins were being disturbed and their garden allotment was vandalised. Moss continued her surveillance, but no new events were noted over the next two weeks. On 8 October Moss, Thomas and Williams travelled to London for a meeting with Nicholls and Bodkin. Nicholls then travelled to Littlehampton and interviewed several individuals connected to the case, including the Mays and Moss. Nicholls' report to Bodkin led to Swan being charged on 21 October with obscene libel for "unlawfully writing and publishing a certain false, scandalous and defamatory libel of and concerning one Violet May".
Swan's committal hearing was heard on 27 October at Arundel Town Hall; she was committed to trial at the Lewes assizes on 8 December 1921 with Sir Clement Bailhache as the judge; Humphreys was the prosecuting barrister. Part of Swan's defence was that Moss only had a limited view of the area from her hiding place, and it was possible that a third party could have thrown the paper into the courtyard. During the defence questioning, it was stated that Swan had never been known to swear; the judge interrupted Humphreys' questioning to ask if he intended to continue, saying "If I were on the jury, I should refuse to convict." Given such a steer from the judge, Humphreys did not continue and the case collapsed. Hilliard observes that despite all the evidence against her, Bailhache must have been convinced to exonerate Swan because she appeared to be incapable of committing such a crime.

More letters and the focus on Swan, July to December 1921


Although there was a hiatus in the libellous letters being sent in Littlehampton, they recommenced in early 1922. By October 1922 a large number of such letters had been received; recipients included many of those who had been included in the court cases, including a magistrate, court officials, members of the police and those who provided bail for both Swan and Gooding. The notes were also addressed to other residents of Littlehampton. One recipient, Caroline Johnson, was accused of being a prostitute. Johnson assaulted Gooding, pulling her hair and hitting her in the face, knocking her unconscious to the floor. On 17 October she was fined £1 for the assault, an amount Hilliard describes as modest, although it was double the amount another woman was fined for a similar offence that day. Frederick Peel, the former superintendent, but by then the deputy chief constable of West Sussex, was present at the case and Bill Gooding overheard him saying that he still believed Rose was responsible for the letters.
By mid-1923 the police and the General Post Office (GPO) had decided to act. The GPO detectives developed a strategy that targeted Swan. They marked stamps with invisible ink, which they supplied to the local sub-post office; the owners were instructed to only sell these to Swan, which they did on 23 June. A post box thought to be used by Swan was kept under surveillance and the Post Office staff were instructed to look out for any mail Swan posted in the inside box. The GPO detectives had what Hilliard describes as "a periscope mirror" that allowed a user to view inside postboxes to look at any letters that had been posted; they could also watch the entrance to the Post Office while remaining out of sight. On 24 June Swan was seen posting two letters in the inside postbox. The postmaster caught the letters as they were posted and handed them to the detective. While one was to Swan's sister, the other was addressed to the local sanitary inspector; it was shown to contain obscene words. A second GPO detective went to Swan's house and brought her back to the post office. Swan was cautioned and the contents of the letter and marked stamp were shown to her; she replied "I have no explanation to offer other than that I am not guilty either of writing or posting any letters to the Sanitary Inspector". On 4 July 1923 Peel and Thomas went to Swan's house and charged her under Section 63 of the Post Office Act with "attempting to send a postal packet which had thereon words of an indecent, obscene, and grossly offensive character".

Swan's second court case, January 1922 to December 1923


Swan's committal hearing was held at Arundel Town Hall on 11 July 1923. Swan chose to reserve her defence; she was committed to trial. Bail was fixed at £25 and two sureties of £25. As these were not paid, Swan was held in custody until the trial. Swan's case opened at Lewes assizes on 18 July. Humphreys appeared for the prosecution again and Avory was again the judge. Swan swore her innocence throughout the trial, despite the evidence against her. Avory's thirty-minute summary was in Swan's favour, and he noted that she was a clean and upright woman, but the jury found her guilty. She was sentenced to twelve months in prison. In his 1946 memoirs, Humphreys considered Swan to be


... the perfect witness. Neat and tidy in appearance, polite and respectful in her answer, with just that twinge of feeling to be expected in a person who knows herself to be a victim of circumstances ... She completely took in three juries and two judges.
Swan soon appealed, and this was held on 13 August 1923 at the Court of Criminal Appeal in London. The matter was considered by Lord Hewart, the Lord Chief Justice; Sir Arthur Salter and Sir Rigby Swift. They declined the appeal. In December 1923 she petitioned the Home Office both for a reduction in sentence and for her release on the grounds she was innocent. Four days later the Home Office responded saying there would be no action taken and Swan served her full sentence.
Hilliard observes that the small matter of insulting letters being sent in Littlehampton resulted in four trials and two appeals, and involved the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Lord Chief Justice. This, Hilliard suggests, was because of the assumptions made on the basis of the social values held by many of the officials involved. These values saved Swan from a conviction, despite eyewitness testimony from Moss. Hilliard considers that "Edith Swan personified the respectable, respectful victim of circumstances; Rose Gooding's 'roughness', illegitimate child and heterodox family licensed people to think her capable of writing the offensive letters".


According to Cockayne, Rose was a changed person after her ordeal. She suffered from insomnia and was "unable to pick up the thread of her life". Even after Swan's conviction Gooding continued to encounter hostility and was marginalised by the community. The Goodings moved house away from Western Road and into the centre of Littlehampton; Bill died there in 1947, aged sixty-eight. Rose lived until December 1968, when she died at her daughter's home in East Dean, a village near Eastbourne, East Sussex. Swan died in a council-run residential home—a former workhouse—in March 1959, at the age of sixty-eight.
In August 1975 many of the houses on Western Road—including numbers 45, 47 and 49—were designated Grade II listed buildings, providing the properties with protection from unauthorised demolition or unsympathetic modification.
The film Wicked Little Letters was released in 2023. Based on the events of Littlehampton, the film stars Olivia Colman as Swan and Jessie Buckley as Gooding. In 2024 it was reported that a similar case of anonymously sent offensive or obscene letters was experienced by some residents of Shiptonthorpe, East Yorkshire; parallels were drawn with the events in Littlehampton. In Shiptonthorpe, the letters were sent over a period of two years.


Logan, a Family History is a Gothic novel of historical fiction by American writer John Neal. Published anonymously in Baltimore in 1822, the book is loosely inspired by the true story of Mingo leader Logan the Orator, while weaving a highly fictionalized story of interactions between Anglo-American colonists and Indigenous peoples on the western frontier of colonial Virginia. Set just before the Revolutionary War, it depicts the genocide of Native Americans as the heart of the American story and follows a long cast of characters connected to each other in a complex web of overlapping love interests, family relations, rape, and (sometimes incestuous) sexual activity.
Logan was Neal's second novel, but his first notable success, attracting generally favorable reviews in both the US and UK. He wrote the story over a six-to-eight-week stretch at a time when he was producing more novels and juggling more responsibilities than any other period of his life. Likely a commercial failure for the publisher, who refused to work with Neal in the future, the book nevertheless saw three printings in the UK. Scholars criticize the story's profound excessiveness and incoherence, but praise its pioneering and successful experimentation with psychological horror, verisimilitude, sexual guilt in male characters, impacts of intergenerational violence, and documentation of interracial relationships and intersections between sex and violence on the American frontier.
These experimentations influenced later American writers and foreshadowed fiction by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Robert Montgomery Bird, and Edgar Allan Poe. The novel is considered important by scholars studying the roles of Gothic literature and Indigenous identities in fashioning an American national identity. It advanced the American literary nationalist goal of developing a new native literature by experimenting with natural diction, distinctly American characters, regional American colloquialism, and fiercely independent rhetoric. It is considered unique amongst contemporary fiction for the preponderance of sexually explicit content and gratuitous violence.


The story begins in the colony of Virginia in 1774. Mingo chief Logan enters the chamber of the governor of Virginia and overpowers him. The governor is saved by Harold, a young man of mixed English and Indigenous descent who lives among the Mingo. Harold impregnates the half-asleep governor's wife Elvira, who is infatuated with Logan and finds Harold similarly attractive.
The Virginia Governor's Council meets with Native Americans; Logan demands a treaty and decries the Yellow Creek massacre by white frontiersmen from Virginia. Suspicious of Logan's Indigenous identity, Mohawks realize he is actually an English aristocrat from Salisbury named George Clarence. They follow and attack him in the woods. Logan escapes, seriously injured.
The governor learns about Harold's sexual relationship with Elvira and banishes him to the woods. There he meets Logan and the two realize they are both in love with a Mingo woman named Loena. They threaten each other, then realize Logan is Harold's father. Logan dies after securing a promise from Harold that he will lead the Mingos to "pursue the whites to extermination, day and night, forever and ever".
Harold arranges a funeral for Logan, though his body has disappeared. The funeral is attacked by Native Americans, who injure both Harold and Elvira. They reveal romantic feelings for each other, though Elvira is unconsciously attracted to Harold as a surrogate for her attraction to Logan. Harold decides to leave Virginia, but stays for Elvira. He visits her at night and the two have sex, leaving Harold racked with remorse, and running to Loena for consolation.
Harold leads the Mingo into battle against a combined force of Mohawks and British colonists. He is reunited with Loena and convinces her to join him on a trip to Europe to prepare himself for leadership of the Mingo tribe. They start by traveling to Quebec City, where Loena remains, parting with Harold on poor terms after she learns about his relationship with Elvira.
While sailing to Europe, Harold is haunted by his own thoughts of Loena and meets a child named Leopold, who grows attached to him. Harold also meets an intellectual genius named Oscar, who has long conversations with Harold, opining on capital punishment, religious freedom, American slavery, moral double standards, ancient societies, and Shakespeare. Harold witnesses him leaping overboard in a crazed fit over a former lover. Harold then learns that Elvira is on board, that Leopold is her son, and his as well. Harold was originally traveling to France, but decides to accompany her and Leopold to England, where he discovers his familial connections to British nobility.
Harold learns that his father left behind children in England and moved to North America to live a double life as Logan. Harold meets his sister Caroline and learns that Oscar was his brother and Loena is his sister. Oscar, Harold learns, was crazed by the belief that he murdered Elvira, who was once his lover. Leopold dies. Harold confesses to Elvira that he loves another woman and she confesses to him that she has loved him for his resemblance to Oscar.
Harold champions the cause of Native Americans before the British Parliament before he and Elvira return to North America. Just before they are married, Harold leaves Elvira for Loena, but learns that Loena is in love with Oscar, who did not die, but was rescued after jumping ship in the Atlantic. On a moonlit night, all four visit the spot where Harold met Logan and where the latter died. Harold is shot by a figure in the distance, who turns out to be Logan, who is still alive, but delirious. Upon learning that he has killed his son, Logan cries out, then is killed by Oscar, his other son. Loena kisses Harold's corpse and dies. Elvira confesses to Oscar her sexual history with Harold and Oscar goes mad, then dies. The narrator ends by asking English readers to "acknowledge us, as we are, the strongest (though boastful and arrogant) progeny of yourselves ... when your nation was a colossus".


John Neal wrote Logan as white American authors were beginning to look toward American Indians as a dominant source of inspiration. Scholars have pointed to the way Logan can be understood as portraying Indians as the originators of American nationhood, with white Americans as the inheritors of that legacy. Harold calling for America's Indigenous nations to unify against British colonization seemingly parallels calls by Anglo-Americans for revolution just a few years after the novel takes place. The historical Logan was an Indigenous leader of the Mingo people, but the Logan of Logan is revealed to be an English aristocrat assuming an Indigenous identity, suggesting that such an identity can be assumed by one's will. Once assumed, Indigenous identity can be used to differentiate white Americans from the British in a manner similar to that used by instigators of the Boston Tea Party or the Improved Order of Red Men. This would place Patriot colonists as inheritors of Indigenous territory for the making of the new American nation.
Scholars see Neal's blurring of racial boundaries in family relationships as a testament to humanity's commonality. This interpretation is reinforced by the characters' habit of confusing identities: Elvira mistakes Harold for Oscar, Harold mistakes Elvira for Leona, and Harold and Oscar are fashioned as character doubles. It was common in nineteenth-century literature to portray American Indians as vanishing to make way for a new American national identity. This novel's uncommonly excessive and incoherent narrative could be Neal's way of indicating the contradiction inherent in this portrayal. In this view, Neal's national identity of the new United States is neither Indigenous nor white, but both. Writing interracial relationships and sexual fantasies into a novel in 1822 was taboo, and this pioneering effort foreshadowed future works by Nathaniel Hawthorne and other American authors.
Harold being of mixed ancestry, exploring both his Indigenous identity in America and his English roots overseas, may also be a tool for Neal to question the emerging concept of manifest destiny and to paint the US as a multinational, cosmopolitan nation with permeable boundaries. Acknowledging the contradictory reality of racial separation in the US may be Neal's reason for ending the novel with disaster and death for all major characters: "a place of broken hearts, and shattered intellects", as he states in the novel. The novel's Gothic depiction of the genocide of Native Americans as central to the American story can be seen as an indictment of American imperialism. Logan's lack of coherence and cohesiveness may reflect Neal's disdain for institutional structures generally and his belief that the US, like all nations, has a finite lifespan. Alternatively, it may be that Neal meant for this mass death scene at the novel's conclusion to symbolize the American Revolution's function of renewing various colonial-era allegiances into a single American nation.


When he was temporarily living with the family of his business partner in 1818, Neal snuck into the bedroom of that business partner's sister, and into her bed. She cried out and Neal returned to his room before her family came to her assistance. This event, alternately described by scholars as either a failed seduction or an attempted rape, was fictionalized in different forms in all of Neal's four novels published between 1822 and 1823. The theme of sexual guilt running through all four novels is seen as Neal processing this personal trauma. In Logan, this materialized as the dream-like and questionably-consensual sex scene between Harold and Elvira, leaving the protagonist shrouded in intense sexual guilt, which he considers ending with suicide, but then channels into a war he leads against the Mohawk and British colonists. This is one of multiple instances of male protagonists in Neal's novels committing sexual crimes and dealing with consequences that scholars Benjamin Lease and Hans-Joachim Lang claim "reflect a sophisticated awareness on Neal's part of male chauvinism in a male-dominated world". The preponderance of complicated sexual activity and love triangles between related characters can also be interpreted as supporting the theme of American national disunity. This explicitly sexual content, sometimes interracial, and exhibiting both men and women as sexually motivated, is unique for the period and likely influenced Hawthorne's focus on sexual guilt in his fiction.


Like many of Neal's novels, Logan exhibits stylistic choices meant to advance American literary nationalism: natural diction, distinctly American characters, regional American colloquialism, and rhetoric of independence. This is made explicit in the preface: "I hate prefaces. I hate dedications. Enough ... to say, that here is an American story". This rejection of the preface's customary purpose can be read as a rejection of British literary convention that Neal sought in order to form a distinctly American literature. Possibly to point out the absurdity of American novelists employing British Gothic conventions, he included those conventions only while the story had moved to England in the second volume.
Logan represents Neal's effort to Americanize the Gothic style, otherwise associated with British literature, by rejecting British conventions and developing new ones based on America's history of racial persecution. In a nation bereft of ancient architecture, Neal uses natural landmarks as witnesses to colonial violence. Neal was inspired by the "haunted elm" in Charles Brockden Brown's novel Edgar Huntly (1799) as a Gothic American natural landmark. Logan advanced the device by using a haunted tree visited by Harold that has stood witness to violence since long before recorded or oral histories, but most recently, that which has been committed by Anglo-American colonizers against Native Americans. These Gothic devices foreshadowed future works by American authors: intermingling romance and violence in American border regions in Nick of the Woods (1837) by Robert Montgomery Bird; impacts of crimes by the father on the life of the son in multiple works by Hawthorne; and maniacal psychology in multiple works by Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe, particularly Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.
Scholar Theresa A. Goddu refers to the novel as "Neal's wildest gothic experiment", which relies heavily on gratuitous and incessant descriptions of violence: scalping, murder, hatred, rape, and incest. This was unique for the period and was matched neither by Brown, Neal's inspiration in this regard, or by Poe, his best-known immediate successor. The novel's conclusion, according to scholar Lillie Deming Loshe, is "an epidemic of death and insanity". This brand of Gothicism also relies on loose structure and unrestrained emotional intensity to the point of incoherence. Neal avoided dialogue tags "said he" and "said she" whenever possible to heighten the sense of immediacy in characters' actions. His repetitive statements at moments of emotional intensity are what scholar Jonathan Elmer refers to as "spastic iteration", as in: "Yes, I saw him ... alone, alone! All, all alone!" and "Not dead!—no, no, not dead!—not dead!" Neal used dashes of variable lengths, varying types of ellipses, and abundant parentheses, italics, and exclamations to excite and exhaust the reader. Scholars have referred to these techniques as resulting in "off-putting disjointedness", "melancholic Byronism", and a "hyperkinetic and sometimes hyperbolic sense of energy". In his 877-page study of American literature from the Revolutionary War through 1940, scholar Alexander Cowie found that only Bird's The Hawks of Hawk Hollow (1835) could compare with Logan's level of incoherence. Neal himself warned readers: "It should be taken, as people take opium. A grain may exhilarate—more may stupify—much will be death."


Stylistically, Logan bears the influence of Wieland (1798) and Edgar Huntly (1799) by Charles Brockden Brown, whom Neal saw as his literary father and one of only two American authors beside himself who by 1825 had successfully contributed toward developing a distinctively American literature. However, Neal drew the novel's core concept from "Logan's Lament", a speech delivered after the conclusion of Lord Dunmore's War by an American Indian figure referred to variably as Logan or Ta-gah-jute. The speech was first published in 1775, but made famous by Notes on the State of Virginia by Thomas Jefferson in 1787. It was commonly known by Neal's childhood, but his attention may have been directed to it by the epic poem Logan, an Indian Tale (1821) by Samuel Webber (1797–1880). Neal likely believed the speech to be genuine when he wrote the novel, though in 1826 he called its provenance into question, referring to it in The London Magazine as "altogether a humbug".


Neal wrote Logan in Baltimore during the busiest part of his life between the bankruptcy of his dry goods business in 1816 and his departure for England in 1823. He spent between six and eight weeks writing it, finishing on November 17, 1821. By March 1822 he had written three more novels, which he considered "a complete series; a course of experiment" in declamation (Logan), narrative (Seventy-Six), epistolary (Randolph), and colloquialism (Errata). This was the most productive period of Neal's life as a novelist, shortly after he passed the bar and began practicing law in 1820. Whereas Keep Cool (1817) was his first serious attempt at producing literature, Logan was published after Neal had gained a considerable reputation as an author and critic, and had worked for years on refining his theory of poetry to the point that he came to see the novel as the highest form of literature, able to communicate a poetic prose superior to formal poetry.
Between the two novels, Neal labored for years reading law and supporting himself with other literary ventures: the epic poem Battle of Niagara (1818), the index to the first twelve volumes of Niles' Weekly Register (1818), the play Otho (1819), and the nonfiction History of the American Revolution (1819), as well as serving as the editor and daily columnist for the daily newspaper Federal Republican and Baltimore Telegraph for about half of 1819. Neal also actively advocated many reform issues at the time and used his novels to express his opinions. In Logan, he supported the rights of American Indians and condemned debtors' prisons, slavery, and capital punishment. His depiction of public executions in the novel may have factored into the national movement to remove them to private settings. He also attacked lotteries in the novel, depicting them as mechanisms for robbing the poor.
Neal published the novel anonymously, but hinted at his authorship in Blackwood's Magazine in 1825, saying he could neither "acknowledge or deny" the claim. In his 1830 anonymously-published novel Authorship, the protagonist refers to Logan as the product of Carter Holmes, the pen name he used for Blackwood's. Neal's anonymously-published novel Seventy-Six is credited to "the author of Logan". When Logan was republished in 1840, it was credited to "the author of Seventy-Six".


In 1821, Neal approached well-known Philadelphia-based publishers Carey and Lea with the manuscript of Logan. They delayed publication for months because of printing issues and their own reservations concerning the novel's profanity, "wildness", and "incoherence", which they claimed made the story "not well calculated for the novel readers of our day". The first edition was released in two volumes in April 1822. Published five years after Keep Cool, Logan was Neal's second novel, but his first of notable success. It was pirated in London three times: under the original title by A. K. Newman and Company in 1823 and as Logan, the Mingo Chief. A Family History by J. Cunningham in 1840 and 1845. It was Neal's first novel published outside the US and the only one ever published abroad more than once. Despite the considerable influence it had on successive generations of American writers, Logan was never republished in the US. Carey and Lea refused to publish anything else by Neal, likely because of the novel's poor sales. Neal nevertheless enjoyed encouragement enough to continue his career as a novelist.


Logan received generally favorable criticism in both the US and UK, though British reviews were more often mixed in praising it as the work of a genius while criticizing it as erratic. Philadelphia journalist Stephen Simpson issued ecstatic praise: "In all the productions of the human understanding, that we have ever heard of ... we remember nothing, we know of nothing, we can conceive of nothing equal to this romance." Comparing to Neal's chief rival, James Fenimore Cooper, Simpson expresses "astonishment that the still life of the Pioneers, should be read and applauded in the same age that produced Logan!" A British journalist in The Literary Gazette made a similar comparison to Cooper, noting that Logan and Neal's subsequent novels Seventy-Six and Brother Jonathan are "three of about as extraordinary works as ever appeared—full of faults, but still full of power; if we except these, there is no rival near Mr. Cooper's throne." The British Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review praised Neal's lifelike depiction of Indigenous dialogue and claimed that Logan "possesses considerable interest, and the work will be no discredit to the shelves of a modern circulating library". The British Magazine of Foreign Literature claimed that the novel failed because of its rejection of established British literary conventions:


It would be difficult, indeed, to guess what end he purposed to accomplish by his singular work. It could not be to amuse his readers, because it is intelligible; if he wished to frighten them he has failed of his end, for he only makes them laugh ... We laugh not with him, but at him. His style is the most singular that can be imagined—it is like the raving of a bedlamite. There are words in it, but no sense ... We have taken some pains to inquire who the author may be, but without success;—it is, perhaps, as well that we are in ignorance of his name; the knowledge must be painful, as we have no doubt that the poor gentleman is at this time suffering the wholesome restraint of a straw cell and a strait waistcoat. If he is not, there is no justice in America.
Neal's self-criticism acknowledges the novel's fatal excesses. The preface to Seventy-Six (1823) bemoans Logan's "rambling incoherency, passion, and extravagance" and expresses Neal's hope (writing anonymously) that he showed improvement with that novel. His next (also anonymously-published) novel after that, Randolph (1823), includes this criticism of Logan from the protagonist: "Nobody can read it through, deliberately, as novels are to be read. You are fagged and fretted to death, long and long before you foresee the termination." Two years after that, he wrote under an English pen name in American Writers: "Logan is full of power–eloquence–poetry–instinct ... Yet so crowded—so incoherent— ... so outrageously overdone, that no-body can read it through. Parts are without parallel for passionate beauty;—power of language: deep tenderness, poetry—yet every page ... is rank with corruption—the terrible corruption of genius." Writing under his own name in his autobiography almost a half century later, he called Logan "a wild, passionate, extravagant affair with some ... of the most eloquent and fervid writing I was ever guilty of, either in prose or poetry".


The majority of modern scholars agree that Logan is too incoherent to enjoy. Cowie found the novel confusing for all of Neal's attempts at exuding high energy and emotion. Biographer Irving T. Richards felt similarly about the novel's excessive Gothic features and added that he considered the characters unrealistic: "They are swept by emotional waves over which they have no control and for which they are not accountable." Scholar Fritz Fleischmann feels the novel is "oversized and excessive" and full of "lacerating thoughts [that] pass by the reader, often without much rhyme or reason." Biographer Benjamin Lease dubs it "an incoherent failure" of "high pitched absurdity" with "scarcely a plot". Authors of the Literary History of the United States claimed Neal must have been too busy with his law studies and other simultaneous literary pursuits to be original: "He snatched high-minded villains from Godwin and low-minded heroes from Byron, then sent them roaring and murdering through the hackneyed routines of cheap melodramas". Literary historian Fred Lewis Pattee, who collected a series of Neal's literary criticism for publication in 1937, remarked on Neal's rapidity in drafting novels like Logan: "Two-volume novels thrown off in a month! Hard to believe—until one reads the novels."
Scholars Edward Carlson and David J. Carlson nevertheless claim Logan to be one of Neal's four best novels. Richards felt that its plot structure showed a clear improvement over Neal's first novel, Keep Cool, with better use of characters, tone, structure, and suspense. Cowie felt that there was particular strength in the novel's psychological horror that foreshadowed later works by Poe. Arthur Hobson Quinn felt similarly, pointing to the fact that the publishers were challenged to prove that the novel was not a copy of the celebrated William Godwin, because Godwin's novel The Pirate was published just months prior. Goddu went further to say that those Gothic elements surpassed anything by either Poe or Brown. Also comparing to Neal's peers, scholar Philip F. Gura called the novel "remarkable" for documenting the historic reality of interracial relationships that contemporaries like Cooper avoided. Fleischmann praised Logan's verisimilitude: "Spurning the adornments of past literary styles, it succeeds by spontaneity ..., by recreating the tumble of emotions present in real life."


Marriage License is an oil painting by American illustrator Norman Rockwell created for the cover of the June 11, 1955, edition of The Saturday Evening Post. It depicts a young man and woman filling out a marriage license application at a government building in front of a bored-looking clerk. The man is dressed in a tan suit and has his arm around his partner, who is wearing a yellow dress and standing on tiptoe to sign her name. Although the room and its furnishings are dark, the couple are illuminated by the window beside them. The contrast between the couple and the clerk highlights two reoccurring themes in Rockwell's works: young love and ordinary life.
Rockwell had a long history of using people who lived near him as models. He used photographs of local shopkeeper Jason Braman; Stockbridge, Massachusetts, native Joan Lahart; and her fiancé Francis Mahoney as a reference while creating the painting. Lahart was suggested for the role by her sister Peggy, a nurse at the Austen Riggs Center where Mary Rockwell was receiving treatment. During the photo shoot, Braman was captured in a more natural and uninterested pose compared to the one envisioned by the artist. Rockwell liked it and used it for his painting instead.
Since its appearance in The Saturday Evening Post, the painting has been praised by critics and is considered one of Rockwell's best works. Commentators have compared it to the works of Johannes Vermeer due to Rockwell's use of light and dark. The 45.5 by 42.5 inches (116 cm × 108 cm) painting is in the collection of the Norman Rockwell Museum and has been a part of major exhibitions in 1955, 1972, and 1999. In 2004 Mad magazine published a parody of Marriage License by Richard William that used the original work to explore how same-sex marriage challenges the meaning of marriage and government role.


Marriage License is an oil painting on canvas measuring 45.5 by 42.5 inches (116 cm × 108 cm). It is set in a dark city hall office filled with bookshelves. The floor is strewn with used cigarettes and a brass spittoon. In the middle of the painting stand a young couple in front of a rolltop desk filling out their application for a marriage license. The man is wearing a tan suit and has his arm protectively around his fiancée. The woman wears a yellow dress with high heels but has to stand on her tiptoes to sign the document. Light from the open window beams down on the couple's faces.
A bored looking older man in a bow tie and waistcoat sits behind the desk, with a cat resting beside his chair. Rubber galoshes have been placed over his shoes. The wearied look on the clerk's face starkly contrasts with the excited couple. Behind the clerk, in the window, sits a single red geranium. On top of the bookshelf is an unfolded United States flag, thought by the Norman Rockwell Museum to be a sign that the couple has come in at the very end of the day. In the background a calendar gives the date as June 11, 1955, the date the painting appeared on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post.


Marriage License highlights two reoccurring themes in Norman Rockwell's works: the drab of ordinary life and the excitement of young love. The subject choice of a couple signing a marriage license, in private, rather than a public wedding was a deliberate one. Throughout his career, Rockwell consistently opted to show small moments of American life. Love is a topic that Rockwell explored extensively in paintings such as The Letterman (1938), Little Girl Observing Lovers on a Train (1944), Before the Date (1949), and The University Club (1960). Marriage License is one of the few times he directly addressed the theme post-World War II. The subject is amplified by the juxtaposition of the excited young couple next to the uninterested clerk. Depending on the side of the desk the painting is being viewed from, the day depicted in the painting is either run-of-the-mill or monumental.


Rockwell moved from Arlington, Vermont, to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, in 1953 to be close to his wife Mary, who was receiving psychiatric treatment at the Austen Riggs Center, and to receive therapy from Erik Erikson. He set up a studio and continued to paint illustrations for magazine covers and yearly Boy Scout calendars.
Starting in the 1930s Rockwell created his paintings from 50 to 100 reference photographs. The models for these were often drawn from the local community. Marriage License's three main figures – the young couple and the older man – are drawn from around Stockbridge. The office and surrounding buildings draw from both Johannes Vermeer's The Little Street and photographs of Stockbridge's town clerk's office.
In 1954 Rockwell approached Peggy Lahart, a nurse at the Riggs center, to pose for a painting depicting a bride-to-be. Peggy passed the opportunity to her younger sister Joan, who was engaged to Francis "Moe" Mahoney, a retired NBA player, in January 1955. After some prodding, Mahoney agreed to pose with his fiancée. For their photo shoot, Rockwell told the couple what to wear: a specific yellow summer dress with puffed sleeves for Lahart and a "light blue shirt and wingtips" for Mahoney. The dress had to be custom made as summerwear was impossible to buy in Stockbridge during winter. The couple were each paid $25 (equivalent to $290 in 2024) and received an oil sketch of the painting as a wedding gift.
The older man was modeled by Jason Braman, a shopkeeper in Stockbridge. Braman was chosen as the model because his wife had recently died. Rockwell originally positioned him sitting nearer the couple. During the photo shoot Braman relaxed and "slumped down" in the chair, a more natural pose Rockwell took a liking to and used for the final painting.


Using his collection of reference photographs, Rockwell composed a series of full-size sketches which were used to create a smaller final color study. A filing cabinet from the clerk's office made its way into a study but was removed in the final painting in favor of a potbelly stove to make the room look older. The final painting was created by transferring the sketch onto the canvas and painting over it. It took Rockwell just over a month to finish the painting, which was framed and then sent to The Saturday Evening Post. The Post had the painting color photographed. It was used to create four plates (blue, red, yellow, and black) which would be used to print a color reproduction.