Among the press coverage attracted by the Rites of Eleusis was a piece in an unpleasant paper called The Looking Glass, or, Things As They Are, edited by a man named West De Wend Fenton. It was a racing and gossip paper based in an upstairs office at 149 Fleet Street, with the telegram address ‘Fentonism’, and it seems to have dealt not only in scandal but literal blackmail, whereby someone on the receiving end of an exposé could pay not to have it taken further in subsequent issues. One issue had a cartoon occupying the entire front page, wishing readers a Happy New Year from The Looking Glass “or Grave Diggers Journal” and featuring a coffin titled “Reputations” with a bottle of champagne on top of it.
On October 29, 1910, The Looking Glass ran a facetious piece about the Rites entitled ‘An Amazing Sect’, following it up with two further instalments. By the third, the attack had extended to Crowley's friends Allan Bennett (“sham Buddhist monk… there were rumours of unmentionable immoralities which were carried on under their roof”) and George Cecil Jones, guilty of nothing more than being a named associate of Crowley. But given the overall drift of the articles that was enough, and Jones sued.
It was back to the Royal Courts of Justice, not far from the paper's office. In April 1911 the case of Jones v The Looking Glass Publishing Co Ltd. was heard before Lord Justice Scrutton. Jones brought the case, but it was Crowley's reputation that was on trial, and two old Golden Dawners – Dr Berridge,1 and MacGregor Mathers – appeared in court to help blacken it. Crowley (“a man of notoriously evil character”) was not called, although he lurked in court for the proceedings, nor did he bring any action against The Looking Glass himself. Jones lost.
As with Mathers's previous appearance in court, hostile barristers and the press had a field day. Crowley wrote a parody of the courtroom dialogues – only slightly more ridiculous than the real transcripts in The Times and elsewhere – entitled ‘The Rosicrucian Scandal’. And in reality the judge, Scrutton, found the whole case so bizarre that he said it was “getting very much like the trial in Alice in Wonderland”, a little joke chiming with Alice Through the Looking Glass. In fact it was more like that than he knew, because Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers was a relative of Alice Liddell, Lewis Carroll's original Alice.
Crowley might joke about the case – in his parody he has Mathers say Crowley is “an associate of the notorious Jones” – but the damage was done to his friendships with two of the most impressive men and magical comrades he had ever known, Jones and Fuller (Fuller had also resented receiving an envelope full of dirty postcards from Tangier, as he told Neuburg's biographer Jean Overton Fuller). Fuller considered Crowley a coward for not suing The Looking Glass for libel, and not defending himself in order to help Jones. He wrote him a last letter on 2 May, 1911, including the lines:
If you wish to hoorosh down on a fixed bayonet, like a howling dervish, well good, it really is no business of mine.
I am extremely sorry that Jones should be the sufferer for your want of pluck.
Outside the actual cost of the case I do not think he loses much, for modern journalism is so constructed that unless you happen to be Crippen or a Home Secretary, your identity within a week is lost in a Nirvana of senseless sensational headlines.
And finally, as a parting shot:
PS. I said the other day I admired your works. I do: but you have never written so fine a line as this of Blake's
“a little moony night and silence.”