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I thought it was... but you know how you start questioning yourself.
Example: "I met Gemma and I gave her my last Rolo."
Could be written: "I met Gemma, to whom I gave my last Rolo."
...and "He wanted to speak to the professor, so he arranged a meeting."
Could be: "He arranged a meeting with the professor, with whom he wanted to speak."
No problem with either of those. And with the second version of the sentences you can remix them into a slightly formal but reasonable-sounding question and answer, i.e. :
To whom did I give my last Rolo? Gemma.
With whom did he want to speak? The professor.
But "give" and "speak" are both verbs that (in this context) need a word like "to", "from", "with", etc. to make proper sense. "Tell" is direct, like "kiss" or "punch".
You'd never ask, "Whom did you want to kiss?" or "Whom punched that bloke?"
I don't know how far off the mark my logic is here, but I would have said that Tiny Nell's sentence would be either:
'Not even Gordon, to whom I had yet to confess my crime.'
or:
'Not even Gordon, who I had yet to tell about my crime.'
If I'm wrong about how this works and somebody can explain why, that would be great. I feel like I have a reasonable ear for grammar but I never learned the 'nuts and bolts' of it so everything's just based on observation.
We rarely, in ordinary speech, use the formal 'to whom'. As a result, that's creeping into written work, too. You have to go with what sounds right to you.
If, for instance, you are writing a historical novel (or an historical novel, indeed), you may want to use the more correct grammatical form to give a flavour of the speech of the time.
If you're writing a modern novel, you should stick to what's in common use.
'Nutsy yelled at the man at whom he was pointing the gun' is never going to work - it's not the flavour of the piece.
You'd never say 'Whom punched that bloke', Dan, because the first person referred to is the subject, not the object. 'That bloke' is the object - the man on the receiving end of the punch. You could say, 'That bloke, whom the other man punched' - but given that you're using 'bloke', which is informal, you'd use 'who'. 'Who punched that bloke': 'that bloke who the other man punched' - that's how you'd say it, in common everyday parlance, so that's probably how you'd write it, allowing for context.
Formal grammar - whom, as it is the object of the verb.
"She (subject) told (verb) him (object)"
"He (subject) told (verb) her (object)"
You would never say "She told he" (unless you are a farmer from the West Country!), so you use whom where you are referring to the object and would use him or her, regardless of type of verb.
Informal - if it sounds right it's Ok and hardly anyone uses whom in any circumstances now (apart from me and I am a pedant!)
She is soooo much better educated in these matters than I.
I'm sure I've got this wrong in things I've had published in the past, but then again I'd tend to avoid a construction like "She didn't know from whom the letter had come", in favour of the more direct "She didn't know who had sent the letter" - "whom had" would sound bizarre, although from the sounds of things it would be technically correct.
In each of your cases above you have a complex sentence, with an 'object clause' following the verb 'know' rather than a simple object.
She didn't know HIM - simple object
She didn't know 'from whom the letter had come' - object clause.
Think of 'The letter had come from him' (Letter=subject, him=object), so 'from whom the letter had come' is formally correct (though I agree that very few people would ever use it)
But: 'he had sent the letter' - in this case he is the subject of the verb 'sent' and the letter is the object, so 'who had sent the letter' is correct, not 'whom had'.
There are cases where 'whom had' would be correct (usually in a question and ugly with it!), but not this one!
(e.g. "I had sent someone to collect the letter"
"Whom had you sent?"
"I had sent Dan, as he seemed to be very interested in them."