Jack the Ripper and the London Press 9780300133691

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1. The Whitechapel Murders: A Chronicle
Chapter 2. Images and Realities of the East End
Chapter 3. The Theory and Practice of Victorian Journalism
Chapter 4. Sensation News
Chapter 5. Victorian Murder News
Chapter 6. The First Two Murders
Chapter 7. The Double Event
Chapter 8. The Pursuit of Angles
Chapter 9. The Kelly Reportage
Chapter 10. The Inquests: Reporting the Female Body
Chapter 11. Responses to Ripper News: Letters to the Editor
Chapter 12. The Cultural Politics of Ripper News
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index

Citation preview

Jack the Ripper and

the London Press

JACK the RIPPER and

the LONDON PRESS

L. PERRY CURTIS, JR.

Yale University Press / New Haven and London

Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Philip Hamilton McMillan of the Class of 1894, Yale College. Copyright ∫ 2001 by Yale University All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Designed by Mary Valencia and set in Simoncini Garamond type by Keystone Typesetting, Inc., Orwigsburg, Pennsylvania. Printed in the United States of America by Vail-Ballou Press, Binghamton, New York. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Curtis, L. Perry (Lewis Perry), 1932– Jack the Ripper and the London press / L. Perry Curtis, Jr. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–300–08872–8 (alk. paper) 1. Jack the Ripper. 2. Serial murders—Press coverage—England—London. 3. Serial murderers—Press coverage—England—London. 4. Serial murders—England—London—History—19th century. I. Title. HV6535.G72 L663 2001 070.4%493641523%092—dc21 2001002530 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

In Memoriam

LEWIS P. CURTIS (1900–1976) Father, Teacher, Anglophile, and Man of Letters ‘‘The desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it.’’ Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy

Contents

Introduction

1

Chapter 1 The Whitechapel Murders: A Chronicle

19

Chapter 2 Images and Realities of the East End

32

Chapter 3 The Theory and Practice of Victorian Journalism

48

Chapter 4 Sensation News

65

Chapter 5 Victorian Murder News

83

Chapter 6 The First Two Murders

109

Chapter 7 The Double Event

140

Chapter 8 The Pursuit of Angles

164

Chapter 9 The Kelly Reportage

186

vii

CONTENTS

Chapter 10 The Inquests: Reporting the Female Body

213

Chapter 11 Responses to Ripper News: Letters to the Editor

238

Chapter 12 The Cultural Politics of Ripper News

253

Notes

275

Acknowledgments

343

Index

345

viii

Introduction

Since 1960, at least thirty books—not to mention scores of articles and chapters—have dealt with the exploits and identity of Jack the Ripper.1 One of the fastest-growing light industries of the late-twentieth-century publishing world, what is known as ‘‘Ripperature’’ has attracted a worldwide audience, owing in part to exotic film and television variations on the theme of whodunem. Writers who relish playing the game of ‘‘hunt the Ripper’’ tend to thrive by the rule that even the flimsiest circumstantial evidence can serve to buttress a foregone conclusion. No matter how exhaustive the archival hunt and how personally gratifying the discovery of the ‘‘real’’ Jack may be—especially if he turns out to have been a gentleman or a royal—the results of this exercise have brought us no closer to the real culprit than did the exertions of Scotland Yard in 1888. Of course, the fact that Jack’s identity remains a mystery explains much of his appeal today. Given all the multimedia attention paid to Jack the Ripper in recent years, one may well ask why we need yet another study of his deeds and the myths swirling around them. My short answer is that long ago I discerned a significant gap in Ripperature. For years Ripper buffs have devoted so 1

INTRODUCTION

much energy to tracking down the killer that the subject of what the London press conveyed to the public in the way of murder news has been largely obscured. In other words, the story of Fleet Street’s construction of the Ripper story has yet to be told. Moreover, there has been an almost complete failure of communication between, on the one hand, the male ‘‘essentialists’’ who focus on the Ripper’s exploits and identity and, on the other, the ‘‘theorized’’ feminists, who have an entirely different agenda and see these sadistic murders as symptomatic of the deep-seated misogyny that pervades patriarchal societies. The burgeoning field of ‘‘murderology’’ has been much enriched of late by some outstanding studies by a new generation of cultural critics and historians—most of them written by American women—of the representation of murder, murderers, and victims not only in newspapers but also in fiction and art. Scholarly studies by Helen Benedict, Karen Halttunen, Judith Knelman, Sara Knox, Wendy Lesser, Maria Tatar, Richard Tithecott, Andy Tucher, and Amy Srebnick have greatly expanded the horizons of this vital, if morbid, topic and made us more aware of how deeply we are all implicated as readers and as members of society in narratives of violent death. These studies are also studded with clues about the workings of culture as well as class and gender relations.2 In short, they help to remind us that at some level of our psychic lives the familiar emotions of love, hate, anger, jealousy, lust, and greed (almost all the seven deadly sins) make us complicit with the principal actors in murder cases, however strenuously we may try to distance ourselves from the victims or the victimizers. In the words of Sara Knox, ‘‘The teller of the tale of murder touches upon grand and unanswerable questions.’’3 These tales affect us directly, if only because we are all at risk when it comes to random, familial, or domestic acts of lethal violence. No matter how far removed we may be from the actual crime scene, we are drawn to such tales because the horrific reality of homicide reminds us of both the precariousness of life and the immanence of death. Although feminist critics attribute the media’s fondness for sensationalizing murder to the voyeuristic or prurient impulses of male journalists and their primarily masculine audience, there can be no doubt that murder cases and trials in the Victorian era appealed deeply to many women, judging from their presence in the visitors galleries of courtrooms. They also made up at least a third of the spectators at public executions in England up to 1868. In other words, the representation of murder and its aftermath in newspapers, pamphlets, leaflets, and books reveals much 2

INTRODUCTION

about the tastes or needs of the populace as a whole. At the outset of her study of the legal, social, and moral issues arising out of a condemned prisoner’s wish to have his own execution videotaped and shown on a television station in California, Wendy Lesser admits that she is ‘‘interested in our interest in murder.’’ So am I. But whereas she is most concerned with ‘‘the increasingly blurry borderline between real murder and fictional murder, between murder as news and murder as art, between event and story,’’4 I am intrigued by the illusions of reality purveyed by the print media, and I keep wanting to know more about the efforts of editors and reporters to fill as many of the empty pockets of murder news as possible with messages of moral, if not political, import. Although not fully deserving of the label fiction because they were not the products of pure imagination, the feature articles about murder in the Victorian press contained many of the basic ingredients of the novel or short story—with the obvious exception of the clinical details of bodily injuries that Victorian newspapers served up to readers in an almost pornographic manner. The larger focus of this study, then, falls on representations of different kinds of murder in the London press since the 1840s, including all the extra baggage that accompanied feature stories about homicides deemed newsworthy by editors. While most Ripperologists have treated Jack the Ripper as a unique hero-villain, some feminists have interpreted his activities as a paradigm of the ‘‘modern’’ phenomenon of sexual murder, configuring him as an extreme expression or epitome of ‘‘the patriarchal order.’’ In other words, this icon of evil represents a huge milestone in the long war of the sexes that has been variously called gynocide, gendercide, or femicide.5 When one surveys the different approaches taken to studying the Whitechapel murders, what stands out is the absence of any serious dialogue or exchange between the (mostly British) male essentialists and the (mostly American) feminist cultural critics. Like ships in the night, the two schools pass each other by with barely a foghorn or semaphore message to acknowledge the presence of the other. (Much the same could be said about historians of murder in nineteenth-century Britain and America, but that is another story.) One notable exception, Christopher Frayling, has confronted the cultural implications of the Ripper mythos and pointed out how the press occasionally went so far as to chastise itself—ever so gently, one might add—for exploiting the lurid aspects of these mutilation murders.6 My own point of entry into the heavily trafficked highway of Ripper studies may be likened to a roundabout in the midst of two highly gendered streams of traffic. Among my principal concerns—in no order of 3

INTRODUCTION

importance—are first, the constructed nature of news in general and murder news in particular; second, the handling of the Ripper’s mutilations by reporters; third, the pervasive presence of law-and-order imperatives in Ripper news during a time of tense class relations; fourth, the imaging or ‘‘Othering’’ of the East End as the natural site of such horrors; fifth, the relation of Fleet Street’s representations of the Ripper’s victims to contemporary (male) images of the female body; and sixth, the public responses to these murders in the form of letters published in some leading papers. In one way or another all these themes arise out of my conviction that Ripper news and its spin-offs afford insights into the preoccupations, indeed obsessions, of the late Victorians. To put this another way, into the partial vacuum created by all the unknowns in this horror story rushed the kind of fears and fantasies that were usually hidden behind the doors of reticence or repression and therefore deemed unfit to print. Cast in a more empirical mold, the first two chapters offer an overview of the crimes and a brief survey of the crime scene—Whitechapel—as constructed by both contemporaries and historians. These are followed by three chapters in which I seek to contextualize the industry and the art of journalism and deal with the various meanings of sensationalism and the nature of murder news in Victorian England. To aid and abet my understanding of the theory, practice, and politics of journalism I have drawn on both the pioneering work on the twentieth-century British press carried out by Stuart Hall, Steve Chibnall, and their colleagues at Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies during the 1970s, and also the sociological investigation of the Canadian news industry (both print and television) orchestrated by Richard Ericson a decade later.7 Despite their differences, these cultural critics have likewise illuminated the ideological and/or political nature of news about crime and other forms of deviant behavior. Their studies of media-driven ‘‘crime waves’’ in the late twentieth century help us to understand better the workings of Victorian crime news, so much of which was designed to achieve a well-ordered or well-policed society. To that end, many (but not all) Victorian journalists drew sharp distinctions between normative and deviant behavior, thereby reinscribing the dominant codes of social and sexual respectability. With these critical journalistic studies in mind, I have treated murder news as a social and cultural construct assembled by reporters who both influence and are influenced in turn by standards of approved behavior. News, in sum, is not just about politics, it is politics.8 In Chapter 6 I begin the process of analyzing Ripper news by comparing 4

INTRODUCTION

the various accounts of the Nichols and Chapman murders. The next four chapters are devoted to the coverage of the last three Ripper murders (Stride, Eddowes, and Kelly). In Chapter 11 I deal with several hundred letters to the editor sent by readers with various agendas to express. And, finally, in Chapter 12 I reflect on the political-cum-cultural ramifications of Ripper news. Among the many omissions in this study are the countless resurrections of the Ripper murders in our own time, whether these assume the form of fiction, opera, film, television dramas, comic books, East End walking tours, or tacky memorabilia sold in Whitechapel pubs. Such topics could easily fill another book. To appreciate the nuances of Ripper news, we must first examine the conventions of crime reporting and murder news and then see how Ripper news reinforced West End impressions of the East End as a den of unrelieved depravity. After this comes the gore. Since so much of the Ripper reportage consisted of graphic descriptions of the injuries inflicted by the killer, I have addressed the subject of ‘‘sensation-horror news’’ with all its prurient and voyeuristic implications. In this regard, both the evening and Sunday press took top honors by featuring the Ripper’s ‘‘abdominal’’ mutilations as revealed at the various inquest sessions. While some of these passages contained intimate glimpses of female anatomy that seemed much more appropriate for a medical journal, even these papers omitted some of the clinical details found in the autopsy reports. At the same time, the upmarket morning papers did not lag far behind their penny competitors when it came to serving up gore to readers, few of whom ever complained in print about undue shocks to their sensibilities. Years of reading newspapers both past and present have driven me to the rather depressing conclusion that news is more or less whatever editors and journalists deem newsworthy on any given day or night. In other words, our daily or weekly diet of news represents the result of much sifting, selecting, blending, and narrating of discrete facts or events, in ways that reflect the values of reporters, editors, and publishers. Without entering into a long and no doubt tedious disquisition about how we can ever know what really happened in any reported event given the insistence of poststructuralist critics on deferred meaning and the always unstable and self-referential nature of language, I should point out that murder news is treated here as another form of ‘‘social knowledge’’ as well as a cultural production that falls somewhere along the broad spectrum between fiction and lived reality. Just as ‘‘perceptions are perceptions of perceptions and so on ad infinitum . . . [that] never reach—say their critics—the realities which are 5

INTRODUCTION

the referents of truth,’’ so my approach amounts to a series of representations of the media’s representation of five brutal homicides that took place in Whitechapel between August 31 and November 9, 1888.9 Written without benefit of semiotic theory, this study analyzes the feature articles and editorials about these murders in order to illuminate some of the deeper concerns of those who composed and consumed the texts in question. There are several deafening silences in the texts of murder news. Not only has the victim been silenced forever, but the perpetrator, when and if caught and convicted, rarely says anything truthful, least of all if coached by a lawyer. Even when a Victorian murderer did confess, the results could hardly be trusted to contain ‘‘the whole truth and nothing but the truth.’’ Into the vacuum created by these silences rush all kinds of speculation and fantasy on the part of journalists and their readers. And then, so obvious as to be virtually ignored, there are the silences surrounding the composition and publication of the stories. Journalists are not given to explaining just how they went about gathering and selecting the materials for their articles, and editors do not leave elaborate notes about why they chose to make a front-page splash out of one particular murder while burying another in fine print at the foot of a column deep inside the next day’s edition. Mindful that the truth about what really happened and why during the Ripper’s murder spree can never be known, I have focused on the representations of these bloody events in more than a dozen London newspapers. Because Ripper news depended so heavily on ‘‘the codes of [Victorian] culture to give them meaning,’’ we cannot neatly separate the newspaper accounts of what happened on each occasion from such contextual issues as sexual propriety, class relations, masculine images of women, fantasies about male and female sexuality, and constant fears of the hard-core criminal element in the East End.10 In addition, the rigid codes of social and sexual respectability made it hard for both the producers and consumers of murder news to deal with lust murder, especially when the pelvic mutilations were bound to cause some readers acute distress. Ever since Marie Belloc Lowndes published her short story about a religious fanatic and misogynist (improbably named Mr. Sleuth) who murdered women ostensibly out of fear and loathing of their sexuality, the exploits of Jack the Ripper have inspired a number of male writers to act as historical detectives in pursuit of the true perpetrator.11 Apart from this familiar form of Ripperature, plays, operas, movies, and television dramas have also embellished the Ripper legend, serving up villains who run the gamut from proletarians to gentlemen and at least one member of the royal 6

INTRODUCTION

family—the Duke of Clarence.12 Even today, the custodians and sellers of Ripper mementos in London continue to depict Jack as a tall, thin gentleman with a top hat and expensive black opera cloak. To paraphrase a ranking police official who worked long and hard on the case, there has been enough nonsense written and said about the murders to sink a Dreadnought.13 For this reason I see no point in adding more dead weight to the sunken hulk by proposing yet another candidate for the leading role, especially when I do not share Donald Rumbelow’s faith that someday ‘‘the mystery will be solved.’’ On the other hand, I have to agree with his surmise that the killer—if ever discovered—will probably have a face ‘‘not so very dissimilar from our own.’’14 Leaving all the speculation about Jack’s identity to the armchair detectives, who are convinced that they can solve crimes that baffled the combined forces of Scotland Yard and the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) at the time, I have concentrated on the news of his handiwork served up by Fleet Street to millions of eager as well as alarmed readers around the country and abroad. In recent years two very different books have insightfully addressed the cultural implications of serial murder in America. Concerned with why ‘‘we’’—proverbial middle-class readers all—are so susceptible to the social panics engendered by serial killers, both works consider our (over)reactions to such perceived threats and the natural reluctance of men to admit any resemblance between themselves and these ‘‘monstrous’’ or ‘‘bestial’’ killers. In Killer Among Us, Joseph Fisher explores the social and psychological impact of serial murder on the communities wherein they occur. Drawing on various serial murders in the United States—from Richard Valenti’s attacks on young women in South Carolina in 1973–74 to Jeffrey Dahmer’s necrophilic acts in Milwaukee—Fisher constructs a semisocial scientific model of the responses of the media and local residents to the ‘‘monster’’ lurking in their midst. His final chapter, based largely on the coverage in the Pall Mall Gazette, deals with ‘‘The Classic Case’’ of Jack the Ripper. Addressing the media circus that always arises in cases of sexual serial murder, he contends that ‘‘the public’s insatiable desire for news, the media’s commercial interests in providing it, and the killer’s need to publicize his invincibility can create a synergistic situation that spirals out of control.’’15 Whether or not Fleet Street and the public ever spun out of control in the autumn of 1888, there can be no doubt about the presence of a synergistic response to the Whitechapel murders in the press as well as the metropolis. The second work, Richard Tithecott’s Of Men and Monsters, contains a series of illuminating as well as disturbing messages about the ways in 7

INTRODUCTION

which our culture constructs serial murderers like Jeffrey Dahmer. Stressing the paradoxical nature of the killer’s image, Tithecott conceives of him as ‘‘one who must not be fully represented and one who is made in our own image.’’ Far from producing an essentialist portrait of Dahmer, Tithecott ruminates about our collective response to the so-called cannibal-killer, whom we imagine to be either a maniacal monster, a sane embodiment of pure evil, or an emotionally handicapped outsider. Such conventional categories are designed to distance ‘‘him’’ or ‘‘it’’ from ‘‘us.’’ Seeking a logical motive for his atrocities, we rummage through Dahmer’s childhood looking for clues about where he and his parents ‘‘went wrong’’ and how an ordinary boy grew into an alcoholic, necrophilic man. Tithecott insists that we are asking the wrong questions and are guilty of accepting the flawed findings of the experts—whether psychologists or criminologists—who reassure us that we have nothing in common with such monsters. Instead of wasting time trying to understand the inexplicable reasons for such predatory behavior, we should be exploring the ‘‘dominant culture’’ and its relationship to our own unarticulated ‘‘dreams of violence, of racial or sexual purity, of closure, of death.’’ In short, Tithecott asks us to search our own souls for answers that will always remain problematic because there are no natural or clear distinctions between ‘‘sanity’’ and ‘‘insanity’’ or between ‘‘normal’’ and ‘‘perverse.’’ To demonize the Ed Geins, Ted Bundys, or Jeffrey Dahmers of recent notoriety is to delude ourselves into thinking that serial killers are not real human beings who resemble us (at least us males) in ways that are bound to undermine our complacency. In a moment of startling self-reflexivity, Tithecott looks into the mirror of his own soul and finds there a composite image of himself alongside Dahmer: ‘‘The serial killer I see haunts his common representation. He is the monster within, or rather he is monstrous normality within the monster of serial killer mythology. Identifying myself with the normal and remarking on its monstrosity is to have a contradictory perspective, allowing me to confess, Frankensteinlike, that the serial killer I see is my monster, my creation—that I write the serial killer and I write my self.’’16 Since the Victorians lacked the convenient category or label of ‘‘serial killer’’ and knew so little about lust murder, they had a better excuse than ourselves for demonizing or Othering the Whitechapel murderer. My study of murder news is much less reflexive than Tithecott’s ruminations and far more concerned with ‘‘them’’—namely, the Victorians who wrote and read all those lurid articles about the Whitechapel horrors and who felt the panics, shocks, and thrills arising therefrom. The core chapters 8

INTRODUCTION

herein deal with newspaper texts as though they were ideologically charged and fragmented images of events that had passed through the filters of witnesses, reporters, editors, and, of course, readers, all of whom carried their own preconceptions. The distorting effects of all this filtering prevent us from ever attaining a complete grasp of the original events, despite the apparent authority of each newspaper account. Equally important, reporters often devoted some time and space to their own surmises and rumors gleaned from contacts or witnesses. In other words, all the unknowns in these murders created a thousand and one openings for imaginations to run riot. Whether by means of feature articles, leaders, or letters to the editor (and the police), Jack’s contemporaries contributed much to the nightmarish story he inscribed with his knife on the bodies of his victims. If murder is a social (as well as antisocial) act, then its telling and selling by the press are significant cultural events that reveal much about what journalists think the public wants or needs to know. Murder news by definition both whets and feeds an appetite that disapproving critics deem perverse or voyeuristic. Why, we may well ask, are so many of us drawn to images of violence that frighten or disgust us? What is the source of our ambivalent response to scenes or images of horror in films, on television, and in newspapers? (Why do we slow down and stare at a car crash while driving along the highway when we have no intention of helping any of the victims?) Some tentative answers to these questions lie scattered through the following pages. For the present we need but allude to Cynthia Freeland’s observation that pornography and the horror film share in common not only multiple participants and body parts, but also ‘‘the embodiment of humans’’ or ‘‘intimacies of the flesh.’’17 Murder news, then, is not just about extreme violence inflicted on someone else. As Tithecott points out, it is also about our own fantasies and the culture out of which they arise. Implicitly or explicitly, feature stories about homicide convey powerful messages about morality, respectability, and normality. For example, the Victorian press often garnished murder news with allusions to the wages of sin, which had the effect of moving readers to imagine themselves as either victim or victimizer, thereby giving rise to the thought ‘‘There but for the grace of God go I.’’18 Crime news is, of course, only one form of storytelling. Because most of us have been immersed in stories of one kind or another since childhood, we find it hard to resist narratives and narrativizing. Some years ago Joan Didion addressed our collective hunger for stories that contain a moral, especially those dealing with violent death: ‘‘We tell ourselves stories in 9

INTRODUCTION

order to live. . . . We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.’’19 This notion of freezing the ever-shifting phantasms of our own lived experience conjures up another vital aspect of murder stories—namely, the ways in which the narrative form helps us to cope with the fears that well up inside us whenever we encounter scenes of terror or sites of horror. As Wes Craven, the director of the notorious Scream films, observed, ‘‘It’s like boot camp for the psyche. In real life human beings are packaged in the flimsiest of packages, threatened by real and sometimes horrifying dangers, events like Columbine. But the narrative form puts those fears into a manageable series of events. It gives us a way of thinking rationally about our fears.’’ Craven then went on to reveal how much he enjoyed the search for ways to heighten the fears of his audience: ‘‘They see patterns, and they try to think logically about how to escape the lurking danger. Our job is to always stay one or two steps ahead and keep them scared.’’20 Because the Whitechapel killer was never caught and put on trial, the murders became the kind of mystery that resisted simple, let alone seamless, emplotment. Detective fiction buffs need no reminding of the pleasure of the denouement, when the master sleuth (more often nowadays the medical examiner or forensic pathologist) unmasks the villain and thereby helps to restore order and heal the gaping wound in the community. The Ripper’s elusiveness denied both the police and the public the kind of closure that comes with the arrest, conviction, and (in Victorian England) execution of the murderer. Instead of a reassuring end to the story, these mutilation murders left gaps into which all kinds of theories, daydreams, and nightmares rushed pell-mell. Bereft of an explanation, contemporaries also had good reason to fear that the perpetrator would soon strike again so long as he remained free. Thus the silences in our newspaper texts problematize the narrative and create countless breaks or ruptures that invite more speculation. When dealing with the Ripper reportage, then, one would do well to bear in mind the warning phrase still heard every day in the London underground: Mind the gap. Beyond our love of stories lies the attraction of news about sex and violence involving people other than ourselves and our families and friends. Such news usually sends shudders of horror or frissons down our spines, 10

INTRODUCTION

and may well inspire a fleeting sense of schadenfreude. Sometimes we justify our fondness for the gory details by intellectualizing them. In the words of Theodore Dalrymple: ‘‘Murderers and their deeds raise acutely the fundamental moral and psychological questions of our existence, which is why there are so many murders in literature. The proper study of mankind is murder.’’21 In any event, the priority given by the media to murder news reveals much about the anxieties of any culture and society, and this applies with special force to the Ripper reportage. As Maria Tatar has shrewdly observed about another time and culture (Weimar Germany), ‘‘the representation of murdered women must function as an aesthetic strategy for managing certain kinds of sexual, social, and political anxieties and for constituting an artistic and social identity.’’22 Seen in this light, murder news is not only heavily laden with gender conflicts and social inequities, it also reveals how the media package such reports with an eye to either raising or allaying the fears of readers, and to enhancing the appeal of the next day’s edition. Stories of real murder continue to fascinate, especially if they deal with bizarre perpetrators and unusual modes of killing. Harold Schechter, a professor of American literature and culture in New York City, has raised the narration of homicidal acts to an art form in a book that dwells in the twilight zone between the fictional and the factual. In Fiend: The Shocking True Story of America’s Youngest Serial Killer (2000), he recounts with some of the novelistic skills of Caleb Carr the sadistic crime spree of Jesse Harding Pomeroy, a deeply disturbed youth from South Boston who between 1872 and 1874 tortured and sexually molested over a dozen small boys before stabbing to death and severely mutilating a four-year-old boy. For this latter murder the perverse Pomeroy earned the enduring epithet ‘‘the Boy Fiend,’’ and spent more than fifty years in prison. Although written more than thirty years ago, Richard D. Altick’s Victorian Studies in Scarlet (1970) remains the best starting point for any inquiry into the import of murder news in Victorian England. Drawing on the trial transcripts compiled by such murder buffs as Henry B. Irving and William Roughead, Altick ranged over some fifteen high-profile murders between 1849 and 1903. However, his blithe assumption that the public’s passionate interest in such cases helped to ‘‘ease the social tensions of the time’’ seems rather wide of the mark.23 By featuring certain homicides and by employing reporters who specialized in murder, the London press had by midcentury succeeded in taking this subgenre of news out of the hands of publishers of ha’penny broadsides or street cocks and had begun to 11

INTRODUCTION

captivate a huge audience—young and old, male and female alike—by means of blood-curdling stories of violence and mystery. Altick’s final chapter, ‘‘Murder and the Victorian Mind,’’ begins with a rhetorical question: ‘‘Who can account for the prevalence of murder in Victorian England?’’24 However, one remarkable feature of Victorian society was the relative infrequency of murder, considering the hordes of pauperized people crowded together in dirty and fetid tenements, the extent of class antagonism, and the amount of alcohol consumed. While the population of England and Wales rose from roughly twenty to twenty-nine million between 1861 and 1891, the annual number of recorded homicides between 1857 and 1890 averaged only 369.25 Rarest of all murders were those committed by middleand upper-class perpetrators, especially women or ladies, even though females were more likely to be indicted for murder than for any other felony.26 The banality of most murders in England meant that newspaper editors were constantly on the lookout for ‘‘good’’ or unusual homicides that would grab and hold the attention of readers for days or weeks on end. Following in Altick’s wake, various Victorianists have cultivated the fertile field of murder, ranging from the single crime of passion to serial killings.27 Thomas Boyle’s engagingly subjective tour of sensational crimes in the mid-Victorian period draws heavily on the press clippings of an English naval surgeon obsessed by such morbid fare.28 The literary critic John Cawelti has speculated about the ways murder news affected Victorian readers, who were supposedly filled with feelings of guilt, anger, and sexual desire.29 Needless to say, cases of domestic murder, involving family members, friends, lovers, or servants, held a special fascination for respectable Victorians, who were well aware of the emotions or desires that might drive someone to commit the ultimate crime. Few of these studies, however— with the notable exception of Altick’s Deadly Encounters (1986)—directly address the reporting of murder in the press, though at least one lateVictorian crime aficionado, Dr. John Watson, knew just how widely the accounts of any given crime varied from one newspaper to another.30 The history of murder news raises many questions about the criteria used by editors to decide which crimes deserved special attention. Why, we may well ask, were some homicides assigned feature status while others were relegated to mere filler at the bottom of the page? Alas, we know so little about the inner workings of the Victorian press, especially the reasons behind the editorial decisions made every day about the content and layout of every newspaper. (As a youthful copyboy working for the New York Times, I often wondered what went on when the senior editors or news12

INTRODUCTION

room moguls gathered together in the ‘‘bullpen’’ at night to discuss the next day’s paper.) Apart from the anecdotal memoirs of the leading lights of Fleet Street, who relished tales of their more eccentric colleagues, all we have in the way of evidence are the printed results of the editorial decisions taken; and unlike today, we have to contend with anonymity in the Victorian era, when most journalists never knew the joy of a byline. While one murder trial might earn three full columns, another would merit only a short paragraph. That seasoned connoisseur of murder trials William Roughead once declared, ‘‘We have in Scotland a really good murder about once in five years,’’ while England, ‘‘more favoured in matters criminal, boasts one a week.’’ Chief among his criteria of a ‘‘good’’ homicide were ‘‘striking circumstances, the picturesque, unusual setting, and the curious character of the chief actors.’’31 Such criteria help to explain why Fleet Street made such a splash out of the ten-day trial of Alfred John Monson in the High Court of Justiciary, Edinburgh, in December 1893. A moneylender and opportunist, Monson was accused of murdering his well-born pupil Lieutenant Windsor Dudley Cecil Hambrough, aged twenty, while shooting rabbits at Ardlamont House near the Kyles of Bute in Argyleshire. Monson told the police that Hambrough’s gun had discharged while he was climbing over a wall. But there was conflicting evidence about the gun that fired the fatal shot, and Monson turned out to be the beneficiary of a large insurance policy in the event of Hambrough’s death. At first the London papers ran only a few short articles about the shooting. But their response to Monson’s trial was overwhelming. More than a hundred pressmen from all over the country covered the proceedings—including seventy reporters, twenty-one ‘‘descriptive writers,’’ and fifteen artists. The Times alone ran a total of twenty columns on the trial, consisting mostly of the paraphrased testimony of witnesses.32 Dismissing the prosecution’s argument that Monson was a consummate liar, the jury returned a verdict of ‘‘not proven,’’ and the defendant left the courthouse to cheers from the crowd waiting outside.33 The media hype surrounding this case says a good deal about the nature of journalistic sensationalism. What exactly was it about this case that drew so many reporters as well as spectators to the trial? Was it the elitist ambience of the shooting party, the victim’s Oxonian ties, or Monson’s financial intrigues? Here was a murder laden with mystery and scented with snobbery. How very different was the media’s response to the trial in 1889—also in Edinburgh—of a plebeian baby farmer named Jessie King, who had strangled three illegitimate infants whom she had adopted for a 13

INTRODUCTION

cash advance. While the trial attracted many spectators, the Times awarded it only twenty-three lines of small print.34 In almost every respect the contrast between these two stories could not have been greater. Clearly Fleet Street regarded infanticide in a Scottish slum, without any element of mystery and devoid of elitism, as undeserving of feature status. Fascination with murder was not confined to newspapers. Witness all the shilling shockers, penny dreadfuls, ha’penny broadsides, penny gaffs, and melodramas about unnatural death in plebeian settings. The crowded galleries in courtrooms during highly publicized murder trials also attest to the drawing power of this crime. For all the curious people—many of them women—who could not get into the courtroom, the press provided the only access to the case. When it came to bloodshed, Victorian readers seemed to relish the details of what knives, axes, bullets, or other lethal weapons had done to the victims’ bodies. Many of the morbid details revealed in the press would be deemed unfit to print today even in the most Murdochian tabloids. Descriptions of bodies stabbed, shot, poisoned, and dismembered—what I call sensation-horror news—composed the centerpieces of feature stories about the inquests and trials in homicide cases. Thus a good deal of Victorian murder news qualifies as ‘‘gorenography’’ because the clinical or anatomical details published offered a fine feast for the eyes of more prurient readers. Although terms like ‘‘pornography’’ and ‘‘violence’’ lack any fixed or stable meaning and invariably become matters of personal judgment, we should bear in mind Tatar’s reminder that ‘‘the representation of violence cannot but become deeply implicated in the violence of representation.’’35 This in turn should move us to contemplate not only the varieties of violence but also the cultural significance of images of death—especially when the bodies are those of young women. Alluding to paintings or photographs of dead female bodies, Elisabeth Bronfen has observed that whenever we look at these images we are not only voyeurs but also participants in an act of violence. Thus, ‘‘narrative representations of death . . . serve to show that any ‘voyeur’ is always also implicated in the field of vision.’’ In her view, ‘‘ ‘death’ is always culturally constructed . . . can only be read as a trope,’’ and although ubiquitous, it ‘‘remains outside clear categories.’’ Paradoxically, it is both ‘‘nowhere’’ and ‘‘everywhere.’’36 The import of these reflections should become clear in Chapter 10, in which I deal at some length with Fleet Street’s disparate accounts of the Ripper’s pelvic mutilations as revealed at the various inquests. Since our culture is no readier to accept a standard definition of violence than we as readers (or editors) are 14

INTRODUCTION

prepared to agree on what is fit to print or see, we cannot deal in absolutes. Where Ripper news is concerned, the paucity of letters to the editor complaining about all the gore suggests that most readers were at least willing to tolerate the thrills arising out of the lurid accounts of knife wounds. Embedded in a matrix of moral and political imperatives about law and order, Ripper news also engendered something akin to a social and moral panic. Because the murders were motiveless and random, and because the killer seemed to be taunting the police with boastful letters, the press had a surfeit of disturbing as well as sensational material on its hands. Some papers took advantage of these extraordinary crimes and the bafflement of the police by focusing on ordinary crime and insisting that Londoners had every reason to worry about their safety and property. Many an editorial asked why the killer had not been caught and called for drastic reform of Scotland Yard and the CID. If the extent of law-and-order news varied from one paper to another, Fleet Street had no trouble turning the Ripper murders into the crime story of the century. In sum, the press coverage of the Whitechapel murders reveals much about late Victorian culture, or what Raymond Williams called ‘‘structures of feeling’’ and ‘‘the informing spirit of a whole way of life.’’ Like other kinds of news, the reporting of murder involves ‘‘the structures of meaning based on historical constructs,’’ while reflecting the ideological and material interests of the newspaper industry at large.37 Murder news also reinforces the codes of normative or respectable behavior that are supposed to protect the integrity of the family—indeed, the whole social order.38 Since murder represents the ultimate social and moral transgression, readers of these stories yearned for reassurance that the criminal justice system worked and that the villain would pay dearly for his wickedness. In an increasingly secular age, editors or leader (editorial) writers took on the clergy’s traditional task of preaching about the wages of sin and the necessity of avoiding temptation. Not just keen to sell more papers, they also wished to remind readers about the terrible fate that awaited anyone who succumbed to the desires that had ended in this particular tragedy or scandal. After all, one did not have to be a ‘‘born criminal’’ to progress (or regress) rapidly from venial to mortal sin and thence to prison or the scaffold. Murder news thus reflected the Victorian obsession with character and virtuous conduct. No matter how much the Whitechapel murders differed from the standard fare of domestic murder, the fundamental issues of morality and depravity also underlay the reporting of these horrors. In stark contrast to the classic domestic homicide, which contained an 15

INTRODUCTION

understandable motive, the Whitechapel murders were palpably sadistic and apparently motiveless. They also caused readers untold horror, suspense, fear, and uncertainty for more than three months. Instead of a coherent ‘‘newspaper novel’’ based on a familiar (or familial) plot, the Ripper saga comprised a series of highly cobbled or disjointed articles laden with unknowns, contradictions, and silences. The lack of hard clues and the absence of a trial forced the press to fill the gaps with descriptions of conditions in Whitechapel, reports of sightings of suspects and minor attacks on women, suggestions for catching the killer, sharp criticism of the police and government officials, discussions of reward money, and stories taking many other angles on the case. If the Ripper story had a beginning, reporters and the police disagreed over who was his first victim. And if this narrative had a series of middles, it lacked a clear ending. The villain never even had a conventional name—only an epithet of dubious provenance. Denied a visible culprit to revile, the public and the press were forced to rely on such metaphors as ‘‘fiend,’’ ‘‘monster,’’ and ‘‘assassin,’’ while conjuring up a generic male suspect—dark-complexioned, black-bearded, blackcoated, and ‘‘foreign-looking’’—in short, a stereotypical Jew living in the East End. Initially, Fleet Street may have agreed about the ethnic features and origins of this outsider, but there was no consensus about his motive, that all-important staple of domestic murder. The absence of any ‘‘reasonable’’ explanation for these mutilation murders stimulated all kinds of speculation by journalists and readers as well as the so-called alienists who specialized in criminal insanity. The primary sources for this study consist of some fifteen London newspapers, including three East End weeklies. These papers were chosen with an eye to striking a rough balance between the morning and evening, the daily and weekly, and the Tory, Liberal, and Radical press. Except for the Times, Globe, Morning Post, and several East End papers, the papers used here all enjoyed circulations of over 75,000 in 1888. Two of the Sunday papers—Lloyd’s Weekly and Reynolds’s Newspaper—dwarfed the dailies with circulations of 900,000 and 350,000, respectively. Based on these mostly national papers, the core of this book consists of comparisons of the Ripper reportage from late August to the end of December. Besides relying on some valuable studies of the mass media in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I have also gained insights into the always problematic relationship of history, journalism, and fiction from exposure to the metahistorical musings of Hayden White about language, 16

INTRODUCTION

tropes, rhetorical strategies, modes of emplotment, and narrativity. Although he does not address journalism directly, White’s discussion of ‘‘the fictions of factual representation’’ spurred me to rethink many cherished assumptions about the content and form of historical narratives and their relationship to reality.39 As for the methods used in this study, these may be best described as cautious and eclectic empiricism—insofar as I do rely on a firm documentary base composed of newspaper texts—combined with the hypotheses and inferences of the cultural studies school. Several decades of exposure to practitioners of hard-core ‘‘theory’’ at Brown have helped to distance me from the (oc)cultist camp occupied by the votaries of Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, and other French philosophes. Apart from the occasional genuflection toward Michel Foucault, whose radical episteme opened my eyes to the rule of language, the dominance of discourse, the genesis of genealogy, and the nature of power/knowledge, I am certain that readers versed in the kind of high theory imported from France after 1968 will realize early on that my modest attempts at close readings of newspaper texts are a far cry from the hermeneutics of biblical scholars, let alone the artful deconstructions of the semiotic clerisy. In a more pedestrian way I have tried to read or interpret all these newspaper texts from the perspective of what the Dutch scholar Joep Leerssen has called in a very different study ‘‘the contextual and intertextual.’’ By this he means the ‘‘ideological and political circumstances’’ of the images appearing in print or the mass media, and also ‘‘the conventions, commonplaces, and indeed stereotypes’’ that are found in ‘‘previous texts.’’40 As we will see, Victorian newspapers contain all kinds of ore worth mining in the name of intertextuality. Somewhere beyond the doubly distorted images of the Ripper murders in the London press lies the stark reality of five female corpses, four of them terribly mutilated. And no amount of critical theory or semiological dissection of language can subvert that fact. As Dr. Watson once noted, writing about a far less gruesome crime, ‘‘The story has, I believe, been told more than once in the newspapers, but, like all such narratives, its effect is much less striking when set forth en bloc in a single half-column of print than when the facts slowly evolve before your own eyes, and the mystery clears gradually away as each new discovery furnishes a step which leads on to the complete truth.’’41 The absence of the master detective himself and the lack of firm clues about the killer meant, of course, that we would never know the truth about the Whitechapel murders. So we are left with Tithecott’s ominous reminder that we (men) need to scrutinize our souls and recognize the nature of the image of the serial killer that we have created in collusion 17

INTRODUCTION

with the (male-dominated) media. At the same time, we must confront the close relationship of narratives or storytelling to the lives we lead. In the words of Hayden White, questions about narrative ‘‘invite reflection on the very nature of culture, and, possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself.’’42 If this is the case, then much of the murder news considered here should move us to reflect on man’s inhumanity to woman.

18

Chapter One

The Whitechapel Murders A CHRONICLE

Before delving into the Ripper reportage, we must first survey the actual events that comprised the basis of this baffling and still unfinished story. Fortunately, the abundance of accounts of the five known murders makes it unnecessary to repeat all the salient events here. Taken together, the narratives provided by such well-informed Ripperologists as Paul Begg, Martin Fido, Donald Rumbelow, Keith Skinner, and Philip Sugden contain most of the known facts as well as the theories and surmises about each slaying, even though disagreements persist. Sugden’s study of the murders has the advantage of correcting many of the errors and myths that have pervaded Ripperature over the decades.1 Apart from continuing controversy over who was the Ripper’s first victim, whether or not he had an accomplice, whether there was a copycat killer, and the exact time of Mary Kelly’s demise, most experts today agree about the circumstances surrounding the five ‘‘official’’ killings. For this reason, the following brief outline avoids entering into the finer points of either agreement or dispute.2 The conventional Ripper narrative begins on August 31, 1888, with the discovery of the still warm and bleeding body of Mary Ann (Polly) Nichols 19

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(also spelled Nicholls), aged forty-two, on the cobblestones in Buck’s Row, next to a gate leading into a stable yard. Around 3:40 A.M. a cart driver found her lying on her back with her skirt pushed up to her waist and a deep cut across her throat. Having tried and failed to decapitate her, the killer had slashed her abdomen and apparently stabbed her twice in the ‘‘private parts.’’3 Married but separated from her husband, and the mother of five children, Nichols lived off her meager earnings from prostitution and also scrounged for food and drink. A heavy drinker, she moved from one run-down lodging house to another or slept rough when she could not stand another grim night in Lambeth Workhouse. Shortly before her death a friend saw her drunk and soliciting a man in the hope of earning the price of a night’s lodging. The second victim, Annie Chapman (born Eliza Anne Smith), aged around forty-seven, was the wife of a Windsor coachman, John Chapman, who had left her some years before. She had borne two children and was living with a man who made sieves by the name of Jacky Sivvey, hence her nicknames—‘‘Siffey,’’ ‘‘Sievey,’’ or ‘‘Sivvey.’’ Known to her friends as ‘‘Dark Annie,’’ she was a fierce fighter and heavy drinker, who tried at times to earn an honest living, but could not conquer her thirst for beer. Like Nichols, she was continually driven back to prostitution by her lack of a steady income to pay for food, clothing, shelter, and drink. Around 6 A.M. on Saturday, September 8, her severely mutilated body was found in the backyard of a dilapidated lodging house at 29 Hanbury Street in Spitalfields. Once again the killer had tried to cut off her head, judging from the knife marks on the cervical vertebrae. Not satisfied with slashing her abdomen, he had ripped out her small intestines and thrown them near her right shoulder. (Some papers also claimed that her heart lay nearby.) Although it was not disclosed for some weeks, her uterus, along with a small section of the vagina and bladder, had also been removed.4 After a three-week hiatus, the killer struck again in the early hours of Sunday, September 30. This time his victim was Elizabeth (‘‘Long Liz’’) Stride, aged around forty-five. Born in Sweden with the name of Elisabeth Gustafsdotter, she had left her father’s farm at seventeen to work as a servant in nearby Gothenburg, where the police soon identified her as a prostitute. After several bouts with venereal disease, she turned up in London in 1866 and married John Stride, with whom she had nine children. After falsely claiming that her husband had drowned in a shipwreck, Long Liz took up a nomadic life in the East End, moving from one lodging house to another, working as a casual prostitute, a seamstress, and a domestic 20

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servant. Also fond of the drink, she had a record of arrests for drunk and disorderly behavior. Several workers found her body shortly after 1 A.M. in a courtyard off Berner Street, at the rear gate leading to the International Working Men’s Club, which catered to plebeian Jewish socialists and radicals. The deep throat wound and the absence of any mutilations moved the police to presume that the same killer had been interrupted before he could finish his sadistic work.5 The fourth victim, Catherine Eddowes (alias Kate Kelly or Kate Conway) was also in her mid-forties. She died less than an hour after Stride in a dark corner of Mitre Square, Aldgate. The daughter of a tinplate worker from Wolverhampton, Eddowes was also an alcoholic. But her last lover, John Kelly, denied that she was a prostitute. During her twenties she had lived with a pensioned Irish soldier named Thomas Conway, and given birth to three children before leaving Conway for Kelly around 1880. She encountered her killer shortly after being discharged from the police station at Bishopsgate, where she had been locked up for drunk and disorderly behavior. Heading for her lodging house on Flower and Dean Street, she had been attacked in Portsoken Ward. After cutting her throat to the bone, the killer slashed her face, stomach, and pelvic area, pulled out much of her intestines, and threw them over her right shoulder and next to her left arm. During the autopsy the police surgeons discovered that both her left kidney and uterus were missing. Besides occasional soliciting, Eddowes also earned some money from selling goods, hop-picking in Kent, and working as a charwoman. Despite her chronic drinking, she seemed to have had a reasonably stable relationship with Kelly.6 At this point in time, a letter and postcard signed by ‘‘Jack the Ripper’’ and posted several days earlier were received by a leading news agency. As soon as Scotland Yard authorized Fleet Street to publish these macabre messages, the Ripper mythos was born. Labeled ‘‘the double event,’’ these two murders proved a windfall for Fleet Street, and vastly increased the public’s alarm over the predatory ‘‘fiend’’ on the loose in Whitechapel. For reasons best known to the killer, no further prostitute murders took place for more than a month. Perhaps the increased surveillance by the police and local vigilance committees served as a deterrent. Despite daily expectations of another death, the culprit, now known as Jack the Ripper, did not strike again until the early hours of Friday, November 9, just in time to mar the festivities of Lord Mayor’s Day. On this occasion he deviated from his pattern by killing indoors, which gave him ample time to indulge his rage against the female body without fear of interruption. His 21

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final victim went by the name of Mary Jane (or Mary Ann) Kelly, and she died inside a small, dingy bedroom—number 13—in a lodging house often used by prostitutes. Located behind the house at 26 Dorset Street, Miller’s Court stood amidst one of the filthiest ‘‘rookeries’’ in Whitechapel. Unlike the other victims, Kelly was Irish (having been born in Limerick), young (only twenty-four years old), and attractive. After her first husband died in a mine explosion, she arrived in London in 1884 and began to work as an upmarket prostitute around Knightsbridge. For reasons unknown she drifted into the East End, where she had to endure a rougher and much poorer clientele. Around 1887 she took up with a Billingsgate porter of Irish origins named Joseph Barnett, with whom she lived for a year, until he walked out (on October 30) after a bitter row over her drinking and insistence on sharing their room with another prostitute. Owing some twentynine shillings in back rent, she had gone out to earn a few shillings so that she could keep the landlord at bay and buy some beer. The exact time of her death remains in dispute, but the burden of medical evidence suggests that she died between 3:30 and 4 in the morning. Although her body was discovered around 10:30 on the morning of the 9th, the police refrained for several hours from breaking down the locked door and entering the room because they had sent for a bloodhound, which never arrived. They did, however, summon a police photographer, who took pictures of the victim through the broken window.7 In an orgy of flaying and disemboweling, the killer had torn out Kelly’s viscera and heart and cut the flesh from her thighs. Even the briefest catalogue of the injuries makes for repugnant reading. Once again he tried and failed to decapitate her. After this he sliced off both breasts as well as her nose and dumped some of her abdominal organs on the bedside table.8 When the surgeons reassembled the internal organs, they found the heart missing. Some of Kelly’s clothes lay neatly folded on a chair near the bed, as though she had undressed deliberately and without fear. Warm ashes from a recent fire glowed in the fireplace, suggesting that the killer had used the flames from burning clothing to illuminate his handiwork. Because no one had a key to the locked door, the police finally ordered the landlord to force entry by means of a pickax. The charnel-house scene that greeted them inside upset even the hardest-boiled officers of the law.9 All five murders occurred on weekends toward the end or beginning of the month. With the exception of Stride, the mutilations showed a steady escalation of violence, culminating in the killer’s attempt to destroy the very femaleness of Kelly’s body as he acted out his gynophobic rage. When the 22

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authorities revealed that the uterus had been removed from at least two (possibly three) of the victims, the public and the press naturally indulged in all kinds of speculation about motive and identity. Although no weapon was ever found at or near the crime scenes, the police and the medical examiners assumed that a long, sharp dissecting knife had been used. Thus the Ripper’s distinctive ‘‘signature’’ or modus operandi involved deep cuts across the throat from left to right as well as pelvic mutilations and disemboweling (with the exception of Stride). He attacked in the early hours of the morning and targeted prostitutes who were well past their prime (with the exception of Kelly), presumably because they were the only ones still seeking clients so late at night.10 After Kelly’s death the murders came to a halt, leading some to infer that the Ripper had committed suicide because he could not endure or surpass the horror of Miller’s Court. Although several other prostitutes were stabbed to death in the East End during the following year, the murder of Alice (‘‘Clay Pipe’’) McKenzie in Castle Alley, Whitechapel, before dawn on July 17, 1889, could not be conclusively assigned to Jack the Ripper, despite the eagerness of some police officials and at least one surgeon to make this connection.11 The horrific nature of the Whitechapel slayings not only provoked panic among women of all ages and classes, but also raised fears of anti-Semitic rioting in the East End because so many of the suspects were young Jewish males. While most newspapers subscribed to the theory that the murderer was a maniac or ‘‘bloodthirsty fiend,’’ some editorial writers construed them as proof positive of a serious moral malaise afflicting the nation. As the murders continued despite greatly increased police patrols in the East End, criticism of Scotland Yard reached alarming levels. Some Londoners expressed deep concern about their own safety in letters to the editor. And the Queen went so far as to scold one of her favorite prime ministers (Lord Salisbury) for not having done more to ensure the culprit’s capture. The political content of these various responses reflected the dramatic differences between the Whitechapel crimes and the standard fare of domestic murder news. Besides widening the cultural gap between the West and East Ends of London, the Ripper reportage also made women far more apprehensive about any strange man in their neighborhood and about venturing outside alone. Interpretations As if to thicken the plot and deepen the mystery, a number of journalists and police officials at the time—not to mention a few Ripperologists 23

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today—firmly believed that the Ripper killed more than five women. One of his first victims, so they contended, was Martha Tabram (or Tabran or Turner), a fortyish prostitute, whose body was found in the early hours of Tuesday, August 7, lying in a pool of blood on the stone steps of a tenement house at 37 George Yard Buildings, just off Whitechapel Road. Although the injuries and the presumed weapon differed altogether from the Ripper’s modus operandi, the viciousness of the assault moved reporters to count Tabram as the first—or possibly second—victim of the same maniac. In fact, a Scotland Yard memorandum on the Whitechapel murders contains a list of nine women—beginning with Tabram and ending with Frances Coles— which may or may not reflect official thinking about the actual number of Ripper victims.12 At the outset the press treated Tabram’s death as an almost routine act of violence in a location notorious for such events. The Times (Aug. 8) first mentioned this case in a short article under the small headline ‘‘SUPPOSED MURDER,’’ which revealed that the victim had been seen carousing with some soldiers in a public house shortly before her death.13 It took the authorities almost a fortnight to identify the George Yard victim as Martha Tabram, who often solicited clients in the area. On August 10, the Times carried a longer but still modest article beneath a bolder headline—‘‘THE MURDER IN WHITECHAPEL’’—dealing with the coroner’s inquest at the Working Lads’ Institute.14 The most arresting feature of this story was the testimony of the medical examiner, Dr. Thomas Killeen (also called Timothy Keene), who had autopsied ‘‘the very well nourished’’ body of the victim. After a brief summary of the thirty-nine stab wounds, he attributed death to one deep thrust into the heart. The Times’s reporter distilled all the clinical details into one concise passage: ‘‘The left lung was penetrated in five places, and the right lung was penetrated in two places. The heart, which was rather fatty, was penetrated in one place, and that would be sufficient to cause death. The liver was healthy, but was penetrated in five places, the spleen was penetrated in two places, and the stomach, which was perfectly healthy, was penetrated in six places. The witness did not think all the wounds were inflicted with the same instrument.’’ Quite apart from the repeated use of the verb ‘‘penetrated,’’ this article alluded to only twenty-one of the thirty-nine wounds. Why the reporter failed to mention the others stirs some curiosity. Whether he omitted them because they were superficial or because they involved the genitalia remains unknown. However, at least one newspaper dared to mention the unmentionable on this occasion. In the course of a long article on this 24

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murder, a reporter for the East London Observer (Aug. 11) quoted the police surgeon as stating: ‘‘The lower portion of the body was penetrated in one place, the wound being three inches in length and one in depth. From appearances, there was no reason to suppose that recent intimacy had taken place.’’ As we will see, the mainstream morning press avoided any explicit allusion to sexual intercourse, and hardly any pelvic, not to say genital, injuries ever appeared in newsprint until the Ripper’s mutilations were reported during the inquests. An accompanying editorial in the East London Observer lamented ‘‘another dreadful murder,’’ as though the series had already commenced, and the writer wondered whether this crime would ever be solved. Certainly, the ‘‘savagery’’ of the attack, manifested by seventeen stab wounds in the breast, heart, lungs, liver, and intestines, suggested that the killer was much more than ‘‘a vindictive paramour.’’ Several days later the Times (Aug. 24) covered the resumed inquest in a much longer article (half a column of fine print). By this date the victim had been identified as Martha Tabran (later, Tabram), aged thirty-nine or forty, with no fixed address and an estranged husband, Henry, who worked in a warehouse or hauled furniture.15 The last person to see her alive was a fellow street woman, Mary Ann Connolly, better known as ‘‘Pearly Poll,’’ who recounted a festive pub crawl with Martha (or ‘‘Emma’’) and several soldiers on the night in question. After the coroner’s summation, the jury arrived at the verdict that would be repeated at the end of every Ripper inquest: ‘‘Murdered by some person or persons unknown.’’ In contrast to the rather remote style of the Times, the East London Observer (Aug. 25) added the kind of personal touches that one would expect of a local paper. Thus, Coroner Collier was depicted sitting solemnly beneath a portrait of the Princess of Wales, while Detective-Inspector Reid was wearing his ‘‘usual dark blue serge coat and waistcoat,’’ as well as ‘‘light striped trousers.’’ Henry Tabram was ‘‘a sallow-complexioned man with iron-grey’’ hair, moustache, and imperial (beard). Turner, the unemployed carpenter and ex-companion of the victim, was ‘‘dressed in a light tweed suit, with a pale face and a light moustache and imperial.’’ As for Pearly Poll, she wore an old green shawl and her face was ‘‘reddened and soddened by drink.’’ She told the jurors bluntly: ‘‘I am single and follow no occupation, being an unfortunate.’’16 More interested in the dress and facial features of those present than in the victim’s wounds, this reporter noted that after the jury returned its verdict the coroner recommended that gaslights be installed on the streets around the crime scene. In both form and content, the Times’s coverage of the Tabram case 25

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epitomized the morning press’s handling of Ripper news, with the obvious exception that the volume of newsprint devoted to the subsequent murders increased exponentially after Nichols’s death on August 31. Although the Times’s austere reporting style differed from the sensationalist articles published by the evening and Sunday papers, the newspaper eventually printed almost as much clinical gore culled from the autopsy reports as the masscirculation penny dailies. And when the corpse of another ‘‘unfortunate’’ turned up in Whitechapel at the end of the month, Fleet Street needed little prompting to provide the kind of front-page treatment normally given to colonial wars, political crises, royal weddings, or natural disasters. In the popular imagination Tabram was not necessarily the Ripper’s first victim. Many contemporaries (along with the Ripperologist Tom Cullen) believed that a mysterious woman known only as ‘‘Fairy Fay’’ had died at the hands of the Ripper on Boxing Day 1887, from massive blood loss caused by a stake shoved deep into her vagina following a night of heavy drinking in Mitre Square.17 Most Ripperologists today regard this woman as a phantom victim, contending that she has been conflated with Emma Elizabeth Smith, a forty-five-year-old widowed mother of two children who suffered an instrumental gang rape in the early hours of April 3, 1888, on Wentworth Street that ruptured her perineum and caused her to bleed to death. In a rambling account given shortly before her demise, Smith accused four drunken men of having stolen her few coins before raping her with a stick or cane. Despite severe hemorrhaging she managed to reach her lodging house, where she collapsed and was taken to London Hospital. But the doctors could not stop the bleeding and she died three days later.18 Lacking the now standard category of ‘‘serial murder’’—a term coined by FBI profilers in the 1970s—and unfamiliar with the new concept of ‘‘lust murder,’’ Fleet Street had to rely on hyperbole and tropes when characterizing the deadly menace lurking in the East End.19 If lethal violence against prostitutes was no novelty, the Whitechapel slayings involved a degree of sadism that baffled the police and stirred heated debate among the so-called experts, only a handful of whom had read the recently translated edition of Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s pioneering study of lustmord, written as a contribution to the new science of ‘‘medico-forensics.’’20 Since each victim had apparently been chosen at random, the police had a hard time linking any suspect to all five women. Furthermore, this brazen culprit seemed to be taunting them. With one eye firmly fixed on circulation figures, Fleet Street heightened the public’s alarm by stressing the inherently dangerous nature of the East End, by turning the murders into a media 26

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event filled with sensationalism and gore, and by raising the Ripper’s body count from five to eight or even nine.21 While Tory papers pointed to the slayings as further evidence of the endemic depravity found in Whitechapel, the East End press assured readers that this district was just as safe as any other part of London and downplayed the horror of these nocturnal attacks. Ripperology and Ripperature Since the 1960s, the pursuit of Jack the Ripper has become a profitable light industry producing all kinds of books, films, and television ‘‘spectaculars.’’ Clearly the public’s desire for a solution to the murders has only grown with time. To play the game of ‘‘hunt the Ripper’’ all one needs is a lively imagination, a few well-heeled sponsors or indulgent friends, and a willingness to immerse oneself in newspaper sources, memoirs, and diaries of the 1880s and thereafter. Once one has found a suitably demented young male— whether plebeian or patrician—who was familiar with Whitechapel, then one can build a case based in large part on coincidence and circumstantial evidence. Add a vivid imagination and the result is a foregone conclusion. In the absence of any new significant material from the files of Scotland Yard all this feverish sleuthing has brought us no closer to the real villain. Not to be denied their sport, however, some Ripperologists continue to operate like true believers. In the words of two dead-keen players, ‘‘We were confident that any real find would only further support what we already knew to be the truth. We had already arrived at our destination— for now, at least—and our journey would soon be over.’’22 No doubt the whodunem genre has kept the Ripper industry in business by generating much publicity and some modest royalties based on the bold claim of ‘‘the final solution.’’ But no matter how ingenious the argument, none of these works has come close to building a case that would survive the scrutiny of a scrupulous judge and jury. Determined to avoid playing this game by nominating yet another farfetched candidate, I have chosen instead to focus on both the content and cultural context of Ripper news contained in some fifteen London dailies and weeklies during the latter months of 1888. Since the appearance of Marie Belloc Lowndes’s The Lodger in 1911, Jack the Ripper has inspired almost one hundred books and pamphlets, as well as countless articles, more than twenty films, a few operas, and at least one ghoulish comic book based on the Masonic conspiracy theory.23 Of the twenty-odd books about these murders published since 1970, virtually all have been written by men.24 And while building various houses of cards in 27

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the course of tracking down the true killer, they have all avoided problematizing the Ripper reportage and confronting the larger cultural, not to say political, implications of the murders. Suspects Most modern studies of the Whitechapel murders take their readers through the long list of famous and obscure candidates for the role of the Ripper whom amateur and professional sleuths have fancied over the years. To this day many Ripper buffs cling to the notion that Jack was a gent—a West End professional, a ‘‘guv’nor’’ or toff—who wore an expensive cloak and top hat and was driven by misogyny, religious fanaticism, or venereal disease to destroy prostitutes. Among the most persistent and ludicrous of myths is the one linking the murders to royalty—namely, H. R. H. Prince Albert Victor (‘‘Prince Eddy’’), Duke of Clarence and Avondale, the eldest son of Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, the heir to the throne. Clarence led an active homosexual life and frequented the notorious male brothel on Cleveland Street, where he was once arrested during a police raid. Prolonged self-indulgence led to an early death, apparently from the effects of venereal disease acquired in the West Indies.25 An equally implausible candidate is Sir William Gull, the Queen’s highly respected personal physician, who allegedly entered into a conspiracy of elite Freemasons determined to eliminate every prostitute who knew about Clarence’s supposed secret marriage to a Roman Catholic shop girl, Annie Crook. According to this myth she had given birth to a daughter, which raised the specter of a Roman Catholic heir to the throne.26 Another upper-class suspect still fancied by a few Ripperologists is Prince Eddy’s tutor at Cambridge, James K. Stephen, the emotionally disturbed and misogynist son of the noted judge Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, and the first cousin of Virginia Woolf. An ardent advocate of this theory, Dr. David Abrahamsen, a retired New York psychiatrist and an expert on the Son of Sam murders, studied the ‘‘psychodynamics’’ of the killer and concluded that Stephen had enjoyed a passionate love affair with Prince Eddy while tutoring him at Trinity College. For a short time their ‘‘perverted partnership’’ continued in London after graduation, but the Prince jilted him and Stephen lost the remnants of his sanity. He then embarked on his war against prostitutes, whom he condemned as the ‘‘syphilitic spawn of hell’’ and the ‘‘Harlots of Jerusalem.’’27 Another favorite suspect has long been Montague John Druitt, an Oxford graduate and briefless barrister who took up schoolteaching and lived for a time in Whitechapel. The 28

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strange circumstances of his death as well as his alleged homosexuality have enhanced his suspect status. At the end of December 1888 the police hauled his body out of the Thames, and surgeons estimated that he had thrown himself into the river toward the end of November—not long after the last of the Ripper’s known killings. Thus there has been speculation that Druitt had drowned himself not just because of his dismissal from his teaching job but out of remorse for his terrible deeds in Whitechapel.28 Far more eminent suspects at the time included that most virtuous of Liberal leaders and ardent rescuer of prostitutes William Gladstone, as well as the painter Walter Sickert, the brilliant Anglo-American actor Richard Mansfield, and the esteemed patron of destitute children Dr. Thomas Barnardo. Obscure or plebeian suspects include Joseph Barnett, the ex-lover of Mary Kelly; a vengeful doctor named Stanley, whose beloved son had supposedly caught venereal disease from Kelly; the mad Polish hairdresser Aaron Kosminski; and the mad Russian doctor Michael Ostrog.29 Then there is the eccentric and colorful medical quack Dr. Francis J. Tumblety, a Canadian-born con man of Irish origins who made a small fortune by peddling a fake cure for pimples. Much admired by ladies with bad complexions, he passed himself off at one time or another as a surgeon, an officer in the federal army, and a gentleman—three roles for which he was wholly unqualified. During a visit to England in the fall of 1888 he was arrested for ‘‘unnatural offences’’ (which remain a mystery), whereupon he fled to France and then back to America. For the remainder of his life (he died in 1903) he tried to dodge detectives and reporters looking for a good story.30 Among the most exotic suspects fancied by a few Ripperologists have been practitioners of black magic reputed to have left their mark by such cabalistic signs as the number of stab wounds in Tabram’s body (39, or 3 times 13), the choice of the murder sites so as to form a cross or pentagram across Whitechapel, the ritualistic mutilations, and the timing of each attack to accord with phases of the moon.31 The veteran Ripperologist Melvin Harris chose for the role of Jack a ‘‘weird, uncanny’’ and bohemian character named Robert Donston Stephenson, alias Roslyn D’Onston. The stark contrasts in this man’s personality and career gave him something of a Jekyll-and-Hyde quality as he moved from medical to biblical and then necromantic studies and even served as a surgeon in Garibaldi’s army. Emulating the FBI, Harris compiled a thirteen-point ‘‘master profile’’ of the serial killer, which seemed to fit Stephenson because of his obsession with the occult and his sociopathic leanings. Besides murdering the five 29

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prostitutes, Stephenson is supposed to have killed and dismembered his wife. He also made beauty creams and magic candles out of secret ingredients, and he allegedly stored the bloodstained ties he wore for each of the five murders in a tin box that turned up in a Sicilian abbey. With all the zeal of a bloodhound but without providing any footnotes, Harris followed the tortuous and shadowy path of Stephenson, to whom he assigned the authorship of a bizarre article in the Pall Mall Gazette (Dec. 1) signed by ‘‘One Who Thinks He Knows,’’ wherein the murders are blamed on a French practitioner of black magic or necromancy obsessed with the ritual murder of prostitutes.32 During the fall of 1888 the police took in hundreds of suspects for questioning but released all of them after a few hours or days. Besides the early prime suspect, John Pizer, a Jewish bootmaker who made some money by threatening to sue several newspapers for defamation of character, the pool of suspects included a nameless Jewish butcher or Kosher slaughterman (known as a shochim or shochet); a lunatic barber-surgeon (Severin Klosowski, alias George Chapman); a mad Russian secret agent (Dr. Alexander Pedachenko, alias Vassily Konovalov), who had supposedly been sent to London by the Ochrana in order to discredit Scotland Yard for failing to punish Russian anarchists severely; Dr. Thomas Neill Cream, the provider of poisonous ‘‘pink pills for pale prostitutes’’; and at least two lunatic Jewish paupers from the East End (David Cohen and Aaron Kosminski). Needless to say, virtually all of the Jewish suspects fit the Orientalist bill of Otherness with their dark complexions, black hair, black clothing, and heavy foreign accents.33 The bogus ‘‘diary’’ of Jack the Ripper featured in the British press during 1993 exemplifies the continuing power of the Ripper legend to excite media interest. No doubt the Liverpudlian producers of this bizarre text— written in a uniform twentieth-century hand in an old scrapbook with many pages torn out—hoped to make millions by assigning the authorship to James Maybrick, a well-to-do and middle-aged cotton merchant who died in 1889 from an overdose of arsenic. His death became front-page news for weeks on end when his American wife, Florence (née Chandler), was accused of having poisoned him. Her trial in 1889 made headline news around the country and attracted hordes of spectators. Although convicted and sentenced to hang, she escaped execution, and spent fifteen years in prison.34 According to this confessional diary, James Maybrick commuted to London by train to wage his private war against prostitutes and returned late at night with or without bloodstains on his suit. Serious Ripperologists, 30

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as well as handwriting experts for the Sunday Times, soon denounced the Maybrick diary as an utter hoax, and in July 1994 its purveyor, Mike Barrett, confessed to the Liverpool Post that he had forged the journal. Nevertheless, Paul Feldman, a British video maker, embarked on a prodigious quest to prove the diary authentic.35 Given the perennial desire for a solution of the mystery, and given the acrobatic logic or legerdemain of some Ripperologists, there can be no doubt that new and even more farfetched suspects will emerge in the future to fill the great void created by the killer’s elusiveness. Running parallel to these masculine productions and rarely touching them at any point are a few important studies by British and American feminists who have their own distinct ideas about the murders as the epitome of male misogyny since time immemorial. First among these polemical but sobering studies was Susan Brownmiller’s indictment of men bent on rape or gynocide who admire serial killers like Jack in Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (1975). Twelve years later, Jane Caputi launched her polemic against the lethal nature of male heterosexual desire and the vital role played by serial killers in not only the lives of women but also the mass media ever since 1888. The Age of Sex Crime (1987) reflected her anger and deep concern over femicidal predators from Jack to Ted Bundy and David Berkowitz. With a flair for telling tales of women tortured, raped, and murdered, Caputi accused the patriarchy of having produced not only Jack but also his many emulators. Her grim catalogue of sexual murder ends with what she calls the ‘‘logical’’ consequence of all these fusions of sex and violence—namely, the rape of ‘‘Mother Earth’’ by the (manmade) hydrogen bomb.36 Between these two publications, in 1982, the much more moderate and empirical feminist Judith Walkowitz published a groundbreaking historical essay on the social and cultural ramifications of the Ripper murders, pointing out how some Englishmen exploited the public panic by acting out their Ripper fantasies, thereby reinforcing male control of women.37 Then in 1987 two English feminist cultural critics, Deborah Cameron and Elizabeth Frazer, published a book on lust murder that stressed the connection between the codes of heterosexuality and the murder of women. Toward the end of this occasionally insightful work they indulge in a wonderfully utopian, or naive, appeal for the ‘‘total reconstruction’’ of male desire.38 In sum, the Ripper murders have inspired a literature that ranges from fantasy or fiction to polemics and forensics, and the dividing line between the imaginative and the factual remains as elusive as ever across the fertile field of Ripperature. 31

Chapter Two

Images and Realities of the East End

Contextualizing Ripper news requires immersion in not only Victorian newspapers and Ripperature but also empirical studies of the East End in the 1880s. But we should bear in mind that constructing any kind of historical context requires textualization, which is, of course, filled with all the inherent ambiguities of language and subjectivities of ideology. In other words, there is no clear boundary between the lived realities of East Enders and our historical reconstruction more than a century later of Whitechapel during the year of the Ripper, just as the boundaries of the East End itself remain ambiguous. To affluent West Enders (and we should not forget that poor people lived west of Piccadilly Circus), Whitechapel was a breeding ground for criminals, prostitutes, and layabouts; a center of depravity, degradation, and disease. At times it seemed like a remote colony of the imperial city, if not a foreign country. Filled with pride over the quality of English civilization, most West Enders regarded Tower Hamlets (the core of the East End) as an embarrassment—a vast Cimmerian den populated in the main by degenerates and troglodytes. No doubt readers of Stevenson’s novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde recognized in the 32

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villainous Hyde an allegory of the ‘‘pale and dwarfish’’ savages who apparently thrived in this dark and dangerous part of town. In short, the educated elite of Mayfair, Knightsbridge, and Kensington were not at all surprised that these homicidal horrors were taking place in Whitechapel. Since the mid-eighteenth century, when open fields stretched north and south of the London Hospital (completed in 1752), Whitechapel had become criss-crossed with narrow, twisting streets and lanes running off the main thoroughfares of Commercial and Whitechapel Roads, where old and new immigrants struggled to earn a living by hauling goods or portering, street trading, silk weaving, leather tanning, furniture making, tailoring, or sewing.1 By 1830, tens of thousands of nearly destitute people were packed into overcrowded and dingy tenements and common lodging houses from the Isle of Dogs to Spitalfields, and many more thousands drifted into the district during the next half century, having been displaced by major road-building projects in central London. Condemned to sharing single rooms, these families were forced to scrounge for menial work when the Huguenot-dominated silk-weaving industry around Fournier Street started to decline. The population of greater London grew by leaps and bounds during Queen Victoria’s reign, rising from around 1.8 to 4.5 million. At the same time, the gulf between rich and poor steadily widened. So too did the sense of contrast between the two Ends of London, which had the effect of eliding central London in the collective imagination. In the words of Stedman Jones, the East End became not only a city in all but name but also ‘‘an immense terra incognita periodically mapped out by intrepid missionaries and explorers who catered to an insatiable middle-class demand for travellers’ tales.’’2 One of Henry Mayhew’s friends observed at midcentury that ‘‘Whitechapel has always been looked on as a suspicious, unhealthy locality. To begin, its population is a strange amalgamation of Jews, English, French, Germans, and other antagonistic elements that must clash and jar, but not to such an extent as has been surmised and reported.’’ Missing from this account were the impoverished and often despised Irish, whose numbers soared after 1850 as a result of the famine exodus.3 The small but palpable presence of West Europeans and East Asians made Whitechapel a colorful mix of ethnicities, accents, cuisines, and customs, especially after 1880, when hordes of Jewish refugees fleeing pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe began to arrive. By 1887 the number of Jews living in Tower Hamlets had climbed to 45,000 out of a total population of some 909,000, and many more were on their way.4 In the words of William Fishman, the East End was ‘‘a complex tapestry 33

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of peoples and institutions,’’ where dire poverty was occasionally ‘‘relieved by spacious middle-class enclaves.’’ Here virtue and vice, faith and unbelief, healthy and diseased bodies, affluence and destitution, criminals and missionaries, Jews and gentiles, and hope and despair coexisted in uneasy proximity.5 Just across the street from the Ten Bells pub, frequented by artisans, costermongers, and idlers, as well as prostitutes hustling for pints and clients, stood Hawksmoor’s imposing neoclassical structure Christ Church Spitalfields, where affluent and poor worshipers offered up prayers for the living and the dead. If most Londoners took inordinate pride in their modern Rome and hailed it as the epicenter of the greatest and richest empire the world had ever known, some pessimists saw the metropolis as overcrowded, unhealthy, and oppressive. Novelists of the London scene often invoked the tropes of ‘‘light’’ and ‘‘dark’’ to heighten the contrast they found between the forces of civilization and those of barbarism.6 The absence of streetlights in the poorer parts of town gave this binarism a literal meaning between dusk and dawn. Moreover, darkness also connoted chronic dirt, disease, drunkenness, crime, violence, pollution, pauperism, and overcrowding, all of which contributed to high infant mortality rates and physical and sexual abuse.7 Not even the glitter and the gold of Piccadilly, Westminster, and Mayfair could persuade the pessimists that London was anything but ‘‘the great wen’’ of the journalist William Cobbett’s imagination. The sheer size and anomie of the metropolis moved a number of poets, critics, and flaneurs to stress its profoundly paradoxical nature. The ‘‘charter’d streets’’ of Blake’s haunting poem ‘‘London’’ (1789–93) bustled with throngs of busy people whose varied features and dress impressed many a visitor. That most melancholy of poets James Thomson wrote gloomy stanzas about London’s ‘‘desert streets,’’ ‘‘peopling corpses,’’ and ‘‘holocaust of woes, sins, lusts, and blasphemies’’ in such poems as ‘‘The Doom of a City’’ (1857) and ‘‘The City of Dreadful Night’’ (1870–74). To London’s rescue, however, came the American aesthete and flaneur Henry James, who found the city not only ‘‘dreadfully delightful’’ but positively vibrating with people, virtues, vices, colors, and activities. London, in short, was ‘‘magnificent . . . clumsy and brutal . . . a strangely mingled monster . . . an ogress who devours human flesh to keep herself alive to do her tremendous work.’’8 Unfazed by the city’s darker corners, James enjoyed gazing at people and places beyond the safe precincts of St. James’s and Piccadilly. On the other hand, that romantic champion of rural values Thomas Hardy called London a ‘‘monster 34

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whose body had four million heads and eight million eyes,’’ and likened the London crowd on Lord Mayor’s Day to ‘‘a molluscous black creature having nothing in common with humanity . . . [that] throws out horrid excrescences and limbs into neighbouring alleys.’’9 For Disraeli, the capital was more of a nation than a city, as he made clear in Lothair (1870). Clearly London was far too big and complex a social organization to be contained by a single trope. London offered spectators a bewildering variety of people, activities, goods, moods, and cityscapes. Gustave Doré captured some of the synergy and diversity as well as misery of the metropolis—especially the East End— in his haunting prints entitled London (1872). Stevenson’s best-selling story about the doubled character Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde can be read as an extended metaphor for a deeply divided city, wherein the forces of reason, civility, and learning are pitted against those of animal passion and violence. The protagonist in this neo-Gothic tale personified both the genius and the depravity of this great city, wherein a much-respected West End doctor could degenerate into a monster acting out his malevolent fantasies in the East End with ‘‘ape-like fury.’’ While the evil Hyde was taking possession of the mind, body, and soul of his creator, a young Scottish-Irish doctor from Edinburgh by the name of Arthur Conan Doyle was calling London ‘‘that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.’’10 A number of Victorian writers preferred to ‘‘Africanize’’ the East End by means of a jungle trope derived from the travelogues of African explorers like Paul du Chaillu, Richard Burton, and Henry Morton Stanley, or the adventure-romances of Rider Haggard set in ‘‘darkest’’ Africa. Social investigators, missionaries, and reformers often imagined the East End as an urban jungle filled with danger and sin and infested with ‘‘savages’’ or ‘‘beasts of prey in human shape.’’11 The oxymoronic metaphor of the urban jungle enabled social investigators to fancy themselves as hardy adventurers entering what would today be called a ‘‘combat zone,’’ armed with nothing more than a map, notebook, and Bible. Along with good intentions they carried a fair share of class and racial prejudice. These prejudices owed much to sheer ignorance of conditions in the rookeries and back alleys or wynds of Tower Hamlets. As the Daily Telegraph declared (Oct. 2, 1888), ‘‘The majority of the inhabitants of West and Central London know as much [about the East End] as they do of the Hindoo Kush or the Northern Territory of South Australia.’’ Small wonder, then, that the sites of the 35

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mutilation-murders struck educated Victorians as wholly appropriate given their view of this heart of darkness in the midst of the world’s most civilized city. The heaviest-handed application of the jungle metaphor came from ‘‘General’’ William Booth, the ardent evangelist who founded the Salvation Army in the late 1870s. With much help from the crusading journalist W. T. Stead, he applied the African analogy to urban England—not just the East End—at the outset of his messianic best-seller, In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890). Beginning with a sexually charged metaphor borrowed from Stanley’s account of penetrating ‘‘this inner womb of the true tropical forest,’’ where pygmies and apelike tribesmen lurked, Booth compared the ‘‘two tribes of savages, the human baboon and the handsome dwarf’’ in Africa with ‘‘the vicious, lazy lout, and the toiling slave’’ who jostled each other in England’s slums. According to his moral pathology, both ‘‘Darkest England’’ and ‘‘Darkest Africa’’ were plagued by deadly sins and malaria, and ‘‘the foul and fetid breath of our slums’’ was ‘‘almost as poisonous as that of the African swamp.’’ The East End that he knew so well from missionary work had become a living hell where ‘‘the ginshop stands at every corner with its River of the Water of Death’’ flowing night and day, the result of which was ‘‘a population sodden with drink, steeped in vice, eaten up by every social and physical malady.’’ Playing on the jungle analogy for all it was worth, Booth declared that ‘‘the denizens of Darkest England’’ stood in desperate need of material and spiritual regeneration: As there is a darkest Africa is there not also a darkest England? Civilisation, which can breed its own barbarians, does it not also breed its own pygmies? May we not find a parallel at our own doors, and discover within a stone’s throw of our cathedrals and palaces similar horrors to those which Stanley has found existing in the great Equatorial forest? But the stony streets of London, if they could but speak, would tell of tragedies as awful, of ruin as complete, of ravishments as horrible, as if we were in Central Africa; only the ghastly devastation is covered, corpselike, with the artificialities and hypocrisies of modern civilisation.12 Though this catalogue of tragedies did not include mutilation-murder, the deeds of Jack the Ripper seemed to pervade this indictment of a metropolis capable of spawning such ‘‘African savagery.’’ Booth argued that all these evils could be alleviated only by Christian compassion, abolition of the 36

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Poor Law system, the establishment of self-help communities run along Salvation Army lines, a return to village life in the countryside (back to the Garden of Eden), and assisted emigration overseas. And he appealed to readers to give generously toward these goals. Besides indulging in the jungle trope, some late-Victorian reformers cherished sewer or midden metaphors when seeking to epitomize Whitechapel and environs. As Peter Stallybrass and Allon White have pointed out, obsessions with purity, sanitation, personal hygiene, and respectability drove middle-class observers to project their ‘‘baser’’ desires and accompanying guilt onto the slum dwellers by means of allusions to animals, scum, sewers, and excrement. In short, they were engaged in a ‘‘mapping of the city in terms of dirt and cleanliness [that] tended to repeat the discourse of colonial anthropology.’’13 Writers as different as Dickens, Chadwick, and Hugo conveyed the pervasive fear of respectable people about having any contact with these polluted or diseased creatures. At the same time, moralistic reformers like the Rev. Andrew Mearns, W. T. Stead, the Rev. Sidney Godolphin Osborne, and General Booth binarized their urban world into zones of light and darkness, cleanliness and dirt, safety and danger, virtue and vice. In their febrile imaginations all the drainpipes and sewers of the metropolis seemed to empty into the East End. While reinforcing the older image of the East End as one vast slum, the metaphors of the midden and the jungle also conflated the greatest problems afflicting this region—bad sanitation, worse housing, and overcrowding. If some progress had been made since the 1850s in purifying the water and improving drainage, the efforts to tear down the rookeries and build tenements affordable by former residents were both fitful and pitiful. The tendency of respectable Victorians to compare the dregs of the East End—or what they called with heavy irony and euphemism the residuum—to apes, pigs, rats, and dogs deepened the already profound gulf between the classes and the two Ends of London.14 Far different was Charles Booth’s monumentally empirical approach to the metropolis. In 1886 this pioneering social investigator enlisted a team of young and progressive researchers to survey and map every street and ‘‘block of buildings’’ in London with the objective of identifying the different zones and degrees of poverty, comfort, and affluence prevailing there.15 Even in the reputedly poorest districts of the East End and Southwark, Booth’s team found enough diversity of housing and lifestyles to undermine all the generalizations and stereotypes that contemporaries used in order to distance themselves from Whitechapel. In the 1902 edition of his 37

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voluminous work, Life and Labour of the People in London, Booth also compared the slums of Tower Hamlets to sub-Saharan Africa. After mentioning the racial similarities between the dark and ‘‘savage pygmies’’ who thrived in both regions, he likened the recent ‘‘speakable horrors’’ in the East End (a clear allusion to the Ripper murders) to those Stanley had encountered ‘‘in the great Equatorial forest.’’16 The first volume of the Poverty Series began with a detailed survey of the trades, living conditions, and institutions of ‘‘East London.’’ Determined not to sensationalize the poverty, dirt, and dangers of a district where he had lived for a time, Booth presented a statistically informed picture of standards of living all over town. At one point he compared the East End to a curtain ‘‘on which were painted terrible pictures:—Starving children, suffering women, overworked men; horrors of drunkenness and vice; monsters and demons of inhumanity; giants of disease and despair.’’ How close, he wondered, did these images come to reality? By gathering reams of data about the earnings, expenses, and hardships of the inhabitants of every street and square, he sought to raise that curtain and reveal how people actually managed to survive.17 Defining the ‘‘poor’’ as people engaged in a daily struggle to obtain ‘‘the necessaries of life and make both ends meet,’’ and the ‘‘very poor’’ as those living ‘‘in chronic want,’’ who together constituted almost one-third of all East Enders, Booth stressed the difficulty of drawing an ‘‘accurate picture of so shifting a scene as the low-class streets.’’ Because a still photograph could never do justice to this constantly changing world, he settled for ‘‘an instantaneous picture, fixing the facts on my negative as they appear at a given moment.’’ Readers would have to use their own imaginations to ‘‘add the movement, the constant changes, the whirl and turmoil of life.’’ Aware of the raw energy, the color, and the diversity of life in the East End, he also knew that many of the down-and-out were physically or mentally deficient. Indeed, remnants of the ‘‘savage, semi-criminal class’’ that once ruled large parts of London could still be found here and there. Mixing his tropes, he likened the inhabitants to ‘‘fish in a river,’’ who did not travel far but lingered in the same vicinity, ‘‘almost as if the set of streets which lie there were an isolated country village.’’18 The people he encountered may have suffered from a pervasive ‘‘helplessness,’’ but they had strong emotional ties to family, ‘‘faction,’’ street, or tenement. Although the ubiquity of dirt and disease, as well as ‘‘alien’’ immigration, increased the amount of degeneration, most East Enders went about their daily tasks with remarkable vitality. They also pursued money with a passion that was most conspicuous along 38

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Petticoat Lane on Sundays—what he called ‘‘one of the wonders of London’’—when and where ‘‘a medley of strange sights, strange sounds, and strange smells’’ greeted the visitor. As he put it bluntly, ‘‘Petticoat Lane is the exchange of the Jew, but the lounge of the Christian.’’19 Booth uncovered much diversity or ‘‘strange bedfellows’’ within even the worst tenements and lodging houses. Even so, Whitechapel had the largest number of paupers, casual workers, and semi-criminals in all of Tower Hamlets, at 3.3 percent. And yet St. George’s-in-the-East was by far ‘‘the most desolate’’ and squalid parish. As for criminals, these could be found in every class, and they certainly were not confined to the East End.20 The homeless, idle cornermen and beggars led ‘‘the life of savages with vicissitudes of extreme hardship and occasional excess.’’ Booth could but hope that this class of ‘‘outcasts’’ would soon become ‘‘less hereditary in its character.’’ He likened the hustle and bustle of Whitechapel to the children’s game where the players run across a line drawn on the ground, crying, ‘‘Here we’re on Tom Tiddler’s ground, picking up gold and silver.’’21 Under the heading of trades or occupations, Booth found that just over 18 percent of the people in Whitechapel made clothes, 6.5 percent made cigars or prepared food, 8 percent sold goods in the streets, and 5.25 percent operated small sweatshops.22 Mindful that money alone could not bring happiness, Booth blamed ‘‘great poverty’’ on idleness, casual and irregular work, and puny profits. Drink appeared in fifth place in his list of causes, followed by a ‘‘drunken or thriftless wife,’’ illness or infirmity, and a large family to support. As befit a convert to New Liberalism, he prescribed a ‘‘limited form of Socialism,’’ or a benevolent extension of the Poor Law that combined state intervention and private philanthropy without any kind of compulsion. He wanted to see the poorest families resettled in industrial communities outside the slums; and if this did not appeal, then there was always the route of assisted emigration. To his enduring credit, he never allowed the reams of data gathered by his researchers—‘‘the arithmetic of woe’’—to obscure the experiences and feelings of individuals trapped in the slums. The remarkable ‘‘Descriptive Map of London Poverty’’ produced by Booth’s investigators resembled a patchwork quilt of colors ranging from black and blue to purple and yellow.23 Armed with a color-coding system, the research team proceeded to paint the East End. Whitechapel contained a small but significant series of black spots just south and north of Christ Church, Spitalfields—signifying streets or dwellings occupied by ‘‘the lowest class,’’ or unskilled laborers, ‘‘loafers, and semi-criminals.’’ These peo39

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ple were confined in dismal, overcrowded tenements made of dark bricks and crumbling mortar, where the doors were wide open, the rooms dingy and dirty, the adults jobless or idle, and the children disheveled. Even the cats were starving. Booth used two shades of blue to denote the ‘‘very poor’’ (dark) and the ‘‘moderate’’ poor (light). Adjacent to these blocks of blue were many purple squares, indicating an area with a mix of ‘‘poverty and comfort,’’ where skilled workers like plumbers and carpenters lived. Next to these lay strips of pink, denoting ‘‘working-class comfort’’ or better-off artisans. Most prominent in the Whitechapel area were long, thick strips of red running up and down such thoroughfares as Whitechapel, Commercial, and Mile End Roads, and further north, Bethnal Green Road, marking the shops, offices, and warehouses of well-to-do merchants and businessmen. A concentration of red blocks lay between Commercial Road and Bishopsgate Street Without. No traces of yellow, signifying the ‘‘wealthy’’ upper middle class, appeared in Whitechapel, Bethnal Green, or environs. In sum, dark blue, pink, and purple predominated behind the main avenues, with only the occasional blotch of black signifying the worst slum areas.24 For the discerning few who saw this map, the conventional image of London as divided between regions of wealth and lightness (the West End) and poverty and darkness (the East End) with few if any intervening gradations could no longer stand scrutiny. However, Booth had to admit that ‘‘so lurid and intense is the light which murderous outrage has lately thrown on these quarters, that the grey tones of the ordinary picture become invisible.’’ Hoping to prevent contemporaries from painting all of Whitechapel black, he wrote that ‘‘the saddest form of poverty’’ in every part of the metropolis involved not merely the homeless or hard-core and semi-criminal indigents, but also ‘‘the gradual impoverishment of respectability, silently sinking into want.’’25 As if to reassure his readers, Booth made clear near the outset that there was no basis for the nightmare vision of West Enders that ‘‘hordes of barbarians’’ would some day pour forth from the slums and ‘‘overwhelm modern civilization.’’ If there were barbarians in the East End, they were a small and declining percentage, and they represented ‘‘a disgrace but not a danger.’’26 Most middle-class writers of the period—whether bad poets or sharp journalists—ignored the empirical findings of Booth’s team, preferring to binarize the West and East Ends as though they were divided by an unbridgeable gulf. From their pivotal position in central London, journalists could literally look toward the East and West Ends and dwell on the stark 40

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contrasts they found there. This deep spatial and cultural division was reinforced in 1883 by the publication of the Rev. Andrew Mearns’s searing pamphlet about the wretchedness and godlessness of London’s poor, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, which W. T. Stead touted enthusiastically. In 1883 the able journalist and playwright George Sims, who later became a keen Ripperologist, wrote a series of equally disturbing articles about the savage inhabitants of ‘‘Outcasts’ Land’’ entitled ‘‘How the Poor Live.’’ Both of these works provoked debate in the press and the House of Commons, and resulted in a Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes (1884–85), which produced far more rhetoric than state-funded tenements for the down-and-out.27 The steady flow of impoverished European Jews into the East End reinforced the West End view of this district as populated by people of darker skin and/or swarthier complexion, and therefore primitive qualities. Most of the early suspects in the Ripper slayings fell into this category. Convinced that no true Englishman could commit such savage crimes—if only because the culprit killed far too swiftly, viciously, and silently for an ordinary phlegmatic Englishman—ethnocentric readers were quick to construct a Jewish ‘‘monster’’ or a culprit who belonged to some other ‘‘inferior race.’’ Resentment over the rising tide of Jewish immigrants, many of whom managed to prosper in the environs of Whitechapel, strengthened the currents of antiSemitism. Although most of the refugees from persecution in Eastern Europe spoke little or no English upon arrival, many managed to climb up and out of poverty through shrewd selling of goods and services. The palpable success of Jewish tradesmen, sweatshop owners, moneylenders, and pawnbrokers stirred the envy of many gentiles, especially those who had to borrow money at high interest rates. Early in 1888, the government appointed two select committees to investigate foreign immigration and the sweatshop industries, both of which discussed ways to curb the influx of European Jewry.28 Along with Jewish immigrants, there were thousands of Irish-born residents in Tower Hamlets, in addition to much smaller numbers of Germans, French, Italians, Lascars, Africans, Chinese, and Malays—all of whom gave the East End its reputation as England’s main port of entry for destitute ‘‘passengers’’ from all over the world. Struggling with a new language and an alien culture, these foreigners often had to contend with cruel ethnic or racial gibes.29 The Ripper murders occurred less than a year after thousands of unemployed and casual workers had marched from the East End into central London to protest low wages and layoffs. Denigrated in the Tory press as 41

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‘‘roughs’’ and savage men of ‘‘low character,’’ many of these marchers were dockland ship-gangers, porters, and warehousemen as well as artisans and street peddlers reacting to the effects of the long depression, which lasted from the mid-1870s to the mid-1890s. Only a few of the long-term underemployed and unemployed in the East End ever succeeded in climbing out of the deep trough of debt, despair, and alcoholism into which they had fallen. In the words of Booth, respectable society considered the dock worker an ‘‘irrecoverable ne’er-do-well, or . . . a down-fallen angel.’’ Certainly such menial labor meant a daily struggle to find work that would prove backbreaking and yield only a few shillings. The chronic poverty of such workers moved some social reformers to promote assisted emigration as the only way to alleviate their misery.30 When angry workers ‘‘invaded’’ central London in February 1886 and looted some fancy shops in the vicinity of St. James’s, the elite press indulged in the usual outcries against destructive socialists and anarchists. If the poverty and pollution of Tower Hamlets’ slums could not be seen from the West End, they could certainly be smelled, providing the wind was blowing in the right (or wrong) direction. The daily deposit of tons of animal and human excrement and the presence of open sewers, cesspools, pigsties, and the remnants of the carcasses of over thirteen thousand animals slaughtered every week in knackers’ yards combined to infuse London’s air with a noxious stench, especially in warm weather. To this malodorous mixture one must add the smoke from the myriad sulfurous coal fires that assaulted the lungs of rich and poor alike during the winter months. In short, the East End stank both literally and figuratively in the sensitive nostrils of the middle classes.31 Apart from such baneful consequences of poverty and overcrowding as alcoholism and physical and sexual abuse, Whitechapel also had a bad reputation for crime.32 Few East Enders could avoid the sight of prostrate bodies—dead, half-alive, or dead-drunk—lying in the streets or wynds after weekend drinking bouts. When dealing with the victims of foul play, the police would often chalk such deaths up to accident or misadventure, given the district’s unsavory reputation. Needless to say, many young men regarded the police not as protectors but rather as ‘‘the common enemy.’’33 Christian missionaries and secular reformers called the East End ‘‘the abyss,’’ where every form of depravity flourished. And yet the ‘‘pestilential’’ rookeries of Whitechapel were no worse in most respects than those in Liverpool, Manchester, or Glasgow. To cleanse ‘‘the Augean Stables’’ of the East End would have required a Herculean effort, and there 42

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was no Hercules able to steer the power of the state in the direction of radical sanitary reform and slum clearance.34 If Sir Richard Cross’s Artisans’ Dwelling Act of 1875 provided better housing for some skilled workers who could afford to pay the higher rents, this measure, along with new road and railway construction, also drove out the residents of the old tenements condemned under this measure, and failed to prevent slumlords from exploiting their tenants and neglecting their properties. While the population of central London slowly declined in the 1880s, the periphery grew steadily. Between 1861 and 1881, the number of residents of central London fell by 13.6 percent, compared with 9.6 percent for Whitechapel.35 However well-intentioned, the public health acts of the midVictorian era and the modest slum clearance measures of 1868 (Torrens) and 1875 (Cross) brought minimal relief to the rookeries, even if they did alert the public to the overcrowding and high mortality rates in the East End slums. In his panoramic survey of Tower Hamlets in 1888, Fishman deliberately blurs the distinction between image and reality.36 Among his most revealing literary sources are the novels of Margaret Harkness (alias John Law), a cousin and quondam friend of Beatrice Webb, who knew the East End intimately and wrote with much empathy about the inhabitants. In one of her best-known novels, In Darkest London: Captain Lobo, Salvation Army (1889), she evoked the ebb and flow of variegated humanity on a typical Saturday night along Whitechapel Road: ‘‘There one sees all nationalities. A grinning Hottentot elbows his way through a crowd of long-eyed Jewesses. An Algerian merchant walks arm-in-arm with a native of Calcutta. A little Italian plays pitch-and-toss with a small Russian. A Polish Jew enjoys sauer-kraut with a German Gentile. And among the foreigners lounges the East End loafer, monarch of all he surveys, lord of the premises.’’37 Another acute observer of London’s squalor and human misery, the novelist George Gissing, described a slum in Clerkenwell: ‘‘Filth, rottenness, evil odours, possessed these dens of superfluous mankind and made them gruesome to the peering imagination.’’38 Far from being one vast slumland of dark and dingy streets crowded with brutes, louts, and prostitutes on the prowl for money, drink, and sex, however, Whitechapel was a potpourri of petty producers, dealers, porters, dockers, buskers, beggars, touts, ponces, and ordinary shoppers. The inhabitants ranged from affluent gentiles and Jews to odd-job laborers, hustlers, and hopeless, homeless alcoholics. In such respectable districts as Poplar, Bow, and Bromley, middle-class tradesmen and skilled artisans 43

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lived in decent houses marked by flower boxes and clean windows. Along Commercial and Whitechapel Roads and around Spitalfields, barrowvendors and hawkers sold food and secondhand goods at what they trumpeted as bargain prices. Even more colorful were the street actors, buskers, and puppeteers. At night, people with a few shillings to spare flocked to the music halls and the respectable theaters, while poorer folk descended into boisterous and unlicensed basement dives where they could enjoy lewd revues or scary melodramas known as penny gaffs, and drink the cheapest beer. As Stedman Jones has observed, the domestic comedy of the plebeian music hall contributed much to working-class consciousness in late Victorian London.39 Following a visit to a penny gaff filled with morbid displays, Margaret Harkness recalled how ‘‘a smell of death rises into your nostrils, and you feel as if your throat were filled up with some poisonous fungus.’’40 For many male workers in the East End, modestly appointed social clubs offered a welcome escape from the stresses and strains of family life in close quarters—a luxury denied to their wives—where they could smoke, drink, and talk with friends of similar tastes and political leanings. Typical of the bad press accorded Whitechapel was the headline in the Pall Mall Gazette (Oct. 17, 1888) above a letter from a respectable East Ender eager to defend his community against all the insults: ‘‘CAN ANY GOOD THING COME OUT OF WHITECHAPEL?’’ The new People’s Palace in Mile End Road, which opened its doors on October 3, 1887, with Queen Victoria in attendance, epitomized the contrast between light and dark. Funded by philanthropists, this multipurpose building ‘‘brightened the lives’’ of locals by providing space for exhibitions, lectures, concerts, plays, and physical exercise.41 In a letter to the Times (Sept. 29, 1887), the noted architect Sir Edmund Hay Currie, who designed the People’s Palace, paid tribute to ‘‘the wonderful improvement in manners and morals’’ that had occurred in the East End over the previous thirty years. Then he made his pitch for more money to pay for his costly edifice. The founding of Toynbee Hall in 1885 gave Whitechapel a vital center for the evangelical impulses that had driven missionaries into the East End seeking to rescue lost souls from the demons of drink, prostitution, and violence. Under the firm but benevolent stewardship of the Rev. Samuel Barnett, rector of St. Jude’s, Whitechapel, and his energetic wife, Henrietta, Toynbee Hall became the new epicenter of Christian charity and paternalism in slumland, where Oxbridge youth with a conscience carried out good works during the day and dined sumptuously by candlelight at night.42 Conditions in Whitechapel had indeed improved since the 1840s, even 44

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though rookeries teeming with drunken men and women and ragged children persisted and all kinds of petty and serious crime flourished. If the crime rate in the metropolis as a whole had fallen in recent years, East Enders still had reason to fear for their few possessions, and the number of crimes that went unrecorded and unpunished hardly inspired confidence in the forces of law and order.43 Arthur Morrison, a native East Ender, drew a bleak picture of life and death in the rookery in his novel A Child of the Jago (1896), set in the Old Nichol that lay between Bethnal Green and Shoreditch. This book described a close-knit plebeian community where people knew each other only too well and where family feuding turned into tribal wars involving women and children as well as men. As one of the protagonists in the novel exclaimed, ‘‘My God, there can be no hell after this!’’ And when the ‘‘good Bishop’’ ventured into this den of iniquity to spread the gospel and promote ‘‘the Elevation Mission,’’ the nimble fingers of Dicky Perrott relieved him of his gold pocket watch.44 Morrison likened the residents of the Jago to ‘‘great rats’’ slinking about the alleys and inner courtyards of the malodorous slum, the only escape from which lay in death. One byproduct of the Whitechapel murders was a renewed demand by the social-purity lobby to stamp out prostitution. Since the Ripper’s victims were common prostitutes, their deaths revived the old debate over whether the state should regulate the sex trade. Since prostitution in itself was not a crime, a policeman could arrest a woman only for soliciting or being disorderly—charges not so easily proven in a court of law. In addition, some prostitutes enjoyed a cozy relationship with the local constabulary, to whom they handed out sexual favors or bribes. In general the police arrested only the drunk and obnoxious members of the ‘‘fallen sisterhood.’’ Estimates of the number of prostitutes working in London varied hugely, because the British state did not regulate the flesh trade as strictly as did the French, and also because so many women were ‘‘casual’’ prostitutes rather than full-time sex workers, who hustled for clients after a night of carousing in order to pay for a ‘‘doss’’ in some filthy lodging house.45 Provided they avoided lewd and lascivious behavior, most of them could ply their trade with minimal risk of arrest. They found it far harder to avoid alcoholism and venereal disease. While many newspapers continued to denounce the ‘‘great scourge’’ of prostitution after the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts in 1886, practical solutions to this ubiquitous ‘‘evil’’ seemed in short supply, and most respectable Victorians resigned themselves to the existence of a class they considered not just immoral and polluted but downright dangerous.46 45

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The combined efforts of social purists, police constables, and magistrates failed altogether to suppress a vice involving so many people behaving furtively. Moreover, the police rarely hassled the pimps or ponces who lived off the earnings of the women under their control.47 Until the late 1880s, despite all the complaints about notorious brothels, local authorities usually looked the other way, because they did not want to upset slumlords or interfere with private enterprise. Most owners and operators of the lodging houses serving as brothels withstood the forces of the social-purity lobby until the arrival of Frederick Charrington. This courageous crusader, a scion of a rich brewing family, launched a one-man campaign against brothel keepers at some risk to his own safety. Using the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, he declared war on immoral earnings and pressed the police to shut down some of ‘‘the foulest sinks of iniquity.’’ However, his success came at a price, because the closing of some two hundred bordellos in Tower Hamlets drove hundreds of prostitutes into the street at night, several of whom fell victim to the Ripper’s knife.48 Just when the battered image of Whitechapel was slowly brightening, the mutilation-murders began. Old stereotypes die hard, and the East End’s reputation for darkness and danger did not disappear with the installation of more gaslights and the building of a few model tenements. Mindful that the Ripper murders were reinforcing the image of Whitechapel as a ‘‘plague spot,’’ the East London Observer (Sept. 15) insisted that the district was just as safe as any other part of the country, while acknowledging that ‘‘the blot’’ created by this fiend could never be effaced. Another extended troping of the East End occurred in 1902, when the American writer Jack London, a man of working-class origins and socialist sympathies, set forth on an expedition into a region that his friends regarded as wholly foreign and dangerous. Dressed like a down-and-out laborer he entered the East End—what he came to call the ‘‘Abyss’’ and ‘‘The City of Degradation’’—in order to meet members of the residuum and learn how they endured the appalling privations. At times his disguise proved worthless because he carried a camera and took numerous pictures of the beer-sodden and desperate people who lived in this ‘‘vast shambles.’’ Like an ethnographer, he observed people and scenes and then adopted the familiar metaphor of the urban jungle to characterize Whitechapel and environs, where he found pathetic victims of capitalism driven to drink, despair, and even suicide. Calling them menacing ‘‘savages’’ filled with lethal rage against their fellow man, he compared the more degenerate members of this ‘‘menagerie’’ to wild animals or ‘‘gutter wolves,’’ who might 46

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some day invade the West End and take their revenge against the rich. Shifting from the lupine to the simian trope, he likened some of the depraved street people to stunted gorillas: ‘‘Their bodies were small, illshaped, and squat. There were no swelling muscles, no abundant thews and wide-spreading shoulders. They exhibited, rather, an elemental economy of nature, such as the cave-men must have exhibited. But there was strength in those meagre bodies, the ferocious primordial strength to clutch and gripe [sic] and tear and rend. When they spring upon their human prey they are known even to bend the victim backward and double its body till the back is broken.’’ In his view, these conscienceless predators made up ‘‘a new species, a breed of city savages. The streets and houses, alleys and courts, are their hunting grounds. . . . The slum is their jungle, and they live and prey in the jungle.’’ Only the presence of zoo ‘‘keepers,’’ or bobbies, prevented passersby from falling into their Ripper-like clutches.49 Like the radical journalists at the Star, London blamed the grim conditions in his namesake city on the rich, or ‘‘The Management.’’ At the end he pondered the question of whether or not ‘‘civilization [had] bettered the lot of the average man,’’ and concluded that the Innuit Indians of Alaska were far better off in their ‘‘primitive’’ state than were the starving hordes struggling to survive in the midst of a highly civilized society that was showing signs of physical and mental degeneration owing to systematic ‘‘mismanagement.’’ In sum, Jack London’s fondness for the jungle trope and the Gothic image of semi-simian predators stalking innocent victims in the streets at night evokes the dark and spectral figure of Jack the Ripper that continued to haunt Whitechapel in the early 1900s.

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Chapter Three

The Theory and Practice of Victorian Journalism

In one of his more dogmatic moments, Thomas Macaulay declared that ‘‘the only true history of a country is to be found in its newspapers.’’1 If some contemporaries would have agreed with this obiter dictum, few informed readers would accept it today. Imbued with skepticism, we focus on the special interests and ideological leanings of the press corps and the moguls who dominate the mass media. Quite apart from questions of political bias, the now conventional belief of academicians in the inherent instability or slipperiness of language moves us to question the ‘‘real’’ reality of any event that has been represented by words. Since the late 1960s, cultural critics in both England and North America have analyzed the process of newsgathering and production in order to expose the fallacy of regarding newspapers as conveyors of ‘‘truth,’’ or disinterested and unmediated reality. To modern critical thinkers, news is the highly commodified product of complex and profit-driven organizations, designed to attract as many readers and advertisers as possible. Moreover, the prominent news stories (or feature articles) in newspapers constantly reinscribe the dominant values governing normative behavior. Quite apart from the role 48

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of reporters in reinforcing codes of morality or decency, readers also play an active part in this transfer of information by deciding what paper to buy, which articles to read, and how to interpret their contents. Our contextualization of Ripper news begins with some general observations about the nature of news reporting and its relation to the dominant values of society. Analogous in some respects to the radical criminology and sociology that flourished in the 1970s, what might be called ‘‘critical journalistic theory’’ regards newspapers not as objective repositories of truth but as commercialized promoters of law and order and normative behavior. At one end of the spectrum, Paul Hoch has insisted that the press represents the ideological agent of ‘‘a whole network of interlocking directorates’’ created by what he calls monopolistic capitalism. In his view, the American press brainwashes readers by means of sensational and sexually titillating stories while serving as a tool of the business elite and advancing its financial interests around the world.2 A less radical critic, Jeremy Tunstall, has stressed the media’s power to discover and define political ‘‘crises’’ that in turn compel governments to explain their behavior or policies to an acquiescent electorate. Thus journalists do not simply entertain readers with tales of crime, scandal, or sports, but wield real power.3 Adopting a more sociological stance, Gaye Tuchman argues that news stories resemble fairy tales or fictional narratives insofar as they flow out of ‘‘cultural resources and active negotiations.’’ Given their ‘‘public character’’ or accessibility, these stories form an important part of ‘‘our cultural equipment.’’ Relying on the cliché that newspapers constitute ‘‘a window-on-the world,’’ she maintains that what viewers see through the panes depends on the size and location of the window, the thickness and opaqueness of the glass, where the viewer is standing, the quality of his or her vision, and, of course, the actual events occurring ‘‘out there’’ in the ‘‘real’’ world. For all their differences, these critics all regard the news as a cultural construct laden with political values, and concur that the media ‘‘play an important role in the news consumers’ setting of a political agenda.’’4 Such critiques of the media are a far cry from the traditional respect accorded to newspapers as producers of ‘‘all the news that’s fit to print,’’ based on reliable reporting of events deemed likely to interest readers.5 After the mid-1960s, the critical interpretation of the media flourished at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, where Stuart Hall, Steve Chibnall, and others construed the British press as the tool of powerful magnates who were closely tied to the government and the Establishment, or social and intellectual elite. For them then, the mainstream 49

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Fleet Street press served the interests of the governing class, and was especially influential in times of economic distress or social unrest. Law-and-Order News Exemplifying this radical critique was Steve Chibnall’s study of crime news in the London press during the late 1960s and early 1970s, which owed much not only to socialist theory ranging from Marx to Gramsci but also to the pioneering work of Hall and his colleagues at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies during the late 1970s. Their landmark work Policing the Crisis examined in detail the responses of the British public, press, and judiciary to some vicious muggings (a term imported from America) that had occurred in Birmingham, London, and other cities in 1972–73. Seeking to understand why British society had plunged so quickly into ‘‘a moral panic’’ over these relatively minor felonies and why there was so little public discussion about their underlying social and economic causes, Hall and his colleagues pored over the Fleet Street papers, paying particular attention to the utterances of judges and other notables about the decline in public morality in the United Kingdom. Aware that they had no easy answers to the inequities that had produced such crimes, they laid out in great detail how repressive forces within society and the state were mobilized so as to ensure the triumph of law and order over what was construed as anarchy or thuggery. Much of what they had to say about the exploitation of these mugging incidents by individuals and organizations that wanted more police and more repression of the criminal element echoed the ‘‘garroting crisis’’ that had erupted in London in 1862–63.6 In Steve Chibnall’s opinion, the media ‘‘do not merely monitor the events of the real world; they construct representations and accounts of reality which are shaped by the constraints imposed upon them.’’ These constraints derive not only from ‘‘the values, ideologies, and interests which inform the construction process,’’ but also from the way news bureaucracies are organized. Thus crime news ‘‘illustrate[s] most effectively, the system of beliefs, values, and understandings which underlies newspaper representations of reality. There is, perhaps, no other domain of news interest in which latent press ideology becomes more explicit than in what we may term ‘law-and-order news.’ ’’7 Editors and reporters not only decide what is newsworthy, they also mediate the events in question through the always ambiguous and subjective instrument of language. Rejecting any clear boundary between ‘‘sacred facts’’ and ‘‘profane interpretations,’’ Chibnall argued that the former were ‘‘contained within complex frameworks of 50

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conventional understandings,’’ and that the news came wrapped in ‘‘latent press ideology’’ after having been ‘‘extensively predigested, coded, and packaged in conventional parcels.’’ Journalists, in short, use news of criminal or deviant behavior to convince readers that a serious malaise afflicts society. Drawing on the work of Steven Box and Stuart Hall, he surveyed crime news in London papers over the previous decade and concluded that Fleet Street had created a series of artificial crime waves by arranging unconnected incidents into a pattern that appeared to pose a major threat to public safety. Muggings and other random street crimes made the best kind of ‘‘law-and-order news’’ because they alarmed law-abiding citizens, who then clamored for stricter laws, harsher punishment for offenders, and bigger police budgets, all of which meant more repression.8 Tales about crime and social unrest always appeal to respectable readers regardless of their class, sex, ethnicity, or religious beliefs, because they live in a world of binary opposition between good and evil. As Chibnall makes clear, stories about particularly brutal crimes have more than entertainment value because they foster ‘‘generalized anxieties’’ and feed fears of an impending breakdown of order. As soon as the media feature stories of random violence or street crime, the public starts to worry about the risk to their own lives and valuables. Cases of juvenile delinquency, gang murder, bank robbery, drug trafficking, and terrorism become so many ripples that are shaped by editors and reporters into a tidal wave labeled an ‘‘underlying social malaise’’ or a ‘‘nameless malignant sickness.’’ To drive this point home editors hire academic experts to produce ‘‘scientific’’ data ‘‘proving’’ that society is on the verge of moral collapse, if not anarchy. In Chibnall’s view law-and-order news ‘‘mythologizes’’ by lumping isolated incidents together into ‘‘a single, intangible entity whose existence must remain an article of faith.’’ Phrases like ‘‘moral decline’’ and ‘‘the disease of violence’’ become the dominant slogans of the day, as the media seek to achieve the goal of a well-policed society. In this way law-and-order news plays into the hands of reactionary politicians in need of votes who condemn lax moral standards and lobby for more police repression. Crime waves are thus constructed by people who fear the erosion of traditional values and see gratuitous violence at every turn. Moreover, this alarmist journalism not only raises the level of anxiety among ‘‘law-abiding’’ citizens, but also seems to boost newspaper circulation.9 Law-and-order journalists need angles to sustain reader interest, and for this reason they indulge in hyperbole and speculation and strain to heighten the element of mystery. Any unusual twists and turns in the plot 51

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arouse reader curiosity, even if they turn out to lead nowhere. These contrived plots do not, however, add up to pure fiction, because ‘‘newspaper fiction is not the antithesis of factual reality, it is a distortion of that reality, pulled and puckered out of shape by the interests and everyday practices of newsmen and their informants. As a distortion of reality it is far more persuasive than mere fiction.’’10 Like all forms of news, crime news is both an institutional product and the result of a cultural process, churned out by a complex organization (the newspaper) and subject to strict economic and spatial constraints. No matter how hard reporters may work to capture what they consider the reality of any given event, what actually appears in print is the result of much selecting and editing. Just as with radio and television news, editors can print no more than a small fraction of the ‘‘significant’’ events that have taken place during the previous twenty-four hours. Therefore they must practice a form of triage, choosing the stories deemed worthy of notice and deciding on the appropriate number of column inches and the placement of the article on a given page.11 According to Chibnall, crime news represents the ‘‘medium through which deviance and opposition within British society is publicly reported and interpreted,’’ and the end result is ‘‘a species of . . . ‘commercial knowledge’—a saleable product designed with consumers in mind’’ that carries special weight or urgency when street crimes coincide with bombings and assassinations emanating from political extremists of the Provisional Irish Republican Army variety.12 Crime news, moreover, is not just about ‘‘them,’’ but also about ‘‘us,’’ insofar as it reflects our anxieties and our fervent wish to live without fear of crime and violence. Although these radical critics were writing at a time of profound alienation from the capitalist state as well as anger at the so-called Establishment, their strictures about the nature of crime news cannot simply be dismissed as the product of an outmoded or naive political protest. Much of what Chibnall, Hall and his colleagues, and Box had to say about the construction of crime news in the 1970s applies to both today and yesterday— notably, to late Victorian journalism. In other words, the reporting of garroting attacks in 1862, the battles around Trafalgar Square in 1886–87, and the Whitechapel murders in 1888 all contained elements of the same perceived threat to not only law and order but also English ‘‘civilization.’’ Constructing Deviance Following in the wake of the critiques produced by the Birmingham cultural studies group, three Canadian sociologists spent much of the mid52

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1980s analyzing news production in a Toronto newspaper office and television station. Curious about the social and cultural dynamics of reporting deviant behavior in the so-called ‘‘knowledge society,’’ Richard Ericson and his coauthors studied the selection and production of newsworthy material and concluded that stories of crime or deviance in the mass media involved a systematic distortion of ‘‘the facts in order to sustain news as a form of fiction.’’13 Invoking the work of sociologists from Durkheim to Ben-Yehuda, the authors focused on the vital links between deviance, social control, and morality, and insisted that definitions of deviance go hand in hand with mechanisms of control—they are both ‘‘key elements in everyday life, used by all of us to define who we are and what we might become.’’ In their view, journalists do not just record events but belong to ‘‘a deviance-defining elite’’ that draws rigid distinctions between acceptable and unacceptable behavior. Echoing Foucault, the authors credit reporters with the ‘‘power/ knowledge’’ to redefine reality in order to achieve ‘‘the reproduction of order.’’ For them, any form of knowledge, including the work of journalists, is inherently ideological because it promotes power over the population and the environment. In great detail, they explain how news originates in the immediate facts of the event and the views of witnesses or experts, and is then processed by reporters, who are ‘‘the active agents of organized life.’’ Then the editors in the newsroom revise the text for publication. The Ericson team sees television news as full of fictions and analogous to theater or film, because the networks’ producers, directors, and actor-reporters dramatize ‘‘reality’’ under the bright lights and through the lens of the camera. As with all forms of discourse, fictions are used in news reporting ‘‘to discover and apprehend the world.’’ These fictions ‘‘give order to the world and are essential to the creation of an orderly world of fact.’’ Any newsworthy event—whether a disaster, a political crisis, or a crime—becomes a story that gives mass audiences the illusion of having seen a fragment of the real world, being unaware of all the ideological filters through which the discrete event has passed before it reaches their eyes. Within the highly complex network of newsgathering and writing, reporters function as agents ‘‘for policing organizational life.’’ Their mandate to interpret sources and data empowers them to compose stories about deviant behavior that reinforce the dominant values of society. As collective power brokers, they help to control human activity by producing the appropriate ‘‘social and cultural constructions’’ rather than a ‘‘veridical account of reality.’’14 The Ericsonian approach to journalism has profound implications for the study of Victorian crime news. Even if the latter is far from being fiction 53

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and even if readers are not totally manipulated by reporters and the media magnates who employ them, Fleet Street habitually reduced the complex and often disputed facts of felonious crimes to a few morally charged ‘‘truths’’ that continually reinscribed the boundary between normative and deviant behavior. At any rate, to recognize today the large overlap between fact and fiction in news reporting is far from the heresy that it would have seemed to the late Victorians. Suffice it to say that the critical approach to journalism should move us to question our own assumptions about the objectivity or truth-yielding nature of the news we read every day. The Ripper murders prompted some papers to promote a moral and social panic far greater than the alarm raised over the garroting or mugging of a few gentlemen in the West End in 1862, when the right-wing press and several Tory members of Parliament orchestrated a crime wave by turning several minor assaults into a threat to life and limb all over the metropolis. The alarm over garroting resulted in a severe crackdown by the police, who arrested 779 more suspects between July and December of 1862 than they had in the whole previous year. During November, twenty-three men charged with garroting were tried and convicted at the Old Bailey.15 This spurious emergency anticipated the much more serious law and order crisis of 1886–87, when thousands of unemployed workers marched into Trafalgar Square to hear radical speakers accuse employers of keeping them and their families in chronic poverty and hunger. In February 1886, small bands of roving rioters looted shops in St. James’s and frightened passersby shortly after the police arrested several speakers and cleared the square of demonstrators. Alarmed by reports that plebeians had broken a few windows at the Carlton Club and Brooks’s, the Times (Feb. 9–12) denounced the vandalism and looting of these ‘‘roughs’’ as the worst in living memory. More than a year later, on Sunday, November 13, 1887, thousands of unemployed and casual workers marched from Tower Hamlets to Trafalgar Square, resolved to hold another mass rally. But this time the new Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Charles Warren, the very model of a modern martinet, was determined to teach ‘‘the mob’’ a lesson, and he ordered his forces to drive the protesters out of the square with their batons.16 The ensuing police riot left hundreds of workers badly battered and bruised. If not quite in the league of the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 in Manchester, ‘‘Bloody Sunday’’ became another cause célèbre in the British working-class movement—one that would not be forgotten or forgiven by committed liberals, radicals, or socialists.17 These two incidents spurred the Tory press to conjure up the specter of a 54

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dangerous criminal class in the East End bent on wreaking havoc in the prosperous and fashionable parts of town. In a bullish mood, the Times (Nov. 14, 1887) had no trouble filling nine columns with reports of the ‘‘heroic’’ victory of the police over a ‘‘vast mob of organized ruffianism, armed with lethal weapons’’ that had laid siege to central London. As one leader writer put it, the stakes were high because this was a battle for control of the metropolis between ‘‘civilized society’’ and ‘‘the criminal classes,’’ and Warren deserved full marks for upholding the law and defending ‘‘civilisation.’’ A year or so later some upmarket papers blamed the Whitechapel murders on the same depraved ‘‘residuum’’ that had rampaged around Trafalgar Square. On the other hand, the Liberal and Radical press, still angry over Bloody Sunday, accused Scotland Yard of utter incompetence because the killer had not been caught, and predicted that habitual criminals all over town would step up their activities now that they felt safe from the inept police.18 Modernizing the Victorian Newspaper Industry If the Victorian middle class never attained a complete monopoly of power and social control given the presence of a still powerful aristocracy and gentry, the remarkable growth of this multilayered class in numbers, wealth, talent, energy, and self-confidence can hardly be denied. Dedicated to the pursuit of both profit and upward social mobility and keen to acquire the ‘‘paraphernalia of gentility,’’ this class had achieved unprecedented wealth and authority by midcentury.19 The defeat of Chartism and the triumph of the Anti-Corn Law League in 1845–46, and the rise to power of such professional politicians as Peel, Gladstone, and Disraeli, bore witness to the ability of middle-class men to mobilize their intelligence, energy, and political resources in order to align themselves with the aristocracy and gentry whenever such an alliance proved useful. Beyond the arena of politics, the old and new men of business and the professions were keen to achieve recognition as gentlemen of good taste, and for this reason they bought paintings and patronized painters who celebrated English civilization and the beauty of the countryside.20 The enterprising and educated middle class may have composed the core of newspaper readership in the 1850s, but skilled workers were not far behind. Artisans and factory workers with a penny or two to spare were entering the newspaper culture in droves, having improved their reading and writing ability in both Sunday schools and state-supported elementary schools. The spread of working-class literacy may have been uneven, but 55

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there can be little doubt about the influence of the press on ‘‘ordinary educated Englishmen’’ after the 1860s, when the readership of newspapers climbed above the six million mark.21 This huge expansion had less to do with rising literacy rates among workers than with the falling price of dailies and weeklies—the advent of the penny paper enabled workers to buy a daily or weekly paper on a regular basis without having to forego their pints of bitter or plugs of tobacco. Editors and journalists working for the penny press knew how to satisfy the tastes of an increasingly plebeian readership without neglecting the needs of their middle-class readers.22 If the mid-Victorian middle class was riven with sharp divisions and petty snobberies, it was also driven by fear of a politically conscious and restive working class, the skilled segment of which aspired to play an active part in the political process after the passing of the Second Reform Act in 1867. Mid-Victorian prosperity went far to lessen class antagonisms despite the disparities of wealth, economic interest, education, and political allegiance. So too did the mass circulation press, which proved an effective cultural bridge over the great social divide. Regardless of their class, status, or occupation, more and more readers relished the sheer entertainment value of the news, particularly when it came to disasters and crime, especially murder.23 The significance of crime news should be interpreted in the light of the huge increase in both the number of publications of every variety and the number and range of readers after the 1830s. The repeal of the Stamp Duty on printed materials in 1855, following the arduous campaigns of the Cobdenites and other radicals, opened up the journalistic floodgates by enabling publishers to lower the price of their product. Then came the abolition of the duty on paper in 1861. As prices plunged, the number of newspapers in Britain rose steadily—from 795 in 1856 to well over 2,000 by 1890.24 The advent of the penny press meant that readership extended far beyond the educated middle class. By the 1860s, many skilled workers and artisans were buying an evening daily in addition to the cherished Sunday weekly. The rapid growth in the number and readership of cheap papers meant that the fourth estate came to occupy a central position in British culture and society, feeding the growing demand for not only knowledge but also entertainment. More and more workers were given fleeting glimpses of the complex world that lay far beyond their windows.25 According to the Liberal journalist Joseph Cowen, who edited the Newcastle Chronicle, the ‘‘wondrous,’’ if still controversial, new penny paper enabled the different classes ‘‘to communicate with each other, ‘as if the penny post 56

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sent letters open that all might be read by all.’ It identified with the interests of millions, not hundreds or thousands, and ‘around it the high and low, the rich and poor may gather together all being represented.’ ’’26 If this sentiment sounded too rosy, there were always pessimists and reactionaries who were convinced that a cheap press would corrupt the masses or spur them to commit criminal acts. Early Victorian newspapers differed markedly from the small-circulation and gossipy journals of the mid-eighteenth century, but the changes in format, content, and circulation that took place between the 1850s and 1880s were almost as pronounced. In addition to such technological advances as the telegraph and the web rotary printing machine, the emergence of some remarkably able proprietors and editors, along with the surge in consumerism, advertising, and working-class literacy, left lasting marks on both the national and the provincial press. Technological progress did not stop with the adoption of the rotary-action press in the late 1840s. Output figures soared after 1855 with the installation of the American-made Hoe web, or revolving machine—the so-called ‘‘double supplement’’ rotary press—that relied on rotating type cylinders. After the Times adopted the Walter rotary perfecting press in 1868, several other mechanical improvements appeared before the breakthrough of Otmar Mergenthaler’s famous Linotype, which reached Fleet Street around 1890 by way of the English provinces. This powerful machine could spew forth some two hundred thousand copies an hour—a figure quite unthinkable twenty years earlier.27 Such innovations in the production and dissemination of news made possible the emergence of a mass-newspaper culture by the 1870s. As Aled Jones has asserted, ‘‘The popular newspaper . . . [had] been transformed into the most dynamic and profitable of all products of the printing press by the end of the century. . . . It had also been securely implanted into the cultural landscape as an essential reference point in the daily lives of millions of people.’’28 Given the number of people who shared the same copy, the actual sales of each paper represented only a fraction of total readership on any given day.29 The expansion of this cheap and accessible ‘‘literature for the millions’’ did not stop in the mid-1870s. By 1914 the number of newspapers had at least doubled, the readership had quadrupled, and the size of the press corps had grown by leaps and bounds.30 Following the lead of the Sunday and evening press, most morning papers began to assign more space to crime, sports, short stories, and theater reviews at the expense of speeches by leading politicians. If a few earnest evangelicals and radicals still believed that the press had a mission 57

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‘‘to Enlighten, to Civilise, and to Morally Transform the World,’’ any veteran editor knew that sensationalized tragedies and crimes, served up as ‘‘scoops’’ or ‘‘splashes,’’ sold many more papers.31 Under the shrewd direction of Joseph Moses Levy, the circulation of the Daily Telegraph passed the one-hundred-thousand mark in the late 1850s. This figure was almost dwarfed by the two leading Sunday papers, Reynolds’s and Lloyd’s, which filled the chasm between the crude and ephemeral chapbooks or street cocks and the evening dailies. By combining lurid stories of death and disaster with summaries of political and economic events in a reader-friendly format, and by lowering prices to a penny, the Sunday press proved a roaring commercial success.32 The penny press could not have survived financially without a major increase in advertising. This quintessential expression of the new mass consumer society enabled newspaper owners and directors to charge less for their product while aiding and abetting the growing passion—especially among women—for shopping.33 As Thomas Richards has argued convincingly, advertising increased by leaps and bounds after the Great Exhibition in both volume and its ability to attract notice by means of ‘‘spectacle,’’ or eye-catching words and pictures.34 According to one late-Victorian column counter, advertisements occupied 49 percent of the six hundred columns in the Times during a single week in April 1886, compared with 51.1 percent in the Standard and 60.6 percent in the Daily Telegraph for the same period.35 Reliable circulation figures for the Victorian era are so few and far between that we must settle for rough estimates. The only English daily to surpass the 50,000 mark before 1855 was the Times, which peaked at close to 70,000 in the early 1860s, slumped to 61,000 in 1877, and then fell to 40,000 by 1890, while the price stayed at threepence.36 During these same decades the Daily Telegraph, Standard, and Daily News caught up with and then surpassed ‘‘the Thunderer’’ in copies sold.37 After Levy cut the price of the Daily Telegraph from twopence to one penny, circulation took off, rising from 27,000 in 1855 to 141,700 in 1861, 191,000 in 1871, and then 250,000 in 1880.38 The penny evening press soon attracted thousands of lowermiddle-class and skilled working-class readers on the strength of price, a lively format, and short feature stories, all of which paved the way for that ha’penny precursor of the tabloid press, the Daily Mail, in 1896. During the 1870s several metropolitan and international news agencies made their debut on the strength of the telegraph and the growing demand for syndicated news. Two of the best-known were partisan operations— 58

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notably, the Conservative-dominated Central News Agency and its rival, the Liberal (later National) Press Agency, both of which supplied ‘‘wire copy’’ to newspapers in much the same way electronic or computerized services do today.39 The constraints of money, time, and space imposed by the telegraph resulted in a terse and unadorned style. As with journalism in American cities twenty years earlier, the telegraph left little room for literary flourishes, so the news emanating from the wire services became more commodified and less sensationalized.40 By the 1880s, half a dozen such agencies were selling copy to papers around the country. Whether published in its original form or reworked by editors, this material enabled provincial newspapers to expand their coverage of events, by carrying national news that otherwise would have exceeded their resources. The rapid growth of these ‘‘news factories’’ during and after the 1870s attests to the press’s increasing reliance on this convenient source.41 Besides drawing on these agencies, some papers hired outside correspondents to write pieces on topical subjects, with the result that both the provincial and the metropolitan papers were able to cover many more stories without increasing their staffs. By 1888 London had thirteen morning and nine evening national dailies, including the new ha’penny upstart the Star. In the wake of Annie Chapman’s murder, the Star ’s circulation soared to 261,000 copies a day, then dipped down to 190,000 in mid-September, and rose again to 217,000 during the first week of October. Rather like a crude barometer of public interest in the Ripper murders, this paper reached a new peak of 300,000 just after Mary Kelly’s death.42 Only five metropolitan dailies sold more than 200,000 copies a day in the mid-1880s: the Daily Chronicle, Daily Telegraph, Standard, and the ha’penny Echo and Evening News. But none of these dailies could match Lloyd’s Weekly, whose circulation climbed from 97,000 in 1855 to 600,000 in 1880.43 The latter’s only serious rival, Reynolds’s Newspaper, appealed to a slightly more plebeian readership interested in radical social reforms as well as sensational fiction and news. Reynolds’s exuded some of ‘‘the spirit of aggressive insubordination’’ that had sustained the radical journalism of William Cobbett, Thomas J. Wooler, and Richard Carlile in the 1820s, and it often featured stories of crime and punishment while championing trade unionism and workers’ rights.44 The growth of the press was even greater in the provinces than in the metropolis, judging from Edward Baines’s estimate that 340 million of the 546 million copies of newspapers produced in 1864 flowed from provincial presses in cities and towns. Besides all the new weeklies and dailies 59

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circulating in the country, there were numerous magazines and illustrated weeklies competing for readers willing to pay upwards of threepence a copy.45 Thus British newspapers were facing ever stiffer competition for readers. So too were the press titans of New York—notably Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst.46 As soon as newspaper proprietors, directors, and stockholders started grumbling about the low return on their investments, editors felt pressure to raise circulation and reduce overhead expenses. To the dismay of some older newsmen, the need for capital to buy the latest press and hire more reporters forced the fourth estate to become more cost-efficient and profit-minded. In this new climate, few newspapers could afford to operate like the small family enterprises they had once been. Predictably, the shift toward a cheaper and more efficient product prompted some critics to complain that journalism had ceased to be an honorable profession and had become instead a mere ‘‘branch of commerce.’’ Kennedy Jones, who edited both the Evening News and the Daily Mail, used to rail against the commercialization of Fleet Street, and in 1917, the journalist Thomas H. S. Escott, later the editor of the Fortnightly Review, lamented that ‘‘journalism has sunk, or at least is in danger of sinking, from a liberal profession to a branch of business.’’47 On the other hand, Fleet Street’s magnates could take some comfort in the fourfold increase in the sale of all daily papers between 1880 and 1914. The launch in 1896 of Harmsworth’s Daily Mail, the first ha’penny morning paper, was the logical result of all the innovations in the industry over the previous thirty years, and this immensely popular contender paved the way for the modern tabloid, with its huge, shocking headlines and simplistic stories of murder, mayhem, and sexual deviance. Apart from lower prices, a more inviting format, and advances in printing technology, another factor in this long revolution in the newspaper industry was the sheer talent of such journalistic giants as George Reynolds, Edward Lloyd, Henry W. Lucy of the Daily News, Henry Labouchere of Truth, Frederic Greenwood and William Stead of the Pall Mall Gazette, and Sir William H. Russell of the Times. These pioneers of what has been called ‘‘the golden age of English journalism’’ inspired a younger generation of equally astute editors and writers—notably E. T. Cook, Henry Massingham, Ernest Parke, William Madge, the Harmsworth brothers, George Newnes, T. P. O’Connor, and J. A. Spender.48 Working alongside this galaxy of talent were scores of obscure journalists and subeditors, who served up stories about everything from commercial and financial transactions to 60

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elite marriages, births, and deaths, as well as sports, disasters, wars, royal ceremonies, and, of course, ‘‘murder most foul.’’ The New Journalism Disagreements over the precise nature of the New Journalism continue to percolate among historians of the Victorian press. If this term is confined to the shock-provoking and crusading journalism associated with William T. Stead’s famous exposé of child prostitution in 1885, then the accolade of innovator should fall on the Pall Mall Gazette. But if we extend the term to include a heavier emphasis on crime, scandal, disaster, and sports along with bolder and more lurid headlines and subheads, then the Sunday and evening press of the 1860s and 1870s deserves most of the credit for this development. Clearly, it took more than the adoption of subheads (or crossheads) to create a racier and more tabloidlike journalism. In 1887 Matthew Arnold looked down from his lofty perch upon the New Journalism and pronounced it not only able, novel, varied, and sensational, but also filled with sympathy and generosity. In his opinion, however, it suffered from one ‘‘great fault.’’ Like the British democracy, it was ‘‘feather-brained,’’ because it made assertions based on wishful thinking rather than fact and did not bother to correct them when they were found to be false.49 Since in the 1880s there was nothing new about sensationalizing crime, scandal, or disaster, the roots of the New Journalism, as Joel Wiener rightly contends, lie ‘‘in the deep though as yet unexplored soil of Victorian journalism.’’50 Because the Pall Mall Gazette often borrowed a good deal of material from the morning dailies—with or without acknowledgment—it contained elements of the old as well as the new. As Stephen Koss aptly observed, the New Journalism ‘‘existed by calling attention to itself. What was new about it was the extent to which it evoked comment, invited speculation, and engendered passions.’’51 Something of a publicity hound himself, Stead loved to give readers tantalizing glimpses of the latest murder, scandal, disaster, or expedition. What made his paper so unusual was its much smaller size, larger type, more readable format, and gossipy style, all of which differed from the conventional newspaper, with its densely packed columns of fine print that demanded readers’ time and concentration. Compared to both the Sunday papers and the evening penny press, Fleet Street’s upmarket dailies were rather stodgy affairs. As Arnot Reid pithily put it, ‘‘The English newspaper tries to be dignified; the American tries to be smart.’’ Although Reid found little difference between London and New 61

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York papers when it came to dealing with general news, the Manhattan press set the pace for sensationalizing murder.52 After arriving at Fleet Street in 1887, Ralph Blumenfeld, the American editor of the Daily Express, complained about the ‘‘dull advertisements and duller news announcements’’ in the dailies.53 Kennedy Jones, who moved from the Evening News to the Daily Mail, recalled the ‘‘artificial’’ tone of newspapers aimed at middle-class readers who lived in nice houses and seemed to prefer dull news, relieved only by the occasional scandal, divorce case, or ‘‘first class’’ murder.54 The lack of a lively style moved F. H. Kitchin, the discerning editor of the late-Victorian Times, to pity the reader who had to ferret out the news from ‘‘walls and walls of solid type without a cross-head to cheer . . . [him] upon his weary way.’’55 Quite rightly, Stanley Morison, the distinguished chronicler of the English press, stressed the influence of evening papers like the Pall Mall Gazette and the Star on the so-called New Journalism. But he should have acknowledged the role of the Sunday press and the illustrated weeklies in fostering the racier journalism of the 1880s.56 Well might Jones deplore the commercialization of the fourth estate, but he knew full well that good feature stories depended on ‘‘the methods of the detective story or the blood-and-thunder stage.’’57 According to that flamboyant journalist Frank Harris, the public had only two serious interests—‘‘kissing and fighting’’— and he obliged readers by serving up lashings of both in the Evening News, which set the standard for lowbrow sensationalism along the length of Fleet Street. The shrewd Irish nationalist politician and editor T. P. O’Connor maintained that the New Journalism consisted of stories that struck readers ‘‘right between the eyes.’’ And he tried to produce this effect while in charge of the Star. Instead of printing long transcripts from a trial in the manner of the Times, the New Journalists preferred to summarize the proceedings and then describe the leading actors in the courtroom. O’Connor once resorted to a musical trope to convey the difference: a successful paper resembled a ‘‘street piano: its music is not classical nor very melodious, and perhaps there is a certain absence of soul, but the notes should come out clear, crisp, sharp.’’58 By contrast, Edward Dicey, a leader writer for the Daily Telegraph and then editor of the Observer, opted for a gastronomic metaphor. In his view, the New Journalism served to entertain readers who ‘‘like to have their mental food given them in minces and snippets, not in chops and joints. They prefer smart headed paragraphs to able leading articles.’’59 62

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There was a rather hypocritical note in the complaints of some lateVictorian editors about the lack of a crisp and provocative style and the dominance of commercial values in their industry. Henry Massingham, who purveyed a rather elitist brand of radicalism, hardly discouraged sensationalism during his stint at the Star, yet he accused the American press of being too fond of ‘‘mere scandal and sensation,’’ and deplored Fleet Street’s embrace of the profit priority.60 The facelift given to the Pall Mall Gazette and several other papers should not blind us to the continuities in the content and emphases of news reporting during the 1860s and 1870s. The traditional emphasis on royal ceremonies, elite scandals, accidents, natural disasters, battles, domestic murders, and sports continued unabated, and the steady increase in sales convinced most editors that they were serving up the right mix of news to their readers.61 Despite some distinct differences in format and readability—not to mention price—the elite and popular press had much in common. Granted, the penny papers had bigger headlines on their front pages; nevertheless, both types of newspaper used much the same vocabulary and sensationalist style. Although the Times remained the paper of choice for the governing class, and retained the respect of most rival editors, it too delivered morsels of horror in stories about violent crimes and disasters. And when it came to sexual scandals, this ‘‘supposed pillar of respectability,’’ as the proprietor of the Daily Telegraph so kindly put it, devoted 13.75 columns to the three trials of Oscar Wilde during the late spring of 1895, compared with 19.5 columns in the Daily Telegraph.62 The evening papers often borrowed liberally from the morning press, while the weeklies recycled a good deal of material from the dailies. Moreover, most papers bought copy from one of the news agencies. Journalists were fully aware of what their competitors were producing, and any differences in sensationalism tended to be of degree rather than kind. In addition, editors and reporters often moved from one paper to another during their careers. If the penny and ha’penny papers fancied bolder and more lurid headlines, the growing reliance of both the national and provincial press on the wire services meant that different papers’ stories often bore a striking resemblance to one another. In any event, by the 1870s the penny paper had become the predominant form of ‘‘social knowledge’’ for the masses and could be found in the cottage of every poor man, as the Quaker social reformer John Bright had predicted, helping to create a more homogenous mass culture. Few Victorian readers questioned the truth of the articles they read. The 63

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credulity of the public in accepting the facts presented in their favorite newspaper gave this medium a power that could easily be abused. Both shaping and reflecting the opinions of its devoted readers, the newspaper embodied a constant process of information exchange between readers and reporters or editors. Whether a story concerned a royal tour, the latest racing results from Doncaster, a flood or earthquake in China, a scandal in St. John’s Wood, a yacht race off Cowes, or a murder in Whitechapel, readers usually trusted the accuracy of the account. And there were no other news media (such as radio and television) to provide an alternative version. Newspapers thus gave Victorians a fleeting diversion from personal worries, feeding them all kinds of ‘‘facts’’—some useful, most useless—about events at home and abroad that went far to shape their view of the world.

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Chapter Four

Sensation News

Before proceeding to analyze Victorian murder news, we must look first into the nature of crime news in general and the ways in which stories about deviance serve to reinforce the dominant values of society. In other words, there is more to murder news than descriptions of a dead body, suspects, motives, modes of detection, and the legal procedures attendant upon conviction or acquittal. Although most editors were (and remain) committed to selling more copies of their paper, they were also dedicated to supporting the forces of law and order and keen to remind readers of what happened to those who broke the law or yielded to the temptations of the flesh and of drink. In this respect, the sensational aspects of crime news functioned for the prurient reader as so much chocolate coating over the pill of old morality, and editors hoped that readers would prefer their version to that of the competition. Not surprisingly, some late-Victorian men of letters saw little difference between sensationalism and vulgarity. As that grand subversive Oscar Wilde observed—no doubt with the penny press in mind—journalism ‘‘justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of 65

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the vulgarest.’’ And when asked to define the difference between literature and journalism, Wilde’s protagonist replied, ‘‘Oh! journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read.’’1 At the same, time many readers of the upmarket morning press shared Leslie Stephen’s interest in unusual homicides, and the more prurient among them relished reading any sensationalized account of murder, adultery, or breach of promise. Vulgar or not, news of crime and scandal appealed to the classes as well as the masses, judging from the steady rise in readership after the 1840s and the purchase of several different papers each day or week by those who could afford the price. In the words of one Daily Telegraph editor, readers who complained loudest about a lurid report of murder often could not wait for the next installment of the story.2 Not content with just producing a paper filled with morbid tales of crime, disaster, and scandal, the managers of the evening press stimulated the public’s appetite by hiring droves of young hawkers, who peddled papers on street corners all over central London—shouting at the top of their voices: ‘‘Ech-ow! Exteree speciul! Ech-ow! Steendard!’’3 One shrewd observer of the British press as well as society attributed the soaring sales of the Sunday paper to the fact that there was ‘‘nothing like crime to bring Sabbath calm.’’4 By the 1880s, however, highbrow critics on both sides of the Atlantic were lamenting the decline and fall of good taste and decency in the press. As one late Victorian put it, the good old days of ‘‘tenderness and respect’’ had long gone, and the new age of ‘‘journalistic barbarism’’ had arrived. Unnatural death had now become the object of ‘‘curious and prying eyes. . . . We have unmercifully gotten beyond such reverence, and nothing is permitted to screen corpse and coffin.’’5 The object of many an elitist complaint at this time was the so-called New Journalism, which was equated with sensationalism. But what did the latter word mean? Dating from around 1863, the verb ‘‘sensationalize’’ meant ‘‘to exaggerate in a sensational manner.’’ This definition forces us back to the adjective ‘‘sensational,’’ one meaning of which was any expression ‘‘calculated to produce a startling impression.’’6 However, ambiguity permeates the word ‘‘sensation,’’ which has been applied to any ‘‘operation of any of the senses’’ or state of consciousness, as well as a violent death, a natural disaster, and a work of art that reveals too much human flesh or appears to treat religious icons in a sacrilegious manner. Recently an English writer went so far as to call that mother lode of definitions—the Oxford English Dictionary—the ‘‘longest sensational serial ever written.’’7 The sensationalizing of crime and deviance has a long history in English 66

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popular culture, reaching back well before the Victorian era. As early as the 1650s, the Perfect Diurnall was publishing short but dramatic accounts of murder and mayhem that boosted sales, and after the Restoration, broadsides and pamphlets often celebrated the lives and deaths of highwaymen, thieves, and other criminals.8 As Lincoln Faller has argued, the early Hanoverians relished strong-brewed murder news, judging from the lurid accounts of Catherine Hayes’s conspiratorial murder of her (much cuckolded) husband in 1726—a case that contained not only dismemberment and the distribution of body parts around London, but also an equally shocking charge against Catherine for having fondled her own foundling boy. In the early 1720s the talk of London was the exploits of Jonathan Wild, the master thief, crime boss, and receiver of stolen goods who informed on some of his accomplices and was eventually hanged at Tyburn in 1725. And then there was the arrogant robber and acrobatic prison-escaper Jack Sheppard, who loved to strut around town in finely tailored clothes. A legend in his own time, he too ended up swinging on the gallows, one year before Wild.9 If crime news appeared in different shapes and formats during the eighteenth century, the Newgate Calendar had no equal in terms of popularity and longevity. Crammed with case histories of thieves, swindlers, murderers, and outlaws, this dictionary of roguish biography ranged from obscure men like William Hitchin, who stole an exchequer bill, and Joseph Moses, who received the skins of six purloined swans, to John Williams, the notorious Ratcliffe Highway murderer, who executed two families in December 1811, and John Bellingham, who assassinated Prime Minister Spencer Perceval.10 The anonymous contributors to the Calendar warned readers about the danger of succumbing to the pettiest temptation. So popular was this work that many Grub Street writers and printers emulated its style and content—most notably James Catnach, the Rupert Murdoch of Seven Dials, who thrived on stories about ruthless killers.11 The title page of a sixpenny pamphlet about the trial of a Suffolk couple in 1812 for starving and beating to death their young daughter began with ‘‘MURDER IN SUFFOLK!!’’ and then proceeded to outline the death ‘‘By Starvation and Cruelty’’ of Mary Anne Smith, aged only eight. A small, crude sketch on the cover depicted her frail body suspended by a rope tied to a rafter, while the wicked stepmother beat her with a whip.12 Similarly, James Greenacre’s murder and dismemberment of his wife-to-be, Hannah Brown, in December 1836 inspired a number of pulp pamphlets in London and the provinces. This perpetrator of the so-called ‘‘Edgware Road Murder’’ had once 67

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been a respectable grocer in Southwark before marrying a series of women with ample dowries, all of whom died young. Living well beyond his means, Greenacre was a con man who killed his latest fiancée after a quarrel over money. When her trunk, legs, and head were discovered in different parts of the metropolis, suspicion focused on her lover, and after a two-day trial in May 1837 he was sentenced to death, while his paramour-accomplice, Sarah Gale, was transported for life.13 Much the same exploitation of violent crime also flourished in America, where the axe murder of Ellen Jewett, a Manhattan prostitute, and the trial of her killer in 1836 inspired some gruesome pamphlets. One of these contained a sketch of the half-naked victim sprawled on a bed surrounded by flames; another broadside warned young people that ‘‘Sin, and Shame, and Sorrow await the Frequenter of DENS OF INFAMY.’’14 In June 1834 the radical journalist Henry Hetherington, ever hungry for profit, launched a new, unstamped paper called the Destructive, which promised to deliver an abundance of ‘‘Police Intelligence . . . Murders, Rapes, Suicides, Burnings, Maimings, Theatricals, Races, Pugilism, and all manner of moving ‘accidents by flood and field.’ In short it will be stuffed with every sort of devilment that will make it sell.’’15 The flood of broadsides and chapbooks about violent crime, executions, and scandals that flowed from Grub Street presses during the long Hanoverian century paved the way for the spine-tingling ‘‘penny dreadfuls’’ and ‘‘shilling shockers’’ of the 1840s. These pulp semifictions set the stage in turn for the colorful ‘‘sixpenny wonderfuls’’ published by Chatto’s after the 1880s, thrillers and love stories that lured thousands of readers by means of colorful or dramatic cover illustrations.16 Worried by the competition from this popular fare, newspaper editors began to assign more space and bigger headlines to any murder that contained even modest amounts of mystery or gore. Thus the vicious slaying in 1823 of a gambler or ‘‘blackleg,’’ William Weare, who had cheated some friends at cards, attracted not only Catnach but also reporters from the Times and Morning Chronicle. The prime culprit in this much-publicized case, John Thurtell, was the wayward son of a Norwich merchant. Running with an unsavory crowd of gamblers, boxers, hustlers, and ex-convicts, Thurtell had fallen off the plateau of respectability, and this gave the press a chance to sing the familiar refrain about the wages of sin.17 Although journalists served up many more details from the autopsy reports revealed at inquests than would ever appear in newspapers today, editorial concerns about decency and space constraints resulted in much elision and summary or paraphrase. Even so, graphic accounts of bodies 68

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maimed, burned, stabbed, or shot still had the power to shock or stimulate readers. The absence of photographs meant that words alone had to convey the horror of violent death. After the 1850s, of course, weekly magazines like the Illustrated London News, the Graphic (launched in 1869 at sixpence a copy), and the Penny Illustrated Paper carried images of murderers and their victims without any close-ups of the actual injuries. A fine example of pictorial sensationalism was the weekly Illustrated Police News (founded in 1863 and costing a penny), which featured dramatic sketches of crime scenes, victims, and villains on every front page. While editors of the elite papers kept their eyes peeled for unusual crimes or major disasters, they tried to spare their more sensitive readers the grimmest details of violent death. However, sometimes members of the public became so involved in a ‘‘sensational’’ murder that they would travel miles to visit the murder site and wander around in search of a souvenir to take home.18 Long before the 1880s, newspapers were sensationalizing ship and train wrecks, great fires, exploding boilers, military battles, disasters, and feats of courage or heroism as well as unusual crimes.19 When two steamships collided in heavy fog off the coast of Newfoundland on August 14, 1888, drowning some 150 passengers, the Times ’s correspondent (Aug. 18) provided a vivid description of the victims’ struggle to avoid drowning, and a leader writer (Aug. 20) pointed out how ‘‘Every fatal collision of two great steamships seems the worst till another occurs to take its place in horrifying the imagination. . . . Never were men and women more irretrievably abandoned to their doom.’’20 In a literal sense, the success of journalistic sensationalism depended on the writer’s ability to move the reader to consume the whole story and then buy the next day’s edition in the hope of learning more. Here an eyecatching or tantalizing headline could make all the difference. Thus the Pall Mall Gazette tried to entice readers to devour a story about an English expedition up the Congo River by means of the following three-tiered headline: ‘‘MORE ATROCITIES ON THE ARUWIMI / PLUNDER, MURDER, AND CANNIBALISM / ALLEGED COMPLICITY OF ENGLISHMEN.’’ Upon further perusal, however, it turned out that no Englishman had indulged in cannibalism. The alleged consumers of human flesh belonged to the Manyema tribe, while the English explorers were merely ‘‘passive spectators.’’21 No doubt this clarification elicited sighs of relief in the gentlemen’s clubs along Pall Mall. Victorian newspaper sensationalism thus involved not only murder, but also big fires, shipwrecks, railway crashes, alpine ascents (or rather falls), 69

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expeditions into ‘‘darkest’’ Africa, and colonial rebellions.22 Stories about human ‘‘freaks’’ or people with ‘‘monstrous’’ deformities were also filled with sensationalist touches. During the Napoleonic wars some papers dramatized the appearance of ‘‘the Hottentot Venus,’’ or Saartjie Baartman, who was exhibited like a caged animal by wily entrepreneurs keen to exploit her (sensationally) steatopygous posterior.23 Sixty years later, the English minders of Joseph Carey Merrick, alias ‘‘the Elephant Man,’’ exploited his terrible deformities by displaying him to crowds willing to pay a few pennies for the thrill of being horrified. Not long after this the authorities closed down such freak shows in the East End. Fortunately, the compassionate surgeon Frederick Treves intervened, took Merrick under his care at the London Hospital, and then made use of the press—notably the Times—to launch an appeal for money to cover Merrick’s expenses. The public’s response was so generous that Merrick lived off the proceeds for the rest of his life, and several aristocratic ‘‘ladies bountiful’’ followed the lead of the Princess of Wales by paying him regular visits.24 Upper-Class Scandals Sensationalism also swirled around serious misconduct by members of the middle and upper classes. Then as now, the press indulged in feeding frenzies whenever some lady or gentleman broke the codes of acceptable behavior and ended up in the arms of a policeman, or—worse—in court. The exposure of the sexual transgressions of Sir Charles Dilke and Charles Stewart Parnell in the divorce courts during 1885–86 and 1889–90, respectively, showed how heavy a toll such charges could exact. Breach-ofpromise cases, moreover, left an indelible stain on any woman who admitted to having been seduced.25 Whenever the extramarital affairs of aristocrats, not to mention royals, came to light in the courts, the press seemed to react with thinly disguised delight, as evidenced by the sexually charged Mordaunt divorce case and also by the marathon trials of the so-called Tichborne Claimant, who was charged with impersonating the dead heir to a large estate. During the early 1870s Fleet Street played up these two grands scandales for months on end. When Sir Charles Mordaunt, Baronet, M.P., sued his wife, Harriet Sarah, for divorce on the grounds of adultery, her sexual adventures came to light as servants and friends testified about an unsteady stream of lovers, including the Prince of Wales. Like Mary Braddon’s Lady Audley, Lady Mordaunt suffered an emotional collapse and entered an insane asylum after giving birth to a love child. Even the Times 70

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devoted over a dozen articles, amounting in all to thirty-three columns or some 62,700 words, to the sensation-filled trial, which raised tortuous legal questions about Lady Mordaunt’s mental competence. Apparently this story of trysts and infidelity in high society helped to revive the Echo, which attained a circulation of some 124,000 copies, a peak unsurpassed until the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War.26 As for the Tichborne Claimant, the trials and tribulations of Arthur Orton (or Castro), who was accused of impersonating Roger Tichborne, eldest son and heir of the 10th Baronet, who had supposedly drowned off the coast of South America in 1854, dominated the domestic news pages off and on for several years. Fleet Street assigned scores of reporters to cover the civil trial of the Claimant (from May 1871 to March 1872) and the criminal trial (from April 1873 through February 1874).27 This long legal battle not only drained the resources of the once rich family, but also resonated with class antagonism, owing to the support given the Claimant by prominent radicals and democrats, who applauded this challenge to the Establishment. For some six years, the national press faithfully recorded the Tichborne trials and editorialized about the moral implications of the case.28 So long as elite families kept their squabbles and vices out of the public domain, the law pages of the Times made rather dull reading. But whenever an aggrieved party took an aristocrat to court for some transgression, then this section of the paper carried its own form of sensationalism. Transcending both class and gender, reader prurience created a strong demand for the details of illicit trysts, love letters, illegitimate babies, broken vows, and fraud. Thus the steamy case of Thelwall v. Yelverton in 1861—which involved an extramarital affair, two phony marriage services, and bigamy by the caddish heir to an Irish estate and the daughter of a socially ambitious Manchester silk merchant—gave reporters the rare opportunity to spin a tale of seduction and abandonment among ‘‘the Quality.’’29 Another notorious case of seduction and abandonment involved a young Anglo-Irish woman, Mildred Long, who had been trapped into a bogus marriage by a rich Englishman, Edward Martin Langworthy. During the spring of 1887, W. T. Stead championed her cause in the Pall Mall Gazette and the resulting publicity had its effect, for after years of futile litigation, the court finally awarded her and their love child twenty thousand pounds in damages, plus legal costs. While Stead rejoiced over this proof of his editorial clout, such sordid scandals prompted one erudite critic to deplore this pandering to the most vulgar tastes.30 Henry Mansel, a high-minded 71

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professor of logic at Oxford, condemned what he called these ‘‘newspaper novels’’ because they appealed to the basest emotions and lacked any redeeming intellectual qualities.31 In his entertaining book Deadly Encounters: Two Victorian Sensations, Richard Altick reconstructed two cases of gentlemanly violence in the summer of 1861. Fleet Street exploited the elitist nature as well as the sexual tensions of the first of these ‘‘sensations,’’ which involved a lethal fight in a Northumberland Street house between ex-Major Murray of the 10th Hussars and a shady moneylender named William Roberts. Whether they fought primarily over money or Murray’s young mistress, Anne Marie Moody, remains unclear. But after the combatants had finished wielding their fists, a bottle, a pistol, and a pair of fire tongs, they both landed in the hospital. Murray survived a gunshot wound, but Roberts died of head injuries several days later. Even so, the Crown refused to indict Murray for either manslaughter or murder, and the public was denied the juicy details that would have poured forth from a trial.32 The second highly publicized case arose out of an altercation between a soi-disant French nobleman, styling himself Baron de Vidil, and his stepson, Alfred, who was beaten about the head with the butt end of the older man’s whip while riding down a quiet country lane near Twickenham, Surrey. Although Alfred suffered only minor injuries, reporters magnified this incident as a result of de Vidil’s aristocratic connections. They soon had to change their tune, however, after learning that the Baron’s title and elite friendships were both bogus.33 Not only did editors and reporters wring as much violence and sex out of these two unrelated events as the evidence could possibly bear, but they also used them to deplore the perceived decline in ‘‘civilized behavior.’’ Typical of this moralizing was a leader in the Morning Chronicle about the woeful example set by Murray and Roberts: ‘‘It is in no degraded purlieu, no haunt of pugilists and blacklegs, no slum of Bermondsey, or cellar of Houndsditch, overflowing with fleas and Jews, that the deadly encounter took place, but in the chambers of a gentleman. . . . Surely nothing more barbarous ever occurred in the blackest epochs of our social history.’’34 Several highbrow periodicals also denounced these flagrant violations of gentlemanly behavior. Deploring ‘‘the barbarous attack of a father upon a son, in the very centre of civilisation,’’ a writer in Fraser’s Magazine regretted that ‘‘the fierce passions of men are not tamed by the progress of civilisation.’’35 What Mansel scorned as ‘‘hot dishes’’ of crime news were not limited to the penny press. The pricier morning dailies also served up 72

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steaming casseroles of sensationalism even if they did not use quite as much spice as the evening and Sunday press. Far from being confined to the newspapers, narratives of sex and violence also flourished in the serial novelettes that flowed from the prolific pen of George W. M. Reynolds, author of the best-selling The Mysteries of London. Emulating the French doyen of titillating tales, Eugène Sue, whose Les Mystères de Paris (1842–43) became a best-seller in France, Reynolds filled page after page with sword-wielding men and bosom-heaving women, along with such occasional Gothic refinements as grave robbing and torture. Through these shilling shockers ran the crimson threads of sexually aggressive and mercenary rogues who slew rivals and seduced vulnerable women, in a heady mixture of soft-core pornography and hardcore violence that captivated thousands of readers.36 Reynolds’s cast of characters ranged from virtuous to vicious nobles, chaste to vampish ladies, and loyal servants to baseborn cutthroats. His elaborate plots kept readers on edge until the last page and made them long for the next installment.37 No wonder some critics predicted that such ‘‘trash’’ would corrupt English youth into a life of hedonism or crime. At least one lawyer actually used this pulp fiction as a mitigating factor in defending several clients charged with felonies by contending that they had been seduced by Reynolds’s prose.38 The huge success of the Mysteries spurred him to launch Reynolds’s Newspaper in 1850, so that he could make more money and give a radical spin to stories of crime and other newsworthy sensations. Within a few years this penny paper was outselling all but Lloyd’s Weekly on the weekends. Sensation Novels Higher-brow or gentler readers who preferred fictional mystery, suspense, or intrigue in affluent households to authentic cases of plebeian murder and rape could always turn to the sensation novel for their daily dose of thrills or frissons. These popular novels featured ladies and gentlemen caught up in all kinds of intrigues or deceptions by wicked friends or kin. With an unerring eye for distinctions of class and status, writers like Mary Braddon and Wilkie Collins wove elaborate plots based on disloyalty and desire masked by polite manners and apparent virtue. As Winifred Hughes has pointed out, the sensation novelists of the 1860s fused the antithetical elements of romance and realism to construct villains who betrayed the trust of friendship or kinship owing to some fatal character flaw.39 After three or four hundred pages of slowly mounting suspense, the 73

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reader would arrive at the long-deferred denouement, when the villain would be unmasked and punished for his or her misdeeds. Sensation novelists like Collins often culled fragments of their plots from newspapers (as in the case of the Road murder). As the acerbic Mansel observed, ‘‘proximity’’ to recognizable events and people explained much of the appeal of such works. Anticipating the classic detective story, the plots of sensation novels often revolved around innocent young women menaced by sinister schemers, whose evil designs supplied the necessary spine-tingling effects.40 Condemned by Mansel as vulgar and trashy literature that played only on the nerves or emotions, the sensation novel blended family tensions, deception, sexual repression, and social ambition in ways that kept readers on tenterhooks until the end. Unlike most real crime scenarios, however, these romances often contained an intelligent policeman or amateur detective capable of cracking the case, whereas the constables and inspectors in murder news remained largely faceless and colorless, not to say dull-witted. Indeed, the absence of heroic detectives in newspaper crime goes far to explain the enormous appeal of such masterly sleuths as Godwin’s Caleb Williams, Poe’s Auguste Dupin, and Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. Unlike the lower-middle-class police detectives of Scotland Yard, these elite amateurs could use their analytical powers to see through the dark glass of mystery and hypocrisy to the evil that lay behind. Sensation-Horror For sheer violence and stark horror, the sensation novel could never compete with such classic Gothic novels as the Castle of Otranto and Frankenstein, which were designed to administer repeated shocks to the reader’s central nervous system. If, as Peter Ackroyd has written, ‘‘horror is the true sublime,’’ then during the age of the sublime, writers managed to horrify readers repeatedly by exploiting the destructive forces of both human nature and the supernatural.41 Graphic accounts of mental and physical torture and murder in dark dungeons abound in the novels of Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, and ‘‘Monk’’ Lewis, wherein the heroes and heroines are constantly forced to confront the forces of evil. The Irish writer Charles Maturin enjoyed plucking the nerves of readers with long, drawn-out scenes of aristocratic vice and intrigue involving family feuds, religious persecution, menacing ghosts, mysterious strangers, and confinement in cold, damp cells.42 However, not even the torture scenes in Maturin’s novels came close to the terror-inducing quality of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), wherein the eponymous doctor paid so dearly for daring to tamper 74

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with the laws of nature by creating an eight-foot monster out of body parts collected from cemeteries, charnel houses, and dissecting rooms. Abandoned by his ‘‘father’’ and rejected by society, the nameless and hideous creature avenged himself by destroying everyone Frankenstein loved, and eventually pursued his nemesis-creator into an icy wasteland. The addiction of early Victorians to sheer horror found fullest expression during the state-orchestrated ritual of execution outside prison walls.43 On these almost festive occasions the crowds behaved as though they were watching a circus or athletic contest rather than a ceremony of awful solemnity. Spectators would debate the demeanor of the condemned man on the scaffold just as modern sports fans assess an athlete’s performance. Public executions also brought out subversive impulses, as people applauded any sign of bravery by the prisoner. But if he struggled to delay the proceedings, then the crowd might utter cries of disgust.44 These spectacles afforded rich and poor alike a dramatic glimpse of the ultimate penalty for felonious crime, even though the grim ritual had long since lost its ability to overawe, and had become instead ‘‘a species of festive comedy or light entertainment.’’ For this reason, the state decided in 1868 to move executions inside the prison walls, denying the public its orgy of morbidity.45 Once this ‘‘theatre of royal power’’ was abolished, veteran gallows-watchers had to settle for the vastly adulterated horror of murder news. But not even the fullest stretch of their imaginations could yield a small fraction of the thrills once derived from public hangings. The horror element in sensation-horror news consisted first and foremost of images of bodies subjected to severe or lethal trauma. Unlike run-of-the-mill sensationalism, which dealt in synoptic reports of railway crashes, fires, shipwrecks, military skirmishes, and battles, sensation-horror offered readers graphic descriptions of corpses based on eyewitness accounts or autopsy reports. To capture the essence of such gruesome material, some Victorians turned to the expressive term ‘‘horripilation,’’ which denoted a hair-raising experience. The following passage from the Times ( July 8, 1865), concerning the autopsy report on a woman who had died as a result of her husband’s malice aforethought, epitomizes the kind of gore found in sensation-horror: ‘‘Poison was found diffused through the whole organs and parts of the body, and throughout its fluids. It was found in the spleen, in the kidney, in the stomach, in the liver, in the heart, in the brain, in the blood, and in the rectum. The body was impregnated with it.’’ If such clinical details repelled some readers, they fascinated many more, and by the 1860s even elite papers were indulging in such lurid passages. Thus the 75

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Times ( Jan. 4, 1856) treated readers to the results of the exhumation of Walter Palmer, months after he had been poisoned by his brother William: ‘‘On the removal of the outer coffin a hole was bored in the leaden receptacle in which Walter Palmer’s body was confined, and instantly a most sickening and noxious effluvium escaped, which permeated the entire building, affected parties at the other end of the inn, and produced a sickening effect on all in the immediate vicinity of the coffin. Subsequently the leaden lid was removed, and the spectacle presented by the body was absolutely frightful. The cheeks were so terribly distended as to extend to either side of the coffin; one eye was opened, and the mouth partially so, presenting the appearance of a horrible grin and grimace. Each limb was also swollen to prodigious proportions, and the sight was revolting in the extreme. Nearly all the jurors were afflicted with vomiting and fainting.’’46 Although descriptions of decomposed flesh were rarer than those of knife-torn or bullet-riddled bodies, when they did appear in newspapers or pamphlets, sales were no more hampered in England than they were in America when such passages appeared.47 Readers needed a strong digestive system to consume such gruesome fare. At the heart of sensation-horror lie descriptions of battered, stabbed, strangled, burned, poisoned, and bullet-ridden bodies. According to Noel Carroll, the fictional or filmic form of ‘‘art-horror’’ fascinates rather than repels the viewer/reader because the always anomalous monster or alien is seen to be an invention, the product of the imagination or the stuff of nightmares. Since the killer crabs/bees/birds/flies/spiders/blobs of horror fiction and films do not really exist, they cannot harm us. We spectators remain safely ensconced in our seats—somewhat agitated by the scary scenario, but fully aware of who and where we are and why this predator does not constitute a real threat. Such make-believe monsters are a far cry from the ‘‘natural’’ horror of war, genocide, torture, rape, and murder that we read about in our daily newspapers or see on T.V. news programs. Unlike the sinister villains of Gothic novels and the carnivorous aliens of sci-fi films, the serial killer or rapist on the loose sends shudders through the entire community, and his horrifying attacks stir in us feelings of genuine alarm rather than idle curiosity.48 Thus there is more to horror—whether in art or real life—than mere fascination with how much of this alarm we can endure. According to Lord Burnham, the managing proprietor of the Daily Telegraph, ‘‘the quality of horror’’ varied from one age to another.49 But the sheer quantity of horror seemed to increase over the century. No strangers 76

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to physical pain and emotional suffering, the Victorians took a morbid interest in the injuries sustained by their unfortunate contemporaries. Indeed, some ‘‘seemed almost to revel in a good disaster.’’50 Graphic gore attracted readers of all ages and both sexes. Perhaps their devotion to godliness, gentlemanliness, work, duty, thrift, and charity created an emotional vacuum that could be filled only with images of the human body subjected to every kind of violence, because these aroused little or none of the guilt associated with sexual desire. Reflecting on Otto Dix’s and George Grosz’s depictions of women’s bodies ravaged by knife or dismembered by meat cleaver, Maria Tatar observes: ‘‘We may be repulsed by images and descriptions of bodily violations, yet we also feel irresistibly drawn to gape, ogle, and stare—to take a good hard look or to make sure that we do not miss a word.’’51 Like viewers of horror films, readers may cringe at this mediated carnage, but they are unlikely to avert their eyes for more than a few seconds. If representations of lethal violence moved some to wonder what it felt like to be shot, stabbed, mutilated, burned, drowned, or tortured, perhaps sadistic readers fantasized about inflicting such injuries on others. No doubt reading passages of pure gore at the safe remove of one’s favorite newspaper has some of the same spine-tingling or hair-raising (or horripilating) effects that viewers of horror films experience.52 In any event, the dramatic rise in newspaper circulations after the 1860s should not be entirely attributed to price or the advent of the penny paper, if only because sensation-horror, or what some feminists have called ‘‘gorenography,’’ provided the kind of thrills that an ever more literate public found enthralling.53 In the autumn of 1888, reporters dwelled on the ‘‘thrill of horror’’ that ran through the country as a result of the atrocities taking place in Whitechapel. After dipping his pen in purple ink, one journalist wrote: ‘‘Horror ran through the land. Men spoke of it with bated breath, and pale-lipped women shuddered as they read the dreadful details. People afar off smelled blood, and the superstitious said that the skies were of a deeper red that autumn.’’54 No doubt such hyperbole reflected the horrors of the Ripper’s mutilations. But when combined with the clinical details revealed by the police surgeons at each inquest, the resulting catalyst enabled most Fleet Street papers to attain new peaks in circulation. Sensation-horror also flourished in tales of monsters or half-human predators like the villain of R. L. Stevenson’s Manichean novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). Bespeaking the unspeakable, Hyde’s sadistic assaults in some dark and distant part of town—presumably the East 77

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End—epitomized the evil that lurked in the deepest recesses of the human mind.55 It took a powerful chemical potion to transform the gentlemanly Dr. Jekyll into a libidinous fiend who sallied forth at night to gratify his lust for violence.56 Jekyll’s dramatic degeneration from respectable doctor to semisimian troglodyte involved the kind of mental regression to a state of criminality that Cesare Lombroso would have called atavistic. In what must be deemed a remarkable coincidence, several fringe productions of this compelling story opened on the London stage on the eve of the Whitechapel murders. When the famous actor Richard Mansfield appeared in his ‘‘authorized’’ version at the Lyceum in July 1888, theater critics and audiences alike hailed his performance as stunning.57 According to an ardent admirer, he ‘‘depicted, with horrible animal vigor and with intense and reckless force of infernal malignity, the exultant wickedness of the bestial and frenzied Hyde—displaying a carnal monster of unqualified evil.’’58 Shortly after Chapman’s murder some Fleet Street papers speculated that the killer was a Jekyll and Hyde creature who led a double life and appeared quite respectable during the day. In fact, the Whitechapel murders ruined the play’s chances of a long and profitable run, because Hyde’s behavior came too close for comfort to the Ripper’s reign of terror. Audiences emerging from the theater in September occasionally heard newsboys in the Strand crying, ‘‘Another ’Orrible Murder,’’ and rumors soon connected Mansfield to the crimes. After announcing that the play would close shortly, a worried Mansfield brought the production to a halt on October 20.59 Quite apart from theatrical horror and lurid images of murder in leaflets sold by street vendors, many Victorians derived their fix of sensationhorror from museumlike displays of waxen effigies and plaster casts of heinous murderers. By far the most successful entrepreneur of these threedimensional thrills was Madame Marie Tussaud, who brought her collection of lifelike wax figures and historical relics from Paris to London in 1802.60 She spent the next thirty years touring the country with realistic models of notable persons both living and dead. In 1884 her sons moved these elaborate figures to new premises on Marylebone Road, where they kept adding the latest heroes to the collection, whether royals, statesmen, generals, or admirals.61 A pioneer of the horror show, Madame Tussaud supplemented her waxen portraits of the great and the good with images of the latest notorious murderers, and re-created murder scenes replete with blood-soaked bodies sprawled in dimly lit rooms or streets. She paid good money to acquire the clothes in which the killers had died on the gallows. These special effects spurred thousands of people every day to pay an extra 78

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sixpence for admission to the Chamber of Horrors, which became as big a tourist attraction as Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London, and St. Paul’s Cathedral.62 Visitors entering the Chamber of Horrors at midcentury would encounter a guillotine allegedly used during the French Revolution, as well as ‘‘portrait models’’ of the Edinburgh body snatchers Burke and Hare; the wife dismemberer John Holloway; the Liverpool lunatic John Gleeson Wilson, who had wiped out an entire family; the lethal husband and wife team Maria and Frederick Manning; and the Norfolk double killer James Rush.63 After 1850 the Tussaud sons carried on the tradition of molding the features of the latest notorious murderer.64 Significantly, Madame Tussaud’s did not mount a Jack the Ripper exhibit for almost a century, owing to its time-honored practice of modeling villains only from life, sketches, photographs, or death masks.65 The imaging of sensation-horror was not confined to shilling shockers, wax figures, lithographs, and the stage. Some morbid entrepreneurs carried on the eighteenth-century tradition of anatomical display by assembling wax models of male and female bodies containing both healthy and diseased organs.66 Apart from these anatomical curiosities, sensation-horror could also be derived from spectacular reenactments on large, panoramic stages of shipwrecks, battles, avalanches, fires, and storms that challenged the talents of set designers, actors, and directors alike.67 The growing demand for theatrical thrills kept playwrights busy adapting the sensation novels of Braddon, Collins, and others.68 And in the East End, penny gaffs enabled working-class youth to watch lewd and lascivious or horror shows and get drunk without having to worry unduly about police interference.69 W. T. Stead and Shock Journalism Arguably the most astute practitioner of journalistic sensationalism in the late Victorian era was the crusading editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, William Thomas Stead. Burning with zeal to right wrongs and keen to promote the power of the press as well as the sales of his own paper, he had an exalted view of editors as the ‘‘uncrowned king[s] of an educated democracy.’’ For him newspapers were ‘‘the great court in which all grievances are heard . . . the great inspector, with a myriad eyes, who never sleeps.’’70 At the beginning of July 1885, this brash editor achieved notoriety by exposing the silent horrors of child prostitution in London. Forsaking the strictly reportorial for the proactive mode, he risked his career by arranging to buy a thirteen-year-old girl for five pounds in order to show how the market in virgin flesh worked. He then produced four shock-laden and 79

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titillating front-page articles entitled ‘‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon,’’ in the hope of pressuring Parliament to raise the age of consent for girls from thirteen to sixteen. The lurid details of child prostitution revealed in these articles made the paper and its editor the talk of the town. But even though circulation rose and the price of a single copy of the series soared to a shilling, Stead actually lost money on this venture, because several leading news vendors refused to sell it in their railway stalls and Stead’s legal costs ate into the profits.71 If ‘‘The Maiden Tribute’’ enhanced Stead’s reputation as a man with a mission and obsessed with sex, it also landed him in jail after he was found guilty of the trumped-up charge of abducting a minor without her father’s consent. (He had bought the child from her willing mother.) Despite this temporary setback, Stead’s crusade helped to persuade the government to raise the age of consent to sixteen years.72 The series also earned him the lasting respect of General William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, as well as two prominent feminists, Josephine Butler and Millicent Fawcett.73 In the long run, ‘‘The Maiden Tribute’’ went far to define the so-called New Journalism, no matter how indebted Stead may have been to Henry Mayhew’s epistolary sketches of London’s colorful street people in the Morning Chronicle during 1849–50.74 In his study of mid-Victorian fascination with murder and sexual scandal in newspapers, novels, and broadsides, Thomas Boyle construed sensationalism as a vital part of the modernization process because it helped readers to deny the Hyde that lurked behind their Jekyll-like masks of propriety. Relying to a large extent on the crime news cuttings of a retired naval surgeon, he also argued that the ‘‘crimes, follies, and misfortunes’’ of their countrymen enthralled the Victorians because they diverted attention away from the horrors of England’s unplanned urban and industrial growth.75 The evidence for this ambitious conjecture remains at best elusive, and Boyle fails to take into account the all too obvious possibility that some readers may have enjoyed sensationalism—not to mention horror—for its own sake. In other words, the attractions of such topics may have had much less to do with middle-class angst over poverty or fear of class war than with such pleasurable sensations as hair-raising thrills and schadenfreude. Even more than sensation novels, murder news often induced what D. A. Miller has called a ‘‘somatic experience’’ by jangling the nerves, making the flesh creep, and tingling the spine. Sensationalism was thus associated with distinctly physical and emotional responses, and if readers did not feel any of these sensations, then the writer had clearly failed in his mission to provoke or excite.76 80

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And yet—appearances to the contrary—journalistic sensationalism had its limits, and was often marked by silences or reticence imposed by the dictates of good taste. Once in a while a newspaper might omit a criminal case on the grounds of indecency or impropriety.77 If reports of an inquest or trial gave the appearance of a verbatim transcript, this was the illusion that editors wanted to foist on readers, because there was never enough room for all the interrogation of witnesses and the judges’ long-winded summations. After 1860 Fleet Street relied more heavily on bolder headlines and subheads as well as the ‘‘yellower’’ journalism served up across the Atlantic by James Gordon Bennett, the self-described ‘‘Napoleon of the press.’’78 Gradually editors devoted more space and bigger headlines to battles, natural disasters, train wrecks, and alpine accidents (like the first ascent of the Matterhorn in July 1865), because of their conviction that readers relished the surge of emotions caused by tales of violent death. And if no terrible tragedies had occurred, they could always fall back on royal weddings or funerals, an eclipse, a comet, or an expedition down the Nile, if not into the always dangerous African jungle.79 Ironically enough, one of the few papers to show a little self-reflexivity about serving up so much sensationalism was the Pall Mall Gazette. On one or two occasions the voyeuristic Stead actually admitted (at least for public consumption) to having some qualms about featuring stories of sexual misconduct and homicide. In a front-page leader published just before the first Ripper murder, entitled ‘‘THE BLOOD-THIRST OF THE DAY,’’ he reflected on the reasons behind the public’s ‘‘craving for sensation, the longing to be thrilled.’’ In his view, these ‘‘are the master passions of this nervous and excitable generation. And after all there is nothing so sensational as death, which is the climax and end of all sensation. Literature, painting, the theatre, our exhibitions, journalism, all bear witness to the fact that murder, suicide, or sudden death—that is to say, bloodshed in some form or another —is the master spell for enchaining human attention.’’ To prove his point Stead cited a subhead from a New York Herald story about a domestic tragedy: ‘‘LOVE, INTRIGUE, JEALOUSY, PASSION, LUST, MADNESS, MURDER, DEATH.’’ Such emotive words drove him to exclaim: ‘‘Men and women, choking of ennui, cry for ‘blood—blood—blood.’ ’’ Novelists like H. Rider Haggard made sure that readers got ‘‘their fill of gore.’’ Surveying ‘‘the annals of crime,’’ Stead found no more revolting episode than the murders carried out by Burke and Hare, which remained ‘‘the most popular subject that a novelist can select.’’ Apparently, the Sheffield Telegraph was selling three hundred thousand copies a week on the strength of some articles 81

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about these multiple killers. With a touch of feigned regret, he admitted that a ‘‘good, first-class bloody murder’’ would always sell more papers than a poem by Tennyson or ‘‘an exquisite prose essay’’ by Ruskin.80 In the end, Stead betrayed a curious ambivalence about ‘‘blood and guts’’ journalism. A few months later, at the height of the Ripper murders, he wrote an editorial (Oct. 5) entitled ‘‘WANTED A COURT OF CONSCIENCE,’’ that questioned the value of pandering to the demand for such news just to boost circulation: ‘‘What is the right thing to do? The paying thing to do is clear enough. The paying thing is to go in for sensation, to bring out a sheet which drips with gore and is almost as ‘creepy’ and revolting as the gashed and mangled corpse of the murderer’s victim. To work up the sensation by every means known to journalism, to press everything into the service, to use the pen of the reporter, the memory of the interviewer, the pencil of the artist, and all the resources of typography, in order to produce special murder editions—that is the plain path set before the journal by considerations of profit and loss. But what does it profit even an editor if he gain the world and lose his own soul?’’81 Wanting to keep his own soul while reaping profits for the Gazette, Stead refused to condemn ‘‘blood’’ news outright because it ‘‘ministers to one of the strongest passions of mankind.’’ In a rush of idealism, he called for a ‘‘Court of Conscience’’ to educate journalists about morality. Anyone who made money by feeding the public’s appetite for lurid news should ask himself: ‘‘Does no dark stain remain on the profits of the Blood Bath?’’ Curiously enough, Stead’s display of some scruples on this score went beyond this written plea, because the Gazette was one of the very few national papers to omit most of the horrific details of the Ripper’s mutilations.

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Chapter Five

Victorian Murder News

What kinds of murder drew the attention of Fleet Street, and why did some cases receive bolder headlines and many more columns of print than others? Any answers to these questions must perforce remain provisional in the absence of firsthand testimony from the people who made those crucial decisions every day and night in editorial offices around London and the provinces. Even a cursory glance at the national press confirms Richard Altick’s observation that the Victorians treated murder news like a form of ‘‘popular entertainment, a spectator sport.’’1 However upset they might be by the actual event, readers seemed to relish both the gruesome details of the crime and ‘‘the moment of truth’’ when the jury returned a verdict of guilty and the judge imposed the familiar sentence of death by hanging. As Judith Knelman contends, women who committed homicide had a much greater appeal to the predominately male reading public, who regarded murderesses as far more subversive of the social order than homicidal men. Of course the paucity of lethal women—excepting those who committed infanticide—and their flagrant defiance of the codes of normative feminine behavior made such cases the very truffles of the murder-news feast.2 83

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Lurking somewhere inside murder news—whether close to the surface or buried deep down—is a series of muffled messages about power. Because murder is by definition the ultimate form of victimization, there can be no more dramatic display of self-empowerment than taking someone’s life. Leaving aside times of war, when nation-states and revolutionary groups train men to kill, send them forth to eliminate as many of the enemy as possible, and then honor the survivors as heroes on their return, those who kill in civil society are feared and reviled above all other violent criminals (except for child molesters), and if found guilty of murder in the first degree, they are often sentenced to death under laws still rooted in the Old Testament tradition of an eye for an eye. Altick’s study of some 480 homicides that ended in the conviction and execution of the offender revealed 127 cases of wife murder but only 5 instances of husband murder.3 In the former category, avarice or the desire for profit rather than the lure of extramarital sex apparently inspired most of the wife killings, while jealousy, the wish to change partners, and pregnancy accounted for most of the mistress murders by men. Robbery came next on the list of motives, followed at a long distance by political protest, which played a negligible role in murder in Great Britain, as distinct from Ireland.4 Seeking to explain the appeal of murder news, Altick fell back upon the old crutch of reader ennui. In his view, the long era of ‘‘Pax Victoriana’’ deprived Victorians of the vicarious thrills they had once enjoyed when reading about war. In their hunger for excitement they turned to murder news as the ‘‘immoral equivalent’’ of war.5 There’s an old and somewhat cynical saying in American newsrooms to the effect that ‘‘if it bleeds, it leads.’’ Newspaper readers and television watchers today hardly need reminding about the mass media’s long love affair with stories of murder or extreme criminal violence, especially when every day’s news bears witness to this editorial priority. Certainly, the attractions and repulsions of murder news should not be forced into the simplistic category of peacetime boredom—least of all when we know so little about the fantasy lives of respectable readers, and how they were affected by their daily or weekly dose of news. We do know, however, that in the 1880s most London papers were publishing many more clinical details of violent death than they had in the 1840s, and that by the time of the Ripper murders, the penny press had won a huge readership owing to a combination of low prices and bolder and bigger headlines for disasters, upper-class scandals, and domestic murders. In matters homicidal, the press and presumably the public showed a marked preference for a middle-class am84

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bience (not to mention that rarity, an aristocratic victim or perpetrator). Before the Ripper episode, Victorians were accustomed to feature stories about lethal love triangles and murder arising from such motives as greed, anger, and jealousy. Because the strict codes of sexual propriety and respectability left so little room for deviance from the straight and narrow path of monogamy, the press leapt at the chance to publicize the murder of a mistress or wife by a respectable man desperate to keep up appearances. In this respect, the sensation novels or ‘‘romances’’ of Mary Braddon and Wilkie Collins were so many instances of art imitating life—or death—and these best-selling books anticipated the classic detective stories of Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy Sayers, in which intrigue and betrayal usually took place in affluent or elite households, where greed and forbidden desires drove people to commit crimes made even more heinous by their elite status. As for public attitudes toward ‘‘real’’ crime, many educated Victorians believed in the existence of a hardened criminal class, composed of hereditary offenders who preyed on honest citizens. Attuned to the pseudosciences of physiognomy and phrenology, which confirmed ancient folk beliefs about the intimate relation of mind, character, and body, many educated Victorians were convinced that they could spot the sexual deviant or habitual criminal by scrutinizing facial features or feeling the bumps and depressions on heads. As one American authority put it (no doubt with Caliban in mind), ‘‘Murderers generally have the forehead ‘villainous low’ in the region of Benevolence.’’6 Once the theories of the eminent Italian forensic anthropologist Cesare Lombroso gained currency in England, even such ardent Liberals as Luke Owen Pike and the Rev. William D. Morrison, chaplain of Wandsworth Prison, embraced the paradigm of criminal atavism and found striking physical and mental resemblances between habitual offenders and savages, as well as ‘‘inferior animals.’’7 On one occasion, Lombroso held the skull of a notorious brigand in his hands and declared that the hereditary criminal had ‘‘an irresponsible craving of evil for its own sake, the desire not only to extinguish life in the victim, but to mutilate the corpse, tear its flesh and drink its blood.’’8 Following in the footsteps of Lombroso, the influential Morrison classified criminals according to the shape of their chins, eyes, ears, noses, and skulls, and insisted that they composed a caste of degenerates. Popular versions of the hereditary theory of crime often found their way into crime fiction, cartoons, and newspaper stories about violent men whose features resembled those of apes, foxes, or rats. Victorian champions of law and order, like the Assistant 85

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Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Robert Anderson, insisted that hard-core thieves, burglars, and muggers deserved long prison sentences if not hanging.9 In his wide-ranging study of Victorian social theory and policy about criminality and punishment, Martin Wiener argues that the traditional faith in morality and free will gradually gave way to the conviction of the new social scientific experts that violent or deviant behavior should be blamed on society or heredity and not the individual. Determined to ‘‘de-moralize’’ criminality, writers as different as Charles Booth, James Bruce Thomson, Arthur Morrison, and R. L. Stevenson agreed that criminals acted not out of deliberate depravity but in response to environmental or hereditary forces over which they had no control. The new schools of psychology and criminology, led by such notables as Henry Maudsley and Havelock Ellis, attributed criminal or lunatic behavior to such social factors as poverty, alcoholism, and parental neglect or abuse. Criminals, they argued, were ‘‘as much manufactured articles as are steam engines and calico-printing machines,’’ and their deviant behavior was the result of ‘‘defective physical and mental organization’’ for which they were not fully responsible. Judges who had to punish these offenders should therefore take these mitigating factors into account.10 If the new scientific discourse of criminology sought to de-moralize crime, as well as expose the fallacies of the Lombrosian school, this did not deter most newspaper editors and reporters from continuing to blame the individual malefactor for his misdeeds. Emphasizing the lack of Christian compassion or the presence of some fatal character flaw, and invoking at times the Ten Commandments, reporters would quote the summations of judges at the end of certain murder trials, wherein the ‘‘heinous’’ crime was blamed on the wickedness of the culprit rather than on society at large. Fleet Street, in short, used murder news to remind readers once again about the wages of sin. When reflecting on some high-profile murder, a leader writer would sound like a preacher warning his flock about the danger of yielding to temptation and echoing the conviction of that godly guardian of public morality Gladstone, who declared in the year of the Ripper: ‘‘I believe in a degeneracy of man, in the Fall—in sin—in the intensity and virulence of sin. No other religion but Christianity meets the sense of sin, and sin is the great fact in the world to me.’’11 Always keen to reinscribe the code of respectability, editors featured murder news not just to feed the appetites of the prurient, but also to drive home the lesson that even virtuous people could commit frightful crimes by 86

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yielding to temptation—whether through drink, anger, jealousy, or lust. Following in the tradition of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ‘‘gallows sermons’’ on the subject of murder, and invoking much the same moral agenda found in the Newgate Calendar, the producers of Victorian murder news were fond of declaring that a single false step might well send a man or woman down the slippery slope of perdition to the gallows, and thence to hell.12 Thus in September 1888 a Durham clergyman took the funeral of a young woman who had been viciously beaten and stabbed by a young man near Birtley. Attributing this dreadful crime to ‘‘baffled lust’’ and ‘‘malignant spite,’’ the Rev. Arthur Watts delivered a familiar message about the depravity of man and warned the mourners against yielding to temptation: ‘‘Oh! the down slide is a swift slide. What lessons has to-day for each of us? Burn these two lessons of to-day into your memories, that they may never die out. In us, whose manhood is disgraced, pity for the wretched murderer has a hard struggle with shame at the crime. We will try to say ‘May he find mercy, though he showed none!’ For our sister, whose poor mangled body lies there, we fear not. She died rather than sin; she has borne her cross; her soul is with God. Her gift to us to-day is, ‘Die rather than sin!’ ’’13 The fact that some London papers quoted this homily about the fate of an obscure woman from the north says much about the moral, indeed ideological, content of murder news in this most secular of media. Murder as a Fine Art To a large extent, the reporting of murder reflected the prevailing aesthetic standards governing crime fiction at any given time. Much exercised about the low quality of crime news, Thomas De Quincey regaled readers of Blackwood’s Magazine in 1827 with a wonderfully satirical essay about the quality of murder. His protagonist began the annual ‘‘Williams Lecture on Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’’ with a tribute to the memory of John Williams, who ‘‘has exalted the idea of murder to all of us,’’ on the strength of having slaughtered an entire household in Whitechapel in December 1811. The lecturer insisted that murder should be judged by connoisseurs or ‘‘morbidly virtuous’’ critics just as they would treat ‘‘a picture, statue, or other work of art.’’ Leaving aside the assassination of monarchs, statesmen, and philosophers, he deplored such recent ‘‘abominable innovations from Italy’’ as poisoning, which had no more aesthetic value than a waxwork copy of a sculpture. What a pity it was that ‘‘old women and the mob of newspaper readers’’ now cared only about the amount of blood spilled. A truly satisfying murder had to fulfill Aristotle’s concept of tragedy 87

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by cleansing ‘‘the heart by means of pity and terror.’’ Ideally, the victim of murder should be a good but obscure and healthy man, because homicide deserved to be treated as a ‘‘liberal art’’ that deepened the element of pathos and awoke feelings of sympathy in the reader: ‘‘The world in general, gentlemen, are very bloody-minded; and all they want in a murder is a copious effusion of blood; gaudy display in this point is enough for them. But the enlightened connoisseur is more refined in his taste; and from our art, as from all the other liberal arts when thoroughly mastered, the result is, to humanise the heart.’’14 This whimsical essay ended with the lecturer’s abject confession of guilt for having tried to kill a greedy tomcat. More than a decade later, De Quincey returned to this grave subject. He began by denying the allegations of unkind critics that he had once committed murder, and then gave a blow-by-blow account of a riotous dinner held by the Society of Connoisseurs in Murder that ended with a toast to ‘‘Thugdom in all its branches,’’ after which the drunken and raucous guests shattered their wine glasses and one diner—named ‘‘Toad-in-the-hole’’—fired his pistols in ‘‘every direction.’’15 One eminent Victorian who mourned the demise of aesthetically pleasing murders was Leslie Stephen. Hiding behind the nom de plume of ‘‘A Cynic,’’ he complained in the course of ‘‘The Decay of Murder’’ that most murderers suffered from ‘‘bad character and limited intelligence,’’ while their victims, or ‘‘clients,’’ were just as ‘‘stupid, if not as wicked.’’ Evincing a De Quinceyan nostalgia for the ‘‘style’’ and imagination of bygone murderers, he declared that the advent of ‘‘gross, stupid, and brutal murders’’ mirrored the emergence of a society filled with insignificant men who wanted only to ‘‘get on in the world,’’ and lacked both flair and originality. If some plebeians had escaped ‘‘the enervating polish of civilization’’ and retained ‘‘the rude energy along with the brutal propensities of a more animal existence,’’ the prevailing fashion in matters of virtue and vice had, alas, become ‘‘colourless and monotonous.’’ Sad to say, even revenge killings had died out, along with true martyrs, heroes, eccentrics, misers, and ‘‘fine old English gentlemen.’’ Echoing Mill’s essay On Liberty, this elitist man of letters condemned the baneful effects of uniformity and the tyranny of the majority.16 In Stephen’s wake, Oscar Wilde honored the memory of an engaging dandy-aesthete by the name of Thomas Griffiths Wainewright (1794– 1847), who wrote fanciful essays, painted, struck elegant poses, and collected objets d’art. Borrowing the title of his amoral essay—‘‘Pen, Pencil, and Poison’’—from Swinburne, Wilde celebrated the life of a gifted but 88

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impecunious artist and writer, who not only worshipped beauty but also indulged in the ‘‘subtle’’ poisoning of people whose deaths benefited him financially. Even more egregious than any homicidal tendencies, in Wilde’s view, was his indulgence in ‘‘asiatic prose . . . pictorial epithets, and pompous exaggerations.’’ Since the pleasure of admiring beauty and producing ‘‘gorgeous’’ prose lost its appeal when he ran out of money or could not keep his creditors at bay, Wainewright forged some legal documents and poisoned several close relations and a friend in order to benefit from their legacies and life insurance policies. Clever enough to elude the charge of murder, he was found guilty of forging a power of attorney, and landed in Newgate Prison before being transported to Van Diemen’s Land. There he endured the kind of shame and pain that Wilde would soon suffer in Reading Gaol. For the latter, the lesson of Wainewright’s picaresque career lay in the absence of any ‘‘incongruity between crime and culture.’’ Wilde implored his readers not to judge this man too harshly simply because he lived ‘‘too close to our own time’’ rather than in some remote period of European history.17 Long after Henry B. Irving founded his ‘‘Crimes Club’’ in 1903 for the benefit of true connoisseurs of murder, George Orwell expressed his regret over the demise of that peculiarly English phenomenon—murder for the sake of respectability. To his way of thinking, the years 1850–1925 deserved to be called ‘‘the Elizabethan period’’ of murder, because they contained such classic middle-class killers as Palmer, Cream, Crippen, and Seddon, all of whom had succumbed to the forces of greed or lust or had tried to conceal an extramarital affair. Fascinated by professional men who killed out of passion and who might have avoided detection had it not been for some foolish mistake, Orwell deplored the new age of witless and callous killers like the American army deserter Karl Gustav Hulten, who had shown no remorse, let alone imagination, in shooting an English cab driver in 1944 simply to impress his new English girlfriend.18 What Orwell missed most was the ‘‘domestic poisoning drama’’ that only a stable and deeply hypocritical society of the Victorian variety could produce.19 More recently, Brian Appleyard has argued that contemporary television and film melodramas rarely feature the psychologically ‘‘comforting’’ murder associated with the moral absolutes and rigid class relationships of the past. Such notable culprits as Palmer, Cream, and Crippen were all proud and insecure men, who killed because they were obsessed with keeping their reputations unblemished. Appleyard shared Orwell’s disdain for the commonplace nature of twentieth-century murders and the public’s 89

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acceptance of ‘‘the blank cataloguing of weaponry and the amount of blood issuing from exit wounds.’’ It was bad enough that English murderers had become ‘‘Americanised.’’ But to make matters worse, they also possessed a ‘‘blank, sub-human’’ personality and ‘‘a background so alien as to make pity impossible.’’20 Clearly these elitist connoisseurs of murder coveted cases with a touch of class and an aura of mystery. Unapologetic about their snobbish tastes and gender bias, they relished tales of respectable men who gratified some forbidden desire and then killed to preserve their precious social standing. Like fancy food critics sampling a variety of rich dishes and fine wines, these cultural critics wanted to ‘‘sup full with horrors,’’ and they kept hoping to find some new or exotic flavor that would excite their jaded palates.21 If newspaper editors also appreciated the newsworthy value of respectable and clever murderers, they could not afford to be so fastidious, because such cases were very much the exception to the rule among the three to four hundred homicides reported each year. In other words, the rarity of gourmet murders meant that Fleet Street usually had to embellish or melodramatize what the aesthetes would have deemed sordid or crude. Even Lord Burnham had to admit that his own paper, the Daily Telegraph, ‘‘sometimes overdid’’ the reporting of murder. But he insisted that such excess was essential to commercial success, given the banal nature of most crimes.22 Doctor Watson once complained to Sherlock Holmes that ‘‘the cases which come to light in the papers are, as a rule, bald enough, and vulgar enough. We have in our police reports realism pushed to its extreme limits, and yet the result is . . . neither fascinating nor artistic.’’ In reply, his sage companion observed: ‘‘A certain selection and discretion must be used in producing a realistic effect. . . . This is wanting in the police report, where more stress is laid perhaps upon the platitudes of the magistrate than upon the details, which to an observer contain the vital essence of the whole matter. Depend upon it there is nothing so unnatural as the commonplace.’’23 The best reporting of murder required extensive selection and discretion by journalists, who had to be mindful of the dictates of decency as well as the reluctance of the police to discuss the details of their investigations and the ever-present constraints of space. Small wonder, then, that some discriminating readers complained about the lack of flavor in the standard fare served up by the daily and weekly press. The English criminal justice system, unlike France’s, made no allowance for crime passionelle, and any man—let alone woman—who killed a wife, mistress, lover, or rival in a fit of 90

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anger or depression could expect to suffer the full consequences of an unforgiving law. For this reason Fleet Street reporters had less in the way of suspense to work with than their Parisian counterparts, because defendants found guilty of domestic murder could not escape the noose on this legal ground.24 In any event, most Victorian crime reporters went out of their way to season the main course of murder news with gore and mystery. Since not even the penny press could award feature status to every murder committed in the country, let alone report every felony, editors had to pursue a policy of triage by highlighting crimes they considered unusual or intriguing.25 First and foremost, they featured crimes and scandals that involved respectable people. Thus the murder of a young middle-class clerk from Upper Tooting by the name of Edwin Rose, who had been hiking on Goats Fell Mountain on Arran Island in the Firth of Clyde in July 1889, received far more publicity in the London press than did the arrest and trial of a plebeian ‘‘baby-sweater’’ from Edinburgh, Jessie King, even though she had strangled three adopted infants in the previous year. In the former case, prejudices of both class and ethnicity played some part, because the man charged with breaking Rose’s skull with a rock and then concealing his body was a Glaswegian artisan who had gone hiking with the English tourist.26 Because the press dramatized this case, hundreds of spectators had to wait hours to find a seat in the crowded courtroom. On the whole, the scarcity of elite victims and victimizers meant that such cases invariably received banner headlines and many columns about the inquest and trial. If murder had long been ‘‘a staple of the English entertainment diet,’’ as Altick contends, then lethal violence in upper-class households became the equivalent of a five-course feast. When dealing with felonies in general, the morning papers often divided them into four categories. First, a column toward the back of the domestic news section, headlined ‘‘POLICE,’’ summarized the previous day’s proceedings in the police magistrate’s courts around the metropolis. The offenses discussed in these short articles ranged from muggings to murder. Second, a paper like the Times covered the inquests held by coroners in cases of suspicious death. These official inquiries might earn a few paragraphs or even several columns along with banner headlines, depending on editorial whim. Third, the previous day’s proceedings in the Central Criminal Court in London were covered in summary form. And fourth, the Times reported briefly on murder trials held in the circuit courts or assizes around the country, and printed précis of quarter sessions held in the Home Counties. Which cases wound up getting in-depth coverage depended on the social 91

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standing of the principals and the amount of violence, intrigue, or mystery that reporters could wring from the story. If the method and motive of murder seemed too ordinary, or if the police arrested the perpetrator right away, then the case might earn only a few lines of print at the bottom of a page devoted to domestic news. Hardly any evidence has survived about the day-to-day thoughts of editors who had to decide how much or little space should be assigned to any given homicide, suicide, or other serious crime. Why, for example, did the Times devote sixteen columns to the six-day trial of Herbert John Bennett, aged twenty-one, for having strangled his estranged wife, Mary Jane, with a mohair lace from one of his boots on Great Yarmouth Beach on September 22, 1900? There was little about her death that could be called mysterious or intriguing, even though Bennett was keeping company with another young woman at the time. Nevertheless, the press sought out witnesses and friends of the young couple with such zeal that counsel for the defense accused journalists of having perverted the course of justice by publishing interviews before the trial began. The case lacked not only a clever culprit but also gore. The medical evidence presented at the trial and reported in the papers (February 26, 1901) focused on the victim’s bruises and scratches, and the bootlace-ligature tied tightly around her neck. Even though one police surgeon was quoted as mentioning ‘‘bloodstains on her underlinen,’’ the Times refused to pursue the intriguing possibility of sexual assault. Most of the testimony related to where and how the couple had spent their last days and the victim’s silver watch and gold chain necklace, found in Herbert’s possession. Why the trial was removed certiorari from Norwich assizes to the Central Criminal Court in London, where the Lord Chief Justice presided, remains a mystery. In sum, nothing about this domestic murder would have detained De Quincey, Stephen, or Orwell. The long reports of the trial testimony in the Times ranged over a marriage gone sour, the defendant’s travels with his new love interest, eyewitness accounts of a nighttime scuffle on the beach, and a woman’s overheard cry of ‘‘Mercy, mercy.’’27 One wonders if perchance these were slow days for other kinds of news. Needless to say, not even the goriest murders monopolized the news, in either the local or national press. No matter how gripping, murder stories always had to compete for space with countless other kinds of news, from high politics to finance and sports. On any given day, editors had to make some hard choices about which events or stories merited how many column inches and where these should go. When pondering the old question of 92

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what kinds of news sold the most papers, the veteran editor Kennedy Jones declared: ‘‘The first answer is ‘War.’ . . . War apart, a State Funeral sells more papers than anything else.’’ And then, he added: ‘‘Next to a State Funeral comes a First-Class Murder.’’28 Apart from the amount of space and size of headlines assigned to murder news, there remains the vital issue of the language used by Victorian journalists to record events that might offend readers. Whenever sexual behavior came into play, euphemism, circumlocution, and elision were the order of the day. However habituated readers may have been to graphic accounts of violence, they rarely if ever encountered explicit mention of sexual activity or the genitalia unless they dealt in pornography or medical discourse. Instead of using the term ‘‘prostitute,’’ most morning dailies preferred such euphemisms as ‘‘fallen woman,’’ ‘‘sister of the abyss,’’ or ‘‘woman of the street.’’ Occasionally a reporter would employ the even more delicate phrase ‘‘the frail sisterhood.’’ Such colloquialisms as ‘‘whore,’’ ‘‘harlot,’’ ‘‘trollop,’’ and ‘‘tart’’ did not appear in the respectable press. The Times, Standard, and Morning Post all referred to the Ripper’s victims as ‘‘unfortunates,’’ a term dating from the 1790s and designed, presumably, to take some of the stigma out of their principal source of income.29 In cases of rape, most Victorian papers used this word when citing the criminal charge but they usually opted for code words like ‘‘assault’’ or ‘‘outrage,’’ without prefacing these terms with the adjective ‘‘sexual.’’30 Thus when a female tramp who was gang-raped by some colliers in Liverpool in 1874 earned an article in the Daily Telegraph, the reporter described the victim as having been ‘‘outraged to death’’—exactly the same phrase used in some headlines about the fate of Emma Smith in 1888.31 Among the euphemisms for masturbation were ‘‘self abuse,’’ the ‘‘solitary’’ or ‘‘degrading vice,’’ ‘‘self pollution,’’ and ‘‘the secret sin.’’ A standard phrase for abortion was ‘‘an illegal operation.’’ Venereal disease was often termed ‘‘a noxious complaint’’ or ‘‘a bad disease.’’ Both the medical and lay term for sexual intercourse was ‘‘connexion’’—a word that rarely appeared in any newspaper.32 In sum, a heavy veil of what Alan Hunt has called ‘‘sexual euphemization’’ hovered over every aspect of sexuality in the literature consumed by respectable readers. Such reticence in reporting sexual activity did not apply to violence and bloodshed, where reporters tended to indulge their readers and themselves to the limit. Even the Times printed details of physical injury that would not be tolerated by editors of today’s tabloids. And remarkably few readers ever wrote indignant letters to the editor protesting such lurid material. 93

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Gauging reader responses to murder news for the Victorian era must perforce remain something of a guessing game. But if some sensitive readers skipped over the morbid passages, there can be little doubt that many others eagerly devoured the gory bits and secretly craved more. Domestic Murder In his study of the formulaic nature of adventure and crime narratives, John Cawelti construes ‘‘literary crime’’ as ‘‘an ambiguous mirror of social values, reflecting both our overt commitments to certain principles of morality and order and our hidden resentments and animosity against these principles.’’ Sharing Altick’s view that Victorian readers were consumed by tales of domestic murder, he contends that ‘‘husbands poisoning wives, nephews murdering wealthy aunts, cousins doing away with cousins[:] These were the staples of the classical detective story and of the great Victorian murder trials.’’ For Cawelti, Victorian readers’ fascination with such cases was ambiguous, because they were ‘‘vicariously working out feelings of hatred and frustration imposed by the intensity of the family situation.’’ Or, to put it another way, ‘‘The classical detective story . . . showed a particular fascination with the hidden secrets and guilts that lay within the family circle. . . . The sense of shame . . . afflict[ed] many of those addicted to the detective story.’’33 The main problem with this ‘‘guilt-trip’’ theory is that it rests on the reader’s secret complicity with the murderer and ignores the empathy that so many Victorians felt for the victims of violence. Why readers should have identified only with the perpetrator remains unexplained, as does the feeling of pleasure or schadenfreude many readers presumably experienced while perusing stories about the villainy of those whom they despised or envied as their social superiors. According to a recent study of Victorian homicides, some 63 percent of all indictments for murder between 1856 and 1875 fell into the domestic category—granting the ambiguity of the term.34 The cult of domesticity for which Victorian society is so rightly renowned goes far to explain the popularity of stories about murder and deception within the bosom of the family. For centuries, murder within that supposedly safe and loving ambience had been regarded as an unforgivable betrayal of trust and affection. In medieval times this crime went by the name of petit treason, and anyone who violated that ‘‘confidence’’ deserved no mercy.35 For these reasons Victorian reporters were prepared to write at length about this kind of homicide and demonize the perpetrators of such unmitigated evil. Whenever an unusually shocking case of domestic murder came to the fore, 94

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leader writers would indulge in ‘‘end-of-civilization’’ warnings and condemn the wicked culprit to hell.36 Many of the murders featured in the Fleet Street press involved people who knew each other—whether as kith and kin, friends, acquaintances, exlovers, servants, or hired workmen. Occasionally, an editorial on the day after a guilty verdict would demonize the man or woman who had broken the sacred trust that had once bound him or her to the victim. By contrast, random assaults and stranger murders usually earned no headlines unless they occurred in the West End or involved people of social consequence. The exceptions were multiple murders, other crimes of violence, or plebeian love triangles ending in bloodshed. As for motives, readers needed no lessons about the range of passions that drove someone to commit murder.37 Chief among these, according to one connoisseur of murder, Tennyson Jesse, were the desire for ‘‘gain, revenge, elimination,’’ and ‘‘jealousy,’’ as well as ‘‘lust of killing’’ and ‘‘conviction.’’ To this list William Roughead added ‘‘murder for fun,’’ bearing in mind the Ratcliffe Highway murders and the Ripper ‘‘butcheries.’’ At the end of the day, both the press and the public seemed most enthralled by murder involving people who ‘‘prided themselves on their possession of that cardinal Victorian virtue—Respectability.’’38 Although Fleet Street’s coverage of murder should not be forced into a cast-iron mold, the typical full-length story followed a formula that called for beginning with the discovery of the body, describing the crime scene and the injuries, and then including statements from witnesses or bystanders. A day or so later articles would appear about the inquest and possibly the police pursuit of suspects. If the police magistrate’s inquiry ended in an indictment, then the ensuing trial would be covered at length, with testimony both paraphrased and quoted. The longest-running stories involved much repetition of detail from one article to another. When and if the defendant was found guilty, then the final articles would cover the sentencing and later the execution, with a brief description of the condemned man’s demeanor as he mounted the scaffold. Accustomed to the formulaic nature of murder news, spread out in a series of installments over weeks or months, readers knew more or less what to expect in form or layout, if not content. No simple summary of domestic murder reporting in any decade of the long Victorian era can possibly do justice to the rich variety and myriad nuances of the genre. But a few highly condensed case studies may serve to illustrate the main features of murder news between the 1840s and 1880s. 95

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Taken together, these cases exemplify some of the standard techniques, formats, and language used by both the popular and the elite press to draw in readers over the short life of the story. From the opening lines about the discovery of a corpse to the final sentences about the execution, murder news followed a pattern marked by repetition and hardly any summaries of the developments to date. Often devoid of paragraph breaks, the articles in the morning papers required close attention, because significant revelations were often buried in the midst of a long, densely packed paragraph of fine print with no subheads to guide the weary reader. If the penny evening and Sunday papers contained articles that made easier or more exciting reading, there was often less difference than one might imagine between the elite and popular press when it came to such vital ingredients as gore and mystery. The St. Giles Murder, 1845 The St. Giles murder involved a twenty-one-year-old working-class man of Irish origins, Joseph Dennis Connor, who enjoyed consorting with prostitutes close to his mother’s age. Convinced that he had caught a venereal disease from a forty-six-year-old ‘‘unfortunate’’ named Mary Tape (or Brothers), he bought a carving knife and hunted her for several days, boasting aloud that he would ‘‘pepper’’ her or give her a ‘‘stinger.’’ On the evening of March 31, he finally tracked her down and invited her to accompany him to a rundown lodging house near Covent Garden—ostensibly for the purpose of sex. Once inside the threepenny room he suddenly attacked her with the knife. Hearing a woman cry ‘‘Murder!’’ three times, the housekeeper forced the door open, and the assailant rushed past her and disappeared down the street. Tape lay dying on the floor, drenched in blood, with the knife still embedded in the back of her neck. Within a few days the police learned Connor’s identity and arrested him while he caroused with four younger women. During his trial at the Central Criminal Court in mid-May, several of Tape’s female friends testified about Connor’s fondness for older women, his obsession with having a ‘‘loathsome’’ disease, and his burning desire for revenge. The medical examiner repeated the testimony given at the inquest about the sixteen penetrating and incised wounds, and noted that he had found no signs of (venereal) disease in her organs.39 Following the jury’s verdict of guilty, the judge imposed the death sentence, and Connor went to the gallows outside Newgate Prison on June 3, while a boisterous crowd of thousands searched in vain for signs of emotion on the prisoner’s face. 96

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In a manner reminiscent of Hogarth’s famous series of prints ‘‘A Rake’s Progress’’ (also set in Covent Garden), Fleet Street focused on the fall of a young man whose father was an honest employee of a well-known firm of silversmiths. The trial reports stressed Connor’s morbid fear of venereal disease (unnamed by most papers), his request for an inspection of his private parts by a friendly prostitute (for a small fee), and his relentless pursuit of Tape. Most papers lingered over the knife stuck in the neck, and the catalogue of stab wounds added more gore to this tale of lust and vengeance. The Morning Post (April 2) pointed out that ‘‘minute pieces of flesh’’ lay on the blood-soaked bed and then dipped deeper into the well of gore by alluding to footprints in the ‘‘thick stream of blood’’ near the bed, as if ‘‘the victim and her murderer had paddled . . . in it.’’ Despite some long passages culled from the testimony given at the police magistrate’s hearing, the inquest, and the trial, a good deal of elision took place. Thus the Times (May 16) shrank the judge’s lengthy summation to the jury down to a mere twenty-one words, and compressed the three-hour speech of Connor’s counsel into fourteen lines. Surgeon Michael Fitzgerald’s detailed autopsy report received only eighty words. On the other hand, the paper made room for the following rumination from the bench after the judge had pronounced the sentence of death: ‘‘A more barbarous murder than the one you have committed on the unfortunate woman who was your victim can hardly be conceived. The circumstances under which you committed it shew that he who offends against one law of God is guilty of the whole. What was begun in what is called venial sin ended, in your case, in the commission of that crime for which you will suffer. Who in society that offends against God’s laws can tell the point where to stop, and so rule himself as to avoid stepping over the boundary!’’ Evidently Connor stood ‘‘motionless as a statue’’ while listening to this little sermon. Despite all the compression and omission of testimony, the Times still managed to devote a total of twelve columns, or some twenty-six thousand words, to this case between April 1 and June 3, proving that even an elite paper could sensationalize plebeian murder. Including prostitution, veiled allusions to venereal disease, and the sorry fate of this ‘‘Idle Prentice,’’ the case gave reporters a chance to spin an old morality tale about lust, revenge, and the wages of sin. Not only did this story reinscribe the codes of godly and righteous conduct, but it also reassured the public that the criminal justice system worked.40 The Times ( June 3) ended this sad story of yet another fall from grace on a poignant note. Rumor had it that Connor had ‘‘only lately associated with bad women.’’ Before then he had lived quietly 97

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with his parents, to whom he dutifully handed over his wages. What went wrong, why this youth had altered his habits so drastically, this paper did not say. But to make matters even sadder, the reporter revealed that Tape had arranged with a missionary to enter a Magdalen asylum for fallen women on the morning of the day she was murdered. The lesson was all too clear: if only she had kept that appointment, then her ‘‘wretched life’’ would have been spared.41 The Road Murder, 1860 Fifteen years later, a far more famous—and truly familial—murder took place near the village of Road, on the border of Wiltshire and Somerset. In the middle of the night of June 29, 1860, someone murdered Francis Saville Kent, the four-year-old son of a wealthy factory inspector, Samuel Kent. Evidently the murderer had suffocated the boy in his bed and then carried him outside to a privy in the garden, where he or she cut his throat and stuffed the body through the hole in the seat. Thwarted by silences, professions of innocence, lack of evidence, and malicious rumors, the local police failed to identify the culprit. Gossip cast the father as the prime suspect, because he was deemed a mean-spirited philanderer, who was having an affair with the young nursemaid while married to his second wife. However, the victim’s siblings, Constance Emillie (aged sixteen) and William (aged fourteen), the children of Samuel’s first marriage, deeply resented their half-brother, and Constance had once run away from home disguised as a boy. For this double rebellion, and because her bloodstained nightdress had mysteriously disappeared a day after the murder, she fell under suspicion. Unable to crack the case, the local police called in Scotland Yard, and the highly respected Inspector Jonathan Whicher arrived on the scene. After interrogating family members and servants, Whicher concluded that Constance was guilty, largely on the strength (or weakness) of the missing nightgown. For lack of any firm evidence, the police magistrates granted Constance bail and then discharged her. Amidst charges of police incompetence, criticism of Whicher by his superiors, and an editorial blast from the Times about his reliance on ‘‘the most frivolous’’ evidence, the detective resigned in anger and humiliation.42 Following her release, Constance entered a school in France and later an Anglican convent at Brighton. This brutal and bizarre slaying garnered headlines in both the provincial and national press for weeks on end. The Times devoted no less than six leading articles to the case during that autumn. And then it dropped out of 98

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sight. Five years later, however, Constance created a major splash by confessing to the murder without offering any explanation. Scores of journalists descended on Salisbury to cover the grand jury’s indictment and the ensuing brief trial, where she pleaded guilty. When he arrived at the sentence of death, the judge supposedly broke down, and many of the spectators in the packed courtroom sobbed along with the defendant. Although a leader writer in the Times called this murder one of the most cold-blooded crimes ever committed, and expressed profound regret that Constance refused to explain her act, he urged that Constance be spared the gallows and sentenced instead to life imprisonment. Shortly thereafter the Home Secretary commuted her sentence.43 Fleet Street had a field day with this story of horror, treachery, and mystery in a respectable family setting, and the absence of any hard evidence or plausible motive kept contemporaries enthralled for years. Always on the lookout for unusual scandals and crimes, Wilkie Collins famously appropriated the case of the missing stained nightdress for The Moonstone (1868). Poisonous Physicians During the decade between 1855 and 1865, newspapers were filled with the shocking details of murder by poison carried out by three respected members of the medical profession. Their known victims were family members, friends, and former lovers, but suspicion persisted that the actual body count was much higher. The first of these domestic-melodrama villains was Dr. William Palmer of Rugeley, Staffordshire, who went on trial in May 1856 for having poisoned his friend and gambling partner J. Parsons Cooke.44 The publicity swirling around this case goes far to explain why the trial attracted so many spectators—including the Duke of Wellington, the Earl of Derby, and Prince Edward of Saxe Weimar—to the Old Bailey. Cooke was not Palmer’s only victim. His wife, brother, and sister-in-law had also died under suspicious circumstances, and reporters speculated that Palmer, who was eventually convicted of killing six people, might have poisoned as many as fourteen. The recently revitalized Daily Telegraph devoted many columns and banner headlines to Palmer’s financial intrigues, and highlighted the gruesome details in the autopsy reports about the various poisons administered to friends and relations.45 Found guilty and sentenced to death, Palmer was hanged on June 14, 1856. The second medical poisoner was Dr. Thomas Smethurst, a bigamist accused of murdering his second wife in 1859 in order to inherit her large estate. After the jury found him guilty, several papers, spearheaded by the 99

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Daily Telegraph, launched a campaign to overturn the conviction on the grounds that the prosecution’s toxicologist had bungled a crucial test for arsenic.46 After more legal wrangling, Smethurst was pardoned. But he had to spend a year in jail after his conviction for bigamy. The third case involved Edward Pritchard, a Glasgow physician who was tried in 1865 for the murder of his mother-in-law and wife by means of assorted poisons.47 Pritchard’s trial drew many reporters as well as eminent spectators, and the press competed fiercely for the fullest and most lurid coverage. Found guilty of these crimes, he was soon executed. Not only did the press award feature status to these betrayals of the Hippocratic oath by once highly esteemed professionals, it also brought to the fore all the arcane details of the poisons used to dispatch the victims. All this adverse publicity caused the medical profession much embarrassment, and the mercenary motives in each case only heightened the chagrin felt by some doctors. In the words of Conan Doyle, whose own medical training gave him some authority, ‘‘When a doctor does go wrong, he is the first of criminals. He has nerve and he has knowledge. Palmer and Pritchard were among the heads of their profession.’’48 Fleet Street lost no time in playing on the public’s fears about doctors who violated their oath to heal the sick. At the same time, these cases may also have elicited feelings of schadenfreude among readers who relished the sight of eminently respectable men falling from a state of social grace.49 And yet such fleeting pleasure must have been tinged with anxiety over the ease with which a doctor could use his expertise to do away with friends or family members, not to mention patients. To make matters more alarming, anyone could buy arsenic, antimony, prussic acid, strychnine, and other poisons over the counter. Since poison was the weapon of choice for women who wanted to eliminate a rival, spouse, lover, or child, the use of this method by men, who traditionally resorted to knife, pistol, or blunt object, added an extra charge of electricity to these narratives of domestic murder.50 The Balham Murder, 1876 Another good example of domestic murder news dates from July 1876, when Florence Bravo, the widow of a wealthy gentleman named Charles D. T. Bravo from suburban Balham, Surrey, fell under suspicion of having poisoned her late husband. Although the inquest had ended with a verdict of suicide, several medical experts questioned the coroner’s finding. The clouds of suspicion thickened when rumors circulated that she had enjoyed several love affairs before and after her marriage. Taking a proactive stance, 100

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the Daily Telegraph’s chief subeditor, Drew Gay, began his own investigation, found evidence of poisoning, and demanded a fresh inquiry. Under mounting pressure, the authorities exhumed Bravo’s body, arranged a second autopsy, and ordered a new inquest, which ran for an unprecedented twenty-three days, from mid-July to mid-August. Other papers soon exploited the Balham case, serving up column after column of testimony that ranged from trivia to sensational revelations about Florence’s ‘‘criminal intimacy’’ with her physician while traveling on the Continent. However embarrassing, the latter disclosure constituted no proof that she had poisoned her husband. On a more morbid note, the press also highlighted the contents of Charles Bravo’s poison-saturated stomach.51 In the end, lack of conclusive evidence enabled Florence to escape indictment for murder. Ruling out both suicide and ‘‘death by misadventure,’’ the coroner’s jury found that Bravo had been ‘‘wilfully murdered by the administration of tartar emetic’’ by persons unknown. The Daily Telegraph praised the jury for its hard work and then congratulated itself for having brought about the second inquest. As a leader in the Daily Telegraph (Aug. 12) put it, ‘‘The Balham Mystery remains a mystery.’’52 Once again, the combination of death by poison, an elite household, sexual misconduct, and serious disagreements among the medical experts enabled the press to create a media event, and this in turn drew hundreds of spectators—both obscure and eminent—to the second inquest.53 If readers unversed in the finer points of toxicology missed crucial clues, they had more than enough domestic scandal to satisfy their prurient appetites. The Whitechapel Murder, 1874–75 Thirty years after the Connor-Tape case, the murder of a married man’s mistress in Whitechapel helped to rescue Fleet Street from the doldrums of mundane crime news. The Wainwright-Lane murder became a steamy and morbid ‘‘newspaper novel,’’ featuring the betrayal of a loyal wife by an ostensibly respectable husband and the calculated murder of a long-term mistress, Harriet Lane, with whom he had been living clandestinely for at least three years under the assumed names of Mr. and Mrs. Percy King. Here was a murder that would have delighted De Quincey, Stephen, and Orwell, even though the culprit, Henry Wainwright, showed little imagination, let alone skill, when it came to disposing of the body. Both the elite and popular papers assigned countless columns to this case of middle-class adultery gone badly wrong, and just as with the fall of Joseph Connor, Fleet 101

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Street used this crime to drive home the familiar message about the wages of sin and the high cost of yielding to lust. The so-called Whitechapel Road Mystery began as a modest article in the Times (Sept. 13, 1875), stating that a man had been arrested in the borough of Southwark while carrying two heavy bags filled with the dismembered and decomposing body parts of an adult female.54 The prime suspect was a philanderer and small-time dealer in mattresses and brushes who had been leading a double life. Married to a faithful wife in Chingford, Essex, and the father of five children, he had set up a love nest in Whitechapel with a younger woman, Harriet Lane, and their two children. Given to a fancy lifestyle and reckless spending, Henry had some nasty fights over money with his mistress, and when she threatened to expose their affair, he killed her by means of a revolver and knife in the fall of 1874. He then buried her remains beneath the floorboards of his rented warehouse at number 215 Whitechapel Road. When the lease ran out a year later, the now insolvent Henry dug up the decomposing corpse and chopped it into pieces, which he stuffed into two black canvas sacks. He then asked his employee, Alfred Stokes, to carry the parcels into the street, while he went in search of a taxi. Suspicious of the foul-smelling contents, Stokes opened one bag and to his horror saw a human head and hand. Determined to learn his master’s destination, he doggedly pursued the cab on foot across London Bridge and into Southwark, where he managed to alert two policemen. After Wainwright had dragged the parcels inside a vacant store, the constables accosted him. He offered them a hundred pounds to go away, but they spurned the bribe and arrested him, along with a young woman whom he had brazenly invited to join him in ‘‘a spin across the river.’’ The press coverage of the police magistrate’s hearing, the inquest, and the nine-day trial at the Old Bailey at the end of November 1875 constitutes one of the longest narratives of murder in the late-Victorian press, one that aroused enormous public interest. In a series of cobbled articles, Fleet Street laid out in excruciating detail Wainwright’s secret life, the murder, the burial of Harriet’s body, his use of the wrong kind of lime, his enlistment of his brother, Thomas, to help conceal her disappearance, the exhumation and dismemberment of the corpse, and, of course, the famous taxi ride across the river with Stokes the amateur sleuth in hot pursuit. A melodramatic penny pamphlet about the trial of the two brothers hit the streets after the jury had returned a verdict of guilty. For the cover illustration the artist depicted the two well-dressed defendants standing in the dock, with the rather dapper Henry holding in one hand a monocle at102

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tached to a ribbon around his neck.55 Using both quotation and paraphrase, the Times sustained reader interest by reporting the forensic aspects of the case as the prosecution set out with the help of police surgeons to prove that the corpse was indeed Harriet Lane. Once again feature treatment in the papers swelled the number of spectators at each stage of the legal proceedings, and both the inquest and the trial drew a smattering of aristocrats and barristers, along with hundreds of ordinary citizens. Like most other papers, the Times did not enter into all the intimate details about the state of Harriet’s dismembered body.56 A highlight of this slowly unfolding story was Stokes’s vivid account of carrying the noisome parcels out of the warehouse and chasing the cab across the river. The Times ’s reporter (Sept. 17) not only stressed Henry’s plunge from respectability as a result of his spending habits and adultery, but also pointed out that Harriet’s body had gone undetected for so long despite the stench because ‘‘the district of Whitechapel is notoriously not one of the sweetest as regards smells, and the people who dwell and work there have not the reputation of being particularly fastidious.’’ On October 1, the police arrested Henry’s brother, Thomas, for complicity in murder, because he had helped to deceive Harriet’s relations and friends by writing letters stating that she had left town with another man by the name of Edward or ‘‘Teddy’’ Frieake.57 On the final day of the trial, the presiding judge, Lord Cockburn, took six hours to deliver his summation— a speech severely condensed in the papers. After deliberating for fifty minutes, the jury found Henry guilty of murder and Thomas guilty of being an accessory after the fact.58 After reprimanding Henry for having invoked the name of God when the evidence of his guilt was so overwhelming, the Lord Chief Justice stated that he had committed a ‘‘barbarous, cruel, inhuman, and cowardly act’’ and then pronounced the sentence of death.59 On the day after Henry’s conviction, an editorial in the Times reflected on ‘‘the moral aspects of this repulsive story,’’ pointing out that a once respectable and loving family man had deceived his wife and friends for the sake of forbidden pleasure. Corrupted to the point of ‘‘base cruelty,’’ he had ‘‘broken recklessly with the wholesome, tranquillizing restraints of family life.’’ Devoid of any ‘‘moral principle,’’ he had succumbed to gross immorality as well as hubris and ‘‘recklessness.’’60 Most papers assigned a few morbid lines to Henry’s execution, which took place inside Newgate Prison at 8 A.M. on December 21, while a large crowd waited outside.61 The Wainwright-Lane case possessed all the right ingredients for a newspaper novel—namely, sensation-horror and sexual scandal in a respectable 103

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household. The Daily Telegraph devoted almost 125 columns to the case from start to finish, and even the Times gave this murder over 91 columns, compared with 55 in the Morning Post.62 The total space assigned to the case by the Times and Telegraph amounted to almost twice that devoted to the entire Ripper saga. The allocation of so much space to the murder of an obscure seamstress by a smalltime businessman says much about editorial priorities along Fleet Street at a time of intense competition for new readers. A remarkable fallout from this case was the public’s generous response to newspaper appeals for money to relieve the distress of Henry’s wife and her five children. After the Rev. Alfred Conder of Middleton, Middlesex, promoted this worthy cause in a letter to the Daily Telegraph, funds poured in to the tune of seven hundred pounds. Not only did more than six hundred people contribute to this fund, but two undersheriffs at the Old Bailey made a public appeal to help Harriet Lane’s orphaned children and their guardian, with the result that several hundred pounds flowed in their direction.63 Besides these charitable acts, the press also raised some reward money to compensate Alfred Stokes for his initiative and the wages he lost while giving testimony.64 In sum, the Wainwright-Lane murder provided the press with a fascinating plot filled with morbidity and sex, and enabled editors to send forth another set of powerful messages about the wages of sin. At the same time, the public could savor a sense of closure along with the thrill of reading the fascinating details of Henry’s fall from social grace. Societal Murder In stark contrast to domestic murder, wherein the victim and perpetrator knew each other, however slightly, societal murder was random and impersonal. Even when they did not end in death, crimes of opportunity like muggings, garrotings, purse snatchings, and burglaries provoked greater fear than did domestic crimes because assaults by strangers could affect any law-abiding citizen who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Jack the Ripper’s attacks alarmed women of all classes—not just prostitutes plying their trade in Whitechapel—and the longer he remained at liberty, the greater the fear. More often than not, domestic murder cases enabled readers to say, ‘‘This could never happen to me because I would never put myself in that position.’’ Moreover, domestic murders were usually much easier to solve, owing to the small pool of suspects and the more obvious array of motives. Clearly, the Ripper saga offered readers no such reassurances. These 104

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murders remained an impenetrable mystery and an unprecedented horror, with the killer seemingly capable of striking again at any time. Not only did this narrative have an ambiguous beginning (was it April 2, August 6, or August 31?) and an uncertain middle (September 30), it also lacked a clear ending (was it November 9, 1888, or July 17, 1889—or later?). Here was a series of shocking crimes without any closure. Instead of the customary sequence of arrest, indictment, trial, and execution, the public had to endure five gruesome inquests that shed no light on the killer’s identity or motive. The long list of suspects brought the police no closer to their quarry, and complicated the journalists’ task of narrating the crimes. And the police’s failure to catch the killer exposed them to a barrage of criticism from newspapers and readers, some of whom were beginning to doubt Scotland Yard’s ability to cope with ordinary crime. Unlike Connor and Wainwright, who were rather weak men and posed no threat to the community, Jack the Ripper was anonymous, alien, arrogant, cunning, and, above all, powerful. He made no attempt to conceal his savage deeds, and even more unusual, he taunted the police by sending boastful letters to the press defying Scotland Yard to catch him. Instead of the conventional plot of adulterous love or murder for money, the Whitechapel horrors heralded a new kind of gratuitous violence against the most vulnerable of that already vulnerable ‘‘class’’—women. Into the partial vacuum created by all the unknowns in this strange case rushed social and political concerns about not only the East End but also the solemn cause of law and order and the state of English civilization. This time the press did not need to invent any mystery, because the slayings were so inherently baffling. Nor was there any need to exaggerate the gore, because the mutilations were so horrific. In his classic study of the cultural contrasts between rural and urban England, The Country and the City, Raymond Williams distinguished the ‘‘knowable communities’’ of the countryside from the ‘‘opaque’’ and bewildering world of the city, especially London, with its complex organization, burgeoning population, and extremes of wealth and poverty. In his view, ‘‘most novels are in some sense knowable communities,’’ epitomizing ‘‘direct relationships . . . face-to-face contacts within which we can find and value the real substance of personal relationships.’’ Williams went on to argue that ‘‘what is knowable is not only a function of objects—of what is there to be known,’’ but also of ‘‘subjects, of observers—of what is desired and what needs to be known.’’65 In an analogous sense, the domestic homicides featured in newspapers fell into the category of knowable 105

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communities, because the circumstances and the motives were so easily imaginable to Victorian readers. Interviews with relatives, friends, and neighbors who shed some light on the protagonists made such crimes seem comprehensible. Far different were the Ripper murders, which belonged to the unknowable, if not unthinkable. Refusing to fade into obscurity, the specter of Jack the Ripper haunted the public imagination and provoked nightmares in adults as well as children. And the abundance of books, movies, and television documentaries about Jack in our own time attests to the continuing power of this legendary villain to attract and repel people with almost equal ease. In her far-ranging study of the cultural implications of murder narratives in early nineteenth-century America, the cultural and social historian Karen Halttunen argued that ‘‘the dominant narrative expressing and shaping the popular response to the crime of murder underwent a major transformation,’’ from a spiritual interpretation of the deed in the form of a ‘‘sacred narrative’’ based on the moral failings of the sinner prevalent before the 1780s, to a ‘‘secular’’ accounting after the Revolution that focused on the crime and relied on the ‘‘new’’ framing device of Gothic horror and mystery. The new producers of murder narratives, she contended, not only stressed the horror of the deed through ‘‘inflated language and graphic treatment of violence’’ in order to capture the reader’s attention, but also wrapped the crime in a dark cloak of ‘‘incomprehensible’’ mystery that could never be plumbed to its iniquitous depths. In her view, the Gothic tale of murder defied the rule of ‘‘Enlightenment liberalism,’’ which allowed no room for such ‘‘radical human evil.’’ Thus, ‘‘Gothic mystery and Gothic horror affirmed the ultimate incomprehensibility of any given crime of murder, in sharp contrast to the execution sermon’s unproblematic acceptance of the nature of the act and the guilt of the condemned murderer.’’66 If this Gothic paradigm helps to explain the cultural shift in attitudes toward murder in America in the age of Emerson and Webster, it certainly does not apply to Victorian Britain, where domestic murder stories in the press were almost as English as roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. In other words, they were far from being wrapped in the shrouds of Gothic mystery. When early Victorian newspapers featured cases of murder arising out of rage, greed, jealousy, or the desperate quest to keep up appearances, readers found nothing exotic, let alone Gothic or mysterious, about these motives, which seemed so familiar as to arouse some guilty feelings. If reporters added a Gothic touch here and there, they did so simply to heighten the melodrama, not because they saw anything mysterious or 106

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supernatural about the emotions that had driven the culprit to kill. Halttunen’s Gothic scenario pertains much more to the then-rare phenomenon of random serial murder, in particular the handiwork of Jack the Ripper. Devotees of Benthamite rationalism hardly needed any lessons about the dangers of yielding to the emotions, let alone sexual passion, because, like Sherlock Holmes, they knew and feared that love or lust (eros) could so easily upset the delicate mechanism of reason (logos). Unlike cases of domestic murder, the Whitechapel slayings constituted a series of genuine mysteries that were bound to inspire fear and boost the sagging sales of any paper. Instead of relying on tried and true formulas and familiar scenarios, reporters had to stretch their imaginations and create episodes as well as motives because they were just as baffled as the police by these attacks. Alas, there was no cerebral detective capable of tracking down the perpetrator. As Auguste Dupin had remarked over forty years earlier, about the brutal murder of two respectable women inside a bedroom with all the doors and windows locked from the inside, ‘‘the unusual horror of the thing’’ proved most striking. The throat of one victim had been cut to the point of decapitation; the other had been throttled and then stuffed up the chimney with great force. After noting the outré character of these crimes, Dupin declared: ‘‘The police are confounded by the seeming absence of motive—not for the murder itself—but for the atrocity of the murder.’’67 And, of course, the all-observant and rational Frenchman solved the murders by analyzing the smallest details and identifying the culprit as a vicious ‘‘Ourang-Outang’’ rather than a ‘‘raving maniac.’’ If, as Philip Sugden has observed, much of the Ripper press coverage was fiction, few contemporaries regarded it as such.68 Stretching their imaginations to convey the horror of these crimes, reporters did indeed ‘‘Gothicize’’ their descriptions of the crime scenes. In the words of Lord Burnham, the Daily Telegraph went beyond straight reporting of the ‘‘sordid murders’’ by delving into the lifestyles of these ‘‘wretched’’ women.69 Ripper news certainly awakened readers to the existence of a new kind of horror for which there was no simple explanation. Lacking firm clues and familiar motives, Fleet Street had little choice but to dwell on the sheer horror of the mutilations and the elusiveness and bravado of the killer, who flaunted his deeds but left no clues behind. So remote from the standard fare of murder, these atrocities denied the press and the public the spectacle of a trial and the satisfaction of a conviction followed by a hanging. Instead of a proven culprit on whose head everyone could heap abuse, there was no clear suspect—scores of obscure plebeians and even a few 107

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gentlemen fell under suspicion. Deprived of the standard murder narrative and yet determined to feed the public appetite for Ripper news, journalists filled endless columns with rumors or hunches about sinister suspects and macabre motives. Enterprising reporters sought out witnesses who claimed to have seen one of the victims talking to some strange man shortly before her death. One journalist went so far as to put on a dress before venturing into Whitechapel in the hope of attracting the killer’s attention. After the first two murders, some journalists virtually camped out in Whitechapel waiting for the killer to strike again. One of the Globe’s more enterprising reporters, William Le Queux, spent days in the East End in the company of two colleagues (Charles Hands of the Pall Mall Gazette and Lincoln Springfield) cooking up ‘‘picturesque and lurid details’’ after visiting each crime scene. When composing their various news stories, they would try to outdo one another with farfetched theories about the murderer’s motives and methods.70 At least one journalist thought that Jack might be one of his own kind—an ‘‘enterprising newspaperman,’’ who killed in order to make the right ingredients for a truly sensational story.71 In the absence of an indictment and trial, editors had no choice but to highlight the inquests, which contained enough clinical detail about the injuries to create a Grand Guignol effect. The number of victims, the nature of the mutilations, and the testimony of the police surgeons all drew readers ever deeper into the story, driving some into daytime panics and nightmares about encountering this monster in some part of town.72

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Chapter Six

The First Two Murders

Our sample of Ripper news consists of stories from eight morning and evening national dailies, four Sunday papers, and two weeklies and one biweekly from the East End. In political sympathies the dailies ranged from Tory to Liberal and Radical. Three of them upheld Tory or Conservative principles—namely, the Morning Post, Globe, and Evening News. Unlike the Star, with its bellicose radicalism, the trendy Pall Mall Gazette flirted with a left-wing iconoclasm that appealed to some smart Tory readers. The Irish Home Rule crisis of 1886 had moved the Daily Telegraph to embrace Liberal Unionism, while the Daily Chronicle remained faithful to Gladstonian Liberalism. Although the magisterial Times took great pride in its avowed political independence, it steadfastly upheld the causes of law and order and Irish Unionism. Five of these dailies opposed Home Rule, while two—the Star and the Pall Mall Gazette—supported Parnellism. As for the Sunday press, the People espoused Tory principles, the Weekly Times promoted mainstream Liberal values, and the hugely popular Lloyd’s Weekly and Reynolds’s Newspaper championed such advanced Liberal and Radical causes as social reform and manhood suffrage. Finally, the more apolitical 109

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East London Observer, the East London Advertiser, and the East End News were small local papers that catered mostly to the commercial or smallbusiness classes in Tower Hamlets and environs. With regard to the penny weeklies, Lloyd’s Weekly was the flagship of the Sunday press. Founded by Edward Lloyd in 1842, it hewed to ‘‘an advanced liberal and popular progressive’’ line and promoted measures to alleviate poverty or distress. Also devoted, by its own admission, to ‘‘the two great principles of quantity and cheapness,’’ Lloyd’s offered lowermiddle- and upper-working-class readers everything from commercial and political news to murder stories, book reviews, and sports coverage. Under the editorship of Douglas Jerrold and his son Blanchard, this paper boasted of having the largest circulation in the world.1 As for its chief rival, Reynolds’s Newspaper proudly flaunted its democratic credo on the front page: ‘‘Government of the People, by the People, for the People.’’ Launched in May 1850 by the former Chartist and prolific writer and editor George Reynolds, this paper not only advocated ‘‘the widest possible measures of reform’’ but also cultivated a racy style marked by ‘‘much strong, nervous writing, thickly spiced with abuse of the privileged orders,’’ as well as stories of ‘‘awful tragedies’’ that appealed primarily to skilled workers in the midlands and north. A shrewd mix of attacks on the old aristocracy and the new plutocracy, along with republican sympathies, sensationalism, and a reader-friendly format, accounted for its vast circulation by the 1870s.2 The other two Sunday papers in our sample had smaller circulations, but still outsold most dailies. Captain George Armstrong had founded the People in 1881 and soon laid boastful claim to owning ‘‘the Largest and Best London Weekly,’’ with a circulation bigger than ‘‘nearly all of its older rivals.’’ Although Conservative in outlook, this paper sought to attract ‘‘All Classes’’ by blending political news with sensational accounts of fatal accidents, homicides, and suicides. In fact, not even the talents of editor Joseph Hatton and managing director William T. Madge could stimulate sales, but in 1888 the paper apparently received a fillip from its vivid coverage of the Ripper murders.3 Committed to ‘‘all measures of political and social progress,’’ the Weekly Times and Echo (launched in 1847) wanted to eliminate ‘‘all distinctive privileges in the Universities, Church, etc.’’ However, its emphasis on human-interest and sensational stories reflected a greater ambition to become ‘‘the Largest Penny Weekly’’ in the land. If columns devoted to women’s and children’s topics projected the image of a family paper, the amount of crime news suggested that its priorities lay with a predominately male, lower-middle-class audience.4 110

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Among Fleet Street’s penny dailies, the Globe (launched in 1803) claimed the honor of being the Conservative party’s oldest journalistic supporter. Exchanging its mantle of Palmerstonian Whiggery in the 1860s for Disraelian Conservatism, this evening paper gained many new readers during the Tory resurgence after 1874. The enterprising William Madge became co-owner with Sir George Armstrong in 1886 and served as editor, manager, and publisher for some forty-two years.5 The Globe’s inviting content and format enhanced its appeal to moderate Tories. Decidedly more elitist and given to fine print, the Morning Post cultivated a core readership of High Church Tories and imperialists, but also aspired to be ‘‘the fashionable chronicle and journal of the Beau Monde.’’ This old paper emerged from London’s lively political culture in the 1770s. Until 1845 it championed Peelite principles and expedients; it then espoused the party of Derby and Disraeli after the split over the Corn Laws.6 Attuned to the gossip and sporting interests of the governing class, the Morning Post also featured stories of natural disasters, riots, and field sports, and treated violent crime ‘‘with appropriate solemnity.’’ Despite the paper’s reputation as an ‘‘aristocratic’’ journal, the high quality of its prose drew readers who did not belong to the Tory elite.7 In July 1881, C. P. Scott, the beacon of Mancunian Liberalism, tried to recoup some of his losses on the Manchester Guardian by launching the Evening News. Strange to say, this political prodigal child soon grew up to become a highly profitable Conservative organ of the law-and-order variety, which adhered to the vague goals of ‘‘such changes in law and government as are demanded in the interests of the country.’’8 Energized by Frank Harris, this ha’penny paper attracted the racetrack-betting crowd, as well as supporters of Cecilian Conservatism at home and abroad. The brilliant left-wing journalist Henry W. Massingham, editor successively of the Star, the Daily Chronicle, and the Nation, regarded the Evening News, along with the Star and Echo, as the epitome of the New Journalism, which he characterized as ‘‘lightness, point, and go . . . balanced by haste and a love of mere scandal and sensation.’’ More to the point, the Evening News made good use of a subsidy from the Unionist party and became a small gold mine for its proprietor.9 By contrast, the Daily Telegraph achieved fame and profit through smart management and sharp editing and writing. Founded in 1855 by Colonel A. B. Sleigh and then taken over by Joseph Moses Levy, this paper showed a certain ecumenism by embracing Gladstonian Liberalism while backing Disraeli’s investment in Suez Canal shares. In 1876, when circulation had 111

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reached almost 242,000, the paper took a pro-Turkish stance over the Bulgarian massacres and severed the Gladstonian connection.10 As Massingham noted, the Daily Telegraph became the favorite paper of ‘‘the clerk, the shopkeeper, and . . . the great mass of villadom,’’ largely on the strength of an ‘‘elaborate, rounded, allusive style’’ that came to be known as ‘‘Telegraphese.’’ The dynamic and eccentric George Augustus Sala pumped new life into the paper with the Livingstone-lost-in-Africa story. Tales of crime and horror bearing such headlines as ‘‘FELONIOUS ASSAULT ON A YOUNG FEMALE,’’ ‘‘FIVE MEN SMOTHERED IN A GIN VAT,’’ and ‘‘HORRIBLE ATROCITY. A CHILD DEVOURED BY PIGS’’ proved irresistible to readers. However, Lord Burnham insisted that his paper ‘‘never romanticized the crime or aggrandized the criminal.’’ Shrewdly managed by the Levy-Lawson family and later edited by Edwin Arnold, the Telegraph offered something to everyone, including articles on travel, food, and fashion. For all these reasons it became the most popular morning paper of the 1880s.11 Many contemporaries held the Times, nicknamed ‘‘the Thunderer,’’ in high esteem, considering it a national institution rather than just a leading London paper. Although circulation fell off sharply from sixty thousand in 1879 to forty thousand in 1890, owing to its relatively high price and stodgy reporting, this ‘‘paper of record’’ survived its disastrous attempt to discredit Parnell by buying and publishing forged letters that allegedly incriminated the Irish nationalist leader. Committed to wide and thorough coverage of both domestic and foreign affairs, the owners and editors basked in the tradition of political independence amidst the fiercely partisan strife of Westminster politics. And yet this tradition of impartiality did not stop leader writers from ranting about the ‘‘follies and blunders’’ of politicians— especially Gladstone and his Liberal colleagues.12 Whether or not that consummate editor George Earle Buckle really did believe that he could prevent ‘‘the sacred lamp of Truth’’ from burning with ‘‘a smoky flame,’’ the Times’s employees liked to accuse their rivals of publishing party propaganda.13 Devoted to such sacred creeds and institutions as free trade, the Church of England, the Act of Union, and sterling character, the Times strove to maintain its lofty reputation as the nation’s premier newspaper despite the steady loss of money and readers. During their reign, John Walter III, the proprietor, and John Delane, the editor, adopted a principled stance toward partisan politics, criticizing or supporting the policies of either Gladstone or Disraeli, depending on their view of the issues at stake. As the Newspaper Directory put it ever so grandly, the influence of the Times was ‘‘co-extensive with civilization.’’14 112

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Founded by Edward Lloyd in 1855, the Liberal Daily Chronicle reflected its owner’s democratic leanings. This penny paper appealed mainly to readers of lower-middle-class and artisanal origins who were concerned about working-class poverty and slum clearance. As Massingham observed, the Daily Chronicle ‘‘dethroned the criminal from his place as the hero-in-chief of the English newspaper,’’ and honored instead the work of social reformers in the slums. Having invested £170,000 in this venture, Lloyd was disappointed by the returns. But reliance on the telegraph and the advent of able correspondents at home and abroad gave this paper a reputation for carrying the very latest news.15 The newest paper in our sample—the Star—burst onto the scene in January 1888, and soon won over thousands of plebeian readers with its flamboyant style, radical stance, and ha’penny price. Under the editorial thumb of T. P. O’Connor, the Irish nationalist M.P., who recruited a brilliant young staff, this radical paper produced polemical leaders on the front page under the banner ‘‘WHAT WE THINK’’ that called for sweeping social and political reform, an overhaul of Scotland Yard, and Irish Home Rule. The strident tone of these editorials upset the paper’s wealthy Liberal investors, who did not approve of bashing Gladstonianism even though first-day sales set a record with a total of 142,600. A leading proponent of the New Journalism, this paper moved one detractor to call it ‘‘half a joke and half a crusade.’’16 As leader writers fired salvo after salvo into the flanks of Toryism and Liberalism for resisting social reform and defending the baton charges of Bloody Sunday, circulation soared. But this commercial success did not stop the directors from objecting to O’Connor’s fulminations against the established order. And his devotion to Home Rule nettled some of his best journalists, including a young Irish upstart named G. Bernard Shaw. Eventually ‘‘T. P’’ was forced to resign amidst charges of betrayal. When Massingham succeeded him, however, the editorial line moved even further left, and the Liberal directors sacked him in 1891. Ernest Parke’s sensational reporting of the Ripper murders undoubtedly helped the Star reach the massive circulation figure of three hundred thousand in November 1888, less than a year after its launch.17 Arguably the most controversial paper in our sample, the Pall Mall Gazette made its first appearance in 1865, under the editorship of Frederick Greenwood. A penny evening paper whose small size and large print made it unique along Fleet Street, the Gazette took a sharp turn to the left in 1880, under John Morley’s supervision. This trend continued from 1883 to 1889 under the inspired leadership of William Thomas Stead.18 Like its 113

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rival, the St. James’s Gazette, this quasi-radical paper served up clever and sardonic editorials, good gossip, and juicy scandals, as well as special features on crime, African expeditions, balloon ascents, theater, politics, and social reform. Driven by ambition as well as a concern for social justice and profit, Stead was a crusader who loved to shock prudish or complacent readers. He lived for scoops and sensations, and he died sensationally by going down with the Titanic in 1912.19 Something of ‘‘a smart Clubland evening paper,’’ the Gazette seemed to many to epitomize the New Journalism, with its chatty, informal style and emphasis on elite scandals, unusual accidents, and serious crimes. The able journalist Oswald Allen apparently composed many of the Gazette’s feature articles about the Ripper murders, but it was Stead who orchestrated the Ripper coverage, as well as the paper’s alarmist articles about the breakdown of law and order in the metropolis. The rogue elephant of Fleet Street, he took the art of investigative reporting a step beyond Mayhew, and made both himself and his paper the talk of the town.20 The East End papers in our sample were aimed primarily at middle- and lower-middle-class residents. The East London Observer, the East London Advertiser, and the East End News provided political, social, and commercial news for readers in Tower Hamlets, Bermondsey, Hackney, and environs. As Jack London pointed out, East End papers were ‘‘filled with civic pride’’ and liked to assure readers that there was no better place in the world to live.21 Founded in 1857, the penny weekly East London Observer reported on local education, housing, sanitation, elections, social events, commerce, and crime.22 The even more parochial East End News appeared twice a week and served primarily the docklands district. Claiming editorial neutrality, this ha’penny paper featured news about public utilities, education, and housing, and played down the Whitechapel murders, even though it covered much less sensational crimes in the East End. Presumably the editor worried about heaping any more abuse on Whitechapel’s already tarnished reputation as a sinkhole of sin and danger.23 Where circulation and profits were concerned, the Ripper murders could not have appeared at a more opportune time, because the growing competition for readers was making Fleet Street proprietors and investors anxious. Long before 1888, of course, Fleet Street knew that murder news sold well. Even John Delane, the magisterial editor of the Times from 1841 to 1877, recognized the magnetic attraction of crime and scandal, especially when respectable people were involved. By the 1860s, even the morning dailies were emulating the evening and Sunday press by treating murder as a staple 114

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of domestic news. The Whitechapel murders proved a journalistic windfall. Among other papers, both the Star and the People sold more copies in the autumn of 1888 than ever before. William Madge’s graphic accounts of the Whitechapel horrors enabled the latter paper to achieve a profit for the first time.24 Years later, Massingham recalled that the Evening News, Star, and Echo had their presses running ‘‘around the clock’’ during the season of the Ripper.25 And these were only a few of the papers that turned these shocking events into the crime of the century and beyond. The Nichols and Chapman Reportage What transpired in London during the autumn of 1888 was not just a series of five sadistic murders but a serial story combining mystery and sensationhorror spread out over almost four months and cobbled together by a metropolitan press eager to boost sales. Committed to the promotion of law and order and public morality, most papers played up not only the brutality of the attacks but also the immoral lifestyles of the victims. The gratuitous mutilations, the apparent lack of motive, and the elusiveness of the perpetrator baffled Scotland Yard. As Police Commissioner Warren told the Home Secretary, the murders were ‘‘unique in the history of our country.’’26 Although the police were understandably loath to reveal any details of their massive investigation, reporters had ample material with which to spin their tales of a predatory monster stalking women of the streets. Just who was this bizarre ‘‘beast’’ and what drove him to slaughter these ‘‘ageing, ailing, alcoholic unfortunates’’? Even if the victims were common prostitutes or ‘‘pathetic drabs,’’ this did not mean that they deserved, as one modern Ripper expert bluntly put it, ‘‘to end up as so much butcher’s meat on the cobbles of the streets that they walked.’’27 Fleet Street could hardly have been expected to see in the murder of Nichols the beginnings of a major media event. Only with Chapman’s more brutal murder a week later did editors start to pull out all the stops. Accustomed to the occasional prostitute murder, as well as domestic homicides and suicides, where the wounds were limited and the motives comprehensible, readers must have had a hard time coming to terms with mutilation-murder. The slashing cuts and the apparent absence of any intent to rob the victims moved some readers to blame these atrocities on a Jewish, French, Italian, or Asian maniac, because Englishmen were far too self-controlled and clumsy to kill so sadistically and swiftly and then vanish without a trace into the night. Since the epithet ‘‘Jack the Ripper’’ did not emerge for almost a month, most papers referred to the culprit as a ‘‘fiend,’’ 115

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‘‘ghoul,’’ ‘‘monster,’’ or ‘‘assassin,’’ who seemed to epitomize the depravity and violence they associated with the East End. The victims were called ‘‘poor unfortunates,’’ and their ‘‘polluted’’ bodies served as allegories of all the disease, dirt, and vice of Whitechapel. As might be expected, the search for an explanation for these crimes gave rise to many farfetched theories. Several psychologists, or alienists, cited Dr. Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s pioneering treatise on lust murder, Psychopathia Sexualis (1885), as the definitive guide to such crimes. But this anecdotal and clinical study had limited appeal to a public unaccustomed to sadomasochist or cannibal killers. Some papers discreetly sidestepped the question of motive and focused instead on the threat posed to life and property all over London by the apparent ineptness of the police, who could not catch one killer who attacked women out of doors and did not even try to hide their bodies. While the Liberal and Radical press belabored the police and the government for their failings, Tory papers stressed the dangerous conditions in Whitechapel and the likelihood of collective violence against Jews unless the police stepped up their patrols. Both the Star and Pall Mall Gazette accused Home Secretary Henry Matthews and Chief Commissioner Warren of bungling the investigation and caring little about the murder victims. For such reasons they demanded drastic reform of Scotland Yard and the CID.28 Neither paper could forgive Warren for having ordered the baton charges in Trafalgar Square in the previous year, or Matthews for having condoned them. A leader writer in Lloyd’s (Sept. 16) called Warren a ‘‘strange mixture of the martinet and the philanthropist,’’ who had so militarized the police that they could no longer think for themselves or patrol the streets effectively. As we will see in Chapter 9, the killer’s ferocity forced editors to consider how many details of the pelvic mutilations were fit to print. During the trial of Israel Lipski for the murder of a young married woman, Miriam Angel, in the East End in the summer of 1887, Fleet Street had elided virtually all allusions to sexual activity and the victim’s genitalia. For this reason readers had no clear idea as to whether or not Lipski had tried to rape her before pouring nitric acid into her mouth. Only professional journals like the Lancet and the British Medical Journal broached such delicate matters, and even this was a rare occurrence. Eventually, however, the Ripper’s mutilations forced editors to push the envelope of clinical candor to an unprecedented extent. Besides the issue of propriety, reporters had to contend with the persistent refusal of Scotland Yard to divulge the details of their hunt for the killer. Lack of cooperation from the police greatly hampered the 116

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efforts of journalists to cover the entire story and forced them to rely on the testimony of police surgeons and other witnesses at each inquest.29 Because newspapers often borrowed heavily from rivals or bought copy from one of the news agencies, many passages in Ripper stories had a familiar ring. Drawing on second-hand reports, rumors, interviews, and accounts found in other papers, reporters cobbled together disjointed articles that often contained internal contradictions. The relentless pressure of deadlines and reluctance to reset entire columns of type to accommodate latebreaking information accounted for much of this conglomerated and contradictory effect. At least the Sunday press had the luxury of several days’ grace, and could cull the week’s dailies before composing their feature articles on Thursday or Friday night. The derivative nature of so much Ripper news did not mean that individual creativity was stifled, however. When reporters like Ernest Parke or William Madge brought their talents to bear on the murders, the results could and did attract many new readers.30 Most feature articles about the Whitechapel murders resembled a brightly colored braid composed of sensation-horror, mystery, suspense, human-interest details, and, of course, law and order news. Occasionally a reporter would venture into the Other world of Whitechapel in search of background material about the crime scene, the habits of the victim, and signs of mounting panic. A ‘‘special correspondent’’ might seek out the victim’s friends or neighbors, describe the tense mood of the crowds swarming around the murder site, and remind readers that the fiend was more than likely to strike again. Many reporters, however, seemed content to stay in their offices and glean material from second-hand sources, including the news agencies that served as conduits for information that Scotland Yard wanted to divulge.31 Another notable, if oft overlooked, feature of Ripper news was the divergence in spelling surnames and the presence of many other discrepancies. The press often failed to agree on the names of victims and witnesses as well as the precise times of death. Such variations added more confusion to an already confusing story.32 Nichols News Bearing what came to be known as the Ripper’s trademarks—a nearly severed neck and ‘‘abdominal’’ mutilations—the body of Mary Ann or ‘‘Polly’’ Nichols was found before dawn on August 31 in Buck’s Row, a short distance from Bethnal Green.33 Under a modest headline, ‘‘ANOTHER MURDER IN WHITECHAPEL,’’ the Times (Sept. 1) implied that the site of this ‘‘foulest’’ of murders should occasion no surprise. Beginning with Police 117

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Constable John Neill’s discovery of the ‘‘still warm’’ body of a woman with her throat ‘‘cut almost from ear to ear,’’ the Times reporter mentioned the arrival of surgeon Rees Llewellyn, the East End medical officer and physician, and alluded briefly to ‘‘terrible’’ wounds in the victim’s abdomen.34 He lingered over the victim’s clothing and drinking habits and noted that the police were blaming the crime on a ‘‘High Rip’’ (protection-racket) gang of ruffians who had been intimidating ‘‘unfortunates’’ in the district and punishing anyone who failed to pay them a percentage of her earnings. Apparently two other such women had been killed in similar circumstances during the past year. At no point did the reporter even hint that the killer might be a psychotic hater of women rather than simply a ‘‘maniac.’’ Compared with the Times, the Star (Aug. 31) wallowed in sensationhorror. Probably written by Parke, their feature story began with a large multiple headline: ‘‘A REVOLTING MURDER / ANOTHER WOMAN FOUND HORRIBLY MUTILATED IN WHITECHAPEL / GHASTLY CRIMES BY A MANIAC.’’ Beneath this arresting header appeared a tantalizing subhead in smaller print: ‘‘A Policeman Discovers a Woman Lying in the Gutter with Her Throat Cut—After She has been Removed to the Hospital She is Found to be Disembowelled.’’ To heighten the horror, another subhead further down the column revealed: ‘‘Her Throat Cut From Ear to Ear.’’ Then came a long paragraph about ‘‘The Ghastliness Of This Cut’’ and the two deep slashes in the abdomen that could only be ‘‘The Deed Of A Maniac.’’ By means of another headline on September 1—‘‘THE THIRD CRIME OF A MAN WHO MUST BE A MANIAC’’—the paper indicated that the same man had also killed Emma Smith and Martha Tabram on the previous two bank holidays. Apparently the latest victim, known as ‘‘Polly,’’ had spent her last hours drinking and looking for a customer to pay the few pence needed for a doss. Stressing her ‘‘abandoned character,’’ the reporter mentioned the ‘‘hideous mutilations’’ of all three victims.35 Unlike the Times and Star, the Globe (Sept. 1) derived most of its news about this crime from the Central News Agency. An aroused leader writer blamed ‘‘the alleged state of chaos in Scotland Yard’’ on Warren’s ‘‘excessive militarism,’’ which had lowered morale and raised the level of inefficiency. This writer contrasted Whitechapel’s past notoriety with such recent improvements as Toynbee Hall and the People’s Palace, which had given the district ‘‘a sweeter odour in the nostrils of the public.’’ Just when the district was beginning to ‘‘live down its ill-fame,’’ these ‘‘ghastly crimes’’ had taken place. Then came an allusion to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: ‘‘One can almost imagine that Whitechapel is haunted by a demon of the type of 118

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Hyde, who goes about killing for the mere sake of slaughter.’’ Although these crimes had greatly aggravated the problems at Scotland Yard, the writer was confident that the murderer would soon be caught.36 During the first week of September, the penny press played up the disarray in Scotland Yard and the threat to public safety posed by this Whitechapel ‘‘fiend.’’ The Evening News (Sept. 1) ran a front-page story entitled ‘‘HOMICIDAL MANIACS,’’ ridiculing the police theory that a gang of pimps was punishing prostitutes who withheld their earnings. Convinced that the culprit was a maniac, this reporter also raised the Jekyll and Hyde theory, and then mentioned such infamous multiple murderers as King Louis XI of France and the King of Uganda, who had shown symptoms of homicidal mania. A reporter in the Daily Chronicle (Sept. 1) prefaced his feature article on the Nichols murder with a reminder that Whitechapel was well known to be a place where ‘‘crimes of a brutal . . . almost incredible nature’’ often occurred. Linking the murders of Smith, Tabram, and Nichols, he recounted the details of the latest ‘‘ghastly deed.’’ An editorial on the facing page underlined the endemic violence in Whitechapel and sent the obvious and ominous message that an ‘‘insane’’ murderer was on the loose. On the other hand, the Daily Telegraph (Sept. 1) backed the police theory of a blackmailing gang, while observing that whatever motives underlay these atrocities, the women of the East End had good reason to fear for their lives. A law-and-order editorial (Sept. 6) reminded readers that a notorious case of poisoning in late-seventeenth-century France had spurred the state to reform an incompetent police force, and suggested that the time had come for Scotland Yard to address its serious problems of organization and morale. Resorting to hyperbole, the writer noted that ‘‘the nerves of the Metropolis are stirred and thrilled by the appalling Whitechapel murder; while in the immediate neighbourhood of the scene of the tragedy nervousness has been aggravated to the proportion of a panic.’’ Absolving the press of any blame for inciting such high anxiety, he observed that there was no need ‘‘to preach superfine homilies about ‘morbid curiosity,’ ‘a diseased appetite for sensation,’ and the like,’’ because the truth was that ‘‘humanity has a rooted aversion to having its throat cut by a midnight assassin.’’ Until the killer was caught, people were bound to be scared. On a more practical note, he urged the police to install ‘‘the latest scientific appliances’’—namely, street-side telephone boxes like those used by the New York City police to improve communications. At first, the Pall Mall Gazette (Aug. 31) slighted Nichols’s death, assigning the event only one short paragraph on an inside page. Here the 119

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reporter noted that this murder was ‘‘even more shocking’’ than the previous murders, because the victim’s throat had been cut from ear to ear while her ‘‘bowels [were] protruding’’ from the abdomen, making for a ‘‘ghastly sight.’’ The next day, however, the paper carried a front-page story that named the victim, mentioned the last people to see her alive, and stressed the horrific ‘‘abdominal wounds.’’ Of the four Sunday papers surveyed, Reynolds’s (Sept. 2) awarded this murder the biggest splash, with a front-page article about the crime scene, the mutilations, the victim’s background, and the first session of the inquest. The reporter called this ‘‘tragedy even more revolting’’ than Tabram’s death, owing to the deep gashes in the abdomen, which caused ‘‘the bowels to obtrude.’’ Having declared the mutilations ‘‘too horrible to describe or even to hint at,’’ he then proceeded to describe them. He also quoted Dr. Llewellyn’s observation: ‘‘I have never seen so horrible a case. She was ripped open just as you see a dead calf at a butchers.’’ He then speculated that Nichols might have been killed elsewhere and dragged or carried to Buck’s Row. Lloyd’s (Sept. 2) also placed the Buck’s Row murder on the front page; but this article turned out to be merely an appetizer for the main course on page 7, which occupied over three columns. Insisting that Nichols’s death surpassed in ‘‘atrocity any that has disgraced even the East-end,’’ the writer also pointed out that the ‘‘ghastliness’’ of the throat wound ‘‘paled into insignificance’’ when compared with the abdominal injuries. As with the story in Reynolds’s, this article comprised a potpourri of diverse events, interviews with local people, rumors, and excerpts from the first session of the inquest. Although the People (Sept. 2) relegated Nichols’s murder to the back page, their article contained two separate accounts of the ‘‘diabolical injuries’’ that had ripped open ‘‘the lower part of the body.’’ Writing as though he had seen Nichols’s body lying in the morgue, the reporter underlined the ferocity of the knife attack. Unlike the Fleet Street press, the East End newspapers went out of their way to avoid giving the impression that Nichols had been murdered in an almost foreign land. Absent from the East London Observer and the East London Advertiser were any allusions to rampant vice and poverty in Whitechapel, and both papers showed empathy for the victim. The Observer (Sept. 1) sent a reporter to the mortuary, where he spotted a pathetic bundle of rags—the victim’s clothing—lying in a heap outside the door. Once inside the ‘‘dead house’’ he asked the keeper to remove the lid of the black wooden coffin so that he could glimpse the body, covered by a sheet and blanket. The sight of her face moved him to write a passage whose like 120

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was not found in any of the Fleet Street reports: ‘‘The features were small and delicate, the cheek-bones high, the eyes grey, and the partly-opened mouth disclosed a set of teeth which were a little discoloured. The expression on the face was a deeply painful one, and was evidently the result of an agonizing death.’’ At his request, the keeper raised the covers high enough to afford a view of her naked torso, and the reporter’s gaze shifted dramatically, first to the severed throat and then to the lower abdomen, where he saw ‘‘the most sickening spectacle of all . . . a terrible gash extended nearly as far as the diaphragm—a gash from which the bowels protruded.’’ But the gore stopped there. As for motive, robbery had to be ruled out because Nichols was carrying no valuables. For this reason her killer had to be the same ‘‘fiend’’ who had attacked Tabram. The Observer (Sept. 8) began its report of the Nichols inquest by equating the excitement with that generated by the Wainwright-Lane case in 1875. Pointing out the ‘‘terrible similarity’’ between the deaths of Tabram and Nichols, this reporter noted the ‘‘abject terror’’ of the crowds swarming around Buck’s Row. People were talking in hushed voices and some were pleading for more police protection. Focusing on the personal appearance of the principals at the inquest, he described the coroner for East London, Wynne Baxter, cutting a splendid figure in ‘‘a pair of white-and-black checked trousers, a dazzling white waist-coat, a crimson scarf, and a dark coat.’’ The victim’s father, Edward Walker, appeared to be ‘‘an old, greyheaded, and grey-bearded man . . . with head lowered and hands behind his back.’’ Police Constable Neill was ‘‘a tall, fresh-coloured man, with brown hair, and straw-coloured moustache and imperial [beard].’’ Dr. Llewellyn was ‘‘quiet and sedate, as befitted a man who had just come fresh from the unpleasant ordeal of making a post-mortem examination.’’ Nichols’s husband, William, arrived wearing a black coat and tie, dark trousers, and a ‘‘tall, silk hat,’’ and looking ‘‘very gentlemanly.’’ These sartorial details overshadowed the results of the autopsy, which received only a few lines. An editorial lamented the latest layer of notoriety to descend on ‘‘the East of London [sic]’’ and deplored the ‘‘unmitigated ferocity’’ of the slaying after all the improvements there. These ‘‘fearful blots on civilisation’s record’’ proved that one did not have to go far ‘‘to find human nature at its worst.’’ Although the ‘‘repulsive’’ acts of this ‘‘demented being’’ meant that journalists did not have to exaggerate the horror, this writer was obviously proud of being an East Ender, and he applauded Whitechapel’s low crime rate despite the lack of adequate police patrols. For its part, the East London Advertiser (Sept. 8) covered the murder in 121

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graphic detail, while also expressing regret about this fresh stain on Whitechapel’s reputation. An editorial speculated that the killer was a ‘‘creature mad with thirst of blood,’’ who had probably escaped from a lunatic asylum because his deeds were so inexplicable. Perhaps he hid somewhere in the slums and then sallied forth at night ‘‘like another Hyde, to prey upon the defenceless women of the ‘unfortunate’ class.’’ Despite his great cunning he was bound to be caught soon, because everyone was now alerted to his presence. So long as he remained at large, every woman in the East End would live ‘‘in nightly danger of her life,’’ and for this reason the paper asked local people to act as ‘‘unauthorized detectives.’’ In sum, while taking note of Scotland Yard’s ‘‘High Rip’’ gang theory, most journalists opted for the maniac theory, especially in the light of the abdominal wounds. The absence of any robbery or revenge motive and the assumption that Nichols was the third victim of this culprit lent credibility to the conclusion that this ‘‘lunatic’’ or ‘‘fiendish assassin’’ might well strike again. The Chapman Reportage For four or five days after the Buck’s Row murder, the press devoted long articles to the crime, the first two sessions of the inquest, suspects, and motives. By September 6, however, press interest in the story was fading. Even the sensation-minded Daily Telegraph was running low on Whitechapel news. This decline ended abruptly with the discovery of Annie Chapman’s badly mutilated body around six in the morning of Saturday, September 8, behind a house on Hanbury Street. At this point Fleet Street realized that it had a major murder mystery on its hands, and between September 10 and 14, the leading papers devoted three times as much space to the story as they had after the Nichols murder. The Star ’s (Sept. 8) multiple headlines captured both the horror and the melodrama surrounding the Hanbury Street killing: ‘‘HORROR UPON HORROR / WHITECHAPEL IS PANIC-STRICKEN / AT ANOTHER FIENDISH CRIME / A FOURTH VICTIM OF THE MANIAC.’’ The two-and-a-half-column article beneath these headlines began with some classic Gothic images: ‘‘London lies today under the spell of a great terror. A nameless reprobate—half-beast, half-man—is at large, who is daily gratifying his murderous instincts on the most miserable and defenceless classes of the community. There can be no shadow of a doubt that . . . the Whitechapel murderer, who has now four, if not five, victims to his knife, is one man, and that man a murderous maniac. There is another Williams in our midst. Hideous malice, deadly cunning, 122

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insatiable thirst for blood—all these are the marks of the mad homicide. The ghoul-like creature, who stalks through the streets of London, stalking down his victim like a Pawnee Indian, is simply drunk with blood, and he will have more.’’ Armed with his Plains Indian analogy, this radically minded reporter went on to blame the police for the latest murder, and remind readers that Chief Commissioner Warren had ordered his men to use their truncheons against defenseless workers in 1887. Since Warren knew so little about conditions in the East End, the citizens of Whitechapel would therefore have to form vigilance committees to patrol the district. Doubting Scotland Yard’s ability to cope with even ordinary crime, the writer scolded the police for treating reporters assigned to the Nichols case ‘‘like interlopers or pickpockets.’’ He then described the crime scene, the horrific injuries, and the mounting panic. A gruesome subhead—‘‘THE HEART AND LIVER WERE OVER HER HEAD’’—preceded an account of local people ‘‘with frightened, whitened faces . . . so panic-stricken that they hardly dared to speak above a whisper.’’ The rest of the article ranged from descriptions of the murder site and the victim’s clothing and habits to interviews with people who had seen or known her and a rundown of several suspects. Evidently, one enterprising resident of Hanbury Street was charging visitors a penny to see the murder site next door. After denouncing landlordism and coercion in Ireland, a leader writer (Sept. 10) again urged East Enders to form vigilance committees because the police and detectives were so ineffectual. The Star (Sept. 11) also took the Home Secretary to task for refusing to offer reward money to any informants. Surely the time had come to pay five hundred pounds to anyone who could lead the police to the ‘‘Man Monster’’ or ‘‘mad Cain’’ and any accomplices. According to this cynical writer, if the victims had been ladies living in the West End, large sums would have quickly been raised for this purpose, but this government had a callous attitude toward the poor: ‘‘Working men and women have been butchered in cold blood in the streets in broad daylight, and not so much as a hint has been given as to the perpetrators of the crimes. And when public opinion is at last aroused, and the whole East-end is under a Red Terror, our authorities refuse to take the most obvious and elementary precautions for ensuring detection.’’ In its rush to find a plausible suspect, the Star almost incurred a costly libel suit by accusing a Jewish bootmaker, John Pizer (also Piser), alias ‘‘Leather Apron,’’ of being the killer. Hoping to profit from his sudden notoriety, Pizer threatened to sue several papers for defamation. But Ernest Parke, the probable author of the Star ’s article, shrewdly invited Pizer to his 123

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office for a chat. When the latter demanded a hundred pounds in cash for his silence, Parke countered with an offer of fifty. After Pizer held out for a hundred, Parke told him that he could squeeze the balance out of another newspaper that had also tied him to the murders. No sooner had Pizer agreed to this arrangement than Parke named the other paper and sent him off to apply pressure there. The upshot was that Pizer received his matching sum from the second paper and Parke saved the Star a good deal of money in damages and legal fees.37 Eager to help the police track down the killer, the Star (Sept. 13) broached the popular belief that the eyes of murder victims retained the images of their killers, arguing that the police should photograph Chapman’s eyes in the hope of discovering in the picture the features of the culprit.38 Far removed from the Star ’s sensationalism and polemics, the Times (Sept. 10) treated Chapman’s murder in an almost prosaic manner. After surveying the crime scene and mentioning a few suspects, their reporter stated that the abdominal mutilations were ‘‘too shocking to be described.’’ But he mentioned the ‘‘large clots of blood’’ surrounding the body and the handkerchief wrapped around the neck as if to prevent Chapman’s head from falling off, and noted that her body lay in the same wooden ‘‘shell’’ at the mortuary that had contained Nichols’s corpse. According to him, the police had abandoned their blackmailing-gang theory and now suspected a maniac on account of the mutilations, and were inquiring about three insane medical students formerly employed at the London Hospital.39 The article also contained interviews with people who had seen the victim, either alive or dead. An editorial referred to the public’s ‘‘stupor’’ over murders that surpassed in ‘‘diabolical audacity’’ anything found in De Quincey or Poe, and were ‘‘unique in the annals of crime.’’ Defending Scotland Yard’s efforts to catch the culprit, a leader writer wrote of his fear that the attacks would continue because of the maniac’s ‘‘sottish passion’’ and ‘‘lust for blood.’’ A day later, the Times featured the arrest of the prime suspect, ‘‘Leather Apron,’’ who had allegedly attacked several woman in Whitechapel. (Pizer had in fact been released the day before.) The paper then mentioned another suspect, William Pigott, a mentally deficient expublican who had been arrested at Gravesend and resembled a man witnesses had seen in Hanbury Street on the night of the murder. How the murderer—‘‘reeking with blood’’—could have walked through the streets without being noticed defied this reporter’s imagination. Perhaps the killer did not belong to ‘‘the wretched class’’ living in common lodging houses after all, but could afford to reside in a ‘‘decent house’’ nearby, which 124

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enabled him to ‘‘retire quickly’’ and wash away ‘‘all traces of his hideous’’ crime.40 One of the country’s leading—and most vainglorious—experts in criminal insanity, Dr. Lyttleton Forbes Winslow, also believed in the middleclass-killer theory. Drawing on his clinical experience as an alienist, he insisted that such maniacs had all the cunning needed to carry out these crimes with such stealth. In letters to the papers he boasted that the Ripper would soon be caught if only the police would put him in charge of the case.41 Lacking any solid clues about the killer, most papers filled the void with sightings of ‘‘foreign-looking’’ suspects dressed in black and with dark complexions—a profile that fit most young Jewish males in the East End. Living up to its reputation for morbid murder news, the Daily Telegraph (Sept. 10) had no trouble filling three columns with the details of Chapman’s death, including three separate accounts of the mutilations. After pointing out that knife attacks and immorality were rife in the Hanbury Street area, their reporter quoted Chapman’s roommate, Amelia Farmer, who called her a sober woman trying to earn an honest living after her husband had deserted her. But other witnesses painted a darker picture of a vagrant and an alcoholic. Tucked away at the bottom of a paragraph was the tantalizing announcement that ‘‘a portion of the flesh . . . [was] missing from the stomach.’’ No organ was named, but this was one of the first papers to reveal that the killer had gone beyond disemboweling. Exactly what portion was absent and why remained a profound mystery. A leader writer urged the dispatch of more police into the East End, and then added that Chapman had been so ‘‘terribly and barbarously butchered, and so mutilated that no wild beast in its fury could have displayed a fiercer rage to rend and destroy.’’ Not only was Whitechapel in a ‘‘state of consternation and horror’’ over this ‘‘fiendish . . . cunning . . . and cruel’’ murderer, but the entire metropolis was ‘‘thrill[ed] with anger and apprehension,’’ because ‘‘the miscreant . . . goes to-day undetected and [is] at full liberty to commit new horrors about its streets and lanes.’’ Small wonder that all London now lived in fear of this madman. This journalist chose the same metaphor used by the Star to express his hope that the East End would soon ‘‘be purged from the Red Terror.’’ To ensure the capture of this ‘‘vampire,’’ a large reward should be offered to any accomplice who came forward. A front-page leader in the Pall Mall Gazette (Sept. 8) announced that a fourth murder ‘‘of the same kind’’ had occurred early that morning, and predicted, by means of a headline, ‘‘MORE TO FOLLOW.’’ Like the Star, the Gazette pointed out that the police had denied thousands of workers the right of free assembly in Trafalgar Square, and yet they were powerless to 125

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stop one man from mutilating four ‘‘miserable and wretched’’ women in a savage manner. How could anyone believe in ‘‘the progress of civilisation’’ in the face of such crimes? After stressing the panic in the East End, the Gazette reporter dwelled on the deep throat wound and the disemboweling of ‘‘the viscera in a fashion recalling stories of Red Indian savagery.’’ Sounding like William Booth, but invoking the ‘‘savages’’ of the American West rather than the African jungle, this journalist (arguably Stead himself ) conflated Stevenson’s novella with tales of Indian atrocities: ‘‘There certainly seems to be a tolerably realistic impersonification of Mr. Hyde at large in Whitechapel. The Savage of Civilization whom we are raising by the hundred thousand in our slums is quite as capable of bathing his hands in blood as any Sioux who ever scalped a foe.’’ Piling on the rhetoric, he added that the culprit might well be ‘‘animated by that mania of bloodthirsty cruelty which sometimes springs from the unbridled indulgence of the worst passions.’’ Perhaps this ‘‘Mr. Hyde of humanity’’ was not ‘‘slum bred’’ at all but rather ‘‘a plebeian Marquis DE SADE.’’ Given the disaffection within the police force, the public had good reason to be uneasy so long as the murderer remained at large. Page 8 of this edition contained a feature article that described Chapman’s ‘‘horribly mutilated’’ body surrounded by a pool of blood, with the ‘‘heart and abdominal viscera lying by the side.’’ After more details of the crime scene and the victim’s appearance came the rumor that a leather apron found near the body belonged to a local man named Leather Apron. To find precedents for such atrocities, the writer added, one would ‘‘have to go to the wilds of Hungary’’ or search the annals of ‘‘French peasant life.’’ On the following Monday (Sept. 10), the Gazette carried two feature articles about the murders, along with a summary of the first Chapman inquest, the arrest of Leather Apron, and two sketches of the Hanbury Street site. On September 14 the Gazette dealt briefly with the third session of Chapman’s inquest in one short paragraph, taking note of Dr. George Bagster Phillips’s belief that the killer had some knowledge of anatomy. Combining ingenuity with ‘‘the lust . . . of the savage’’ and ‘‘the skill of a savant,’’ this culprit had to be more like Mr. Hyde than ‘‘a wandering lunatic.’’ Although the Gazette played down the sensation-horror of the mutilations and concentrated instead on the two leading suspects and vigilante patrols in Whitechapel, this was one of the first papers to suggest that the killer might be a Sadean ‘‘victim of erotic mania,’’ who looked like an ‘‘amiable gentleman’’ and not a ‘‘horrid ruffian.’’ 126

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Also under the spell of Stevenson’s tale of Manichean man, the Globe (Sept. 8) depicted a killer with a dual personality who reveled in ‘‘purposeless ferocity.’’ Life—or rather death—was imitating art, because ‘‘the obscene Hyde’’ took no more ‘‘intense delight in murder for murder’s sake’’ than did the Whitechapel assassin. On September 10 the paper ran a long feature article about Chapman’s death, the arrest and interrogation of Pizer along with various other suspects, the opening day of the Chapman inquest, and Scotland Yard’s bungling of the investigation. No doubt the West End would soon be needing an efficient detective force just as much as the East End. A leader writer (Sept. 10) compared the Whitechapel murders with the Ratcliffe Highway massacre and the body-snatching activities of Burke and Hare, adding that unlike these villains of yore, this killer took ‘‘a horrible delight in the hacking and hewing of the female body.’’ For this reason he had to be ‘‘a monster in whom the beast has gained the upper hand.’’ His capture would be so much easier if only the press were allowed to publish ‘‘every detail likely to furnish a clue.’’ In a much more restrained manner, the Morning Post (Sept. 10) described Whitechapel as ‘‘horrified to a degree bordering on panic.’’ An account of the crime scene and various suspects accompanied several gruesome passages about the mutilation of Chapman. Evidently, Dr. Phillips had replaced all the excised ‘‘portions’’ during the autopsy and no organs seemed to be missing. By contrast, the Daily Chronicle (Sept. 10) devoted over four horror-filled columns to the ‘‘SHOCKING BRUTALITY’’ of Chapman’s murder, using many of the same phrases found in other papers. Although only a few papers alluded to the possibility of missing organs at this stage, most printed the same graphic details of the injuries, along with interviews with people who had seen or known the victim. Here and there a background article would appear about Whitechapel or the latest suspect. The Daily Chronicle (Sept. 10) described the tense condition of Tower Hamlets in a quasi-Orientalist article entitled ‘‘THE EASTERN MURDER LAND,’’ wherein the emphasis fell on the violence, cunning, and mystery that thrived in the East End, as distinct from the civilized West End. Taking readers on a tour of the four murder sites, this reporter found no Victor Hugo ‘‘romance,’’ but rather sheer misery and depression in ‘‘the lanes, streets, and blind alleys.’’ Yet despite all the poverty and hardship, Whitechapel was alive with people on the move. Some locals thought the murderer was a butcher or slaughterman, who knew how to cut the throat, rip open the abdomen, and tear out ‘‘the vital parts.’’ The Chronicle 127

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reporter, however, endorsed the theory of a ‘‘bloodthirsty maniac,’’ who escaped with ease because there were not enough brave police to patrol the dark alleys. He ended his tour on an ironic note: ‘‘There is, however, no panic, but a puzzled and fearsome conviction prevails that, after all, Central Africa is as safe as Spitalfields.’’ In a vigorous law-and-order leader, the Daily Chronicle (Sept. 10) conjured up a nightmarish vision of violence spreading well beyond the East End, where ‘‘official apathy, stupidity, and incompetence’’ had caused these savage crimes. The people of Whitechapel were in a ‘‘very dangerous frame of mind’’ and could easily be led to vent their anger on the Jews. If another murder took place, it would be hard to ‘‘hold the East-end in hand.’’ Warming to his task, the writer accused the police of ‘‘simply letting the first city of the world lapse into primeval savagery,’’ and allowing Whitechapel, which had long ‘‘swarm[ed] with gangs of blackguards,’’ to fall into the grip of a half-human and half-bestial maniac. Clearly the murders were ‘‘a rank outgrowth from the soil of young ruffianism that is being deposited in everdeepening strata every year in our community.’’ He then summoned up a classic Gothic image: ‘‘The rowdy hobbledehoy is developing more and more rapidly into the savage of the slums. He in turn is becoming more and more akin to the monster—half-man, half-brute—who is now prowling round Whitechapel like the ‘were-wolf’ of Gothic fable. But where is this process of hideous evolution to stop? Are the resources of civilisation powerless against it?’’ Apart from the radical press and the East End papers, reporters shared a view of Whitechapel as the lair of savages, monsters, and werewolves who held honest citizens in a state of terror, and whom the police were powerless to control. One of the few papers to pursue an explicitly sexual motive was the Evening News (Sept. 10), which attributed the murders to ‘‘erotomania,’’ or epileptic seizures that turned into homicidal impulses when combined with sexual desire. This reporter alluded to experts on criminal insanity who had found that ‘‘amatory desires of an inordinate nature’’ could trigger an epileptic attack that would throw ‘‘the whole nervous system . . . out of gear’’ and culminate in homicide or suicide.42 The next day the News published a long interview with the controversial alienist L. Forbes Winslow, who ran a lunatic asylum in Hammersmith and had been pressing Scotland Yard to hire him as a consultant in the hunt for the murderer. Winslow boasted that he could capture the killer within a fortnight if only the police would give him complete control of the investigation. Convinced that the same cun128

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ning madman had committed all the murders, he divulged his plan to disguise a dozen policemen as women and then disperse these decoys all over town. To ensure the killer’s capture he would need a list of every maniac who had escaped or been released as ‘‘quasi-cured’’ from every insane asylum in the country. Winslow also believed that the murderer was well-to-do and probably lived in the West End—a theory that would appeal to countless Ripperologists in the next century. Even the Western Mail (Sept. 10) of Cardiff gave Chapman’s murder the honor of a six-tiered headline followed by a long article based on material from the Press Association. Apart from mentioning two spurious messages written in chalk on walls near the murder scene, one of which warned of fifteen more murders to come, this article followed the Fleet Street formula of describing the crime scene and the search for Leather Apron. The reporter also discussed Chapman’s background, the terror and excitement in Whitechapel, more suspects, and the death of a ‘‘well-dressed’’ woman on Blackfriars Road on Saturday night. Several papers carried the Central News report of a night tour through the brightly lit thoroughfares and dark alleys of Whitechapel, which contained images akin to Doré’s drawings of London slums. The Central News reporter found ‘‘the usual percentage of gaudily-dressed, loud-mouthed, and vulgar women, strutting or standing at the brightly-lighted cross ways, and the still larger proportion of miserable, half-clad, dejected creatures of the same sex, upon whom hard life, unhealthy habits, and bad spirits have too plainly set their stamp.’’43 In stark contrast, the biweekly East End News (Sept. 11) dealt almost dismissively with Chapman’s death, by merely reprinting an editorial from the previous day’s edition of the Times, wherein the writer warned that ‘‘panic’’ not only facilitated the assassin’s escape, but also endangered the lives of innocent people. Rather protective of Whitechapel’s reputation, this paper simply fell back on the Times ’s recent leader by way of outlining the murders to date.44 Lacking any such qualms, the East London Observer (Sept. 15) reveled in the kind of gore found in the mainstream press.45 Writing as though he had visited both the crime scene and the morgue, the Observer reporter noted how the victim’s blood ‘‘slowly oozed’’ from ‘‘the heap of rags’’ that had once been her clothing. ‘‘Portions of the flesh on the lower part of the body hung in shreds, the dress was bespattered with blood—as, indeed, was a portion of the fencing, as if it had received a spurt from a severed artery—beside the woman two pools of blood had formed, and upon her shoulders were splashes of blood and some of the viscera.’’ 129

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Now the whole East End was ‘‘terror-stricken’’ by a murderer who could kill with such stealth. Because ‘‘every man imagined himself a detective,’’ anyone who looked suspicious ran the risk of being chased through the streets. Full of sympathy for the victims, this reporter worried about the ‘‘depreciation of our end of town’’ by outsiders who considered it a ‘‘plague spot on our civilisation.’’ Two editorials (Sept. 15) staunchly defended ‘‘our great industrial district’’ as well as the police, who had become the favorite whipping boys of Fleet Street. In point of fact, the paper argued, East Enders had never been ‘‘better protected.’’ On September 15 the East London Advertiser devoted over five columns to Chapman’s murder, including an editorial, ‘‘The Whitechapel Murders and the Police,’’ that mentioned De Quincey’s celebration of truly foul murder. No doubt ‘‘the man monster’’ responsible for these deeds was mad, but the police would never catch him because the ‘‘martinet’’ Warren had undermined the force by replacing older, more experienced constables with ex–military men who knew nothing about the areas they were patrolling. Otherwise this ‘‘ghoul’’ would have been caught long ago. The main article followed the Fleet Street formula by surveying the murder scene, the victim’s appearance, suspects, and the coroner’s inquest. Despite the short notice, Chapman’s murder received a major splash in the Sunday press. Under a multi-tiered headline that began with ‘‘ANOTHER FIENDISH MURDER IN WHITECHAPEL,’’ Reynolds’s (Sept. 9) devoted four of seven front-page columns to the latest killing, concentrating on the crime scene and the mutilations. Although the police had released scant information, the crime seemed to be the latest in ‘‘the series of fiendish atrocities on women.’’ An interview with the man who had found the body preceded mention of the chalk inscription on a nearby wall threatening more murders. In the meantime, the story reported, angry crowds were gathering in Whitechapel and shouting ‘‘Down with the Jews’’; ‘‘It was a Jew who did it’’; and ‘‘No Englishman did it.’’ Lloyd’s Weekly produced several editions on September 9, which differed slightly in format and content as late-breaking news came in and editors decided how much of the previous Sunday’s articles should be repeated. Early editions reprinted the account of Nichols’s murder given the week before, and then summarized the first two sessions of the inquest. The front-page article on Chapman took up almost five columns and contained three separate accounts of the mutilations, along with descriptions of her features, clothing, and habits. The People (Sept. 9) also placed Chapman’s murder on the front page, and called the knife wounds ‘‘even more 130

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diabolical’’ than Nichols’s. Most of the language bore a close resemblance to the Pall Mall Gazette ’s story on September 8. In general, the Chapman coverage followed the pattern established in the Nichols case, except for the far greater space given to the crime scene, the mutilations, the links to the three previous murders, and suspects. Although the full horror of Chapman’s mutilations did not emerge until the third session of the inquest, most reports dwelled on the ‘‘vital organs’’ strewn about the body and the amount of bloodshed. After Chapman’s murder, the police became even more tight-lipped about their investigation; this partial blackout accounts for much of the hearsay, rumor, and conjecture published thereafter. Now that the police had abandoned their gang theory, the door was open to all kinds of theories about the crimes. To gain some idea of the differences in Fleet Street’s construction of Chapman’s character I have compared seven versions of the testimony attributed to her friend Amelia Farmer (also Palmer), in response to Coroner Wynne Baxter’s questions on the opening day of the inquest. According to the Evening News (Sept. 10), Farmer did not mention prostitution when asked how Chapman earned a living: ‘‘She used to make crochet work and antimacassars, and sell flowers.’’ When Baxter asked if Chapman ‘‘used to get money on the streets,’’ she replied: ‘‘I cannot say. I am afraid she was not particular. She was out late at night at times. She has told me so. On Fridays she had to go to Stratford to sell lace, or flowers, or anything she had to sell.’’ Both the Globe (Sept. 10) and the People (Sept. 16) quoted Farmer as saying that Chapman ‘‘used to do casual work, make antimacassars, and sell flowers in the street. I am afraid that the deceased was not particular how she got a living. On Friday she used to go to Stratford in order to sell these things. On Friday afternoon I met her again at about five o’clock, and she appeared to be perfectly sober.’’46 The Times (Sept. 11) resorted to paraphrase and circumlocution in describing her lifestyle: The deceased, who frequently got the worse for drink, used at times to earn money by doing crochet work, and at others by selling flowers. Witness believed she was not very particular what she did to earn a living and at times used to remain out very late at night. In quoting Farmer, the Weekly Times (Sept. 16) used a glaring subhead to express its disapproval of Chapman’s habits: 131

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‘‘She was partial to rum, and I have seen her many times the worse for drink. She used to do crochet-work, make anti-macassars, and sell flowers. I am afraid she was NOT PARTICULAR HOW SHE EARNED HER LIVING and I know that she was out late at times.’’ After alluding to her ‘‘addiction to drink,’’ the East London Advertiser (Sept. 15) declared: She used to do casual work, make antimacassars, and sell flowers in the street, but witness was afraid that she was not particular how she got a living. On Friday she used to go to Stratford in order to sell these things. The East London Observer (Sept. 15) soft-pedaled her sexual promiscuity, quoting Farmer as saying: ‘‘I have seen her the worse for drink. She used to do crochet work, make antimacassars, and sell flowers. She was out late at night at times. On Fridays she used to go to Stratford to sell anything she had.’’ On the other hand, the Western Mail (Sept. 10) offered an almost glowing testimonial: Farmer asserted that her murdered friend was apparently a sober, steady-going sort of woman . . . who seldom took any drink. . . . As a regular means of livelihood, she had not been in the habit of frequenting the streets, but had made antimacassars for sale. Sometimes she would buy flowers or matches with which to pick up a living. Although these discrepancies may seem slight, they sent different signals about the morals of the victim and therefore the amount of sympathy she deserved. Apart from the Times, Morning Post, and East London Observer, most leader writers used the Chapman murder to heighten their criticism of Warren and Scotland Yard. While almost every paper indulged in some degree of sensation-horror, relatively few uttered dire warnings about the threat posed by an incompetent police force to the security of life and property all over London. Unlike the Liberal and Radical papers that blamed poverty for driving so many working-class women into prostitution and alcoholism, the Tory press held the victims partly responsible for their fate and defended Scotland Yard and the Home Office in this time of crisis. 132

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Filling the Gaps Because the nine sessions of the Nichols and Chapman inquests were spread out over most of September, Fleet Street had little trouble keeping the story of mutilation-murder alive for the rest of the month. Stories about the inquest proceedings also contained many false leads and wild conjectures about the killer’s identity and motives. As the weeks went by, accusations of bungling by Scotland Yard mounted, and even a few left-wing papers began to ring the law-and-order bell by demanding more police patrols in the East End. Reynolds’s (Sept. 9) called Home Secretary Matthews a ‘‘cowardly sneak’’ who wanted to prevent unemployed workers from assembling in Hyde Park to air their grievances.47 Many articles stressed the growing fears of East Enders about the predator in their midst. Apart from the Pall Mall Gazette, no editorial voice was more caustic about Scotland Yard and the CID than the Star, which could neither forget nor forgive the baton charges of Bloody Sunday. A front-page leader (Sept. 14) deplored ‘‘the epidemic of lawlessness’’ in the metropolis. Three ‘‘violent robberies’’ had recently taken place in Whitechapel and yet no arrests had been made. As this writer pointed out, the manifest failings of the detective force made the formation of vigilance committees a necessity. Indeed, the ‘‘depth of human blackness’’ in this ‘‘bewildering labyrinth’’ offered little hope: ‘‘Neighbourhoods go mad like individuals, and while the West sits discussing the Whitechapel horrors over its wine, the East is seething with impatience, distrust, horror. What a situation!’’48 These overwrought allusions to lawlessness in Whitechapel reveal how quickly Chapman’s murder opened a Pandora’s box of fears about public safety once the law-and-order lobby swung into action. Letters appeared in the papers about the growing disrespect for authority and the diversion of Scotland Yard’s energies away from ordinary crime.49 As the Star (Sept. 15) pointed out, a cripple, two gentlemen, and several other persons had recently been robbed in Whitechapel despite all the plainclothes detectives and constables moving about, and no arrests had been made. Clearly, more police were needed to cope with both common and uncommon crime. The Star (Sept. 6) also deplored the public’s complacency about crime and social injustice. ‘‘Mere murder and suicide’’ seemed to arouse little sympathy. People had become inured to the horror of murder, and this apathy could not be blamed on ‘‘midsummer madness’’ or London’s ‘‘ugliness’’ or a ‘‘Jekyll and Hyde’’ syndrome. This state of affairs was not ‘‘one of the successes of nineteenth-century civilisation,’’ and while the West End 133

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deserved much blame for the sufferings of Whitechapel, the police should have caught the killer long ago. On a lighter note, a leader writer in the Pall Mall Gazette (Sept. 25) proposed sending a ‘‘Mission to the Anthropoid Apes’’ that would be made up of kindly missionaries and serious scientists who would teach them how to climb up the evolutionary ladder toward the ‘‘long-lost Missing Link!’’ Apart from saving some lost souls, this ‘‘scientific mission’’ might just reveal something about ‘‘the secret spring and source’’ of the Whitechapel killer’s ferocity.50 The Daily Telegraph (Sept. 12) also used the murders to beat the drum of law and order, contending that Londoners had every reason to worry about their safety. The rapid growth of the metropolis and the laxity of the authorities meant that many more police were needed to control ‘‘the necessitous and dangerous classes’’ concentrated in ‘‘foul and noisome slums.’’ England’s two ‘‘national vices’’—carelessness and hypocrisy—had paralyzed Scotland Yard, and only stringent measures could save the day. This champion of a well-policed society proposed that the inmates of every common lodging house be compelled to register and that the state should license and regulate every prostitute. As for reforming the CID, only the appointment of a civilian and gentlemanly commander could end the ‘‘blockheadism’’ there. Focusing on the ‘‘hideous conditions’’ that underlay these murders, the Morning Post (Sept. 12) stressed ‘‘the daily sins, the nightly agonies, the hourly sorrows that haunt and poison and corrupt the ill-fated tenants . . . in those homes of degradation and disease.’’ At last these brutal murders had torn away the veil hiding the misery of tens of thousands in the richest city in the world, and respectable people should be asking ‘‘how these things can be,’’ after ignoring all the warnings of clergymen, doctors, and writers about the terrible conditions in the ‘‘pestilential’’ slums. As for a remedy, this leader writer could offer only the old nostrums of ‘‘moral ministries’’ to the poor, better sanitation, higher wages, and lower prices. Alas, all of these measures violated the sacred laws of political economy. Even if the rich donated all their money to the destitute, ‘‘the evil would not be cured,’’ because such extreme charity would subvert the ‘‘laws of production.’’ Rather lamely, this latter-day paternalist recommended only one remedy for these evils—‘‘true benevolence.’’ During the lull in the murders after September 8, the press highlighted the inquests (discussed in Chapter 10), alluded to all kinds of suspects, and speculated about the killer’s motive and identity. Reluctant to summarize any of the previous proceedings at each inquest, most papers simply 134

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printed the exchanges between the coroner and witnesses in the manner of court reports on the legal page. To ensure a steady supply of murder news, some papers repeated old reports or stale rumors. Thus both Lloyd’s and Reynolds’s filled the intervals between the murders and the inquests with reprints of the previous week’s articles. The People (Sept. 16) recycled the details of Chapman’s murder, funeral, and inquest in a series of articles that occupied almost ten and a half columns. Although a subhead in a feature article about Chapman referred to ‘‘THE MISSING PORTIONS OF THE BODY,’’ the reporter made clear that surgeon Phillips had refused to name these organs on ‘‘conscientious grounds.’’ Such reticence failed to impress this reporter, because only full disclosure would help the coroner’s jury and the public find a motive and possibly lead to the culprit’s capture. Indeed, the mystery of the missing organs would haunt the public and preoccupy the press for years to come. An editorial in the People (Sept 16) attributed all four murders to ‘‘the same blood-stained hand’’ and a ‘‘mad brain—mad with a devilish madness.’’ Fortunately, the kind of fiend responsible for these atrocities appeared only once or twice in any given century. But the fact remained that Londoners needed alert policemen to protect them from something even more menacing than the Whitechapel killer—namely, ‘‘the most desperate criminal class in the world.’’ One of the few newspapers to indulge in any semblance of gallows humor about the murders was the Pall Mall Gazette, which announced (Sept. 18) in a paragraph under the heading ‘‘OCCASIONAL NOTES’’ that Warren had personally ordered all ‘‘loyal subjects’’ to leave their calling cards on the body of anyone whom they had murdered. In addition, said the paper, constables had been ordered to muster for duty at every station in order to ‘‘receive murderers desiring to give themselves up.’’ On the following day, Stead sent an altogether different message in the form of a somber and excoriating editorial entitled ‘‘MURDER AS AN ADVERTISEMENT.’’ Deploring the class bias inherent in the murders, he called the killer a ‘‘Scientific Humanitarian . . . a Sociologist PASTEUR,’’ who wished to expose the appalling conditions in the slums in order to educate the rich about the hellish suffering of the poor. ‘‘Absolutely indifferent to the sufferings of the individual,’’ the killer wanted to benefit ‘‘the community at large,’’ wrote Stead. ‘‘If these cesspools of brutalized humanity were not to become a permanent source of poisonous miasma, it was necessary something should be done that would at once rouse public attention, create universal sensation, and compel even the most apathetic and self-indulgent to admit the first postulate of the Socialist’s faith, that the luxury and wealth 135

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of the West must be employed to mitigate the squalor and crime of the East.’’ To shake the rich out of their complacency, murder was not good enough. ‘‘There must be blood. . . . The warning must be printed in letters of gore.’’ This meant mutilating the dead, because this was bound to have a greater effect ‘‘on the vulgar mind’’ than any moral or physical cruelties inflicted on the living. Sadly, the victims belonged to the dregs of society: they were all ‘‘drunken, vicious, miserable wretches’’ for whom death was almost an act of charity. But if the attacks of this anonymous benefactor served to awaken the public’s conscience ‘‘in this scientific sensational way,’’ then these wretched women would not have died in vain. In a defensive mood, the East London Observer (Sept. 15) devoted two editorials to the Whitechapel murders. The first, entitled ‘‘Has East London Sufficient Police Protection?’’ refuted the accusation that the police were never around to arrest the criminal. The truth was that ‘‘East London was never better protected,’’ and that the new patrolling tactics adopted since Nichols’s murder had made the district safer than any other part of the country. The second leader denounced as ‘‘rubbish’’ Fleet Street’s image of Whitechapel as ‘‘a plague spot on our civilisation.’’ Granted that the murders were ‘‘blots on our fame,’’ visitors nevertheless had no reason to fear for their lives or property. Just because some maniac was purging Whitechapel of ‘‘immoral women’’ did not mean that the East End should be written off as depraved, and any paper spouting such nonsense ought to be boycotted. Also anxious about Whitechapel’s reputation, a leader writer in the East London Advertiser (Sept. 22) endorsed the view of the noted evangelical the Rev. Sidney Godolphin Osborne (otherwise known to readers of the Times ’s letters to the editor as ‘‘S.G.O.’’) that the murders resulted from the decision of missionary societies to fund a new Church Institute rather than slum clearance.51 In such ways did the editors of the East End press defend their turf and try to reassure all and sundry that Whitechapel was a safe place for business or shopping. Many of the gaps in Ripper news were filled with sightings of suspects and praise or criticism of Warren and Matthews. A leader in Lloyd’s (Sept. 16) hailed the courage of ordinary policemen while calling the Chief Commissioner ‘‘a strange mixture of the martinet and the philanthropist.’’ Radical journalists demanded a complete overhaul of both Scotland Yard and the CID. The Star (Sept. 19) accused Warren of demoralizing the police and leaving London ‘‘prey to the criminal classes.’’ At last ‘‘the law and order school has got its soul’s price,’’ and the resulting breakdown in law enforcement explained the ‘‘savage epidemic of crime’’ in the East End. To 136

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avoid further disaster Matthews should resign and Warren should relinquish his ‘‘octopus clutch’’ on the police and detective force. In short, the daily or weekly fare of Ripper news during the second half of September consisted of an amalgam of inquest material, suspects, possible clues, disputed facts, detectives disguised as prostitutes, wild rumors about the killer, and diatribes against Scotland Yard. Toward the end of the month, some papers reported on another female victim of a knife attack. Only this time the murder had taken place far from Whitechapel—at Birtley Fell, near Gateshead in County Durham. A few reporters tried to connect this case to the Whitechapel murders by emphasizing the terrible knife wounds that had killed the woman, Jane Savage (or Beatmore). Scotland Yard went so far as to send Dr. Phillips north to examine the battered body, which had been found in a ditch. But the postmortem examination soon ruled out any resemblance to Chapman’s wounds and the press abandoned this futile line of inquiry.52 Straining to strike the right chords of compassion and dismay, a leader writer in Reynolds’s (Sept. 16) deplored ‘‘the surfeit of horrors afflicting London.’’ While ‘‘we, metaphorically speaking, breakfast, luncheon, dine, and sup on human blood and viscera’’ and blame the police for allowing them to occur, the upper classes were ultimately responsible for these horrors, because ‘‘Society’’ had created the conditions that made them possible. In other words, ‘‘the grandeur of the West End could not exist but for the poverty-stricken degradation of the East End.’’ This writer then conjured up an image of Annie Chapman walking the streets of Whitechapel in search of fourpence for a doss while the Duke of Westminster lay on ‘‘a bed of down,’’ dreaming about his millions of ‘‘unearned’’ pounds. Only ‘‘colossal injustice, fraud, and robbery’’ could account for the wretched lives led by ‘‘unfortunates.’’ Reminding readers that ‘‘God made the country and man made the town,’’ the writer condemned the modern city for devouring its children and praised the simple, healthy, and virtuous life of people in small towns and the countryside. Keen to turn the Whitechapel tragedies into a lasting lesson for middleand upper-class Londoners, Reynolds’s (Sept. 23) published Leonard Wells’s verses about the yawning gulf between the two Londons: The East End Horror Rich dwellers in London city, there’s a horror broods o’er the east. Cease awhile from your fooling, stay from the dance and the feast, For murder is stalking red-handed ’mid the homes of the weary poor; 137

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Stay for awhile, if ’tis but to ask how long ye shall rest secure. Ye have striven to hush the outcast throng who cried in their anguish for bread, And still in our hearts there lingers the wail for our murdered dead. Scarcely we deem you have pity, but gaze on this blood’s red hue— Ye shall gaze and list our reproaches as we charge the blame upon you. Ye have herded the poor together far from your elegant ease; Little ye care to visit hovels and dens like these; Yet know, ye merchants and tradesmen, you have garnered your boasted wealth From the poor who are pent in these alleys where murder stalketh in stealth. And so, ’mid the brooding darkness, stalks murder with baleful mien: Rich man, stay from your folly, gaze on your Frankenstein! Do you dream you can keep him ever here in the squalid East? Have you never a fear lest his face may peer ’mid the flowers of your life-long feast? Then, in your frenzied trembling, you would draw from your wellloved hoard; For those who dare cope with the monster you would offer a rich reward; But little you reck, while you fondly deem your pampered life secure, Tho’ the Horror slinks in the silence thro’ the squalid homes of the poor.53 Wells thus invoked Mary Shelley’s Gothic monster to convey the horrific nature of not only the murders but also the slums that had produced them. Far more prosaic—and more hopeful—was the East London Observer’s announcement (Sept. 15) that some Oxbridge students at Toynbee Hall had joined forces with workingmen to create St. Jude’s Vigilance Committee, which would patrol the streets at night in the hope of preventing assaults on women and other crimes. In sum, the murders of Nichols and Chapman made Fleet Street more mindful of conditions in the East End, and moved some reporters to raise the specter of a crime wave spreading over the metropolis. The murders were seen as the work of a maniac, without any precedent in England. Although men known as ‘‘stabbers’’ or ‘‘rippers’’ had been using their knives on the dresses or flesh of women in the streets of European cities for 138

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decades, few of these compulsive misogynists had caused serious injury, and the press paid little attention to such random attacks.54 Sharing the public’s ignorance of lust murder as analyzed by Krafft-Ebing, journalists fell back on such clichés as ‘‘fiend’’ or ‘‘monster,’’ and speculated about the causes of the killer’s rage. Then suddenly, on the last day of September, he struck again, adding two more victims to his list. Soon London and the world would have a name for this elusive culprit—one of the most notorious sobriquets in the annals of crime.

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Chapter Seven

The Double Event

The crescendo of publicity given to the Whitechapel murders reached a peak during the first week of October, following the deaths of Stride and Eddowes before dawn on Sunday, September 30. News of the ‘‘double event,’’ as some papers took to calling the killings, spread fast and far. In Paris, the social-realist novelist George Gissing went out of his way to buy a copy of the Standard on October 2 so that he could learn about the latest murders, which had prompted one French newspaper to gloat ever so smugly that ‘‘the English have no decency left; they are ignoble exploiters of human flesh.’’1 For more than a week, every national daily and weekly covered these events in morbid detail; and several papers printed crude but graphic images of the victims lying on their backs at the respective crime scenes, Berner Street and Mitre Square. One such print depicted the bodies divided by a torn edge of paper, which evoked the effect of a knife tearing into human flesh. Between October 1 and 4 most papers also featured the boastful ‘‘Dear Boss’’ letter (dated September 25) and the bloodstained postcard (undated but postmarked October 1) that had been received by the Central News 140

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Agency, both of which were signed ‘‘Jack the Ripper,’’ and were widely believed to have come from the killer. The combination of two more murders and these apparently authentic messages provided rich grist for Fleet Street’s sensation-horror mills. At last the mysterious villain had not only a name but also the self-bestowed label of ‘‘saucy,’’ which was richly deserved if this writer, who so brazenly defied and taunted the police, really was the man responsible for these atrocities. Because this letter-writing culprit was tailor-made for the media, several ranking police officers attributed these messages ‘‘from Hell’’ to some enterprising journalist who wanted to heighten the sensationalism.2 If a few skeptics dismissed all Jack’s communications as bogus, the police apparently considered the first letter and postcard genuine—otherwise they would not have gone to such lengths to ensure the publication of facsimiles in the papers. As Caputi has rightly observed, ‘‘The authenticity of these letters remains, like so many things surrounding the Ripper, a matter of controversy, dispute, and mystification.’’3 One by-product of the double event was the growing conviction that panic in the East End might lead to mob violence against Jews unless the killer was caught. For this reason, as well as from the need to prevent another murder, the police stepped up their patrols. While scores of constables and detectives scoured the streets and alleys of Whitechapel for clues and suspects, the Liberal and Radical press raised the volume of their diatribes against Warren and Matthews for bungling the investigation. More reporters roamed through Whitechapel in search of background material, and editors used bigger headlines as well as crude illustrations and maps of the murder sites to attract more readers (fig. 1). In the absence of revelations from Scotland Yard about the steps being taken to catch the killer, reporters conveyed the wildest rumors and served up human-interest stories about the backgrounds and lifestyles of the victims. Here and there, suggestions from the public about how the killer might be caught also found their way into the papers. Reporting the Stride and Eddowes Murders The prolonged inquests into the murders of Stride and Eddowes enabled journalists to add a good deal more sensation-horror and mystery to the ‘‘newspaper novels’’ they were gradually composing. Any prize for journalistic enterprise at this point should have gone to Lloyd’s, which scooped the competition on Sunday, September 30. Evidently, news of the murders reached the editor’s office around 2:10 A.M.—some twenty minutes after Police Constable Edward Watkins had found Eddowes’s body in Mitre 141

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Figure 1 ‘‘London’s Reign of Terror: Scenes of Sunday Morning’s Murders in the East-End,’’ ca. Oct. 2, 1888, author and source unknown (from the Donald Rumbelow collection, by permission)

Square. By then the first, or ‘‘special,’’ edition had already gone to press. But the editor and his staff moved fast enough to assemble articles about both murders, one of them written by a reporter just back from Mitre Square. Around 4 A.M. the editor stopped the press run and inserted an ‘‘Extra Special Edition,’’ which broke the news of the latest murders. The 142

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speed and power of the new double Hoe presses enabled readers in the provinces as well as London to savor the details of this carnage at the breakfast table. Several Sunday papers missed the story altogether, while Reynolds’s (Sept. 30) managed to squeeze only half a column of fresh murder news into its ‘‘special edition.’’ Fuller accounts of the double event had to wait for Monday’s dailies. One week later, Lloyd’s repeated most of the same details, along with a leader praising itself for having produced the story that almost every daily had recycled on Monday.4 Emphasizing the horror of the latest murders, the Times (Oct. 1) avoided laying any blame on the police for not having caught the man responsible. Besides a four-column article on the murders, the paper ran an editorial comparing the ‘‘atrocities’’ inflicted on both Chapman and Eddowes and noting that the latter’s body ‘‘bore clear proof of some anatomical skill,’’ even though the murderer had been in a greater hurry than when dealing with Chapman. It read, ‘‘We are once again in the presence of mysterious crimes, for which no adequate motive has been assigned,’’ and left readers wondering if any ‘‘portions’’ were missing. The next day the Times covered the first session of Stride’s inquest and reported on the still unidentified Mitre Square victim, as well as a bloodstained cloth found on Goulston Street, which the killer had apparently torn from Eddowes’s apron in order to wipe his knife.5 After mentioning a few slender clues and suspects, the Times reporter revealed that ‘‘Jack the Ripper’’ had sent two ‘‘extraordinary’’ communications to the Central News Agency, from which he quoted several sentences. Not to be outdone, the Globe (Oct. 1) assigned five columns along with an editorial to the Ripper story. First appeared a description of ‘‘Long Liz’’ Stride’s body lying just inside the gates in Dutfield’s Yard leading to the International and Educational Club at 40 Berner Street.6 After an inventory of her clothing came interviews with several acquaintances, who described the victim as a part-time charwoman and widow in her fifties, who resorted to prostitution ‘‘only when driven to extremities.’’ Apart from the occasional drunken binge, she was apparently a popular and quiet woman in good health. On the opposite page appeared an article about the Mitre Square victim and the ‘‘terrible’’ cut across her throat. According to P.C. Watkins, her nose and right ear had been sliced off and there were ‘‘other indescribable mutilations’’ that went unspecified. Focusing on the cuts around the throat and face, the reporter stressed the frenzied mutilations carried out on this second victim and the public’s anger over the ‘‘extraordinary daring and brutality’’ of the murders. The paper further noted that 143

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mounting tensions in Whitechapel had prompted Scotland Yard to send reinforcements there, and called for the fullest inquiry into these atrocities so that the monster who now threatened the entire metropolis would be caught. During a predawn tour of Whitechapel, a Globe reporter ran into a policeman who told him that a murder could easily occur there and go unnoticed for hours owing to the number of ‘‘dens’’ filled with thieves and destitute women. Besides covering both inquests, the Globe (Oct. 2) speculated about motive. Perhaps the murderer was a religious fanatic consumed with ‘‘monstrous rage’’ or a ‘‘passion for slaughter.’’ Or maybe he was a ‘‘superlative delinquent’’ with a divinely ordained mission to destroy all women of ‘‘a peculiar class,’’ and therefore incapable of feeling any remorse for killing these sinners. Given the obvious inability of the police to catch this ‘‘detestable assassin’’ on their own, the public should be on the lookout for any man wearing bloodstained clothes. Devoting three columns of fine print to the murders, the Morning Post (Oct. 1) also lingered over the injuries as well as the terror and excitement in the East End. After scolding Matthews for refusing to approve reward money, the paper published the text of the ‘‘Dear Boss’’ letter, but omitted the word ‘‘whores.’’ If some journalists dismissed this epistle as a hoax, they could not deny that it had been written several days before the latest murders, or that the postcard had actually predicted a ‘‘double event’’ and mentioned that there was no time to ‘‘get ears for police.’’7 Whoever invented the epithet ‘‘Jack the Ripper’’ must have had a lively imagination as well as some familiarity with English slang, because the name Jack was associated with everything from a sailor, a privy, the British flag, and a phallus to money, boots, hammers, clowns and mummers, informers, and peasants.8 Besides these usages, Jack was also the name of Jill’s boyish companion; the giant-killer; the hero of the beanstalk story; the man of all trades; the Sprat who would eat no fat; the Straw who led the peasant uprising of 1381; and the figure associated with the lantern and the box. Moreover, the picaresque superstar of English highwaymen, Jack Sheppard (1702–24), the agile prison-breaker, used to stroll around town in fancy attire as if to defy the authorities, all of which earned him lasting honor in ballads, songs, and popular biographies. Such swagger or ‘‘sauciness’’ seemed to anticipate this new Jack. Last but not least, there was the spectral bogeyman known as ‘‘Spring Heeled Jack,’’ who leapt over tall buildings and emitted dark blue flames from his mouth. Clad in helmet and body suit, this folklorish creature had terrified women and men ever since his first 144

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appearance in 1837. As late as the 1880s, some mothers were still trying to keep their unruly children in line by threatening to summon this frightening ‘‘Jack’’ to discipline them.9 The term ‘‘ripper’’ conjured up everything from butchers cutting open the bellies of animals to blackmailers, ponces and ‘‘high-rip gangs,’’ a well-bowled cricket ball, and a knockdown blow in boxing. In addition, hospital assistants who prepared cadavers for dissection were known as ‘‘rippers.’’10 Whatever the provenance of the letter and card sent to the Central News Agency, there could be no question about their media value. At the request of Scotland Yard most leading papers gave them top billing, not just because everyone involved hoped that someone would recognize the handwriting or the style, but also because the letter and card revealed that rare bird—a killer who loved publicity and dared to taunt the police. Of course the notoriety surrounding the letter and card from Jack gave rise to countless imitators, who flooded police stations and newspapers with equally crude missives. Written in different hands, most of these manic messages threatened more butcheries to come. Thus the East London Observer (Oct. 13) published a letter from ‘‘George of the High Rip Gang,’’ boasting that he would now commence cutting up ‘‘gilded’’ women or duchesses in the West End, while his ‘‘pal’’—‘‘jocular Jack’’—continued his work in the East End. As he put it, ‘‘Oh, we are masters. No education like a butcher’s. No animal like a nice woman—the fat are best.’’ Most of the leading papers— with the notable exception of the Times—carried facsimiles of the ‘‘Dear Boss’’ letter and postcard, and in subsequent weeks they published short excerpts from other letters signed by the would-be culprit.11 The similarities in Ripper news from paper to paper owed much to widespread reliance on the various news agencies, to which Scotland Yard sometimes sent releases. As we have seen, the evening papers often borrowed heavily from the morning press just as the Sunday papers borrowed from the dailies without acknowledging their source. Not surprisingly, the feature articles in different papers contained much the same interviews with witnesses, the same inventory of the wounds, and the same signs of panic in Whitechapel.12 On October 1 the Evening News devoted some nine and a half columns to the double event, along with an editorial and a map of Mitre Square. Beneath the bold headline ‘‘THE REIGN OF TERROR IN WHITECHAPEL,’’ a reporter quoted the comments of some bystanders who were heckling the police: 145

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‘‘It’s a pity some of you fine chappies wasn’t about ’ere larst night,’’ said a morose individual who had been ordered to move on. ‘‘You’d a-done a deal more good than shovin’ innercent folks hoff the pavement this arternoon.’’ Then, in a jeering tone, ‘‘When do you expect you’ll ketch the murderer, sonny?’’ ‘‘Ketch the murderer?’’ laughed another dilapidated onlooker. ‘‘Not till they puts a ‘bobby’ to sit upon havery doorstep in Vitechapel. And then ’alf on ’em will be asleep.’’ This reporter had been struck by the ‘‘terror and amazement’’ etched on so many faces, as well as the sight of West End gentlemen rubbing shoulders with ‘‘the grimy denizens’’ of the slums, and ‘‘daintily dressed ladies’’ elbowing their way through knots of ‘‘their less favored sisters.’’ Echoing Lombroso’s theories about dangerous criminal women, he described Stride’s lips as ‘‘thick, the upper one especially so, with that sort of double fold often noticed in lascivious women.’’ At the morgue his voyeuristic gaze moved from the pile of discarded clothing to her body: ‘‘As she lies in the mortuary, her dress is open over her bosoms, but her stays have not been undone. The left side of her face is much dirtied and bruised, as if she had been forcibly thrust down into the mud of the Court.’’ Despite Stride’s ‘‘fine physique,’’ she was ‘‘undoubtedly debauched beyond all respectability.’’13 As for the Mitre Square victim, most reporters focused first on the crime scene and then zoomed in on the body lying on the pavement in a dark corner. Once again, the Evening News (Oct. 1) excelled at delivering sensation-horror with a dash of sexual allure: ‘‘The clothes had been raised up to the chest, and, more horrible still, the body had been completely ripped up from the pelvis right up to the chest, the flaps of flesh being turned back and revealing the intestines. All the viscera were cut out, and the lower part of the abdomen lifted up bodily towards the breast; in fact, a more fearful case of mutilation cannot be imagined.’’ This cobbled article also dealt with the arrest of suspects, the two messages from ‘‘Jack the Ripper,’’ and interviews with the eminent physician Sir James Risdon Bennett and Forbes Winslow, who classified the killer as a homicidal (and religious) monomaniac with sexual aberrations.14 A leader writer deplored the fact that the ‘‘East-end fiend’’ had claimed two more victims in such ‘‘silence and secrecy,’’ thereby showing his contempt for the police and vigilance committees. Alluding to the removal of an unnamed organ from Chapman’s body, this writer could not explain why the ‘‘bloodthirsty miscreant’’ wanted to possess ‘‘a certain portion’’ unless this was a symptom of 146

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‘‘sexual insanity.’’ Unfortunately, the lack of clues ruled out any firm conclusions except for the obvious fact that East Enders deserved far better police protection. The Star (Oct. 1) also gave the murders a front-page splash, with seven columns of lurid details beneath a multiple headline, part of which read: ‘‘THE MURDER MANIAC SACRIFICES MORE WOMEN TO / HIS THIRST FOR BLOOD.’’ Laden with hyperbole and enhanced by sketches of the murder sites along with the faces of distraught East Enders, this article focused on the brutality of the slayings, which had sent ‘‘a thrill of horror throughout the land.’’ This time the ‘‘hellish fiend who stalks abroad in Whitechapel’’ had struck down two ‘‘poor unfortunate and degraded women.’’ After almost decapitating his first victim, he had gone on to Mitre Square, where he ‘‘hacked, mutilated, and disembowelled’’ his second victim. Besides surveying the crime scenes and interviewing policemen, doctors, and local people, this reporter quoted P.C. Watkins as stating that when he discovered Eddowes’s body, her clothing had been ‘‘thrown up breast-high,’’ her stomach ‘‘ripped up like a pig in the market,’’ and her entrails ‘‘flung in a heap around her neck.’’ Although the ‘‘abdomen [had been] ripped open and the puberic [sic] bone left completely bare,’’ as a subhead announced, ‘‘NO PART OF THE BODY WAS MISSING.’’ Another article dealt with mounting tensions in Whitechapel, where the police had blocked every entrance to the murder sites and were ordering spectators to move on. The Star (Oct. 1) also carried two leaders about the murders, one of which described the people of Whitechapel as ‘‘half-mad with fear’’ and called upon journalists to ‘‘keep their heads cool and not inflame men’s passions’’ when writing about these atrocities. This leader writer went on to dismiss as absurd a theory of Coroner Baxter’s that an American pathologist had hired someone to procure specimen uteruses for the purpose of medical research. It was far more likely that the killer had suffered an ‘‘epileptic outbreak of homicidal mania.’’ Warming to his task, the writer then warned about the urgent need to bring light to Whitechapel before the district gave birth to a revolution that would ‘‘smash the Empire’’ and bring about a republican regime.15 On the next day the Star explored the broader implications of the murders, adopting the secular as well as radical line that most of Whitechapel’s problems could be blamed on ‘‘eighteen hundred years of Christian civilisation.’’ Arguing that life in the slums was often worse than death, this leader writer prescribed bright lights and fresh air because the ‘‘moral crusades’’ of West End reformers were so useless. What the East End needed was a ‘‘political crusade’’ that would compel people to 147

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choose between ‘‘Terror’’ and ‘‘Reason’’ and lead to the elimination of slumlords and unfair taxes.16 Relying largely on copy from the Press Association, the Daily Chronicle (Oct. 1) devoted a full page to the double event, outlining the previous deaths before delving into the latest ‘‘atrocities.’’ Filled with such minute details as the grapes and sweetmeats clutched in Stride’s hands and the ‘‘black straw bonnet, trimmed with black beads’’ worn by the Mitre Square victim, this article kept returning to the crime scenes and the injuries. There were nine mentions of Stride’s severed throat and eight separate accounts of the Mitre Square victim’s mutilations, the severity of which had given rise to speculation about missing organs. Had the killer removed the same ‘‘portions’’ as those absent from Chapman’s body? So long as the police surgeons remained silent on this score, reporters could deal only in rumors or surmises. Most papers had no choice but to cite the Central News Agency’s (Oct. 1) evasive statement that ‘‘the details of the mutilation are almost exactly the same as in the case of Annie Chapman, a certain portion of whose body, it will be remembered, was missing.’’ A leader writer in the Daily Chronicle (Oct. 1) ventured that the killer had carried out the same ‘‘frightful mutilations’’ on the Mitre Square woman even though the autopsy report had not been released. In his opinion, the murderer’s swiftness and evident knowledge of female anatomy confirmed Baxter’s theory that a pathologist was killing these women in order to obtain certain organs. For this reason the police should be searching for an ‘‘eccentric’’ medical researcher. However, most papers rejected the vivisection theory outright and opted instead for an epileptic maniac. The Daily Telegraph (Oct. 1) gave the murders two long front-page articles, supplemented by a sketch map of Mitre Square and an editorial, amounting in all to eight columns. Beneath such headlines as ‘‘SAVAGE BUTCHERY AND MUTILATION’’ and ‘‘PUBLIC TERROR,’’ reporters described the metropolis as ‘‘horror stricken’’ over the latest deeds of the ‘‘merciless’’ murderer. Having failed to mutilate the Berner Street victim, he had slaughtered another ‘‘luckless waif . . . with more than the savagery of a wild beast, hacking her face to pieces, and mutilating her lifeless body in a manner that is all but indescribable.’’ After dealing with possible motives, the injuries, the crime scenes, and the acute shame felt by Londoners because these crimes were taking place in their great and supposedly safe city, the paper pointed out that ‘‘consternation’’ was turning to ‘‘wrath’’ in the East End and that this could easily endanger innocent people. Exasperation over the failure of the police to arrest the killer had moved some East Enders to take 148

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the law into their own hands by organizing vigilance committees, and they were also petitioning the Queen to approve reward money.17 While thousands of sightseers and slummers were pouring into the district to stare at bloodstained cobblestones, one ‘‘prominent City official’’ denied that the police had not done enough to catch the killer. Ruling out the ‘‘scientific anatomist theory,’’ he stated that the police were looking for ‘‘a mere fiendish butcher’’ or ‘‘a vulgar pig-sticker,’’ who was consumed with ‘‘a maniacal fury against the lower class of street walkers.’’ This official had no doubt that the ‘‘inhuman monster will be speedily tracked to his lair.’’ A leader writer tied the latest murders to the four previous ‘‘midnight assassinations,’’ and accused Matthews of indifference to this ‘‘frightful catena of slaughter,’’ which ‘‘scandalised our civilisation’’ and threatened to paralyze the police. In the absence of news from Scotland Yard about the measures being taken to catch the Ripper, the press had little choice but to cover the inquests, the activities of vigilance committees, the issue of reward money, tensions in Whitechapel, and the arrest and release of suspects. Supposed clues about the Ripper vied for attention with complaints from prostitutes that their nightly trade had become too risky.18 Accompanying a report on the first day of the Stride inquest, an editorial in the Daily Telegraph (Oct. 2) urged the government to show the kind of concern displayed after the Burke and Hare murders, when Parliament had passed the Anatomy Act of 1832 to regulate the supply of cadavers to dissecting schools. As for suspects, this writer offered readers a choice between homicidal maniacs, ‘‘abandoned desperadoes,’’ and monsters and ogres. Still reluctant to exploit the gore, the Morning Post (Oct. 1) passed discreetly over the mutilations and defended Scotland Yard against its many critics. One leader writer raised the possibility of a copycat killer, because ‘‘the narrative of a horrible deed works like a poison in the diseased imagination and tends to spread a kind of contagion.’’ Since robbery was out of the question, this fiend had to be driven by homicidal mania. Sailing closer to the winds of radicalism, the Pall Mall Gazette (Oct. 1) observed that neither the victims nor the police should be blamed for these murders. ‘‘We are all at fault,’’ the editorialist announced, and ‘‘society stands helpless, wringing its hands . . . but not knowing the least in the world what to do or how to do it.’’ With his usual heavy irony, Stead (presumably) argued that it was fortunate that all six murders had taken place in Whitechapel rather than Ireland, for had these been Irish crimes, then a great uproar would have broken out, Parliament would have been 149

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recalled, another stringent coercion act would have been passed ‘‘in hot haste,’’ and the Times would have relished every ‘‘gory detail as affording ample proof of the innate ferocity of the Celt.’’ In a clever inversion of Anglo-Irish relations, he declared that if Dublin ruled England with a majority as ‘‘ignorant and prejudiced’’ as the Unionist party at Westminster, then a ‘‘spanking Coercion Act would promptly be passed,’’ stifling all the liberties enjoyed by citizens, while such worthies as the Rev. Sydney [sic] Godolphin Osborne and the Rev. Sam Barnett would be accused of being ‘‘hand in glove with the assassin.’’ It was only a matter of time before someone tried to link the ‘‘ghoul who makes necklaces of the viscera of his victim’’ to the Archbishop of Canterbury. To underscore the absurdity of Coroner Baxter’s uterine researcher theory, this leader writer concocted a price list for the pickled parts of the human body extracted in dissecting rooms. Heading the list was a complete corpse for the bargain price of three pounds five shillings, followed by a thorax, costing only five shillings. As for the unidentified organ removed from Chapman’s body, this could be had ‘‘for the asking’’ at any postmortem room some twelve hours after death. A full-page article in the Pall Mall Gazette (Oct. 1) headlined ‘‘MORE HORRORS IN THE EAST-END’’ ranged over the discovery of the bodies and the nature of the injuries. Only the Berner Street victim had a name. Passing rather quickly over the mutilations of the Mitre Square woman, which made ‘‘Recognition Almost Impossible,’’ this reporter described the thousands of morbid spectators milling around and hoping to catch a glimpse of the actual murder sites, noting that at least they were bringing a little business to the area. Unrelenting in its disparagement of Matthews, this paper borrowed a subhead from the Daily Telegraph: ‘‘THE HELPLESS, HEEDLESS, USELESS FIGURE AT THE HOME OFFICE.’’ Along with a tonguein-cheek list of motives and suspects, the Gazette (Oct. 2) printed ‘‘An Epitome Of The Suggestions Of The Public,’’ which included the recommendation that ‘‘EVERY ONE . . . REPORT TO THE POLICE BEFORE GOING TO BED.’’ Among the candidates canvassed for the role of Jack in this horror story were a policeman, a Jewish compatriot of Lipski seeking to expose the folly of the police, a ‘‘Scientific Sociologist’’ keen on killing prostitutes in order to raise the alarm about the judicial neglect of abused women, a multiple murderer from Texas, a ‘‘fanatical vivisectionist,’’ a ‘‘religious maniac,’’ a Burke and Hare–style procurer of female organs, and a Jekylland-Hyde character who led a double life. But then again the culprit might be a gang or a ‘‘fanatical Jew’’ seeking atonement for having been intimate with a gentile woman. Clearly, the absence of hard news about the double 150

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event was driving some journalists to plumb the depths of their own lively imaginations. While most newspapers agreed that the latest murders were the work of the same maniac who had slain the other victims, and that the uterine researcher theory was patently absurd, only the Tory press rallied to the defense of Warren and Matthews. For the first week in October most dailies had enough Ripper material to fill at least several columns. And on the days following each inquest session the papers regained those peaks (with the notable exception of the Pall Mall Gazette), owing to long extracts from the testimony of witnesses. In Edinburgh, the Scotsman (Oct. 2) added a pinch of Orientalism by comparing East Enders to (East) Indians confronted with a man-eating tiger. But there was one obvious difference: whereas tigers could be readily recognized, this ‘‘tigerish man’’ went about unnoticed. Even if insane, he knew how to kill swiftly and silently. If he was a gentleman, then his good manners probably allayed the suspicions of his victims. The Scotsman also followed Fleet Street’s example by discussing suspects, the two bizarre messages from the Ripper, reward money, the impact of the murders on East End trade, and Baxter’s American pathologist suspect. In the meantime, the Pall Mall Gazette (Oct. 4) wanted to know why the ‘‘practitioners of occult science (or religion)’’ were not working on a solution to the murders. ‘‘Why,’’ this writer asked with heavy irony, ‘‘does the Society for Psychical Research stand ingloriously idle?’’ Besides providing the prurient reader with glimpses of Eddowes’s ‘‘abdominal’’ wounds and her promiscuous lifestyle, some papers dwelled on conditions in Whitechapel after the double event. Thus a Daily Telegraph (Oct. 3) reporter described the growing tension and fear in the district, the throngs of tourists swarming around the murder sites, and the ‘‘fallen women’’ huddled in doorways and afraid to venture forth into the darker streets or alleys despite their desperate need for money. To his surprise, the Evening News’s ‘‘Special Commissioner’’ (Oct. 6 and 10) found bright lights and lively, well-dressed people on Fashion Street. He even overheard some street children singing ‘‘God Save the Queen.’’ No doubt the ‘‘abnormal respectability’’ of these residents could be explained by the fact that they were mostly Jewish and more affluent than their neighbors. Far different was Flower and Dean Street, where ‘‘ghoulish-like figures stalked forth from the doorways into the bleakness of the street,’’ and where ‘‘crouching and distorted creatures lurched noiselessly about as if waiting . . . [to] spring upon some unsuspecting victim.’’ Except for two half-drunken women quarreling over the position of their saucepans over a fire, the local 151

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people remained silent and sullen. Eddowes’s paramour, John Kelly, revealed that he used to take ‘‘Kate’’ to the casual ward when penniless rather than let her walk the streets for immoral purposes. Evidently this part of Whitechapel was filled with ordinary folk as well as plainclothes detectives after sunset, but the pubs emptied rapidly and the streets fell quiet after midnight. On Tuesday, October 2, many papers announced that the still nameless Mitre Square victim had been arrested for drunkenness and detained in Bishopsgate Street police station on the night of her death. On Wednesday several papers reported her name as Kelly and stated that she came from ‘‘the lowest class’’ of unfortunates, who often slept rough for want of money. The police usually had a hard time identifying such women because they led such ‘‘broken’’ or migratory lives and used so many aliases. Meanwhile, to complicate Stride’s identification, a Mrs. Mary Malcolm of Holborn told the police that the victim was her sister Elizabeth, who had married the son of a Bath wine and spirit merchant. He had walked out after catching her with another man and eventually emigrated to America. Most papers made some play out of this new twist in the case. At the third session of the inquest (Oct. 3), Michael Kidney, a waterside laborer, positively identified the victim as Elizabeth Stride, with whom he had lived off and on for three years, and stated that she had borne nine children.19 Discovering the name of the Mitre Square victim proved rather harder. But on the night of October 2 a casual laborer named John Kelly, of 55 Flower and Dean Street, informed the City of London police that the victim was probably the ‘‘wife’’ with whom he had cohabited for seven years. For this reason some morning papers (Oct. 4) called her Kate Kelly or Conway—the latter being the surname of an earlier lover with whom she had lived long enough to produce three children.20 The name of Eddowes did not surface until the 5th, after Eliza Gold (alias Mrs. Frost) had identified the victim as her sister, Catherine Eddowes.21 For the next few days Fleet Street filled columns with news of the inquests, the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, the letter and postcard, sundry suspects, Warren’s defense of his police, and Matthews’s disapproval of reward money. Among other papers, the Star and Evening News (Oct. 4) carried a Central News report that Jack the Ripper had been arrested after ‘‘a desperate struggle’’ following a knife attack on a mounted policeman. But both articles ended with a complete refutation, as the reporters admitted that the story was ‘‘an entire fabrication.’’ Several papers indulged in some sleuthing. The fifth edition of the Evening News on October 4 announced ‘‘the most startling 152

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information that has yet been made public . . . and the first real clue’’ to the murderer’s identity. The reporter then tantalized readers by revealing that his paper had hired two private detectives from a firm in the Strand to investigate Stride’s murder. Evidently these sleuths had tracked down a greengrocer and fruiterer by the name of Matthew Packer, who claimed to have sold a bunch of black grapes to a woman resembling Stride on the fatal night. Packer had seen her escort, and described him as a stout man of medium height in his mid-thirties, wearing a ‘‘wideawake’’ hat and dark clothes and looking like a clerk. He watched the couple cross the street and stand in the rain talking outside the International Workingmen’s Club before they disappeared into the darkness.22 On the same day many papers reported Warren’s defense of his forces in response to sharp criticism from the Whitechapel Board of Works. Insisting that London was ‘‘the safest city in the world,’’ the Commissioner maintained that the police could not prevent further murders ‘‘so long as the victims actually, but unwittingly, connive at their own destruction’’ by enticing the murderer into secluded places. After urging all good citizens to dissuade ‘‘unfortunates’’ from wandering into ‘‘lonely places’’ with strange men, he announced that Scotland Yard was distributing ten thousand handbills in the East End that asked citizens to report any suspicious person. He conceded that his forces were already strained to the limit and warned that any increase in the number of police patrols in Whitechapel would mean pulling constables away from other parts of town. When it came to blaming the victims, the illustrated weekly the Graphic (Oct. 6) did not mince its words. Declaring that reward money would be far better spent on streetlights in ‘‘the poorer parts of town,’’ the weekly chided the victims for choosing the path of self-destruction: ‘‘It is worth noting here—in refutation of the Socialist theories which are so rife just now—that the miserable and degraded creatures who have lately been so ruthlessly butchered did not belong to an oppressed residuum, crushed down by social or capitalist tyranny; they were all originally well brought-up, fairly well-to-do persons, the wives of respectable men; and their terrible downward course into vice and wretchedness seems chiefly chargeable to their own misdoing.’’ Such strictures had the familiar ring of a wages-of-sin sermon addressed to an eminently respectable congregation. The mainstream press was fond of dramatizing brief encounters with possible suspects. Thus the Daily Chronicle (Oct. 5), having reported the arrest of the Whitechapel killer, proceeded to reveal that a young man had been held for questioning after he lured a young unfortunate into a side 153

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alley, where he produced a knife and then tried to repeat his ‘‘revolting practices.’’ Hearing her shrieks for help, several men rushed to her rescue, whereupon the culprit jumped into a cab. A ‘‘howling mob’’ soon surrounded the vehicle, but the police arrived and took him off to Leman Street station. As the reporter put it with just a touch of exaggeration, this fracas ‘‘plunged the East End into a whirl of excitement.’’ However, a few lines later he had to admit that the whole affair was nothing but an ‘‘idle canard.’’ Even ‘‘the most trifling incident’’—such as a strange man quarreling or fighting with a woman in the street—would draw a small crowd and earn a few lines in the next day’s paper. Among those who made the news, however fleetingly, was a French polisher who emerged from a coffeehouse at Charing Cross carrying a parcel stained with what looked like blood. A vigilant policeman spotted the parcel and questioned the man before allowing him to proceed on his way. Many papers printed the rumor that the killer was hiding in dense woods not far from ‘‘the genteel neighbourhood’’ of Croydon and Upper Norwood, but nothing more was heard of this phantom suspect.23 As we will see in Chapter 10, the great bulk of Ripper news during October consisted of lengthy extracts from the five sessions of the Stride inquest and the four sessions of the Eddowes inquest.24 Trusting in the ability of sensation-horror to boost circulation, Fleet Street dwelled at length on Eddowes’s injuries, stressing the killer’s ‘‘insensate desire to disfigure the face’’ and the ‘‘wanton and unnatural delight’’ he took in mutilating her body. At the same time, a few papers tried to relieve the gore with some tidbits of empathy. Thus the Evening News (Oct. 5) asked how Londoners would react if the miscreant turned his attention from unfortunates in the East End to ladies in the West End. No doubt the result would be ‘‘a simple panic among all classes.’’ And what if this madman forsook women for men? In that case ‘‘half London would constitute itself into a vigilance committee’’ and hunt him down relentlessly. Why, then, should less be done ‘‘when the victims are only women who have sunk to so low a depth of degradation that their sisters can scarcely afford to risk the contamination of their society’’? Fleet Street’s publication of facsimiles of the ‘‘Dear Boss’’ letter and postcard at the behest of Scotland Yard unleashed a torrent of boastful and often incoherent messages to the press and the police from Ripper wannabes. Although the Daily Chronicle (Oct. 4) stated its hope that reproducing the letter and card would ‘‘be of immense importance’’ to the investigation, it then conceded rather illogically that both messages were probably the 154

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Figure 2 ‘‘Jack the Ripper—Fac-Simile of the Blood-Smeared Post-Card and Letter,’’ Evening News, Oct. 4, 1888 (by permission of the British Library)

work of ‘‘an idiotic practical joker.’’25 Between October 4 and 7 the police took the rather desperate step of posting facsimiles of the letter and card all over town, for the benefit, no doubt, of those who did not read any newspaper. The Evening News (Oct. 4) prominently displayed facsimiles of Jack’s two messages, complete with the large bloodstain on the postcard (fig. 2). Although the writing on ‘‘saucy Jacky’s’’ postcard appeared more hurried or ‘‘scribbled’’ than that in the letter, most reporters treated the penmanship as similar. The Daily Telegraph (Oct. 4) pointed out that the Central News Agency had deemed the September 25 letter a practical joke until it became clear that the killer had actually sliced off part of Eddowes’s ear—a mutilation mentioned in both the letter and the card. By publishing these messages, editors could claim to be performing an important public 155

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service. The use in the letter of words and phrases like ‘‘Boss,’’ ‘‘fix me,’’ ‘‘shan’t quit,’’ and ‘‘right away’’ moved some journalists to surmise that the author was either an American or an Englishman who had ‘‘mixed with our cousins’’ across the ocean. Others doubted that both messages came from the same pen. No doubt many readers sought reassurance that the Ripper was anyone but an Englishman. The cobbled quality of Ripper news showed clearly in the Western Mail ’s feature story on October 5. Headlined ‘‘THE LONDON TERROR’’ and based on a Press Association story, this article contained copies of the Ripper letter and card along with news of Stride’s murder and the first session of the Eddowes inquest. Here surgeon Brown was quoted as stating that the same organ taken from Chapman’s body was also missing from Eddowes. Following a long passage lifted from the Evening News about the fruit-seller who had sold grapes to Stride’s companion, the reporter cited Brown’s announcement at the Eddowes inquest that the organs missing from her body were the left kidney and womb. Most London dailies carried this ominous news on the same day.26 Unlike the dailies, the Sunday papers had ample time to range over the previous week’s murder news so that the contents gained more coherence and perspective. Thus Reynolds’s (Oct. 7) managed to crowd onto the front page the myriad details of the double event along with the two messages from ‘‘Jack,’’ the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, a précis of the presumed six murders, the arrest of three suspects, the five sessions to date of the Stride and Eddowes inquests, a headless torso found on the site of New Scotland Yard (discussed in Chapter 8), and several other murders around the country. If they did not have room to publish all the fine points and rumors found in the dailies, the Sunday press did serve up large chunks of the evidence from the inquest, while editorializing about the ‘‘nameless horror’’ that menaced the metropolis. Given to hyperbole, a Reynolds’s leader writer declared that the police were obviously unable to ‘‘prevent another holocaust.’’ After contrasting the intelligence and zeal of ordinary constables with the ‘‘military martinet’’ in charge of Scotland Yard, this writer fastened on Matthews, the ‘‘incompetent lawyer’’ at the Home Office who had ignored with piglike obstinacy the pleas for reward money coming from the East End, as well as from the Queen. For this reason, ‘‘Never-atHome Matthews’’ deserved to be called the worst Home Secretary in years. For sheer volume of Ripper news, Lloyd’s set a record on October 7 by assigning over fifteen columns (almost twenty-five thousand words) to the double killing. Much of this coverage repeated the previous week’s Extra 156

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Special edition. Only the People came close to matching this amount of space for any of the murders. By comparison, on the same Sunday Reynolds’s served up almost seven columns, or roughly 15,600 words, covering much the same terrain. Lloyd’s also provided maps of the murder sites and a sketch of Mitre Square. In a full-page story on page 7, a reporter revealed that the clothing of the Mitre Square victim had been thrown over her head, thereby exposing ‘‘a gash extending right up the body to the breast.’’ After a suggestive allusion to her ‘‘well-developed’’ body, he returned to the gore: ‘‘A most sickening spectacle presented itself. The whole of the inside of the murdered woman, with the heart and the lungs, appeared to have been wrenched from the body, and lay, in ghastly prominence, scattered about the head and neck, and on the pavement near.’’ Alternating between quotation and paraphrase, Lloyd’s excerpted Brown’s two-hour interrogation by the coroner, using an ominous crosshead—‘‘PORTIONS OF THE BODY MISSING’’—to signal the special mystery and horror of Eddowes’s death. A front-page leader in the same edition of Lloyd’s addressed the ‘‘reign of terror’’ in Whitechapel, which made the Wainwright-Lane case ‘‘pale into insignificance.’’ If the killer really was ‘‘insane, there is a fearful method in his madness; but if he be sane, then it is an awful reflection that in this great centre of civilisation there should be a fiend in human shape capable of deeds which we can scarcely associate with a Nero or a Caligula.’’ Perhaps these tragedies would spur the public to pay more attention to the wretched slums in the East End. But the first concern had to be public safety, and the killer’s ability to strike at will and escape unseen proved the ineffectiveness of the police. After urging the case for offering reward money, deploying bloodhounds, and improving lighting in the district, this writer took up the question of motive: ‘‘Murders generally may be accounted for by passion, jealousy, or revenge; but this is war against a class, and is therefore all the more terrible.’’ He then wondered why the murderer had not been caught: ‘‘People are already beginning to ask how many more women must be killed at the East End before the authorities can be roused to action.’’ Once this predator was caught and punished, then East Enders should receive all the remedial measures they had been seeking over the years. The People’s (Oct. 7) coverage of the double event came close to that of Lloyd’s in terms of length, with almost three entire pages, or fourteen and a half columns, filled with the most minute details of the victims’ features, clothing, habits, and injuries, all covered with the gravy of gore. This 157

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conglomerated article also contained witnesses’ descriptions of their relationship to the two women, along with medical reports given at the inquests about Eddowes’s ghastly mutilations. Reporters also dwelled on suspects, the letter and postcard, reward money, the ‘‘panic-stricken’’ crowds around the murder sites, the lack of police protection, and several possible clues. There was one allusion to the ritual killing and mutilation of a gentile woman by a Jew named Ritter near Kraków in 1884, a topic that would engage a number of papers after Kelly’s murder in November. Despite all the clinical material culled from the Eddowes inquest about the cuts to the neck, face, and abdomen, this paper glossed over Dr. Gordon Brown’s mention of the missing womb by stating that ‘‘the same organs had been removed as in former cases.’’ Although filled with the same material as the other Sunday papers, the Weekly Times (Oct. 7) took a giant step over the customary boundary of discretion in sexual matters by quoting Brown’s observation: ‘‘Nor was there any evidence of recent intercourse.’’ No other paper in our sample went this far. After this rare display of clinical candor came a moment of euphemism with an allusion to the amount of medical knowledge needed to cut out the ‘‘abdominal organs.’’ The reporter then quoted Brown’s revelation about the missing left kidney and uterus. And he went further by stating that ‘‘the cervexuteri [sic] was uninjured.’’ No other paper in our survey used this term. The fresh sensation-horror of missing organs moved a leader writer in the same edition to characterize the atmosphere of London as ‘‘fast becoming that of a charnel house.’’ And in an aside worthy of Josephine Butler or some other committed feminist, he added: ‘‘The double damnation of the brothel and the gin-palace reigns supreme, East and West, in London and our great cities, because you men will have it so.’’ Whenever hard news about the murders and the inquests ran low, Fleet Street would magnify reports of suspects, random assaults on women, the ‘‘amateur detectives’’ or vigilantes of Whitechapel, and the victims’ origins and lifestyles.27 A law-and-order leader in the Daily Telegraph (Oct. 5) defended Warren and then urged the public and the CID to watch out for professional criminals and receivers of stolen goods. Because there were so many ‘‘wild savages who detest every restraint and abhor order and law,’’ an ‘‘iron hand’’ was needed to keep them in line. Advocating more streetlights in Whitechapel, this writer observed that when it came to prostitution and crime, ‘‘one good gas-lamp is worth two policemen.’’ Moreover, the ‘‘wretched women’’ and the ‘‘rough men’’ who consorted with them required not only regulation, but also ‘‘decent and strict lodging houses,’’ 158

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where the police could keep an eye on them. Invoking Goethe, he observed that what the East End really needed was ‘‘Light, more light.’’28 On October 5, the Star gave the Rev. Samuel Barnett space to air his views about the underlying causes of the murders. Under the headline ‘‘THE MORAL OF THE MURDERS,’’ he made it clear that the rich were not alone responsible for the sufferings of the poor. In fact, both parties were at fault. He scolded working-class men for mistreating the women in their lives and accused respectable husbands of dominating or abusing their wives. So long as men denied equality to women at home and in the workplace, so long would women be beaten with impunity. Neighbors should become one another’s keepers and take notice of the crimes and abuses in their midst. The rich should subsidize better lighting and housing for the poor, and the latter should honor their women and love their neighbors. If ever men dared to admit that the abuse of women, including prostitution, was even worse than the murder of six unfortunates, then sexual equality might come to pass and England would be a much happier country. In this way a few papers used the murders to promote the moral and social well-being of the country as a whole rather than simply beating the drum of law and order. During the first fortnight of October the press also played its spotlight over new suspects taken in for questioning, who included a Scandinavian about to sail for America, a ‘‘well-dressed man’’ who had threatened a woman in Aldgate, a beggar in Tiptree Heath, and one or two knife-wielding men dressed in women’s clothing.29 Although all these men dropped rapidly out of sight, their appearance enabled papers to expand the volume of Ripper news and convey the impression that the police were not idle. One East End paper strove to bring readers closer to the realities of Whitechapel. After summarizing the double event, a reporter for the East London Observer (Oct. 6) described conditions around Aldgate and Houndsditch in a manner akin to Margaret Harkness: ‘‘The babel of tongues as each inquired of the other the latest particulars, or the exact locality of the Aldgate murder, or speculated on the character or whereabouts of the murder, was simply deafening. Every window of every inhabited room in the vicinity was thrown open, for the better view of the inmates; and seats at these windows were being openly sold and eagerly bought. On the outskirts of this vast chattering, excited assemblage of humanity, costermongers, who sold everything in the way of edibles, from fish and bread to fruits and sweets, and newspaper vendors whose hoarse cries only added to the confusion of sounds heard on every hand, were doing exceedingly large trades.’’ He then shifted his 159

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attention from Eddowes’s mutilations and missing organs to a recent meeting of the Whitechapel Board of Works, where nervous members had questioned the adequacy of police protection. Another article in the same paper criticized Fleet Street for manufacturing and sensationalizing incidents of women being attacked by men.30 A leader in this edition entitled ‘‘A WORD FOR WHITECHAPEL’’ called for more police patrols and deplored all the ‘‘hysterical nonsense’’ and sensationalism in the mainstream press. It further expressed the hope that all the excitement would soon die down and local business would recover, and stated that people needed reminding that these murders were ‘‘peculiar’’ and that ordinary folk were in no danger because the killer had chosen his victims ‘‘with marvellous definiteness from the lowest class of prostitutes.’’ The press had an obligation to do everything in its power to discourage the ‘‘dangerous class’’ from thinking that crimes could be committed with impunity. Pulling out all the stops, the East London Advertiser (Oct. 6) lavished no less than seven columns and five editorials on the double event. The first leader, entitled ‘‘A THIRST FOR BLOOD,’’ pointed out that two fresh murders had ‘‘excited the imagination of London’’ to an unprecedented extent. Persuaded that ‘‘some awful . . . freak of nature’’ had emerged, people were conjuring up occult theories and ‘‘myths of the Dark Ages,’’ laden with ‘‘ghouls, vampires, bloodsuckers, and all the ghastly array of fables . . . accumulated [over] the . . . centuries.’’ Heating up the rhetoric, the writer noted how appalling it was to think that some diabolical being was ‘‘stealthily moving about a great city, burning with the thirst for human blood, and endowed with such diabolical astuteness as to . . . gratify his fiendish lust with absolute impunity.’’ Coroner Baxter’s theory about an American pathologist seeking specimens of internal female organs was utterly absurd, because no sane man would risk his life or liberty to commit murder for the paltry sum of twenty pounds. Clearly, then, the killer had to be a maniac. The second leader, entitled ‘‘THE SUPERNATURAL ELEMENT,’’ dealt with the premonitions of Stride’s sister that something terrible had happened to Long Liz. The third leader urged local authorities to ‘‘clean the Augean stable’’ of common lodging houses. A fourth dwelled on Dr. George Savage’s recent article in the Fortnightly Review on murder and maniacs, and the ease with which children could turn into killers. In Lombrosian fashion, Savage had stressed the resemblances between the brains of criminals and animals, especially monkeys, from which he inferred that the Whitechapel killer’s skill in attacking and mutilating suggested someone with 160

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knowledge of human anatomy.31 The fifth leader expressed the fervent hope that the killer would grow careless and make a mistake that would lead to his capture.32 Lack of fresh suspects or a new inquest session forced journalists to focus on conditions in the East End, especially the relations between gentiles and Jews, the squalor of lodging houses, the criminal element, the need for streetlights, the subculture of unfortunates, and the depressed state of trade. A feature story in the Evening News (Oct. 6), ‘‘Down Whitechapel Way,’’ by ‘‘A.D.V.,’’ praised the business acumen, uprightness, selfrestraint, and managerial skills of Jewish tradesmen, whose material success made the whole populace ‘‘less degraded, less unclean.’’ On the subject of prostitution this writer disagreed with local policemen who denied the existence of Jewish unfortunates. Such women did indeed exist, but they were either prosperous prostitutes or, ‘‘like their brethren in trade,’’ they had gone into business by managing bordellos. And not even the Whitechapel ‘‘fiend’’ would dare to cross the threshold of such establishments. For good measure, he added: ‘‘The Jew is the Yankee of Europe.’’ Always on the lookout for a striking story, the Star (Oct. 6) reported that a doctor had recently visited its office to reveal that a former surgical assistant of his, who had once worked in Whitechapel, had gone mad after learning that he had contracted a venereal infection, and wanted to exact revenge on prostitutes. Moreover, this monomaniacal man knew every alley and court in the district. The doctor also denounced the police for having treated him in a cavalier manner when he told them of his suspicions. In his opinion, the killer was a dissolute man who had caught a disease from a ‘‘loose woman’’ and was determined to punish the whole class for his affliction. Several papers used the murders as an excuse to discuss the moral state of the nation. In answer to the headlined question ‘‘Is Christianity a Failure?’’ leader writers and correspondents wondered if the murders reflected the godlessness prevailing in the East End, if not the country at large.33 The press also took note of the extraordinary precautions taken by the police over the weekend of October 6–7 in response to rumors that the Ripper was poised to strike again. Given all the police and plainclothesmen wandering about, as well as vigilante patrols and curiosity seekers, Whitechapel must have made a poor hunting ground for prostitutes and petty criminals, not to mention Jack.34 While the Liberal and Tory press debated Scotland Yard’s competence and publicized suspects and supposed clues, several reporters were 161

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mistaken for the Ripper in the East End. One vigilance committee patrol shadowed several reporters in Whitechapel but stopped short of making a citizen’s arrest. The growing competition along Fleet Street for ‘‘scoops’’ inspired a Pall Mall Gazette (Oct. 8) reporter to point out that the lull in the slayings had almost caused the Daily Telegraph to ‘‘throw up the sponge,’’ because it could hardly scrape together three-quarters of a column of Ripper news on that day. Unfazed by the lack of a new murder, the Daily Chronicle (Oct. 8) still managed to produce nearly four columns on the East End ‘‘horrors.’’ As the Gazette pointed out in its ‘‘Occasional Notes’’ column, the News of the World had recently tricked readers into thinking that two more murders had occurred by simply repeating the story of the double event and instructing news vendors to shout: ‘‘Two more murders in Whitechapel! horrid mutilation! paper! paper!’’ Heeding these cries, many people had rushed out on Sunday to buy a copy in the belief that four women had just been slaughtered. Only after paying these ‘‘rogues’’ two or three pence a copy did readers realize that this was merely a rehash of the previous weekend’s murders. ‘‘Can nothing be done,’’ the Gazette asked sanctimoniously, ‘‘to punish those who thus disturb, frighten, and cheat the community?’’ Most dailies on October 8 and 9 made a small splash out of the chalk inscription discovered by an alert policeman on a brick wall on Goulston Street next to the stairway where the bloodstained piece of Eddowes’s apron had been found.35 Fleet Street eagerly jumped to the conclusion that the killer had written these words after finishing off Eddowes in Mitre Square. The Central News Agency’s version of this graffito was: ‘‘The Jews shall not be blamed for nothing.’’ But controversy soon swirled around the precise words and spelling.36 Most controversial of all was Warren’s on-thespot decision to have the message erased with a sponge without waiting for a police photographer to take a picture, on the grounds that leaving it for locals to see might trigger an outburst of violence against Jews.37 Most papers castigated Warren for having destroyed the only genuine clue left by the murderer. The Pall Mall Gazette (Oct. 8) claimed that the City police were ‘‘very indignant’’ over this order and hoped that the coroner’s jury would censure Warren for this grave mistake. Equally dismayed by Warren’s decision, the Evening News (Oct. 8) regretted that the police had failed to photograph the inscription, but conceded that the Central News Agency had received over thirty letters a day since October 1 from people claiming to be Jack the Ripper, all of which were without doubt ‘‘the con162

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coction[s] of silly notoriety hunters.’’ Amidst all the recriminations about Warren’s order to obliterate this message, at least one man rose to his defense. On behalf of the Jewish community, Acting Chief Rabbi Hermann Adler praised the Chief Commissioner, in a letter made public on October 13, for his ‘‘humane and vigilant actions during this critical time.’’38

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Chapter Eight

The Pursuit of Angles

The relatively long hiatus in the Ripper’s activities from October 1 to November 9 meant that Fleet Street had to scratch hard for murder news, even though the Stride and Eddowes inquests dragged on for weeks. In their quest to keep the story alive by means of new angles and theories, reporters proved more than inventive, and they managed to fill some of the void with anecdotes, rumors, false reports, and conjectures. During the five-week interval before the final murder many papers raised the volume of law-andorder news. Whether praising or damning Warren, they expressed concern about public safety and questioned the way Scotland Yard was deploying its resources. Shortly after the double event Warren delivered his annual report on the state of the Metropolitan police and appealed for more money and more men. Virtually all the leading papers commented on his proposals. The Morning Post (Oct. 8) supported his contention that the burdens of policing London had increased more rapidly than the number of constables and the funds available over the previous forty years. Given the ever-present 164

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danger posed by ‘‘mischievous agitators’’ and ‘‘unruly mobs,’’ he was fully justified in asking for more policemen to cope with the criminal elements. In this writer’s view, the East End murders proved how easily the police could become the targets of unfair criticism by a panic-stricken public. The police could not have prevented these crimes because the murderer knew how to strike swiftly and evade capture. While approving Warren’s annual report as well as his conduct, the Times (Oct. 6) also praised the courage and intelligence of ordinary policemen, who afforded Londoners ‘‘the safety and immunity which they enjoy,’’ for which they should be more grateful. Another leader (Oct. 12) denied that the police were guilty of ‘‘culpable stupidity’’ in pursuing the culprit and blamed the victims for making such ‘‘easy prey’’ because they chose to evade police surveillance in order to pursue clients. Since they spurned police protection, they were to all intents and purposes ‘‘in league with the murderer.’’ Liberal and Radical papers continued to remind readers of Warren’s role in the brutal repression of Bloody Sunday. Thus the Daily Chronicle (Oct. 8) denounced Warren’s claim to have won an important victory over the forces of disorder in 1887 because workers had every right to hold rallies in Trafalgar Square. In short, the paper argued, Warren’s order to disperse the protesters had provoked the clash and aggravated the running feud between the police and the masses. The priority he placed on ‘‘military drills and parades’’ had discouraged the police from thinking for themselves, while his neglect of the CID had reduced the detective branch to ‘‘such crapulous decrepitude’’ that James Monro, the head of the CID, had been forced to resign. While the taxpayers of London deserved some assurance that Warren was making the best use of his forces, the ‘‘ghastly list of undiscovered crimes’’ in recent months offered little hope on this score.1 Rushing to Warren’s defense, the Globe (Oct. 4) applauded his vigorous response to criticism from the Whitechapel Board of Works, and pointed out that constables could not be stationed on every street corner in London. To illuminate all the dark streets in the East End, moreover, would cost far too much money. Another leader (Oct. 8) backed Warren’s plea for more police, pointing out that only two-thirds of the force was available for street patrol at any given time. An editorial in the East London Observer (Oct. 20) expressed dismay over the failure to catch the Whitechapel fiend despite the lapse of a full year since his first murder. In the past, multiple murderers like Burke and Hare had always been caught. But the Whitechapel horrors were different because the culprit was still at large and 165

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Scotland Yard’s feeble response amounted to ‘‘a series of false alarms, false arrests, fruitless theories, and . . . useless house to house visitations.’’ The East London Advertiser ’s (Oct. 13) editorial, entitled ‘‘OUR DEFECTIVE DETECTIVE SYSTEM,’’ heaped abuse on Warren’s record as Chief Commissioner. Not only had he grossly mismanaged Scotland Yard, but his policies had driven Monro to resign. The time had come for a thorough reform of the CID along French lines, so that skilled detectives (including women) could be assigned to infiltrate the criminal class. Only when the police had acquired ‘‘better brains and better organization’’ would London cease to be a place where ‘‘most murderers go scot free.’’ The Pall Mall Gazette (Oct. 9) continued to rant against the breakdown of law and order in the metropolis, by publishing an interview with the Lord Mayor of London, Sir Polydore de Keyser, who called the murderer ‘‘a human mad dog—a proper subject for Mr. Pasteur,’’ and a monomaniac who had evaded all the detectives looking for him. Barring suicide, the killer was bound to be caught during his next attack because ‘‘a whole army of bloodhounds (metaphorical and literal) . . . [are] on his track.’’ Convinced that reward money was ‘‘meant more for show than use,’’ de Keyser opposed increasing the number of police on the grounds of expense and traditional British prejudices against uniformed authority. On October 12 the Gazette again deplored Warren’s order to destroy the message scrawled by ‘‘the blood-red hand of the assassin’’ on Goulston Street without first obtaining a photograph. Here was proof positive of his ‘‘utter unfitness’’ to lead Scotland Yard. Law-and-Order News Stead was not content with merely taking the occasional potshot at the heads of a criminal justice system that had incarcerated him in 1886. Directing some of his animus at Scotland Yard and taking advantage of the growing dismay over the failure of the police to catch the killer, he warned readers in a trenchant leader on October 8 that a serious crime wave was sweeping through the metropolis while the police were looking the other way. In the same edition, he published the first of six long and data-laden articles under the headline ‘‘THE POLICE AND THE CRIMINALS OF LONDON,’’ about the ubiquity of crime and the virtual immunity from arrest enjoyed by the perpetrators.2 Common criminals were thriving in central London because the police could not catch them. Among the most crimeridden areas, in the Gazette ’s opinion, were Gray’s Inn Road, Hackney 166

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Road, and Marylebone, where the police were undermanned, overworked, demoralized, and poorly led. The author of this article insisted that professional criminals lacked any respect for Scotland Yard, and he accused Robert Anderson, the new head of the CID, of being a millenarian who wrote religious books. To make matters worse, Anderson had recently gone on holiday to Switzerland just when the police were losing the fight against crime. Because Warren knew so little about ‘‘the science of criminal catching,’’ Scotland Yard had become ‘‘a laughing-stock.’’ Another front-page leader in the Gazette (Oct. 10), entitled ‘‘LAW AND ORDER IN LONDON,’’ lamented ‘‘the present reign of plunder and anarchy’’ on Gray’s Inn Road. Far from being the work of ‘‘wild Irishmen in the remote morasses of Connaught, or by savage Asiatics in the recesses of the Himalayas,’’ serious crimes were being committed by Englishmen in ‘‘the heart of the greatest commercial centre of the world.’’ Embroidered by such subheads as ‘‘Ruffianism and Rowdyism Rampant’’ (Oct. 11), articles like these exemplified the alarmism of law-and-order news, the logical conclusion being that only more police, more surveillance of suspicious persons, and harsher sentences would stop the criminal element in their tracks. In the twentieth century the tendency to criminalize whole districts or neighborhoods has been seen as a vital part of ‘‘social control strategies.’’3 If the Ripper murders made women even more terrified of ‘‘sexual predators,’’ as Judith Walkowitz maintains in City of Dreadful Delight, they also strengthened the lobby for radical reform of the police and detective forces. Only a few elite papers like the Times and Morning Post refused to join in the hue and cry for Warren’s head. And when he did resign on the eve of Kelly’s murder—ostensibly over a jurisdictional dispute with the Home Office—both these papers expressed sincere regret. Canine Sleuths Under the heading of detection, the use of bloodhounds received a great deal of play in the press. Judging from the number of letters to the editor and allusions in feature articles, the idea of setting trained hounds onto the presumably bloodstained tracks of the killer clearly appealed to far more than fox-hunting enthusiasts. All kinds of dog fanciers, breeders, and handlers joined in the debate about the pros and cons of deploying countrytrained canine sleuths on city streets saturated with animal blood, offal, and excrement. Although finding any particular human scent in congested Whitechapel posed a formidable challenge to even the smartest hound, 167

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some correspondents insisted that this was the only way that the murderer could be caught. An article entitled ‘‘BLOODHOUNDS AS DETECTIVES’’ in the Pall Mall Gazette (Oct. 3) cited several cases where hounds had tracked down slaves, poachers, and criminals on the run. Evidently the killer of a little girl in Blackburn around 1876 had been pursued or ‘‘convicted’’ by a hound. Of course, these animals had to be rushed to the crime scene while the scent was still fresh, and for this obvious reason some experts called on the police to register every bloodhound within striking distance of the East End so that they could be deployed as soon as the next murder occurred.4 Virtually every leading paper featured the bloodhound trials carried out under police supervision in Regent’s Park and Hyde Park around October 9. But few reporters bothered to point out how different the conditions were between the park’s sylvan grounds and Whitechapel, where butchers threw the remains of knackered animals into the gutters every day and night. The Evening News (Oct. 9) turned the Hyde Park trials into an enthralling, and almost amusing, story. Drawing on a long letter from an expert, the paper revealed that two seasoned hounds named Barnaby and Burgho had been brought at 7 A.M. to the Albert Gate entrance of the park, where they were greeted by several officials and a police surgeon. Having arrived on horseback, Warren volunteered to serve as the quarry. He then walked rapidly across the grass toward Bayswater while the hounds cast about for a few minutes and then picked up his scent. With only a few checks where his tracks crossed those of other people, they soon ran him to ground. Several more successful trials so impressed Warren that he ordered the police to keep some hounds in a kennel near Whitechapel.5 Warren’s role in the Hyde Park trials made the best kind of news, combining elements of both comedy and tragedy (and giving rise to the legend that one of the hounds had bitten him). Interviewed by the People (Oct. 7), a leading veterinarian argued that well-trained hounds would be a useful ‘‘auxiliary’’ to the police, but they would have to be ‘‘familiarised with the odour of blood’’ before being put on the scent. Even so, the presence of so many other smells and shifting wind currents in any big city seriously reduced the chances of success. A reporter for the East London Advertiser (Oct. 13) pointed out that the trials in Hyde Park could not be replicated in Whitechapel, where so many passersby would ‘‘obliterate’’ the killer’s scent; for this reason he chose ‘‘to back the biped against the quadruped.’’6 Departing briefly from sensational prose, the Pall Mall Gazette (Oct. 9) regaled readers with some doggerel under the title ‘‘A BALLAD OF BLOODHOUNDS’’: 168

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Shall Jack the Ripper’s arts avail To baffle Scotland-yard forsooth? Quick—on the flying murderer’s trail Unleash the bloodhound, Truth! ‘‘Where’er he skulk in hovel pent, Or through the streets red-handed roam, I, Charles, with sleuth-hound on the scent, Will hunt the miscreant home.’’ Thus boasts Sir Charles; and Truth, the hound, Springs from the leash, and holds not back, But from Whitechapel’s tainted ground Leads westward on the track. And up and down, through thick and thin, While crowds collect and loafers stare, They speed, until their way they win Full through Trafalgar-square. Till last by Scotland-yard they halt, Where Truth, the sleuth-hound, sniffs and snarls: ‘‘The trail is utterly at fault— What means it?’’ quoth Sir Charles. Just this. The reign of lawless law, The tyranny of stocks and staves, Which strikes in honest hearts the awe It spares to murderous knaves: To this belongs the blood that’s spilt By fiends who know not human ruth; To this is due the heavier guilt Tracked by the bloodhound Truth. Although the CID did not unleash any hounds after Kelly’s murder, despite reports that a police inspector had sent for them, the prospect of using these ‘‘sleuths’’ inspired numerous articles and letters to the editor. Always keen to embarrass Warren, the Pall Mall Gazette (Oct. 19) parodied the canine angle in an article entitled ‘‘DISAPPEARANCE OF THE BLOODHOUNDS / THEIR ARREST ORDERED BY SIR C. WARREN.’’ Apparently the hounds had gone missing from their kennel and were being hunted by the police. ‘‘Quis 169

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custodiet ipsos custodies? ’’ asked the writer gleefully after learning that Scotland Yard wanted to detain the missing dogs for questioning.7 The Anti-Semitic Backlash Another aspect of the murders given much prominence was the threat of anti-Semitic rioting owing to the widespread belief that Jack was a Jew. Reporters were quick to note any threatening gesture or gibe aimed at Jews, and the police stepped up their patrols in Whitechapel after Chapman’s death in order to head off any outbreak of violence against these ‘‘alien’’ immigrants. As the Lipski-Angel murder had shown, even an isolated act of violence by a Jew against one of his own people could easily trigger ethnic hostility.8 The very success of Jewish furniture makers, street dealers, and moneylenders stirred deep resentment among their gentile customers, and this animus found expression in verbal abuse as well as caricature. A week or so before Kelly’s murder, Superintendent Frederick G. Abberline explained to some colleagues why someone had shouted the anti-Semitic epithet ‘‘Lipski’’ at a man with ‘‘a strong jewish [sic] appearance’’ simply because he had been watching another man ‘‘ill-using’’ one of the Ripper’s victims before her death.9 Throughout October the police continued to focus their attention on young Jewish or ‘‘foreign-looking’’ males with dark complexions, black hair and beards, and dark clothing. No doubt thousands of men in the East End answered this generic description.10 Although some suspects did deviate from the Jewish stereotype insofar as they possessed sandy moustaches or fair complexions, the Goulston Street inscription kept the hot coals of antiSemitism glowing. Occasionally other foreign suspects would surface far from Whitechapel. The Times (Oct. 16) reported that the signature of an Austrian seaman, who had sailed on a ship from France to Tyneside, bore a strong resemblance to the letter written by ‘‘Jack the Ripper,’’ and a man with an American accent, wearing a slouch hat and carrying a black leather bag, had aroused suspicion in Limavady, County Londonderry. Following Kelly’s murder, several more Jewish suspects were featured in the papers— notably the pale-faced man with the black astrakhan coat, large gold watch chain, and dark hair, whom an unemployed laborer, George Hutchinson, had spotted near Miller’s Court on the night of Kelly’s death, and also the ‘‘dark man’’ of medium height glimpsed in Aldgate, whose clothing was as black as the shiny bag he carried.11 As some Ripperologists have pointed out, the Whitechapel murders revived the old canard that Jewish men who 170

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had enjoyed sexual relations with gentile women had to kill them ritualistically for the sake of purification.12 The conviction of so many contemporaries that Jack was a swarthy Jew bent on carrying out some kind of rite or act of self-purification reflected the increasing hostility of East Enders toward the hordes of Eastern European refugees flowing into their part of town. In 1888 two parliamentary committees were investigating both the sweatshop system of hand manufacture in tiny garrets and the Jewish influx, and there was much talk of curbing this immigration.13 Far from being an exclusively working-class problem, anti-Semitism thrived within the political and social elite. Robert Anderson, the new Assistant Commissioner of Police, who took charge of the Ripper investigation on October 6, believed not only that the killer was ‘‘a low-class Polish Jew,’’ but also that the Jews would never ‘‘give up one of their number to Gentile Justice.’’14 Newspapers published more than a few letters from people insisting that Jack was a Jewish ritual slaughterman, or shochet, who was expert at cutting the throats of animals and eviscerating them with razor-sharp knives. On the basis of this assumption they believed that the murder weapon was the kind of knife used by these ‘‘Jewish cutters.’’15 Against a background of horror stories about Jewish ritual killings in Eastern Europe, readers did not forget that Stride had been killed outside the rear entrance of a Jewish working-class club on Berner Street and that the Goulston Street graffiti made mention of the ‘‘Juwes.’’16 The Search for New Angles Another large if sharp angle involved the serious disagreements among the police surgeons about how much or little the killer knew about surgery and female anatomy. Was he perchance a mad doctor, a failed medical student, a pathologist, or simply a butcher? Refuting Coroner Baxter’s far-out vivisection theory, surgeon George Sequeira stated firmly that the killer ‘‘had no particular design on any organ’’ and lacked ‘‘great anatomical skill’’ (Globe, Oct. 11). The Star (Oct. 11) reported Dr. William Saunders as making the same denial. Long before the coroners’ juries in the Stride and Eddowes inquests returned their verdicts of ‘‘wilful murder by some person unknown,’’ Fleet Street was hunting and pecking for grains of Ripper news, sensationalizing even minor assaults on women. Even in the middle of the month, Lloyd’s had no trouble filling four columns with the Eddowes inquest, her funeral at Ilford, bloodhounds, the replies of Warren and Matthews to their critics, anti-Semitism in the East End, the arrest of a suspect 171

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in Belfast, and the stabbing of a detective dressed in ‘‘female attire.’’17 A front-page leader in the same paper (Oct. 14), entitled ‘‘GOOD OUT OF EVIL,’’ trusted that these ‘‘atrocious crimes’’ had aroused the authorities and the public to the urgent need for relief of all the suffering in the East End. Almost as keen as the penny press to exploit the murders, the Times and Morning Post nevertheless featured other kinds of news. Not surprisingly, the results of horse racing around the country occupied almost as much space as events in Whitechapel. Moreover, at the height of the doubleevent crisis the Times (Oct. 3) assigned more columns to the international Sugar Convention, the Church Congress at Manchester, and the speeches of prominent politicians. After the initial shock of these two murders had worn off, the paper continued to devote more space to financial affairs in the City than mutilation-murder further east.18 Between October 8 and November 9, Ripper news—apart from the Stride and Eddowes inquests and the ‘‘Lusk kidney,’’ a piece of kidney sent to George Lusk, a prominent Whitechapel businessman and the president of the local vigilance committee (see below)—gradually tapered off. Because the killer had gone underground and the police remained tightlipped about their investigation, reporters had to dig deep for new angles, and more often than not they failed to find a fresh lead. By the end of October news from Whitechapel had virtually dried up. Preoccupied with the special commission investigating Parnell’s alleged complicity with agrarian violence in Ireland, the Times published no more feature articles about the Ripper until Kelly’s death. The Pall Mall Gazette was so hard-pressed for Ripper news that it printed a short letter from ‘‘Jack the Ripper’’ to George Lusk threatening to commit another ‘‘double event’’ on the night of Saturday, October 13—a report that turned out to be quite false.19 The police actually caught one of the Ripper letter writers, who turned out to be a ‘‘good-looking, respectably dressed,’’ twenty-one-year-old seamstress named (appropriately) Maria Coroner, from Bradford. A search of her lodgings yielded copies of several Jack the Ripper letters in her handwriting, addressed to both the Chief Constable and a local newspaper, indicating Jack’s intention to ‘‘do a little business’’ in Bradford. After her arrest, Coroner confessed that she had simply wanted to create a sensation, but then tried to excuse her conduct as a ‘‘joke.’’20 Reluctant to let the Ripper story die during the last fortnight of October, the press highlighted suspects, who ranged from a tall gentleman with sandy or reddish hair to a short, dark, and black-haired man. Evidently 172

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both Scotland Yard and Fleet Street continued to be swamped with letters from people claiming to know who the assassin was, or tendering advice about how to catch him. In the choice words of William Fishman, all the anxiety over the murders meant that ‘‘the weirdos, the eccentrics, the perverts and inadequates had a field day.’’21 Social Reform One obvious angle favored by the Liberal and Radical press was the issue of what the East End needed in the way of social reform. As we have seen, these papers blamed the murders on the pernicious effects of slum life and called for model housing, streetlights, and night shelters for homeless women. A few idealistic leader writers even demanded an end to prostitution as well as overcrowding. But the big question remained unanswered: Who would foot the bill for all these heroic measures? On October 21 Lloyd’s recommended public assistance for the honest poor who had to live amidst so much crime and vice. Even if the murders gave rise to a ‘‘more humane spirit,’’ this writer argued, that did not translate into radical reforms. To lift the poor out of their misery required both commitment and money, and these were bound to dwindle because public sympathy for the victims would not last. A second leader, bearing the ominous title ‘‘THE FAILURE OF CIVILIZATION,’’ cited the so-called rash of murders taking place all over London as evidence of how ‘‘the large residuum of coarse brutality’’ continued to defy the forces of civilization and education. No doubt the ‘‘thrill of horror’’ caused by the Ripper murders had stimulated philanthropy throughout the country, but much work remained to be done because too many people lived like the Ishmaelites, with their hands turned against their neighbors.22 Needless to say, none of these middle-class nostrums offered the destitute residents of Spitalfields or Whitechapel much hope that their lives would improve before they died. In addition to the left-wing press, several leading medical journals also championed slum improvement. Concerned about the misery and squalor in the East End, the British Medical Journal (Sept. 22) pointed out that both heredity and environment produced hard-core criminals, and praised the Rev. Samuel Barnett’s efforts to prevent ‘‘evil individuals’’ from coalescing into a criminal class.23 For its part, the Lancet (Oct. 6) published three editorials in the same issue about the slayings. The first of these backed Barnett’s call for more streetlights, fresh air, and sanitation, to be financed by public funds and strictly enforced by the laws relating to working-class housing. According to the second leader, the murders proved the ‘‘existence 173

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in every city of a criminal class whose capacity for evil’’ could only be reduced by more responsible journalism rather than better housing. To support this bold claim the writer pointed an accusing finger at Fleet Street and contended that morality could never vanquish immorality so long as an ‘‘unscrupulous press’’ published ‘‘grossly indecent’’ material. Not only were ‘‘lower class newspapers’’ demoralizing boys and girls, but ‘‘vice and crime rival one another as a means of stimulating a depraved appetite for the horrible and the bestial.’’ The sensationalism of the penny press merely stimulated the animal passions to the exclusion of lofty thoughts. While children in the slums were being corrupted, the Education Act was opening ‘‘the door to this flood of filth,’’ to the detriment of respectable youth. Calls for self-help were not enough—only censorship could put an end to such debased literature. The writer had no doubt that this prohibitive measure would promote ‘‘the best interests’’ of all concerned.24 The third leader argued that the Whitechapel tragedies had ‘‘awaken[ed] the public conscience’’ to the lack of sanitation there, and the close connection between overcrowding, poverty, dirt, and lethal violence. Proud of the Lancet’s past efforts to expose the miseries of the slums, this writer dismissed recent improvements as ‘‘wholly insufficient’’ and unworthy of England’s ‘‘boasted civilisation.’’ Unfortunately, the killer’s knife had proved more potent than ‘‘the pens of many earnest and ready writers’’ when it came to educating the public. Several weeks later, the Lancet (Oct. 27) returned to the attack, again accusing Fleet Street of sensationalism, and of exploiting the vice and violence that flourished in the East End. Arguing that prurient readers were almost inured to murders, divorces, and ‘‘fashionable scandals,’’ this writer accused newspaper editors, as well as theater-owners, of serving up ‘‘a constant succession of highly spiced dishes.’’ Judging from the contents of almost any paper, one would think that the whole country was ‘‘practically absorbed in the contemplation of revolting wickedness.’’ Granted that murder was ‘‘the most anti-social of crimes,’’ this did not warrant ‘‘the prurient and demoralising amplification of its sickening details,’’ which could so easily corrupt readers and stir dangerous passions in ‘‘weaker and more ill-balanced minds.’’ Thus, ‘‘the exploits of ‘Jack the Ripper,’ as detailed for our delectation at the breakfast table day after day, are likely not only to hurt the consciences of innocent minds, but to fire the imagination, and perchance kindle the emulation, of those just hovering on the verge of criminal violence. It is in vain that such descriptions are accompanied by sententious and virtuous moralisings. When we have befouled 174

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ourselves with pitch, there is little advantage in calling for a looking glass and owning with compunction that pitch is very black and altogether objectionable.’’25 Having berated Fleet Street for sensationalizing murder (and having blamed France’s population decline on the indulgence of readers in ‘‘vile and corrupt’’ fiction), this indignant and righteous writer chose to ignore the fact that the Lancet published most of the intimate details of the Ripper’s mutilations. More concerned about the corrupting effects of poverty than those of journalism, the British Medical Journal praised Barnett’s campaign against ‘‘the public indifference’’ to the ‘‘true causes’’ of the murders, which lay in the rookeries, where there was ‘‘a vast population . . . packed into dark places, festering in ignorance, in dirt, in moral degradation, accustomed to violence and crime, born and bred within touch of habitual immorality and coarse obscenity.’’ Not even the heroic efforts of Barnett and others to eliminate the filth and flood the district with Christian compassion had succeeded in penetrating the darkness, where ‘‘the great residuum [remained] untouched and unpurified.’’ Philanthropists like Lord Shaftesbury, Baroness Burdett-Coutts, and the Rothschilds certainly deserved accolades for ‘‘sweeping away . . . nests of crime, filth, and degradation’’ and replacing them with ‘‘light, cleanliness, [and] purity.’’ However, pockets of dire poverty and degradation remained. The East End stood in sore need not just of intelligence and altruism, but also money to raze and rebuild the slums. This writer blamed the ‘‘obscenity and brutality and violence’’ of the ‘‘darkest spots’’ on, first, ‘‘ourselves, the great public of London’’ for ‘‘flagrant indifference’’ to the ‘‘degradation of our fellow citizens’’; second, the metropolitan authorities for neglecting the lighting as well as the paving and cleaning of streets; and third, the police, who lacked a ‘‘higher sense of public morality’’ and could not even protect women in the East End. In the long run, he trusted that these horrifying murders would have ‘‘a fruitful effect on the social well-being of the metropolis,’’ and not just Whitechapel.26 Motives One of the biggest angles constructed by journalists, the police, and the public concerned the killer’s frame of mind, or emotional state. Once the police abandoned their punishment-gang theory, they came to share Fleet Street’s belief that a homicidal maniac was lusting for blood, and that he might be leading the double life of Jekyll and Hyde. By mid-September the press was citing Forbes Winslow’s views on criminal insanity as though he 175

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were the reigning expert in such matters. Although he changed his mind more than once, Winslow opted for a gentlemanly lunatic—a ‘‘mad toff’’— who had recently been discharged (or escaped) from an asylum. Other medical men quickly joined the debate over motive through interviews with reporters and letters to the editor. Leader writers also reflected on the killer’s obsession, in light of the sadistic slashes and eviscerations. However much the pundits might disagree about his medical experience and psychopathology, they knew he had enough cunning to lure his victims into dark places, where he could kill them noiselessly and then escape unnoticed. After the double event, a few journalists broached the sensitive issue of sexual motivation by alluding to Psychopathia Sexualis, the learned treatise by the Viennese psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing. Prefaced by a poignant testament to the importance of love in human affairs, the book dealt empirically and anecdotally with types of sexual and criminal abnormality, running the gamut from male impotence to sadomasochism, fetishism, homosexuality, rape, lust murder, and cannibalism.27 The Evening News (Oct. 15) featured an article by ‘‘A Medical Man’’ about the kind of men who disemboweled women for ‘‘voluptuous’’ reasons. Alluding to KrafftEbing’s discussion of ‘‘the perversion of the sexual impulse’’ in mass murderers, he suggested that the killer was achieving sexual gratification by eviscerating or mutilating these poor women. Also under the influence of Lombroso, this expert noted that the ‘‘sexu-psychopathically afflicted’’ male also derived great pleasure from ‘‘wallowing in the steaming entrails of slaughtered animals,’’ and argued that since such lust-murderers did not always rape their victims, the Whitechapel killer might be ‘‘an anthropologically degenerate individual, suffering from ‘perversion of the sexual impulse.’ ’’ Other self-styled experts attributed the murders to rage arising out of venereal disease. Perhaps the culprit was a ‘‘mad syphilitic doctor’’ bent on killing prostitutes to avenge his own infection or that of some close relative or friend. A third hypothesis with sexual overtones involved epilepsy. Both Lombroso and Krafft-Ebing believed that some men experienced intense sexual desire while in the midst of a seizure and would attack women or children in a sexual frenzy without ever recalling the episode.28 Needless to say, such learned discussions rarely found their way into the morning press, which preferred to focus on the violence of the knife attacks, and buried any inklings of sexual perversion deep inside the tropes of monster or fiend. On the other hand a few reporters working for the evening papers had no qualms about searching for precedents involving lethal forms of sexual 176

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perversion.29 After perusing Krafft-Ebing’s text, a reporter for the Pall Mall Gazette (Oct. 7) came up with a laborer named Andreas Bichel, who in 1806 had lured several women to his house in Regensdorf, Bavaria, on the pretense of showing them a magic mirror that foretold the future. After killing them, he dismembered their bodies.30 Given the fact that the Ripper never dismembered his victims, this farfetched comparison illustrates the lengths to which some reporters went in their quest to explain the inexplicable. The Lusk Kidney Most Victorians regarded cannibalism, or anthropophagy, as the defining sign of savagery in the most primitive regions of the world. Conveniently forgetting that Englishmen were quite capable of eating cabin boys or shipmates when stranded in a lifeboat on the high seas, they excluded this ‘‘custom of the sea’’ from their catalogue of depravity.31 For this reason, the reading public must have found it hard to believe that ‘‘gynophagism’’ (to coin a word) existed in their own capital city. More than curious about what exactly the killer had done with the ‘‘portions’’ taken from Chapman and Eddowes, readers received a shocking answer on October 19, when the press reported that someone had sent half a human kidney inside a small bloodstained box to George Lusk, cofounder of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee. The crude note that accompanied this parcel, inscribed ‘‘From Hell’’ at the top, indicated that the sender had ‘‘prasarved’’ half of the ‘‘kidne’’ taken from the Mitre Square victim. In his own words, ‘‘tother piece I fried and ate it was very nise I may send you the bloody knif that took it out if you only wate a whil longer.’’ The note was signed, ‘‘Catch me when you can—Mishter Lusk.’’32 Like the Goulston Street inscription, the Lusk kidney became another turning point in the Ripper saga, and the press took full advantage of this fresh piece of sensation-horror. Scotland Yard’s stony silence about the parcel seemed to lend more weight to its authenticity. Whether or not the kidney did belong to Eddowes, most papers attributed Lusk’s parcel to ‘‘Saucy Jacky,’’ and they made good use of it to revive the flagging Ripper saga. Typical of the penny press’s response was the six-tiered headline in the Evening News (Oct. 19): ‘‘MITRE SQUARE MURDER / STARTLING NEWS / HALF THE VICTIM’S MISSING / KIDNEY RESTORED / THE OTHER HALF EATEN BY THE / CANNIBAL ASSASSIN.’’ According to this account Lusk and several friends had taken the foul-smelling kidney to the offices of the Evening News on the previous day, even though they suspected that it was a bad joke in the form of a kidney taken 177

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from a domestic animal. Later, some friends urged him to show the ‘‘ghastly relic’’ to Dr. Thomas Openshaw, the pathological curator of the London Hospital Museum, who used his microscope to assert that it was half of the left kidney of an alcoholic woman aged around forty-five, who had died about the same time as Eddowes. Lusk then decided to convey the box and letter to Leman Street police station, where an officer promptly sent for Inspector Abberline.33 Although this ‘‘ginny’’ kidney made the best kind of sensation-horror, several papers downplayed the incident either because they thought it was a hoax or because they were reluctant to deal with something as gross as domestic cannibalism. Both the Times and the Pall Mall Gazette (Oct. 19) assigned the kidney one short paragraph, noting Openshaw’s verdict that it came from an alcoholic woman. Unlike the East London Observer (Oct. 20), which had no qualms about featuring the kidney, the East End News (Oct. 19) ignored the whole episode. So, too, did the leading newspaper of the Jewish community, the Jewish Chronicle, which had not mentioned the Nichols and Chapman murders until Fleet Street floated the theory that a kosher butcher might be responsible for the crimes.34 The Lusk kidney stirred much debate among doctors and the police. Whoever sent this post-Gothic present to Lusk left the press and the public utterly baffled as to whether it was a perverse prank or a vital clue. Soon even this incident faded from the leading papers, whose only Ripper news now consisted of filler stories about minor crimes in the East End, suspects, and complaints from police constables about their heavy workload and the pressure to make an arrest. Petitions to the Queen Besides reporting the demands of reformers for slum clearance, more police patrols, and better street lighting in the East End, the press also drew attention to petitions from concerned citizens addressed to the Home Secretary and the Queen. On September 29, Lusk and several other local worthies petitioned Queen Victoria for an official reward to be paid to anyone with information leading to the arrest of the murderer.35 Although Matthews opposed the use of state funds for this purpose, many East Enders hoped that he would change his mind and prove with deeds, not words, that the government really did care about Whitechapel’s ordeal. During the last week of October, Henrietta Barnett, wife of the godly Samuel and a dedicated moral and social activist in her own right, organized a petition to the Queen on behalf of the working women of the East 178

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End. Signed by more than four thousand women, this letter appeared in many papers, and conveyed the revulsion felt by respectable women over ‘‘the dreadful sins’’ recently committed as well as their sorrow and shame over the new notoriety attached to Whitechapel. Admitting that the inquests had taught them much about the ‘‘sad and degraded’’ condition of unfortunates, who had ‘‘lost a firm hold on goodness,’’ the petitioners promised to make men ‘‘feel with horror the sins of impurity’’ that drove women to lead ‘‘such wicked lives.’’ They also urged the Queen to remind her ministers to shut down all the ‘‘bad houses,’’ wherein ‘‘wickedness is done and men and women [are] ruined in body and soul.’’ Most papers printed not only this petition, but also the bland reply of a government spokesman, who stated that the message had been ‘‘graciously’’ received by Her Majesty and that the Home Secretary appreciated such efforts to promote morality. This bureaucrat also assured the petitioners that the police commissioners were considering ways to ‘‘mitigate the evils’’ in question. But exactly what these steps might be he did not reveal.36 ‘‘Whose Body?’’ or the Westminster Trunk Mystery The fallout from the double event soon reached Whitehall and the Home Office in a most unexpected way. By October 3, newspapers were announcing the discovery of a headless and limbless female body on the site of the new headquarters of the Metropolitan police, between Cannon Row and the Embankment. A carpenter had come across a large bundle, wrapped in black cloth, lying in a corner of the unlit basement where holding cells were being built. Upon opening the parcel he recoiled—just as Alfred Stokes had done in 1875—at the sight and smell of a rotting female torso. Only this time there were no arms, legs, or head.37 A short article in the Times (Oct. 3) dwelled on this ‘‘ghastly discovery.’’ According to surgeons Thomas Bond and Thomas Neville, the body was that of a ‘‘remarkably fine young woman’’; they had no idea when the parcel had been placed there.38 Most of the Pall Mall Gazette’s (Oct. 3) article about the trunk came directly and without attribution from the Times. After seeing the human remains, the Daily Telegraph’s (Oct. 3) reporter noted that the skin had a ‘‘dark reddish hue’’ (characteristic of decomposition), as though it had been soaked in Condy’s antiseptic fluid. Since the trunk weighed over fifty pounds, he reckoned that this was ‘‘no light load’’ for even a strong man to carry. The victim seemed ‘‘a mature, well-formed, and perhaps an unmarried woman, not over forty years of age.’’ Over the ensuing week some papers raised the possibility that the Ripper might have moved his 179

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operations into the West End. Once again, mystery surrounded this murder and led to more questions and speculations. What the press called variously the Westminster or Whitehall murder mystery had actually begun back in mid-September, with reports of the discovery of a human arm and hand on the muddy foreshore of the Thames near the Grosvenor Road Bridge at Pimlico.39 Summoned to the Gerald Street police station, Dr. Neville of Sloane Street identified the limb as the right arm of a woman, ‘‘cleanly severed’’ after death, that had been immersed in water for several days. In vain the police searched the riverbanks around the Pimlico site and dragged the river bottom looking for other body parts. While a few reporters thought that the Whitechapel killer had struck again, others regarded the arm as merely the ‘‘grim joke’’ of a medical student. However, Neville denied that the arm showed any signs of medical dissection. In the meantime, the police searched for the rest of the body ‘‘on land and water.’’ The People (Sept. 16) devoted an article to the Pimlico limb, featuring a graphic account of the arm and hand, beneath the headline ‘‘GHASTLY DISCOVERY — MURDER OR MEDICAL EXPERIMENT?’’ The story then sank out of sight for a fortnight—until a young boy walking along Lambeth Road in Southwark noticed a parcel lying in the grass near the railing that surrounded the School for the Blind. Climbing over the fence, he unwrapped the paper and found a ‘‘somewhat decomposed’’ arm covered in lime. He alerted a constable, who took the second limb to a nearby police station. Rumors soon circulated that this arm belonged to the same body as the Pimlico arm.40 These scattered parts of an unknown woman were reminiscent of a case in the previous year when the pelvis, thorax, and thigh of a young female were found at different points along the Thames between Battersea Park and Rainham in Essex. No head ever turned up in either case, making identification well-nigh impossible.41 When the Westminster trunk was discovered on October 2, no sooner had Bond seen it than he remarked confidently: ‘‘I have an arm which will fit that.’’ Having retrieved the Pimlico arm from the Ebury Street mortuary, he found that its ‘‘jagged edges’’ fit neatly into the shoulder socket of the torso. As several papers put it aptly, the arm was ‘‘a limb cut from this trunk.’’42 Exploiting the sensation value of the Westminster torso to the full, some papers tried to embarrass Scotland Yard by pointing out that the culprit had deliberately placed the body close to the offices of Warren and Matthews. Perhaps this ‘‘fiendish assassin’’ was taunting Warren. Appealing to 180

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more prurient readers, others noted Bond and Neville’s observation that the young female victim had a ‘‘remarkably fine’’ body. It did not require much ingenuity to connect this corpse to the Whitechapel murders so long as one was willing to ignore the differences between the victims’ injuries. Overlooking the fact that Jack did not dismember his victims, some reporters referred to the Westminster body as having been ‘‘mutilated,’’ and suggested that if the Ripper was now looking beyond the East End for his victims, no woman in London could feel safe. Some papers juxtaposed the names of Whitechapel and Whitehall in adjacent headlines, thereby insinuating some connection. Trying hard to forge a connection between the East and West End murders on the grounds that all the victims were female and had suffered knife wounds, the Daily Telegraph (Oct. 3) lumped together the double event and the West End trunk under the headline ‘‘THE TRAGEDIES IN LONDON.’’ This reporter made no bones about tying the Westminster body to the Whitechapel murders: ‘‘Horror succeeds horror in our colossal complex of cities. Ere the East-end of London has ceased to shudder over the dreadful discoveries of last Sunday morning, revolting evidence of another ghastly tragedy, enacted in this capital, has come to light in Westminster, on the Embankment, one of our noblest thoroughfares. . . . This mangled relic of humanity, besides having been shorn of head and limbs, had suffered the peculiar mutilation inflicted upon the victims of the Whitechapel murders.’’ A second feature article, entitled ‘‘THE WHITEHALL MURDER,’’ detailed the discovery and condition of the trunk. Seeking to convey the ‘‘revolting’’ nature of this ‘‘discovery within sight of the Home Office windows,’’ this reporter turned to Othello: ‘‘On horror’s head horrors accumulate.’’ Presumably the Whitechapel assassin had chosen this site because he wanted to humiliate the Home Secretary. The Evening News (Oct. 3) also implied a link to the Ripper by choosing the headline ‘‘ANOTHER MURDER AND MUTILATION.’’ This reporter set forth in graphic detail the ‘‘sickening spectacle’’ of the limbless body, which emitted a ‘‘dreadful’’ smell. Several crossheads underlined the linkage: ‘‘IS THE WHITECHAPEL MURDERER AT THE BOTTOM OF IT?’’ and ‘‘THE MUTILATION OF THE BODY SIMILAR TO ANNIE CHAPMAN’S CASE.’’ At the same time, he suggested that the woman might have been the victim of an ‘‘unlawful operation’’ because, as he put it without benefit of the autopsy report, ‘‘certain portions of the abdomen’’ were missing. To conceal an abortion, the ‘‘miscreant’’ might have killed her and removed the organ that would 181

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have offered evidence of his original crime. Without revealing his sources, the reporter added authoritatively that ‘‘the organ referred to in the Annie Chapman case’’ had not been found. To strengthen the ties between the East and West End murders, several papers added to the confusion by counting the Westminster trunk as the Ripper’s seventh victim. Thus one of the multiple headlines in the Daily Telegraph (Oct. 3) contained the words ‘‘A SEVENTH HORRIBLE CRIME.’’ Was it no more than ‘‘the irony of Fate,’’ this reporter wanted to know, that the culprit had left the body only ‘‘a stone’s throw’’ from the office of the Home Secretary, who regarded these ‘‘atrocities’’ as if they were ‘‘old-world legends or modern sensational fictions’’? The Daily Chronicle (Oct. 9) also conflated mutilation and dismemberment with such headlines as ‘‘INTERNAL MUTILATION OF THE BODY.’’ As for the Sunday press, Lloyd’s (Oct. 14) reprinted the previous week’s feature article on ‘‘THE WHITEHALL MYSTERY,’’ wherein Bond allegedly noted that the victim’s uterus was missing, which therefore tied her to Chapman and Eddowes. Needless to say, none of these papers bothered to point out that the Ripper had not dismembered any of his victims or wrapped their bodies in canvas. Pursuing its relentless campaign against the Home Secretary, the Pall Mall Gazette (Oct. 3) hoped that the discovery of the trunk so close to Matthews’s office would wake him up—something that the ‘‘seven mutilations at Whitechapel’’ had obviously failed to do. As the reporter put it, perhaps this ‘‘bag of bones placed, as the Daily Telegraph gruesomely suggests, under Mr. Matthews’s nose may produce more effect on him than any quantity of mangled remains found in Whitechapel.’’ On the other hand, the Globe (Oct. 3) was not at all convinced of any such connection, and pointed out that the Whitechapel killer had left his victims in the open, whereas the slayer of the Westminster woman had gone to great lengths to conceal his crime and her identity. Even though the lack of clues soon forced Fleet Street to back away from the attempt to forge a link to the Ripper, the Daily Chronicle ran stories about the murders in Whitechapel and Whitehall in parallel columns for almost a week. Reluctant to blame the Westminster corpse on the Ripper, the Times (Oct. 4) focused attention on the torso and Bond’s postmortem findings, and speculated that the killer might have carried the body to the building site with the intention of tossing it later into the Thames. Possibly the discovery of the Pimlico arm and the increased vigilance of the police foiled his plan for disposal. The Times paraphrased Bond’s detailed postmortem report, including the comment that advanced decomposition made it hard 182

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to tell if the victim had a fair or dark complexion. Evidently, all the organs of this ‘‘very fine’’ and ‘‘exceedingly well nourished’’ woman were intact and normal.43 Late that afternoon, the Pall Mall Gazette appeared with a story on the medical aspects of the Westminster trunk. This article contained rather more details culled from the autopsy report than could be found in any of the paper’s reports on the Ripper inquests, but once again most of the detail came from that morning’s edition of the Times. The collective gaze of the surgeons and reporters focused on the condition of the victim’s hands and fingernails, as well as the amplitude of her breasts—all in the name of forensic science. The medical examiners were anxious to ascertain the social standing or occupation of this unidentified female. More than once the Times (Oct. 4, 5, 9) cited Dr. Neville’s surmise that the victim had done manual work because the fingers were plump, the nails ‘‘badly kept’’ and dirty, and the skin rough and hard. For these reasons he concluded that she was probably a servant or an unfortunate. But Bond disagreed. Controversy also arose over the quality of the victim’s dress. Was this an expensive or common piece of black silk? Some reporters thought that if the material came from a fashionable dressmaker, then the buyer might be identified. According to one rumor, the cloth came from a West End dressmaker, but Detective-Inspector Marshall of the CID announced that the fabric was common broche satin made in Bradford. Leaning toward the theory that the victim was a ‘‘lady,’’ Lloyd’s (Oct. 14) described the victim’s fine features: ‘‘long and tapered’’ fingers, and ‘‘carefully trimmed and kept’’ nails, the ‘‘richly-flowered moire silk’’ wrapped around the trunk, and her ‘‘large and prominent’’ breasts. The Star (Oct. 9) shared this view by means of a small headline apparently derived from Bond’s findings: ‘‘THE MEDICAL EVIDENCE SHOWS THAT THE VICTIM WAS A PERSON OF REFINEMENT.’’ After alluding to the well-nourished body, the Star pointed out in a crosshead that the hand was ‘‘LONG, WELL-SHAPED, AND CAREFULLY KEPT.’’ On October 20, the Illustrated Police News produced front-page sketches of the bodies of Stride and Eddowes along with several men suspected of being the ‘‘mysterious monster’’ of Whitechapel. At the bottom appeared two small illustrations of ‘‘The Whitehall Mystery.’’ The first showed three well-dressed surgeons examining the trunk on a table in the morgue, with a cloth discreetly draped over the pelvis. While one medical man fit the Pimlico arm into the shoulder socket, another took notes. The second sketch depicted some men conveying the corpse to the mortuary on a coffinlike cart. Another bizarre angle surfaced briefly on October 6, when several 183

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papers revealed that back in August someone had come across a few boiled bones lying near the railway line at Guildford. Apparently a local doctor had identified them as the leg and foot bones of a human being, but he could not vouch for their sex. After storing the bones for several days, the Guildford police buried them in a wooden box. When the Westminster trunk came to light, Inspector Marshall recalled these bones and wondered if they might belong to the torso. Acting on this hunch, he ordered the bones dug up and went down to Guildford in person to carry them back to London. After a weekend of no little suspense, readers learned that police surgeons had examined the bones and found them to be those of a bear.44 When the inquest opened on October 8, most papers filled at least one column with the proceedings.45 One significant exception was the Pall Mall Gazette (Oct. 8), which passed over the inquest and instead ran the second installment of its law-and-order series about the crime wave in London and the failings of Scotland Yard.46 According to the Times (Oct. 9), Bond testified about the amputating cuts, the organs inside the decomposed trunk, the Pimlico arm, and the well-nourished condition of the body. He concluded that the victim had never borne a child, and assigned the cause of death to hemorrhage rather than suffocation or drowning. The Westminster mystery had almost dropped out of sight when suddenly it leapt back into prominence on October 17, after two enterprising journalists and their mongrel dog unearthed a partly decomposed human leg in the same cell where the trunk had been found. Having received permission to search the basement area, these amateur sleuths—Jasper Waring and the appropriately named Mr. Angle—took with them a mixed breed dog who sniffed the earthen floor. Suddenly the dog started digging frantically and exposed a leg and foot severed just above the knee. The police promptly sent for Bond, who declared the leg to be human, but refused to tie it to the torso until he had completed his examination.47 Embarrassed once again, the police returned that night with the same terrier and searched in vain for more remains. For a few days the canine sleuthing incident rekindled interest in this bizarre story and supplied more ammunition to the radical press about the incompetence of Scotland Yard. Several papers noted that Warren did not bother to visit the Embankment site until October 19, and they took this as a sign of his indifference. The second session of the inquest, held on October 22, enabled Fleet Street to compose another round of articles about the discovery of the leg by the mongrel dog and Bond’s clinical findings. Lacking any clear lead from 184

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the coroner, the jurors returned a verdict of ‘‘Found Dead’’ instead of ‘‘Wilful Murder.’’ Fleet Street’s attempt to connect the Westminster torso to the Ripper thus fizzled after a week of feverish speculation. If the limbless trunk in the basement of New Scotland Yard did not come near the cumulative horrors of the double event, it had its own brand of morbidity and mystery. Bond’s clinical discussion of the body, arm, and leg filled some of the holes in the Ripper story for the rest of October. Had the victim been an unfortunate, it might have been easier to connect her to the Whitechapel killer. But those polished nails and delicate hands seemed to indicate a higher social class, which meant to many ladies in the West End that they now had to contend with something worse than male ‘‘pests’’ or sexual harassers in central London. The mystery of the Whitehall trunk frustrated reporters, because the victim had no name or history, and this prevented them from reinventing her past in order to make a better story. In the absence of any clues about the perpetrator, they had to focus on the decomposing trunk, the quality of the cloth in which it was wrapped, and the condition of the fingers and nails. If Stead and his friends took delight in this further proof of Scotland Yard’s myopia, they had almost a month to wait for Jack to end his long holiday from slaughter. Scrambling for fragments of murder news, Fleet Street wanted to know how the police proposed to catch the killer if they could not even prevent a corpse from turning up in the basement of their new headquarters. Unaccustomed to lust murder and the theft (not to mention cannibalization) of female body parts, reporters knew that background articles about the victims and slum life could not compete for reader attention with lurid accounts of knife-torn bodies. But they did not have to wait long for the elusive monster to strike again.

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Chapter Nine

The Kelly Reportage

The month-long lull in the Ripper’s lethal operations came to a horrifying halt before dawn on Friday, November 9, when the killer found both the privacy and the time needed to act out his rage against women to the fullest extent. The only one of Jack’s victims to be murdered indoors, the young Mary Jane Kelly died horribly inside the dingy room she rented in Miller’s Court, furnished with a cheap wooden bed, a small table, and a chair on which her clothes lay neatly folded. Kelly had not taken off her linen chemise, which is barely visible in the police photograph of her body sprawled on the bed.1 Once the police arrived at the scene they waited for bloodhounds, which failed to appear, and a photographer, who did. After that they ordered the landlord, John McCarthy, to force the locked door. The carnage inside moved veteran newspaper editors to think twice about how much sensation-horror they should print, lest a surfeit of gore put readers off and possibly lead to mob violence in Whitechapel. Because Kelly’s body was not discovered until around 10:45 A.M., only the afternoon and evening papers were able to announce the latest atrocity on Lord Mayor’s Day. As soon as the word spread, journalists rushed to White186

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chapel, and by mid-afternoon street vendors were hawking broadsides, some printed in red ink, filled with the gory details.2 Of all the murders, this one required the least exaggeration in conveying the ferocity of the mutilations, which were so extensive that it took the police surgeons hours to figure out whether any organs were missing. From the outset, however, Scotland Yard sought to prevent the spread of wild rumors by declaring that all the victim’s organs were present or accounted for.3 Preoccupied with the Lord Mayor’s show as well as by the Parnell Commission, the Globe (Nov. 9) had little time to reconstruct the grim scene in Miller’s Court, but managed to identify the victim as ‘‘Mary Jane,’’ aged around twenty-three or twenty-four, an ‘‘unfortunate’’ in good health and of a ‘‘somewhat genteel and retiring manner.’’ Contradictory accounts of her movements on the eve of her death soon emerged. While one reporter declared that no one had seen her alive after 7 P.M. on Thursday, only a few sentences later he revealed that she had been spotted early on Friday morning walking along Dorset Street in search of breakfast milk. Presumably she had spent the night with her murderer and had died around 9 or 9:30 that morning. According to another account, a man had seen Kelly’s body ‘‘lying in the passage of the house,’’ and a third version alleged that her head lay on the floor next to the bed containing the headless body.4 On one point most papers seemed to agree: the entire district was ‘‘simply terror-stricken.’’ Preliminary reports from Scotland Yard announced that the police surgeons had carried out an ‘‘exhaustive’’ autopsy, and replaced every organ in its ‘‘natural position.’’ In the usual cobbled manner, most of the articles on the 10th ranged over the crime scene, the condition of the body, suspects, sightings of the victim before her demise, Warren’s offer of a pardon to any accomplice who came forward, tensions in Spitalfields, and the large number of prostitutes who continued to solicit clients late at night despite the danger. Reporters drew attention to the bafflement of the police and the growing pessimism about ever catching the fiend now that he had moved his operations indoors. The question of exactly when Kelly died caused almost as much consternation as the issue of missing organs. Although most papers accepted the medical consensus that Kelly had died between 3:30 and 4 A.M., judging from the onset of rigor mortis, some quoted at length witnesses who had seen her alive and hung over on Friday morning.5 Faced with so many conflicting statements, the press and the public looked to the medical experts to clarify these issues. Among the usual allusions to Jewish-looking suspects, some papers quoted Forbes Winslow as stating that Kelly’s murderer 187

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was the same maniac who had slain all the other women, and that he would continue to kill until caught. The front page of the Star’s special edition (Nov. 10) contained four and a half columns of murder news beneath the headline ‘‘SEVENTH CRIME OF THE MURDER MANIAC,’’ along with an editorial tirade about the failings of Warren and Matthews. Carrying much the same material as the Globe and the Times, the Star printed the standard passage about what Superintendent Thomas Arnold, the first investigator on the scene, had seen through the broken window in Miller’s Court: ‘‘A horrible and sickening sight then presented itself. The poor woman lay on her back on the bed, entirely naked. Her throat was CUT FROM EAR TO EAR, right down to the spinal column. The ears and nose had been cut clean off. The breasts had also been cleanly cut off and placed on a table which was by the side of the bed. The stomach and abdomen had been ripped open, while the face was slashed about, so that the features of the poor creature were beyond all recognition. The kidneys and heart had also been removed from the body, and placed on the table by the side of the breasts. The liver had likewise been removed, and laid on the right thigh. The lower portion of the body and uterus had been cut out, and these appeared to be missing. The thighs had been cut.’’6 Appearing in most papers, this passage resembled less the spontaneous recollection of a police officer who had just come from an appalling crime scene than a collaborative statement prepared by Scotland Yard and some news agency.7 Not only were the police ‘‘COMPLETELY BAFFLED,’’ as a subhead in the Star put it, but they were also reluctant to apprise the press of any new developments. Once again, the partial news blackout imposed by Scotland Yard, the divergent accounts of witnesses, and the pressure of deadlines go far to explain the jumbled and often confusing nature of the Kelly coverage. While most papers mentioned the extraction of the heart and other organs, the question of which if any body parts the killer had carried away remained unanswered. Amidst all the inconsistencies and silences, the Liberal and Radical press stuck to the party line that this latest horror proved the utter incompetence of Chief Commissioner Warren, who, ironically enough, had privately tendered his resignation just before Kelly’s murder. Unlike the East London Observer, which gave the murder less than a column, the Daily Chronicle (Nov. 10) assigned three full columns to Kelly’s death (and three more to the Lord Mayor’s Day festivities, as if bent on balancing the good news with the bad). The feature murder story began by alluding to the ‘‘hoarse cries’’ of newspaper vendors about ‘‘another terrible murder’’ that had greeted the crowds waiting for the Lord Mayor’s proces188

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sion to pass. After noting the novelty of a Ripper killing indoors, the reporter described the crime scene in a manner suggesting that he had actually seen the interior of that room: ‘‘The pieces of flesh which had been dimly seen through the grimy window proved inexpressibly more ghastly at a close view. Large pieces of the thighs had been cut off and thrown about with brutal carelessness. Both breasts of the unhappy victim had been removed, and one of them lay on the table alongside a confused and horrible mess of intestines. The throat had been cut with such ferocious and appalling thoroughness that the head was almost severed from the trunk. The body, which was almost naked, had been ripped up and literally disembowelled. The chief organs had been entirely removed; some were thrown upon the floor, and others placed on the table.’’8 After reminding readers that this was ‘‘the same mournful story of want, immorality, and inhuman crime,’’ he interviewed several people who claimed to have seen Kelly on Thursday night. Although several papers were convinced that the killer had removed Kelly’s uterus, the police and their surgeons refused at first to comment on this rumor. Having surveyed the butchery, some reporters mentioned the pathetic sight of the horse and cart carrying Kelly’s torn body to the mortuary in a coffin shell. They also described Warren’s arrival and departure in a carriage, accompanied by Dr. Bond, while a restive crowd surged against the police cordon around Miller’s Court. To allay unnecessary fears, a Central News bulletin stating that no organs were missing made the rounds. As a leader writer in the Daily Chronicle (Nov. 10) put it, the killer had to be a monomaniac who took a ‘‘frenzied delight in absolutely wallowing in blood.’’ Perhaps the fiend’s ‘‘daring’’ behavior would soon lead to his capture. On the other hand, so much time had elapsed between the murder and its discovery that the villain could easily have gone into hiding, diminishing the chances of any bloodhound ever finding a good scent. Two-thirds of the Morning Post’s (Nov. 10) feature story resembled the Daily Chronicle’s version. But the former omitted McCarthy’s and Arnold’s descriptions of the body, and highlighted instead the failure of the bloodhounds to appear, the arrest of two suspects, and Forbes Winslow’s diagnosis of the killer’s mental state. The Evening News (Nov. 10) lived up to its reputation for sensation-horror with four columns of gore beneath a multiple headline that contained such compelling phrases as ‘‘SEVENTH VICTIM SLAUGHTERED’’ and ‘‘HORRIBLE MUTILATION.’’ One headline invoked the overworked passage from Othello: ‘‘ON HORROR’S HEAD HORRORS ACCUMULATE.’’ Stressing both the excitement and the terror coursing through 189

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Whitechapel, this reporter noted that half an hour after the pubs had closed (around 12:30 A.M.) all the ‘‘festive revellers’’ and ‘‘unfortunates’’ had disappeared, leaving the almost empty streets to the amateur and professional detectives. And when they had gone, the darkened pavements resounded with ‘‘the heavy mechanical tread of the blue-coated guardians of the night.’’ Two men had been detained for questioning, but no break in the case seemed near. One tantalizing crosshead—‘‘NO PARTS OF THE BODY ARE MISSING’’—seemed to promise more revelations, but these did not follow, and the reporter focused instead on the time of Kelly’s death.9 The Miller’s Court murder inspired the Pall Mall Gazette (Nov. 10) to unleash another blistering attack on Warren and Matthews. Instead of a front-page article about the state of Kelly’s body, the paper dwelled on the incompetence of the police. Beneath the stark, eloquent, and exaggerated headline ‘‘NUMBER NINE,’’ the writer (who may have been Stead) blamed Scotland Yard for the deaths of ‘‘at least nine women’’ over the last ten months, and then noted how a locked door had enabled the killer to ‘‘indulge . . . his mania for mutilation’’ to the full. ‘‘Short of actually skinning his next victim from head to heel,’’ he observed, ‘‘it is difficult to see what fresh horror is left for him to commit.’’ Whether the murderer was a Malay bent on revenge or a ‘‘debauchee gone mad with excess, possessed by a passion for blood superadded to the mere brutal instinct from which that passion spreads,’’ the police had clearly failed in their duty. Even worse, Warren and Matthews had destroyed ‘‘the machinery for the detection of crime,’’ as well as the only clue (the Goulston Street inscription) that might have led to the killer’s capture. Perhaps it would take an eleventh or twelfth victim to open the eyes of these ineffectual men or force them to resign.10 As for the East End press, the East London Observer (Nov. 10) opted for restraint, concentrating on Kelly’s background and lifestyle rather than the mutilations. This reporter simply stated that the killer had tried to cut off her head and that ‘‘the abdominal wounds’’ resembled those of Eddowes. After pointing out the ‘‘extraordinary coincidence’’ that Chapman had died exactly two months previously, he made fun of Warren’s straying bloodhounds. In fact, this paper assigned more space on November 10 and 17 to the school board elections in Tower Hamlets than to Miller’s Court, and carried no leader about the latest murder. Ripper news ceased altogether in this paper after the 17th. However, the East End News (Nov. 13) surpassed its competitor in this respect by ignoring Kelly’s fate altogether, as though it wanted to avoid any more negative news about Whitechapel.11 On the other hand, the East London Advertiser (Nov. 17) atoned for this studied 190

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neglect with a feature article about the murder scene, the victim’s identity, and the cry of ‘‘murder’’ overheard in Miller’s Court before dawn. The centerpiece of this article was Arnold’s description of the ‘‘Horrible and Sickening Sight’’ that had greeted him on that fateful morning—exactly the same passage carried by the Fleet Street press. The Sunday papers took full advantage of Kelly’s death and treated their readers to lashings of gore. Lloyd’s (Nov. 11) devoted four dense columns to the murder scene and the mutilations. After surveying the surgeons’ initial findings and broaching the issue of missing organs, the Lloyd’s reporter trusted that the truth would be revealed at the inquest. Evidently the police had sifted through the ashes in the fireplace at Miller’s Court hoping to find either burned organs or some other clues—all to no avail. Perhaps the killer had taken one or more organs away with him. Reynolds’s (Nov. 11) tried to outdo its rival by declaring that the murders had ‘‘sent a thrill of horror through the country,’’ and providing readers with four separate descriptions of Kelly’s body on the front page. This report declared unequivocally that the murderer had taken away Kelly’s womb, ‘‘together with other parts of the intestines and genital organs.’’ The ensuing description of the almost severed neck, the bloody heap of organs lying on the bedside table, and the flesh cut from the cheeks, forehead, and thighs left little to the imagination. Evidently, even veteran policemen had found the injuries ‘‘more hideous’’ than anything they had ever seen. Showing more reticence, the Weekly Times (Nov. 11) focused on Kelly’s background and her paramour, Joseph Barnett, and elided the mutilations. A paragraph on the ‘‘PANIC IN WHITECHAPEL,’’ contained glimpses of ‘‘low women with whom the street abounds [who] appear more like fiends than human beings,’’ and of tense crowds milling about aimlessly. After reporting that Warren had offered to pardon any accomplice with information, this writer speculated that the killer might be a Channel-crossing cattledrover or butcher who spent his weekends in London. Then came a Central News report that ‘‘no portion of the murdered woman’s body was taken away.’’ The People (Nov. 11) ran a highly cobbled feature story that opened with the now familiar ‘‘thrill of horror’’ running through London and the country. After dealing with Kelly’s origins, the journalist arrived at the ‘‘revolting sight’’ of her naked and mangled body. He then discussed suspects and the dispute over the time of death. Two small headlines signaled the immediate concerns of the press and the public: ‘‘Organs of the Body Missing’’ and ‘‘Panic in the District.’’ Under the first heading readers learned that ‘‘the 191

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uterus and other organs were, as in previous cases, missing.’’ But then only a few lines later came a flat contradiction: ‘‘No portion of the murdered woman’s body was taken away.’’ In the meantime, excited bystanders were straining to catch a glimpse of Miller’s Court, and there was an almost festive mood among the ‘‘thousands of idlers attracted by morbid curiosity.’’ Editorial Comment On the days following Kelly’s death, most leader writers focused on the elusiveness of the killer and the helplessness of the police while avoiding such awkward questions as the motives behind these crimes. Thus the Globe (Nov. 10) made the obvious point that the ‘‘monster’s’’ move indoors, his knowledge of ‘‘every local twist and corner,’’ his choice of vulnerable victims, and his cunning made it all the harder for the police to catch him. After chiding anyone who faulted the police, this writer wondered why bloodhounds had not been used and speculated about the killer’s occupation. Whether or not the slayings were the work of a single man, the police were obviously doing their best, and needed constructive advice rather than the kind of abuse that was bound to encourage the criminal element. On the latter score, the Star (Nov. 10) could not have disagreed more. A front-page leader, ‘‘WHAT WE THINK,’’ blamed the Ripper’s escape entirely on Warren and Matthews. While the CID was in the hands of a ‘‘clumsy, wilful and . . . ignorant martinet,’’ the Home Office had ‘‘a heedless and helpless’’ man at the helm.12 Following more insults aimed at Scotland Yard, this writer pointed out that no matter how demented, the killer was still clever enough to avoid detection. Perhaps he was a loner living in a city known for ‘‘the isolation of life.’’ He might even be a gentleman, a churchgoer, a clerk, or a dealer in stocks and shares, whose coworkers suspected nothing. Given all the unknowns, said the writer, readers should scrutinize their own friends carefully and look for any traits or habits that might fit this profile. The sooner Warren and Matthews resigned the better because they were widening the gulf between the two Londons. Then came the crucial message: ‘‘Whitechapel is once more to the fore—a grim spectre at our shows and banquets. And there Whitechapel will remain—till modern society alters and there are no more Whitechapels—and no more Pall Malls.’’ Whether or not the killer was ‘‘drunk with an insane love of notoriety,’’ it was clear that in his quest to produce a ‘‘counter-demonstration’’ to the Lord Mayor’s show, he had succeeded beyond all expectation. Of course, the Morning Post (Nov. 10) took just the opposite point of view by defending Scotland Yard and emphasizing the mystery and horror of 192

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Kelly’s death. This writer held out hope that the maniacal killer would soon be arrested, because other monsters, like Williams of Ratcliffe Highway infamy, had given themselves away by their all-consuming ‘‘passion for crime.’’ One of the few papers to invoke the findings of Krafft-Ebing, the Evening News (Nov. 10) called Kelly’s death a case of ‘‘Lust morder [sic],’’ and wondered whether the culprit had an artistic streak because he obviously loved his ‘‘diabolical work’’ and craved attention. ‘‘His art is horror,’’ this paper suggested, ‘‘and he seeks ever to intensify it.’’ Favoring the epilepticmaniac theory, this writer urged medical experts to compile a list of every patient suffering from this condition who had been released over the last two years. Although Jack was neither a ‘‘skilful anatomist’’ nor a ‘‘schoolbred man,’’ the police would never catch him unless they changed their ‘‘time-honoured traditions.’’ Tapping the vein of popular radicalism, Lloyd’s (Nov. 10) spent almost as many words on the failings of Warren and Matthews as on Kelly’s murder. Among other things, the monster, who had now slain six women according to this paper’s count, had made the people of Whitechapel ‘‘panic stricken’’ and hostile toward the police. Moreover, local publicans deeply resented Warren’s recent order to close any pub that had served someone subsequently arrested for drunkenness. Utterly blind to the fact that publicans also disliked drunkards, Warren was determined to ‘‘drill the population into good behaviour,’’ and this goal could only aggravate the already strained relations between the police and the people. During the week following Kelly’s murder, the press concentrated on the one-day inquest, sightings of old and new suspects, the possibility of missing organs, the bumblings of the CID, Warren’s resignation, Kelly’s funeral arrangements, and the time of death.13 Public exasperation over the failure to catch the killer was not the only cross officials had to bear, however. Queen Victoria, who had no love for her Home Secretary, learned of Kelly’s death while at Balmoral. Appalled by ‘‘this new most ghastly murder,’’ she immediately telegraphed Lord Salisbury with a demand for ‘‘some very decisive action’’—including installing gaslights in dark courtyards. She wanted to see the detective force thoroughly overhauled, and reminded the premier that he had promised to raise this matter in cabinet after the Nichols murder.14 On the morning of the Kelly inquest—Monday, November 12—the Times stressed the heavy burden borne by the police assigned to the case. Apparently every constable was dealing with an average of thirty clues or 193

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leads a week, and clerks at Scotland Yard had received at least fourteen hundred letters about the murders since September 30. For reasons that remain unclear, the authorities had ordered the removal of Kelly’s body from Spitalfields (which lay within Coroner Baxter’s jurisdiction) to Shoreditch mortuary, where the coroner for North-East Middlesex, Dr. Roderick Macdonald, who was a Scottish Liberal M.P. for Ross-Shire, a police surgeon, and a medical officer, held sway.15 Because the statutes governing inquests stipulated that the location of the body should determine the coroner’s jurisdiction, the decision to take the inquest out of Baxter’s hands was rather unusual.16 The evening papers on November 12 carried preliminary reports of the inquest, and on the following day almost every paper expressed surprise or dismay over the truncated proceedings. Whether or not he was obeying orders from the Home Office, Macdonald made sure that this inquest was the shortest of any since the demise of Martha Tabram. In their articles about the inquest several papers reported the jurisdictional dispute that took place when one disgruntled juror boldly asked the coroner to explain why the inquiry was not being held in Whitechapel. A nettled Macdonald replied that ‘‘the jurisdiction lies where the body lies, and not where it is found.’’ He then warned any malcontents that ‘‘if they persist in their objections, I know how to deal with them—that is all.’’17 To compensate for the absence of hard news about the murder, the Globe (Nov. 12) discussed suspects and cited a Press Association report that Kelly was Welsh, not Irish. She was also ‘‘an excellent scholar’’ and ‘‘an artist of no mean degree,’’ who had left Cardiff for London, where she had fallen into the clutches of a French lady in Knightsbridge. This madam had corrupted her into leading a ‘‘degraded’’ or ‘‘gay’’ lifestyle that eventually landed her in the East End. The Globe also drew attention to the eccentric Dr. William Holt of Willesden, who supposedly practiced medicine at St. George’s Hospital. Fond of masquerade, he whitened his dark face with a creamy ointment and then smeared streaks of soot over the white. In this weird, Pierrot-like disguise he wandered through Whitechapel pretending to be the Ripper. His performance soon drew a crowd with lynching on its mind, and the police arrived just in time to spare him this fate and escort him to Leman Street station.18 Sensation-horror vied with law-and-order news along Fleet Street. After rebuking the police for withholding information about their investigation and recounting the dispute over the coroner’s jurisdiction, a Star (Nov. 12) reporter gave readers some Gothic glimpses of Kelly’s corpse laid out in the mortuary, where jurors and reporters saw for themselves ‘‘that the pieces 194

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cut from the body had been replaced and sewn up.’’ Although a blanket covered her body and only her face was exposed, the sight ‘‘was ghastly and sickening enough, in all conscience.’’ Back at the inquest in Shoreditch Town Hall, jurors heard Joseph Barnett testify about Kelly’s Irish background, brief marriage, widowhood in Cardiff, her liaison with him, and her promiscuous lifestyle in London.19 An Indian army pensioner, Thomas Bowyer, who worked for Kelly’s landlord, appeared next in the witness box and gave his version of what had happened after he’d gone to Miller’s Court to collect overdue rent from Kelly. What he had seen through the broken windowpane became clear from the Star ’s (Nov. 12) dramatic crosshead: ‘‘TWO LUMPS OF FLESH LYING ON THE TABLE.’’ Then McCarthy testified that Kelly was subdued when sober and talkative when drunk. Evidently, her arrears of rent amounted to twenty-nine shillings. At this point, a subhead assured readers that ‘‘NO PART OF THE BODY IS MISSING,’’ because the surgeons had identified every organ and replaced each one in its original position. Only a day later, however, the Star reversed its stance by announcing emphatically, ‘‘SOME PORTIONS OF THE BODY ARE MISSING.’’ No source was cited for this claim. As for the ‘‘abrupt’’ ending of the inquest, the Star (Nov. 13) regretted that Dr. Phillips, who had examined the body, had not been able to testify about ‘‘the mutilated portions,’’ but conceded that publicizing every detail might hamper ‘‘the ends of justice.’’ The Evening News (Nov. 12) added a new wrinkle by revealing that McCarthy the landlord had received a letter from Jack the Ripper threatening to commit two more murders. This time a mother and daughter would be the victims. Only a few paragraphs later came a denial: McCarthy had never received such a letter. The usual round of murder news followed, ranging from suspects and the inquest to the killer’s boldness, Warren’s offer to pardon any accomplice who came forward, and the pressure on the police to find the killer. Omitting any testimony from the inquest, the Pall Mall Gazette (Nov. 12) finally managed to serve up some gore by means of a visit paid by its ‘‘special correspondent’’ to the mortuary along with the coroner’s jury. Struggling to capture this gruesome scene, he wrote: ‘‘Only her face was visible: the hideous and disembowelled trunk was concealed by the dirty grey cloth, which had probably served to cover many a corpse. The face resembled one of those horrible wax anatomical specimens which may be seen in surgical shops. The eyes were the only vestiges of humanity; the rest was so scored and slashed that it was impossible to say where the flesh began and the cuts ended. And yet it was by no means a horrible sight. I have seen bodies in the Paris Morgue which looked far more repulsive.’’ 195

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He went on to describe the jurors leaving the morgue and having to push their way through the dense crowd of spectators and reporters who followed them down Commercial Road and onto Dorset Street. At the tunnellike entrance to Miller’s Court they ran into another crowd of ‘‘frowzy women with babies in their arms, drunken men recovering from their orgies, and a whole regiment of children all open-mouthed and commenting on the jury.’’ Inside the room of death he overheard a police inspector recount the murder with ‘‘appalling minuteness.’’ Chastened by what they had seen and heard, the jurors returned to Shoreditch to begin ‘‘their very simple labours.’’ According to this reporter, the surgeons had accounted for all of Kelly’s organs and estimated the time of death as between 2 and 3 A.M. In much more prosaic language, the Western Mail (Nov. 12) featured Kelly’s murder by means of a twelve-tiered headline laden with sensational phrases. Relying on a Press Association report, the correspondent for Wales played up Kelly’s Welsh connections by asserting that she had been born in Llanelly and had later lived in Cardiff. Another article dealt with suspects. This paper reprinted virtually the entire article featured in the Pall Mall Gazette on November 9, under the headline ‘‘IS THE MURDERER A MALAY?’’—written by a Mancunian convinced that the Ripper was Malaysian.20 While on Tuesday (Nov. 13) most London dailies featured the abrupt ending of the inquest, they provided somewhat different versions of the terse exchange between the coroner and Dr. Phillips. One or two morning papers revealed that Phillips had just finished attributing the cause of death to the ‘‘severance of the right carotid artery,’’ when the coroner interrupted him to say that he saw no need to enter into ‘‘any further particulars’’ because the jury could always recall him later if necessary. After a short adjournment for lunch, the jurors reconvened and the coroner asked them if they were ready to decide the cause of death. Answering in the affirmative, they promptly returned a verdict of ‘‘wilful murder against some person or persons unknown.’’ Here ended the inquest—with all kinds of big questions unposed and unanswered. As the Star observed, the light shed by the inquest was ‘‘so confused and shifting as to be almost worse than useless,’’ and Macdonald’s decision to bypass the mutilations came in for severe criticism.21 Several papers, convinced that the killer had carried out another crude hysterectomy (this word was not used) on Kelly, hinted at a cover-up by Macdonald. Thus the Daily Telegraph (Nov. 13) insisted that a ‘‘portion of 196

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the bodily organs was missing’’ despite all the official denials, and then announced that more detailed evidence would be presented at a future hearing. The paper also dwelled on suspects, bloodhounds, and the menacing postcard allegedly sent to McCarthy by ‘‘Jack Sheridan, the Ripper.’’ Among other supporters of the missing-organ theory were the Globe and the Evening News (Nov. 13), whose reporter contradicted the assertion of other papers that the surgeons had replaced all the excised organs in the body during an autopsy that had lasted six and a half hours. He then mentioned the latest prime suspect: the dark-complexioned, Jewish-looking man with the dark moustache who had been seen by George Hutchinson outside Miller’s Court on the night of the murder, who seemed affluent in view of his ‘‘long, dark coat trimmed with astrachan [sic],’’ his black necktie with horseshoe pin, and the ‘‘massive gold chain’’ in his waistcoat.22 Although taken aback by the sudden ending of the inquest, the Daily Chronicle (Nov. 13) commended the coroner for suppressing all ‘‘the hideous details’’ of the autopsy. Ignoring the question of missing organs, this paper focused instead on the suspicious men who were seen with Kelly shortly before her death. Following the lead of the Press Association, many papers shifted their attention to the man with the astrakhan-trimmed coat and gold watch-chain. While some papers deplored Macdonald’s handling of the inquest, few raised the possibility that Scotland Yard or the Home Office might have ordered the coroner not to press Phillips for more details about the injuries and not to call Hutchinson to the witness stand.23 True to its radical origins, the Star (Nov. 12) hinted at an official coverup and clamored for more information about missing organs. After berating the police for not having caught the killer, a leader writer pressed the case for social reform in the East End while pointing out one positive byproduct of Kelly’s death: at least the careers of Matthews and Warren were now doomed. Recalling Bloody Sunday, he declared: ‘‘Whitechapel has avenged us for Trafalgar Square, for Coercion in Ireland and in London, for a score [of ] things which are rather more culpable than the failure to take the Whitechapel murderer.’’ Unfortunately, the writer continued, even if both men resigned, the miseries of Whitechapel would remain, because these nightmarish murders arose out of dire poverty, and England had no Zola to capture the plight of the near-starving, joyless, and hopeless unfortunates struggling to survive. If the politicians and working-class leaders bore the main responsibility for alleviating these miseries, only unselfish English democracy could eliminate the ‘‘sweating system’’ and promise ‘‘better things than the horrors which fill our minds to-day.’’ On November 197

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13 the Star hailed Warren’s resignation as the greatest victory for the ‘‘democracy’’ of London since the Hyde Park railings had been torn down in 1867. But if Warren was ‘‘a defeated and discredited man,’’ unfortunately both ‘‘militarism’’ and ‘‘Warrenitis’’ were alive at Scotland Yard. So the battle was not over. Even worse than Warren was Matthews, who had ordered the police to wield their batons against the people in 1886 and 1887. While the Police Commissioner had ‘‘the courage of his mischievous opinions,’’ the Home Secretary lacked both opinions and courage, and because he was driven only by the ‘‘base instinct’’ of self-preservation he simply had to go. To Warren’s aid rushed the Daily Chronicle (Nov. 13), which defended the conduct of the police and the government’s refusal to approve reward money. Attributing Warren’s resignation to a conflict with Matthews over the right to run Scotland Yard as he saw fit, a leader writer praised the Commissioner’s military qualities, along with his sympathy for ‘‘inferior races’’ in the colonies. Although the Sunday papers on November 11 carried long feature articles about Kelly’s murder, they had to wait another week to assemble and print all the horrific details. Not until the 18th did Lloyd’s convey the full extent of the carnage in Miller’s Court, beneath a bold multiple headline that contained the line ‘‘MORE REVOLTING MUTILATION THAN EVER.’’ Like the People’s coverage on the previous Sunday, this article highlighted Superintendent Arnold’s description of the murder scene. After recounting the removal of the corpse to Shoreditch mortuary, the reporter added one grisly detail found in few other papers: shortly after a horse-drawn van had taken the coffin away, a police detective emerged onto Dorset Street carrying a bucket covered by a newspaper that contained portions of the victim’s viscera.24 Interviews with McCarthy and a few of Kelly’s friends revealed that she was too poor to escape her degraded lifestyle and return to Ireland. This reporter denied the ‘‘pathetic story’’ that Kelly was the mother of a small boy. Reynolds’s (Nov. 18) covered much the same terrain in even greater detail, focusing on the mutilations, suspects, and lack of any clues. Surpassing in verbiage both Lloyd’s and Reynold’s, the People (Nov. 18) devoted over seven columns to the murder and the inquest, including sketches of the crime scene, a map of the seven murder sites, and quotations from the inquest. This long report contained no mention of any missing organs. For its part, the Weekly Times (Nov. 18) summarized the inquest, lingered briefly over the mutilations, and disclosed Hutchinson’s last sighting of Kelly talking to the dark-complexioned gentleman. 198

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Scotland Yard’s refusal to divulge information about the steps being taken to catch the killer meant that Fleet Street had to fall back on news of suspects, people who had seen Kelly on the eve of her death, questions about the inquest, and the rift between Matthews and Warren. The latter’s resignation, as well as a rancorous debate in the House of Commons on November 14 over the annual estimates for the Metropolitan police, brought the discourse of law and order again to the fore. By the middle of the month, however, Kelly’s murder had started to recede into the background, and reporters were emphasizing instead the threats to life, limb, and property in an underpoliced metropolis. While the Daily Telegraph (Nov. 13) declared Warren unfit for his former office owing to his ignorance of London, the Morning Post (Nov. 13) noted that even though he had tendered his resignation on November 8, the government had not accepted it until the 10th.25 Running low on Ripper news, the Daily Chronicle (Nov. 17) deplored the squalor of Whitechapel’s lodging houses and urged strict enforcement of the laws against overcrowding and unsanitary conditions because so many people were living in conditions unfit even for horses. On November 15 the Morning Post, starved of Ripper news, sounded the alarm of law and order by reporting on the debate at Westminster over the police estimates, and accusing Radical M.P.s of fomenting violence and encouraging hostility to the police. Without bothering to mention the Whitechapel murders, one leader writer harked back to the Trafalgar Square protests, and accused the ‘‘unscrupulous’’ and ‘‘contemptible’’ demonstrators of lacking any worthy goals and seeking only to ‘‘cast odium’’ on the police. Because Radical M.P.s had supported this mob, the government had every right to ban ‘‘disorderly meetings,’’ especially when they interfered with the business or freedom of law-abiding citizens. In the week after the Kelly inquest, tensions in Whitechapel evidently remained high. A strange man with a black bag drew a threatening crowd on Tower Street, but the police found nothing suspicious in his bag. Even this nonevent earned a few lines in some papers.26 On November 16 both the Daily Chronicle and the Pall Mall Gazette used the same phrase to sum up the police investigation: ‘‘The murderer appears as far from justice as ever.’’ Nothing was said about any missing organs. Inundated with suggestions from the public about how to catch the killer, the police were not only stymied but weary. Amidst all the silences and wild rumors in the press, two tiny news items vied for attention: Kelly’s funeral was set for Monday, October 19, at Chingford cemetery, and landlord McCarthy was 199

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complaining about his loss of income because the police were still guarding the entrance to Miller’s Court and preventing prospective tenants from renting his rooms.27 Fleet Street had a hard time keeping the Ripper story alive after November 15, for two obvious reasons. First, the principal actor had gone into seclusion and no one knew for how long. Second, the police continued their information blackout on the steps being taken to track him down. In the meantime, the quasi-judicial inquiry by a special commission into charges of complicity between Parnellism and political or agrarian crime in Ireland was dominating the front pages of most national papers. The space assigned to the murders fell off rapidly after the Kelly inquest, and the few tidbits of Ripper news—such as Kelly’s funeral—appeared as short fillers at the foot of some other article. On November 17 the Evening News managed to print only eight lines about the murders along with Warren’s letter of resignation. And for the entire week of November 17, the Morning Post could compile no more than half a column of Ripper news, compared with the Daily Telegraph’s one-third of a column for the same period. Even the Star started to lose interest in the murders once the flurry of excitement over the inquest and missing organs had abated. During the same week, the Star merely mentioned a few new suspects and encounters by frightened women with Ripper impersonators. Shunning sensation-horror, the East London Advertiser (Nov. 24) published a poignant article about Kelly’s funeral procession to Leytonstone, during which a dense crowd of mourners, many of them women in tears, stretched out their arms to touch the handsome coffin as it passed by.28 The paper also carried a story about another ‘‘supposed outrage’’ in Whitechapel, involving a woman who had apparently been murdered in a manner similar to Kelly. Only a few lines later came a complete retraction. Apparently, this ‘‘ordinary’’ assault on an unfortunate named ‘‘Tillie’’ or ‘‘Flossie’’ (later identified as Annie Farmer) by a tall, dark man whom she had known for a year turned out to be rather extraordinary. Seeking to extort money from her client, she cut her throat slightly and then screamed that she was being attacked by the Ripper.29 Despite the decline in Ripper news after mid-November, the mysterious villain and his deeds continued to cast a long shadow over Whitechapel for years, indeed generations, to come. The Volume of Ripper Verbiage Apart from all the sensation-horror and mystery, the most obvious feature of Ripper news was the sheer volume of space assigned to the slayings, the 200

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inquests, and the police investigation. For four or five days after each murder and for one or two days after each inquest session, most papers gave big headlines and multiple columns to the story. But when the police put a lid on their investigation and the latest suspects were released, the coverage naturally dwindled in size and prominence, only to be revived whenever another murder or inquest session took place. To appreciate the extent and variety of Ripper news over time, I have measured the length of articles devoted to each murder over the ensuing week in a sample of eight dailies and four weeklies. Because the number of words per column-inch varied so widely between one paper and another, owing to different font sizes and line spacings, only rough estimates of the number of words contained in each column can be provided.30 These measurements reveal considerable variance between the space assigned by competing papers to each murder. As figure 3 shows, most of the eight dailies in our sample gave roughly twice as much space to Chapman’s murder as to Nichols’s.31 Then, during the first week of October, five of these papers devoted over twice as many words again to the double event, while the Globe, Morning Post, and Pall Mall Gazette increased their Ripper verbiage more than fivefold compared to the Nichols case.32 The curtailing of the Kelly inquest and Scotland Yard’s refusal to divulge the details of the mutilations meant that the space allotted to the final murder fell just below the levels of the Chapman coverage in half of our sample.33 In terms of individual papers, the upmarket Morning Post and Times devoted a total of 81 columns to all five murders, compared with 115 for the lower-brow Evening News and Star. As figure 4 reveals, the Daily Chronicle, Daily Telegraph, and Evening News lived up to their reputation for gore by expending a combined total of 383,600 words on the murders during these four weeks, compared with 189,800 words for the smaller-circulation Globe, Morning Post, and Pall Mall Gazette. To take two of the extremes in our sample of dailies, the Daily Telegraph produced a grand total of 72 columns of Ripper news over 24 issues, compared with the Pall Mall Gazette’s 46 columns in the same period—amounting to a difference of some 90,000 words. The sheer quantity of the Daily Telegraph’s coverage may help to explain why it boasted the highest circulation (roughly 300,000) of any morning paper in London. Counting all the columns devoted to the five murders in these eight dailies, we arrive at figure 5, which displays the expected sharp rise in the volume of news after the discovery of each body. Here the combined totals rose from 30 columns for Nichols (September 1 to 7) to 101 for Chapman 201

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Figure 3 Total number of words devoted to each Ripper murder in daily newspapers

(September 8 to 14), and then soared to 214 for Stride and Eddowes (October 1 to 6). With Kelly’s death (November 10 to 16), however, the number of columns assigned fell back to 105. This table reveals the towering peak of Ripper news attained by the double event during the first two days of October, compared with which the other peaks look almost like foothills. The decrescendo pattern of Ripper news four or five days after each murder emerges clearly from these measurements, which, of course, fail to take into account the coverage of subsequent inquest sessions. Counting the coverage of the five murders on an individual basis, the Daily Chronicle led the field with 80 columns, followed by the Daily Telegraph (72), the Evening News (61), the Globe (55), the Star (55), the Pall Mall Gazette (46), the Times (45), and the Morning Post (36). Despite its reputation for thorough coverage of the murders, in terms of 202

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Figure 4 Total number of words devoted to Ripper coverage in daily newspapers

word count the Pall Mall Gazette occupies last place in our sample, if only because Stead refused to carry transcripts of the testimony given at each inquest. The relatively modest amount of Ripper verbiage in the Gazette may be explained in part by its smaller size and larger typeface.34 But if this paper contained the least Ripper news in our sample, the space taken up by the murders constituted a higher percentage of the paper’s news stories and leaders on certain days than in most other dailies. As for the total verbiage expended on the Whitechapel murders—from the discovery of Nichols’s body on August 31 to the aftermath of Kelly’s murder on November 16—the Times published roughly 113,000 words about the murders and related topics (including leaders) during these months, as compared with the 81,500 words published by the Pall Mall Gazette during the same period. What these summary column and word counts fail to reveal is the steep decline in the volume of Ripper news once the initial shock of each murder abated and the inquests had ended. When there were no new bodies to describe and reporters ran out of unusual suspects or exciting angles, Ripper news fell off sharply, and it took another inquest session to produce a feature article as distinct from a filler or short notice buried amidst other news stories. Only a week after the double event, Ripper news shrank to well under two columns in the Daily Telegraph, Globe, and Morning Post, and less than one column in the Pall Mall Gazette and Times. One week 203

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Figure 5 Total column inches devoted to Ripper coverage in eight daily newspapers

after Kelly’s death, none of these papers could muster a full column about the Whitechapel mystery. By Saturday, November 17, the Daily Telegraph, Pall Mall Gazette, and Times had run out of Ripper news altogether, and neither the Morning Post nor the Star could assemble more than a short paragraph. Not surprisingly, the longest articles occurred when missing organs, the Lusk kidney, or a new suspect made an appearance, or when such topics coincided with an inquest session or a background article about conditions in Whitechapel. The Sunday press also exploited the murders to the fullest extent. Figure 6 reveals the volume of Ripper news in four leading weeklies on selected Sundays following each murder. Here the Chapman, Stride, and Eddowes murders assume a commanding lead in verbiage compared with the first and last murders. Including editorials and letters to the editor, Lloyd’s dominated its rivals with a total of 61 columns, followed by the People with 57, Reynolds’s with 35, and the Weekly Times with 32. As for total verbiage, the same rank order prevailed, with Lloyd’s topping the list (89,000 words), 204

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Figure 6 Total number of words devoted to each Ripper murder in Sunday newspapers

followed by the People (80,000), Reynolds’s (74,000), and, lagging far behind, the Weekly Times (48,000). Of course, the curtailing of the Kelly inquest goes far to account for the much smaller number of columns assigned to her murder. All these measurements illustrate the way Fleet Street shifted into higher gear with Chapman, whose death received overall almost six times as many columns as Nichols’s (a total of 10 for Nichols and 62 for Chapman). In Reynolds’s, the verbiage fell off slightly—from 27,300 words for Chapman (3 issues) to 26,600 for Stride and Eddowes (4 issues), compared with 16,700 for Kelly 205

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(2 issues). A comparison of the daily and Sunday press reveals just how much attention the latter devoted to the murders in their entirety. Over the course of ten editions, the four Sunday papers published a total of some 290,600 words about the murders, compared with the sum of 455,700 words in the four leading dailies (the Daily Chronicle, Daily Telegraph, Evening News, and Globe) over the course of twenty-four editions. As for single-issue coverage, no paper in our sample came close to the special edition of Lloyd’s of October 7, wherein 15.4 columns (22,500 words) were lavished on the double event. At the height of each murder, Ripper news thus constituted a substantial proportion of each paper’s domestic news, especially if the bold multiple headlines in the penny press are counted. If the upmarket morning papers could not match the mass-circulation papers in their volume of Ripper news, they did not exactly starve their readers of sensation-horror during these three harrowing months. Behind all these numbers, of course, lay the myriad decisions of editors and reporters about the layout of each edition and the content of each article—a subject about which we are, alas, condemned to almost complete ignorance. Epilogue For some years after 1888, any knife attack on a woman in the metropolis spurred Fleet Street to revive the specter of the Ripper. Not even the absence of a slashed throat and abdominal mutilations deterred journalists from forcing the murder of a prostitute in the East End into the Ripper mold. Thus on Christmas Eve several papers highlighted the violent death of an unfortunate named ‘‘Lizzie’’ in Poplar. Although she had been strangled with a rope, and Phillips refused to comment on the case, this did not stop the Star (Dec. 24) from quoting the doctor as having stated that this was ‘‘THE WORK OF THE SAME MAN.’’ The paper also used a three-tiered headline—‘‘IS HE A THUG?/ A STARTLING LIGHT ON THE WHITECHAPEL CRIMES / THE ROPE BEFORE THE KNIFE’’—to connect these murders. The author of this fanciful piece floated the theory that the culprit was an Indian ‘‘Thug,’’ or worshiper of Kali, who knew how to kill silently and swiftly. To prop up this notion he adduced ten points of resemblance between the Whitechapel and Poplar murders, without once admitting that Lizzie had been neither jugulated nor mutilated. Within a day or two this crude form of Orientalism had vanished from the Star. Few papers showed more persistence and ingenuity in prolonging the life of the Ripper saga than the Pall Mall Gazette. Having exulted over 206

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Warren’s departure, Stead insisted in a leader (Nov. 13) that he bore the Police Commissioner no personal antipathy, and even considered him quite a capable, public-spirited, and courageous man. But his tenure at Scotland Yard had been ‘‘a disastrous failure.’’ Wondering why the Home Secretary had thrown him to the wolves and who would succeed him, Stead made clear that the wolves were now howling for Matthews’s head, because he had played Assistant Police Commissioner Monro of the CID off against Warren in a manner ‘‘unworthy of an English gentleman.’’ The sooner Matthews resigned the better for all concerned.35 Criticism of the top law enforcement officials almost obscured the little news trickling in from Whitechapel. Two articles in the Gazette (Nov. 15 and 16) dealt with the extent of pauperism and homelessness there, as well as several new suspects and Kelly’s funeral. On the 19th a reporter suggested that the murderer might be a man from Manchester or Birmingham who commuted by rail to London to gratify his lethal desires.36 After a short lull in Ripper news, the paper ran a feature article (Nov. 21) that tried to tie the ‘‘fearful’’ attack and mutilation of a woman on Flower and Dean Street—Annie Farmer—to the previous murders. But just as with the false alarm in the East London Advertiser (Nov. 24), this reporter had to recant the entire story. Challenged by the Ripper’s dormancy, the Gazette (Nov. 26) composed several macabre stories, one of which consisted of a long letter written by ‘‘Jack the Ripper’s Pal.’’ Alternating between remorse over his crimes and a maniacal desire to ‘‘burn or blow all those dens down, and all those filthy low women in them,’’ this self-styled accomplice of ‘‘the wild wretch’’ blamed his friend Jack (a Bavarian) for having cast a spell that drove him to murder women.37 A satirical reporter announced that the police were now worried lest the waxen models of animals and human organs on display in the windows of medical or surgical supply stores inspire morbid men to kill and mutilate women. Under the headline ‘‘THE HORRORS OF THE SHOW WINDOWS,’’ he supplied a price list of anatomical models that ranged from a wax man ‘‘showing 2,000 objects of detail’’ and priced at £120, to a hen’s egg 148 times bigger than life-size, a horse with ‘‘3,000 objects of detail’’ and ninety-seven removable pieces, and a wax gorilla also costing £120. One could also obtain the waxen brain of a man for eight pounds and that of a chimpanzee for the bargain price of one pound four shillings. A few days later (Dec. 1) Stead ran a front-page article entitled ‘‘THE WHITECHAPEL DEMON’S NATIONALITY AND WHY HE COMMITTED THE MURDERS.’’ Beneath the byline ‘‘One Who Thinks He Knows,’’ the author tried to decode the Goulston Street inscription by turning the word ‘‘Juwes’’ 207

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into ‘‘Juives,’’ which meant that the murderer had to be a French practitioner of black magic and necromancy. Prostitute murder, he believed, was ‘‘peculiarly a French crime,’’ because the French proletariat despised whores as well as Jews. Invoking the French master of magic who used the alias ‘‘Eliphaz Levy,’’ he suggested that the killer required a number of exotic and erotic objects in order to carry out his ‘‘unholy rites.’’ One vital ingredient for his black-magic casserole was ‘‘a certain portion of the body of a harlot.’’ Although he refrained from naming this organ (presumably the uterus), he did reveal that the recipe called for candles made from human fat, the head of a black cat, and strips of skin taken from a suicide. He argued that these had to be ritual killings because the six murder sites formed a ‘‘perfect cross’’ running from Buck’s Row to Mitre Square along one axis and from Hanbury Street to Berner Street along the other.38 As the year drew to a close, even the Pall Mall Gazette had trouble cooking up Ripper news. But Fleet Street refused to abandon such rare sensation-horror without a struggle. The ripple effect of the Ripper murders reached down into Hampshire at the end of November, when the body of an eight-year-old boy, Percy Knight Searle, was found with four knife wounds in his neck in the small town of Havant. At first local people thought that Jack had done this dread deed, and one eccentric suspect seen in the vicinity of the crime was called ‘‘the Ripper.’’ Suspicion soon focused on Searle’s young friend Robert Husband, who had accompanied him on the fatal night and who alleged that a tall man had attacked his companion. Skeptical of this story, the police arrested and imprisoned him. At the inquest, another youth testified that he had overheard Husband exclaim shortly before the murder: ‘‘Here comes Jack the Ripper.’’ As it turned out, the murder weapon belonged to his brother. Bond performed the autopsy and ruled out any connection with the Whitechapel slayings, because the crude cuts suggested a weapon more like a blunt bayonet than a sharp knife. Despite the fact that Husband had washed his hands after returning home, and notwithstanding the presence of bloodstains on his shirt, the Winchester assize jury found him not guilty and the so-called Havant murder went unsolved.39 Another abortive Ripper scare ran through the town of Bradford after Christmas, when the mutilated body of a boy, John Gill, was found in a stable yard on December 28 ‘‘with his legs, ears, and other members cut off,’’ as the Pall Mall Gazette (Dec. 29) put it. Once again several papers rushed to judgment by pinning this murder on Jack, even though the victim was a young male and the body had been dismembered in order to make a 208

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smaller bundle. The likeliest suspect was a milkman who had befriended the lad, but he managed to escape indictment even though bloodstains had been found on his clothing and the coroner’s jury deemed him guilty of the crime.40 On the last day of the year the Pall Mall Gazette announced that a police inspector along with six detectives and two clerks had gone to New York via Montreal to track down the Whitechapel murderer. But no more was heard about this transatlantic task force.41 In mid-January 1889 several papers reported that an Englishman suspected of being the Ripper had been arrested in Tunis along with a ‘‘band of robbers and assassins.’’ According to the French police, Alfred Gray had several tattoos on his arms, including a naked woman and the letters ‘‘M’’ and ‘‘P’’—supposedly standing for Mary Kelly and Polly Nichols.42 Early in February some papers reported the ‘‘butchery’’ of six prostitutes in Managua, Nicaragua, in a manner reminiscent of the Ripper. The absence of robbery and the presence of severe mutilations moved some reporters to surmise that either the Ripper had emigrated to Central America or he had inspired a vicious imitator.43 Of much greater interest to the London press and the public were the murders of two more unfortunates in Whitechapel during July and September 1889. A police constable found the first body in Castle Alley, High Street, before dawn on July 17. According to the Times, she was around forty years old and belonged to ‘‘the poorest class.’’ Blood oozed from two deep stab wounds in her throat, as well as one long and several short superficial cuts on the abdomen and below the navel. Eager to tie this murder to the Ripper, Fleet Street resorted to banner headlines and feature articles filled with gore. The victim was soon identified as Alice ‘‘Clay Pipe’’ McKenzie, a washerwoman who smoked a pipe.44 After Drs. Brown and Phillips had examined her body at the murder site, Scotland Yard asked Bond to take part in the autopsy, held in a shedlike morgue. Once again Bond disagreed with Phillips, who saw no evidence of a link to the Ripper murders. The former contended that the injuries showed the same ‘‘sudden onslaught on the prostrate woman, the throat skilfully & resolutely cut with subsequent mutilation, each mutilation indicating sexual thoughts & a desire to mutilate the abdomen & sexual organs.’’45 Most papers featured the inquest held by Coroner Baxter at the Working Lads Institute. In its usual fashion, the Times ( July 19) skimmed over the abdominal wounds and concentrated on the deep knife thrusts in the throat, which bore little resemblance to the Ripper’s handiwork. Like Macdonald at the Kelly 209

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inquest, the coroner fended off further questions by declaring that the doctor wanted to ‘‘reserve’’ any further medical points until later. Despite the belief of Bond and Monro, the new Chief Commissioner, that Jack had struck again, the authorities backed Phillips, and the inquest ended with the familiar verdict of ‘‘wilful murder by person(s) unknown.’’46 Several months later another Ripper alarm went off after a policeman discovered the headless and legless body of a woman, also aged around forty, clad only in a torn chemise, under a railway arch on Pinchin Street, Whitechapel. The bloody trunk lay in a dark and dirty recess where homeless men often slept. Unlike the Whitehall body there was ‘‘a deep gash [in the abdomen] through which the bowels were protruding.’’ Jumping to the conclusion that the Ripper had struck again, the Times (Sept. 11, 1889) stressed the public’s growing unease in an article beneath the modest headline ‘‘ANOTHER MURDER AND MUTILATION IN WHITECHAPEL.’’ Hesitating to credit the Ripper with this murder, the Times pointed to signs of panic in the East End because people were convinced that Jack was back in business. The Times’s headline did not come close to matching the Pall Mall Gazette ’s (Sept. 10) four-line shocker: ‘‘LATEST EAST-END HORROR / A WOMAN MURDERED AND MUTILATED / THE VICTIM’S HEAD AND ARMS CUT OFF / THE TRUNK FOUND IN A SACK.’’ Alongside this article was a map of the presumed nine Ripper murder sites, which implied that the same culprit had done them all. The next day a Gazette leader writer argued that ‘‘Whitechapel is becoming so blasé with murder’’ that the discovery of this body ‘‘hardly caused a ripple of emotion in the East-end murderland.’’47 Once again the victim was a destitute and presumably alcoholic woman in her early forties. Unlike McKenzie, however, she had sustained not only amputations and beheading but also a huge gash in the pelvic area, which prompted the police to hypothesize that an ‘‘illegal operation’’ (abortion) had gone wrong and the culprit had dismembered the body to conceal that crime. At the inquest, held by Wynne Baxter in the Vestry Hall, Cable Street, on September 11 and 24, Constable William Pennett testified about finding the corpse and the police surgeons presented their autopsy report. Phillips attributed the cause of death to loss of blood and denied that the cuts indicated ‘‘anatomical knowledge,’’ although he admitted that the killer might have worked as a butcher.48 The jury returned a verdict of ‘‘wilful murder by some person(s) unknown,’’ and the slayer of another poor woman went unpunished. Like the Westminster trunk, this headless and nameless victim denied journalists an opportunity to create a narrative, 210

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even one based on the flimsiest rumors. They could not even describe her facial features and clothing. As a leader in the Times (Sept. 11) pointed out, this murder had conferred even more ‘‘ghastly notoriety upon a narrow area in Whitechapel.’’ Clearly, the police faced a difficult task if they wanted to ‘‘avert the disgrace to our civilization’’ of yet another unsolved murder that constituted a ‘‘social reproach and disgrace’’ to the entire country no matter who was to blame.49 After the murder of Kelly, Fleet Street continued to keep its ever-watchful eye on women attacked or menaced in the East End. For example, the Daily Chronicle (Nov. 17) recounted the harrowing experience of a young servant girl who had allowed a strange man to walk with her in Notting Hill. When she tried to get away, he pressed a chloroformed handkerchief against her face and rendered her senseless. After pointing out the girl’s naïveté in view of the Whitechapel ‘‘bogey,’’ this reporter demanded that any miscreant who exploited the murders by acting as if he were Jack be severely punished. On the same day, the Star announced that a young Canadian tourist had been arrested in Liverpool for attacking a wax figure of Jack the Ripper on display in a Tussaud-like museum. Shortly after landing, he had gone to see this waxen image of the presumed killer, whereupon he began striking it with his fists. The magistrate was not amused, and fined him damages as well as costs for destroying property. Long after 1888 the epithet ‘‘Jack the Ripper’’ remained a signifier of deep importance especially for women. During the historic London dockers’ strike of 1889, some dock owners and managers were publicly vilified as ‘‘Jack the Ripper.’’ John Burns, the popular socialist leader, who organized and addressed rallies in support of the strike, liked to tell the story of his brief encounter with the police at this time. Apparently some ardent female supporters had hailed him on the street with cries of ‘‘Jack, Jack.’’ Thinking that they had finally caught up with the Ripper, two policemen rushed forward to collar Burns. At that point several hundred angry women charged the police in an effort to save their leader from arrest, and Burns was forced to rescue the two constables from their fierce clutches.50 Another Ripper alarm went off on February 13, 1891, after a policeman discovered the body of an unfortunate, Frances Coles (alias Coleman or Hawkins), lying underneath a railway arch in Swallow Gardens, Whitechapel, with her throat cut. Amidst more speculation about the return of the Ripper, the police surgeons ruled out any connection to the 1888 murders.51 Lacking even the faintest link to the Ripper, this case soon faded from the papers. But in 1894 the body of a nameless young woman was 211

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found in a London suburb with her throat cut. Shortly thereafter the police received a letter from ‘‘Jack the Ripper.’’ This time the police traced the letter to a sixteen-year-old youth who had fled to Ireland, where he surrendered. In police custody back in London he admitted that he had lived in a home for retarded children, often heard strange voices, and was fascinated by the Whitechapel murders.52 Some eighty years later, a young working-class man from Bingley, Yorkshire, began visiting a wax museum of famous English men and women at the seaside resort of Morecambe, Lancashire, thirty miles south of Blackpool. What drew him there were not the likenesses of Queen Victoria, Disraeli, Sir Anthony Eden, and other eminents, but a Chamber of Horrors upstairs filled with such villains as Dr. Crippen, Reginald Christie, Neville Heath, and, of course, Jack the Ripper. Of special interest to this obsessive young man were the specimen female torsos—life-size, headless, and legless—in the so-called Museum of Anatomy, where he could gaze long and lovingly at a Victorian scientific display of the ‘‘nine stages of pregnancy.’’ In a small annex beyond the ‘‘Macabre Torso Room’’ he could also fix his gaze on candle-wax models of ‘‘burning venereal sores and hives’’ and ‘‘rotting penises.’’ This scopophilic man soon picked up a dose of venereal disease from a prostitute, and while working at a mortuary he would ‘‘borrow’’ the cheap jewelry left on female cadavers in his care. This obsessive-compulsive voyeur was, of course, Peter Sutcliffe, who earned the sobriquet of the ‘‘Yorkshire Ripper’’ during his brutal attacks on some thirteen women during the late 1970s. Although he used a sharpened chisel or screwdriver to stab his victims and a ball-peen hammer to fracture their skulls, the media had no problem labeling him a latter-day Ripper. Feature stories in newspapers and television drove many women into a panic akin to that of 1888. Whatever impression those waxen images of syphilitic genitalia may have had on this psychopathic misogynist, there can be little doubt that Sutcliffe’s obsessions owed much to the mythos of the Whitechapel fiend that Fleet Street had bequeathed to posterity.53

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Chapter Ten

The Inquests REPORTING THE FEMALE BODY

In newspaper parlance, the ‘‘body’’ of a story comprises everything after the opening sentences. As one reporter has observed, these bodies, ‘‘when properly written, flow smoothly and logically from their leads,’’ forming thereby ‘‘complete stories.’’1 In the case of the Ripper reportage, the stories were far from complete, and the core of many a ‘‘body’’ comprised the injuries done to the body of each victim. Often couched in clinical language, these images of violence belonged to the well-established tradition of prurient or sensation-horror journalism. In some respects, these descriptions resembled the subgenre of paintings depicting the nude corpses of women lying on a table in some laboratory or dissecting room—except that those dead bodies were invariably young, beautiful, and intact. Referring to the classic nude, John Berger once noted that women are ‘‘born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men,’’ and men habitually ‘‘survey women before treating them.’’2 In a roughly analogous manner, the journalistic and graphic images of the Ripper’s victims at the crime scene or in the morgue reinforced their utter lack of power and also their objectification by the male gaze. From the outset, Ripper news was charged with 213

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high-voltage currents of gender difference as well as the pervasive sexuality that swirled around prostitution. Given the stark contrast between female victim and male killer as well as the wholly masculine makeup of the press corps and the police, and taking into account the symptoms of perverted lust in the mutilations, the sexual implications of these crimes were as inescapable as they were baffling. In a canonical article, the feminist film critic Laura Mulvey argued that the phallocentric male viewer derives scopophilic pleasure from watching a beautiful young female in films because her penis-lacking (or castrated) body exemplifies sexual difference while serving as the object of erotic desire. In her view, scopophilia always involves the subjection of women to a ‘‘controlling and curious gaze.’’ In extreme cases this gaze becomes ‘‘fixated into a perversion, producing obsessive voyeurs and Peeping Toms, whose only sexual satisfaction can come from watching, in an active controlling sense, an objectified other.’’ Although she later qualified this argument in order to accommodate the ‘‘transvestite’’ position of some female viewers, she regarded the ‘‘fetishistic-scopophilic look’’ of the male as an essential part of the pleasure derived from the filmic text.3 Whether or not one accepts her argument about the sadistic nature of this pleasure, we may safely assume that the burden of sexual repression in the Victorian era meant that every part of the female body was sexualized and therefore constituted an object of desire even when the women in question were not beautiful.4 In short, male readers of Ripper news could hardly avoid fixating on the bodies of the victims ravaged by the phallic knife. Of course, we shall never know whether any pangs of guilt ever troubled the scopophiles who pored over newspaper accounts of the testimony given by the surgeons involved in the autopsies.5 Since the newspapers carried no photographs of the victims’ bodies lying in the morgue (some of these were first published by Donald Rumbelow in 1975), male readers were denied the intense voyeuristic pleasure provided by the police camera, and had to settle instead for what they saw in crude prints published by the Illustrated Police News and other ‘‘graphic’’ periodicals.6 In addition, readers had ample opportunity to use their imaginations when reading the gruesome testimony of the police surgeons at each inquest. Just as the New York press focused on the decomposed body of Mary Rogers found floating in the Hudson River near the Hoboken shoreline in late July 1841, so Fleet Street treated readers to lurid glimpses of each victim’s body as seen through the eyes of reporters who visited the morgue and the police surgeons responsible for interpreting the mutilations.7 Each 214

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victim had, of course, to undergo the close scrutiny of the medical examiners, who acted like forensic detectives trying to read and interpret the mutilations that comprised the only tangible evidence of the Ripper’s character, and arguably his knowledge of surgery or anatomy. At the same time, the focus of some papers on the ‘‘abdominal’’ injuries (the term ‘‘pelvic’’ was hardly ever used) gave the public a chance to indulge in sensationhorror on a scale rarely if ever experienced before. As Sara Knox has observed in another context, ‘‘the visceral text is a tale of murder told on the body.’’8 The gruesome messages inscribed by the killer on the bodies of his victims kept the police and readers alike baffled and enthralled. In the course of the Ripper saga, the telling or revealing of those ‘‘visceral texts’’ had to await the inquests, and no little mystery surrounds the decision to prolong or shorten these crucial legal inquiries. Why did Nichols’s inquest run to four sessions, Chapman’s to five, Stride’s to five, Eddowes’s to two, and Kelly’s to only one? The two victims with the severest injuries thus received the shortest shrift from the coroner and his jurors. Did Coroner Baxter prolong the Nichols, Chapman, and Stride inquests because he enjoyed the limelight more than Coroner Langham, whose subject (Eddowes) was so terribly mutilated? Or did Baxter put the interests of forensic science ahead of his own considerable ego? We will never know.9 Judging from the printed word, only a few editors seem to have worried unduly about publishing extracts from the medical evidence provided at the inquests, even though the mutilations pushed them well beyond the old boundaries of what was deemed unfit to print. Nevertheless, the pelvic cuts and disemboweling, as well as the removal of the uterus in at least two cases, posed an awkward problem for some editors, who were accustomed to bullet wounds and fractured skulls. Fleet Street’s treatment of the genital mutilations had something in common with the media’s handling of the John Wayne Bobbitt case in 1993 and President Clinton’s dalliance with Monica Lewinsky in the White House during 1996–97. In both instances, the ‘‘juiciest’’ parts of the story revolved around the membra virilis, which gave rise to a rash of scatological jokes. Both cases forced the media to push the envelope of clinical candor to the outer limits. Even the staid New York Times had to spell out what Lorena Bobbitt had done to her abusive husband with a kitchen knife on the night of June 23, 1993.10 As for ‘‘Monicagate,’’ the New York Times (Sept. 22, 1998) resorted to such euphemisms as ‘‘interplay’’ in order to avoid mentioning fellatio in the Oval Office. This paper also failed to explain how Monica’s blue dress had become ‘‘notoriously stained,’’ or what Clinton had done with one of his cigars.11 215

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Similarly, the Ripper’s mutilations spurred Fleet Street to print details that were bound to distress some readers—not all of them women. In general, the higher-brow press relied more heavily on euphemism and elision than did the mass-circulation papers. The paucity of letters to the editor complaining about all the gore suggests that few readers had strenuous objections. Hunger for sensation-horror seems to have overcome any momentary repulsion over graphic accounts of the injuries. In their probing study of the cultural dynamics of sexual murder, Deborah Cameron and Elizabeth Frazer discuss crime literature that ‘‘stresses the pleasures of transgression and cruelty instead of the dangers attendant on sin.’’12 Whatever their views on sin, editors knew that ‘‘good’’ murders sold papers, and they must have sensed that images of violence aroused much less guilt or shame than those of sex. For their part, most readers were used to stories of death by knife, rope, blunt instrument, rifle, revolver, or poison, but they seemed to prefer a blend of the language of the drawing room and the morgue. In practice, this meant omitting most of the arcane terms of the medical profession and suppressing allusions to either sexual activity or ‘‘the organs of generation.’’ In sum, editors adhered to what Edward Carpenter once called ‘‘the ‘impure hush’ in matters of sex.’’ As the Lipski case had made clear, Fleet Street had few qualms about reporting violence done to the body except when the private parts and signs of sexual activity before or after death were concerned. Needless to say, the autopsied remains of these aging, alcoholic prostitutes presented a stark contrast to the female cadavers featured in the paintings of Gabriel Max, John Wilkes Brodnax, and Enrique Simonet, who seemed fascinated by the relationship of the surgeon to the nubile woman stretched full-length on the table.13 Whether or not Elisabeth Bronfen is right to contend that ‘‘the feminine body is culturally constructed as the superlative site of alterity,’’ and that male artists ‘‘Othered’’ young women in death in ways that ‘‘visualise even as they conceal what is too dangerous to articulate openly but too fascinating to repress successfully,’’ the fact remains that a world of difference exists between the beautiful cadaver in Max’s Der Anatom (1869) and the mutilated bodies autopsied by the police surgeons in dingy dissecting rooms after each murder in 1888. In death as in life, the Ripper’s victims had little in common with the pristine femininity expressed in these highly romantic paintings.14 The recent work of feminist historians on the theory and practice of gynecology and obstetrics in Great Britain has drawn attention to the fascination as well as ignorance of Victorian doctors and anatomists about 216

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the differences between masculine and feminine physiology, not to mention emotions. Leaving aside ‘‘the latent hermaphroditism or bisexuality of mankind,’’ most medical men were convinced that nature had ordained women to produce and nurture children within the home. By contrast, men were naturally equipped to occupy the public sphere and pursue careers in the liberal professions as well as business, politics, and, of course, the armed services. Most medical experts regarded the ovaries and uterus as the defining organs of women, making them the ‘‘reproductive servants of the race,’’ the handmaidens or helpmates of men, and the guardians of purity as well as domesticity.15 Well before the heyday of Hippocrates, medical men regarded the uterus as a highly unstable organ that often controlled the behavior of women. Restless, unpredictable, and endowed with a mind of its own, the womb could wander from the pelvis up to the throat, and when overheated or unfertilized for any length of time, it misbehaved and gave rise to all kinds of female disorders, most notably hysteria. Vestiges of these ancient myths survived deep into the nineteenth century, and influenced the theories of such esteemed experts as William Buchan, Charles Meigs, and, of course, Sigmund Freud. One mid-Victorian medical expert insisted that ‘‘the uterus is to the Race what the heart is to the Individual; it is the organ of circulation to the species.’’ He went on to call the womb ‘‘the largest and perhaps most important muscle in the female economy.’’16 While a few physicians attached greater importance to the ovaries in determining female behavior, most believed that the womb ruled the mind and body of woman, whether or not the ovum had been fertilized. As Elaine Showalter has stressed, hysteria was ‘‘the classic female malady’’ during the Victorian era, and physicians, psychiatrists, and alienists alike attributed this affliction to the unstable but all-powerful uterus.17 Moreover, the prostitute represented flagrant defiance of what men deemed the proper or ‘‘natural’’ place of women in society, because she forsook the hearth and family and sallied forth onto the streets to sell her most prized and sacred asset—her sexuality. While Fleet Street’s handling of the mutilations constitutes one of the most important aspects of Ripper news, the published versions of what the police surgeons stated at each inquest were far from verbatim transcripts of their testimony. If the leading papers published many more clinical details than would appear in today’s tabloids, there were still countless omissions, some of which shed light on the criteria of decency and indecency used by editors. As some reporters intimated, the police regarded the surgeons as forensic detectives who were supposed to ‘‘read’’ or interpret the mutilations 217

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and come up with clues that would narrow the field of suspects. At the very least, the medical examiners were supposed to assess whether or not the killer had any experience with surgery or the dissecting room. After all, if the surgeons could not assess the skill required to remove a victim’s organs in the dark, who could? A few editors tried to justify the publication of so much clinical detail on the grounds that some reader might recognize the killer from his modus operandi and come forward with vital information. Therefore, the decision to quote or paraphrase material from the autopsy reports should not be dismissed as merely an effort to inject a dose of sensation-horror into Ripper news. And yet editors could not ignore reader sensibilities completely. As Richard Ericson and his fellow Canadian researchers observed about the crime news produced by a Toronto television station in the 1970s, concerns about what was deemed fit to screen always involved the constraints of good taste—‘‘and always with reference to the human body.’’18 As Thomas Laqueur has pointed out, the Victorian era was ‘‘the great age of the post-mortem, of pathology’s ascendancy,’’ and both the number and precision of autopsies performed in the teaching hospitals and morgues of Great Britain and Europe increased by leaps and bounds during this time.19 The Ripper murders, moreover, occurred at a time of mounting medical interest in the ovaries, uterus, fallopian tubes, and vagina, as well as the nature of sexual arousal in both men and women. As for the forensic aspects of ‘‘unnatural, sudden, or suspicious death,’’ the postmortem examination constituted the decisive first stage in any prosecution for homicide or manslaughter. Charged with discovering the ‘‘true cause’’ of death, the coroner bore the solemn responsibility of initiating criminal proceedings whenever there were suspicions of foul play. For this obvious reason surgeons and medical experts played a crucial role in the inquest, and they were expected to scrutinize every scar, injury, or abnormality on the exterior or interior of the body, whether or not these contributed to the cause of death.20 To be sure, the deep throat cuts inflicted by the Ripper left little doubt about the cause of death, although some thought he had first strangled or suffocated his victims.21 Although the police surgeons disputed the extent of the Ripper’s surgical skill, they concurred that he wielded a very sharp knife with great force. Reporters who covered the inquests had to rely on shorthand or pay scribes to transcribe the testimony, and then they faced a choice between paraphrase and direct quotation. Whichever method they selected, not even the most in-depth published reports contained a full 218

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version of the exchanges between the coroner and the surgeon being interrogated. As noted, in the case of Lipski’s trial in 1887 for the murder of Miriam Angel, the press elided almost every allusion to the possibility of sexual assault, and no paper mentioned the small vial held up to the jury by Dr. Kay containing what was designated as ‘‘vaginal matter.’’ The statement that he had found no ‘‘signs of recent connection’’ also went unrecorded.22 Given the dominant medical view of women’s pathological fragility, instability, and ‘‘disorderedness,’’ the reporting of the Ripper’s pelvic mutilations in 1888 raised complex issues. But not until the surgeons revealed that certain ‘‘portions’’ were missing from the bodies of Chapman and Eddowes did the press begin to pay more attention to the lower ‘‘abdomen.’’ At the same time, the Ripper’s efforts to ‘‘desex’’ his victims made it much harder for reporters to describe the ‘‘indescribable.’’ By comparing the police surgeons’ testimony with the official transcripts of their remarks at two inquests, we may gain a clearer idea of the kind of clinical detail that newspapers chose to filter out.23 The Nichols Inquest The Times’s (Sept. 3) report on Dr. Rees Llewellyn’s evidence at the Nichols inquest on Saturday, September 1, began with a paraphrase of his first sight of the body sprawled on the cobblestones of Buck’s Row. Despite ‘‘severe’’ throat injuries, he found surprisingly little blood around the body. As soon as Llewellyn started to read from his autopsy notes, the Times reporter shifted into quotation: ‘‘ ‘On the left side of the neck, about 1 in. below the jaw, there was an incision about 4 in. in length, and ran from a point immediately below the ear, on the same side, but an inch below, and commencing about 1 in. in front of it, was a circular incision, which terminated at a point about 3 in. below the right jaw. That incision completely severed all the tissues down to the vertebrae. The large vessels of the neck on both sides were severed.’ ’’ As soon as the doctor turned to the ‘‘abdominal’’ injuries, however, the language of this article became much more vague: ‘‘ ‘There were no injuries about the body until just about the lower part of the abdomen. Two or three inches from the left side was a wound running in a jagged manner. The wound was a very deep one and the tissues were cut through. There were several incisions running across the abdomen. There were also three or four similar cuts, running downwards, on the right side, all of which had been caused by a knife which had been used violently and downwards.’ ’’24 These allusions to the lower abdomen and the lack of any measurement 219

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of the cuts had a blurring effect. Did any of the wounds involve the genitalia? Just how far ‘‘downwards’’ did those three or four cuts run? Well might readers wonder. Much the same evasiveness appeared in the Morning Post, Reynolds’s, and Lloyd’s. While most papers mentioned the abdominal cuts, only a few reported that there were no ‘‘signs of violence below the abdomen’’—whatever that might mean.25 Eschewing sensation-horror, the Pall Mall Gazette (Sept. 18) awarded Llewellyn’s testimony only two evasive sentences and dwelled instead on what witnesses had seen just before and after the discovery of the body. At least for the upmarket press, the Nichols coverage set a precedent for subsequent Ripper news by highlighting the wounds around the neck rather than the pelvis. Pointing out that all of Nichols’s organs were present and accounted for, most reporters drew attention to the five missing teeth, the bruises on her face and lower jaw, and, of course, the severed throat and windpipe. The abdominal slashes remained in shadow.26 Once the mutilations grew more severe below the navel, both the surgeons and the editors faced harder choices about just how much they should reveal to the public. The Chapman Inquest The discovery during the autopsy that a ‘‘portion’’ of Chapman’s ‘‘stomach’’ had gone missing added a new, macabre, and even more shocking element to the Whitechapel murders. Although the surgeons knew full well which organ the killer had removed, they were reluctant to publicize this information. On September 14, the morning papers reported Phillips’s detailed comments at the inquest in response to the coroner’s questions about the deep cut through the neck that had almost decapitated her. Following this came a very vague passage about ‘‘other mutilations.’’ Apparently anxious to avoid undue shock or embarrassment, Phillips refused to be more specific. At first the coroner tolerated his reticence. But when the surgeon circled back to discuss the ‘‘abdominal’’ wounds, Baxter pressed him to say more. Such papers as the Evening Standard (Sept. 13), Daily Telegraph, and Morning Post (Sept. 14) carried the following exchange between the two principals: CORONER: Was there any anatomical knowledge displayed?— PHILLIPS: I think there was. There were indications of it. My own impression is that anatomical knowledge was only less displayed or indicated in consequence of haste. The person evidently was hindered from making a more complete dissection in consequence of the haste. 220

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CORONER: Was the whole of the body there?— PHILLIPS: No; the absent portions being from the abdomen. CORONER: Are those portions such as would require anatomical knowledge to extract?— PHILLIPS: I think the mode in which they were extracted did show some anatomical knowledge. CORONER: You do not think they could have been lost accidentally in the transit of the body to the mortuary?— PHILLIPS: I was not present at the transit. I carefully closed up the clothes of the woman. Some portions had been excised.

Other papers preferred paraphrase. Thus the Times (Sept. 14) printed the following digest: ‘‘There were indications of anatomical knowledge, which were only less indicated in consequence of haste. The whole of the body was not present, the absent portions being from the abdomen. The mode in which these portions were extracted showed some anatomical knowledge. He did not think these portions were lost in the transit of the body.’’ Though there are obvious differences between these versions, both used the ambiguous term ‘‘abdomen’’ and indirectly noted Phillips’s refusal to name the missing ‘‘portions.’’ The silence in these texts about the pelvic injuries hardly eased the fears of women that some demented doctor might have shifted his research on the female reproductive organs from animals to women. Quite apart from their stance on the issue of vivisection, many Victorian women knew only too well the invasive, not to say callous, procedures of gynecologists, some of whom carried out surgery on the genitalia in order to ‘‘cure’’ neurasthenia. For this reason they could easily imagine a perverse pathologist using his expertise and power to kill women in order to study their private parts. On this occasion, sensationalist Sunday papers like the People and Reynolds’s (Sept. 16) relied on euphemisms or evasions to convey the pelvic injuries, while the Weekly Times went further by declaring: ‘‘The whole of the body was not at the mortuary, the absent portions being from the abdomen. The portion might have been lost accidentally.’’ On the other hand, the East London Advertiser (Sept. 15) ignored the question of missing organs altogether, admitting only that ‘‘the murderer had some anatomical knowledge.’’ At this stage Fleet Street seemed as mystified by the mutilations and ‘‘missing portions’’ as the police.27 Phillips’s refusal to identify the organ (or organs) taken from Chapman’s body only deepened the mystery surrounding her death. As the Globe 221

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(Sept. 15) had already pointed out, withholding such vital information on any grounds amounted to obstructing justice, because even the smallest forensic detail might enable the police to identify the culprit. And if Phillips’s reticence about the mutilations piqued the public’s curiosity, it definitely nettled the coroner. A stickler for the facts and a demanding interrogator, Baxter wanted to ferret out every clue that might shed even the faintest light on the murders.28 For this reason he ordered Phillips to testify again at the resumed Chapman inquest on September 18. Once again, the record of their exchange varied slightly from one paper to another. Baxter evidently began by insisting that all the details of the autopsy should be aired, no matter how ‘‘painful’’ this might prove. For his part, Phillips complained about the lack of time to prepare his remarks and voiced dismay over the demand for full disclosure. Several reports of Phillips’s testimony on this occasion reflected more evasion. Thus the Globe (Sept. 19) produced a paraphrase that deliberately concealed a crucial piece of evidence: ‘‘The witness [Phillips] then proceeded to enlarge the evidence he had given at the last sitting. He said the wall of the abdomen had been removed in three portions. There was a greater portion of skin removed on the left side than on the right. On placing and adjusting these three flaps of skin it was evident that a portion was wanting. He gave a detailed account of the condition of the other organs that were cut or injured. One of the organs was entirely absent from the body. The appearance of the cut surfaces indicated that the instrument used must have been very sharp, and showed a certain amount of anatomical knowledge.’’ Exactly which organ was absent? By stressing the abdominal cuts, Phillips deflected attention away from the reproductive organs. At the same time, his comment about ‘‘anatomical knowledge’’ raised the disturbing possibility that the killer might well be a demented physician, surgeon, or medical student. A fuller account of Phillips’s testimony appeared in Lloyd’s (Sept. 23), beneath the subhead ‘‘EXTRAORDINARY MEDICAL EVIDENCE.’’ Following Baxter’s declaration that ‘‘the interests of justice’’ required full disclosure no matter how painful this might prove, Phillips replied that he would do his best to answer, even though he needed more time to prepare his responses. After describing the scratches on Chapman’s jaw and bruises on her cheek, he declared that what he had to say next was fit only for the coroner and the jury: ‘‘To make public such details would simply be disgusting.’’ At this point, Baxter asked the ladies and messenger boys present to leave the room, whereupon some of Phillips’s previous evidence was 222

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read aloud. Suddenly this reporter slipped from quotation to paraphrase: ‘‘Dr. Phillips proceeded to give details of the post-mortem examination.’’ After admitting that ‘‘two important abdominal parts were missing,’’ and that these had been removed by someone using a knife of five or six inches who had ‘‘a certain amount of anatomical knowledge,’’ he identified one of these organs as the womb. ‘‘The nature of the incisions and other circumstances,’’ he added, ‘‘indicated that the object of the operator was to obtain possession of it.’’ This account did not mention the second missing organ.29 Without any fanfare, the People (Sept. 23) went Lloyd’s one better by cataloguing the cuts in the abdominal wall, the absent flap of skin, and the presence of the intestines ‘‘in situ.’’ At this point, the reporter revealed that ‘‘part of the bladder and other portions of the internal organs were absent and could nowhere be traced.’’ Most dailies were more reticent about the missing organs. The Times (Sept. 20) simply declared: ‘‘The court having been cleared of all women and boys, the witness proceeded to give medical and surgical evidence, totally unfit for publication, of the deliberate, successful, and apparently scientific manner in which the poor woman had been mutilated. . . . The mode in which the knife had been used seemed to indicate great anatomical knowledge.’’ The Daily Telegraph and Globe (Sept. 19) also failed to name the missing parts. But the latter paper added one morsel of sensationhorror not found elsewhere. When Baxter asked Phillips to estimate ‘‘the quantity of matter taken from the abdomen,’’ the latter replied succinctly: ‘‘It would all go into a breakfast cup.’’30 Sidestepping much of the gore, the Weekly Times (Sept. 23) deemed the injuries so ‘‘disgusting’’ as to be fit only for the coroner and jurors. After this came more elision: ‘‘Witness then detailed the terrible wounds which had been inflicted upon the woman, and described the parts of the body which the perpetrator of the murder had carried away with him.’’ Coroner Baxter’s persistence thus brought into the open the crude hysterectomy the killer had performed on Chapman. On September 27 most dailies reported his summation to the jury, which began with an allusion to Chapman’s immoral lifestyle in Spitalfields, where people ‘‘herd like cattle’’ amidst common lodging houses that were a blot on English civilization. After recounting how the killer had attacked Chapman with ‘‘savage determination’’ as well as ‘‘cool impudence and reckless daring,’’ Baxter named the uterus as the missing organ. He then broached his sensational theory about a mysterious American pathologist seeking ‘‘specimen’’ wombs for the price of twenty pounds apiece.31 The Times’s (Sept. 27) version of 223

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Baxter’s address contained a central passage found in most articles on the subject: ‘‘ ‘There were two things missing. Her rings had been wrenched from her fingers and had not since been found, and the uterus had been taken from the abdomen. The body had not been dissected, but the injuries had been made by someone who had considerable anatomical skill and knowledge. There were no meaningless cuts. The organ had been taken by one who knew where to find it, what difficulties he would have to contend against, and how he should use his knife so as to abstract the organ without injury to it. No unskilled person could have known where to find it or have recognized it when it was found. For instance, no mere slaughterer of animals could have carried out these operations. It must have been someone accustomed to the post mortem room. The conclusion that the desire was to possess the missing abdominal organ seemed overwhelming.’ ’’ For obvious reasons, Baxter’s dramatic announcement about the American uterine researcher earned many subheads and paragraphs. If the killer really was a doctor or medical researcher bent on female vivisection, then Fleet Street had every reason to inject this theory into the Ripper story. Clearly the phrase about the ‘‘absence of meaningless cuts’’ served to reinforce Baxter’s hypothesis.32 While most papers made these disclosures, there were a number of exceptions, among them the Morning Post (Sept. 27), the Pall Mall Gazette (Sept. 27), and the East London Advertiser (Sept. 29), all of which failed to name the absent organs. For reasons best known to himself, Stead refrained from mentioning the theft of Chapman’s uterus in the Pall Mall Gazette. This is all the more puzzling given his reputation for sensationalizing sex. Perhaps the fallout from his 1885 child prostitution series and his prison ordeal had made him leery about publishing material that might be deemed obscene. Instead of gore he produced a front-page leader (Sept. 19), ‘‘MURDER AS AN ADVERTISEMENT,’’ about the ‘‘Scientific Humanitarian’’ who was trying to promote the well-being of the down-and-out in London. On the 24th a reporter for the Gazette stressed the murderer’s ‘‘anatomical knowledge’’ and desire to possess ‘‘some of the abdominal viscera,’’ and suggested that he had wanted to procure the same ‘‘object’’ from Nichols but was interrupted in the act. A second leader, ‘‘THE POLITICAL MORAL OF THE MURDERS,’’ raised the possibility of a copycat killer and argued that Phillips might have suppressed part of his autopsy report because he feared the outbreak of ‘‘an epidemic, or a panic, of murder’’ in any part of England. And if that should occur, the public would be bound to blame the press for allowing readers to ‘‘sup upon ‘Newgate Calendars’ and tales of crime.’’ 224

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Three days later, the Gazette carried two short articles about the final session of the Chapman inquest. The first dealt with Baxter’s theory about the American scientist who wanted to buy ‘‘that portion of a woman’s body which the criminal abstracted from his latest victim’’ for the ‘‘upset’’ price of twenty pounds.33 Waxing more Swiftian, this writer condemned the steep rise in the price of corpses since the heyday of Burke and Hare, when they could be obtained for seven or eight pounds. Evidently, the appearance of American buyers was driving up the price, much as it had in the art world. Such specimens could easily be obtained at much lower cost if only poor women on their deathbeds would arrange with anatomists to sell their ‘‘portions’’ for enough money to cover the cost of the morphine needed to allay their pain. If this experiment were tried, ‘‘prices would so soon fall as to make it hardly worth while.’’ On a more serious note, the Gazette (Sept. 27) took note of Baxter’s remarks about the killer’s anatomical knowledge, the absence of ‘‘meaningless cuts,’’ and the removal of ‘‘the abdominal viscera.’’ The Weekly Times (Sept. 30) avoided any mention of the womb in the course of a drastic abbreviation of Baxter’s address to the jury. Pointing out the paltry value of the objects stolen from Chapman and the absence of any ‘‘meaningless cuts,’’ this reporter quoted the coroner as stating that the skill required to ‘‘abstract’’ the organ without damaging it suggested a trained surgeon. Clearly, the killer had an ‘‘overwhelming desire’’ to possess this organ: ‘‘If the object were robbery, the injuries to the viscera were meaningless, for death had previously resulted from the loss of blood at the neck. Moreover, when we find an easily accomplished theft of some paltry brass rings and an internal organ taken . . . by a skilled person, we are driven to the deduction that the abstraction of the missing portion was the object, and the theft of the rings was only a thinly-veiled blind. It is abhorrent to our feelings to conclude that a life should be taken for so slight an object; but, when rightly considered, the reasons for most murders are altogether out of proportion to the guilt.’’ Among the papers that did mention the missing womb were Lloyd’s, Reynolds’s (Sept. 30), and the Daily Telegraph (Sept. 27), though readers of the latter had to wade through a good deal of fine print before discovering the hysterectomy. If some editors scoffed at the American pathologist theory, they too thought that the stolen rings might be a way of disguising the desire for the womb, and they agreed with Phillips that the culprit knew a good deal about (female) anatomy.34 Not surprisingly, the British Medical Journal (Sept. 22) outstripped the popular press in clinical candor by revealing that the murderer had cut out 225

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‘‘a central portion of the abdominal wall, including the navel; two-thirds of the bladder (posterior and upper portions); the upper third of the vagina and its connection with the uterus; and the whole of the uterus.’’35 Just how many of these parts had been taken away remained unclear. But no newspaper mentioned the vagina at this stage. What makes the BMJ’s disclosure noteworthy is that it appeared so soon after Phillips’s testimony on the 18th. A feature article in the Lancet (Sept. 29) ridiculed the idea that some scientific researcher was going around the East End slaughtering women in order to obtain and sell their uteruses. Well aware that the public had already ‘‘supped full of horrors,’’ the writer found this theory ‘‘almost too horrible to be credited.’’ If a medical man really had carried out such a wicked scheme, then the results would have surpassed the villainies of Burke and Hare ‘‘in fiendish greed and disregard for the sanctity of human life.’’ According to the Lancet, ‘‘It appears that the abdomen had been entirely laid open; that the intestines, severed from their mesenteric attachments, had been lifted out of the body, and placed by the shoulder of the corpse; whilst from the pelvis the uterus and its appendages, with the upper portion of the vagina and the posterior two-thirds of the bladder, had been entirely removed. No trace of these parts could be found, and the incisions were cleanly cut, avoiding the rectum, and dividing the vagina low enough to avoid injury to the cervix uteri. Obviously the work was that of an expert— of one, at least, who had such knowledge of anatomical or pathological examinations as to be enabled to secure the pelvic organs with one sweep of a knife’’ (emphasis added).36 Neither of the italicized passages in this quotation appeared in the mainstream papers. That final, chilling phrase about ‘‘securing’’ the reproductive organs with ‘‘one sweep of a knife’’ not only reflected the detached quality of clinical discourse but also gave credence to the theory that the killer had some surgical experience. While divulging all these clinical details, the editor of the Lancet rose up indignantly to denounce Fleet Street for peddling gore and corrupting youth. A blistering editorial on October 6 deplored ‘‘the grossly indecent publications’’ being spread among boys and girls by ‘‘the agents of an unscrupulous press.’’ Insisting that ‘‘vice and crime’’ rivaled one another as a way of stimulating ‘‘a depraved appetite for the horrible and the bestial,’’ this writer accused Fleet Street of feeding ‘‘the lowest and most animal’’ appetites of the young. The time had come to end this practice of ‘‘fill[ing] up the pennyworths of garbage . . . constantly foisted upon foolish and ignorant purchasers by the gutter purveyors of literature.’’37 On September 27 a leader writer in the Times came close to endorsing 226

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Baxter’s theory, if only because it seemed more plausible than a bloodthirsty maniac, a ‘‘butcher hardened to habits of slaughter,’’ a jealous prostitute, or some ‘‘heathen sect’’ given to ‘‘barbarous rites.’’ He also credited the press with having provided a potentially vital clue, insofar as the subcurator of the pathological museum who had reportedly been approached by the American researcher notified Baxter about the visit after he read about the missing organ in a newspaper. If nothing else, Baxter’s theory reduced the field of suspects. But publicity could be a ‘‘double-edged weapon,’’ and this writer urged the press not to divulge any plans the police might have for capturing the killer. Baxter’s theory sparked a heated debate in the press as well as medical circles about the possibility that some ‘‘half-mad physiologist’’ was trying to procure ‘‘living tissues or organs from a healthy subject for experiments.’’38 As the days went by without any evidence that this mysterious American really existed, most papers grew skeptical. A Daily Telegraph (Sept. 29) reporter found only two London hospitals—University College and Middlesex—that did not flatly deny any such approach by a uterine specialist, and he dismissed the theory that someone was willing to pay twenty pounds for each specimen as an ‘‘idle rumour’’ or ‘‘a silly story.’’ Scolding the authorities for ‘‘want of candour,’’ he denounced Baxter’s notion as a ‘‘hoax’’ that served no purpose. Although the Lancet (Sept. 29) conceded the ‘‘great prima facie probability’’ of this theory, it could not imagine any pathologist paying so much money for uteruses, and his apparent wish to include specimen organs in copies of his treatise to be sent to colleagues ‘‘exceeds the bounds of credibility.’’ The coroner had made ‘‘a grave error in judgment,’’ one that would lead the public to nurse animosity against anatomists and curators. Moreover, this false scent had diverted attention from ‘‘the real track of the murderer.’’39 The British Medical Journal also rejected Baxter’s theory about a killer acting out of ‘‘pseudoscientific mania,’’ while noting that one very respectable ‘‘foreign physician’’ had in fact inquired at several medical schools over a year earlier about ‘‘securing certain parts of the body’’ for scientific research. But this doctor had offered no large sum for the organs in question and left London shortly thereafter.40 Within a week, this tale of the foreign uterine researcher had faded into oblivion. The Stride Inquest By comparison with Chapman, the coverage of Stride’s inquest verged on the routine owing to the absence of any mutilations, even though Baxter 227

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prolonged the proceedings by convening no fewer than five sessions. The press had little choice but to concentrate on the crime scene and the deep throat wound. Despite the limited injuries, the Times (Oct. 2–4) had no trouble filling almost six columns in three issues about the ongoing inquest.41 Dr. Frederick W. Blackwell began the medical testimony during the second session by recounting his first sight of Stride lying sprawled against the wall on Berner Street. He then referred to the ‘‘clotted blood’’ running down the gutter and into a drain not far from the back door of the International Working Men’s Educational Club. Unlike the Times and Morning Post (Oct. 3), both the Daily Telegraph (Oct. 3) and Reynolds’s (Oct. 7) quoted Blackwell’s estimate that the blood lost weighed about one pound. At the resumed inquest on October 3, Phillips delivered his postmortem report, parts of which appeared in many newspapers. An oft-quoted passage read: ‘‘There was a clean-cut incision on the neck. It was 6 in. in length and commenced 2 1⁄2 in. in a straight line below the right angle of the jaw, 3⁄4 in. over an undivided muscle, and then becoming deeper, dividing the sheath. The cut was very clean, and deviated a little downwards. . . . From this it was evident that the haemorrhage was caused through the partial severance of the left carotid artery.’’42 After dealing with the throat wound Phillips inventoried the contents of both Stride’s stomach and the pockets of her underskirt, and then attributed her death to loss of blood from the severed carotid artery and windpipe.43 This account of Stride’s injuries barely varied between the Daily Chronicle, Times, and Evening News. On October 7, the Sunday papers summarized the four sessions of her inquest to date, adding little to the versions carried in the dailies.44 The Eddowes Inquest The extensive mutilations of Eddowes’s body explain why it took four surgeons, led by Dr. Frederick Gordon Brown, more than three hours to complete their autopsy on the afternoon of Sunday, September 30, at the City mortuary in Golden Lane.45 Once again the ‘‘ghastly butchery’’ moved some editors to blot out allusions to the genitalia. As rumors of missing ‘‘portions’’ flew around town, Scotland Yard remained silent. Throwing caution aside, the Star (Oct. 1) categorically denied that any organs were missing, and ruled out any ‘‘Burke and Hare theory’’ about the sale of female body parts for scientific research. The mutilations simply reflected ‘‘insane ruthlessness and violence’’ by a ‘‘homicidal maniac.’’ On the other hand, the Western Mail (Oct. 1) refrained from surmises until the surgeons had finished their examination. 228

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The City of London coroner, Samuel Frederick Langham, opened the Eddowes inquest on October 4 in Golden Lane, Barbican, where spectators and reporters overflowed the room.46 After listening to witnesses who had either known Eddowes or seen her shortly before she died, the jury heard several policemen describe the crime scene. In the afternoon police surgeon Brown took two hours to deliver his meticulous, if gruesome, report. Starting with the head and facial injuries, he then moved inexorably downwards, from the deep gash in the throat to the ‘‘abdominal’’ mutilations. Despite many elisions, even the Times’s (Oct. 5) version contained some unrefined gore: ‘‘There was great disfigurement of the face. The throat was cut across, and below the cut was a neckerchief. The upper part of the dress had been pulled open a little way. The abdomen was all exposed; the intestines were drawn out to a large extent and placed over the right shoulder; a piece of the intestines was quite detached from the body and placed between the left arm and the body.’’ Dealing first with the throat, this reporter used the surgeon’s clinical terms for the cut that ran through ‘‘the sterno-cleido-mastoid muscle’’ as well as various cartilages and arteries right on down to the cervical vertebrae. But this precise language faded away when he arrived at the pelvic injuries. Avoiding any mention of the uterus, he quoted Brown as stating that the left kidney had been abstracted and that ‘‘the greater part of the organ similar to that missing’’ from Chapman was absent. In short, this version omitted Brown’s mention of the pubes, mons veneris, vagina, rectum, ilium, and labium, all of which terms appeared in Lloyds’s (Oct. 7), which revealed that both the womb and the left kidney were missing. While most evening and Sunday papers published these findings, the respectable morning dailies left their readers in the dark about the extent of the pelvic mutilations.47 When Brown disclosed that at least two ‘‘portions’’ were missing and the City Solicitor pressed him for particulars, the Times (Oct. 5) merely quoted the surgeon’s statement that there were signs of ‘‘some anatomical and surgical skill’’ because the bladder had not been damaged. While the upmarket papers used the evasive phrase ‘‘precisely the same organs had been removed as in former cases,’’ the penny press chose clinical candor. Thus the Evening News (Oct. 5) used the subhead ‘‘THE DOCTOR’S EVIDENCE — A STARTLING BLOOD-CURDLING STORY’’ to herald Brown’s revelation that ‘‘the walls [of the abdomen] were laid open from the sternum to the pubes.’’ According to this lurid account Brown detailed the cuts through the liver and around the navel, as well as one that ‘‘divided the lower part of the abdomen, and went down to half an inch behind the 229

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rectum.’’ Another subhead, ‘‘CERTAIN ORGANS COMPLETELY CUT OUT,’’ preceded a passage not found in the Times or Morning Post: ‘‘The left kidney was completely cut out and taken away. The renal artery was cut through about three-quarters of an inch. . . . The membrane over the uterus was cut through, and the womb was cut through, leaving a stump of about three-quarters of an inch. The rest of the womb was absent—taken completely away from the body, together with some of the ligaments.’’ Although not quite as anatomically explicit, the Daily Chronicle’s (Oct. 6) article repeated four times that the womb was missing. Even the East London Observer (Oct. 6) divulged that ‘‘the uterus with its ligaments’’ and the left kidney had been taken away, adding that this announcement had caused a ‘‘profound . . . sensation’’ in the courtroom. While the Daily Telegraph (Oct. 5) named both missing organs, it threw a veil over the remaining pelvic injuries: ‘‘Witness here described in detail the terrible mutilation of the deceased’s body.’’48 Uncharacteristically, Reynolds’s (Oct. 7) tried to dodge the issue by stating that ‘‘the same organs had been removed as in former cases.’’ However, Lloyd’s (Oct. 7) was in no mood for euphemism. Under the subhead ‘‘PORTIONS OF THE BODY MISSING,’’ this paper revealed the same details carried by the Evening News. One passage in particular went beyond most reports of Brown’s testimony: ‘‘The incision then took an oblique course to the right . . . divided the mons veneris, and went down to the right side of the vagina and rectum to half an inch below the rectum.’’ The paper’s mention of the uninjured ‘‘cervexuteri’’ [sic] was quite exceptional. Lloyds’s then quoted Brown as stating that although removal of the kidney ‘‘implies great knowledge of its position,’’ even an animal slaughterer could have done the deed. Some idea of the ambiguous boundaries surrounding Fleet Street’s criteria of what was fit to print may be gained by comparing the official transcript of the Eddowes autopsy report with the versions that appeared in the press on October 5. While limitations of space and the wish to avoid an excess of technical terminology played their part in the elisions, there can be little doubt that editors were also concerned about printing too many of the ‘‘intimate’’ details of the pelvic mutilations. With a few exceptions, the italicized words or phrases in the following excerpt from Brown’s testimony were omitted from most of the dailies in our sample: The blood vessels contained clot. . . . The death was immediate and the mutilations were inflicted after death. We examined the abdomen. The front walls were laid open from the breast bone to the pubes. . . . 230

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The knife must have cut obliquely at the expense of the front surface of that cartilage. Behind this the liver was stabbed as by the point of a sharp instrument. . . . The incision went down the right side of the vagina and rectum for half an inch behind the rectum. There was a stab of about an inch on the left groin. . . . An inch below the crease of the thigh was a cut extending from the anterior spine of the ilium obliquely down the inner side of the left thigh and separating the left labium forming a flap of skin up to the groin. The left rectus muscle was not detached. There was a flap of skin formed from the right thigh attaching the right labium and extended up to the spine of the ilium. The muscles on the right side inserted into the Poupart’s ligament were cut through. The skin was retracted through the whole of the cut in the abdomen but the vessels were not clotted. . . . I draw the conclusion that the cut was made after death and there would not be much blood on the murderer. . . . The intestines had been detached to a large extent from the mesentery. About 2 feet of the colon was cut away. The sigmoid flexure was invaginated into the rectum very tightly—right kidney pale & bloodless with slight congestion of the base of the pyramids. . . . The liver itself was healthy. The gall bladder contained bile. The pancreas was cut but not through. . . . The peritoneal lining was cut through on the left side and the left kidney carefully taken out and removed. The left renal artery was cut through. . . . The lining membrane over the uterus was cut through. The womb was cut through horizontally leaving a stump of 3⁄4 of an inch. The rest of the womb had been taken away with some of the ligaments. The vagina and cervix of the womb was [sic ] uninjured. . . . The other organs were healthy. There were no indications of connexion. Quite apart from the more technical language that would have meant little to lay readers, Fleet Street showed some discretion when it came to the private parts. But the evening papers (apart from the Pall Mall Gazette) were not as reticent in this respect as the morning dailies. Among the very few papers that dared to raise the possibility of sexual intercourse was the Weekly Times (Oct. 7), which quoted Brown to the effect that he had found no evidence of recent ‘‘connexion.’’ The elisions in this long statement by Brown (which has been condensed) indicates some editorial concern about reader sensibilities in matters sexual. In any event, even the Times published enough of Brown’s autopsy report to satisfy all but the most prurient among its readers.49 231

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The Kelly Inquest The most remarkable feature of the Kelly inquest on Monday, November 12, was its brevity. The coroner’s abrupt termination of the inquest after little more than half a day’s testimony caught the public and Fleet Street by surprise.50 If most people expected this inquest to last as long as the others and achieve the same depth of forensic detail, they were in for a rude surprise. When the coroner for North-East Middlesex, Dr. Roderick Macdonald, convened the jurors at Shoreditch Town Hall in the morning, he made it clear that ‘‘they could not go into all the particulars at that stage,’’ but he did not let on that Kelly’s injuries would most likely never be discussed at a second let alone a third or fourth sitting. No sooner had Phillips attributed Kelly’s death to the severed right carotid artery than the inquest began winding down. After four more witnesses, including Inspectors Beck and Abberline, testified briefly, the coroner asked the jury if they were ready to render a verdict, and within a few minutes the foreman announced that Kelly had been ‘‘wilfully murdered by person(s) unknown.’’51 Whether or not there was some collusion between Macdonald, the Home Office, and Scotland Yard, the sudden ending of the inquest caught Fleet Street off guard. Several papers, including the Daily Telegraph (Nov. 13), deplored this decision, especially when rumors were rife that some organs were missing. Since the mutilations far exceeded even those of Eddowes and because the time of death was disputed, the papers called for full disclosure. By curtailing the inquest, Macdonald also prevented at least one key witness, George Hutchinson, from describing his encounter with Kelly on the eve of her death.52 Not every paper berated the coroner for having prevented a full inquiry, however. The Morning Post (Nov. 13) applauded his decision to suppress the ‘‘hideous details’’ of Kelly’s death. Deprived of their full menu of sensation-horror, including the possibility of a stolen heart, the press had little choice but to focus on the crime scene and describe the ravaged body lying on the blood-soaked bed in Miller’s Court. A number of papers published interviews with people who had seen Kelly on the night of her murder. While some papers played up the discrepancy over the time of death, the tight lid imposed by the police forced reporters to indulge in some wild conjectures about both motive and missing organs.53 Once again, the Star (Nov. 12) jumped to the conclusion that no organs were missing. But the Daily Telegraph, Globe, Evening News (Nov. 13) and East London Observer (Nov. 17) thought otherwise. The paper providing the fewest details about Kelly’s injuries was the Pall Mall 232

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Gazette (Nov. 12), which described instead the jurors’ visit to the mortuary, where they saw her ‘‘hideous and disembowelled trunk’’ lying in a wooden shell. This reporter then followed the jury to the room in Miller’s Court, with its ‘‘filthy, bloodstained bed.’’ A day later the Gazette chose the subhead ‘‘WHY DID THE INQUEST CLOSE SO ABRUPTLY?’’ to accompany a report that the coroner had assured Phillips there would be ample time for more evidence when the inquest resumed, at which point Phillips stated that he had much more to say and expressed his worry lest the suppression of medical facts impede the course of justice. The Evening News (Nov. 13) also chided Macdonald for failing to explore the mutilations. Beneath a tantalizing subhead, ‘‘SOME PORTIONS OF THE BODY ARE MISSING,’’ this paper pointed out that during an autopsy that had lasted six and a half hours, the surgeons had failed to account for every organ. But no portions were named. A long article in the Evening Standard (Nov. 12) quoted some of Phillips’s testimony and mentioned a police photograph of the bedroom, but said nothing about missing organs. The Daily Telegraph (Nov. 13) also summarized the medical evidence and pointed out that the coroner had simply verified the minimal facts needed to establish the cause of death. An accompanying editorial dwelled on Warren’s resignation and the failings of Scotland Yard. The Morning Post (Nov. 13) applauded Macdonald’s decision, which had apparently met with ‘‘general approval.’’ While the East London Observer (Nov. 17) gave short shrift to the inquest, it too believed that at least one organ had been taken away. The Sunday press heightened both the mystery and the horror of this murder by means of banner headlines and lurid details. Yet in a threecolumn feature story, Reynolds’s (Nov. 18) omitted almost all of Phillips’s testimony while quoting other witnesses. Lloyd’s (Nov. 18) devoted an entire page to the murder and inquest, including salient passages from Phillips’s testimony. On the other hand, the Weekly Times (Nov. 18) assigned only one short paragraph to the medical evidence and never raised the subject of missing organs. As for silences in the newspapers about the condition of Kelly’s body, the following notes jotted down by Dr. Thomas Bond during his visit to Miller’s Court shortly after the discovery of the body provide some clues about what was kept from the public: The body was lying naked in the middle of the bed, the shoulders flat, but the axis of the body inclined to the left side of the bed. The head was turned on the left cheek. The left arm was close to the body with 233

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the forearm flexed at a right angle & lying across the abdomen. The right arm was slightly abducted from the body and rested on the mattress, the elbow bent & the forearm supine with the fingers clenched. The legs were wide apart, the left thigh at angles to the trunk & the right forming an obtuse angle with the pubes. The whole of the surface of the abdomen & thighs was removed & the abdominal cavity emptied of its viscera. The breasts were cut off, the arms mutilated by several jagged wounds & the face hacked beyond recognition of the features. The tissues of the neck were severed all round down to the bone. The viscera were found in various parts viz: the uterus & kidneys with one breast under the head, the other breast by the right foot, the liver between the feet, the intestines by the right side & the spleen by the left side of the body. The flaps removed from the abdomen & thighs were on a table.54 Impersonal and detached, Bond’s account smacked of the operating room or morgue. But none of these anatomical details brought the police any closer to a solution. The truncated inquest, in short, left all the crucial questions unanswered. Ironically, the most atrocious murder in the series created the biggest silences in both the judicial inquiry and the journalistic narrative. The Uterine Angle Of all the sensation-horrors arising out of the Ripper murders up to Kelly’s demise, few had quite as much shock effect as the crude hysterectomies performed on Chapman and Eddowes. Once the word spread that Chapman’s womb was missing, reporters pursued this angle like proverbial bloodhounds. The possibility that the Ripper might be a demented doctor or a mad medical student experimenting on the bodies of prostitutes caused the medical profession some anxious moments. Perhaps the killer really was a Hyde with all the scientific curiosity of a Jekyll. While the press paid close attention to the medical testimony at each inquest, the police surgeons disputed the skill required to remove the womb so quickly and in the dark. The many elisions in the press reports of the genital or ‘‘abdominal’’ injuries seem to confirm Foucault’s observation that in the modern era, ‘‘calling sex by its name became more difficult and more costly.’’ Determined to master this dangerous force, people had ‘‘to subjugate it at the 234

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level of language, control its free circulation in speech, expunge it from the things that were said, and extinguish the words that rendered it too visibly present.’’ This kind of pervasive ‘‘prudishness’’ led to a form of censorship that prevented people from talking about sex ‘‘merely through the interplay of prohibitions that referred back to one another.’’ Nevertheless, despite these profound silences, Foucault maintained that ‘‘a veritable discursive explosion’’ about matters sexual reverberated throughout Europe. Certainly in British newspaper circles editors and reporters accepted the necessity for elisions and euphemisms without demur, and brought into play what Foucault called ‘‘a whole rhetoric of allusion and metaphor’’ in order to cage the potentially wild beast of sexual passion.55 In the aftermath of the Chapman inquest some papers carried sensationhorror stories about wombs being used for magical or ritual purposes. Emanating from Central and Eastern Europe as well as Russia, these reports converged around the belief—supposedly widespread in primitive peasant communities—that candles made from human tallow, especially the uteruses of young women, would emit a flame capable of plunging an entire household into sleep so deep that burglars could steal their goods with impunity. The magical power attributed to these tapers, known variously as Diebslichter, Schlaftslichter, and ‘‘soporific candles,’’ ran parallel to or intersected with the old superstition, evidently widespread in parts of Germany, that the amputated hands or fingers of a stillborn, unbaptized male baby emitted a steady light that rendered people unconscious. Needless to say, witches were often accused of making these so-called thieves’ candles from the hands of dead and innocent infants.56 Shortly after the double event, several papers reported that Dr. Bloch, a Galician rabbi and member of the Austrian Reichsrath (parliament), had attributed the Whitechapel murders to the same motive that had driven peasant thieves to slay and eviscerate women in Odenwald, Westphalia, Magdeburg, and Galicia between 1810 and 1875. Apparently these attacks bore a chilling resemblance to the Ripper’s eviscerations. Among other papers, the Star (Oct. 9) revealed that a gang of thieves in Magdeburg had established ‘‘a regular manufactory for the production of such candles.’’57 Although the Pall Mall Gazette (Oct. 9) featured this macabre story, it coyly avoided naming the uterine ingredient in the recipe, stating only that the candles contained ‘‘the same portions’’ taken from the Whitechapel victims. ‘‘Did ever the diseased imagination of Edgar Allan Poe,’’ this reporter asked, ‘‘conceive a more ghastly idea than this systematic manufacture of 235

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thieves’ candles from the vitals of their murdered victims?’’ Readers were thus left to ponder the possibility that some Eastern European émigré was busy making the same kind of candles in Whitechapel. Two weeks after Kelly’s murder, when Ripper news was fading fast, the Gazette (Nov. 24) revived the magic candle theory beneath an enticing headline: ‘‘A WHITECHAPEL MURDER IN RUSSIA / KILLED TO MAKE A TALLOW CANDLE.’’ According to this paper’s St. Petersburg correspondent, a recent brutal murder in southern Russia resembled not only the East End atrocities but also ‘‘a whole class’’ of homicides. After killing a young girl in a wood near Graivoron (in the district of Kursk), the perpetrator(s) had disemboweled her and taken away ‘‘certain portions.’’ Following a robbery in the next village, two peasant men had been arrested. While searching their house, the police found some tallow ‘‘extracted from human fat’’ and rolled up in a stolen handkerchief. The men then confessed that they had slain the woman because they needed ‘‘certain parts’’ to make magic candles for their nocturnal forays. Tapping into the old myth about the magical properties of infantile hands or fingers, this reporter then pointed out: ‘‘The hand of a corpse, or even the finger, or a candle made of human fat, is firmly believed by the lower classes throughout the length and breadth of Russia to render the thief who possesses it safe from detection; and as there are many thieves in Russia desirous of pursuing their occupations with impunity, the demand for these objects is considerable.’’ At no point did the Gazette bother to explain the differences between the soporific effects of baby hands and the boiled reproductive organs of women, nor did it ever spell out all the ingredients needed to make such candles. An equally macabre and distinctly anti-Semitic explanation for the Ripper murders arose out of the myth that orthodox Jewish men had to carry out the ritual murder of any gentile woman with whom they had been intimate in order to purify themselves. On October 2 the Times ran a story emanating from Vienna that a Galician Jew named Moses Ritter had been accused of murdering and mutilating a Christian woman near Kraków to expunge his sin. Supposedly her injuries resembled those inflicted on Chapman. During Ritter’s trial in 1887, several witnesses testified that ‘‘fanatical’’ Jews inspired by the Talmud had atoned for their sins by killing gentile women after intercourse and removing their uteruses. After the jury found Ritter guilty, the judge sentenced him to death. But a court of appeal overturned the verdict and ordered a retrial on the grounds of prejudice. The second trial also ended with a conviction, whereupon Ritter lodged another successful appeal, which led to a third trial. Again he was found 236

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guilty and sentenced to death. This time, however, the court of appeal quashed the sentence and ordered his release after three years in prison. Although the Times conceded Ritter’s innocence, it equivocated by stating: ‘‘The evidence touching the superstitions prevailing among some of the ignorant and degraded of his coreligionists remains on record and was never wholly disproved.’’ A leader writer in the Pall Mall Gazette (Oct. 2) evinced some concern about the rising tide of anti-Semitism by asking Rabbi Hermann Adler to denounce ‘‘the absurd story’’ about the Talmud’s promise of absolution to any Jew who killed a gentile woman with whom he had slept. ‘‘The feeling against the Jews is quite strong enough in the Eastend already,’’ this writer observed, ‘‘without adding to it this groundless calumny.’’ Far more worried about an outbreak of violence against Jews in the East End, the editor of the Jewish Chronicle (Oct. 5) dismissed out of hand any similarity between the murders in Galicia and Whitechapel. In such ways did Ripper news help to rekindle the fires of anti-Semitism and revive ancient legends circulating throughout Eastern Europe about the magical powers of the uterus—not to mention other female organs or secretions. No doubt these efforts to enthrall readers with Gothic tales of ritual Jewish murder and stupor-inducing candles made of female body parts pleased the owners and stockholders of those London papers whose circulations soared during the season of the Ripper.

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Chapter Eleven

Responses to Ripper News LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

In theory any mundane news story—say a bankruptcy case, a traffic accident, a mugging, or a stolen bicycle—should be able to catch and hold the interest of some readers, if only because they have a personal connection to the event in question. As Peter Dahlgren has argued, reports of even petty crime appeal to people who can relate to either the ‘‘thematic infrastructure’’ of the story or one of the principals—especially the victim.1 Occasionally, a mundane crime story will strike a chord so deep or harmonic that the reader will fire off a letter to the editor, expressing his or her convictions on the subject. When the story involves a series of violent crimes, notably the threat of a serial killer or rapist on the loose, readers who feel particularly vulnerable or emotionally involved may write to their favorite newspaper about the case. As Stuart Hall and his colleagues observed, letters to the editor contain ‘‘readers’ opinions . . . in their least mediated public form.’’ And however different those who write to the Times and the tabloid press may be in social origins, education, and preoccupations, both sets of printed letters constitute a form of ‘‘cultural power.’’ Furthermore, the press uses this highly structured exchange to help shape or ‘‘orchestrate’’ 238

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public opinion. Needless to say, editors keep firm control over the contents of the letters column, especially when it comes to matters of ideological import.2 As for the Ripper murders, the printed letters—whether emanating from elite or plebeian circles—revealed much more about the writers than the crimes. Not long after Chapman’s murder, at first scores and then hundreds of readers sent letters to both the police and the press about the crimes. By so doing, these correspondents wrote themselves into the Ripper story and in the process left some clues about their own desires, fantasies, and fears. At the same time, a small but significant number of letter writers assumed the persona of the killer, and boasted of their bloody deeds or promised more to come. Whether ‘‘kooks’’ suffering from a compulsion to confess or ‘‘crazies’’ who admired this purger of prostitutes, they clearly enjoyed acting out their Ripperesque fantasies in this fashion. All the publicity surrounding these prostitute murders was bound to turn some readers into writers; and whether they happened to be lawyers, ex-constables, spiritualists, clergymen, social reformers, butchers, or little old ladies, almost all of them wanted to help the police capture the Whitechapel murderer. Only a handful betrayed more interest in the reward money than in stopping the slaughter. If the correspondence columns of the Times offer any guide to the reactions of higher-brow readers, the Nichols and Chapman murders produced only a handful of letters, assuming, of course, that the editors did not reject others for whatever reasons. During the first ten days of September not one letter about the Whitechapel crimes appeared in this paper. Then came several letters, followed by eleven in the final week, amounting to nineteen for the entire month. Needless to say, such letters did not dominate the correspondence columns. On September 20, for example, the Times also published letters on sugar bounties, the stability of watercolors, the nesting habits of swallows, and supposed cannibalism in the Congo.3 Shortly after the double event, what had been a trickle of letters suddenly became a torrent flooding editorial offices and spilling over into Scotland Yard and police stations in the East End. During the first half of October hundreds of people shared their ideas with the public about the killer’s identity, motives, and presumed habits. Since no paper could possibly publish all the Ripper mail received, editors either abbreviated or discarded countless letters. Indeed, only a fraction of this mail ever saw printer’s ink. To deal with the overflow, the Daily Telegraph, Evening News, and Star, among other papers, resorted to two- or three-line précis, printing relatively 239

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few letters in their entirety. Thus on October 1 and 2, the Daily Telegraph published some ninety-four Ripper-related letters, of which sixty-nine were two- or three-line summaries.4 Convinced that the killer would soon strike again, many writers suggested ways of capturing him, while others simply speculated about his identity or motive. Some correspondents called the police downright incompetent; others deplored the lifestyles or the poverty of the victims. A few warned of the threat to law and order if the murders did not stop, or insisted that the killings were ruining England’s vaunted reputation as the center of world civilization. Although the number of these letters fell off sharply after October 8, Kelly’s murder galvanized correspondents for a week or two in November. By contrast, the Pall Mall Gazette published only one letter about the murders during September and only a dozen for all of October.5 Taking a sample of 241 letters published in five newspapers, I have analyzed this correspondence according to topic and, where possible, writer and geographical origin. Of all these letters, 37 percent were anonymous and 42 percent bore no address. Some 68 percent of those with an address came from the metropolis. Another 10 percent originated in the Home Counties (that is, the surrounding counties located beyond a twelve-mile radius centered on St. Paul’s), while 15 percent had a postal address in the English provinces. Scotland produced only five letters, while Ireland and Wales yielded none. France, Germany, and the Netherlands produced one correspondent each.6 Besides the plethora of anonymous writers, the other noteworthy feature of these letters was the paucity of female correspondents. Including the twenty-five nameless writers who designated themselves as male by their occupation—e.g., ‘‘A Workingman,’’ ‘‘Medicus,’’ or ‘‘Old Policeman’’— almost 91 percent of the 150 gender-designated correspondents were male. The percentage of women comes very close to the figure of 10 percent for the female cohort in the mail received by the City of London police.7 Despite their profound concern about seeing the killer caught and convicted, women seemed much more reluctant to share their thoughts on the murders with the public. Since so many correspondents preferred to send their ideas about the murders to the police, this added a huge burden to the already overworked clerks and detectives, who had to sift through all this mail and follow up at least some of the suggestions.8 As might be expected, the letters published in the papers tended to be much more articulate and circumspect than those received by the police. 240

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Editors presumably weeded out the wilder and woollier letters and corrected the spelling and syntax of those chosen for publication. George Buckle, the venerable editor of the Times, regarded letters to the editor as not only a ‘‘unique feature’’ of modern journalism but ‘‘the most valuable ‘free copy’ in the world,’’ and he always found space for correspondence from ‘‘the good and the great.’’9 Other papers were less elitist in dealing with this mail, and published letters from obscure people who were drawn like moths to the candle of the Whitechapel horrors. The 302 topics raised in this sample have been sorted into five categories: detection, law and order, suspects, moral and social reform, and miscellaneous. Needless to say, some writers broached more than one topic in the same letter, making simple classification more difficult. Modes of Detection By far the most popular subject—amounting to 41 percent of the whole— concerned suggestions for apprehending the killer. Some 24 of the 123 letters in this category (or 19.5 percent) recommended the use of bloodhounds.10 Twelve correspondents advised deploying smarter detectives, nine suggested that constables on patrol wear rubber-soled boots to muffle their movement, and eight urged the government to offer reward money to any accomplice, eyewitness, or private detective who knew anything about the killer.11 A Middlesex magistrate with thirty years’ experience of criminal behavior insisted that only reward money would lead to the arrest of the killer. And Henry White of South Kensington pledged fifty pounds toward the sum of a thousand pounds that he deemed necessary for this purpose.12 Five writers advised the police to deploy human decoys—whether prostitutes or detectives dressed like them—to trap the killer. And several recommended that these undercover agents wear body armor to ward off knife attacks. One man thought the police should mount bicycles in order to carry out speedy and noiseless patrols of Whitechapel at night.13 Two writers believed that the killer eluded detection by escaping through the sewers. The Anglo-Irish feminist Frances Power Cobbe urged the CID to recruit women, because they had the ‘‘gift of intuitive quickness’’ and were just as effective as ‘‘keen-nosed’’ bloodhounds. Indeed, they could operate much more unobtrusively than men.14 Besides calling for better detectives, more police patrols, and bloodhounds, some writers promoted night shelters for homeless unfortunates. Coroner Roderick Macdonald went out on a limb by speculating that the killer first drugged his victims with a potion 241

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of rum and morphia and then disemboweled them to conceal the symptoms of poisoning.15 Several correspondents heaped ridicule on Baxter’s theory about the American pathologist seeking specimen wombs.16 Although not quite as bizarre and certainly not as salacious as some of the letters sent to the police, much of the newspaper correspondence ranged from the macabre to the absurd. The owner of a large bloodhound kennel proposed that the best way to train hounds accustomed to the countryside to find a scent in an urban setting would be to send them in pursuit of surgeons or medical students wearing bloodstained gowns and walking through the back streets of Whitechapel, in the manner of a human drag-hunt.17 Percy Lindley, a breeder of bloodhounds and travel writer, informed two papers that the murderer might have been caught if only a good hound had been put on his trail while the scent was still fresh.18 Rather less helpful was W. S. Pilling, who asked readers of the Daily Telegraph (Oct. 4) to pray for divine help in capturing the killer. Law-and-Order Mail The second leading subject in this sample of Ripper mail—comprising 21 percent of the topics raised—concerned law and order issues and the failings of the police. Most of these writers contended that deficiencies in the recruitment, training, and administration of the constabulary as well as low morale at Scotland Yard accounted for the police’s failure to arrest the Ripper. Some demanded more police patrols in Whitechapel and several believed that regular soldiers should be brought into the district. A few called for sterner measures against hard-core criminals and the arrest of prostitutes in the East End. One or two writers thought that the police should stop all suspicious persons, carry out house-to-house searches, and register every prostitute, tramp, thief, and lodger in Whitechapel.19 Others were convinced that police bungling in this case was encouraging ordinary criminals to break the law all over town. ‘‘An Old Constable’’ accused Warren of having militarized the police, and recommended a complete reorganization of Scotland Yard. One woman called for more police patrols after dark, when they were most needed to protect people like herself while walking to and from their place of work.20 ‘‘A Working Man’’ who had lived in Whitechapel for twenty-five years complained about the recent theft of his watch and chain. Upset about this crime and the rash of robberies and burglaries there, he asked pointedly: ‘‘Where are our police?’’21 On the other hand, several writers actually praised the police for their courage and 242

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perseverance, while recommending tighter control of criminals and more patrols in the East End.22 Suspects The third most popular category involved the presumed identity, motive, and occupation of the murderer. These topics surfaced in 18 percent of the sample. The leading candidate for the role of Jack, was, naturally, a lunatic (10 mentions), followed by a butcher (7), an American (3), a Malay or Lascar (3), a policeman (2), a respectable lodger (2), a woman (2), an unspecified Jew (2), and a foreigner (2). Single mentions included a victim of venereal disease, a Jewish slaughterman, a gang, a sadist, an opium addict, a sailor, an ex-convict, and an Irish-American Fenian who was terrorizing London with a knife rather than dynamite.23 Seventeen letters combined the categories of detection and suspects. One inventive writer from Brixton believed that the killer simply wanted to collect the reward money that would come his way if after committing these crimes he incriminated an innocent man. He ended his short letter on a rather cryptic note: ‘‘A second Titus Oates is not impossible.’’24 A medical expert, who may have read Lombroso or Krafft-Ebing, shared their belief that epileptics could easily turn homicidal when sexually aroused. For this reason the police should be on the lookout for an epileptic man recently treated in some hospital.25 A London doctor, who had once been attacked by a patient in his own asylum, imagined the murderer to be a religious maniac with a mission ‘‘to extirpate vice by assassination.’’26 Another writer urged the police to interrogate every butcher in the East End because the murderer clearly belonged to this trade.27 An ‘‘Ex-Convict’’ was convinced that the killer had served time in jail, where he had learned human anatomy while working as an orderly in the prison hospital. Perhaps he was killing prostitutes because one of them had betrayed him to the police.28 Lastly, a patriotic ‘‘Anglo-Texan’’ living in London defended the good name of his home state by refuting a Daily Telegraph correspondent who had argued that the slang used by ‘‘Jack the Ripper’’ in his first letter and card resembled the way ‘‘Texas roughs’’ talked.29 Xenophobia Fleet Street’s Ripper mailbag also contained examples of raw xenophobia and ethnocentrism. Firmly convinced that nobody of Anglo-Saxon origins could possibly commit such atrocities, some writers suspected a Continental 243

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European—whether western, eastern, or southern—while others opted for an Asian—either a Lascar, Malay, or East Indian. Occasionally a paper would print an article about the ‘‘Asiatic’’ sadism of the killer. A correspondent named ‘‘Nemo’’ relied on his many years in India to inform readers of the Times (Oct. 4) that the murderer was ‘‘a Malay, or other low-class Asiatic’’ because the mutilations were all inflicted according to ‘‘peculiarly Eastern methods’’ designed ‘‘to express insult, hatred, and contempt.’’ Perhaps a prostitute had robbed this man of all his savings, or she had so ‘‘greatly injured’’ him that he felt the need to exact revenge on her entire class.30 The Times (Oct. 6) reported on an English sailor with the ‘‘peculiar’’ name of Dodge who had encountered a Malay cook in a Poplar music hall. The cook told him that he had been robbed by a prostitute and that if he did not find her and recover his money, ‘‘he would murder and mutilate every Whitechapel woman he met.’’ The Pall Mall Gazette (Nov. 10) promoted its own special blend of Orientalism in a front-page article based on two letters from a Mancunian who styled himself ‘‘Malaysia’’ and insisted that the crimes were typically Malaysian because ‘‘the Malay race are extremely vindictive, treacherous, and ferocious, implacable in their revenge, and on the slightest provocation, or imaginary insult, will commit murder. When bent on revenge they scarcely ever fail of wreaking their vengeance.’’ Malays, he continued, would risk their own lives ‘‘to gratify their thirst of revenge, which nothing but blood will satisfy.’’ Doubtless, he wrote, ‘‘these vicious attributes [are] hereditary and apparently ineradicable.’’ Stead’s willingness to feature the theory of a seafaring Malay cook or butcher ‘‘running a-muck’’ in Whitechapel reflected his wish to remove any AngloSaxon from the list of prime suspects.31 As for European suspects, a solicitor living in Covent Garden dismissed such motives as uterine research, robbery, ‘‘animal passion,’’ revenge for some imagined or real wrong, and homicidal mania. Unlike on the Continent, the annals of English crime contained no precedents for such ‘‘peculiarly horrible’’ murders. The killer’s speed in carrying out his lethal work was ‘‘inconsistent with the ordinary English phlegmatic nature,’’ and the removal of certain organs required the kind of anatomical knowledge that no English slaughterman possessed. Moreover, the weapon resembled a French cook’s knife. Therefore the perpetrator had to be European. While conceding that foreigners enjoyed no ‘‘monopoly of brutality,’’ he found the idiosyncrasies of these murders ‘‘peculiar to particular countries,’’ and fortunately England was not among them.32 If Indians and Malaysians living in London lacked spokesmen capable of 244

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rebutting such ethnic slurs, the Jewish community had some highly articulate defenders who leapt into action as soon as rumors spread that Jack might be a Jewish ritual killer or mad kosher butcher. A number of papers favored the Jewish slaughterman, or shochet, theory at one time or another. Early in October two of East London’s chief rabbis rose to defend their community against accusations of bloodlust and ritual slaughter, calling them not just false but calculated to incite violence against Jews in the East End.33 In addition, Samuel Montagu, the local Member of Parliament, scolded the Pall Mall Gazette (Oct. 15) for making ‘‘grave insinuations’’ against his fellow Jews. Citing the tendency of gentiles to persecute the Jews whenever epidemics or multiple murders occurred, he deplored the revival of this familiar ‘‘red spectre.’’34 No doubt Fleet Street’s focus on Jewish suspects helped to widen the gulf between the (Occidental) West End and the (Oriental) East End. But the vigorous rebuttals by prominent Jews made it clear that such anti-Semitic attitudes would not go unchallenged. The emphasis on ‘‘foreign’’ suspects did not mean that English gentiles were above suspicion, because most correspondents who considered Jack a lunatic, policeman, butcher, or medical man presumably had one of their own ‘‘race’’ in mind. Moreover, many of the suspects detained by the police for questioning were British. As the public panic mounted, any strange man seen on the street with a shiny black bag or suitcase and wearing dark clothes might be mistaken for Jack and roughly manhandled. So it was that an ‘‘Elderly Gentleman’’ wrote to the Times (Oct. 15) about his recent experiences in the midlands. On one occasion he encountered a maidservant, who asked: ‘‘Is it true, Sir, that they’re a-cutting down the feminine seck [sic] in London?’’ She had heard rumors that ‘‘they was a’murdering of ’em by ones and twos.’’ But much worse was to befall this gentleman. While traveling through a coal-mining district, he ran into some young colliers who mistook him for Jack the Ripper and marched him off to the nearest police station, several miles away. Somehow he eluded their clutches and fled. Unable to forgive this affront to his dignity, he expressed acute dismay that these workers had not been able to distinguish between a true English gentleman and the Whitechapel villain. Moral and Social Reform The fourth favorite subject matter of this mail—amounting to 15 percent of all the topics raised—concerned slum conditions in the East End and the urgent need for moral and social reform. Preferring the Times and the Daily Telegraph as their platform, these writers called for better housing, lighting, 245

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and sanitation, as well as night shelters or hostels for homeless women.35 Several evangelicals argued that Christian values could best be promoted in Tower Hamlets by prosecuting slum landlords and brothel keepers, razing rookeries, and building model tenements for the poor.36 Blaming the murders on the rampant poverty and vice in Whitechapel, these social activists wanted to enlist both the state and private philanthropy in the campaign against dirt and depravity. Only one of these do-gooders had the compassion to ask where the poor people displaced by slum clearance projects were supposed to go. Rather sardonically, this writer observed that because the Ripper’s victims had been unable to find any decent lodging for the night it may have been ‘‘a good thing that they fell in with unknown surgical genius,’’ for at least the killer was trying to rid the East End of ‘‘its vicious inhabitants.’’ Alas, if ‘‘the typical Annie Chapman’’ were driven out of Whitechapel, she would either ‘‘carry her taint to streets hitherto untainted’’ or she would have to pay much more for a ‘‘doss’’ elsewhere.37 Suffused with the ‘‘tough love’’ of early Victorian evangelicalism, the Rev. Lord Sidney Godolphin Osborne wrote several searing letters to the Times during the autumn of 1888 under the familiar initials ‘‘S.G.O.’’ about the moral and social cesspool from which these horrors flowed.38 This noble paternalist dreamed of driving away all the bestial elements thriving in the slums. As Peter Stallybrass and Allon White have argued, such reformers embraced a binary view of the world, thinking in terms of contrasts between cleanliness and dirt, prosperity and penury, and civilization and savagery. As they put it, ‘‘In the slum, the bourgeois spectator surveyed and classified his own antithesis.’’ Locked into a scatological view of the East End, Osborne reveled in metaphors of the sewer that connected ‘‘slums to sewage, sewage to disease, and disease to moral degradation.’’39 In a long letter to the Times (Sept. 18) he reduced Whitechapel to one vast cesspool and blamed the murders on the deep gulf between rich and poor. Warning about the danger of not cleaning society’s sewers, he pointed out that thousands of destitute people were wallowing in ‘‘godless brutality’’ not far from the mansions of the rich. These slum-dwellers were ‘‘a species of human sewage, the very drainage of the vilest production of ordinary vice.’’ Blasphemy, obscenity, harlotry, and violence were bound to produce the most heinous crimes, because such ‘‘bestial’’ conditions corrupted youth into committing ‘‘the grossest sins’’ of their elders. Religious societies, moreover, preferred to propagate the gospel overseas rather than at home. Although there was no simple cure for these evils, the murders would make people realize that the 246

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‘‘sewer gas’’ in the East End could easily explode unless drastic measures were taken to dispose of all the ‘‘moral sewage.’’40 Responding to this epistolary sermon, Canon Barnett, who had lived and worked as a clergyman in the East End for sixteen years, informed readers of the Times (Sept. 19) that he shared Osborne’s views about the educational value of the Whitechapel horrors insofar as they exposed the appalling slums of the East End, where he had seen human depravity even worse than these murders. And yet the dens of criminality were confined to a quarter-mile area, while the rest of Whitechapel was as safe as any other part of London. To eliminate the underlying causes of these murders he proposed ‘‘efficient police supervision,’’ better lighting and cleaner streets, the removal of all slaughterhouses from public view, and tenements controlled by ‘‘responsible’’ landlords. Taken together, these four steps would promote altruism, good character, and Christianity.41 A leader writer in the Times (Sept. 19) found some merit in Osborne’s ‘‘strong’’ metaphors but pointed out that the realities of slum life were ‘‘even stronger.’’ This writer also invoked the excremental trope by warning that just as neglect of ‘‘organic waste breeds pestilence,’’ so ‘‘neglected human refuse . . . inevitably breeds crime.’’ Society might experience less crime if, as with garbage removal, ‘‘the vicious and criminal refuse’’ could be confined to particular places. But for all its preaching, the Times offered no practical solution for the problems afflicting the East End. Promoting the familiar precepts of brotherly love and self-help, this writer pointed out that material reforms meant spending money, and East Enders could ill afford to foot the bill. In the absence of state intervention, the only hope lay in efforts by altruistic individuals to bridge the chasm between East and West London.42 Such lofty pronouncements hardly reassured the residents of Whitechapel that material assistance was on its way from Mayfair or Westminster. The advanced Liberal and Radical press did not share the Times’s faith in the charitable instincts of the West End. A leader writer in the Star (Sept. 19) thanked Osborne, that ‘‘eccentric but kindly clergyman,’’ for pointing out the ‘‘true moral’’ of the murders. In a near parody of ‘‘S.G.O.’’ ’s scabrous metaphors, he observed: ‘‘We have given the people moral sewage and poison to drink, and we have got a residuum as foul, as dangerous, as loathly as any that haunted the back streets of Rome in old Imperial days.’’ The murders, he wrote, were the ‘‘pretty result of eighteen centuries of Christianity.’’ A leader in the East London Observer (Nov. 3) hailed the recent decline in the crime rate and endorsed the Bishop of Bedford’s 247

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comment that the murders should not blind people to the greater security of life and property that now prevailed there despite the absence of material improvement.43 The patron of poor and unprotected children, Dr. Thomas J. Barnardo, endorsed Osborne’s outrage about the exposure of boys and girls to ‘‘the foul contamination of these human sewers.’’ In a letter to the Times (Oct. 9) he urged that shelters be built to protect slum children from all the ‘‘vile influences.’’ Last but not least, Frederick Charrington, the bachelor heir to a brewing fortune and a crusader against sexual promiscuity, used the murders to promote his campaign against pimps and owners of bordellos. As he told readers of the Pall Mall Gazette (Nov. 22), Kelly’s murder should spur the authorities to prosecute the ‘‘bullies’’ who lived off the earnings of prostitutes, because these ‘‘scoundrels’’ were almost as evil as the murderer and deserved severe punishment. Another reformer pointed out that no matter how shocking, such murders were extremely rare, and should not obscure the miraculous fact that every day some five million Londoners were fed and on the whole behaved rather well.44 In general, these reformminded correspondents agreed that the murders should be blamed on the moral and social degradation prevailing in the rookeries, for which the wealthy residents of the West End bore some responsibility. But they could not agree on any practical measures to relieve the crushing poverty or prevent the Ripper’s victims from having to walk the streets late at night in search of lustful customers. Miscellany This Ripper-related mail also contained fourteen letters (almost 5 percent of the sample) about other topics. Four of these came from prominent Jews who vehemently denied that the killer was a Jew engaged in ritual murder. Three others dismissed Baxter’s theory about the American pathologist and criticized his handling of the inquests. Five letters took the media to task for exploiting the murders. In a letter to Reynolds’s (Sept. 23), ‘‘Northumbrian’’ deplored a culture that made horror into a ‘‘standing dish, which, unhappily, is never out of season.’’ He blamed all the sensation-horror on journalists, novelists, and theater managers, who wanted to divert attention away from pressing political and social problems. By pandering to the appetite for ‘‘the foul and seamy side of human nature,’’ they were actually encouraging crime. ‘‘We have set up King Horrors,’’ he averred, ‘‘and we must bow down and worship him.’’ John Law of Ludgate Square complained to the Gazette (Oct. 18) about the ‘‘penny gaff’’ set up across the 248

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street from the London Hospital, where one could see a ‘‘ghastly display’’ of wax-model murderers and their victims, including the women slain by ‘‘that bloody demon.’’ Among the ‘‘slummers’’ willing to spend a penny or two to see these images of violent death were mere boys and girls. In that dingy basement ‘‘a smell of death rises into your nostrils, and you feel as if your throat were filled up with some poisonous fungus.’’45 A Scottish critic blamed the rise in violent crime on cheap and ‘‘vicious and criminal literature’’ that made heroes out of ‘‘successful murderers, pirates, burglars, thieves etc.’’ Hungry for this foul ‘‘mental food,’’ many ‘‘depraved’’ children wanted nothing more than to ‘‘emulate the careers of their favourite heroes,’’ who presumably included Jack.46 A letter from Kensington signed ‘‘Pembroke Square’’ in the Daily Telegraph (Nov. 16) deplored the invasion of ‘‘our suburban squares’’ by ‘‘hoarse ruffians’’ shouting about another ‘‘Beautiful-Awful-Murder.’’ These noisy news vendors were shattering the quiet of residential streets and squares in the West End with ‘‘hideous voices’’ that ‘‘frighten[ed] the lives out of all the sensitive women and children in the neighbourhood.’’ Was it not ‘‘monstrous,’’ this elitist writer declared, that ‘‘the police do not protect us from such a flagrant and ghastly nuisance?’’ On a different note, several doctors ridiculed Baxter’s uterine researcher theory. In a defensive frame of mind, Sir James Risdon Bennett, former president of the Royal College of Physicians, told the Times (Sept. 28) that this hypothesis was not only ‘‘utterly absurd,’’ but also ‘‘a gross and unjustifiable calumny on the medical profession.’’ Because the crimes were sexually motivated, the killer had to be either a homicidal maniac with erotic delusions or a ‘‘religious maniac’’ who thought he had a mandate from the Almighty to purge the world of prostitutes. For some unknown reason his crusade against these women included a desire to deprive them of their wombs.47 Other physicians and psychologists made use of articles in the Lancet to advance their theories about the murders. After the editor dismissed the homicidal maniac theory on the grounds that lunatics could not carry out complicated crimes or escape detection, Henry Sutherland, M.D., of Richmond Terrace sent a rejoinder (Sept. 22) arguing that the murderer was ‘‘perfectly sane’’ and that robbery was his motive. In short, Nichols and Chapman had been killed for their jewelry, and the mutilations were designed to divert attention away from this fact.48 In the same issue, Forbes Winslow objected to the editor’s contention that maniacs were not cunning enough to kill more than one victim and escape undetected. One of his patients had, in fact, expressed a desire to kill everyone he saw in the streets 249

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as well as his own doctor. Such lunatics often acted sanely and managed to disguise their ‘‘thirst for blood.’’ In his view, the Ripper was a ‘‘religious homicidal maniac’’ who killed because he wished to ‘‘wipe out a social blot from the face of the earth.’’49 Writing in the Fortnightly Review, Dr. George Savage questioned the value of the term ‘‘homicidal maniac’’ because it covered every kind of affliction from moral imbecility and epilepsy to melancholia and sexual or religious delusions. While the mutilations suggested some anatomical knowledge, he wrote, anyone familiar with postmortem procedures, even a hospital porter or mortuary assistant, was quite capable of inflicting them.50 One of the most exotic theories floated by any correspondent falls under the heading of genital vivisection. Once again the Evening News (Sept. 7) dared to broach this unseemly topic in the form of a front-page letter from an ‘‘Ex-Medico’s Daughter’’ who thought the killer might be a ‘‘medical maniac’’ obsessed with the effects of menopause on the female reproductive organs. To learn more about ‘‘the mysterious changes that take place in older women,’’ the killer needed middle-aged subjects—hence the missing organs of these ‘‘poor women.’’ Perhaps he also wanted to release them from their ‘‘wretched existence.’’ This imaginative lady worried lest the mad doctor’s lethal research into ‘‘the mysteries’’ of woman ‘‘degenerate into a craze.’’ Regardless of their ideas about the killer’s motives, virtually all these letter writers were convinced that he would strike again, and many questioned Scotland Yard’s ability to protect them from even ordinary criminals in any part of town. Anxiety about their own safety as well as compassion for the Ripper’s victims drove many of these writers to share their concerns with the public. One ‘‘poor parson’’ from Folkestone spoke for many citizens when he informed readers of the Times (Oct. 11) that he had recently returned with his family from a day’s outing only to find the vicarage ransacked and property worth sixty pounds stolen. ‘‘No doubt,’’ he lamented, ‘‘most of the police were at Whitechapel.’’ What clearer proof, he wanted to know, could there be that the police were no longer able to protect honest folk in the metropolis? Needless to say, this clergyman seemed more upset about the loss of his valuables than the murder of half a dozen prostitutes in Whitechapel. When read in conjunction with reports of mounting tensions in the East End, his letter may be seen as the tiny tip of a huge law-andorder iceberg. Quite apart from these letters to the editor, countless correspondents 250

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wrote to the police and the Lord Mayor of London about the Whitechapel murders. In general this mail was more spontaneous, candid, eccentric, and cruder than the Fleet Street variety; and some of these writers revealed even more about their personal fears and fantasies. The police mailbag also contained several hundred letters and postcards signed ‘‘Jack the Ripper’’ or some equivalent name that gloated over the murders. Of the three hundred or so surviving letters addressed to Colonel Sir James Fraser, Chief Commissioner of the City of London police, some 44 percent named a suspect, while almost 55 percent advised the police how to catch the killer. Some letters combined both topics. The 143 suspects mentioned in this correspondence comprised 101 Englishmen, 21 Europeans (including 5 Jewish immigrants), 6 Americans, 3 East Indians, 2 Malays, a Black and a White South African, an Irishman, and an IrishAmerican. Of these, some 46 percent were assigned the status of doctor or surgeon, while other occupations mentioned were butcher (9), night watchman (6), policeman (5), and unspecified professional (2). Not surprisingly, the largest single category was that of religious maniac (13). Seven writers thought that the killer was a man disguised as a woman, and six thought that ‘‘Jack’’ was a ‘‘Jill.’’ Whether filled with exotica or erotica, this police mail provided further evidence of just how closely the public was following Ripper news, even from as far afield as Italy or Australia. A few courageous letter writers—including several young women—even volunteered to pose as prostitutes at night in order to entrap Jack, without worrying unduly about the risk involved. The 217 letters and 5 telegrams from wannabe Jacks that have survived in the files of Scotland Yard, as well as the dozen or so similar letters in the archives of the City police, exemplify the ease with which Ripper news drove some mentally disturbed people to don the killer’s mantle and pretend that they were the villain. Many of these often childish and incoherent letters were sprinkled with exclamations like ‘‘Ha! Ha!’’ and some carried crude sketches of daggers or coffins. Much the same macabre response has accompanied highly publicized serial killers in the twentieth century. For example, the arrest and trial of Peter Kürten, who was a keen admirer of Jack the Ripper, in 1930–31 for the murder and mutilation of over thirty women and children inspired at least 160 letters from persons claiming to be ‘‘the monster of Düsseldorf.’’51 In sum, the impenetrable mystery of the Ripper’s identity and motives created a huge vacuum into which all kinds of cranks or crazies as well as many ordinary, rational people rushed with their ideas and fantasies. If a 251

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few letters in the police mailbag came from psychics or seers who coveted the reward money, the vast majority were committed to bringing the culprit to justice. This mail constitutes vivid proof of how the news from Whitechapel inspired some readers to venture beyond prurience and become bit players in the ongoing Ripper horror show.

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Chapter Twelve

The Cultural Politics of Ripper News

Steeped in the kind of mystery and sensation-horror that sold papers, and leaving all kinds of openings or gaps for the play of the imagination, Ripper news went well beyond alarming female readers about a maniac on the loose. Besides providing the public with unprecedented amounts of gore, these news stories also brought to the fore some of the most troubling social and moral issues of the day—notably, poverty and prostitution, the threat of collective violence in the East End, xenophobia and anti-Semitism, the limits of journalistic decency, and, of course, the ability of Scotland Yard to police the metropolis effectively. The profound mystery surrounding the murders, along with the steady flow of Ripper mail and the antics of Ripper impersonators, gave the press a golden opportunity to inject into the main story all kinds of subtexts and ancillary material. Although the absence of bylines in 1888 meant that none of the reporters assigned to the Whitechapel murders became household names—unlike some latter-day journalists on the crime beat, who are invited by celebrity T.V. hosts to discuss the latest sensational murder on camera—they certainly had no trouble turning the ‘‘East End horrors’’ into a media event. And, of course, in the very act of 253

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reporting each murder they were able to shape the Ripper story as they saw fit, thereby contributing much to the mythos surrounding the killer, who came to be endowed with supernatural powers. Whether or not the Ripper deserves to be hailed as the ‘‘father’’ of modern sex crime, as Colin Wilson and Jane Caputi believe, his deeds struck contemporaries as novel, even though reporters soon discovered similar mutilation-murders in Moscow, Texas, and South America.1 As Maria Tatar has noted, what we now call serial sexual murder always stirs ‘‘both curiosity and anxiety’’ because the absence of ‘‘the familiar parameters of greed, revenge, [and] sexual jealousy’’ opens up a veritable Pandora’s box of questions and answers about gratuitous violence against women.2 The ability of the Ripper mythos to live on in our imaginations speaks volumes about both our fascination with Jack’s identity and the effectiveness of the press in sensationalizing the murders. Like the late Victorians, we, too, want to know whodunem and why, and in the absence of any ‘‘rational’’ explanation we conjure up exotic, not to say erotic, scenarios about the villain. Indeed, the classic modern horror film featuring an often sexually ambiguous male serial killer consumed by rage against (young and beautiful) women whom he at once despises and desires owes much to the Ripper, or to his representation in the press. In her absorbing study of Robert Alton Harris’s campaign in 1991 to have his execution at San Quentin filmed and televised, Wendy Lesser shrewdly notes that ‘‘murder is an inherently frustrating subject because it keeps moving away from us, evading us. We want to ask the big questions: more than anything else, we want to get the answers to the big questions. Yet all we can get at, finally, are the details.’’3 In 1888 many of those details consisted of the forensic findings of the surgeons about the ‘‘abdominal’’ mutilations, which contained the richest kind of gore. And yet Ripper news created all kinds of frustrations for reporters and readers alike. The many unknowns in this baffling case arguably helped leader writers to pose some of the ‘‘big questions’’ about the moral health of the nation and the cause of law and order. Although coming from opposing ideological camps, both the left-wing and right-wing press agreed on one point: the failure of the police to catch the culprit revealed serious flaws in either the leadership or the organization of Scotland Yard. While the Star and Pall Mall Gazette blamed this failure on the two officials responsible for Bloody Sunday, the Times and Morning Post defended Matthews and Warren but called for more police and detectives to patrol the East End. Readers were left full of 254

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doubts about the ability of the police to protect any part of the metropolis from either ordinary criminals or homicidal maniacs. Posing the ‘‘big questions’’ was, of course, much easier than finding the right answers, and for this reason most papers preferred to focus on the sheer horror of the slayings and the latest suspects. As for the motives behind these ghastly crimes, reporters served up a tempting variety of choices, from the split personality of the Jekyll and Hyde variety to a ‘‘scientific sociologist’’ bent on purging Whitechapel of prostitutes, a mad doctor indulging in human vivisection in order to learn more about the uterus, a victim of venereal disease, a Jewish ritual killer, or an ‘‘erotomaniacal’’ epileptic. Naturally, the public craved answers that carried the weight of science, and yet the police surgeons could not even agree on the extent of the killer’s surgical expertise. As we have seen, Fleet Street’s reports of the pelvic mutilations contain a number of clues about contemporary attitudes toward women and female sexuality. But we are still left with questions about why the medical examiners and some newspapers were so reluctant to identify the missing ‘‘portions.’’ And why did Baxter’s farfetched theory about an American pathologist seeking specimen uteruses receive so much more play in the press than the possibility of necrophilia or cannibalism raised by the half-kidney sent to George Lusk? Surely Fleet Street’s emphasis on the postmortem reports says more about the nature of sensation-horror and reader prurience than about its devotion to forensic medicine. Sara Knox’s absorbing study of real and fictional murder narratives in modern American culture explores the ‘‘generic’’ nature of such tales as well as ‘‘the cultural impulses that drive the narrator . . . to tell a story that will encompass and address questions ancillary to the actual subject.’’ Focusing on the sensibilities of both the author/narrator and the reader, she delves into several notorious cases and their retelling by men who are convinced that healing and truth reside solely within the science of forensic psychiatry. In their quest for coherence, authority, and epistemological order in murder stories, the narrators strive for a seamless effect by means of tropes designed to divert the reader’s attention away from all the silences or gaps because ‘‘the integrity of the story is all-important.’’4 But the discerning or critical reader knows better. Even the most seemingly definitive accounts of murder—such as Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1965)— contain significant silences. Readers of murder news are always denied the victim’s version of what actually happened, not to mention access to the 255

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police files on the case, the complete autopsy reports, and photographs of both the crime scene and the body before and during the postmortem exam. Quite apart from the deathly silence of the victim, the perpetrator rarely speaks—except to profess his or her innocence. In short, even when a murder is solved and the defendant is convicted, we never know exactly what happened during the hours or minutes leading up to the moment of death. Not even an eyewitness to the crime can be trusted to give an objective account of what transpired. Given all these absences and ambiguities, then, newspaper readers have to use their imaginations to fill in some of the blanks. Unlike murder mystery fiction, newspaper accounts offer no omniscient narrator to lead the reader through the maze of real and false clues to arrive at the killer and his or her motive in the manner of an Agatha Christie, P. D. James, or Patricia Cornwell. Just because women had the most to fear from the Ripper’s knife did not mean that they were the only ones to experience nightmares or anxieties in 1888. For many children—boys as well as girls—Jack became the ultimate bogeyman, especially if their nannies tried to keep them in line by threatening to hand them over to Jack if they did not behave, just as parents around Boston after 1874 warned the young that if they were naughty, then ‘‘Jesse Pomeroy will come and get you!’’5 Looking back on his distant childhood, Compton Mackenzie remembered how he dreaded going to bed during the autumn of 1888, when he was five. ‘‘With her usual perversity’’ his nanny tried to reassure him by pointing out that Charlie Peace, the picaresque villain with the hook at the end of his withered hand, had not only killed more people than Jack, but had been hanged for his crimes and therefore posed no threat. This tale failed to allay the boy’s fears, especially when he heard news vendors shouting at the top of their voices ‘‘ ‘Murder! Murder! Another horrible murder in Whitechapel. Another woman cut up to pieces in Whitechapel!’ ’’ On one unforgettable occasion he panicked while riding alone on an omnibus in Kensington. After spotting the name of Whitechapel on the list of stages and fares advertised inside, he fantasized about being trapped in this bus as it hurtled through central London without stopping until it arrived in Whitechapel, where Jack was waiting to greet the passengers with knife in hand. Despite the passage of many decades Mackenzie could not erase that memory.6 For many children growing up in the East End after 1888 these murders became a mixture of playful myth and terrifying nightmare, as evidenced by their chant while skipping rope in the streets: ‘‘Jack the Ripper/Stole a kipper/Hid it in his father’s slipper.’’ Coming as they did on the heels of the Trafalgar Square disturbances of 256

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1886 and 1887, the Ripper murders confirmed the worst fears and prejudices of many a West Ender, as well as right-wing editors, that the East End was a breeding ground for not only ruffians but nefarious criminals who richly deserved to be batoned in order to curb their anarchist appetites. Besides reinforcing the Gothic and Orientalist images of Whitechapel as a dark and dangerous place where semi-simian criminals preyed on the weak, the Whitechapel murders convinced many Londoners that they could not trust Scotland Yard to safeguard their property or their lives. At the same time, high-minded readers interpreted the murders as a sure sign of the decline of English civilization and the rise of godlessness. To arrest that decline, some Liberal and Radical writers used the press to promote measures for the relief of distress in the East End. Among the lesser leitmotifs of Ripper news was the attribution of magical or superhuman powers to the killer in the manner of ‘‘Spring-Heeled Jack.’’ Then too there was the added attraction of black magic. The appeal of ritual murder theories to those bewildered by these crimes and the reality of Jack’s vanishing acts lent weight to the supposition that the killer was immersed in necromancy. As Richard Tithecott reminds us, the American media endowed Jeffrey Dahmer with similarly transcendent qualities, conjuring up a supermonster and ‘‘outsider,’’ who had nothing in common with normal men like ‘‘ourselves.’’7 Furthermore, by Orientalizing the Ripper, Fleet Street reassured readers anxious to distance themselves from this fiend. He had to be an ‘‘alien’’ Jew, Malay, or Indian Thug, because no Anglo-Saxon could possibly kill and mutilate his victims with such savagery and stealth. Culture-proud Englishmen must have relished these speculations in the Pall Mall Gazette and other papers. When Colin Wilson, the so-called expert on ‘‘the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind’’ and a grand master of Ripper speculation, called the Ripper murders ‘‘the first case of sex crime in the sense that we understand it today,’’ he obviously ignored all the lust murders, rapes, and other sexual offenses that Krafft-Ebing had chronicled in the 1880s. For Wilson, the murders were the logical result of industrialization, which had ushered in a ‘‘new type of man’’—isolated in a fiercely competitive world. The more alienated he felt, the greater his anger and sexual hunger—like the archetypal mother-hater obsessed with wombs. In Wilson’s view, most modern serial killers have been highly sexed, alienated, and ‘‘dominant’’ males with a raging desire to overpower and then kill women in a sadistic manner.8 Not surprisingly, this hypothesis has found few buyers among feminist critics, who write it off as just another myth designed by and for the guardians 257

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of patriarchy. They argue instead that men are not at all alienated from society—which they dominate—but rather from women, whom they fear and despise and seek to control. Out of misogyny and the ambition of heterosexual men to protect their hegemony springs the serial killer of women.9 Aware that sex crimes existed long before the Ripper, Deborah Cameron and Elizabeth Frazer construe (male) ‘‘murderous desires’’ as arising not just out of age-old misogyny but also from modern cultural forces that drive sadistic men to kill out of perverted lust, and even to photograph both the victim and the victimizer.10 Placing Jack the Ripper on the same plane as that of ordinary men except for the intensity of his gynophobia, Jane Caputi agrees with Wilson that a ‘‘new type of crime entered and transformed mass cultural consciousness’’ in 1888. In her view, the Victorians created ‘‘the Ripper mythos—the sex killer as immortal monster, master criminal, even subliminal hero’’— because they wanted to find ‘‘fictional analogues’’ to these horrors. In this way Jack ‘‘emerged as a new gynocidal archetype’’ who set the standard for all subsequent serial killers of women. His butchery ‘‘bespeaks the mythic force and ritual function of serial sexual murder in contemporary patriarchy,’’ wherein sex and violence are fused. This lethal paradigm, she maintains, inspired such monstrous men as the Yorkshire Ripper. (Long before Peter Sutcliffe there was the so-called Jack the Ripper of Atlanta, Georgia, who jugulated and mutilated some twenty black women in 1911–12 and was never caught.)11 Explaining ‘‘the Ripper myth’’ as nothing but ‘‘a collective male invention, a product of criminal, press, and public,’’ Caputi goes so far as to connect Jack the Ripper to the most powerful phallic symbol of all time—namely, the hydrogen bomb that threatens to destroy planet Earth in a climactic act of thermonuclear rape-murder. In her vivid imagination this ultimate nightmare becomes ‘‘the precise macrocosmic parallel to the crimes of Jack the Ripper and his complete mutilation and devastation of the individual female body.’’12 In Jeffrey Weeks’s far more restrained and empirical view, the Victorians did not so much deny the sexual side of their nature as seek to distance themselves from this always dangerous force by relying on both medical discourse and silence. Following Foucault, he asserts that the second half of the century witnessed ‘‘a new taxonomic and labelling zeal which attempted to classify ‘scientifically’ the characteristics and increasingly the aetiologies of the forms of sexual variety, and in so doing helped construct them as objects of study and as sexual categories.’’13 But no matter how hard they tried to relegate sex to a dark corner, it kept obtruding into 258

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their private lives and creeping rather discreetly into their newspapers. The codes of sexual respectability imposed a heavy burden of guilt and fear on those who were taught (as J. S. Mill knew so well) that the forces of ‘‘Logos’’ were always threatened by ‘‘Eros.’’14 Neither pangs of guilt nor the nagging fear of venereal disease, however, seemed to stop men and women from indulging in extramarital sexual relations. The basic hunger for sex and the availability of money to pay for gratification overcame all the taboos and the sermons against illicit sex, and kept untold thousands of casual and fulltime prostitutes gainfully, if precariously, occupied throughout the century. Whatever metaphor or label we choose to impose on Jack the Ripper— whether monster, madman, fiend, lust murderer, sexual maniac, ‘‘saucy lad,’’ or folk-hero—this sinister and shadowy figure continues to serve as a floating signifier that pervades books, films, sensationalized television documentaries, and tacky memorabilia sold in East End pubs. If the Ripper mythos has reached new heights—or depths—of commodification in our own time, we should not forget Fleet Street’s role in helping to stimulate and then feed the public’s appetite for gore in 1888. Impersonating Jack Prominent among the feminist historians who have construed the Whitechapel murders as a turning point in the long history of patriarchy, Judith Walkowitz argued in 1982 that public responses to the murders revealed ‘‘significant class division and class-based fantasies’’ that were reinforced by the perceived divide between a prosperous and civilized West End and an impoverished and dangerous East End.15 However impressive this attempt to demythologize ‘‘the Ripper narrative’’ may be, her study of the impact of the Whitechapel murders on gender relations contains several myths. For example, she maintains that widespread rioting broke out in the wake of Chapman’s murder. In her own words: ‘‘On the streets popular anger precipitated anti-Jewish riots. . . . The poor expressed their engagement with the Ripper murders by rioting. . . . The victims of mob riot were not selected at random. The Whitechapel poor rioted against the Jews, against the police (for not solving the murders), and against doctors.’’16 No doubt such sensational assertions enliven academic monographs of the cultural studies genre. However, there is no hard evidence to support her contention. The only hint of collective violence in Whitechapel around the middle of September appeared in the midst of a five-column article in the East London Observer (Sept. 15) entitled ‘‘A REIGN OF TERROR IN WHITECHAPEL.’’ This report dwelled first on Chapman’s murder, the inquest, the victim’s 259

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background, and suspects before turning to signs of panic in the streets and the ‘‘threatening attitude [of locals] towards the Hebrew population.’’ Then came an arresting crosshead—‘‘A Riot Against the Jews’’—followed by a report that crowds were verbally abusing Jews on the streets owing to the widespread conviction that only a Jew could have committed such a horrible crime. This reporter never produced any evidence of physical violence against Jews, let alone policemen or doctors. On the contrary, he merely observed: ‘‘Happily, the presence of the large number of police in the streets prevented a riot actually taking place.’’ The lack of a precise date and location for all this rioting and the absence of any casualty or arrest figures in Walkowitz’s account adds more fuel to the fire of skepticism.17 One informed historian of the East End, Chaim Bermant, made it clear that notwithstanding all the hostility toward Jewish immigrants, the heavy police presence ‘‘prevent[ed] a threatening situation from degenerating into an outright pogrom.’’18 And Eugene Black has asserted that ‘‘exemplary police work’’ prevented ‘‘what otherwise might have been serious ‘Ripper Riots’ in 1888.’’19 Although angry and fearful crowds did indeed gather in Whitechapel after each murder, and some people did shout anti-Semitic slurs, as happened in the wake of Miriam Angel’s murder, and even though some Ripper suspects were roughly handled, none of the papers in our sample reported rioting against any group in Whitechapel—not even after the carnage in Miller’s Court. In sum, these phantom riots belong to the ongoing process of Ripper mythologizing. As for the impact of these murders on gender relations in London, Walkowitz has painted a dark picture of misogynist men taking advantage of the Ripper’s reign of terror to dominate women. In her view, the murders laid bare ‘‘deep seated sexual antagonism, most frequently expressed by men towards women . . . aided and abetted by sensational newspaper coverage that blamed ‘women of evil life’ for bringing the murders on themselves.’’ As we have seen, a few papers did blame the victims for their fate, while most highlighted even minor assaults on women in any part of town. Quite rightly, Walkowitz dwells on the intimidating behavior of the wannabe Rippers who jumped out of dark alleys or from behind bushes and taunted passing women with the claim that they were Jack. The press also took note of any drunken or violent man who threatened ‘‘to do a Ripper’’ on his wife or mistress. But she then adds the sweeping assertion that ‘‘gentlemen of all sorts were walking about in the evenings looking for women to frighten.’’20 Just how many ‘‘gentlemen’’ roamed through White260

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chapel looking for women to terrify? She does not say. And did all these misogynists act out their Ripper fantasies in this manner with impunity? Although at least a dozen cases of men threatening women with Ripperlike violence were reported in the papers, not one of these malefactors turned out to be a ‘‘gentleman.’’ Most were drunken plebeians, and only one or two actually stuck a knife into their victims. One such verbal offender, George Payne, boasted aloud that he had slain six women in Whitechapel and was looking for a seventh victim. Another culprit was an intoxicated tailor in Holborn, by the name of August Nochild, who tried to strangle a prostitute and then bragged that he had done the Whitechapel murders.21 Other Ripper impersonators included a man who terrified a woman in George Yard by laughing aloud, a sailor named James Henderson who threatened to ‘‘rip up’’ an unfortunate and then struck her head with his cane, a knife-carrying Irish tramp, Thomas Murphy, whom the police arrested near King’s Cross for ‘‘behaving suspiciously,’’ and several nameless drunks who ‘‘confessed’’ to being the killer and wound up in court.22 One inebriated man, Charles Thomas, shouted aloud, ‘‘I’m Jack the Ripper’’ in St. Pancras, but he did not attack any woman. The Daily Chronicle (Oct. 9) reported cases of men impersonating Jack in Stepney, Croydon, Jarrow, and Glasgow.23 However, any man who made such a claim in Whitechapel was soon surrounded by a menacing crowd uttering threats of lynching, and only the arrival of the police spared him this fate. The shaken offender would then be taken to the nearest station for questioning.24 Although Walkowitz denies that ‘‘the Ripper episode directly increased sexual violence’’ against women, she intimates that these Ripper impersonators were rarely arrested, and that, if convicted, they got off with only a slap on the wrist. In only one of the five cases she cites does the offender (Henderson) seem to have been punished—by a fine of forty shillings. In short, she gives the impression that the judiciary tolerated such outrageous conduct. A scrutiny of the newspapers, however, reveals that some magistrates took a very dim view of any behavior that might trigger communal violence, and to discourage such inflammatory acts they imposed exemplary sentences on the guilty parties. Thus George Payne faced the choice of a week in jail or a substantial fine, and a Clerkenwell magistrate sentenced Charles Thomas to a fortnight in prison with hard labor, warning that anyone else convicted of this offense would be treated in the same manner. John Avery, a ticket writer from Willesden, had confided to a 261

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soldier that he was Jack the Ripper and boasted that he would show him ‘‘how I do all the lot.’’ Avery allegedly took the man into a pub, where he repeated his claim three times. At this point the soldier went outside and hailed a policeman, who charged Avery with being drunk and disorderly. In court, Avery’s expression of regret for his behavior did not impress the police magistrate, who condemned his ‘‘exceedingly foolish and wicked’’ conduct and sentenced him to a fortnight in prison with hard labor. A few days later the same magistrate imposed a similar sentence on John Brinckley, a Clerkenwell porter who had consumed much alcohol before slipping a woman’s dress over his own clothes and crying aloud, ‘‘I’m Jack the Ripper. I’m going down City-road to-night and I’ll do another there.’’25 Albeit a mere handful, such cases indicate that some magistrates did not let these Ripper impersonators off lightly. Several Ripper wannabes did inflict serious psychological harm on their victims. Toward the end of October the Sunday papers reported that a young woman named Milligan had been walking down a road with two friends near Kilkeel, County Down, when a man suddenly jumped out from behind a hedge, brandishing a knife and shouting, ‘‘I’m Jack the Ripper.’’ Apparently, Miss Milligan became hysterical and developed a high fever. After lingering in bed for several days, she lost consciousness and died. As one reporter put it, she had literally been ‘‘frightened to death.’’26 A more macabre but less lethal reaction to the murders occurred in Sheffield, where, according to the Weekly Times (Oct. 28), a woman, Theresa Unwin, cut her own throat after dreaming that Jack the Ripper had chased her. Perhaps the publication of articles about men being sent to jail for posing as Jack and frightening women served to deter a handful from indulging in similar acts of folly. No matter how many such incidents went unreported, it would be quite incorrect to infer that London magistrates turned a blind eye toward men behaving so badly. Moreover, we should not allow our interest in these eccentric and often drunken men to obscure the desire of so many sober males, including, by his own account (or wishful thinking), a radical young lawyer named David Lloyd George—not to mention a handful of remarkably courageous young women—to patrol the streets of the East End and protect ‘‘unfortunates’’ from the Ripper’s clutches, and to join in the massive hunt for the killer. As for posing the ‘‘big questions’’ about the Whitechapel murders, a young Irish, socialist Star reporter by the name of George Bernard Shaw knew exactly where to place the blame. For him, these crimes were a function of class rather than gender, because they arose out of the brutal exploi262

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tation of workers by mercenary capitalists. Countering the flow of law-andorder news in the mainstream press, the Star condemned the whole West End for its indifference to the murders. In a front-page letter (Sept. 24), Shaw pointed out that while social democrats had been wasting their time educating and agitating the public about the need for reform, some ‘‘independent genius has taken the matter in hand, and by simply murdering and disembowelling four women, converted the proprietary press to an inept sort of communism.’’ Now every extremist in the country, whether ‘‘Dynamitards’’ or ‘‘Anarchists,’’ would jump to the conclusion that every explosion, looted shop, or mutilated corpse meant ‘‘another ten pound note for ‘ransom.’ ’’ Bearing in mind the high commodity value of aristocratic ladies, he wondered how much the Whitechapel murders were ‘‘worth to the East End in panem et circenses.’’ Then he added for good measure, ‘‘If the habits of Duchesses only admitted of their being decoyed into Whitechapel backyards, a single experiment in slaughter-house anatomy on an aristocratic victim might fetch in a round half-million and save the necessity of sacrificing four women of the people.’’ The ‘‘double event’’ inspired the Star (Oct. 1) to play with both the reality and the metaphor of bringing ‘‘light’’ to the East End, which was now teetering on the brink of revolutionary violence: ‘‘Above all, let us impress the moral of this awful business on the consciences and the fears of the West End. The cry of the East End is for light—the electric light to flash into the dark corners of its streets and alleys, the magic light of sympathy and hope to flash into the dark corners of wrecked and marred lives. Unless these and other things come, Whitechapel will smash the Empire, and the best thing that can happen to us is for some purified Republic of the West to step in and look after the fragments.’’ By recycling the familiar trope of light/enlightenment, this leader writer emphasized the growing conviction that life and property were at risk all over Tower Hamlets. Ardent social and moral reformers like Osborne, Barnett, and both Booths believed that fresh air, better sanitation, and the installation of streetlights would regenerate the minds and bodies of the destitute. But they did not foresee that any such reforms carried with them the seeds of stricter regulation or more surveillance by inspectors, social workers, and the police. On October 5, the Star again broached the class implications of the murders: ‘‘There is the alienation of the rich from the poor; there is that especially unneighbourly form of dealing which consists in one class abstracting the fruits of the labor of another. The West owes to the East something more than platitudinarian gush and sentimental and spasmodic 263

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almsgiving. It is more of a debtor and creditor account than anything else, and the part which Belgravia must play in the purification of Whitechapel is one in which the poor may receive without abasement, and the rich may give without self-congratulation. . . . Surely ‘JACK the Ripper’ is not to be our modern JOHN the Baptist. The brutalisation of nine tenths of our population is too heavy a price to pay for the culture and refinement of the other tenth.’’ No doubt such radical sentiments were wasted on the privileged ‘‘one tenth’’ in the West End, where the male patriarchs of the breakfast table were in no mood to surrender any of their privileges and powers to the submerged ‘‘nine tenths’’ who lived in the eastern ‘‘Abyss.’’ Reflections on the Ripper Saga During the centenary year of the Ripper murders, Deborah Cameron noted how eagerly the British people, who were so well known for ‘‘their sense of history, their love of pageantry and traditional celebration,’’ were cashing in on male violence against women. Pointing to all the memorabilia produced for Jack’s ‘‘birthday’’ in 1988—including Ripper T-shirts, tea-towels, coffee mugs, wall plaques, and a computer game—she stressed the misogynistic nature of this outbreak of nostalgia for Whitechapel’s most famous hero/villain. ‘‘Jack the Ripper,’’ she wrote, ‘‘has been thoroughly sanitised, turned into a folk-hero like Robin Hood. His story is packaged as a bit of harmless fun: only a spoilsport would be tactless enough to point out it is a story of misogyny and sadism.’’27 In that very year, however, some feminists, still enraged by male insensitivity to the butcheries of the Yorkshire Ripper, decided to act by protesting the name of the ‘‘Jack the Ripper’’ pub on the corner of Fournier and Commercial Streets in Spitalfields (whose drink menu featured a ‘‘Ripper Tipple’’). By the end of 1988 the owner had suffered enough grief and/or business losses to change the name of his premises (adopted in 1976) back to the original ‘‘Ten Bells.’’28 The Ripper’s handiwork lives on in popular culture by means of redand-black souvenirs, B-minus teledramas, C-minus films, whodunems, comic books, a bogus diary, tourist walks through a transformed Whitechapel, and a few titillating Web sites.29 More than a century after these events, our collective gaze continues to focus on the unknown perpetrator rather than his five victims, whose names most of us have forgotten. Our fascination with Jack moves us to ignore not only the pain but also the indignities suffered by Nichols, Chapman, Stride, Eddowes, and Kelly after death, as their mutilated and sutured bodies were exposed repeatedly to the gaze of police surgeons, morticians, coroners’ jurors, reporters, news264

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paper artists, and cameras. Indeed, the police photographs of the corpses continue to arouse prurient interest to this day.30 One of the most troubling questions running through Ripper news appears more than once in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone: ‘‘What does it mean?’’31 No doubt readers relished this tantalizing question in the novel, and could not wait for the answers that Collins concealed so carefully among the baffles, false scents, and silences of his labyrinthine text. But when it came to real murder, they craved answers with even more zeal. For Victorians, the fictional mystery had to be deep enough to sustain their interest over hundreds of pages, until the unmasking of the perpetrator. If closure in ‘‘newspaper novels’’ about murder did not bring any answers to questions about the meaning of life and violent death, at least the trial of the culprit was expected to yield a credible explanation of the lethal event. In addition, if and when the defendant was found guilty and punished, readers were assured that the criminal justice system worked. They could then close their paper with a sigh of relief that the world was not going to rack and ruin—until, that is, the next day’s paper announced that an even more heinous crime had been committed. What, then, did the Ripper’s mutilations mean? Did they reflect one man’s psychopathic fantasies or hatred of his mother, or did they reflect the ubiquity of ‘‘patriarchal’’ misogyny and a deep-seated hostility toward prostitutes in particular? The knife wounds were horrific enough, but the crude hysterectomies indicated an obsession with the female reproductive organs that only experts in sexual perversion and criminal insanity could begin to comprehend. However inured they may have been to images of violent death, readers had never encountered anything quite like these pelvic mutilations, let alone the removal of certain intimate ‘‘portions.’’ Such injuries shocked even the police. Apart from Coroner Baxter, few contemporaries were willing to speak out or publish their thoughts about what the killer might have done with the missing organs. Not even the arrival of the Lusk kidney unleashed public speculation about cannibalism and necrophilia— as though these perversions were too sickening to contemplate. The late Victorians can hardly be blamed for seeking rational explanations to these irrational acts. Today—in the wake of ‘‘cannibal killers’’ like Ed Gein and Jeffrey Dahmer—we are too accustomed to stories about bodies dismembered, preserved, and then consumed by necrophiliac monsters who turn out to look uncomfortably ‘‘normal’’ when arrested and put on trial. As Tithecott has observed rather subversively, ‘‘Eating people . . . is not necessarily wrong. It depends on who’s doing the eating and who’s being eaten. It 265

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depends on table manners.’’ Cannibalism, he rightly suggests, has become ‘‘rather sexy at the moment.’’32 We will never know if the Whitechapel killer actually ate any of the body parts he took from his victims. But whether or not he fried and consumed half of Eddowes’s kidney, we may safely assume that the contents of Lusk’s package overfilled the chalice of sensationhorror, just as it deepened the mystery surrounding Jack. Of course, the failure of the police to capture this predator meant there would be no end to fears that he would strike again, and women had special reason to wonder who would be his next victim. As for his identity, the press kept changing its mind. At one point or another he was imagined as a gang of Englishmen, a Jew, a southern European, an eastern European, an American, and a Malaysian. The so-called experts could not agree if he was driven by ‘‘erotomania,’’ misogyny, bloodthirst, or a desire to avenge his venereal disease. In our own time, one of the most popular images of Jack is that of an upper-class gent wearing a top hat and opera cloak, and driving in a fancy black carriage on his way to purge the East End of prostitutes. Needless to say, a Cambridge-educated gentleman living in Mayfair or Knightsbridge has much more box-office appeal than an obscure plebeian lunatic from Whitechapel. Under the heading of sexual reticence, we have seen how the pelvic mutilations forced Fleet Street to push the envelope of what clinical details were deemed fit to print. Even if couched in fine print, allusions to the uterus, vagina, and rectum had hitherto been confined to medical discourse. Both the Chapman and Eddowes inquests raised the ‘‘unspeakable’’ reality of uterine extraction to a new peak of sensation-horror. In some respects, these shocking revelations were analogous to the American media’s coverage of ‘‘Monicagate,’’ or President Clinton’s love trysts in and around the Oval Office. As pointed out in Chapter 10, newspaper and television editors had to make some hard choices in 1998 when dealing with the lurid details in Kenneth Starr’s report. By contrast, reticence had been the rule almost fifty years before, in 1949, when the New York press sensationalized the trial of Martha Beck and Ray Fernandez—the ‘‘Lonely Hearts Killers.’’ When their sexual practices came under close scrutiny, even the tabloid papers adopted a post-Victorian stance by referring to Ray’s indulgence in fellatio with his lethal partner as simply ‘‘abnormal sex.’’33 Social Reform As we have seen, most advanced Liberal and Radical papers took advantage of the murders to advocate more slum clearance, model housing for 266

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the displaced poor, night shelters for female unfortunates, and gas lighting on side streets. All of these concerns anticipated the agenda of Progressive reformers in the 1890s, who recommended the surveillance of lodging houses by inspectors from the London County Council.34 The Daily Telegraph regarded these squalid habitations as breeders of ‘‘nameless vice, nameless crime, [and] nameless disease,’’ and denounced slumlords for forcing men and women to ‘‘live worse than troglodytes.’’35 While evangelicals like ‘‘S.G.O.’’ and Barnett worried about the deleterious effects of such conditions on impressionable youth, several rich philanthropists decided to invest in model housing projects in Tower Hamlets. Some tenement buildings had, in fact, already risen on Flower and Dean Street, because Nathan Meyer, 1st Baron Rothschild, the guiding light of the Whitechapel Sanitary Committee, had prodded the District Board of Works into condemning some of the worst houses there. He then enlisted some friends to finance the construction of several large brick buildings under the auspices of the Four Per Cent Industrial Dwellings Company. Moved by considerations of both profit and altruism to provide better housing for their coreligionists, the directors underwrote in 1886–87 the Charlotte de Rothschild Dwellings, designed to house tenants with steady jobs. However limited in scope, subsequent model housing projects were partly inspired by concern over the Ripper murders.36 As the historian Jerry White concludes, ‘‘Within six years, then, Jack the Ripper had done more to destroy the Flower and Dean St. rookery than fifty years of road building, slum clearance and unabated pressure from police, Poor Law Guardians, vestries and sanitary officers.’’37 Unfortunately, none of the Ripper’s victims could ever have afforded to rent one of these model flats. Not even the ambitious plans of social reformers working for the new London County Council after 1889 could ease the hardships of casual laborers, paupers, and common prostitutes, who naturally resented the efforts of inspectors and constables to ‘‘correct’’ or control their behavior.38 In the summer of 1889, thousands of East End dockside workers supported by their families and sympathizers embarked on a major strike for a living wage. The strikers set up peaceful pickets around the docks and marched through the East End by the thousands, accompanied by brass bands, colorful banners, and dramatic tableaux. On several occasions the strikers processed in an orderly manner all the way from Limehouse to Trafalgar Square and Hyde Park under the watchful eyes of the police. There were no repetitions of the violence from the forces of law and order that had culminated in Bloody Sunday. Sympathetic to the plight of the dockers, Chief 267

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Commissioner Monro refused to side with the employers by cracking down on the picketers. Moreover, the constabulary tended to identify with the strikers, whose orderly conduct impressed even West Enders.39 While the compassionate Cardinal Manning played a crucial role in reconciling the differences between management and strikers and helped to end the conflict amicably, the restraint shown by the Metropolitan police on this occasion may well have owed something to memories of Bloody Sunday and to Monro’s resolve to avoid repeating the mistakes of November 1887. Rippercussions Aided and abetted by Fleet Street, which tried to revive the specter of the Ripper whenever a dead prostitute turned up in Whitechapel, the image of the East End as a dark and dangerous place lingered on in the popular imagination. In 1896 another crank letter from Jack arrived at the Commercial Street police station, announcing that the murders would resume now that the author had returned from a long sojourn abroad. Chief Inspector Henry Moore of Scotland Yard took this message seriously enough to compare it with all the Ripper mail received in 1888–89, and although he found some resemblance to the first ‘‘Dear Boss’’ letter of September 25 and the postcard of October 1, he doubted that this new letter had been written by the same person.40 Ten years after the Ripper murders, the Rev. Samuel Barnett used the stabbing murder of a plebeian woman by her sister on Dorset Street (November 26, 1898) to stress the close connection between poverty, degradation, and violence. Despite some improvements in working-class housing in the East End, he pointed out, men and women still seemed ‘‘to herd like beasts,’’ and conditions in some places had grown worse in the last four or five years. He then reminded readers that a Times leader writer had asked back in September 1888: ‘‘Can we doubt that neglected human refuse inevitably breeds crime, and that crime reproduces itself like germs in an infected atmosphere and becomes at each successive cultivation more deadly, more bestial, and more absolutely unrestrained?’’41 Barnett’s jeremiad ended with another Ripper reprise taken from the Times, to the effect that all London—notably, the West End—bore responsibility for conditions in the East End: ‘‘The East and West are correlative members of a single social organization. London at large is responsible for Whitechapel and its dens of crime. If the luxury and wealth of the West cannot find some means of mitigating the squalor and crime of the East, we shall have to abate our faith in the resources of civilization.’’42 268

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Although the sinister and taunting figure of Jack was tailor-made for Gothic-horror journalism, some satirical and comic writers could not resist the temptation to exploit his crimes. In the name of gallows humor, two of London’s leading comic weeklies, Punch and Judy, applied the serrated edge of satire to the Whitechapel murders. During the autumn of 1888 the eminent comic artist Tenniel produced two sobering law-and-order cartoons for Punch, one of which depicted a helpless, blindfolded policeman being taunted by four or five young roughs, whom he could not see, let alone arrest. The caption consisted of the children’s chant: ‘‘Turn Round Three Times, and Catch Whom You May!’’43 Tenniel’s other Ripperesque ‘‘senior’’ cartoon, entitled ‘‘The Nemesis of Neglect,’’ appeared one week later (fig. 7). It featured the lantern-jawed, bestial, and spectral figure of Murderous Crime wearing a shroud and stalking the slums with knife in hand.44 In both cartoons Tenniel played upon the theme of an ineffective Scotland Yard while sending forth an ambiguous message about the underlying causes of these murders. Adopting a less somber tone, Judy roasted Warren and Matthews in a piece of doggerel written by ‘‘Our Own Hurdy-Gurdy,’’ or ‘‘Grindering Galoot’’: Here’s the Scotland Yard officials goin’ on in the usual way. As their heads are stuffed with sawdust, is all that I can say; And what with red-tape Matthews refusin’ a hundred pound Of the British Public’s money, that the murderer may be found As did them ijious outrages in the East-end of town,— I think that the whole sistem o’ things is upsy-down.45 A week later (Oct. 10) Judy mocked the Home Secretary with some witty law-and-order verses: Oh, where, oh, where has Matthews gone? I asks the empty airs, As ne’er in such a dismal state before were Home Affairs; And are Queen Victoria’s lieges to be scared almost to fits, And helpless women murdered and cut up in little bits, Because the eyes of Justice, which proverbial are blind, Won’t open just a little way and help us for to find The livin’, breathin’, vampire which on blood enjoys its feast, As now perwades and poisons the regions of the East? 269

Figure 7 ‘‘The Nemesis of Neglect,’’ Sir John Tenniel, Punch, Sept. 29, 1888 (by permission of the John Hay Library, Brown University)

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Another set of verses in the same number ridiculed the efforts of the police to catch the killer: Detectives a failure, Stupid bunglers all; Their clues are a failure, The public on them call. To ‘‘spot’’ him hundreds try, And though he hides close by, They own they cannot find him anywhere. The police force a failure, Rotten at the core; Their ‘‘beats’’ are a failure, In this age of gore. By Warren’s strange decree Our criminals are free, And England is daily on the tremble.46 On October 17, Judy spun a clever piece of satire out of the disparate threads of the Irish Home Rule agitation and the failure to catch the Ripper. Unemployed ‘‘Paddy’’ had gone on trial for the ‘‘Attempted Horrible Mutilation’’ of Mrs. United Kingdom, an elderly but still vigorous woman who showed ‘‘few signs of decay.’’ Although she had treated her employee kindly for many years and had given him a wage hike and other benefits, Paddy the ingrate demanded full independence. Ignoring all the favors received, he lured her into ‘‘a dark passage of her own history,’’ where he mutilated her ‘‘by cutting off a portion of her anatomy called Ireland.’’ Assisting him in this wicked attack were some of Mrs. United Kingdom’s own children overseas—in particular ‘‘a certain Mrs. Hail Columbia . . . a runaway daughter of Mrs. U.K.’’47 Such satirical asides must have provided readers with a few moments of relief from all the horripilating news. Kaleidoscopic Images Under the heading of sensation-horror, this study has emphasized the similarities among Ripper news in the highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow press. While they had smaller and less sensational headlines and fewer subheads, the Times and Morning Post served up almost as much morbid 271

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detail as any mass-circulation paper, with the obvious exceptions of Lloyd’s. Admittedly, the morning papers used finer print, paraphrased more of the inquest testimony, and made readers work harder to find the ‘‘juicy bits’’ about the mutilations. If the London press differed in the volume of gore produced, almost every paper published material capable of shocking or thrilling readers. Indeed, hardly any of the clinical passages culled from the autopsy reports would be deemed ‘‘fit to print’’ in today’s tabloids. Accustomed to dealing with acts of violence, crime reporters tried hard at times to describe the ‘‘indescribable.’’ And only a handful of readers (as well as the editor of the Lancet) complained about the corrupting effects of all those gruesome passages. In the centenary year of the Ripper murders, the psychologist and expert on lust murders Joel Norris made the bold claim that his book Serial Killers: The Growing Menace (1988) represented ‘‘the mirror of the fine line that separates each one of us from yielding to the primal, instinctual, animal behavior that lurks beneath the veneer of psychological self-control and social convention.’’48 However, Tithecott’s reflexive meditation on our mediadriven habit of demonizing the serial killer goes far to subvert positivist assumptions about the causes of such acts. Bereft of such a useful and beguiling category as serial killer, the late Victorians chose to distance themselves from these ‘‘monstrous’’ crimes by blaming them on some alien madman who had nothing in common with trueborn Englishmen. At the same time, they imagined the jungle of Whitechapel as the natural habitat of this arch-fiend—a metaphor that served to widen the great gulf already dividing the two Ends of London. Although by the twentieth-century standards of John Wayne Gacy, Henry Lee Lucas, Ted Bundy, or Andrei Chikatilo (the ‘‘Rostov Ripper’’) the Whitechapel murderer produced a rather modest body count, such matters are relative. To contemporaries, many of whom accepted Fleet Street’s extravagant count of eight or nine victims, the ferocity of Jack’s attacks suggested that he was waging a war against not just prostitutes, but all women. As a leader writer in Lloyd’s (Oct. 7) put it, ‘‘Murders may be accounted for by passion, jealousy, or revenge; but this is war against a class, and is therefore all the more terrible. If the criminal cannot be tracked, his shadowy hand will remain as a kind of sword of Damocles over the community; no one knows where the blow may fall next.’’ Fear about when and where and upon whom that sword or knife would fall next induced readers to buy newspapers at a record rate, as they were drawn ever deeper into the 272

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story of a predator who seemed quite capable of expanding his theater of operations into the West End. Ripper-induced fears were not just figments of Fleet Street’s imaginations. More than once those fears turned into severe emotional trauma. Take the case of Mary Burridge, a South London dealer in floor coverings, who lived at 132 Blackfriar’s Road, south of the Thames. Neighbors apparently saw her standing outside her house on September 8, 1888, reading about Chapman’s murder in the Late Final edition of the Star. Evidently the news so affected her that she felt faint and returned to her kitchen, where she suddenly collapsed in a ‘‘fit.’’ On Monday she regained consciousness briefly, but soon took a turn for the worse and died two days later.49 If these reports did not exaggerate, then the story of Burridge’s death deserves to be called one of the greatest achievements of sensation-horror news. Resembling a kaleidoscope filled with fragments of reality along with images, myths, rumors, and political agendas, Ripper news continues to raise more questions than answers. Besides such unknowns as the impact of all the gore on readers, controversy remains as to whether Jack’s exploits should be treated as ‘‘the first (modern) sex crime,’’ as Colin Wilson and Jane Caputi contend, or as one more episode—albeit an extreme one—in the long history of male violence against women. In addition, questions persist about our personal responses to tales of murder—whether domestic, thrill, or serial-sexual. Behind all the shudders or frissons, there lurks what Joyce Carol Oates has called—referring to Ted Bundy and his ilk— ‘‘our uneasy sense that such persons are forms of ourselves, derailed and gone terribly wrong.’’50 For this reason we must keep asking just how complicitous we (men) are with the serial killers whom we have so clearly demonized or ‘‘Othered.’’ According to Tatar we have a ‘‘voyeuristic fascination with the sight of what is our common lot.’’ But, she suggests, quite apart from our morbid interest in seeing bodies ‘‘in a state of biological disintegration’’ and our ‘‘secret sense of pleasure at having escaped that destiny,’’ the very sight of mangled or torn bodies ‘‘bonds us, if only for a moment, with the perpetrators of violence, drawing us into a kind of complicitous gaze at the victim.’’51 We should not, however, allow the argument of our covert complicity with the killer to obscure the empathy that many of us feel toward the victims. Apart from such obvious reactions as ‘‘there but for the grace of God go I,’’ many people—mostly women—cannot help but imagine themselves as targets of such lethal assaults, especially if they read the crime 273

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stories in newspapers. If we can never blot out all the nagging questions about what we might be capable of doing under the influence of rage or drink and drugs, those of us who dwell on the realities and fictions of murder should bear in mind that we are no more in league with any murderer than we are with those law-abiding and educated Victorians who seemed to derive such private pleasure from reading all those texts of pain.

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Notes

Introduction 1. For a short list of the more important nonfictional accounts of the murders published up to 1991, see the valuable reference work compiled by Paul Begg, Martin Fido, and Keith Skinner, The Jack the Ripper A to Z (hereafter JR: A to Z) (London, 1991), pp. 50–52. A much fuller (but dated) list of works on the Ripper murders may be found in Alexander G. Kelly, Jack the Ripper: A Bibliography and Review of the Literature (London, 1972, 1984). See also the sources cited in the footnotes to Philip Sugden’s authoritative study, The Complete History of Jack the Ripper (New York, 1994), pp. 478–527. Some of the fantasy-driven novels arising out of the Ripper murders are cited in Allen J. Hubin’s vast compendium, Crime Fiction: A Comprehensive Bibliography, 1749–1990, 2 vols. (New York, 1994). Note that the title of almost every book cited here about the Whitechapel murderer has been abbreviated in the notes as JR. 2. In roughly chronological order these works are: Helen Benedict, Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes (New York, 1992); Wendy Lesser, Pictures at an Execution (Cambridge, Mass., 1993); Andie Tucher, Froth and Scum: Truth, Beauty, Goodness and the Ax Murder in America’s First Mass Medium (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1994); Amy Gilman Srebnick, The Mysterious

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3. 4. 5.

6.

7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

Death of Mary Rogers: Sex and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York (New York, 1995); Maria Tatar, Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany (Princeton, 1995); Richard Tithecott, Of Men and Monsters: Jeffrey Dahmer and the Construction of the Serial Killer (Madison, 1997); Sara L. Knox, Murder: A Tale of Modern American Life (Durham, N.C., 1998); Karen Halttunen, Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), and Judith Knelman, Twisting in the Wind: The Murderess and the English Press (Toronto, 1998). Ann Jones deals with lewd, lethal, and abused women in her anecdotal study, Women Who Kill (Boston, 1996), and Lucia Zedner has produced a data-laden monograph on male perceptions and treatment of female offenders or ‘‘deviants’’ in Women, Crime, and Custody in Victorian England (Oxford, 1991). Knox, Murder, p. 201. Lesser, Execution, p. 1. These terms and their contexts are discussed by Jane Caputi and Diana Russell in ‘‘Femicide: Sexist Terrorism Against Women,’’ in Jill Radford and Diana E. H. Russell (eds.), Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing (New York, 1992), pp. 13–21. Christopher Frayling, ‘‘The House That Jack Built: Some Stereotypes of the Rapist in the History of Popular Culture,’’ in Sylvana Tomaselli and Roy Porter (eds.), Rape: An Historical and Cultural Enquiry (Oxford, 1989), pp. 174–215. Although Frayling acknowledges that Jack was not a rapist, he treats male knife attacks on women as ‘‘the unavoidable metaphor for the act of rape in countless films, videos, and books.’’ For this arguable reason the Ripper becomes ‘‘the stereotype . . . of the rapist.’’ Ibid., p. 178. See Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, The State, and Law and Order (New York, 1978); Steve Chibnall, Law and Order News (London, 1977); and Richard V. Ericson, Patricia Baranek, and Janet Chan, Visualizing Deviance: A Study of News Organization (hereafter VD) (Toronto, 1987), esp. pp. 3–18. ‘‘As a part of politics, the news media have the characteristics of politics and contribute to political processes.’’ Ericson et al., VD, p. 39. The quoted phrase about multiple perceptions comes from Felipe FernandezArmesto, Truth: A History (London, 1997), p. 225. The quotation comes from Deborah Cameron and Elizabeth Frazer, The Lust to Kill: A Feminist Investigation of Sexual Murder (New York, 1987), p. xii. Lowndes’s tale, The Lodger, first appeared in McClure’s magazine in January 1911 (pp. 262–77). Two years later she turned this tale into a novel by the same name, published by Scribner in New York and Methuen in London. Two more editions of this work appeared in 1940 and 1964. After Alfred Hitchcock made the first Ripper movie in 1926, at least four more films about the murders appeared by 1953. In the centenary year 1988 (October 21 and 23) CBS broadcast a farfetched teledrama, ‘‘Jack the Ripper,’’ starring Michael Caine as a drink-sodden Detective Inspector Abberline; and Cosgrove-Muerer Productions in Los Angeles filmed a panel discussion of

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13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27.

Scotland Yard, FBI, and other ‘‘experts,’’ who eventually decided that the killer was an insane Jewish hairdresser named Aaron Kosminski. ‘‘The Secret Identity of Jack the Ripper’’ (Los Angeles, 1988); see also Begg et al., JR: A to Z, pp. 407–08. Colin Wilson and Robin Odell have listed all the film versions between 1958 and 1980 in Jack the Ripper: Summing Up and Verdict (London, 1987), p. 378. So stated Sir Robert Anderson in The Lighter Side of My Official Life (London, 1910), p. 135. Begg et al., JR: A to Z, p. xii. Joseph C. Fisher, Killer Among Us: Public Reactions to Serial Murder (Westport, Conn., 1997), p. 24. Tithecott, Of Men and Monsters: Jeffrey Dahmer and the Construction of the Serial Killer (Madison, 1997), esp. pp. 7–11, 178–79. Freeland, The Naked and the Undead: Evil and the Appeal of Horror (Boulder, Colo., 2000), p. 271. Dwelling on the average Englishman’s craving for murder news, George Orwell once imagined a John Bullish man seated in his armchair after devouring a huge Sunday dinner. With pipe in mouth and a blazing fire in the hearth, this worthy citizen settled down to enjoy a jolly ‘‘good murder’’ in the News of the World or its equivalent. George Orwell, ‘‘Decline of the English Murder’’ in ‘‘Shooting an Elephant’’ and Other Essays (New York, 1950), p. 156. Joan Didion, The White Album (New York, 1979), p. 11. Quoted in David Blum, ‘‘Embracing Fear as Fun to Practice for Reality,’’ New York Times, Oct. 30, 1999. Theodore Dalrymple, ‘‘Revolting Insouciance or Genuine Amnesia?’’ Spectator, Sept. 24, 1994, p. 10. Tatar, Lustmord, p. 6. Richard D. Altick, Victorian Studies in Scarlet (hereafter VSS) (New York, 1970), pp. 41–43. Ibid., pp. 63–66, 281. This figure derives from V. A. C. Gatrell’s data in ‘‘The Decline of Theft and Violence in Victorian and Edwardian England,’’ in Gatrell, B. Lenman, and G. Parker (eds.), Crime and the Law (London, 1980), Table A1, ‘‘Homicide,’’ pp. 343–44. According to Altick, the average figure was even lower for England and Wales (exclusive of Scotland)—falling from 272 in 1866 to 142 in 1899. VSS, p. 282. Between 1855 and 1874, the number of women tried for murder surpassed that for men in only two years, while averaging half of the male total, and accounted for between 20 and 25 percent of those prosecuted in assize courts for felonies of all kinds. In France, far more women than men were tried for murder under the category of ‘‘crimes of passion’’ between 1880 and 1905; most of them were acquitted. See Ruth Harris, Murders and Madness: Medicine, Law, and Society in the Fin de Siècle (Oxford, 1989), p. 210, note 3. Mary S. Hartman has dealt with a dozen mostly middle-class women charged with murder in France and England in Victorian Murderesses (New York,

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28. 29.

30.

31.

32.

33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

1977). In Domestic Crime in the Victorian Novel (New York, 1989), Andrea Trodd analyzes family tensions and intrigues leading to murder in the fiction of Dickens, Collins, Braddon, Eliot, Gaskell, and Trollope, and finds suspicion and guilt pervasive in middle-class households. Beth Kalikoff has surveyed murders in Victorian street literature, melodrama, novels, and nonfiction in Murder and Moral Decay in Victorian Popular Literature (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1986). And Lionel Rose deals with infanticide in The Massacre of the Innocents: Infanticide in Britain, 1800–1939 (Boston, 1986). Single-murder studies include Albert Borowitz’s account of the trial and execution of Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Manning for the murder of her lover, Patrick O’Connor, in Bermondsey in 1849, The Woman Who Murdered Black Satin: The Bermondsey Horror (Columbus, Ohio, 1981); Martin Friedland’s exhaustive study of the acid poisoning of Miriam Angel by a fellow lodger, The Trial of Israel Lipski (London, 1984); and Angus McLaren’s colorful portrait of Dr. Thomas Neill Cream, the Glaswegian-born Canadian and quondam Ripper suspect, who killed far more prostitutes with his poison pills than ever did Jack: A Prescription for Murder: The Victorian Serial Killings of Dr. Thomas Neill Cream (Chicago, 1993). Thomas Boyle, Black Swine in the Sewers of Hampstead: Beneath the Surface of Victorian Sensationalism (New York, 1989). For the reader-guilt argument, see John G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago, 1976), esp. pp. 55, 77–78, 90–91. For Watson’s survey of the press reports he kept in his scrapbook about the ‘‘Brixton Mystery,’’ see Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet (Oxford, 1993), pp. 48–49. William Roughead cited the case of Dr. Philip Henry Eustace Cross of Shandy Hill near Cork City, who poisoned his wife in June 1887. Having certified the cause of death as typhoid fever, Dr. Cross waited only two weeks before marrying the governess with whom he had been having an affair. Roughead, Murder and More Murder (New York, 1939), pp. 237–39, 243. Times, Dec. 13–16, 18–23, 1893. The Scotsman published 173 columns, or almost four hundred thousand words, about the trial. Monson’s lawyer argued that Hambrough, who stood to inherit an estate valued at £117,000, was worth far more to his client alive than dead, given the elaborate financial scheme they had devised to buy the life interest in the property. See also William Roughead, Enjoyment of Murder (New York, 1938), p. 279; and Murder and More Murder, pp. 3–78. King was convicted, sentenced to death, and hanged. Times, Feb. 19, 1889; Rose, Massacre of the Innocents, pp. 113–14; and William Roughead, ‘‘My First Murder,’’ in Nothing but Murder (New York, 1946), pp. 319–42. Tatar, Lustmord, p. 36. Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic (New York, 1992), pp. 44, 54. Williams’s definitions of that ‘‘most complicated’’ word—culture—appear in

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38.

39.

40.

41. 42.

both Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York, 1976), pp. 76– 82, and The Sociology of Culture (New York, 1982), pp. 11–12. For the codes of Victorian respectability, see inter alia Peter Cominos, ‘‘Late Victorian Social Respectability and the Social System,’’ International Review of Social History vol. 8 (1963), part 2, pp. 1–66; Geoffrey Best, Mid-Victorian Britain, 1851–1875 (London, 1971), esp. pp. 19, 170–77, 199–200, 232–63; Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society (London, 1981), esp. pp. 19–52; and F. M. L. Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), esp. pp. 173–76, 193–96, 250–55. ‘‘Narrative becomes a problem only when we wish to give real events the form of story. It is because real events do not offer themselves as stories that their narrativization is so difficult.’’ Hayden V. White, ‘‘The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,’’ reprinted in White, The Content of the Form (Baltimore, 1987), see esp. pp. 3–5, 21. Joep Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fior-Ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, Its Development and Literary Expression Prior to the Nineteenth Century (Cork, 1996), pp. 4–5. A. Conan Doyle, ‘‘The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb,’’ The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (New York, 1971), p. 203. White, Content of the Form, p. 1. Chapter 1: The Whitechapel Murders: A Chronicle

1. Besides Philip Sugden’s The Complete History of Jack the Ripper (New York, 1994), the following works deserve mention: Tom Cullen, Autumn of Terror: Jack the Ripper His Crimes and Times (London, 1965); Tom Cullen, When London Walked in Terror (London, 1968); Daniel Farson, Jack the Ripper (London, 1972); Michael Harrison, Clarence: The Life of the Duke of Clarence and Avondale (London, 1972); Stephen Knight, Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution (London, 1976); Robin Odell, Jack the Ripper in Fact and Fiction (London, 1965); Richard Whittington-Egan, A Casebook on Jack the Ripper (London, 1975); Donald Rumbelow, The Complete Jack the Ripper (London, 1976) and Jack the Ripper: The Complete Casebook (Chicago, 1988); Martin Howells and Keith Skinner, The Ripper Legacy: The Life and Death of Jack the Ripper (London, 1987, 1988); Terence Sharkey, Jack the Ripper: 100 Years of Investigation (London, 1987); Peter Underwood, Jack the Ripper: One Hundred Years of Mystery (London, 1987, 1988); Martin Fido, The Crimes, Detection and Death of Jack the Ripper (London, 1987); and Paul Begg, Jack the Ripper: The Uncensored Facts (London, 1988). (Subsequent references to any of these titles have been abbreviated to JR.) 2. Those hardy few who share Conan Doyle’s view that the killer was a woman— or ‘‘Jill the Ripper’’—should read William Stewart, Jack the Ripper: A New Theory (London, 1939), as well as the rebuttals in Colin Wilson and Robin Odell, Jack the Ripper: Summing Up and Verdict (London, 1988), pp. 179–203; and Paul Begg et al., JR: A to Z, p. 213. 3. Rumbelow, JR, pp. 37–42; Sugden, JR, pp. 34–56; Begg et al., JR: A to Z,

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4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

pp. 318–22. Note that I have omitted the year 1888 when dealing with any event occurring or any newspaper published in the year of the Ripper. The precise nature of Nichols’s genital mutilations remains moot. Rumbelow, JR, pp. 45–52, 55–56, 58–59; Begg, JR, pp. 59–62; Sugden, JR, pp. 77–104; and Begg et al., JR: A to Z, pp. 73–76. Rumbelow, JR, pp. 61–62, 74–81; Begg, JR, pp. 92–112; Wilson and Odell, JR, pp. 53–61; Sugden, JR, pp. 165–74, 189–218; and Begg et al., JR: A to Z, pp. 439–43. Rumbelow, JR, pp. 63–69, 83–87; Wilson and Odell, JR, pp. 63–67; Begg, JR, pp. 113–28; Sugden, JR, pp. 175–79, 231–54; and Begg et al., JR: A to Z, pp. 123–29. See Rumbelow, JR, pp. 89–105; Wilson and Odell, JR, pp. 77–91, and Sugden, JR, pp. 307–39. Begg doubts that Kelly was the intended victim. JR, pp. 141– 62. Following William Stewart and Donald McCormick, Rumbelow claims that Kelly was three months pregnant. JR, p. 102. The postmortem report contains no reference to a fetus; and neither Rumbelow nor Wilson and Odell cite any documentary evidence to support this hypothesis. See Sugden, JR, pp. 11–12. For details of Kelly’s death, see Rumbelow, JR, pp. 89–105; Wilson and Odell, JR, pp. 77–92; Sugden, JR, 307–39; and Begg et al., JR: A to Z, pp. 219–25. The apparent absence of semen traces on any of the victims suggests that the killer’s sexual gratification may have come from the act of slashing and mutilating. However, the press may well have suppressed allusions to semen, as was done in the Lipski-Angel murder case in 1887. For further details of the McKenzie murder, see Sugden, JR, pp. 346–50. For the so-called ‘‘last Ripper scare’’—the murder of Frances Coles (alias ‘‘Carrotty Nell’’), aged twenty-six, on February 13, 1891—see Sugden, JR, pp. 350–55, Begg et al., JR: A to Z, pp. 83–84; and Frederick Porter Wensley, Detective Days: The Record of Forty-Two Years’ Service in the Criminal Investigation Department (London, 1931), pp. 4–5. See MEPO 3/140, ff. 9–293, Public Record Office (hereafter PRO) (Kew). Tabram’s body was found on the first-floor landing of George Yard Buildings. Evidently, she had sustained ‘‘one large wound over her heart’’ and numerous other stabbing (as distinct from slashing) wounds that might have been inflicted by a bayonet. According to W. J. Fishman, ‘‘most ‘Ripperologists’ estimate’’ the full body count at six (between August 6 and November 9), beginning with Tabram and ending with Kelly. East End 1888: Life in a London Borough among the Laboring Poor (Philadelphia, 1988), pp. 32, 209–13. Rather ambiguously, Sugden assigns all but three of the ‘‘nine killings in the series’’ to the Ripper. JR, pp. 57–58, 356–57. In Jon Ogan’s view, two separate knives were used to kill Tabram, and he identifies her murderer as a lunatic named Puckeridge. ‘‘Martha Tabram: The Forgotten Ripper Victim?’’ Journal of the Police History Society, vol. 5 (1990), pp. 79–83. For the more plausible theory of five victims, see Rumbelow, JR, p. 15; also Begg et al., JR: A to Z, pp.

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14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22. 23.

450–51. Even so, there is no irrefutable proof that the same man carried out all five murders in Whitechapel between August 31 and November 9. This second article was some six times longer than the first. The deputy coroner for South-Eastern Middlesex, George Collier, held the inquest at the same site as two of the five subsequent Ripper inquests. Henry Tabram testified that he had left his wife thirteen years ago because of her drinking habits. Her live-in companion for the last nine years, a carpenter by the name of William Turner, had also walked out in anger over her alcoholism. Mrs. Ann Norris (also Morris), an acquaintance of the victim, was ‘‘a pale looking woman, whose pallor was increased by her totally black, but neat attire.’’ Inspector Reid revealed that he had arrested Tabram three times in the past for ‘‘using bad language and threats.’’ East London Observer, Aug. 25. Evidently, the Pall Mall Gazette (Nov. 10) agreed with the Daily Telegraph that Jack’s first victim, ‘‘Fairy Fay,’’ had died on the night of Boxing Day 1887 after the killer followed her from a pub and then raped her with either a wooden or an iron stake on Osborne Street. See Begg et al., JR: A to Z, p. 131. The authors of this work stress the illusory nature of this victim. Wynne E. Baxter, the coroner for East Middlesex, presided over three of the Ripper inquests. A bold and vainglorious solicitor and smalltime politician with conservative loyalties, he ran afoul of Dr. Roderick Macdonald, the Scottish radical doctor who conducted Mary Kelly’s inquest. Begg et al., JR: A to Z, pp. 37–38, 268–69, 417–18. Baxter opened Emma Smith’s inquest on Saturday, April 7. See Times, April 9; Begg, JR, p. 32; and Sugden, JR, pp. 5–6, 32– 34, 322, 358–59. In FBI circles, the term ‘‘serial killer’’ denotes ‘‘a person who commits a series of similar murders with no apparent motive.’’ This usage gained currency in the wake of the Gacy, Bundy, and ‘‘Son of Sam’’ murders. In the early 1980s the FBI created a special unit for the profiling of serial killers. Oxford Dictionary of New Words (Oxford, 1997), p. 274. Krafft-Ebing’s classic work, Psychopathia Sexualis, appeared first in German in 1885. The only English lust-murderer mentioned therein went by the name of Alton. Evidently he had killed and cannibalized a little girl at some undisclosed location and date (see case number 18, p. 63 of the Philadelphia edition of 1892). One or two papers went much further, crediting Jack with almost twenty victims, according to Jane Caputi, The Age of Sex Crime (Bowling Green, Ohio, 1987), pp. 5, 33. Whereas the Pall Mall Gazette stuck with nine, most papers settled for six or seven Ripper victims, counting Tabram and Smith. Although ‘‘Fairy Fay,’’ Emma Smith, and Martha Tabram had not suffered jugulation, let alone pelvic mutilations, most papers treated Polly Nichols as the second or even third victim. Howells and Skinner, Ripper Legacy, p. 187. See Alexander G. Kelly, Jack the Ripper, A Bibliography and Review of the

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24.

25.

26.

27.

Literature (London, 1973), for a list of almost a hundred books and articles as well as some fifty-seven plays and fictional stories and twenty films about the murders. For a list of Ripper films between 1958 and 1980, see also Wilson and Odell, JR, p. 378. For a truly garish comic book version of Stephen Knight’s conspiracy theory, featuring not only Sir William Gull as the murderer but also the Duke [sic] of Salisbury, see Bruce Balfour, Jack the Ripper (Newbury Park, Calif., 1990). See the bibliographies in Wilson and Odell, JR, pp. 345–72; and Begg et al., JR: A to Z, pp. 50–52, 502–05. One of the few Americans to enter the playing field of ‘‘hunt the Ripper’’ has been the New York psychiatrist Dr. David Abrahamsen, author of Murder and Madness: The Secret Life of Jack the Ripper (New York, 1992), which tries to resurrect the James Stephen/Duke of Clarence theory. Dr. Thomas Stowell was the first to launch the Clarence theory, contending that he slaughtered prostitutes for both sexual gratification and revenge for the syphilis consuming his brain and body. See Stowell, ‘‘Jack the Ripper: A Solution?’’ The Criminologist (November 1970), esp. p. 40. Later Stowell recanted out of concern over causing Queen Elizabeth distress. But he identified Clarence’s accomplice by the letter ‘‘S’’; this turned out to be Clarence’s alleged lover at Cambridge, James Kenneth Stephen. See Colin Wilson, ‘‘Introduction’’ in Alexander Kelly, Jack the Ripper (London, 1973), pp. 12–15; Frank Spiering, Prince Jack: The True Story of Jack the Ripper (New York, 1978); and Theo Aronson, Prince Eddy and the Homosexual Underworld (London, 1994), esp. pp. 93–115. Apparently the Duke of Clarence was out of town on official or social engagements and his whereabouts were known on every night that the Ripper struck. Rumbelow, JR, pp. 188–220; and Begg et al., JR: A to Z, pp. 12–14, 437–49. This fanciful Masonic conspiracy theory was first advanced by Joseph Gorman Sickert in 1973 in a BBC TV ‘‘drama-documentary,’’ and then much embellished by Stephen Knight in Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution (London, 1976). According to this fantasy, the Prime Minister (Lord Salisbury), the Home Secretary, the Commissioner of Police, and other elite Freemasons feared lest the disclosure of this liaison shake the monarchy and empire to its foundations. So they enlisted Gull in a plot to murder every prostitute who knew about Annie’s secret marriage. This elaborate conspiracy theory resurfaced in the film Murder by Decree (1979), based on the Sickert-Knight scenario, wherein Sherlock Holmes (Christopher Plummer) unmasks the Masonic plot and vanquishes the wicked Sir William Gull. Rumbelow dismisses this myth in JR, pp. 198–213 as do Begg et al., JR: A to Z, pp. 94–95, 156–58, 308, 373, 382, 411–14, and Sugden, JR, pp. 7–8, 110–13. Whittington-Egan also refused to play hunt the Ripper after dismissing all the usual suspects. JR, esp. pp. 155–56. As befits a Freudian psychiatrist, Abrahamsen attributed ‘‘Jem’’ Stephen’s misogyny to his emotionally distant and ‘‘castrating’’ mother. But he also emphasized a severe blow to the head that Stephen suffered around 1886. Even-

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28.

29. 30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

tually diagnosed as a manic depressive, Stephen was confined in St. Andrew’s Hospital, Northampton, where he died on February 3, 1892, from ‘‘mania and refusal of food.’’ See Abrahamsen, Murder and Madness, esp. pp. 143–63. Ironically, one of the doctors who examined Stephen after his accident was Sir William Gull. With a few variations of his own Michael Harrison endorsed this theory in his study of the ‘‘panerotic’’ Clarence, The Life of the Duke of Clarence and Avondale (London, 1972). See also Wilson and Odell, JR, pp. 253– 61; and Begg et al., JR: A to Z, pp. 12–14, 162, 431–32. Both the journalist George R. Sims and Sir Melville Macnaghten, Assistant Chief Constable of CID (1889–90), embraced the Druitt theory. See Cullen, Autumn of Terror, pp. 23–24, 217–40. Howells and Skinner also pushed this suspect in Ripper Legacy, esp. pp. 119–21, 155–56. See also Farson, JR, pp. 112–16, 134, 140–43; Sugden, JR, pp. 375–96; Rumbelow, JR, esp. pp. 12–14, 129–32, 146–67; Whittington-Egan, JR, pp. 19–26, 29–32, 35–40, 43–44; Begg et al., JR: A to Z, pp. 110–16; and Abrahamsen, Murder and Madness, pp. 104–08. See Rumbelow, JR, pp. 167–71, 177–85; Sugden, JR, pp. 424–38; Begg et al., JR: A to Z, pp. 232–33, 329–33, 428–30. According to Stewart P. Evans and Paul Gainey, authors of The Lodger: The Arrest and Escape of Jack the Ripper (London, 1996), Tumblety was a bisexual and paranoid maniac, who kept diseased female genitalia in glass jars. Apart from his trip to London in the autumn of 1888, no evidence ties him to any of the murders. Indeed, the authors devote only four pages to his time in London and five pages to New York newspaper reports of occasional Tumblety sightings after 1888. The elaborate theories of the black magic or necromantic school reflect the vivid imaginations of the avid occultist Aleister Crowley, the theosophists Vittoria Cremers and Mabel Collins, and the Fleet Street journalist Bernard O’Donnell. See Whittington-Egan, JR, pp. 68–98. Harris discusses this article in The True Face of Jack the Ripper (London, 1994), esp. pp. 113–25. A more plausible candidate for the article in Stead’s paper is the prominent occultist James Ludovic Lindsay, 26th Earl of Crawford. Stephenson also accused a house surgeon whom he met while a patient at the London Hospital (Dr. Morgan Davies) of being Jack the Ripper. Harris’s other Ripper works include Jack the Ripper: The Bloody Truth (London, 1987) and The Ripper File (London, 1990). See also Begg et al., JR: A to Z, pp. 432– 35. Under the heading ‘‘Index of Suspects,’’ Paul Begg and his cocompilers have listed some 142 named and anonymous suspects in JR: A to Z, pp. 494–97. Rumbelow discusses and dismisses almost every named suspect in JR, pp. 129–231. See also Wilson and Odell, JR, pp. 100–344; Begg, JR, esp. pp. 167– 210; Fido, JR, passim; Evans and Gainey, The Lodger, pp. 157–76; and Sugden, JR, esp. pp. 373–471. Following several lecture tours, Florence became a recluse and lived for years in abject poverty in a tiny cottage on the grounds of South Kent School, where

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35.

36.

37.

38.

she died in squalor in 1941 surrounded by dozens of cats. According to the Ripper diary, the demented and adulterous Maybrick traveled by train from Liverpool to London to ‘‘bag’’ his victims in Whitechapel. See Shirley Harrison et al., The Diary of Jack the Ripper (New York, 1993). Feldman even persuaded Colin Wilson to praise his conjectural study as ‘‘one of the most important and definitive books’’ ever written on Jack the Ripper. Feldman, Jack the Ripper: The Final Chapter (London, 1998). For major demolition jobs, see the report by the American investigator Kenneth Rendell, summarized by Harris in True Face, pp. 185–208, and also Sugden, JR, pp. 8–11. Caputi, Age of Sex Crime, esp. pp. 1–62. As Caputi argues (p. 53), ‘‘Whether as monster, celebrity, hero, or all of these, the sexual murderer performs both practical and symbolic functions for the culture that has produced him. He not only massively generates the sexual terror which preserves male power, but he also functions to promote male pleasure.’’ Walkowitz, ‘‘Jack the Ripper and the Myth of Male Violence,’’ Feminist Studies, vol. 8, no. 3 (Fall 1982), pp. 543–74. An expanded and revised version of this essay appeared in her book City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago, 1992) (hereafter CDD), pp. 191–228. Somewhat cryptically, Cameron and Frazer blame lust murder on ‘‘the whole project of transcendence,’’ as well as the ‘‘structures of male power and masculinity.’’ Lust to Kill, esp. pp. 174–77. Chapter 2: Images and Realities of the East End

1. See Sir Walter Besant, London in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1902), p. 73, and Roy Porter, London, A Social History (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), pp. 132, 140–41, 151, 195. 2. Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship Between Classes in Victorian Society (Oxford, 1971), p. 14. 3. This passage, from Bracebridge Hemyng’s essay ‘‘Prostitution in London,’’ appears in Victor Neuburg’s edition of Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (Harmondsworth, U.K., 1985), p. 477. The number of new Irish immigrants amounted to roughly twenty thousand in the 1880s compared with fourteen thousand for the 1850s. P. J. Waller, Town, City, and Nation: England 1850–1914 (Oxford, 1983), p. 27. 4. Most of these immigrants were concentrated in Whitechapel, whose population ranged around seventy-six thousand. Thus the proportion of Jews in that district was much higher—namely, 64 percent. For the population estimates of Charles Booth around 1887, see ‘‘The Inhabitants of Tower Hamlets,’’ cited in Fishman, East End, p. 131. As for the distribution of Jews in other parts of the East End, Mile End contained some 17 percent and St. George’s in the East 13 percent. Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London (hereafter LLPL), First Series: Poverty, (London, 1892) vol. 1, part 1, ‘‘East London,’’ chapters 1– 3. By 1890 the Jewish immigrants living in the East End amounted to some sixty thousand. See David Feldman, Englishmen and Jews: Social Relations and Political Culture, 1840–1914 (New Haven, 1994), esp. pp. 167–68.

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5. Fishman, East End, p. 48. See esp. chapter 1, ‘‘The Image and the Reality,’’ and chapter 2, ‘‘Housing, Health and Sanitation,’’ pp. 1–48. 6. Raymond Williams dealt with these contrasts in The Country and The City (London, 1973), esp. chapter 19, ‘‘Cities of Darkness and Light,’’ pp. 215– 32. 7. See A. S. Wohl’s incisive studies of public health, overcrowding, sanitary reform, and working-class housing in London: The Eternal Slum: Housing and Social Policy in Victorian London (Montreal, 1977) and Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain (Cambridge, Mass., 1983). 8. Quoted in Walkowitz, CDD, p. 15. 9. Quoted in Williams, Country and the City, p. 216. 10. For Dr. John Watson’s description of London, see Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘‘A Study in Scarlet,’’ in The Annotated Sherlock Holmes (New York, 1992), p. 145. 11. For the pervasive image of ‘‘darkest Africa’’ and its implications for imagining London and other urban centers as junglelike, see Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca, 1988), esp. pp. 3–45, 173–97, and 255–74, as well as Joseph McLaughlin’s recent book, Writing the Urban Jungle (Charlottesville, 2000), passim. Following Jonathan Raban’s acute observation about the ways in which the city ‘‘irritates us into metaphor,’’ McLaughlin writes in the manner of a cultural studies theorist about the ubiquity of the jungle metaphor in texts written by Arthur Conan Doyle, William Booth, Jack London, and T. S. Eliot. See also Anne McClintock’s illuminating Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York, 1995), esp. pp. 118–22. 12. William Booth, In Darkest England and the Way Out (London, 1890), pp. 11– 13 and also ‘‘Part 1.—The Darkness’’ and ‘‘The African Parallel,’’ pp. 13–31. See also Gertrude Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians (New York, 1992), pp. 220–21, as well as McLaughlin, who equates Booth’s jungle with the East End rather than all the cities of Great Britain in Writing the Urban Jungle, pp. 21–22, 79–103. 13. See Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, ‘‘The City: The Sewer, the Gaze and the Contaminating Touch,’’ chapter 3 of The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, 1986), esp. pp. 130–31. 14. Ibid., pp. 125–48. For insights into middle-class subjectivity and images of the poor and paupers in London, see Roger Henkle’s probing study The Imagination of Class: The Victorian Middle Class and the Urban Poor, now being revised for publication by Professor Daniel Bivona of Arizona State University. 15. ‘‘My object has been to attempt to show the numerical relation which poverty, misery, and depravity bear to regular earnings and comparative comfort, and to describe the general conditions under which each class lives.’’ Booth, LLPL, vol. 1, p. 6. 16. The 1892–96 edition of Booth’s study ran to eleven volumes, and the 1902–03 edition topped out at seventeen. For further details, see T. S. Simey and M. B. Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist (London, 1960), and Rosemary O’Day

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17. 18.

19. 20.

21.

22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

29.

30.

and David Englander, Mr. Charles Booth’s Inquiry: Life and Labour of the People in London Reconsidered (London, 1993). Booth, LLPL, vol. 1, p. 172. Ibid., pp. 26–27, 66, 174. See also Harold W. Pfautz’s excerpts from Booth’s survey in Charles Booth on the City: Physical Pattern and Social Structure (Chicago, 1967). Booth, LLPL, vol. 1, pp. 66–67. St. George’s-in-the-East seemed ‘‘to stagnate with a squalor peculiar to itself,’’ having the highest percentage of people in the four lowest classes (A through D), with 48.8. By comparison, Bethnal Green had 44.7 percent and Whitechapel 39.2 percent, while the East End as a whole averaged 38 percent. Ibid., p. 62. ‘‘Whitechapel is a veritable Tom Tiddler’s ground, the Eldorado of the East, a gathering together of poor fortune seekers; its streets are full of buying and selling, the poor living on the poor.’’ Ibid., pp. 36, 38, 66. For Booth’s ideas about ‘‘hereditary urban degeneration’’ and his distinction between the ‘‘true’’ working classes and the casual or indigent poor, see also Stedman Jones, Outcast London, esp. pp. 127–28, 285–90, 305–08, 313–14. Booth, LLPL, vol. 1, p. 63. This colored map, which was displayed for a time in both Toynbee Hall and Oxford Hall, measured some sixteen by thirty feet. Pfautz, Booth, p. 30, note 54. With commendable quality, the London Topographical Society reprinted the map in sections in 1984, with an introduction by David Reeder. For this account I have used the ‘‘North-Eastern sheet’’ of the Descriptive Map of London Poverty, 1889, which was originally prepared in 1887. Booth explained his seven-color coding system in LLPL, vol. 1, pp. 7, 24, 68; vol. 2, pp. 40–41; and Third Series: Religious Influences, vol. 1, pp. 9–72. Booth, LLPL, vol. 1, pp. 68, 150–52. Ibid., p. 39. For the London Housing Acts of 1885 and 1890, see Wohl, Eternal Slum, pp. 206–20, 235–49; John Nelson Tarn, Five Per Cent Philanthropy (London, 1973), pp. 116–17, 252, 325, 330, 334–35, 339; and Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion, pp. 57–67. Some historians have attributed Mearns’s pamphlet to another Congregational minister, the Rev. William C. Preston. Fishman, East End, esp. pp. 199, 304. Fishman, East End, chapter 6, ‘‘The Ghetto,’’ esp. pp. 145–52, and Friedland, Trials of Israel Lipski, esp. pp. 137–38, 170–72, 183–88, 195–200. See also Lloyd P. Gartner, The Jewish Immigrant in England, 1870–1914 (London, 1960), pp. 158–62, and Chaim Bermant, Point of Arrival: A Study of London’s East End (London, 1975), pp. 111–37. For the experiences of London’s four thousand Italian immigrants during this period, see Lucio Sponza, Italian Immigrants in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Realities and Images (Leicester, 1988), esp. pp. 13, 181–251. William Ashworth estimated unemployment in England and Wales as hovering around 10 or 11 percent between 1873 and 1893. An Economic History of

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31.

32.

33. 34.

35.

36. 37.

38. 39.

England, 1870–1939 (London, 1960), pp. 192–93. He also characterized the years 1879, 1885–86, and 1893 as the worst for unemployment in the second half of the century. See also S. B. Saul, The Myth of the Great Depression, 1873– 1896 (Glasgow, 1969) and Howard L. Malchow, Population Pressures: Emigration and Government in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain (Palo Alto, Calif., 1979), p. 141. For the harsh conditions faced by the various types of dockers, see Booth, LLPL, First Series, Poverty, vol. 4, pp. 12–36. For other references to this East End stench, see Wohl, Endangered Lives, pp. 80–107, 205–32, and Eternal Slum, p. 312; Francis Sheppard, London 1808– 1870: The Infernal Wen (Berkeley, 1971), pp. 250–57; and Porter, London, pp. 260–66, 274. For overcrowding in Whitechapel, where some 46 percent of the inhabitants lived under such conditions, and 39 percent lived in poverty, see Wohl, Eternal Slum, passim, as well as Standish Meacham, A Life Apart: The English Working Class, 1890–1914 (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), esp. pp. 30–45. Incest, that almost unspeakable vice, ravaged the lives of countless children. No one really knew the extent of the problem, even though such eminent Victorians as Tennyson, Sir John Simon, and Lord Shaftesbury drew attention to this outrage. Not until 1908 did the Incest Act make punishment more certain and severe. See A. S. Wohl, ‘‘Sex and the Single Room: Incest Among the Victorian Working Classes,’’ in Wohl (ed.), The Victorian Family (New York, 1978), pp. 197–216. Wensley, Detective Days, p. 289. See the comments of Stedman Jones on the shortcomings of the sanitary measures of the 1850s and the Torrens Act of 1868 in Outcast London, pp. 189–90. For the inadequacies of the Cross Act and the working-class housing shortage, see Stedman Jones, Outcast London, pp. 159–233, and Jerry White, Rothschild Buildings: Life in an East End Tenement Block, 1887–1920 (London, 1980), esp. pp. 11–13. In April 1881, metropolitan London contained 4.76 million people, representing 18.35 percent of the population of England and Wales. Fishman, ‘‘The Image and the Reality,’’ chapter 1 of East End, pp. 1–24. John Law (Margaret Harkness), In Darkest London: A New and Popular Edition of Captain Lobo, A Story of the Salvation Army (London, n.d. [1889, 1891]), p. 4. For other glimpses of the sights and sounds of Whitechapel, see her novels A City Girl, A Realistic Story (London, 1887) and Out of Work (London, 1888). Joseph McLaughlin misspells the surname of Harkness’s protagonist in In Darkest London (1889) as ‘‘Captain Lobe’’ in Writing the Urban Jungle, pp. 4–10, 13, 15, 223. The Nether World: A Novel (London, 1903), p. 74. Gissing finished this poignant novel just before the Ripper murders commenced. For puppeteers, see George Speaight, The History of the English Puppet Theatre (Carbondale, Ill., 1990), esp. pp. 185–264. And for East End gaffs—those ‘‘Theatres of the Lost and Damned’’—see Paul Sheridan, Penny Theatres of Victorian London (London, 1981), esp. pp. 1–13, 41–44, 49–56, 69–77. For

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NOTES TO PAGES 44–47

40. 41.

42.

43. 44. 45.

46.

47. 48. 49.

amusements in the East End—from men’s social clubs to the three ‘‘legitimate’’ theaters, music and dance halls, choral societies, cycling and football clubs, and lectures—see Booth, LLPL, vol. 1, pp. 94–105, 115–27. See also Stedman Jones, ‘‘Working-Class Culture and Working-Class Politics in London, 1870– 1900,’’ Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History 27 (Autumn 1973), pp. 29–30. See Law/Harkness’s article ‘‘Penny Gaffs,’’ Pall Mall Gazette, Oct. 18, 1888. Conceived by Walter Besant, funded in large part by the Drapers Company, and designed by Sir Edmund Hay Currie, this building was erected on the site of Bancroft Hospital. See Ben Weinreb and Christopher Hibbert (eds.), The London Encyclopedia (London, 1987), p. 592; Booth, LLPL, vol. 1, p. 118; and Fishman, East End, esp. pp. 174, 311–16. For discussion of the intellectual and theological inspiration behind Toynbee Hall, see Melvin Richter, The Politics of Conscience: T. H. Green and His Age (Cambridge., Mass., 1964), esp. pp. 287–91, 316–30, and Asa Briggs and Anne Macartney, Toynbee Hall (London, 1984). See also Standish Meacham, Toynbee Hall and Social Reform, 1880–1914 (New Haven, 1987), esp. pp. 24– 85, and David Newsome, The Victorian World Picture (New Brunswick, N.J., 1997), pp. 219–20. For crime in Tower Hamlets, see Fishman, East End, pp. 179–229 and Jones, Outcast London, esp. pp. 180–81, 218–19, 242–44, 282–83, 321. Arthur Morrison, A Child of the Jago (London, 1896), pp. 21–27. Paula Bartley, Prostitution: Prevention and Reform in England, 1860–1914 (London, 2000), esp. pp. 157–68. As the eminent sexologist Dr. Charles Acton pointed out, the number of prostitutes in London varied from a police estimate of 8,600 in 1857 to the Bishop of Exeter’s figure of 80,000 in the 1860s, while one police magistrate settled for 50,000 for the early 1800s. Acton, Prostitution (New York, reprint 1968), pp. 32–33. According to the census of 1841, only around 3 percent of the known prostitutes could read and write well, and 54 percent were classified as illiterate. David Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture: England, 1750–1914 (Cambridge, 1989), p. 95. For the state’s efforts to regulate prostitution and curb the spread of venereal disease through the armed services by means of the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866, and 1869, and for Josephine Butler’s heroic efforts to repeal those harsh measures, see Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge, 1980); Frances Finnegan, Poverty and Prostitution: A Study of Victorian Prostitutes in York (Cambridge, 1979), esp. pp. 1–11, 15, 26, 155–56, 164–66; and Sander L. Gilman, ‘‘ ‘I’m Down on Whores’: Race and Gender in Victorian London,’’ in David T. Goldberg (ed.), Anatomy of Racism (Minneapolis, 1990), esp. pp. 146–54, 160–67. Clive Emsley, Crime and Society in England, 1750–1900 (London, 1987), p. 134. For Charrington’s war on brothels, see Fishman, East End, pp. 207, 249–55. Jack London, The People of the Abyss (London, 1978), esp. pp. 11–15, 94,

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114, 125. This work was originally published in 1903. In Writing the Urban Jungle, McLaughlin deals at length with London’s text (pp. 22–23, 104–32). He also misdates the Ripper murders and the dockers’ strike by a full year (p. 207, n. 19). Chapter 3: The Theory and Practice of Victorian Journalism 1. The compilers of Palmer’s invaluable Index to the ‘‘Times’’ thought well enough of Macaulay’s pronouncement to install it on the title page of every volume. 2. With polemical panache, Hoch has written: ‘‘Corporate capitalist control of newspapers has led them to push for policies which have been clearly and fatally disastrous for almost all of mankind.’’ The Newspaper Game: The Political Sociology of the Press (London, 1974), see esp. pp. 10–13, 110. 3. Jeremy Tunstall, Journalists at Work (London, 1971), esp. pp. 2–3, 91–92. 4. Gaye Tuchman, Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality (New York, 1978), pp. 2, 5. 5. Editors, of course, faced the formidable task of deciding which of all ‘‘the infinite number of observed daily happenings’’ were most significant before assigning a reporter to cover a particular story. Political and Economic Planning (hereafter PEP), Report on the British Press (London, 1938), pp. 16–17. 6. Hall et al., Policing the Crisis, passim. 7. Steve Chibnall, Law-and-Order News: An Analysis of Crime Reporting in the British Press (London, 1977) (hereafter LON), pp. ix–x. 8. Ibid., esp. pp. x, 35–36. As Box observes, ‘‘Deviant behaviour occupies so much media space . . . not because it is intrinsically interesting, but because it is intrinsically instructive. It serves to reinforce the world-taken-for-granted by restating social rules and warning subjects that violators will not be tolerated. In this way, the wayward are cautioned and the righteous are comforted.’’ Steven Box, Deviance, Reality and Society (London, 1971), p. 40. 9. Chibnall, LON, pp. xi–xii, 75–141. 10. Chibnall, LON, p. 206. 11. As for editorial selectivity, an observer of a ‘‘popular daily’’ in the mid-1930s estimated that only around 5 percent of all the words that flowed daily into the office ever reached the printed page. PEP, Report on the British Press, p. 18. 12. Chibnall, LON, pp. 221, 223. 13. Richard V. Ericson, Patricia M. Baranek, and Janet B. L. Chan, Visualizing Deviance: A Study of News Organization (hereafter VD) (Toronto, 1988), p. 342. 14. ‘‘Like the novel, news discourse is also a fantasy. As with fiction, fantasy does not mean it is all made up with whim and fancy, or that it is intended to deceive. Rather, it is grounded in reality, a way in which people both make sense of their experiences and make their social worlds.’’ Ibid., pp. 7, 14, 16– 18, 336, 345–47. 15. Jennifer Davis, ‘‘The London Garroting Panic of 1862: A Moral Panic and the Creation of a Criminal Class in mid-Victorian England,’’ in Gatrell et al., Crime and the Law, pp. 190–213.

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NOTES TO PAGES 54–56

16. A graduate of Sandhurst and Woolwich, Warren had served in the Royal Engineers and taken part in campaigns in sub-Saharan Africa and Egypt. He became Chief Commissioner in 1886. His critics accused him of ‘‘militarizing’’ the police and running Scotland Yard like an army unit. See Dictionary of National Biography, 1922–30 (London, 1937), pp. 889–91, and Sir Basil Thomson, The Story of Scotland Yard (London, 1936), pp. 176–77. 17. The Trafalgar Square rally was sponsored by the Metropolitan Radical Association, with the object of denouncing poverty in the East End and coercion in Ireland. After deploying both the constabulary and some regular army units, Warren gave the order to drive the huge crowd out of the square. 18. For example, Reynolds’s (Sept. 16) ran an article under the headline ‘‘UNDISCOVERED CRIMES IN LONDON,’’ citing over a dozen murders in the metropolis during the last two decades that the police had failed to solve. 19. For a pioneering study of the competition for status within the middle class and its demographic consequences, see J. A. Banks, Prosperity and Parenthood: A Study of Family Planning Among the Victorian Middle Classes (London, 1954), passim. 20. See Dianne Sachko Macleod’s penetrating study, Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity (Cambridge, 1996), esp. pp. 15–16, 44–49, 61–69, 95–112, 245–54, 274–80, and 336–40. 21. See the comment of the historian W. E. H. Lecky cited in Aled Jones, Powers of the Press: Newspapers, Power and the Public in Nineteenth-Century England (Aldershot, 1996), p. 59. The guesstimate as to total readership appears in Alan Lee, The Origins of the Popular Press in England, 1855–1914 (London, 1976), p. 34. According to David Mitch, The Rise of Popular Literacy in Victorian England (Philadelphia, 1992), p. 78, Victorian workers ‘‘sent letters and read newspapers on a regular basis.’’ But they were primarily interested in football matches or horse races rather than ‘‘religion, politics, urbanization, and peer pressure.’’ For the disparities in working-class literacy, see chapter 4 of David Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture, pp. 95–119. Harvey Graff contends that literacy rose from around 70 percent in 1850 to some 85 percent in 1900. The Legacies of Literacy (Bloomington, Ind., 1987), Fig. E1, p. 375. 22. For very rough estimates of income distribution among the major classes in Victorian England, see R. Dudley Baxter’s table in National Income (London, 1868), cited by Harold Perkin in The Origins of Modern English Society (London, 1969), Table 6, p. 420, and also Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society: England Since 1880 (London and New York, 1990), p. 29. 23. David Vincent comments on the entertainment value of journalism—especially for men after a long working day or week—in Literacy and Popular Culture, p. 191. For the addiction of American readers to lurid murder news, see Tucher, Froth and Scum, esp. pp. 7–20 and 191–99. 24. By 1862 the press was freed from all state impositions for the first time since the early eighteenth century. Richard Altick, The English Common Reader (Chicago, 1957), p. 354. Among the morning papers, the Daily Telegraph and

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NOTES TO PAGES 56–58

25.

26. 27.

28. 29.

30.

31.

32.

the Standard dropped their price to a penny in 1856 and 1858, respectively. The effect of price on readership may be judged from the experience of the Times. When this paper cost fivepence, in 1836, circulation stood at around 10,000. But after the price fell to threepence in 1861, circulation soon reached 70,000. E. L. Woodward, The Age of Reform, 1815–70 (Oxford, 1958), p. 601, n. 1. The combined circulation of London’s five leading weeklies—namely, the Illustrated London News, News of the World, Lloyd’s Weekly, Weekly Times, and Reynolds’s Newspaper—had reached the 453,000 mark by 1855. By the late 1870s, Lloyd’s had topped 600,000 and went on to attain 750,000 in 1886. Altick, English Common Reader, pp. 394–95. Quoted in Jones, Powers of the Press, p. 49. For allusions to mechanical innovations, see Thomas S. Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914 (Stanford, 1990), p. 299, and Harold Hobson, Phillip Knightley, and Leonard Russell, The Pearl of Days: An Intimate Memoir of the Sunday Times, 1822– 1972 (London, 1972), pp. 33–34, as well as Lucy Brown, Victorian News and Newspapers (hereafter VNN) (Oxford, 1985), pp. 8–11. Jones, Powers of the Press, pp. 2–3. According to one estimate, ‘‘for every purchaser of a newspaper in the early nineteenth century there were as many as thirty readers.’’ Joel Wiener, ‘‘Sources for the Study of Newspapers,’’ in Laurel Brake, Aled Jones, and Lionel Madden (eds.), Investigating Victorian Journalism (New York, 1990), p. 159. See also G. A. Cranfield, The Press and Society: From Caxton to Northcliffe (London, 1978), p. 119. There were roughly 1,609 newspapers published in the British Isles in 1875, and 2,504 in 1914. Periodicals soared from 643 in 1875 to 2,531 in 1903. Taken from The Newspaper Press Directory, these figures are cited by Peter Keating in The Haunted Study (London, 1989), p. 34. See also Jonathan Rose, The Edwardian Temperament—1895–1919 (Athens, Ohio, 1986), p. 166, and Richard Altick, ‘‘English Publishing and the Mass Audience in 1852,’’ in his anthology, Writers, Readers, and Occasions (Columbus, 1989), esp. pp. 142–47. Margaret Stetz discusses the growing female audience for novels, newspapers, and magazines in ‘‘Life’s ‘Half Profits’: Writers and Their Readers in Fiction of the 1890s,’’ in Lawrence S. Lockridge, John Maynard, and Donald D. Stone (eds.), Nineteenth-Century Lives (Cambridge, 1989). See John Vincent, The Formation of the Liberal Party, 1857–1868 (London, 1966), p. 61, and Altick, ‘‘The Reading Public in England and America in 1900,’’ in Writers, Readers, and Occasions, esp. pp. 227–28. Lucy Brown attributes the huge increase in circulation after the 1850s largely to lower prices rather than to any dramatic changes in content, format, or literacy. VNN, pp. 29–31. Six morning and four evening dailies in London lowered their prices by a penny within a few months of repeal of the tax, and in 1857 both the Morning Herald and the Standard launched editions at twopence. Lee, Origins, p. 69.

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33. Paul Hoch put this more bluntly: ‘‘Mass production required mass consumption. Which required a mass advertising media. Which became the popular newspaper.’’ The Newspaper Game, p. 15. 34. See Richards, Commodity Culture, passim. 35. ‘‘General News’’ dominated all categories in the Times with 13.2 percent, followed by parliamentary reports at 11.7 percent, commerce and shipping at 8 percent, leaders and leader summaries at 5 percent, foreign affairs at 4.6 percent, and sports and athletics at 2.1 percent. Arnot Reid, ‘‘The English and the American Press,’’ Nineteenth Century, vol. 22, no. 126 (Aug. 1887), p. 226. Evidently, the Times’s earnings from advertisements rose from £107,000 in 1849 to £234,000 in 1877, while income from sales fell from £175,000 to £172,000 over the same period. James Bishop and Oliver Woods, The Story of the Times: Bicentenary Edition, 1785–1985 (London, 1985), p. 117. 36. A. P. Wadsworth, Newspaper Circulations, 1800–1954, Manchester Statistical Society (Manchester, 1955), p. 21, and Brown, VNN, pp. 52–53. The Morning Chronicle foundered in 1862 and the Morning Herald survived until 1869. The Times’s proprietor, John Walter III, refused to drop the price below threepence because he wanted to uphold ‘‘the highest standards’’ rather than compete for numbers with cheaper rivals. See Stanley Morison, The History of the ‘‘Times,’’ vol. 2, 1841–1884 (London, 1939), pp. 215, 306–08. 37. The radical penny paper the Morning Star appeared in 1856 but did not last beyond 1868, owing to lack of firm party affiliation. By 1858, the Tory Standard had become a morning paper selling for the same price. Several outstanding provincial papers, notably the Birmingham Post and Manchester Guardian, were luring Times readers away in their regions. See William D. Bowman, The Story of the ‘‘Times’’ (New York, 1931), p. 20. When Lord Northcliffe bought the Times in 1908, daily sales averaged 38,000 and then rose slowly to 47,000 in 1911. His decision to lower the price to a penny in 1914 saved the paper from collapse. The History of the ‘‘Times,’’ vol. 3, The Twentieth Century Test, 1884– 1912 (London, 1947), pp. 570–83, 768–70. 38. After switching allegiance to the Liberal Unionist camp during the Home Rule crisis of 1885–86, the Daily Telegraph reached the heady heights of 300,000 copies a day. The only Conservative paper to challenge this feat— briefly—was the Standard, which climbed to 255,000 in 1889 after the price fell to a penny in 1858. But the numbers declined to 80,000 in 1904 and the paper died shortly before 1914. Another penny paper, the Daily News, absorbed the Morning Star in 1869 and reached a peak of around 150,000 during the Franco-Prussian war, before falling down to 50,000 in 1899. Wadsworth, Newspaper Circulations, pp. 20, 25. 39. Founded in 1871, the Central News Agency became the Conservative party’s house organ, just as the National Press Agency served the Liberal party faithfully, seeking to recruit new voters after 1873. Each agency published a daily paper that could be cut into segments and inserted into other newspapers. Brown, VNN, pp. 118–19; H. J. Hanham, Elections and Party Management (London, 1959), p. 359; and Stephen Koss, Rise and Fall of the Political Press,

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NOTES TO PAGES 59–60

40. 41.

42.

43.

44.

45.

vol. 1, The Nineteenth Century (hereafter RFPP ) (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1981), pp. 149, 206, 272, 367. See Tucher, Froth and Scum, esp. pp. 192–94. Founded by the Provincial Newspaper Society, the Press Association had an annual gross income that rose from almost £20,000 in 1871 to £76,000 in 1887. In 1884, some Tories launched the Constitutional Press Agency to counteract the Liberal bias of their rivals. See Koss, RFPP, vol. 1, pp. 272, 312, and chapter 8. The new news agencies included Havas, Wolff, Reuters (for international news), and the Press Association, founded in 1868. Brown, VNN, pp. 112–26; Michael Harris and Alan Lee (eds.), The Press in English Society from the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries (London, 1986), pp. 107–218; and Joel H. Wiener (ed.), Innovators and Preachers: The Role of the Editor in Victorian England (Westport, Conn., 1985). These figures were advertised in the Star on Sept. 10, 14 and Nov. 10, 1888. London’s total number of weeklies and biweeklies amounted to 432 in 1888. National Press Directory, 1888 (hereafter NPD) (London, 1888), pp. 31–53. Having launched Lloyd’s Illustrated London Newspaper in 1842, Edward Lloyd started a more conventional paper, Lloyd’s Weekly, filled with both hard and soft news and costing threepence. After he dropped the price to a penny, circulation rose from 613,000 in 1879 to 910,000 in 1893. Brown, VNN, p. 52; NPD, 1888, p. 44; and Joel Wiener (ed.), Papers for the Millions: The New Journalism in Britain, 1850s to 1914 (New York, 1988), pp. 56, 69. David Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture, pp. 252–56, and John Vincent, Liberal Party, pp. 59, 60. Taken together, the sales of these two weeklies dwarfed all other competitors. Reynolds’s achieved the half-million mark in the mid-1880s, by which time Lloyd’s had passed 800,000. In 1896, Lloyd’s became the first British newspaper to attain one million readers. What is often overlooked in studies of the Victorian press is the number of editions published by the same paper each morning or evening. In other words, the leading papers often produced at least three or four editions on the same day; the Pall Mall Gazette prided itself on five in the afternoon and evening. This means, of course, that any microanalytic study of Fleet Street should ideally begin with comparisons of early and late editions rather than across-the-street comparisons of one paper with another. In the provinces in 1864, 3,907,000 copies of weeklies and 438,000 copies of dailies were circulating, compared with 2,263,000 and 248,000 copies, respectively, in London. Between 1855 and 1870, at least seventy-eight new dailies were launched outside London, fifty-nine of which survived the rigors of infancy. Most of these new papers had a Liberal tilt. See John Vincent, Formation, pp. 59, 65, and Lee, Origins, pp. 68–69. In 1891 the Manchester Guardian surpassed the Times with a circulation of 42,500, a lead it held until 1904, when circulation shrank to 37,400. Wadsworth, Newspaper Circulations, pp. 21–22, 25. The next two largest provincial papers in the 1860s were the Liverpool Mercury and the Leeds Mercury, followed by the Yorkshire Post and the Sheffield Daily Telegraph. Ibid., p. 21. By 1892, there were 159 provincial

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NOTES TO PAGES 60–62

46. 47.

48.

49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57.

dailies, of which 85 were evening papers. Brown, VNN, pp. 32–33, 52–53. In 1898 the Harmsworth brothers struck journalistic gold again with Harmsworth’s Magazine, sales of which came close to the one million mark. The number of illustrated newspapers in London rose from five to thirteen during the 1890s. Altick, Writers, Readers, and Occasions, p. 226. Tucher, Froth and Scum, esp. pp. 198–99. Quoted in Wiener, Papers for the Millions, p. 57. One correspondent in the Printer (1885) stated that ‘‘in the modern newspaper management everything has to give way to L.s.d. [i.e., pounds, shillings, and pence].’’ Quoted in Jones, Powers of the Press, p. 138. Lee contends that ‘‘The press had become [by 1914] . . . a business almost entirely, and a political, civil and social institution hardly at all.’’ Origins of the Popular Press, p. 232. For discussion of these and other stellar newspapermen, see Brown, VNN, pp. 75–94; Koss, RFPP, vol. 1, passim; and Simon Jenkins, The Market for Glory (London, 1986), pp. 18–19. Matthew Arnold, ‘‘Up to Easter,’’ Nineteenth Century, vol. 21, no. 123 (May 1887), pp. 629–43, esp. p. 638. Wiener, Papers for the Millions, pp. 62, 70. Another precursor of the New Journalism was the Illustrated Times, founded in 1855 by David Bogue and edited by Henry Vizetelly. This magazine-cum-newspaper featured stories about war and crime, used illustrations profusely, and hired some lively reporters. Both Lucy Brown and Aled Jones neglect the rich seam of crime news in their otherwise laudable studies of Victorian journalism. Koss, RFPP, vol. 1, p. 343. Arnot Reid, ‘‘The English and the American Press,’’ pp. 223–24, and Tucher, Froth and Scum, esp. pp. 7–20, 26–28, 141–42, 191–99. Ralph Blumenfeld, The Press in My Time (London, 1933), quoted in Koss, RFPP, vol. 1, p. 345. In his memoir, Fleet Street and Downing Street (London, 1929), pp. 84–87, Jones stressed the press’s commitment to the cult of respectability: ‘‘Be conventional, be dull, and in consequence be highly respectable, was the noblest aspiration of thousands of excellent people. The sanctity of the home resolved itself into the avoidance of scandal.’’ Frederick Harcourt Kitchin, The London ‘Times’ Under the Managership of Moberley Bell (London, 1925), p. 40. Stanley Morison, The English Newspaper, 1662–1932 (Cambridge, 1932), p. 279. Quoted in Joel Wiener, ‘‘How New Was the New Journalism?’’ in Wiener, Papers for the Millions, p. 65. Harry Schalck credits two evening papers for launching the New Journalism—the revitalized Pall Mall Gazette and the Star. See Schalck, ‘‘Fleet Street in the 1880s: The New Journalism,’’ in Wiener, Papers for the Millions, pp. 73–87. For Frederick Greenwood’s contribution to the New Journalism, see B. I. Diamond, ‘‘A Precursor of the New Journalism: Frederick Greenwood of the Pall Mall Gazette,’’ in Wiener, Papers for the Millions, pp. 25–45.

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58. T. P. O’Connor, ‘‘The New Journalism,’’ New Review, vol. 1, no. 5 (October 1889), pp. 423–34. 59. Dicey disapproved of papers that catered to the ‘‘masses’’ rather than the ‘‘classes,’’ and opted for ‘‘leaderettes’’ (‘‘an odious word’’) rather than leaders. He lamented that the future belonged to the ha’penny press, and if this was not all bad, it was certainly ‘‘distasteful.’’ ‘‘Journalism New and Old,’’ Fortnightly Review, vol. 77, no. 461 (May 1905), pp. 904–18. 60. Massingham blamed most of the ‘‘new’’ commercialism along Fleet Street on such nouveaux press barons as Rothermere, Beaverbrook, and Berry, who had achieved nothing in either literature or politics and who treated newspapers as ‘‘organs of business’’ rather than leaders of policy or opinion. For him, ‘‘a purely commercial Press is and must be, an anti-social thing. It wants war because war sells papers; it wants crime because crime sells papers; it wants all forms of exciting amusement because exciting amusement sells papers.’’ ‘‘The Press and the People’’ (1924), printed in H. J. Massingham (ed.), H. W. M.: A Selection from the Writings of H. W. Massingham (London, 1925), pp. 129–40. 61. Long before the Queen’s golden jubilee in 1887, royal events made good copy. When the Prince of Wales paid a visit to Sheffield in 1875, the Sheffield Telegraph hired twenty-seven extra reporters to cover every princely move. This commitment paid off in the form of a record sale of a hundred thousand copies. Brown, VNN, p. 30. 62. Lord Burnham, Peterborough Court (London, 1955), p. 81. Sir Harry LevyLawson (1862–1933) became 2nd Viscount Burnham in 1919, and served as managing owner of the Daily Telegraph from 1903 to 1928. Dictionary of National Biography, 1931–1940 (hereafter DNB) (London, 1949), pp. 533–34. Chapter 4: Sensation News 1. See Wilde’s essay ‘‘The Critic as Artist,’’ in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (New York, 1923), vol. 5, pp. 62, 122. 2. Burnham, Peterborough Court, pp. 79–80. 3. As George Gissing put it in The Nether World (Oxford, 1992), p. 30. 4. Wadsworth, Newspaper Circulations, p. 23. 5. ‘‘Journalistic Barbarism,’’ the Printer (May 1886), p. 85, quoted in Jones, Powers of the Press, p. 136. 6. Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford, 1934), vol. 2, p. 1840. 7. Simon Winchester, The Professor and the Madman (New York, 1998), p. 220. In the matter of length Winchester has a point, given the number of volumes (12) and the number of words (414,825) defined therein. 8. See Joseph Frank, The Beginnings of the English Newspaper, 1610–1660 (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), pp. 202, 212, 223, 226, 237 ff. 9. Evidently this youth was one of the coconspirators in the murder of Mr. Hayes. Lincoln B. Faller, Turned to Account: The Forms and Functions of Criminal Biography in Late Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1987), esp. pp. 68–70, 315. 10. These men appear in The Complete Newgate Calendar, G. T. Crook and J. L.

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11.

12.

13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

Rayner (eds.) (London, 1926), vol. 5, pp. 66, 92–93, 119–24, and 134–42. Two versions of the Newgate Calendar appeared, first in 1728 and then in 1773. Andrew Knapp and William Baldwin published The New Newgate Calendar in 1824–26. Several more editions in the 1840s preceded the handsome fivevolume edition sponsored by the Navarre Society in 1926—cited above— which drew on the ‘‘brief lives’’ of assorted highwaymen, murderers, footpads, cheats, and other malefactors produced at different times by Captain Charles Johnson (1734), Captain Alexander Smith (1719), and George Borrow (1825), along with The Tyburn Chronicle (1768), The Malefactor’s Register (1796), and Camden Pelham, Chronicles of Crime (1841). Keith Hollingsworth discusses the calendar in The Newgate Novel, 1830–1847 (Detroit, 1963). For Williams’s murder of two families in the East End in 1811, see P. D. James and T. A. Critchley, The Maul and the Pear Tree: The Ratcliffe Highway Murders, 1811 (New York, 1986), esp. pp. 1–90, 108–13. Salacious tales of women accused of poisoning, stabbing, or mincing men appear in Elliott O’Donnell’s potboiler Women Bluebeards (London, 1931), which dwells at length on the legendary sexual hunger and scientific curiosity of the English-born Parisian Mlle. Jaborouski, who conspired to kill her lovers and then sold their cadavers to anatomy schools. She pickled their heads in jars so that she could study them for phrenological purposes. Ibid., pp. 255–65. This girl died from malnutrition and abuse on Feb. 11, 1812. The pamphlet may be found in the British Library (1132.b.66). Altick cites several such broadsides and street cocks in VSS, pp. 50–53. At least three publishers produced sixpenny pamphlets about Greenacre’s murder and ‘‘horrid mutilation’’ of his victim, featuring dramatic aquatints of the villain dismembering Mrs. Brown with knife and saw. First, C. J. Williams, Greenacre, or the Edgware-Road Murder (Derby, n.d. [1837]), published by Thomas Richardson; second, Edgware Road Murder . . . The Trial of James Greenacre and Sarah Gale for the Wilful Murder of Hannah Brown! (London, 1837), published by J. Duncombe; and third, The Paddington Tragedy: A Circumstantial Narrative of the Lives and Trial of James Greenacre, and the Woman Gale, for the Murder of Mrs. Hannah Brown, His Intended Wife— Which Was Brought to Light by the Discovery of Her Mutilated Remains, His Attempt at Suicide, Examination and Confession (London, 1837). Reproduced in Tucher, Froth and Scum, pp. 29–30. Quoted in David Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture, p. 246. Over the course of fifteen years, Chatto’s sixpenny edition of Charles Reade’s The Cloister and the Hearth sold 380,000 copies. Other best-sellers in this format were the detective stories of Manville Fenn and R. Austin Freeman. Anon., Sixpenny Wonders: 6d Gems from the Past (London, 1985), pp. 8–9. With two accomplices, Thurtell had killed Weare near Radlett in the parish of Aldenham, Hertfordshire, on October 24, 1823. After his trial and execution on January 9, 1824, Thurtell’s body was taken to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital for dissection before an audience that included a few phrenologists. Mounting concern about this ghoulish spectacle led to the exclusion of the public. See

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18.

19.

20.

21. 22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

Albert Borowitz, The Thurtell-Hunt Murder Case: Dark Mirror to Regency England (Baton Rouge, La., 1987), esp. pp. 79–93, 192, 195–97, 199–200, and Boyle, Black Swine, pp. 44–54. Catnach’s first broadsides about this case sold upwards of two hundred thousand copies, and the chapbook on the trial enjoyed a press run of half a million copies. Total sales of publications about the murder, trial, and execution of Thurtell may have reached the two million mark. Victor E. Neuburg, Chapbooks (London, 1964) and A Select Handlist of References to Chapbook Literature (Edinburgh, 1952). See also P. H. Muir, Catnachery (San Francisco, 1955). Thus the horrific murder of seven members of the Marshall family at Denham near Uxbridge in May 1870 by a disgruntled laborer ( John Owen, alias Jenkins, alias Jones) inspired busloads of trippers to come down from London in ‘‘pleasure vans’’ to see the blood-spattered cottage. Some people broke off branches from a nearby fir tree and picked up ‘‘loose articles’’ lying about. Times, May 30, 1870. For examples of feature stories about violent death and injury, see the account in the Daily Telegraph ( July 15, 17, 18, 27, and 28, 1876) of bodies burned by steam and fire after a boiler exploded on board the ironclad the S. S. Thunderer in the Solent in 1876 that killed twenty-nine. Among other papers featuring this collision was the Penny Illustrated Paper and Illustrated Times, which devoted the whole front page on August 25 to what it called TERRIBLE COLLISION OF THE GEISER AND THINGVALLA IN THE ATLANTIC. Pall Mall Gazette (hereafter PMG), Sept. 20, 1888. With good reason, Victorian newspapers featured railway accidents: fatalities arising out of train collisions were fifteen times higher in England than in Germany. G. M. Young, Early Victorian England, 1830–1865, vol. 2 (London, 1934), p. 460, n. 1. For accounts of the heavily sexual and racial implications of ‘‘the Hottentot Venus,’’ see Sander L. Gilman, ‘‘Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature,’’ in Henry L. Gates (ed.), ‘‘Race,’’ Writing, and Difference (Chicago, 1986), pp. 223–61 (esp. 232–38), and Anne Fausto-Sterling, ‘‘Gender, Race, and Nation: The Comparative Anatomy of ‘Hottentot’ Women in Europe, 1815–1817,’’ in Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla (eds.), Deviant Bodies (Bloomington, Ind., 1995), pp. 19–48. For the ordeal of Merrick, who suffered from multiple neurofibromatosis and attributed his disease to his mother’s fright at the sight of an elephant, see Michael Howell and Peter Ford, The True History of the Elephant Man (Harmondsworth, U.K., 1980). For a recent study of breach of promise cases in England, see Ginger S. Frost, Promises Broken: Courtship, Class and Gender in Victorian England (Charlottesville, Va., 1995), esp. pp. 25–57. Brown, VNN, p. 30. After her confinement in the asylum, Lady Mordaunt went to live with her father, Sir Thomas Moncreiffe. Further litigation and an

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27.

28.

29.

30.

31. 32.

33.

34.

appeal to the House of Lords finally enabled Sir Charles to obtain his divorce on March 11, 1875, and he remarried three years later. Times, Feb. 17, 18, 21, 24–26, March 9, April 28, 29, and June 3, 1870, and Oct. 26, 1871. Journalists often referred to the huge physique of the defendant, Arthur Orton, alias Thomas Castro, who had lived for some years in Wagga Wagga, Queensland, after deserting from the navy. Lady Tichborne, mother of Roger, defied the rest of her family and complicated matters by insisting that Orton was her long-lost son. After the jury in the criminal trial found Orton guilty of perjury, he was sentenced to fourteen years in prison. The legal fees alone cost the Tichborne estate upwards of two hundred thousand pounds. See Douglas Woodruff, The Tichborne Claimant: A Victorian Mystery (London, 1957), and also DNB, Supplement, vol. 3 (London, 1901), pp. 236–38. During the Crimean War, Major William Charles Yelverton (1824–83), the second son and heir of the 3rd Viscount Avonmore, began a love affair with an heiress, Theresa Longworth, who had gone out to the Crimea to nurse the wounded. Yelverton hired someone to impersonate a clergyman, who then went through the motions of a marriage service in Scotland and Ireland. After the relationship soured, he married an affluent widow while Theresa ran up bills for which he was legally responsible. During a bitter legal wrangle lasting nine years, Yelverton admitted that he had seduced Longworth and then arranged a bogus marriage. To the cheers of spectators, the Dublin judge ruled that the couple had been legally married. Yelverton appealed this verdict to the House of Lords, which declared the marriage invalid. DNB, vol. 63, p. 318; W. L. Burn, Age of Equipoise: A Study of the Mid-Victorian Generation (New York, 1965), pp. 255–57; Richard Altick, Deadly Encounters: Two Victorian Sensations (Philadelphia, 1986), pp. 7–8. Frederick Whyte summarizes the seduction and abandonment of Miss Long in The Life of W. T. Stead (London, 1925), vol. 1, pp. 244–46. In 1887 Stead reproduced his articles in pamphlet form under the title The Langworthy Marriage, or A Millionaire’s Shame. See Mansel’s scathing critique of sensation novels in the Quarterly Review, vol. 113 (April 1863), pp. 482–514. This vicious fight took place on July 12, 1861, at 16 Northumberland Street. Murray lived with his mistress and their love-child in suburban Tottenham. The press filled columns with details of the bloodstained room, the multiple wounds, the Roberts inquest, and speculation about the elusive Miss Moody, who called herself ‘‘Mrs. Murray.’’ Altick, Deadly Encounters, passim. Although this strange assault took place on June 28, Fleet Street waited a fortnight before focusing on the story. Altick rashly ventures out on a thin limb by arguing that all the media attention given to these assaults ushered in the ‘‘Age of Sensation’’—a ‘‘craze that lasted an entire decade.’’ Ibid., pp. 3, 10. Quoted in Ibid., p. 118. The linking here of fleas and Jews foreshadowed the ugly strains of anti-Semitism that emerged during the Lipski-Angel murder in 1887 and the Whitechapel murders in 1888.

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35. Quoted in Ibid., p. 120. Altick defines sensation as ‘‘fascination with the extraordinary, the perilous, the violent,’’ and goes on to contend that ‘‘sensation itself . . . was the sensation.’’ Ibid., p. 3. Although this semicircular argument has some merit, it fails to address the differences between the sensational and sensation-horror. 36. At one point, cheap editions of Reynolds’s Mysteries were selling at the rate of forty thousand copies a week. For a good example of the sexual dimensions of his fiction, see the account of the Countess of Desborough’s sexual stirrings while awaiting her lover in G. W. M. Reynolds, The Mysteries of the Court of London, vol. 1 (London, 1850), pp. 251–53. For Reynolds’s career, politics, and fiction, see ‘‘The Gothic Poor,’’ in Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (New York, 1983, 1985), pp. 435– 52, as well as Anne Humpherys, ‘‘G. W. M. Reynolds: Popular Literature and Popular Politics,’’ in Joel Wiener (ed.), Innovators and Preachers: The Role of the Editor in Victorian England (Westport, Conn., 1985), pp. 3–21, and Ellen B. Rosenman, ‘‘Spectacular Women: The Mysteries of London and the Female Body,’’ Victorian Studies, vol. 40, no. 1 (Autumn 1996), pp. 31–64. 37. Between 1845 and 1856, Reynolds produced some 3,327 double-columned pages of melodramatic adventure-romance, or roughly three and a half million words, published in an eight-volume edition by John Dicks in London between 1850 and 1856. Besides churning out 624 ‘‘penny dreadfuls’’ and producing his successful Sunday paper, Reynolds also wrote tales of love and hate for Reynolds’s Miscellany. One of his last novels was a neo-Gothic thriller, The Necromancer (London, 1884), wherein a lustful and long-lived serial killer uses black magic to kill five beautiful women between 1390 and 1510. 38. See the case cited by Emsley in his Crime and Society in England, p. 71. 39. See Winifred Hughes, The Maniac in the Cellar (Princeton, 1980), esp. pp. 3– 27. 40. Edmund Gosse recalled in his autobiography the almost sensual thrill he experienced as a boy when he found a few pages of a sensation novel lining a trunk in the attic of the family house. The victim of a deeply repressed father, he read this fragment of forbidden fiction ‘‘kneeling on the bare floor, with indescribable rapture.’’ Gosse, Father and Son (London, 1961), p. 35. 41. Quoted by David Sexton in his review of Peter Ackroyd’s horror-detective novel Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, in Spectator (Sept. 10, 1994), p. 33. In The Delights of Terror: An Aesthetics of the Tale of Terror (Chicago, 1987), p. 19, Terry Heller distinguishes between states of terror (‘‘the fear that harm will come to oneself’’) and horror (‘‘the emotion one feels in anticipating and witnessing harm coming to others for whom one cares’’). This artful but artificial distinction fails to convince. 42. See especially Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), which deals with the iniquities of the Spanish Inquisition, and also The Wild Irish Boy (1808), wherein the hero pits his resources against malevolent aristocrats. 43. For the culture of the gallows see Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1991); V. A. C.

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44.

45.

46.

47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55.

Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770–1868 (Oxford, 1994); Harry Potter, Hanging in Judgment: Religion and the Death Penalty in England from the Bloody Code to Abolition (London, 1993); and Emsley, Crime and Society, pp. 214–30. Both the Catnach press and Fleet Street had a field day whenever an execution took place, sending reporters to and from the scene, and printing special editions—often before rigor mortis had set in. For an example of gallows gore, see the account in the Leader ( June 21, 1856) of William Palmer’s execution in Stafford, when the hangman had to pull on the dying man’s legs to expedite death. Quoted in Boyle, Black Swine, pp. 88–89. Thomas W. Laqueur, ‘‘Crowds, Carnival and the State in English Executions, 1604–1868,’’ in A. L. Beier, David Cannadine, and James M. Rosenheim (eds.), The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone (Cambridge, 1989), esp. pp. 317–23. A public execution outside Newgate on May 26, 1868, marked the end of this spectacular tradition. The coroner and jury viewed the exhumed bodies of Walter and his wife, Anne, on January 2, 1856, in the commercial room of the Talbot Inn at Rugeley. The smell of decomposing flesh lingered for days and forced the owners to fumigate and then scrape and repaint the entire room from ceiling to floor. See Boyle, Black Swine, pp. 70–71. For the popularization of gore in nineteenth-century America, see Halttunen, Murder Most Foul, esp. pp. 60–90. When discussing ‘‘the paradox of horror,’’ Carroll stresses the vital role played by curiosity and fascination, and argues that ‘‘there is a strong correlation between fascination and horror due to the fact that horrific monsters are anomalous beings. That is, both fascination and art-horror converge on the same type of objects just because they are categorical violations.’’ He goes on to say that ‘‘we seek out horror fictions because the specific fascination they afford us is bound up with the fact that it is animated by the same type of object that gives rise to art-horror.’’ The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart (New York, 1990), esp. pp. 190–91. Burnham, Peterborough Court, pp. 79–80. Newsome, Victorian World Picture, p. 81. Tatar, Lustmord, p. 9. Halttunen dwells on the pleasures derived by American readers exposed to ‘‘dreadful’’ horror in Murder Most Foul, pp. 61–69. According to Jane Caputi, most of the gore in ‘‘gorenography’’ involves images of female bodies being ravaged by men, and reading the gory details promotes much the same pleasure in men as that experienced by the actual killer. See Caputi, ‘‘Advertising Femicide: Lethal Violence against Women in Pornography and Gorenography,’’ in Jill Radford and Diana E. H. Russell (eds.), Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing (New York, 1992), p. 205. Quoted by Whittington-Egan, Casebook, p. xv. See Andrew Jefford, ‘‘Dr. Jekyll and Professor Nabokov: Reading a Reading,’’ in Andrew Noble (ed.), Robert Louis Stevenson (London, 1983), pp. 62–63.

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56. Stevenson’s paradigm of the divided self, wherein good and evil coexist in the same person, has served as a defining characteristic of not only Jack the Ripper but also many serial killers since 1888. Both Moira Martingale’s Cannibal Killers (London, 1993) and the two-volume ‘‘Encyclopedia of Serial Killers’’ edited by Michael Newton, Hunting Humans (New York, 1990), exemplify the Jekyll/Hyde archetype. See also Tithecott, Of Men and Monsters, esp. pp. 50– 52. 57. After some litigation, Mansfield opened ‘‘the sole authorized version’’ of Jekyll and Hyde at the Lyceum on Saturday, August 4. The Pall Mall Gazette’s drama critic wrote: ‘‘Nothing more horrible has ever been seen on a stage’’ than Hyde’s murderous assault on Sir Danvers Carew at the end of act one. Mansfield’s transformation into ‘‘the abominable and apish Hyde,’’ he noted, ‘‘makes your flesh creep.’’ ‘‘The critic may curse the morbid and the horrible, but the craving for them is deeply rooted. Scratch John Bull and you find the ancient Briton who revels in blood, who loves to dip deep into a murder, and devours the details of a hanging.’’ PMG, July 31, Aug. 7, 1888. 58. William Winter, Life and Art of Richard Mansfield (New York, 1910), vol. 2, p. 43. 59. In mid-September Mansfield and the impresario Sir Henry Irving combined Jekyll and Hyde with a ‘‘pretty’’ one-act Roman comedy called Lesbia, and on October 22 they staged a benefit performance of Prince Karl, a farce by A. C. Gunter, in order to raise funds for the Bishop of Bedford’s night refuge for unfortunates in the East End. Times, Oct. 20. See also Paul Wilstach, Richard Mansfield: The Man and the Actor (London, 1908), pp. 158–63; PMG, Sept. 6, 20, 29, Oct. 20, 22; and Times, Sept. 18. 60. Inspired by her maternal uncle, Dr. Curtius, an eminent wax sculptor who owned the Caverne des Grands Voleurs in Paris, Madame Tussaud put her own wax models on display during the Revolution and later brought them to London, where they were exhibited in a house in the Strand. See Altick, VSS, pp. 97–98, and also Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), pp. 332–38. 61. Besides representations of the Terror, Madame Tussaud’s featured the ‘‘heroes and the desperadoes of history, the follies, the vices, and the virtues of humanity.’’ Herbert Fry, London Illustrated by Twenty Bird’s-Eye Views of the Principal Streets (London, 1891), pp. 132–33. The collection contained likenesses of every English monarch since William I, along with ‘‘All the World’s Greatest Men and Women.’’ One flyer informed visitors to the Chamber of Horrors that they could see ‘‘ALL THE NOTABLE CRIMINALS OF THE CENTURY’’ as well as ‘‘THE ORIGINAL GUILLOTINE.’’ See also John W. Dodds, The Age of Paradox: A Biography of England, 1841–1851 (London, 1953), pp. 101, 386–87, and Altick, VSS, pp. 64, 97–105. 62. Altick, Shows of London, pp. 332–38. Evidently, the title ‘‘The Chamber of Horrors’’ appeared first in July 1843 in an Illustrated London News advertisement. The management called it ‘‘the dead room’’ or ‘‘the black room.’’ See also Gatrell, Hanging Tree, pp. 114–17.

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63. Altick, VSS, esp. pp. 45–46, 121–22, 135–45, 291–94. G. M. Young’s Early Victorian England, 1830–1865 (London, 1934), vol. 1, facing p. 186, contains a flyer advertising the Chamber of Horrors and the new likeness of Rush— ‘‘taken from life at Norwich during the trial.’’ As Gatrell points out, the death masks of some Victorian villains were still on display in the Chamber of Horrors in 1917. Hanging Tree, p. 117. 64. Shortly after Israel Lipski had been hanged for the murder of Miriam Angel in August 1887, Tussaud’s unveiled its ‘‘portrait’’ of the culprit, which remained a star attraction until 1899. Friedland, Trials of Israel Lipski, pp. 203–04. The popularity of Madame Tussaud’s museum may be gauged by the fact that on a single day in the spring of 1888 some twenty-eight thousand visitors passed through the turnstiles to see royal personages and political heroes on display as well as such ‘‘foreign-born’’ murderers as Lipski and the Parisian triple-murderer Pranzini. Times, April 3, and Evening News, Oct. 1. An orchestra usually performed twice daily and the museum stayed open twelve hours each day. Adults had to pay a shilling for admission to the main exhibit and an additional sixpence for the Chamber of Horrors. 65. Eventually bowing to popular demand, the directors opened a Ripper exhibit in April 1980, featuring a blood-spattered woman (presumably Catherine Eddowes) sprawled on a cobblestone street in a fanciful slum setting with no killer in sight. See Walkowitz, CDD, pp. 1–5, and also the exhibit in Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors. 66. Emulating the collection assembled by Benjamin Rackstrow in the 1750s and the famous Hunterian Museum with over thirteen thousand specimens of human organs, some exhibits contained salons for ‘‘Ladies Only,’’ filled with models of the female reproductive organs. Other salons were reserved for males over eighteen. A central London showroom exhibited two idealized waxen images of Venus and Adonis that opened up to reveal all the internal organs. The Cosmorama Rooms of Mr. Sarti’s Museum of Pathological Anatomy featured a Moorish woman’s body ‘‘divisible into seventy-five sections’’ of waxen parts. Altick, Shows of London, pp. 339–40. 67. For these awesome productions, see Michael R. Booth, Victorian Spectacular Theatre, 1850–1910 (London, 1981), pp. 60–74; James Stottlar, ‘‘ ‘A House Choked with Gunpowder and Wild with Excitement,’ ’’ in Judith L. Fisher and Stephen Watt (eds.), When They Weren’t Doing Shakespeare (Athens, Ga., 1989), pp. 212–29. 68. The box-office triumphs of the 1860s and 1870s included suspense-laden versions of The Woman in White, The Moonstone, and Lady Audley’s Secret—not to mention Mrs. Henry Wood’s tale of female suffering and endurance, East Lynne. See Altick, Deadly Encounters, pp. 139–43; Martha Vicinus, ‘‘ ‘Helpless and Unfriended’: Nineteenth-Century Domestic Melodrama,’’ in Fisher and Watt (eds.), Shakespeare, pp. 174–86. 69. As Fishman put it, penny gaffs offered ‘‘cheap theatre for the poorest of the poor.’’ East End 1888, pp. 320–21. See also Paul Sheridan, Penny Theatres of Victorian London (London, 1981).

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70. Stead, ‘‘Government by Journalism.’’ Quoted in Friedland, Trials of Israel Lipski, p. 127. 71. Although sales almost doubled by the end of the year, the paper actually lost money on the ‘‘Maiden Tribute’’ series. At least one gentlemen’s club—the United University Club—cancelled its subscription for a week. Koss, RFPP, vol. 1, pp. 234, 262, and Robertson Scott, The Life and Death of a Newspaper (London, 1952), p. 150, quoted in Wadsworth, Newspaper Circulations, p. 23. See also Raymond L. Schults, Crusader in Babylon: W. T. Stead and the Pall Mall Gazette (Lincoln, Neb., 1972), esp. pp. 140–53. Judith Walkowitz devotes two long chapters to Stead, charging him, inter alia, with incorporating into the ‘‘Maiden Tribute’’ series ‘‘the entire repertoire of late nineteenthcentury pornography.’’ She also accuses him of having ‘‘metamorphosed into a compulsive voyeur and chronicler of sexual commerce.’’ CDD, esp. pp. 96–97 and 122–27. By contrast, Frederic Whyte painted a portrait without any warts in The Life of W. T. Stead (London, 1925), vol. 1, see chapters 8 and 9, esp. pp. 159–205. In his pamphlet version of ‘‘The Maiden Tribute’’ (1887), Stead boasted about the innovative nature of his exposé, and urged English mothers to teach their daughters ‘‘that Virtue is a ‘pearl without price.’ ’’ Stead, ‘‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon—Reprinted from the Pall Mall Gazette’’ (London, 1887), p. i. Originally published on July 6, 7, 8 and 10, 1885, the complete series was reprinted later that year. See also Deborah Gorham, ‘‘The ‘Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ Re-Examined,’’ Victorian Studies, vol. 21 (Spring 1978), pp. 361–68; G. A. Cranfield, The Press and Society (London, 1978), pp. 212–15; Michael Pearson, The Age of Consent: Victorian Prostitution and Its Enemies (Newton Abbott, 1972); and Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society, pp. 246–52. 72. This measure also gave a mite of legal protection to young girls working in brothels or living with ‘‘immoral’’ parents. 73. Havelock Ellis attributed Stead’s obsession with sex to his ‘‘repressed sexuality.’’ Whyte, Life of Stead, vol. 2, pp. 341–42. 74. As Koss has cogently observed, Stead’s brand of shock journalism represented a case of ‘‘new wine in old bottles.’’ RFPP, vol. 1, esp. pp. 345–46. 75. Boyle, Black Swine, pp. 1–45. 76. In Miller’s words, ‘‘Sensation is felt to occupy a natural site outside meaning, as though in the breathless body signification expired.’’ D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley, 1988), p. 147. In 1862, Mr. Punch recorded the chief ingredients of the sensation novel: ‘‘Harrowing the Mind, making the Flesh creep, causing the Hair to stand on End, giving shocks to the nervous system. . . .’’ Quoted by Walter de la Mare, ‘‘The Early Novels of Wilkie Collins,’’ in John Drinkwater (ed.), The Eighteen-Sixties (Cambridge, 1932), p. 98. 77. See the allusion in the Times (March 4) to a case heard before Justice Phillimore in Central Criminal Court on March 2, 1901, that otherwise went unreported. 78. For the advent of lurid crime news and other alluring news stories in the New York Herald and other papers after 1835, see Tucher, Froth and Scum, esp. pp. 16–20, 150–61.

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79. Judged by volume of coverage, the greatest newspaper sensation of Queen Victoria’s long reign was her own death, which received a total of 305 columns in the Times—the equivalent of fifty-one full pages—from January 23 to February 5, 1901. On January 23 alone this paper assigned over fifty columns—the equivalent of eight and a half full pages of text, with heavy black lines bordering every column—to the Queen’s obituary and the tributes paid by dignitaries at home and abroad. 80. Stead went on to deplore depictions of bloody gladiatorial contests in ancient Rome and the slaughter of American Indians and other subject peoples. ‘‘Where will it stop?’’ he wanted to know. ‘‘The popularity of a hanging in England in old time and of a guillotining in Paris today show how deep and passionate is the craving to see men killed.’’ PMG, Aug. 28, 1888. 81. Stead pointed out that one established weekly had ‘‘deluged’’ London on the previous Sunday with 400,000 copies filled with the details of the Ripper’s ‘‘double event’’ on September 30 and had sold every one, while on Monday another well-known paper ‘‘followed with a second flood of 300,000 copies.’’ PMG, Oct. 5, 1888. Chapter 5: Victorian Murder News 1. Altick, VSS, p. 9. 2. Judith Knelman, Twisting in the Wind: The Murderess and the English Press (Toronto, 1998), esp. pp. 3–43, 225–33, and 249–71. Citing the research of Robyn Anderson on murder indictments and trials in London, Knelman points out that for the period 1856–75, 32 percent of the victims of male murderers were wives, while 91 percent of the victims of murderesses were babies or children. For a good example of the extra heat engendered by female killers, see David M. Kiely’s potboiler Bloody Women: Ireland’s Female Killers (Dublin, 1999), which narrates some seventeen homicides by Irish women between 1879 and 1991. 3. According to Altick, 25 of these 480 homicides involved children of the accused, while 25 other victims were blood relations. Thirty of the female victims were variously described as ‘‘concubines,’’ ‘‘paramours,’’ and ‘‘sweethearts.’’ Altick, VSS, pp. 281, 286. 4. Knelman cites the findings of William Guy in 1875 to the effect that one-third of all the murderers executed between 1836 and 1870 had been animated by greed and another third by passion (notably revenge, jealousy, or grudge), while roughly one-fifth had killed as a result of ‘‘domestic discord.’’ Twisting in the Wind, p. 9. Needless to say, the manifest ambiguity of these categories should invite skepticism. 5. At least Altick dismissed the absurd notion that murder news offered readers ‘‘a substitute for sex.’’ VSS, p. 288. 6. Samuel R. Wells, How to Read Character: A New Illustrated Handbook of Phrenology and Physiognomy (New York, 1894), p. 85. Wells’s examples of this cranial type included Caligula, Nero, Danton, and Robespierre. 7. For discussion of the supposed criminal class, see J. J. Tobias, Urban Crime in

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8.

9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

Victorian England (New York, 1972), pp. 52–77, and Emsley, Crime and Society, pp. 31, 55–77. The French writer M. A. Frégier was among the first to label this supposed class ‘‘dangerous’’ in Des classes dangereuses de la population dans les grandes villes, 2 vols. (Paris, 1840). See also Louis Chevalier, Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes (Princeton, 1973), n. 28, pp. 447–48. Quoted in Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York, 1981), p. 124. Zedner discusses Lombroso’s ‘‘biological’’ view of female criminals in Women, Crime, and Custody, pp. 76–83. Anderson, ‘‘Our Absurd System of Punishing Crime,’’ Nineteenth Century, vol. 49, no. 287 (Feb. 1901), pp. 268–84. Martin J. Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law, and Policy in England, 1830–1914 (Cambridge, 1990), esp. pp. 224–44. On the other hand, Clive Emsley contends that from 1750 to 1900, the experts denied ‘‘any relationship between low wages, poverty and the bulk of crime. The main causes of crime were given as moral weakness, luxury, idleness, corrupting literature, parental neglect, and lack of education.’’ Crime and Society in England, p. 58. John G. Cawelti alludes briefly to ‘‘the rise of a scientific and social approach to the analysis of criminal deeds’’ in Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago, 1977), pp. 57–58. Quoted in Peter Clarke, Liberals and Social Democrats (Cambridge, 1981), p. 7. See also Altick, VSS, pp. 293–97. Examples of the morality quotient in Victorian murder news may be found in the murder stories featured in the Times and other leading papers about the deaths of Mary (Brothers) Tape in St. Giles (1845), Patrick O’Connor in the East End (1849), Sarah Milson in Westminster (1866), Cecilia Aldridge in Finsbury (1870), seven members of the Emmanuel Marshall family in Denham (1870), Ann Boss and Mr. Huelin in Chelsea (1870), Harriet Lane in Whitechapel (1875), Enoch Clark in Finchley (1882), and Miriam Angel in the East End (1887). Jane Beetmore (or Beatmore) was found in a ditch on September 23. Several days later the police arrested and charged a man with her murder. Halttunen discusses the quality of early-nineteenth-century New England execution sermons in Murder Most Foul, esp. pp. 17–20. The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, ed. David Masson, vol. 13 (Edinburgh, 1890), pp. 10, 24–35, 39, 42–43. Albert Borowitz has connected this essay to the murder of William Weare by John ( Jack) Thurtell on October 24, 1823, in The Thurtell-Hunt Murder Case (Baton Rouge, 1987), see esp. pp. 48, 258–60. [De Quincey], ‘‘Second Paper on Murder Considered As One of the Fine Arts,’’ Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine vol. 46, no. 289 (November 1839), pp. 661–68. Stephen ended his jeremiad by deploring the tendency of novels and newspapers to exploit ‘‘more horrors of blood and crime and the gallows.’’ English society and culture had in his view become banal and mediocre and had lost passion and individualism. ‘‘Tragedy, in short, has gone out of fashion in real

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17.

18.

19. 20.

21.

22. 23.

24.

25.

26.

life as on the stage.’’ Cornhill Magazine, vol. 20, no. 120 (December 1869), pp. 722–33. Wilde, ‘‘Pen, Pencil, and Poison: A Study,’’ Fortnightly Review, vol. 45, new series, no. 265 ( January 1889), pp. 41–54. Andrew Motion has recently written a ‘‘creative’’ or fictional confession (supposedly written while in penal exile in the Antipodes) that draws on scraps of historical evidence and the culprit’s own writings. See Wainewright the Poisoner: The Confession of Thomas Griffith Wainewright (New York, 2000). For the particulars of the Hulten case and Hulten’s relationship with Elizabeth Baker Jones in wartime England, see R. Alwyn Raymond, The Cleft Chin Murder (London, 1945). Orwell’s essay, ‘‘Decline of the English Murder,’’ appears in ‘‘Shooting an Elephant’’ and Other Essays (New York, 1950), pp. 156–60. Regarding the dissolving boundary between ‘‘real’’ murder and its representation in the media, Appleyard declared: ‘‘Murders, even real ones, always seem to exist on the boundary between fact and fiction, between dreams and waking. They are the mainspring of so many novels, films and television shows that we are hardly able to grasp the real thing.’’ Brian Appleyard, ‘‘Murder Dies a Death,’’ Sunday Times, Aug. 12, 1990. The metaphor of gourmets tasting fine food or wine has long pervaded the discourse of murder buffs. Thus William Roughead once alluded to ‘‘lunching off’’ the trial of Jessie King and then ‘‘supping off’’ the trial of John Laurie in that bumper year for Scottish murders—1889. Enjoyment of Murder, p. 22. Burnham, Peterborough Court, pp. 80–81. As Watson pointed out, Holmes invariably dealt with ‘‘strange and bizarre’’ cases whereas the papers were filled with mundane crimes. Referring to a case of wife-beating in the morning’s paper, he read aloud: ‘‘There is half a column of print, but I know without reading it that it is all perfectly familiar to me. There is, of course, the other woman, the drink, the push, the blow, the sympathetic sister or landlady. The crudest of writers could invent nothing more crude.’’ Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘‘A Case of Identity,’’ The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Oxford, 1994), pp. 30–31. Ruth Harris deals at length with both male and female crimes of passion and the behavior of juries in her book Murders and Madness, esp. pp. 208–42, 285–320. In the 1860s, trials for all indictable offenses in England and Wales (most of which involved larceny) averaged around 59,000, falling to roughly 53,500 in the 1890s. V. A. C. Gatrell, ‘‘The Decline of Theft and Violence in Victorian and Edwardian England,’’ in V. A. C. Gatrell, Bruce Lenman, and Geoffrey Parker (eds.), Crime and the Law: The Social History of Crime in Western Europe since 1500 (London, 1980), Table 3, p. 282. Homicides (including infanticide) averaged 368.8 per annum between 1857 and 1890. During the years 1878–87 they reached a peak of 406.9 per annum compared with 293.5 for 1905–15. See Appendix A, Table A1, pp. 343–45. For Jessie King’s trial in the High Court of Justiciary, see Roughead, Nothing

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27.

28. 29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

but Murder, pp. 319–42, and also Times, Feb. 19, 1889. Convicted and sentenced to death, she was the last woman hanged in Edinburgh. By contrast, the trial of John Laurie, a petty thief and pattern-maker, for murdering Rose took up five columns on two separate days. Times, Nov. 9, 11, 1889. After the jurors found Laurie guilty by the slender margin of 8 to 7, the judge pronounced the death sentence. But a petition for reprieve drew some 138,140 signatures and sparked a heated debate in the press. Certified insane by a panel of doctors, Laurie escaped the gallows but spent the rest of his life in prison, dying on October 4, 1930. Roughhead, Enjoyment of Murder, pp. 22–27, and Roughead (ed.), Trial of John Weston Laurie (The Arran Murder) (Glasgow, 1932). Times, Feb. 26–28 and March 1–2, 4, 1901. Among the papers that covered the case and published interviews with witnesses were the Daily Mail, Star, Sun, and Evening Standard. The jury found Bennett guilty on March 3 and he was hanged in Norwich jail on March 21, 1901, without confessing to the crime. See also J. H. H. Gaute and Robin Odell, The Murderers’ Who’s Who (Montreal, 1979), p. 39. Kennedy Jones, Fleet Street and Downing Street (London, 1929), pp. 198–200. The Oxford English Dictionary traces this use of ‘‘unfortunate’’ back to 1796. It resurfaced during the notorious Ratcliffe Highway murders in 1811. See P. D. James and T. A. Critchley, The Maul and the Pear Tree: The Ratcliffe Highway Murders, 1811 (New York, 1986), p. 20. Because such women supplemented their earnings from sex with needlework, barrow vending, fruit or hop-picking, and char-work, the more ambiguous word had its uses. An article in the Times (May 6, 1870) about the trial of a paper-stainer for raping his seventeen-year-old employee used ‘‘outrage’’ twice. However, a case of incest (Oct. 27, 1870), which received only four lines, did use ‘‘rape’’ to describe the thirteen-year-old daughter’s fate. Altick, VSS, pp. 51, 295. The Pall Mall Gazette ( June 30, 1887) used the headline ‘‘OUTRAGE IN HIGHGATE’’ for an article about a ‘‘shocking’’ assault on a young woman by three men. See Alan Hunt, ‘‘The Great Masturbation Panic and the Discourses of Moral Regulation in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Britain,’’ Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 8, no. 4 (April 1998), p. 586. Martin Friedland’s study of the Lipski-Angel murder (1887) contains some fine examples of elision and euphemism in matters sexual. See Trials of Israel Lipski, esp. pp. 21–22, 86, and Times, June 29–30, 1887. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance, p. 77. With regard to Victorian crime rates, Gatrell makes clear that the number of trials for indictable offenses fell by a third after 1850 (following a sevenfold increase in the years 1805–42), despite a huge population increase. Gatrell, ‘‘The Decline of Theft and Violence in Victorian and Edwardian England’’ in Gatrell et al., Crime and the Law, pp. 238–341. Robyn Anderson quoted in Knelman, Twisting in the Wind, p. 7. Evidently, 44 percent of these indictments for murder involved the death of children and 19 percent the death of spouses.

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35. Faller alludes to the special opprobrium that fell on the slayer of any family member in Turned To Account, pp. 48–51. 36. Our fascination with murder should not obscure the fact that larceny accounted for almost 90 percent of all indictable offences in England and Wales from the late 1850s to the early 1890s. Felonies against the person constituted only 4 percent. Gatrell, ‘‘Decline of Theft and Violence,’’ pp. 274, 281–83. For an overview of Victorian domesticity and respectability, see F. M. L. Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), esp. chapters 2–4 and pp. 175–76, 193–96, 250–54. 37. As Knelman points out, the ratio of men to women tried for murder between 1855 and 1874 was two to one, while six to seven times as many men as women were indicted for all kinds of serious crime. In the latter 1870s some 86 percent of those sentenced to life imprisonment were men. Twisting in the Wind, pp. 15–16. 38. Roughead, Enjoyment of Murder, p. 16, and also Roughead, Murder and More Murder, p. 239. 39. The reports of both the inquest and the trial contained graphic passages from surgeon Michael Fitzgerald’s postmortem report about having found her bleeding to death. Times, April 2, 1845. 40. Responding to pleas for commutation of the death sentence because Connor was supposedly ‘‘of a weak and imbecile state of mind,’’ the sheriffs revealed that he had a violent temper and had killed his mother’s cat and favorite bird while enraged. Times, June 3, 1845. 41. The Standard, Morning Post, and Globe also featured the Connor-Tape murder, while providing details that often conflicted with the Times’s version. But the Globe (April 7) took one step beyond its competitors by quoting a doctor as stating that Connors had consulted him three times about his ‘‘bad disorder’’—namely, gonorrhea. 42. For Whicher’s long letter of self-justification, see Times, July 25, 1865. Anthea Trodd deals briefly with this notorious case in Domestic Crime in the Victorian Novel, esp. pp. 19–29. 43. Constance Kent never served the full sentence. Times, July 22, Aug. 28, 1865. See also Thomson, Story of Scotland Yard, pp. 153–55; Annual Register, 1865, pp. 221–27; Altick, VSS, pp. 82, 129–31. The feminist scholar Mary Hartman has exonerated Constance and blamed the murder on her domineering father, who had been carrying on with the nurse and was clearly guilty of a ‘‘terrible catalogue of crimes against women.’’ Victorian Murderesses, pp. 94–101, 107– 12, 117–29. See also Knelman, Twisting in the Wind, esp. pp. 28–29, 141–44, 267–68. 44. The scion of a prominent Staffordshire family, Palmer, aged forty, had a weakness for betting on horses. When his wife died—apparently from gastric illness—in September 1855, he benefited from her large insurance policies. Some nine months later his maidservant gave birth to a child that he had allegedly fathered. Palmer borrowed money from Cooke to pay off some of his gambling losses, and when he could not repay the loans, he bought some strychnine,

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45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50.

51.

52. 53.

54.

55.

prussic acid, opium, and morphine, and fed this lethal cocktail to his creditor. See Eric R. Watson’s edition (1952) of George H. Knott (ed.), Trial of William Palmer (Edinburgh, 1912); Altick, VSS, pp. 152–60; Boyle, Black Swine, pp. 61–101; and Burn, Age of Equipoise, pp. 43–44. Between May 15 and 28, 1856, the Telegraph devoted some fifty-five columns to the trial. The Crown’s expert witness, Dr. Alfred Taylor, contended that Smethurst had poisoned Isabella Bankes. But Smethurst’s counsel proved that Taylor had actually analyzed arsenic found in his own laboratory rather than in the victim’s stomach. This revelation did not prevent the judge or the jury from deeming the defendant guilty. See Altick, VSS, pp. 161–67, and Boyle, Black Swine, pp. 60–62, 74–75. When his wife succumbed to his lethal concoction, Pritchard piously prayed for the soul of his ‘‘beloved Minnie.’’ Burn, Age of Equipoise, p. 44. So says Sherlock Holmes in Conan Doyle, ‘‘The Speckled Band,’’ Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, p. 192. Altick, VSS, pp. 169–73. Knelman’s analysis of the fifty ‘‘most notorious accused murderesses’’ in nineteenth-century England revealed that 48 percent used poison and 16 percent chose either suffocation or strangulation, while 8 percent resorted to ‘‘starvation, neglect, scalding or drowning’’—presumably of children. Twisting in the Wind, p. 8. In much the same way, the alleged involvement of three prominent doctors in the murder of wives or lovers in 1999–2000 made headline news in Boston newspapers. These cases prompted members of the medical profession in Massachusetts to utter disclaimers about what one doctor called ‘‘a bizarre coincidence.’’ This certainly did not mean, he added, that physicians had become ‘‘prone to homicide.’’ ‘‘A Case of Coincidence,’’ Boston Globe, July 20, 2000. The medical experts could not agree on the cause of Bravo’s death since the symptoms suggested that the victim had ingested not only laudanum, antimony, and arsenic, but also bichloride of mercury, chloroform, and tartar emetic. Daily Telegraph July 25, 1876, and Burnham, Peterborough Court, pp. 78–80. See also Times, July 12–15, 18–22, 25–29, Aug. 1–5, 8–10, 12, 1876, and Hartman, Victorian Murderesses, pp. 130–41, 155–66, 171–73. Among the elite spectators on the day Mrs. Bravo testified (August 4) were the Earl of Lucan, Lord Alfred Paget, and Sir William Fraser, Baronet (Conservative M.P. for Kidderminster, 1874–80). The following summary of the Wainwright-Lane murder is based on the Times’s coverage along with gleanings from the Daily Telegraph and Morning Post. The fullest account appears in H. B. Irving, The Trial of the Wainwrights (Edinburgh, 1920), on which Altick drew when writing his chapter ‘‘A Spin Across London Bridge’’ in VSS, pp. 210–19. This print appeared on the cover of The Whitechapel Tragedy: Police News Edition of The Life and Trial of Henry & Thomas Wainwright, with Verdict, &c,

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56.

57.

58.

59.

60.

61.

62. 63. 64.

reprinted in Kalikoff, Murder and Moral Decay in Victorian Popular Literature, p. 128 (dated 1874 rather than 1875). The morning papers were particularly reluctant to mention the surgeon’s comments about the state of the uterus. Thus the Times (Nov. 27) paraphrased Larkin’s testimony to the effect that ‘‘the state of the remains’’ suggested that the victim ‘‘had been a mother.’’ His testimony on this occasion was compressed into five lines—compared with the forty-five lines in the transcript published by Irving in Trial of the Wainwrights (see esp. pp. 114–23 [Larkin] and pp. 123–29 [Bond]). Larkin surmised that the victim had borne at least one child. Times, Sept. 25, 1875. Besides two bullet holes in the skull, the surgeons found a third (flattened) bullet, embedded in the victim’s hair-pad, and a ‘‘deep, clean cut’’ in the throat. Using this signature, Thomas had sent several letters and telegrams to Harriet’s family, assuring them that she was well and living abroad. Dorothy Sayers made use of this case more than once in Whose Body? (1923). During his boastful confession to Lord Peter Wimsey, the villain, Sir Julian Freke (whose name echoed Henry’s friend), explained that most criminals got caught because they betrayed themselves through some flaw in their ‘‘pathological condition.’’ He then mentioned Henry Wainwright’s ‘‘reckless confidence.’’ Whose Body? (New York, 1988), p. 157. Of course Wimsey’s lady love, Harriet Vane, owed most of her name to Henry’s ill-fated mistress. When asked if he had anything to say, Henry thanked his counsel and friends and swore ‘‘in the presence of the God before whom I shall shortly appear’’ that he had not killed Harriet. But he did admit to having indulged in ‘‘great immorality’’ and ‘‘many indiscretions.’’ Times, Dec. 2, 1875. Thomas Wainwright was sentenced to seven years in jail, and might have received more had not the judge regarded him as ‘‘the dupe’’ and ‘‘tool’’ of his scheming brother. Times, Dec. 2, 1875. In a long prison letter, Henry accused his brother Thomas of murdering Harriet. According to Henry, Harriet’s demands for money had alienated him, and Thomas had promised to take care of this problem for a mere twenty pounds. Morning Post, Dec. 21, 1875. According to some reports, Henry’s neck broke with ‘‘an awful thud’’ after a fall of five feet six inches, which was exactly his height. After the regulation hour, the body was taken down and carried to the prison mortuary for the routine inquest. The coroner noted that Henry’s neck had been dislocated. See the official report of the execution, compiled by Sidney Roberts Smith, Governor of Newgate Prison—Coroner’s Inquest, City of London, Case No. 231, Dec. 21, 1875, Corporation of London Record Office (hereafter CLRO); also Times, Dec. 22, 1875. These column counts translate into roughly 210,000 words for the Times and 77,000 for the Morning Post. Morning Post, Dec. 3, 9, 1875, and Daily Telegraph, Dec. 6, 7, 14, 15, 1875. Morning Post, Dec. 3, 9, 1875. Evidently, the judge gave Stokes thirty pounds from public funds for his ‘‘perseverance.’’ Altick, VSS, p. 212.

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65. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York, 1973), see esp. p. 165. 66. ‘‘The new murder narratives had ritual recourse to the Gothic conventions of the fundamental mystery of murder—its intrinsic unknowability—and its fundamental horror—the inhuman nature of the act.’’ Halttunen, Murder Most Foul, pp. 2–4. 67. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue,’’ in The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison, vol. 3, Tales (New York, 1965), p. 168. 68. Sugden, JR, p. 5. 69. Burnham, Peterborough Court, p. 82. 70. A maverick journalist, amateur sleuth, and ‘‘name-dropper on a grand scale,’’ Le Queux earned fleeting fame by spinning the tale of a Russian Ripper, Dr. Alexander Pedachenko, who was part of an elaborate conspiracy involving Russian anarchists and the tsar’s secret police (Ochrana) in London. See William Le Queux, Things I Know About Kings, Celebrities and Crooks (London, 1923); Rumbelow, JR. pp. 178–84; and Begg et al., JR: A to Z, pp. 252–53, 343–44. 71. Fisher, Killer Among Us, p. 209. 72. For a useful discussion of the ways in which readers can relate to even the most ordinary accounts of crime in the media, see Peter Dahlgren, ‘‘Crime News: The Fascination of the Mundane,’’ European Journal of Communication, vol. 3, no. 2 ( June 1988), esp. pp. 189–200. Chapter 6: The First Two Murders 1. Lloyd’s made this claim in August 1888. See also NPD 1888, p. 44; Joseph Hatton, Journalistic London (London, 1882), pp. 194–96. 2. NPD 1888, p. 48. See also Virginia Berridge, ‘‘The Language of Popular and Radical Journalism: The Case of Reynolds’s Newspaper,’’ Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History, no. 44 (Spring 1982), pp. 6–7, and ‘‘Popular Sunday Papers and Mid-Victorian Society’’ in George Boyce, J. Curran, and P. Wingate (eds.), Newspaper History: From the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day (London, 1978), pp. 249–64. See also Anne Humpherys, ‘‘Popular Narrative and Political Discourse in Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper,’’ in Laurel Brake, A. Jones, and L. Madden (eds.), Investigating Victorian Journalism (New York, 1990), pp. 33–47. 3. Wadsworth, Newspaper Circulations, p. 23. The People also featured humaninterest stories and serialized middlebrow novels. Willing’s British and Irish Press Guide (London, 1890), pp. 89, 130; NPD 1888, p. 47. Eventually, the People prospered, attaining a circulation of three million in the mid-1930s, which made it second only to the News of the World. PEP, Report on the British Press, p. 84. 4. The Weekly Times proudly called itself ‘‘A Liberal Newspaper of Political and Social Progress.’’ Like the People, it serialized romance and sensation novels. NPD 1888, pp. 52, 212.

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5. The Globe reached a circulation peak of 125,000 on January 15, 1892, owing to the death of the Duke of Clarence and Avondale (one of the late-twentiethcentury Ripper suspects). Madge not only edited the Globe, but also managed the People (with Armstrong’s help) after 1881, and oversaw the Sun in 1904– 06. Born in Plymouth in 1845, he received a baronetcy in 1919. Who Was Who, 1916–1928 (London, 1967), p. 692; Hatton, Journalistic London, pp. 163–66; H. W. Massingham, The London Daily Press (London, 1892), pp. 168–69, 173–76; obituary, Times, Jan. 31, 1927; Koss, RFPP, vol. 1, pp. 182, 248, 274; and Brown, VNN, pp. 66–67. 6. Wilfrid Hindle, The Morning Post, 1772–1937 (London, 1937), pp. 1–147, and Lucyle Werkmeister, The London Daily Press, 1772–1792 (Lincoln, Neb., 1963), pp. 19–108. 7. Among the illustrious contributors in the early 1800s were Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and Lamb. Under the editorship of Sir Algernon Borthwick (1852–76), circulation rose rapidly after the price fell to a penny. Hindle, Morning Post, p. 218. 8. NPD 1888, p. 32. 9. Brown, VNN, p. 35 and Massingham, London Daily Press, pp. 182–83. Sales must have slumped after 1888, for Lord Harmsworth bought it in 1894 for only twenty-three thousand pounds. Much later (1937), the Evening News turned to even finer gold owing to a circulation of almost eight hundred thousand. Simon Jenkins, The Market for Glory (London, 1986), p. 19; PEP, Report on the British Press, p. 85; Viscount Camrose, British Newspapers and Their Controllers (London, 1947), pp. 9, 13, 50. 10. R. T. Shannon, Gladstone and the Bulgarian Agitation, 1876 (London, 1963), pp. 153–54; H. J. Hanham, Elections and Party Management (London, 1959), p. 110. 11. Burnham, Peterborough Court, pp. 75–78. See also Massingham, London Daily Press, pp. 92–94, 102–05; NPD 1888, p. 31; Brown, VNN, pp. 31, 52, 61–62, 171–77, 276; Hatton, Journalistic London, pp. 111–26, 131–40; and Camrose, British Newspapers, pp. 13, 27–34, 66–69. The Daily Telegraph ’s circulation jumped from roughly 215,000 in 1885 to 300,000 in 1888, easily surpassing the Standard, which reached 200,000 around 1880. 12. See Bowman, The Story of ‘‘The Times,’’ pp. 3–24. 13. Kitchin, The London ‘‘Times,’’ pp. 51–55. 14. NPD, 1888, p. 31. Rather immodestly, the Times claimed to be the only paper that ‘‘men of all parties and all classes read and speak of.’’ See Massingham, London Daily Press, pp. 87, 317–40, and Morison, History of the ‘‘Times,’’ vol. 2, esp. pp 160–65, 327–28. In 1908, Lord Harmsworth bought the paper from Arthur Walter for £320,000, and he lowered the price from threepence to two in 1912. After a hard struggle, Harmsworth finally turned a profit on his investment. Camrose, British Newspapers, pp. 21–25, and Jenkins, Market for Glory, pp. 20–23. 15. Massingham, London Daily Press, pp. 121–44. Two outstanding editors, Alfred E. Fletcher from Edinburgh and Henry Massingham, along with Charles

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16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

Sharp, a subeditor, and Robert Wilson, a leader writer, turned the Daily Chronicle into an influential organ of the moderate left. Hatton, Journalistic London, pp. 156–58; Brown, VNN, pp. 36, 39, 50; NPD 1888, p. 32; and Alfred F. Havighurst, Radical Journalist: H. W. Massingham, 1860–1924 (New York, 1974), pp. 41–78. E. T. Raymond’s allusion to the paper’s ‘‘questionable journalistic practices’’ is quoted in Wiener, Papers for the Millions, pp. 54, 66, 68. Having hired such talented reporters and writers as Ernest Parke, Henry Massingham, Sidney Webb, and G. B. Shaw, the editor had some reason to call his paper ‘‘the most powerful organ of London Radicalism for many a day.’’ O’Connor, Memoirs of an Old Parliamentarian (London, 1929), vol. 2, p. 265, and Hamilton Fyfe, T. P. O’Connor (London, 1934), esp. pp. 143–51. O’Connor, Memoirs, vol. 2, pp. 254–57. See H. N. Brailsford’s tribute to Massingham in H. J. Massingham (ed.), H. W. M., A Selection from the Writings of H. W. Massingham, pp. 94–95. See also Havighurst, Radical Journalist, pp. 22–23, and Paul Thompson, Socialists, Liberals and Labour: The Struggle for London (London, 1967), p. 97. Stead began his newspaper career as editor of the Darlington Northern Echo from 1871 to 1880, when Henry Yates Thompson, the new owner of the failing Gazette, hired him as assistant editor. Hatton, Journalistic London, pp. 158–61; Massingham, London Daily Press, pp. 148–49, 155–57; Dictionary of National Biography, 1922–1930 (London, 1937), pp. 566–68. Brown, VNN, p. 68; E. H. C. Moberly Bell, The Life and Letters of C. F. Moberly Bell (London, 1927), p. 118; Friedland, Trials of Israel Lipski, pp. 122–32, 139–40, 183; and Walkowitz, CDD, pp. 81–134. London, People of the Abyss, pp. 283–84. In the mid-1880s the East London Observer and Tower Hamlets and Borough of Hackney Chronicle contained eight pages and was published on Friday evenings for Saturday delivery. NPD 1888, p. 37. Published on Tuesday and Friday mornings in Poplar, the East End News contained only four pages of news and advertising. Kennedy Jones, Fleet Street and Downing Street, p. 77; Brown, VNN, p. 67; and Koss, RFPP, vol. 1, p. 248. Massingham, London Daily Press, p. 182. Quoted in Sugden, JR, p. 2. Whittington-Egan, Casebook, p. xiv. Henry Matthews, later Viscount Llandaff, was the first Roman Catholic to hold a cabinet office, serving as Home Secretary in Lord Salisbury’s second ministry from 1886 to 1892. DNB, 1912–21 (London, 1927), pp. 370– 71; Times, April 4, 1913; Shane Leslie, Henry Matthews, Viscount Llandaff (London, 1921); and A. B. Cooke and John Vincent, The Governing Passion (Brighton, 1974), p. 452. As Rumbelow writes, ‘‘Instead of getting the newspapers to help them, Scotland Yard’s policy was to keep the newsmen at arm’s length.’’ JR, p. 72. See also

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NOTES TO PAGES 117–125

30. 31.

32.

33. 34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

39. 40.

41.

Sugden, JR, p. 4, and Charles T. Clarkson and J. Hall Richardson, Police! (London, 1889; reprint New York, 1984), pp. 278–80. As T. P. O’Connor suggests in Memoirs, vol. 2, pp. 256–57. Thus the Central News Agency supplied a fairly lurid account of the Nichols murder, which conveyed details of the injuries known only to the police surgeons, who had just finished their autopsy. This version even appeared in the East London Advertiser (Sept. 1). Thus papers referred variously to Pizer/Piser, Annie Hardyman/Harriet Hardman, Sarah/Mary Elizabeth Simonds, Palmer/Farmer, Killen/Killeen, and, of course, Nichols/Nicholls. When dealing with the time of Chapman’s death as revealed by Inspector Chandler, the Times (Sept. 14) cited 6:02 A.M., the Morning Post (Sept. 14) mentioned 5:50 A.M., and the Daily Telegraph, People, and Daily Chronicle (Sept. 16) opted for 6:10 A.M. Most papers spelled Nichols’s name with two ‘‘l’s.’’ But modern Ripperologists prefer the single ‘‘l.’’ At the mortuary, Llewellyn, who had once been a house surgeon at the London Hospital, discovered ‘‘other fearful cuts and gashes’’ in addition to the deep throat wound. Stressing the small amount of blood on the cobblestones given the extensive ‘‘gashes in the abdomen,’’ he implied that she might have been killed elsewhere and then dragged or carried to Buck’s Row. Rumbelow, JR, pp. 37–42, Begg, JR, pp. 44, 222; Begg et al., JR: A to Z, pp. 66, 257–58, 318– 22; Sugden, JR, pp. 36–42, 51–55. In an adjacent article under the alliterative headline ‘‘WAR ON WARREN,’’ the Star again blamed the Chief Commissioner for all the police brutality in February 1886 and November 1887. This subeditor also wanted to know why James Monro had resigned as Assistant Commissioner of the CID. For the discord and low morale at Scotland Yard, see Begg, JR, pp. 50, 163; Rumbelow, JR, pp. 69–70; and Wilson and Odell, JR, pp. 72–73. O’Connor, Memoirs, vol. 2. p. 257. Rumor had it that Pizer’s payoff ranged between five hundred and five thousand pounds. East London Advertiser, Oct. 13, 1888. At least five different men wrote to Col. Sir James Fraser, Commissioner of the City of London police at Old Jewry, making the same suggestion. For further details, see Sugden, JR, pp. 137–38. Caleb Carr alludes to this bizarre belief in his elaborate Ripperesque detective novel, set in lower Manhattan in 1896, The Alienist (New York, 1994), pp. 330–31. See also Begg, JR, pp. 66–69. Begg contends that the Times was the first paper to suggest that the killer might belong to the middle class. JR, p. 87. However, the Globe (Sept. 11) and the Evening News (Sept. 11) also raised this possibility. Forbes Winslow was the son of a physician and specialist in mental illness who owned two asylums in Hammersmith. After studying law and medicine at London and Cambridge Universities, he inherited and ran one of the asylums. A disciple of both Lombroso and Pinel, he cultivated controversy and accused

314

NOTES TO PAGES 128–139

42.

43. 44.

45.

46. 47.

48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

the police of bungling the Ripper investigation. No doubt some of his rancor derived from the refusal of Scotland Yard to heed his repeated offers of help. See his memoir, Recollections of Forty Years (London, 1910), esp. pp. 251–83, and also his Mad Humanity: Its Forms Apparent and Obscure (London, 1898) and The Insanity of Passion and Crime (London, 1912). Walkowitz paints a most unflattering portrait of this ‘‘mad-doctor alienist’’ in CDD, pp. 171–89, 295 n. 14. This theory echoed Lombroso’s conviction that ‘‘epileptics, born criminals, and the morally insane’’ were virtually identical and that epileptic fits were often ‘‘accompanied by sexual propensities.’’ See Criminal Man, ed. Gina Lombroso Ferrero (New York, 1911), pp. 61–64. Curiously enough, no English translation of Lombroso’s classic work L’uomo delinquente (1876) appeared until 1911. Evening News and Globe (Sept. 11). Over a three-week period (August 31 to September 21) the East End News printed no more than one and a quarter columns of Ripper news, or a mere thirteen hundred words. Thus Chapman’s knees were drawn up ‘‘as if in agony,’’ and ‘‘the intestines, with the viscera and the heart . . . [had] been literally torn out of the mangled body and laid by her side. The head of the woman was turned back, revealing an enormous gash, so broad and so deep, as almost to have severed the connection with the body.’’ East London Observer, Sept. 15. At this point the People (Sept. 16) inserted a subhead: ‘‘I Knew That She Was Addicted to Drink.’’ The (Roman Catholic) Home Secretary must have been ‘‘trained in a Jesuitical school,’’ because his ‘‘honeyed words’’ in the House of Commons contrasted sharply with his ‘‘ferocious attacks upon starving unemployed people in the streets of London’’ (Reynolds’s, Sept. 9). This leader writer called Warren the ‘‘blundering . . . Maladroit Martinet,’’ and Matthews ‘‘a feeble mountebank, who would pose and simper over the brink of a volcano,’’ and who was quite capable of sacrificing his police commissioner in order ‘‘to save his skin.’’ By contrast, the lawyer, journalist, and writer R. E. Francillon called Matthews ‘‘the ablest man I ever met.’’ Mid-Victorian Memories (London, 1914), pp. 120–21. See the letters from ‘‘A Working Man’’ and J. E. Waller of Bromley-on-Bow, whose watch and chain were stolen on Whitechapel Road, Star, Sept. 7 and 17. This front-page editorial carried the parodic title ‘‘AM I NOT AN APE AND A BROTHER?’’ ‘‘Moral Police Wanted,’’ East London Advertiser, Sept. 22. See the Pall Mall Gazette, Sept. 26, and People, Sept. 30. Reynolds’s, Sept. 23, 1888. As Krafft-Ebing pointed out, these demented men ranged from the silk slasher of Berlin to the girl stabber of Bozen, who could achieve orgasm only by cutting the pelvic region of his victims. Psychopathia Sexualis (Philadelphia, 1892), pp. 70–74. See also Caputi, Age of Sex Crime, pp. 4–5, 11, and R. E. L.

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NOTES TO PAGES 140–145

Masters and Eduard Lea, Sex Crimes in History (New York, 1963), pp. 79, 93 ff. Chapter 7: The Double Event 1. Gissing was much annoyed by this statement in Le Petit Journal. Quoted in Pierre Coustillas (ed.), London and the Life of Literature in Late Victorian England: The Diary of George Gissing (Lewisburg, Pa., 1978), p. 45. 2. The two men suspected of writing the Jack letter and card were employees of the Central News Agency with good connections at Scotland Yard. Sir Robert Anderson, Sir Melville Macnaghten, and Chief Inspector John George Littlechild suspected that the author of the letter and card was either T. J. Bulling (otherwise Tom Bullen), a leading reporter for Central News Agency, or Charles Moore, the managing editor, who apparently fired Bulling. Evans and Gainey, The Lodger, pp. 96–103, 253–54, and Sir Robert Anderson, The Lighter Side of My Official Life (London, 1910), p. 138. See also Sugden, JR, pp. 259–63. 3. Caputi, Age of Sex Crime, p. 21. 4. The editor also published a letter from a reader in Hastings, Sussex, who congratulated Lloyd’s for giving ‘‘later news than any other paper.’’ Sept. 30, Oct. 7. 5. Dr. Phillips took this piece of cloth to the mortuary and matched it with a section missing from the apron. The reporter also recorded that the police had photographed the second victim at the mortuary before and after the autopsy. Times, Oct. 1. 6. Journalists used slightly different names for this socialist club, from the International Workingmen’s Educational Club (Rumbelow, JR, p. 61 and Begg et al., JR: A to Z, p. 194) to the International Working Men’s Club (Fishman, East End, p. 212), the International Men’s Education Society (Star), and the International Workmen’s Club (Times). The club was a rendezvous for mostly Russian, Polish, and Jewish immigrants. Times, Oct. 1. 7. The writer of the ‘‘Dear Boss’’ letter, dated September 25, taunted the police for not having caught him and boasted of his handiwork to date: ‘‘I am down on whores and I shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled.’’ Gloating over Chapman’s murder, he revealed that he had saved ‘‘some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle.’’ But since this had thickened into ‘‘glue,’’ he had been forced to use red ink. He promised to ‘‘clip’’ the ears of his next ‘‘lady’’ victim and send them to the police ‘‘just for jolly.’’ In a postscript he scoffed at the public’s surmise that he was a doctor. See Rumbelow, JR, pp. 116–18; Sugden, JR, pp. 259–63; Begg et al., JR: A to Z, pp. 202–04. Some Ripper experts believe the handwriting of the card resembled that of the letter. 8. In Eric Partridge’s A Dictionary of Slang (London, 1984), pp. 606–07, ‘‘Jack’’ has one of the longest entries assigned to any Christian name. For allusion to the Jacks of the English mummers tradition, see Speaight, English Puppet Theatre, pp. 49, 51, 152–53. 9. See Richard Whittington-Egan, Tales of Liverpool (South Wirral, 1985), pp. 5–

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NOTES TO PAGES 145–149

10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

9, and Sugden, JR, pp. 259–60. There was a notorious haunt of criminals, prostitutes, and drunks off Commercial Road in Whitechapel known as ‘‘Jack’s Hole.’’ Fishman, East End, p. 250. For this latter meaning, see the letter sent to the City of London police by ‘‘A Thinker,’’ Sept. 3. Police Box 3.17, fols. 181–82, CLRO. After 1888, East Enders often referred to a kipper in rhyming slang as a ‘‘Jack the Ripper.’’ See also Sugden, JR, pp. 258–60. Both Lloyd’s (Oct. 14) and Reynolds’s (Oct. 14) also printed several letters and telegrams from ‘‘Jack.’’ Compare, for example, the feature articles about the double event in the Times, Daily Chronicle, Daily Telegraph, Morning Post, and Star for October 1. Evening News, Oct. 1. This same phrase appeared in the Western Mail, Oct. 1. According to Winslow, the killer was quite capable of acting in a ‘‘cool and rational’’ manner between fits of insanity. He advised the police to patrol the streets in the company of warders from insane asylums in order to protect people in the East End and ensure the killer’s capture. This leader writer also suggested that the killer might be exacting ‘‘fiendish revenge for fancied wrongs.’’ Perhaps he was a ‘‘modern Thug or Sicarius, with a confused idea of putting down vice by picking off unfortunates,’’ or a butcher recently released from a lunatic asylum, or a ‘‘mad medical student with a bad history behind him or a tendency to religious mania.’’ The second editorial faulted Scotland Yard for not using bloodhounds to track down the culprit and called for Warren’s dismissal. This writer praised the cooperative attitude of the City police toward the press, as compared with the ‘‘churlish, uncommunicative’’ and even ‘‘deceitful’’ attitude of the Metropolitan police. Arguing that the single tax would keep the specter of revolution at bay, this writer insisted (perhaps with tongue in cheek) that what London really needed was a special crimes act akin to Balfour’s coercive remedy for Irish agrarian crime. ‘‘WHAT WE THINK,’’ Star, Oct. 2. On September 16 George Akin Lusk, a prominent East End builder, member of the Metropolitan Board of Works, vestryman of Mile End Old Town parish, and president of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee (as of September 10), sent a letter to the Home Secretary requesting a public reward for any information leading to the killer. Matthews replied through a subordinate that the practice of rewarding people for the discovery of criminals had been abandoned several years ago because such offers ‘‘tended to produce more harm than good.’’ Lloyd’s (Sept. 23) reported that this reply touched off ‘‘a tremendous storm of indignation’’ marked by more than forty protest meetings. On September 29, Lusk and his colleague Joseph Arrons wrote to the Daily Telegraph and other papers explaining that their petition to the Queen made it clear that the culprit would never be caught unless a reward was offered. The Daily Telegraph (Oct. 2) announced that the Corporation of the City of London had offered five hundred pounds in reward money through the auspices of Col. Fraser of the City police. This sum brought the total of nongovernment reward money to more than a thousand pounds.

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NOTES TO PAGES 152–161

19. Mary Malcolm of Red Lion Square, Holborn, testified (Oct. 2) that she had visited her sister on the day she was murdered. Daily Telegraph, Oct. 3, and Sugden, JR, pp. 190–93. See also Times, Oct. 4; Reynolds’s, Oct. 7; Daily Telegraph, Oct. 3. Eventually, Malcolm’s sister was found ‘‘alive and well’’ in Tottenham, living under the name of Mrs. Stokes. Star and Evening News, Oct. 9. 20. Tom Conway was an Irishman (also known as Quinn) and an army pensioner, whose initials ‘‘T.C.’’ were tattooed on one of Eddowes’s arms. After their breakup in 1880 he seems to have dropped out of sight. Begg et al., JR: A to Z, pp. 123–29; Daily Telegraph, Oct. 4–5. 21. Most papers spelled her Christian name ‘‘Catherine,’’ but ‘‘Catharine’’ appeared on her birth certificate. Her surname varied in the press from ‘‘Eddows’’ to ‘‘Edowes.’’ Born in Wolverhampton in 1842, the daughter of a tinplate worker, she never married. Begg, JR, pp. 113, 232, and Begg et al., JR: A to Z, pp. 123–29. Eliza Gold denied that her sister had ever been a prostitute. Times, Daily Chronicle, Globe, Daily Telegraph, and Evening News, Oct. 3–5. 22. Begg et al., JR: A to Z, pp. 335–38; Sugden, JR, pp. 219–28; and Daily Chronicle, Oct. 9. 23. Daily Telegraph, Oct. 4, and Daily Chronicle, Oct. 5. 24. Reports of the Stride inquest appeared in the morning dailies on October 2, 3, 4, 6, and 24. The Eddowes inquest received feature treatment on October 5, 6, 11, and 12. 25. Apparently, the facsimile placards tried to replicate the exact color of the ink and the blood smears in the originals. One reporter described the language as ‘‘brutal’’ and filled with ‘‘Americanisms.’’ Times, Oct. 6. 26. See, for example, Daily Chronicle, Daily Telegraph, and Star, Oct. 5. 27. Thus the Daily Telegraph (Oct. 5) addressed ‘‘Kate’’ Eddowes’s origins in Wolverhampton and her promiscuous ways in Birmingham and then London. See also Sugden, JR, pp. 231–40. 28. The Whitechapel and St. George’s Board of Works did install gaslights along a few streets in the wake of the murders. Fishman, East End, p. 224. 29. See, for example, Daily Chronicle, PMG, and Times, Oct. 5. 30. The author of ‘‘How ‘Whitechapel Atrocities’ Are Manufactured’’ deplored the ‘‘alarming frequency’’ of such fabricated stories. 31. George H. Savage, ‘‘Homicidal Mania,’’ Fortnightly Review, vol. 44, no. 262, new series (Oct. 1, 1888), pp. 448–63. 32. The murder news in this edition ranged from the crime scenes and the injuries and identities of the victims to suspects, reward money, the Stride inquest, Baxter’s theory, the fruit-seller Matthew Packer, the bewilderment and ineptness of the police, and the number of women threatened by men flashing knives. 33. See the Star, Oct. 4–6. 34. As a leader in the Star (Oct. 8) pointed out, the ‘‘full alert’’ over the weekend probably deterred the murderer from resuming his operations. But the danger was not over and people should avoid complacency. The police also faced a

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NOTES TO PAGES 162–167

35.

36.

37.

38.

dilemma. To catch the killer, they needed to take him in the act of ‘‘repeating his butchery,’’ but with so many patrols about he would be reluctant to launch another attack. P.C. Alfred Long came across these supposed clues shortly before 3 A.M. on Sunday, September 30. See Sugden, JR, pp. 182–88; Begg, JR, pp. 125–26; and Begg et al., JR: A to Z, pp. 259–60. Another version ran: ‘‘The Juwes are not/The men that/will be/Blamed for nothing.’’ According to Sugden, the words were: ‘‘The Juwes are/The men That/Will not/be Blamed/for nothing.’’ JR, p. 183. A few reporters who saw the inscription before it was erased suggested that the handwriting resembled the first Ripper letter sent to Central News. PMG and Times, Oct. 8. Both Rumbelow and Sugden reject Dr. Thomas Dutton’s claim that he photographed the writing and sent copies to Scotland Yard. But Rumbelow (following the conjecture of Robert Donston Stephenson) speculates that ‘‘Juwes’’ might have been an erroneous reading of ‘‘Juives,’’ which implied that the killer was French. Rumbelow, JR, pp. 67–68, 121–23. Sugden deals at length with the significance and various versions of the Goulston Street inscription in JR, pp. 183–86, 254–56, 496–98, 507–10. See also Bermant, Point of Arrival, pp. 116–17; PMG, Dec. 1; and Begg et al., JR: A to Z, pp. 149–51, 432–35. Bermant, Point of Arrival, p. 117, and Friedland, Trials of Israel Lipski, p. 202. Chapter 8: The Pursuit of Angles

1. In defending his record at Scotland Yard, Warren condemned ‘‘the sinister influence of a mob stirred into spasmodic action by restless demagogues,’’ who posed a serious threat to the government. Calling the workers’ protests of February 1886 ‘‘a three days’ reign of terror’’ and alluding to the ‘‘panic’’ that had swept through London in November 1887, he touched briefly on the Whitechapel murders and dismissed all the suggestions from the public about how to catch the killer. Warren, ‘‘The Police of the Metropolis,’’ Murray’s Magazine, vol. 4, no. 23 (November 1888), pp. 577–94; Times, Oct. 27. 2. A prelude to these law-and-order articles appeared on September 21 in the form of an article, ‘‘Undiscovered Criminals,’’ that cited a Blue Book report stating that only 34.5 percent of all indictable crimes in the metropolis during 1886–87 had ended in an arrest, compared with 77.3 percent for the south and southwestern counties and an average of 44.9 percent for England and Wales. Of 163 murders, moreover, 72 cases had gone to trial but only 35 ended in conviction. Published from October 8 through 13, and supplemented by three leaders, the six front-page articles totaled over 31 columns, or roughly 34,200 words. 3. Thus Steven Box contends that these strategies and tactics ‘‘render underprivileged and powerless people more likely to be arrested, convicted, and sentenced to prison,’’ and also ‘‘create the illusion that the ‘dangerous’ class is primarily located at the bottom of various hierarchies by which we ‘measure’ each other. . . . In this illusion it fuses relative poverty and criminal propensities and sees them both as effects of moral inferiority, thus rendering the

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NOTES TO PAGES 168–171

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

‘dangerous’ class deserving of both poverty and punishment.’’ Box, Power, Crime, and Mystification, p. 13. The Gazette (Oct. 4) also printed a letter from ‘‘An Old Sportsman’’ extolling the skill of beagles in hunting human beings as well as hares and rabbits. William Buchanan informed readers of the Times (Oct. 9) that he had seen trained bloodhounds follow the scent of a woman who had murdered a small boy near Dieppe around 1861. George Krehl, editor of the Stock Keeper and Fancier’s Chronicle of 139 Fleet Street, believed that trained hounds would have no difficulty tracking a man carrying human organs or stained with blood. Reynolds’s (Oct. 14) article about the Hyde Park trials included sketches of the two hounds on the scent. See also the letter to the Times (Oct. 11) from the hounds’ owner, Edwin Brough. Some papers reported that Warren instructed the police not to disturb the body of the next victim until bloodhounds from a kennel in southwest London had been brought to the scene. Daily Chronicle, Oct. 9, and Rumbelow, JR, pp. 82–83. For the bloodhound angle, see also Sugden, JR, pp. 136–37, 292–96, and Douglas C. Browne, The Rise of Scotland Yard: A History of the Metropolitan Police (London, 1956), pp. 180–81, 207. For the anti-Semitic outbursts of some newspapers during and after Lipski’s trial in 1887 and the ethnic gibe involving shouts of ‘‘Lipski,’’ in reference to the murder of Miriam Angel, see Friedland, Trials of Israel Lipski, pp. 195–97, and also ‘‘The Invasion of England,’’ PMG, May 7, 1887. According to Abberline, the name Lipski had been used as ‘‘a mere ejaculation . . . to insult the jew’’ ever since the murder of Miriam Angel—‘‘a jewess’’—by Israel Lipski in 1887. See his memorandum, Nov. 1, 1888, MEPO 3/140, f. 204, PRO (Kew). The sketch of the ‘‘Supposed Whitechapel monster,’’ published in the Illustrated Police News resembled, in Sander Gilman’s words, ‘‘the caricature of the Eastern Jew.’’ Gilman, ‘‘ ‘I’m Down on Whores’: Race and Gender in Victorian London,’’ in David T. Goldberg (ed.), Anatomy of Racism (Minneapolis, 1990), p. 156. See also Rumbelow, JR, p. 129; Fishman, East End, esp. pp. 145–59, 216–19; Bermant, Point of Arrival, pp. 122– 94; and White, Rothschild Buildings, pp. 72–85. Among the many suspects was a German barber who had threatened a woman with a knife while in a drunken stupor. Named Charles Ludwig, he was ‘‘slightly built . . . dark complexioned . . . [with] a grizzled beard and moustache’’ and spoke ‘‘broken English.’’ Star, Sept. 5, 19; Times, Sept. 11–13; and PMG, Sept. 8. For Arthur Bachert’s description of one mysterious suspect, see Globe, Nov. 10 and Morning Post, Nov. 10, as well as Rumbelow, JR, p. 96. Gilman discusses the myths of Jewish vampirism and ritual murder in ‘‘The Jewish Murderer: Jack the Ripper, Race, and Gender,’’ The Jew’s Body (New York, 1991), pp. 104–27. This chapter seems to be a recycled version of chapter 11, ‘‘ ‘I’m Down on Whores,’ ’’ in Goldberg (ed.), Anatomy of Racism,

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NOTES TO PAGES 171–174

13.

14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

pp. 146–70, which is flawed by factual errors about the murders. For example, Gilman misdates the first Ripper letter, misspells the name of Dr. George Bagster Phillips, omits Mary Kelly’s murder, and confuses the autopsy reports of Tabram and Kelly as well as the sites of the Eddowes and Stride slayings. For the House of Lords Select Committee on the sweated industries and the House of Commons Select Committee on immigration and emigration, see Fishman, East End, esp. pp. 61, 64–71, 81, 145–49, 159–60. Anderson, Lighter Side of My Official Life, pp. 137–38. Chief Rabbi Hermann Adler, on the other hand, insisted that ‘‘no Jew unless he be a maniac could be connected with the horrible outrages.’’ See his letter to the Times, Oct. 3, and Bermant, Point of Arrival, p. 117. Also convinced of Jack’s Jewish provenance was Godfrey Lushington, Fellow of All Souls, ex–leader writer for the Times, and (after 1885) Permanent Under-Secretary at the Home Office. See the letter from ‘‘A Butcherman’’ in the Evening News (Oct. 9). Robin Odell promoted the homicidal slaughterman theory in Jack the Ripper (London, 1965). See also Odell and Wilson, JR, esp. pp. 170, 174. In Point of Arrival, Bermant dismisses the shochet theory with contempt (pp. 114–21). See, for example, Reynolds’s, Oct. 14. Two cab drivers from Hackney Road were charged with assaulting DetectiveSergeant Robinson, who was disguised as a woman while shadowing a suspicious couple. On October 3, for example, the Times allocated 3.5 columns to the Stride inquest and other murder news, 2.8 columns to the Paris theater, 9 columns to the Church Congress (in addition to a 1.25-column leader), and 4 columns to the money market and commercial and agricultural news. The October 4 edition contained 4 columns on the murders, 2.5 columns on the Central Asian Railway, 5 columns on stocks and shares, 4.5 columns on the Church Congress, 5.5 columns on Lord Hartington’s speech at Inverness, and 1.6 columns on sporting activities. On October 5 the murders received 2.6 columns, compared with 3.3 columns on the Church Congress, 7 columns on the money market and business news, 5.3 columns on the London School Board, and 1.3 columns on sporting news. And on October 11 the Times gave a total of 15 columns to the speeches of prominent politicians, while Ripper news and letters received only 1.8 columns. Supposedly addressed to Lusk and bearing a Kilburn postmark, this letter announced that the murders would take place outside Whitechapel, which had ‘‘got rather too warm’’ of late. PMG, Oct. 15. The police charged her with disturbing the peace. Times, Oct. 22; Weekly Times, Oct. 21; Begg et al., JR: A to Z, p. 90. Fishman, East End, p. 216. Lacking any practical plan, this writer simply argued that ‘‘the great safeguard of our people is . . . increased self restraint and self respect.’’ Lloyd’s, Oct. 21. ‘‘The Whitechapel Murders,’’ British Medical Journal (hereafter BMJ), Sept. 22, pp. 673–74. ‘‘Crime-Culture Through the Press,’’ Lancet, Oct. 6, p. 682.

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NOTES TO PAGES 175–178

25. Lancet, Oct. 27, p. 827. 26. BMJ, Oct. 6, pp. 768–69. 27. The first English edition of Psychopathia Sexualis—With Especial Reference to Contrary Sexual Instinct: A Medico-Legal Study appeared in 1886. By 1892, it had reached a seventh edition. See Charles G. Chaddock’s translation, published by F. A. Davis in Philadelphia and London in 1892, esp. the section on rape and lust murder, pp. 397–400. Only one of the murderers studied by Krafft-Ebing was English—a clerk named Alton, who had killed a young girl without any remorse. Some case histories derived from the research of Lombroso, whom Krafft-Ebing much admired. In a post-1888 edition, he classified the Whitechapel killer as a ‘‘psycho-sexual monster,’’ and then added most inaccurately: ‘‘The constant absence of uterus, ovaries, and labia in the victims (ten) of this modern Bluebeard allows the presumption that he seeks and finds still further satisfaction in anthropophagy’’ (p. 64). See also Cameron and Frazer, Lust to Kill, pp. 94–96. 28. Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, pp. 364–70. 29. The British Medical Journal had to go all the way back to the eighteenth century to find a possible precursor in Renwick Williams, ‘‘The Monster,’’ who had stabbed and maimed several women in London during 1789–90. The son of a Carnaby Street apothecary, who fancied women, fine clothes, and powdered hair, he apparently resembled Robespierre. For his crimes he was sentenced to six years in jail. BMJ, Oct. 6, p. 772. 30. For Bichel’s misdeeds, see Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, pp. 62–67. 31. For a classic case of survival cannibalism involving English sailors, see A. W. B. Simpson, Cannibalism and the Common Law: The Story of the Tragic Last Voyage of the ‘‘Mignonette’’ (Chicago, 1984). 32. Lusk received this package on the evening of Tuesday, October 16. Allegedly the left kidney, it had been preserved in spirits of wine. Apart from the Pall Mall Gazette, most papers reproduced this letter on October 19 or 20. See Sugden, JR, pp. 263–67, 273–75; Begg et al., JR: A to Z, pp. 262–64; Whittington-Egan, Casebook, pp. 51–65; Rumbelow, JR, pp. 119–20; and Wilson and Odell, JR, pp. 69–71. After examining the kidney on October 19, Dr. Gordon Brown questioned Dr. Openshaw’s surmise that it had come from Eddowes. 33. At first Lusk had wanted to throw away the putrid organ, assuming that it came from a dog or sheep. But his friend Joseph Aarons persuaded him to consult a medical expert. But the medical profession had no means of ascertaining the sex of a kidney, let alone the age of its owner. Times, Oct. 19, and East London Observer, Oct. 20. 34. Committed to reporting matters of religious, cultural, social, and historical interest to Jewish readers, the Chronicle’s editor, Asher Myers, denounced the bigots who would blame these horrors on his people. Jews, he insisted, were repelled by ‘‘any mutilation of the body after death.’’ Worried lest such accusations sully the good name of English Jewry and lead to anti-Semitic violence,

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NOTES TO PAGES 178–184

35.

36.

37.

38.

39. 40. 41.

42.

43.

44.

he paid a visit to Divisional Surgeon F. Gordon Brown, bearing a set of sharp knives used by shochets in order to show him why they were not the murder weapon. Jewish Chronicle, Sept. 14, Oct. 5, 12. See also David Cesarani, The ‘‘Jewish Chronicle’’ and Anglo-Jewry, 1841–1991 (Cambridge, 1994), p. 81. When Lusk first approached the Home Office for reward money, he was told that the government had stopped awarding money in such cases. In reply, he pointed out that the murderer of at least four women was still at large and that the Home Office’s refusal to act had angered many people. Daily Telegraph, Oct. 1; Begg, JR, p. 130; Rumbelow, JR, p. 81. Mrs. Barnett, later Dame Henrietta (née Rowland) Barnett, partnered her husband in running Toynbee Hall and worked hard to improve conditions in the East End. See DNB, 1931–1940 (London, 1949), pp. 44–45; Mrs. H. O. R. Barnett, Canon Barnett: His Life, Work, and Friends by His Wife, 2 vols. (London, 1918, 1921); Times, Oct. 25; ELO, Oct. 27. Originally designated for the National Opera House, the new police headquarters ran from the Embankment alongside Cannon Row—only a few minutes’ walk from Parliament Square. The building site was surrounded by an eight-foot wooden fence with one gate locked at night. PMG, Oct. 3; Times, Oct. 3, 5. Dr. Thomas Bond was attached to the A Division of the Metropolitan police. A lecturer in forensic medicine at Westminster Hospital, he played a prominent part in the autopsies of the Westminster body, Mary Kelly (November 10), and Alice McKenzie ( July 18, 1889). He denied that the Ripper had any ‘‘scientific or anatomical knowledge,’’ but believed that McKenzie was another of his victims. Colin Wilson and Robin Odell, JR, pp. 161–64; Rumbelow, JR, pp. 126–27; Sugden, JR, pp. 346–49; and Begg et al., JR: A to Z, pp. 44–50. Times, Sept. 12–13, Oct. 9. Times, Sept. 29, Oct. 1. For the so-called Rainham mystery, see the Times, May 16, June 13, 1887; for the attribution of this wife-murder and dismemberment to Roslyn D’Onston (Robert Donston Stephenson), see Harris, True Face, pp. 108–09. Both the Pimlico and Southwark limbs turned out to be left arms. As with the mutilated bodies in the East End, the medical experts could not agree on the surgical skill of the dismemberer. Times and PMG, Oct. 4, 1888. ‘‘The lower extremities had been severed’’ roughly an inch or so below the navel, and ‘‘the missing portion’’ contained part of the lower intestine. Bond left a copy of his autopsy notes at the Home Office for use at the inquest, scheduled for Monday, October 8, at 3 P.M. Times, Oct. 4. By this time the surgeons had revealed that the Westminster victim was ‘‘a plump woman of about 5ft. 8in. or 9in. high,’’ who had suffered from pleurisy. At least twenty-four years old, she had fair skin and dark hair, and her hand indicated that she was unaccustomed to hard work. The time of death was estimated at around August 20. The victim’s head was never found. Times and PMG, Oct. 6, 8, 10, 18.

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45. The inquest was held at Westminster Sessions House, with Coroner John Troutbeck presiding. For a full report of the opening session, see the Daily Chronicle, Oct. 9. 46. Apart from a brief notice on the 11th, the Gazette made no mention of the Westminster trunk mystery between October 8 and 18. 47. Evidently, the leg had been buried for some six weeks. Times, Oct. 18. Waring was the provincial correspondent of the London Press Agency. In an impish aside, the Times characterized him as bringing ‘‘into detective work the instincts of a dog.’’ Chapter 9: The Kelly Reportage 1. Wilson and Odell, JR, p. 79; Begg, JR, pp. 161–62; Sugden, JR, pp. 307–16. 2. See Tom Cullen’s allusion to The Whitechapel Blood Book in Autumn of Terror, pp. 110–11. 3. Whittington-Egan notes that Stead allegedly told George Marsh, a would-be detective, that the killer had sodomized Kelly before cutting her throat (from behind)—an unproven theory to which both Dr. Morgan Davies of the London Hospital and Robert Donston Stephenson subscribed. Casebook, pp. 93– 97. 4. Globe, Nov. 9, 10. One rumor had it that the victim’s body had been cut into forty pieces. Some confusion reigned over who had first discovered the body. Begg, JR, pp. 141, 238; Begg et al., JR: A to Z, pp. 219–25; Rumbelow, JR, pp. 101–02; Sugden, JR, pp. 311, 323, 325–26. 5. For the ongoing disputes over the time of death and missing organs, see esp. Sugden, JR, pp. 318–32, and Begg et al., JR: A to Z, pp. 224, 254–55, 291, in addition to the leading papers, Nov. 9–12. 6. Next to this article a Star editor boasted that circulation had just reached 298,000 on the previous day, which set a record for any evening paper. 7. Much the same version appeared in papers as different as the Times and Star. Lloyd’s added the news that a police photographer had taken pictures of the room and the body. 8. According to Dr. Bond’s unpublished notes, one of Kelly’s breasts lay beneath her head and the other next to her right foot, with the liver between her feet. Sugden, JR, p. 315. 9. Like most papers, the Evening News (Nov. 10) reported the statement of a witness, Mrs. Kennedy, that she had heard a cry of ‘‘Murder’’ around 3:30 A.M. and seen a young man with a dark moustache talking to two women near the Britannia pub half an hour earlier. 10. This reporter quoted the Daily Telegraph’s allusion to Matthews’s ‘‘helpless and heedless ineptitude.’’ Although the Gazette (Nov. 10) claimed nine victims on the front page, an article on page 2 referred to eight deaths, including the nameless victim ‘‘impaled with an iron stake’’ in 1887 as well as Emma Smith and Martha Tabram. 11. Although the East End News failed to mention Kelly’s death on November 9,

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NOTES TO PAGES 192–195

12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

13, and 16, the edition of the 20th contained almost a column and a half of general news about the murders. Much the same sentiment and phrasing appeared in the Daily Telegraph, Nov. 10, and the PMG, Nov. 10. On the latter score, the Scotsman (Nov. 10) declared unhelpfully that Kelly had died somewhere between midnight and 11 A.M. The Times (Nov. 12) cited Dr. Phillips’s belief that she died ‘‘some five or six hours’’ before he saw the body in Miller’s Court at 10:45 A.M. The other police surgeons fixed the time of death between 3:30 and 4:00 A.M. Salisbury informed her by telegram that the cabinet had indeed met and agreed to offer a ‘‘free pardon to anyone who should give evidence’’ about the latest murder, excepting the actual perpetrator. The Queen also peppered Matthews with comments critical of Scotland Yard, asking if the police had put cattle and passenger boats under surveillance, and how many single men occupied rooms of their own (presumably in the East End). She also wondered where the murderer stashed his blood-splattered clothes. Christopher Hibbert (ed.), Queen Victoria in Her Letters and Journals (New York, 1985), p. 314, and Stanley Weintraub, Victoria: An Intimate Biography (New York, 1987), p. 505. See also The Letters of Queen Victoria, 3rd Series, vol. 1, 1886–90 (London, 1930), pp. 445–50. Besides his parliamentary duties, Macdonald practiced medicine in the East End and served as surgeon to K Division of the Metropolitan police. He had gone to Miller’s Court with Phillips to sift the ashes in the grate, hoping to find human remains. Sugden, JR, pp. 318, 322–24. Both Rumbelow and Begg maintain that Baxter should have presided over the inquest because Kelly had been slain in Whitechapel. Rumbelow, JR, pp. 96–97; Begg, JR, pp. 164–65; Wilson and Odell, JR, pp. 86–87. Begg et al., JR: A to Z, pp. 268–69. It is probable (but undocumented) that the Home Office and Scotland Yard conferred over the weekend and decided that a long and probing inquest spread out over a month might lead to communal violence, and for this reason they chose not to entrust the inquest to the publicity-seeking Baxter. For the legal aspects of removing a body to another jurisdiction, see John D. J. Havard, The Detection of Secret Homicide: A Study of the Medico-Legal System of Investigation of Sudden and Unexplained Deaths (London, 1960), p. 139, and also Coroner’s Act, 1887 (50 & 51 Vict. C. 71, S. 3 (1)). Star, Nov. 12, and Scotsman, Nov. 13. Later, while the jury was inspecting Miller’s Court, the coroner told reporters that they should not question his right to hold the inquest in Shoreditch, where Kelly’s body had been sent: ‘‘The jurisdiction was where the body lay.’’ Daily Telegraph, Nov. 13. Globe, Nov. 12; Begg, JR, pp. 163–64, 242; Begg et al., JR: A to Z, p. 170. Barnett insisted that Kelly rarely drank to excess while they lived together. For all of the testimony, see the inquest report in the London Metropolitan Archives (hereafter LMA), formerly called the Greater London Record Office, MJ/SPC/NE 1888, Box 3, No. 19.

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NOTES TO PAGES 196–200

20. According to the Western Mail, Kelly’s father was an intelligent marine store dealer and Mary Jane had been ‘‘a remarkably fine girl,’’ before going ‘‘on the loose’’ in Swansea and later Cardiff. Most Ripperologists believe that Kelly was born in or near Limerick, the daughter of an ironworks foreman who then moved to Wales. Sugden, JR, pp. 308–9; Rumbelow, JR, p. 98; Begg et al., JR: A to Z, pp. 219–20. 21. The Daily Chronicle (Nov. 13) offered a different account of the exchange between the doctor and the coroner. Evidently Phillips declared: ‘‘This is all the evidence I am prepared to give at the present stage. Details of the postmortem examination must come later.’’ Whether Macdonald conferred with Phillips during the short adjournment is not known. Few other papers credited Phillips with voluntarily curtailing his evidence. The official transcript of the inquest (dated Nov. 12) reveals that Phillips concluded by describing the position of Kelly’s head on the bed. After him came Julia Venturney, Maria Harvey, and Inspector Abberline, who testified briefly before the coroner ended the proceedings. Kelly Inquest, MJ/SPC/NE 1888, Box 3, No. 19, pp. 9–12, LMA. 22. Aged around thirty-five years and five feet six inches tall, this man was presumably the same one seen by Mrs. Kennedy talking to two women around 3:00 A.M. on the night of the murder. Apparently, George Hutchinson had also seen this man chatting up Kelly and escorting her into Miller’s Court. Evening News, Nov. 13. See also Rumbelow, JR, pp. 100–103; Begg, JR, pp. 153–55; Begg et al., JR: A to Z, pp. 187–89; Wilson and Odell, JR, pp. 88–90, 141–43; and Sugden, JR, pp. 333–38. 23. Further criticism of Macdonald’s conduct of the inquest may be found in Charles T. Clarkson and J. Hall Richardson, Police! (London, 1889; reprint, New York, 1984), pp. 277–78. 24. Both Lloyd’s (Nov. 18) and the People (Nov. 11) noted that the detective took a cab straight to Dr. Phillips’s surgery at 2 Spital Square. 25. For details of Warren’s deteriorating relations with the Home Office and his decision to resign, see Hansard, 3rd Series, vol. 330 (1888), pp. 899–904, and vol. 331, pp. 15–16, as well as Thomson, Story of Scotland Yard, pp. 177–78, and the Daily Chronicle, Nov. 15. 26. Some people thought that this dark-moustached and tweed-caped man looked American. Globe, Nov. 14. 27. Kelly was not buried at Chingford but rather in St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic cemetery at Leytonstone. On the coffin-plate appeared the words ‘‘Marie Jeanette Kelly, died 9th Nov. 1888, aged 25 years.’’ Sugden, JR, pp. 338–39. According to Begg et al., JR: A to Z, pp. 224–25, Walthamstow was the place of Kelly’s burial on November 19. Evidently, some tenants left Miller’s Court as a result of the murder. Begg et al., JR: A to Z, p. 266. 28. Evidently, Henry Wilson (or Wilton), verger or sexton of St. Leonard’s Church, Shoreditch, footed most of the bill for the handsome brass-handled, elmwood coffin as ‘‘a mark of sincere sympathy’’ for all the poor of the district. Some of

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NOTES TO PAGES 200–208

29. 30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36. 37.

38.

the mourners cried out, ‘‘God forgive her!’’ and all the men took off their hats out of respect as the cortege passed by. See also Begg et al., JR: A to Z, p. 132. The Pall Mall Gazette’s standard news columns averaged some 1,000 words, compared with 2,100 in the Evening News and 1,900 in the Daily Telegraph. Type size varied considerably within the same paper. Thus a column in the Times could range from 1,300 words on the editorial page to 1,700 words for a feature story and up to 2,000 words for a routine news story. I have included in every word count the space taken up by headlines, and treated them as equivalent to lines of ordinary print. Since the evening dailies and the weeklies often indulged in multiple headlines, these headings could take up as much as one-sixth of a feature story, whereas the Morning Post and Times rarely resorted to more than a one-line header. The total word count for Ripper news in these three papers amounted to approximately 13,000 for Nichols, 46,600 for Chapman, and 74,200 for the double event. The other four papers—the Daily Chronicle, Globe, Morning Post, and Pall Mall Gazette—published an average of 12,700 more words about Kelly’s death than Chapman’s over this six-day period. An average edition of this paper in 1888 contained only twenty columns of news items, editorials, and letters (excluding two pages of fiction), along with some seven columns of advertisements. By way of contrast, the Times (Sept. 1) contained some fifty columns of smaller print devoted to news, leaders, and letters to the editor, and forty-five columns of advertisements. Another leader (Nov. 14) called on Matthews to resign so as to open the door to a more deserving man. The announcement of Monro’s appointment as the new Chief Commissioner spurred the Gazette (Nov. 29) to blame him along with Warren and Matthews for the low morale in Scotland Yard. This theory of an out-of-town commuter-killer (from Liverpool) resurfaced dramatically in 1993 in the bogus Ripper diary. Postmarked London E.C., this letter was addressed to Thomas Porter, a ‘‘gentleman’’ of Hucknall Torkard, who sent it on to the Nottingham Daily Express. This Ripper wannabe stated that he came from ‘‘Notts’’ but had lived in Colorado, where he would return after they had ‘‘pop[ped] off another or two.’’ This writer omitted Miller’s Court because it did not fit his pattern. Why he chose to use the feminine plural of ‘‘Juifs’’ in his translation of the Goulston Street graffito remains another mystery. The Gazette revealed only that the author was ‘‘an experienced occultist,’’ who had studied necromancy under Lord Lytton in Alexandria. For this reason Whittington-Egan and Wilson and Odell assigned authorship to the Earl of Crawford. However, Melvin Harris insisted that his prime candidate for the role of Jack—namely, Roslyn D’Onston or Robert Donston Stephenson—was the author. See Wilson and Odell, JR, pp. 267–80; Begg et al., JR: A to Z, pp. 432–35; and Harris, True Face, pp. 113–21.

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NOTES TO PAGES 208–211

39. See Times, Nov. 27–29 and Dec. 21, 1888. Husband’s family and friends raised over seventy pounds to help defer his legal expenses. 40. Barrett was the last man seen in the company of young Gill. The Times (Feb. 5, 1889) hinted at the possibility of sodomy by reporting the Bradford coroner’s comment that the mutilations suggested a desire to conceal ‘‘an outrage’’ on the victim. After deliberating for an hour and a half, the coroner’s jury found Barrett guilty by a vote of twelve to two. At the end of his trial at Leeds Assizes, however, the jury discharged him for lack of evidence. See Times, Dec. 31, 1888, Jan. 2, 4, 5, 7, 12, 14, 16, 19, 22, 26, Feb. 5, and March 11–13, 1889. 41. Evidently, Inspector Walter Andrews of Scotland Yard and his entourage were acting on a tip from an undisclosed source. Begg et al., JR: A to Z, pp. 26–27. 42. Gray, who allegedly came from Whitechapel, was sentenced to three months in jail for vagrancy. Times, Jan. 16–18, 22, 29, 1889. 43. The Times (Feb. 18, 1889) gleaned this story from the New York Sun (Feb. 6). 44. About five feet four inches in height and around forty years old, McKenzie resembled some of the Ripper victims because of her age and the fact that she was missing at least one tooth and wore a shabby skirt and petticoat that the killer had pulled up above her waist. Times, July 18, 1889. 45. Quoted in Begg et al., JR: A to Z, pp. 49–50. The autopsy reports of Bond and Phillips ( July 8 and 22, 1889) may be found in MEPO 3/140, fols. 260–71, PRO (Kew). 46. Times, Aug. 15, 1889. See Rumbelow, JR, pp. 125–28; Begg, JR, pp. 200, 214– 15; and Begg et al., JR: A to Z, pp. 269–71. On July 19, the papers reported that a man wielding a knife had attacked a woman near Aldgate East station. When she cried out ‘‘Jack the Ripper’’ and ‘‘Murder,’’ an angry mob gathered and threatened to lynch him. Times, July 20, 1889. 47. According to this rather cynical writer, ‘‘It is by no means improbable that before long a couple of lines at the bottom of a column will be all that is deemed necessary by the newspapers to record the discovery of another victim of Jack the Ripper. The newspapers do not think it worth while to chronicle the discovery of dead babies, which are picked up almost every day in various parts of London.’’ In short, the next murder of an unfortunate in Whitechapel would be treated like infanticide or ‘‘one of the ordinary normal incidents of our very complex civilization.’’ PMG, Sept. 11, 1889. 48. Times, Sept. 11, 25, 1889. 49. Following this murder, the Home Office approved Scotland Yard’s request for one hundred additional policemen to be sent into Whitechapel on special assignment for several months. MEPO 2/227, fols. 2–6, 14, PRO (Kew). 50. William Kent, John Burns: Labour’s Lost Leader (London, 1950), p. 43, and F. P. Wensley, Detective Days: Forty Years of Scotland Yard (London, 1931), pp. 5–6. 51. The man arrested for Coles’s murder was a ship’s fireman, John Thomas Sadler, who had known ‘‘Carroty Nell’’ (aged twenty-six) for over a year. At the police station, he swore that he had been on an alcoholic binge with Coles shortly before her death but had not harmed her. With Coroner Baxter presid-

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NOTES TO PAGES 212–215

ing over the inquest, Bond detailed the three knife wounds on the victim’s throat but did not mention the Ripper. However, lack of evidence against Sadler led the jury to return the same verdict as in the previous murders. Times, Feb. 14, 16, 18, 24, 28, 1891; Begg et al., JR: A to Z, pp. 83–84. 52. The trial of this adolescent ended in a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity. He was sent to a lunatic asylum, where Forbes Winslow interviewed him. Winslow, Mad Humanity (London, 1898), pp. 214–17. 53. Inscribed on a card beneath the image of a female victim of ‘‘the French pox’’ seen by Sutcliffe were the words: ‘‘Vice is a monster of so hideous a mien/That to be hated needs but to be seen.’’ Gordon Burn, Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son: The Story of the Yorkshire Ripper (Harmondsworth, U.K., 1986), esp. pp. 153–60, and Michael Newton (ed.), Hunting Humans: The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers, vol. 1 (New York, 1990), pp. 324–27. See also Cameron and Frazer, Lust to Kill pp. 43–44, 127–38, and Walkowitz, CDD, pp. 229–41. Chapter 10: The Inquests 1. William Burrows, On Reporting the News (New York, 1977), p. 64. 2. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London, 1981), p. 46. 3. Laura Mulvey, ‘‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’’ Screen, vol. 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1975), pp. 6–18. 4. As Carol Clover has observed in her study of the position of women in modern horror films, ‘‘Mulvey identifies two ways cinema looks at women, both of which presuppose a male (or masculine) gazer: a sadistic-voyeuristic look, whereby the gazer salves his unpleasure at female lack by seeing the woman punished, and a fetishistic-scopophilic look, whereby the gazer salves his unpleasure by fetishizing the female body in whole or part.’’ Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton, 1992), p. 206. 5. There was nothing new about male writers representing attractive women as utterly powerless either as a result of death or by being strapped down to a table by some lustful doctor. The latter scenario often appeared in medical pornography. See Carol Lansbury, ‘‘Gynaecology, Pornography, and the Antivivisection Movement,’’ Victorian Studies, vol. 28, no. 3 (Spring 1985), pp. 421–24. 6. In the early 1900s various crime magazines reprinted sketches of the Whitechapel murder scenes and the victims. See esp. Anon., ‘‘Jack the Ripper: The Story of the Whitechapel Murders,’’ in Harold Furniss (ed.), Famous Crimes Past and Present (London, 1903). Some of these illustrations appear in Evans and Gainey, The Lodger, pp. 70–71. 7. For the Rogers case and the print media’s handling of her ‘‘polluted’’ body, see Amy Gilman Srebnick, The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers: Sex and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York (New York, 1995), esp. pp. 61–80. 8. Knox, Murder, p. 141. 9. The dates of each session of the five inquests held are as follows: Nichols— September 1, 3, 17, 23; Chapman—September 10, 12, 13, 19, 26; Stride— October 1, 2, 3, 5, 23; Eddowes—October 4, 11; and Kelly—November 12.

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NOTES TO PAGES 215–218

10. See, for example, the article by Annie Gottlieb, ‘‘Whose Shocking Crime?’’ New York Times, Nov. 5, 1993. 11. In a special supplement, ‘‘The President’s Testimony,’’ the New York Times (Sept. 22, 1998) devoted more space to President Clinton’s posture, shifting moods, and self-justification during his taped testimony than to any overt sexual activity. And yet it did mention ‘‘oral sex’’ and semen stains on the blue dress. See Section A, esp. pp. 1, 15–21, and Section B, pp. 1–8. Well before the disclosures of Kenneth Starr’s ‘‘Referral,’’ Walter Goodman noted how mention of oral sex moved television audiences to sense that ‘‘a wall has been breached. The sort of come-on that has served for afternoon titillation had made it into the mainstream.’’ New York Times, Jan. 25, 1998. 12. Cameron and Frazer, Lust to Kill, p. 51. 13. In some of these paintings, as Ludmilla Jordanova points out, the omnipotent surgeon, surrounded by deferential male assistants or students, explores with his scalpel the mysteries of Woman. Indulging in fantasies of divine power as well as rape, they ‘‘adore the heated capaciousness of women.’’ See Jordanova, Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine Between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Madison, 1989), esp. pp. 56–65, 98–110, 149–54. See also Tatar, Lustmord, esp. chapters 4 and 5. 14. See Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, esp. pp. x–xv and chapter 1, ‘‘Preparation for an Autopsy.’’ 15. The male-dominated medical profession denied women muscle power, physical endurance, and emotional (or mental) stability. Besides debarring them from the public sphere, these presumed deficiencies made them highly susceptible to hysteria. See Ornella Moscucci, The Science of Woman: Gynaecology and Gender in England, 1800–1929 (Cambridge, 1990), esp. pp. 15–37, and Laqueur, Making Sex, pp. 149–227. 16. W. Tyler Smith, Manual of Obstetrics (1848), quoted in Mary Poovey, ‘‘ ‘Scenes of an Indelicate Character’: The Medical ‘Treatment’ of Victorian Women,’’ Representations, no. 14 (Spring 1986), esp. pp. 145–47. See also Moscucci, Science of Woman, pp. 220–21. For further details of the powers attributed to the uterus, see Sherwin B. Nuland, The Mysteries Within: A Surgeon Reflects on Medical Myths (New York, 2000), esp. pp. 212–22. 17. Showalter discusses what Victorian medical men regarded as the three classic illnesses of women—hysteria, anorexia, and neurasthenia—in The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980 (New York, 1985). For the neglected subject of ‘‘sexual slippage’’ or the crossing of traditional gender lines, see Jill L. Matus, Unstable Bodies: Victorian Representations of Sexuality and Maternity (Manchester, 1995). Convinced that the ‘‘periodicity’’ of the female reproductive system created instability throughout a woman’s body and mind, most doctors believed that the slightest crisis could upset the delicate balance of the nervous system and bring on hysteria. 18. Ericson et al., VD, p. 323. 19. The state’s growing interest in establishing the cause of death resulted in not only more autopsies but also an ample supply of (plebeian) bodies and organs

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NOTES TO PAGES 218–223

20.

21.

22. 23.

24.

25.

26.

27. 28. 29.

30.

for schools of anatomy. See Laqueur, Making Sex, p. 188. Needless to say, the accuracy of the autopsies performed a century or so ago left much to be desired—as do many postmortem exams today. As one modern expert has written, ‘‘The need for complete and thorough medico-legal examination of every violent death, and all sudden deaths of unexplained cause’’ remains vital, because if this part of the inquest is flawed, then someone could get away with murder. Havard, Secret Homicide, p. 146. Most inquests in late Victorian London ended with verdicts of death by natural causes or by accident rather than ‘‘wilful murder.’’ See, for example, City of London Coroners’ Inquests, 1861–1901, CLRO, 415B. See also Jeremy Gibson and Colin Rogers, Coroners’ Records in England and Wales (Birmingham, 1988) and Gavin Thurston, Coroner’s Practice (London, 1958), esp. pp. 1–9. The medical experts disagreed about the position the killer had been in when he cut his victims’ throats. Some speculated that he held them from behind, while others assumed that they were lying on the ground when he cut their throats from a kneeling position. Most of the surgeons agreed that he was right-handed. Friedland, Trials of Israel Lipski, pp. 22, 86–88. Although the original transcripts of the Chapman inquest and the postmortem report on Kelly have not survived the forces of destruction, the transcript of the Eddowes inquest may be found in the Corporation of London Records Office, Guildhall, under the heading of Coroners’ Inquests (4) 1888, No. 135, pp. 1–42. For the transcript of the Kelly inquest dated November 12, 1888 (Shoreditch Town Hall), see MJ/SPC/NE 1888, Box 2, No. 19, fols. 1–12, LMA. However, this document omits Dr. Phillips’s testimony and the exchanges between the coroner and the doctor about the autopsy report. For the full report of Dr. Llewellyn’s findings taken from the Times, see Begg et al., JR: A to Z, pp. 257–58. In Sugden’s view, the paucity of blood around the body indicated that the killer had strangled Nichols first before cutting her throat and slashing her stomach. JR, pp. 51–55. See the Times, Daily Telegraph, Evening News, Morning Post (Sept. 3), as well as Lloyd’s and Reynolds’s (Sept. 2). The versions in the Times, Daily Telegraph, and Morning Post were almost identical. But the Weekly Times (Sept. 9) omitted all the medical evidence. No paper in our sample reported the rumor—mentioned by Rumbelow—that there were ‘‘two small stab wounds’’ on Nichols’s vagina. JR, p. 40. See also Sugden, JR, p. 53. Phillips’s autopsy notes and the official transcript of the Chapman inquest have not been found. Sugden, JR, p. 89. Several contemporaries praised Baxter for his conscientious approach to inquests. See Clarkson and Richardson, Police! pp. 276–77. Phillips estimated that the killer spent roughly fifteen minutes inflicting all the injuries. A surgeon working with care, he added, would have required ‘‘the best part of an hour’’ to carry out the same procedure. The Globe’s (Sept. 19) article on the inquest preceded a short but dramatic

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NOTES TO PAGES 223–228

31.

32.

33.

34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42.

43.

account of a ‘‘terrible outrage’’ that had just taken place in the West End involving a woman stabbed in the breast and taken to hospital ‘‘in a precarious condition.’’ But a follow-up story dismissed the wound as merely a slight gash on the right cheek. Evidently the weapon was a walking stick, wielded by a ‘‘tall, dark, and respectably dressed’’ man. According to Baxter, the American ‘‘researcher’’ had approached the subcurator of the (unspecified) pathological museum some months before, asking about uteruses and insisting that any such organs be carefully preserved in glycerine—rather than ‘‘spirits of wine’’—so that he could send them out with a copy of his monograph. In other words, instead of a ‘‘lunatic with morbid feelings,’’ the murderer might have had a ‘‘rational’’ or scientific motive, even if he happened to be ‘‘an abandoned wretch.’’ Times, Sept. 27. Nearly identical versions of this passage appeared in the Daily Telegraph, Times, Evening Standard, and Star (Sept. 27), as well as Lloyd’s and Reynolds’s (Sept. 30). ‘‘Talk about scalps after this! The worst Red Indian atrocity fades into insignificance compared with this market quotation for ‘actual specimens.’ ’’ PMG, Sept. 27. The length and content of the articles about Baxter’s summation and the inquest ranged from 3,300 words in the Times (Sept. 27) to 1,100 words in the East London Observer (Sept. 29) and 1,200 in the PMG (Sept. 27). BMJ, Sept. 22, p. 674. Lancet, Sept. 29, p. 637. Ibid., Oct. 6, p. 682. East London Observer, Sept. 22. This writer speculated that the killer had first strangled or suffocated Chapman before cutting her throat, because there were signs of asphyxia present (livid face, lips, and hands). This would explain why she had uttered no cry of alarm. The deep cut across the throat had drained most of the blood out of the severed vessels, thereby accounting for the ‘‘almost bloodless effect of the subsequent incisions in the abdomen and pelvis.’’ Lancet, Sept. 29, p. 637. Evidently, Baxter abandoned his theory within a week. BMJ, Oct. 6, p. 768. Baxter also presided over this inquest at the Vestry Hall, Cable Street, in the parish of St. George’s-in-the-East, held on October 1–3, 5, and 23. See Times and Daily Chronicle, Oct. 4. Phillips supervised Stride’s autopsy on Monday, October 1, at St. George’s mortuary. Assisting Dr. Blackwell were Dr. Rygate (also spelled Reigate) and Edward Johnston, the first medical man to arrive at the murder scene. See also Sugden, JR, pp. 170–73, 198–200. At the next session of the inquest (Oct. 5), Phillips stated that he had examined Stride again and found no signs of her having eaten any grapes shortly before her death. He could not explain why her right hand was covered in blood or why several cachous (a sweetmeat made from cashew nuts) were found in her other hand. He speculated that the killer had seized her by the shoulders and forced her onto the ground before cutting her throat from left

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NOTES TO PAGES 228–232

44. 45.

46.

47.

48.

49.

50.

51. 52.

53.

to right. Unlike Chapman’s, Stride’s wounds offered no indications that her killer had tried to decapitate her. Times, Oct. 6. Running true to form and content, the Weekly Times (Oct. 7) provided much less clinical detail than either Reynolds’s or Lloyd’s. Brown was assisted on this occasion by Drs. Phillips, Sequeira, and William Saunders. Saunders testified (Oct. 11) that there were no traces of narcotic poison in the victim’s stomach and that ‘‘the wounds were not inflicted by a person of great anatomical skill.’’ Unlike the results of the Chapman inquest, he stated that the killer ‘‘had no particular design’’ on any organ. Times, Oct. 12. The two sessions of the Eddowes inquest took place on October 4 and 11. For the official transcript of this first session, see Coroners’ Inquests (4) 1888, No. 135, pp. 1–42, CLRO. This document listed twenty-four jurors, seventeen of whom had check marks next to their names. Some twenty witnesses were also listed, three of whom had taken part in the autopsy. Neither the Times nor the Morning Post or Daily Chronicle (Oct. 5) identified the uterus as the other organ missing from ‘‘the abdominal cavity.’’ Brown complained about conditions in the mortuary, where the temperature had not risen above fifty-five degrees during the autopsy. He reckoned that the killer would have needed around five minutes to perform his operations. At this point the coroner adjourned the inquest until October 11. Although the Times published five and a half columns of detailed testimony from the two sessions of the inquest (Oct. 4 and 11), it made no mention of either the missing uterus or the surgeon’s (futile) search for traces of semen on the victim’s lower body. For the official transcript of Brown’s autopsy report, see Begg et al., JR: A to Z, pp. 57–62, and Sugden, JR, pp. 240–43. When asked how much time it had taken to carry out this attack, Brown replied that ‘‘an expert practitioner’’ had removed the same organs from a cadaver in three and a half minutes. Sugden, JR, pp. 251–52. The official record of Brown’s testimony appears in ‘‘Coroner’s Inquests (4) 1888, No. 135, pp. 17–23, CLRO. Compare Sugden’s version of this transcript in JR, pp. 241–43, with that in Rumbelow, JR, pp. 64–65, 84–87, and Wilson and Odell, JR, pp. 63–64. For the forensic aspects of Kelly’s death, see Sugden, JR, pp. 314–21; for reactions to the murder in both the press and Whitechapel, see Fishman, East End, esp. pp. 213–29. Times, Morning Post, Daily Telegraph, Nov. 13. Hutchinson later admitted to having seen a ‘‘Jewish-looking’’ man escort Kelly to her room shortly after 2 A.M. on November 9. Begg, JR, pp. 153–54; Begg et al., JR: A to Z, pp. 187–89; Rumbelow, JR, pp. 100–103; and Sugden, JR, pp. 333–38, 366–67. See also Weekly Times, Nov. 18. Several early Ripperologists conjectured that one of the ‘‘missing portions’’ was a fetus. According to William Stewart’s Jack the Ripper: A New Theory (London, 1939) Kelly was around three months pregnant when she died. Donald McCormick supported this notion in The Identity of Jack the Ripper

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NOTES TO PAGES 234–240

54.

55. 56.

57.

(London, 1959), pp. 149, 151, as did Tom Cullen in Autumn of Terror, p. 15, and Donald Rumbelow in JR, pp. 99, 102. However, Sugden dismisses this theory in JR, pp. 11–12, 319. Sugden quotes much the same text in JR, p. 315, and then draws on Bond’s notes on p. 319. Later, Bond told Robert Anderson of the CID that the mutilations were ‘‘inflicted by a person who had no scientific nor [sic] anatomical knowledge’’ and did not ‘‘even possess the technical knowledge of a butcher or horse slaughterer,’’ although he did have great ‘‘physical strength’’ as well as ‘‘coolness and daring.’’ Possibly he suffered from ‘‘periodical attacks of Homicidal and erotic mania’’ or the sexual disorder known as ‘‘Satyriasis.’’ Bond speculated that he was ‘‘a quiet inoffensive looking man probably middle-aged and neatly and respectably dressed . . . solitary and eccentric in his habits . . . without regular occupation, but with some small income or pension . . . living among respectable persons.’’ Rumbelow, JR, pp. 139–41; Begg, JR, pp. 161– 62; and Begg et al., JR: A to Z, pp. 44–50. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, vol. 1, An Introduction (New York, 1980), p. 17. For passing allusions to ‘‘Diebslichter’’ and children’s fingers, see Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft (New York, 1996), p. 47, and Michael Kunzle, Highroad to the Stake: A Tale of Witchcraft (Chicago, 1987), pp. 181–85. See also H. L. Malchow, Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Stanford, Calif., 1996), pp. 73, 117, and Eoin O’Brien, Conscience and Conflict: A Biography of Sir Dominic Corrigan (Dublin, 1983), p. 54. See also the East London Advertiser, Oct. 13, and Lloyd’s, Oct. 14. According to Bloch, these magic candles were in such great demand ‘‘among the burgling fraternity’’ that they provided an obvious motive for the Whitechapel murders. He advised Scotland Yard to investigate this angle forthwith. Fishman, East End, pp. 214–15. Chapter 11: Responses to Ripper News

1. The reader response that most interested Dahlgren falls under the heading of ‘‘transcontextualization, which facilitates sense-making of crime news. . . . It is not so much logos which is at work here, rather a small-scale and trivial mythos.’’ Dahlgren, ‘‘Crime News: The Fascination of the Mundane,’’ European Journal of Communication, vol. 3, no. 2 ( June 1988), pp. 189–206. 2. Hall et al., Policing the Crisis, esp. pp. 120–25. 3. Only six of the twenty-five letters published in the Times on October 6 concerned the Whitechapel murders and related topics. 4. On October 2 alone the Daily Telegraph and the Star summarized thirty-nine of the ‘‘hundreds’’ of letters received, and from October 3 to 5 the former paper printed another fifty-two précis in addition to twenty full-length letters. 5. Two letters from the Bishop of Bedford and Dr. Barnardo were excerpted and integrated into an article dealing with social and moral reform in the East End.

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NOTES TO PAGES 240–242

6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21.

A brief letter from Richard Mansfield announced a benefit performance of Prince Karl to help fund night shelters in the East End. PMG, Oct. 9. The newspapers used for this sample were the Times, Daily Chronicle, Daily Telegraph, Star, and Pall Mall Gazette. Two letters had two authors, which makes a total of 243 letter writers. Almost half of the 241 letters in this sample (114) were signed with pseudonyms or initials instead of the Christian name. No doubt some women concealed their sex by hiding behind the male convention of initials preceding the surname. While most of the letters sent to Scotland Yard have disappeared, many of those received by the City police have been preserved, thanks to the efforts of Donald Rumbelow. Addressed in the main to Col. Sir James Fraser, the Chief Commissioner of the City police, and occasionally to the Lord Mayor, these letters may be found in the Corporation of the City of London Record Office. Estimates of the volume of police mail vary from twelve hundred letters a day to a thousand letters a week at the height of the murders. Wilson and Odell, JR, p. 75, and Rumbelow, JR, p. 107. Kitchin, London Times, p. 57. Many papers fanned the public’s interest in the use of bloodhounds by publicizing the trials in Hyde Park. For ‘‘bloodhounds as detectives,’’ see the letters of Edwin Brough, J. D. Dougall, and Henry Ffennell to the Times, Oct. 11 and 13, respectively. As for overlapping themes, the ‘‘detective’’ category contained seventeen letters referring to suspects, while ten mentioned reward money and pardons for anyone who gave information about the culprit. One constable who did nail rubber strips taken from bicycle tires to the soles of his ‘‘clumsy’’ boots was Frederick Porter Wensley. See his memoir, Detective Days, p. 4. Times, Oct. 2. Fred Wellesley to the Times, Oct. 1. Frances Power Cobbe to the Times, Oct. 11. Macdonald thought that the medical examiners should analyze the contents of the victims’ stomachs. Macdonald to the Daily Telegraph and Daily Chronicle, Oct. 4. See Michael Mack to the Times, Oct. 6. This man contended that ten well-trained hounds would find the killer more quickly than a hundred constables. H. M. Mackusick of Merstham, Surrey, to the Daily Telegraph, Oct. 19. Lindley, of Loughton, Essex, recommended that trained hounds be kept at a police station in or near the East End for use in the event of another slaying. Times, Oct. 2, 16, and PMG, Oct. 6. Not all canine enthusiasts shared his optimism. See Henry Ffennell to the Times, Oct. 13. Anon. to the Daily Chronicle, Sept. 15, Oct. 5, and ‘‘A.J.F.’’ to the Star, Oct. 2. F. Walters to the Daily Chronicle, Sept. 14 and 15. J. E. Waller of Bromley-by-Bow to the Star, Sept. 17. Waller contended that no

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22.

23.

24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

woman could walk from Aldgate to Bow and Bromley station without being ‘‘insulted by a pack of hulking and ignorant jackanapes.’’ He urged the police to search and shut down all the gambling dens, beer shops, and bordellos in the East End. Three anonymous writers suggested that the police stop, search, and register every ‘‘stranger’’ or suspicious person in the district. One of these, ‘‘G.E.K.’’ of Rivermere, Old Windsor, recommended that every lodger in Whitechapel’s slums be required to register at the nearest police station before going to bed at night. Daily Telegraph, Oct. 2. For these various candidates, see the Daily Telegraph, Oct. 3–9; the Star, Oct. 3–5; and the PMG, Oct. 8, Dec. 6, 12. The Fenian Ripper theory came from an anonymous letter in the Scotsman, which was quoted in the Star, Nov. 19. None of these writers came close to nominating an aristocratic, let alone royal, candidate. ‘‘H.P.B.’’ to the Times, Oct. 5. ‘‘Medicus’’ to the Evening News, Sept. 11. In his book on the pathology of serial murder, Joel Norris mentions ‘‘psychomotor epilepsy’’ as one of several ‘‘behavioral characteristics of the serial killer syndrome.’’ Serial Killers (New York, 1989), p. 43. Edgar Sheppard, M.D., of 42 Gloucester Square, Hyde Park, to the Times, Oct. 2. ‘‘W.A.G.’’ to the Star, Oct. 2. PMG, Oct. 8 ‘‘Anglo-Texan’’ to the Daily Telegraph, Oct. 6. This writer also alluded to a serial killer in Austin who had used an axe and hammer but had not mutilated his victims. Several correspondents thought that the first Ripper letter and card sent to Central News were filled with Americanisms. See Rev. Charles H. Bromby (Assistant Bishop of Lichfield) to the Times, Sept. 28; ‘‘Observer’’ of Edinburgh to the Daily Telegraph, Oct. 5; and F. A. Schaffter of the Hague to the Daily Telegraph, Oct. 6. In ‘‘Nemo’s’’ view, the culprit might look quite harmless, but when primed with opium or gin, he ‘‘would destroy his defenceless victim with the ferocity and cunning of the tiger.’’ Originally sent to the PMG on October 18, the first letter, from Manchester, formed the basis of the November 10 article, entitled ‘‘IS THE MURDERER A MALAY?’’ Edward Dillon Lewis to the Times and Daily Chronicle, Oct. 4. In another letter, the granddaughter of a Portuguese judge recalled the case of a serial killer in Covilhã during the 1840s who had stabbed sixteen women in the abdomen for sheer pleasure. Esther Delaforce of Wimbledon pointed out that her grandfather, Judge Joao de Campes, had heard this man confess before sentencing him to death half a century earlier. PMG, Dec. 12. See the letters written by Chief Rabbis Hermann Adler of Finsbury Square and M. Gaster of Kilburn to the Times, Oct. 3.

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NOTES TO PAGES 245–247

34. Montagu’s letter also appeared in the Evening News on the same date. 35. See George H. Giddins of Sylvan Villa, Woodford, and Samuel Hayward of Forest Hill, London, to the Daily Telegraph, Oct. 6. 36. ‘‘One Who Knows’’ to the Times, Sept. 29. 37. E. Fairfield of 64 South Eaton Place, London, to the Times, Oct. 1. 38. The third son of Francis, 1st Baron Godolphin, and younger brother of the 8th Duke of Leeds, Osborne was a patrician clergyman who abhorred idleness, obscenity, and vice. He championed Free Trade, the Act of Union, the Established Church, old morality, English (and Christian) civilization, relief of distress, educational reform, and prevention of crime. He visited famine-stricken districts in Ireland during the late 1840s and hospitals in the Crimea during the war. By marrying a Grenfell, he acquired two famous brothers-in-law: Charles Kingsley and James Anthony Froude. For his letters to the Times, see Arnold White (ed.), The Letters of S.G.O., 2 vols. (London, n.d. [1890]) and his obituary in the Times, May 10, 1889. 39. See Stallybrass and White, ‘‘The City: the Sewer, the Gaze and the Contaminating Touch’’ in Politics and Poetics of Transgression, esp. pp. 125–33. 40. In his letter ‘‘At Last,’’ Osborne also suggested that ‘‘female hands’’ might lie behind these murders because violence and jealousy were well-known traits among unfortunates, who had the temper and the strength to commit such awful crimes. Times, Sept. 18, quoted in White (ed.), Letters of S.G.O., vol. 2, pp. 97–101. Osborne wrote another letter to the Times (Oct. 6) about the folly of ignoring the plight of unfortunates in the East End. After alluding to ‘‘the midnight seeker of the harlot’s hire’’ and ‘‘the fully ripened, but decayed fruit of ‘unfortunate’ humanity’’ lying in cheap coffins, he rebuked the upper classes for living in luxury and treating prostitutes like ‘‘human vermin, unclean parasites.’’ In any case, he wrote, the Ripper’s victims had suffered no further pain after their throats had been cut. 41. Samuel A. Barnett to the Times, Sept. 19. The son of a Bristol manufacturer, Barnett was educated at home and then at Wadham College, Oxford. Appointed rector of St. Jude’s, Whitechapel, in 1873, he became the driving force behind the Oxbridge settlement movement in the East End. From 1884 to 1896 he served as the first warden of Toynbee Hall. See Asa Briggs and Anne Macartney, Toynbee Hall (London, 1984), esp. pp. 1–60, and Standish Meacham, Toynbee Hall and Social Reform, 1880–1914 (New Haven, 1987), esp. pp. 1–85. See also DNB, 1912–1921, pp. 31–32; White, Rothschild Buildings, pp. 10–12; Barnett’s essay ‘‘Whitechapel,’’ New Review, vol. 1, no. 5 (October 1889), pp. 459–71; and H. O. Barnett, Canon Barnett: His Life, Works and Friends (London, 1918). 42. ‘‘Personal service and the care of the individual by the individual are needed to drive out the demon of uncleanness, moral and physical, and this result can only be attained by the cultivation of a quickened sense of social unity and fellowship. The East and the West are correlative members of a single social organization. London at large is responsible for Whitechapel and its dens of

337

NOTES TO PAGES 248–255

43.

44.

45. 46.

47.

48. 49. 50.

51.

crime. If the luxury and wealth of the West cannot find some means of mitigating the squalor and crime of the East, we shall have to abate our faith in the resources of civilisation.’’ Times, Sept. 19. The Suffragan Bishop of Bedford was the Right Rev. Robert Claudius Billing, who had been rector of Spitalfields for ten years (1878–88). Fishman, East End, pp. 147, 153, 156, 160; Times, Oct. 9, 13, 30; Daily Telegraph, Oct. 9; and Evening News, Oct. 9. This writer contrasted the ‘‘good behaviour’’ of the great majority with the vicious habits of ‘‘the nauseous but wonderfully limited amount of moral scum rising too visibly to the surface.’’ In short, these murders were ‘‘very limited patches of dark shadow falling upon a vast area, on which is constantly beaming a broad, bright light of Divine and human goodness.’’ William Tallack of the Howard Association to the Times, Sept. 24. For these mini chambers of horror, see Fishman, East End, pp. 321–22. ‘‘I verily believe that there are at this moment in London tens of thousands of children more utterly depraved in mind than you could find in any heathen country in the world.’’ Samuel Smith of Dunkeld, N.B., to the Times, Oct. 1, and PMG, Oct. 23. Bennett received his M.D. from Edinburgh in 1833 and was a consultant and staff member at several London hospitals, specializing in diseases of the chest. DNB, Supplement, vol. 1 (London, 1901), p. 168. See the leader ‘‘The Whitechapel Murders,’’ Lancet, Sept. 15, 1888, pp. 533– 34. Winslow to the Lancet, Sept. 22, 1888, p. 603. Savage urged readers not to blame ‘‘a medical man’’ for the slayings. Either the killer was seeking revenge for an unknown injury or suffering from a ‘‘delusion of persecution or world regeneration.’’ ‘‘Homicidal Mania,’’ Fortnightly Review, vol. 44, no. 262, new series (Oct. 1, 1888), pp. 448–63. Knighted in 1912, Savage was consulting physician to both Guy’s Hospital in London and Earlswood Idiot Asylum. Who Was Who, 1916–1928 (London, 1967), pp. 934–35. He earned posthumous fame for having treated Virginia Woolf during her nervous collapses. Peter Stansky, On or About December 1910: Early Bloomsbury and Its Intimate World (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), esp. pp. 49–50, 57–61, 233, 256 n. 8, and 273 n. 96. As Tatar points out in Lustmord, pp. 46–48. See also Rumbelow, JR, pp. 258– 73, and Margaret S. Wagner, The Monster of Düsseldorf: The Life and Trial of Peter Kürten (New York, 1933). Chapter 12: The Cultural Politics of Ripper News

1. Caputi, Age of Sex Crime, pp. 4–5. 2. Tatar, Lustmord, p. 24. Most of the answers, one might add, turn out to be charged with emotion and ideology. 3. Lesser, Pictures at an Execution, p. 13. 4. Knox, Murder, esp. pp. 1–4, 44. Knox also explores at length Kate Millett’s

338

NOTES TO PAGES 256–260

5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

meditation on the murder of a child by her foster mother in the novel The Basement (1979). Harold Schechter, Fiend: The Shocking True Story of America’s Youngest Serial Killer (New York, 2000), p. 4. Compton Mackenzie, My Life and Times, Octavo One, 1883–1891 (London, 1963), pp. 164–65. In Tithecott’s words, the serial killer is both ‘‘one who must not be fully represented and one who is made in our own image.’’ Of Men and Monsters, p. 179. See Wilson’s introduction to Rumbelow, JR, pp. 1–12. Andrea Dworkin defines gynocide as ‘‘the systematic crippling, raping, and/or killing of women by men . . . the relentless violence perpetrated by the gender class men on the gender class women.’’ ‘‘Under patriarchy,’’ she contends, ‘‘gynocide is the ongoing reality of life lived by women.’’ Quoted by Caputi in Age of Sex Crime, p. 3. Cameron and Frazer, Lust to Kill, pp. 64–66, 138–39. For further details, see Michael Newton, Hunting Humans: The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers, vol. 2 (New York, 1990), pp. 177–78. Newton also deals briefly with the self-styled Jack the Ripper of New York City in 1915, and ‘‘Jack the Stripper,’’ who stalked and strangled eight prostitutes in London between 1959 and 1963 (pp. 178–86). Caputi, Age of Sex Crime, esp. pp. 4–10, 12, 22. Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800 (London, 1985), pp. 20–21. See Cominos’s pioneering study of Victorian codes of respectability and sexual economy, ‘‘Late Victorian Sexual Respectability and the Social System,’’ International Review of Social History (1963), part 2, pp. 1–66. A revised and expanded version of ‘‘Jack the Ripper and the Myth of Male Violence,’’ Feminist Studies, vol. 8 (1982), pp. 542–74, appears as Chapter 7 in Walkowitz, CDD, pp. 191–228. Walkowitz, CDD, pp. 203, 214. The East End News, the East London Observer, and the East London Advertiser (Sept. 8 and 15) reported no rioting against any of these groups after Chapman’s murder. One man wrote to the East London Observer (Sept. 15) insisting that ‘‘the beast’’ responsible for the murders was not a Jew because there was something ‘‘too horrible, too unnatural, too unJewish’’ about them. For a lurid account of the ‘‘panic and hysteria’’ that followed Chapman’s murder and allegations of an ‘‘outburst of Judaeophobia’’ that ‘‘disgraced Whitechapel’’ (whatever this may mean), see Sugden, JR, pp. 118–23, 126–29, 185. Of course, if one defines a riot as a group of people shouting insults and making threatening gestures, then the scenario is bound to change dramatically. Bermant, Point of Arrival, p. 112. Even though Fishman concedes that a ‘‘minor outbreak of Judeophobia’’ did occur, he too cites the East London Observer’s report (Sept. 15) about the absence of actual rioting. East End, p. 217. Discussing the surge of anti-Semitism at the height of the murders,

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NOTES TO PAGES 260–267

19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

31. 32.

33. 34.

Sander Gilman alludes to ‘‘a pogrom [that] almost occurred in the East End’’ after the discovery of Eddowes’s body. But anti-Semitic gibes and menaces in the streets were a far cry from a Russian-style pogrom. See Gilman, ‘‘ ‘I’m Down on Whores,’ ’’ p. 159. Eugene Black, The Social Politics of Anglo-Jewry, 1880–1920 (Oxford, 1988), p. 41. Walkowitz, CDD, p. 218. Reynolds’s, Oct. 7. Fishman discusses a few of these cases in East End, pp. 216–17. William Bull, one of these misdemeanants, was a medical student who became ‘‘mad drunk’’ and wound up at Guildhall police court after confessing to a policeman that he had killed Eddowes. One night in jail drove a sober Bull to take the temperance pledge. Reynolds’s, Oct. 7. Walkowitz highlights the case of Sarah Brett of Peckham, who was stabbed by Frank Hall, an inebriated friend of her common-law husband, Thomas Onley. Evidently, Hall attacked her after a drinking bout with Onley and threatened to ‘‘do a Whitechapel murder.’’ Walkowitz does not mention the outcome of Hall’s trial at the Old Bailey. CDD, pp. 219–20, 308, n. 96. For Dr. William Holt’s escape from an angry crowd on November 11 after he had whitened and blackened his face and wandered about menacing women, see Star, Nov. 12, and Globe, Nov. 13. For this and other suspects, see Begg et al., JR: A to Z, pp. 170, 406–07. Lloyd’s Weekly, Oct. 28, and Weekly Times, Oct. 28. Deborah Cameron, ‘‘ ‘That’s Entertainment’?: Jack the Ripper and the Selling of Sexual Violence,’’ in Radford and Russell (eds.), Femicide, pp. 184–85. Begg et al., JR: A to Z, p. 453. See, for example, the three-part CBS and Thames Television miniseries about the Ripper murders, screened on October 21–23, 1988. As for Web sites, see ‘‘Casebook: Victim’s Page’’ (http:/ /ripper.wildnet.co.uk/victims.html). For discussion of ‘‘the patriarchal (and arguably libidinous) aspect’’ of male fascination with female corpses in the dissecting room—epitomized by Gabriel von Max’s Der Anatom (1869) and Enrique Simonet’s Tenier Corazon (1890)—see especially Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, chapter 1, ‘‘Preparation for an Autopsy,’’ pp. 3–14, and also Jordanova, Sexual Visions, p. 110. Police photographs of the Ripper’s victims may be seen in Rumbelow, JR, pp. 116– 17, and Sugden, JR, pp. 246–47. Other pictures of the victims remain in Scotland Yard’s archives, according to an article in the Times, Aug. 19, 1988. See Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (Harmondsworth, U.K., 1983), esp. pp. 240, 361, 487, and 500. Tithecott, Of Men and Monsters, pp. 65–67. For a survey of Western obsession with cannibalism, see William Arens, The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy (Oxford, 1979). H. L. Malchow also delves into the ‘‘Gothic’’ implications of anthropophagy in Gothic Images of Race, pp. 41–123. Knox, Murder, pp. 87–99, esp. 96–97. For the activities of this municipal inspectorate after 1889, see Susan Penny-

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NOTES TO PAGES 267–268

35. 36.

37.

38. 39.

40. 41. 42.

backer, A Vision For London, 1889–1914: Labour, Everyday Life and the LCC Experiment (London, 1995), esp. chapter 3, pp. 158–240. Quoted in Burnham, Peterborough Court, p. 82. Charlotte de Rothschild Dwellings contained 198 flats (and 415 rooms) in a six-story edifice on the site of former hovels on Flower and Dean Street. For further details see John Nelson Tarn, Five Per Cent Philanthropy: An Account of Housing in Urban Areas Between 1840 and 1914 (London, 1973), esp. pp. 38, 68, 83–89, 99–106. In September 1888, several papers called for the demolition of more rookeries and the building of decent tenements for workers. The Times (Feb. 17, 1889) advocated printing the names of the owners of notorious lodging houses, but conceded that only millions of pounds would make any ‘‘real impression on the vast human rabbit warrens.’’ In 1891 the directors of the Four Per Cent Company bought some of the worst houses on the north side of Flower and Dean Street for forty-five hundred pounds and then evicted five hundred vagrant and casual workers’ families on a cold December day. A year later, solvent tenants occupied the new flats in the six-story Nathaniel (Rothschild) Dwellings. By 1895, only eight of the old lodging houses remained on the street. White, Rothschild Buildings, pp. 27–30. In his study Slums and Slum Clearance in Victorian London (London, 1986), J. A. Yelling fails to make any connection between murder and mortar, and neglects the investment of the Four Per Cent Company in better housing. For the intrusive and often futile efforts of the LCC’s inspectors to regulate the lives of the poor, see Pennybacker, A Vision for London, esp. pp. 158–91. For this famous strike, see Jones, Outcast London, pp. 315–18, 346–47, and Joan Ballhatchet, ‘‘The Police and the London Dock Strike of 1889,’’ History Workshop Journal, no. 32 (Autumn 1991), pp. 54–68. See Moore’s ‘‘minute’’ of Oct. 18, 1896, about this Ripper letter in MEPO 3/142, fols. 157–58, PRO (Kew). For the murder of Eliza Roberts by her sister Kate Marshall, see Times, Dec. 3, 16, 17, 1898, and Jan. 17, 1899. Besides bringing light, moral uplift, and hope to East Enders, Barnett, vicar of St. Jude’s Church, introduced classical music to Whitechapel in the form of concert and choir recitals held in Toynbee Hall, where the gospel of Christian virtue was now beginning to compete with artistic entertainment. Keen admirers of the pre-Raphaelites, Samuel and Henrietta Barnett decided to enrich the aesthetic lives of their parishioners by arranging displays of art in St. Jude’s School on Commercial Street. The splendid exhibit they organized in 1888 featured paintings by Lord Leighton, Sir John Millais, Holman Hunt, and other well-known artists. Crowds also poured in from the West End. These annual exhibitions proved so popular that Barnett launched a public subscription in the 1890s for an independent gallery. The success of this appeal made possible the building of the Whitechapel Art Gallery, which opened in March 1901 and drew some three hundred thousand visitors during the first month of operations. Perhaps this now famous gallery owes its origin in part to the

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NOTES TO PAGES 269–273

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51.

Barnetts’ ambition to wipe out the stain left by Jack the Ripper. See Fishman, East End, pp. 247–48, and Mark Glazebrook, ‘‘Battles with My Trustees,’’ Spectator, March 24, 2001, p. 52. See ‘‘Blind-man’s Buff,’’ Punch, Sept. 22, 1888, p. 139. Punch, Sept. 29, 1888, p. 151. See also Tenniel’s stark image of two violent ruffians in ‘‘Whitechapel, 1888,’’ Punch, Oct. 13, 1888, p. 175. Judy, Oct. 3, 1888, p. 157. ‘‘Is Warren a Failure?’’ Ibid., p. 179. For further allusions to the Ripper murders, see Judy, Nov. 21 and Dec. 5, 1888. ‘‘Our Special Police Reports,’’ Judy, Oct. 17, 1888, p. 190. Quoted in Tithecott, Of Men and Monsters, p. 20. For the story of Mrs. Burridge’s death on either September 11 or 12, see the articles ‘‘Died After Reading the Murder,’’ PMG, Sept. 13, and ‘‘Killed by Emotion,’’ Star, Sept. 13. Cullen mentions this woman’s fate in Autumn of Terror, p. 12. New York Review of Books, March 24, 1994, p. 56. Tatar, Lustmord, p. 13.

342

Acknowledgments

It remains for me to thank various scholars and friends, who had more faith at times in this risky undertaking than did the author. Without the inspiration of my late and much lamented colleague and friend Roger Henkle, who died in his prime with a not-quite-finished manuscript about middleclass images of the London poor, I never would have embarked on this arduous journey back into Victorian Fleet Street and thence into the East End. Through our once flourishing interdisciplinary program at Brown, known as Modern Literature and Society, of which Roger was the beloved magus, and through his wise and witty commentaries on the works of eminent Victorians, I learned how to read history, fiction, and journalism in a more critical manner. Second, my profound thanks go forth to Bill Fishman, a true-born East Ender, a Balliol man by mutual adoption, and a master of Whitechapel’s past and present, whose unfailing faith in this work and exuberant erudition kept me on the right (if not exactly straight and narrow) path. Long ago Donald Rumbelow gave much needed help to a complete novice in Ripper studies, providing advice, autopsy reports, and illustrations with the kind of generosity that I have found rare in academe. 343

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Beyond these supportive mentors I am most grateful to Maria Tatar and Martin Wiener, who had the fortitude to struggle through the thickets of an earlier and much longer version of this book and who then gave me much cogent advice about how to improve (and shorten) the contents. I am also heavily indebted to my Oxonian contemporary Lance Farrar, who laid aside his Germanic commitments at a very difficult time to read and comment on an earlier draft. He served as my guide during the painful ordeal of cutting out almost a third of the original opus (the literary equivalent of liposuction). For their encouraging comments in the early stages, my thanks go forth to Mark Cohen, Judith Knelman, Tony Wohl, and an anonymous British reader for Yale University Press. In addition, Andy Bourgeois’s electronic wizardry bailed me out of computer jams more than once, and Donna Leveillee proved her expertise and patience by designing the four charts in Chapter 9. Also, my former student Raymond Douglas of Colgate has earned my gratitude for coping with various Ripper-related requests. The staffs of the British Library (especially the newspaper library at Colindale), the libraries at Brown University and Dartmouth College, and the map department in Sterling Memorial Library at Yale (especially Fred Musto) also deserve thanks. Last but not least, my long-suffering wife, Alison, has earned lasting gratitude for having nourished me throughout this marathon project despite her profound disapproval of the subject matter. Although I hope this work contains no major ‘‘howlers,’’ I am sure that some miscues about dates, names, places, and events have crept in when I was not looking. No doubt any such errors will be spotted by the eagle eyes of Ripper experts around the world.

344

Index

Atlanta, Georgia, Jack the Ripper of, 258 autopsies, 24, 187, 216, 218; in news accounts, 68–69, 75–76, 97, 196–97; on Nichols, 219–20; of non-Ripper victims, 208, 209, 210–11. See also Ripper murders: inquests into Avery, John, 261–62

Abberline, Frederick G., 170, 178, 232 Abrahamsen, David, 28 Ackroyd, Peter, 74 Adler, Hermann, 163, 237 advertising, newspaper, 58 Allen, Oswald, 114 Altick, Richard D., 11–12, 72, 83, 84, 91, 94 Anderson, Sir Robert, 86, 167 Angel, Miriam, 116, 170, 219 Angle, Mr., 184 anti-Semitism, 23, 30, 41, 170–71, 237 Appleyard, Brian, 89–90 Aristotle, 87–88 Armstrong, George, 110, 111 Arnold, Edwin, 112 Arnold, Matthew, 61 Arnold, Thomas, 188 Artisans’ Dwelling Act of 1875, 43

Baines, Edward, 59 Barnardo, Thomas J., 29, 248 Barnett, Henrietta, 44, 178 Barnett, Joseph, 22, 29, 191, 195 Barnett, Rev. Samuel, 44, 150, 159, 173, 178, 247, 267, 268 Barrett, Mike, 31 Baxter, Wynne, 121, 131, 147, 148, 150, 160, 194, 209, 210; theory about motive for Ripper murders, 222–23, 225–27, 242, 248, 249, 255

345

INDEX

Burridge, Mary, 273 Burton, Sir Richard, 35 Butler, Josephine, 80

Beck, Martha, 266 Begg, Paul, 19 Bellingham, John, 67 Benedict, Helen, 2 Bennett, Herbert John, 92 Bennett, James Gordon, 81 Bennett, Sir James Risdon, 146, 249 Bennett, Mary Jane, 92 Berger, John, 213 Bermant, Chaim, 260 Bichel, Andreas, 177 black magic, 29–30, 208, 257 Blackwell, Frederick W., 228 Blake, William, 34 bloodhounds, 167–70, 192, 242 Blumenfeld, Ralph, 62 Bobbitt, John Wayne, 215 Bobbitt, Lorena, 215 Bond, Thomas, 179, 180, 182–83, 184, 189, 208, 209, 210, 233–34 Booth, Charles, 37–39, 42, 86 Booth, William, 36–37, 80 Bowyer, Thomas, 195 Box, Steven, 51 Boyle, Thomas, 12, 80 Braddon, Mary, 73, 79, 85 Bravo, Charles D. T., 100–101 Bravo, Florence, 100–101 Bright, John, 63 British Medical Journal (BMJ), 173, 175, 225–26 British press. See London newspapers; murder news; newspapers; news reporting Brodnax, John Wilkes, 216 Bronfen, Elisabeth, 14, 216 Brown, Frederick Gordon, 158, 209, 228, 231 Brown, Hannah, 67 Brownmiller, Susan, 31 Buchan, William, 217 Buckle, George Earle, 112, 241 Burnham, Harry Levy-Lawson, Lord, 76, 90, 107 Burns, John, 211

Cameron, Deborah, 31, 216, 258, 264 cannibalism, 177, 265 Capote, Truman, 255 Caputi, Jane, 31, 141, 254, 258, 273 Carlile, Richard, 59 Carpenter, Edward, 216 Carroll, Noel, 76 Catnach, James, 67, 68 Cawelti, John, 12, 94 Central News Agency, 59, 129; communication from Jack the Ripper received by, 140–41, 143, 145, 155–56 Chaillu, Paul de, 35 Chapman, Annie, 20; inquest into murder of, 126, 130, 220–27; newspaper accounts of murder, 115, 122–32, 135 Chapman, John, 20 Charrington, Frederick, 46, 248 Chibnall, Steve, 4, 49, 50–51, 52 Clarence, Prince Albert Victor, Duke of, 7, 28 Clinton, Bill, 215, 266 Cobbe, Frances Power, 241 Cobbett, William, 34, 59 Cockburn, Lord, 103 Coles, Frances, 24, 211 Collins, Wilkie, 73, 74, 79, 85, 99, 265 Conder, Alfred, 104 Connolly, Mary Ann, 25 Connor, Joseph Dennis, 96–98 Conway, Kate. See Eddowes, Catherine Conway, Thomas, 21 Cook, E. T., 60 Cooke, J. Parsons, 99 Coroner, Maria, 172 Cowen, Joseph, 56–57 Craven, Wes, 10 crime news, 5, 50–52, 54–55, 65, 218; categories of, 91–92. See also murder news; newspapers; sensationalism criminality, theories of, 85–86, 175–76

346

INDEX

42–43, 173–75, 245–48; as urban jungle, 35–36, 46–47 East End News, 110, 114; and Ripper murders, 129, 190 East London Advertiser: and Ripper murders, 120, 121–22, 130, 132, 136, 160, 165, 190, 200, 207, 221 East London Observer, 110, 114, 138; and the Lusk kidney, 178; and Ripper murders, 120–21, 129–30, 136, 145, 159–60, 165, 190, 230 Eddowes, Catherine (Catharine), 21; inquest into murder of, 141, 154, 228– 31; newspaper accounts of murder, 140, 141–63 Elephant Man ( Joseph Carey Merrick), 70 Ellis, Havelock, 86 Ericson, Richard, 4, 53, 218 Escott, Thomas H. S., 60 ethnocentrism. See xenophobia euphemism in newspaper reporting, 93– 94, 215–16 Evening News, 62, 109, 111, 115; and the Lusk kidney, 177–78; and Ripper murders, 119, 128, 145–46, 151, 152– 53, 154, 155, 161, 162–63, 176, 189– 90, 193, 195, 197, 229, 233; and the Whitehall body, 181–82 Evening Standard, 220–21, 233 execution, popular fascination with, 75

Crook, Annie, 28 Cross, Sir Richard, 43 Cullen, Tom, 26 Currie, Sir Edmund Hay, 44 Dahlgren, Peter, 238 Dahmer, Jeffrey, 7, 8, 257 Daily Chronicle, 59, 109, 113; and Ripper murders, 119, 127–28, 148, 153–55, 162, 188–89, 197, 198, 199; and the Whitehall body, 182 Daily Mail, 60 Daily News, 58 Daily Telegraph, 58, 59, 90, 109, 111–12; letters to the editor of, 240; and Ripper murders, 119, 122, 125, 134, 148–49, 151, 155, 158–59, 162, 196–97, 199, 200, 220–21, 225, 227, 228, 230, 233; and the Whitehall body, 179, 181, 182 Dalrymple, Theodore, 11 Delane, John, 112, 114 De Quincey, Thomas, 87, 88, 130 Destructive, 68 detection, letters about, 241–42 detective stories, 85, 94 deviance, 53 Dicey, Edward, 62 Didion, Joan, 9–10 Dilke, Sir Charles, 70 Disraeli, Benjamin, 35 Dix, Otto, 77 dogs. See bloodhounds Doré, Gustave, 35 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 35, 100 Druitt, Montague John, 28–29 Dupin, Auguste (Poe character), 107

Faller, Lincoln, 67 Farmer, Amelia, 125, 131 Farmer, Annie, 200, 207 Fawcett, Millicent, 80 Feldman, Paul, 31 female physiology, Victorian view of, 216–17 feminist critics, 2, 216–17; Jack the Ripper as viewed by, 3, 31, 258, 259– 61 Fernandez, Ray, 266 Fisher, Joseph, 7 Fishman, William, 33–34, 43

East End: Booth’s survey of, 37–40; criminal element in, 55; diversity of, 33, 43– 44; Jack London in, 46–47; newspapers of, 114; as perceived by affluent Londoners, 32–34, 42–43, 263; poverty in, 34, 37–39, 41–43, 173, 175; prostitution in, 45–46; racial prejudice in, 35–36; and social reformers, 36–37,

347

INDEX

Hetherington, Henry, 68 Hitchin, William, 67 Hoch, Paul, 49 Holt, William, 194 homicide. See murder Hughes, Winifred, 73 Hulten, Karl Gustav, 89 Hunt, Alan, 93 Husband, Robert, 208 Hutchinson, George, 170, 197, 198, 232 Hyde Park trials, 168

Fleet Street. See murder news; newspapers; news reporting; Ripper murders Foucault, Michel, 17, 53, 234, 258 Fraser, Col. Sir James, 251 Frayling, Christopher, 3 Frazer, Elizabeth, 31, 216, 258 Freeland, Cynthia, 9 Freud, Sigmund, 217 Gale, Sarah, 68 garroting, news reports of, 50, 54 Gay, Drew, 101 gender difference, 214, 216–17 George, David Lloyd, 262 Gill, John, 208 Gissing, George, 43, 140 Gladstone, William, 29, 86 Globe, 109, 111; and Ripper murders, 127, 143, 144, 187, 192, 194, 197, 221– 22, 223; and the Whitehall body, 182 Gold, Eliza, 152 Graphic, 153 Gray, Alfred, 209 Greenacre, James, 67–68 Greenwood, Frederic, 60 Grosz, George, 77 Gull, Sir William, 28 Gustafsdotter, Elisabeth. See Stride, Elizabeth

Illustrated Police News, 69, 183, 214 infanticide, 13–14 intertextuality, 17 Irving, Henry B., 11, 89 Jack the Ripper: communications attributed to, 172; ‘‘diary’’ of, 30–31; elusiveness of, 1–2, 10; letter and postcard sent to news agency by, 21, 140–41, 143, 145, 154–56; memorabilia for, 264; possible significance of name, 144–45; wax figure of, 211. See also Ripper murders James, Henry, 34 Jekyll and Hyde (Stevenson character), 32–33, 35, 77–78, 80, 118–19, 126, 127, 175, 234 Jerrold, Blanchard, 110 Jerrold, Douglas, 110 Jesse, Tennyson, 95 Jewett, Ellen, 68 Jewish Chronicle, 178, 237 Jews: in East End, 33, 161; as suspects in Ripper murders, 23, 30, 41, 123–24, 125, 150, 170–71, 197, 236–37, 244, 248, 260; wall graffito relating to, 162– 63. See also anti-Semitism Jones, Aled, 57 Jones, Kennedy, 60, 62, 93 Jones, Stedman, 33, 44 journalism. See crime news; murder news; newspapers Judy, 269, 271

Haggard, H. Rider, 35, 81 Hall, Stuart, 4, 49, 51, 52, 238 Halttunen, Karen, 2, 106 Hambrough, Windsor Dudley Cecil, 13 Hands, Charles, 108 Hardy, Thomas, 34–35 Harkness, Margaret (pseud. John Law), 43 Harmsworth brothers, 60 Harris, Frank, 62, 111 Harris, Melvin, 29–30 Harris, Robert Alton, 254 Hatton, Joseph, 110 Hayes, Catherine, 67 Hearst, William Randolph, 60

348

INDEX

Liberal Press Agency, 59 Lipski, Israel, 116, 170, 216, 219 Llewellyn, Rees, 118, 120, 121, 219, 220 Lloyd, Edward, 60, 110, 113 Lloyd’s Weekly, 58, 59, 109, 110, 116; and Ripper murders, 130, 135, 141–43, 156–57, 171–72, 191, 193, 198, 222– 23, 225, 229, 230; and the Whitehall body, 182, 183 Lombroso, Cesare, 78, 85, 146, 176, 243 London: criminal element in, 166–67; in literature, 34–35; social divisions within, 40–42, 263, 268. See also East End London, Jack, 46–47, 114 London newspapers: circulation of, 58, 59, 110, 112, 113, 114–15; criticism of, 174; letters to the editors of, 238–52; and the Lusk kidney, 177–78; political leanings of, 109–14; and Scotland Yard, 116–17, 119, 123, 132, 133, 134, 136–37, 141, 165–66, 190, 192–94, 254–55; space devoted to Ripper murders, 200–206. See also newspapers; Ripper murders; and names of individual newspapers Long, Mildred, 71 Lowndes, Marie Belloc, 6, 27 Lucy, Henry W., 60 Lusk, George, 172, 177–78 Lusk kidney, 172, 177–78 lust murder (lustmord ), 26, 31, 116, 139, 176, 193

Keene, Timothy. See Killeen, Thomas Kelly, John, 21, 152 Kelly, Kate. See Eddowes, Catherine Kelly, Mary Jane, 19, 22, 29; funeral of, 198–99, 200; inquests into murder of, 194, 195–96, 232–34; newspaper accounts of murder, 186–98 Kent, Constance, 98–99 Kent, Francis Saville, 98 Kent, Samuel, 98 Kent, William, 98 Keyser, Sir Polydore de, 166 Kidney, Michael, 152 Killeen, Thomas, 24 King, Jessie, 13–14, 91 Kitchin, F. H., 62 Knelman, Judith, 2, 83 Knox, Sara, 2, 215, 255 Koss, Stephen, 61 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 26, 116, 139, 176–77, 193, 243 Kürten, Peter, 251 Labouchere, Henry, 60 Lancet, 173–75, 226, 249 Lane, Harriet, 101–4 Langham, Samuel Frederick, 229 Langworthy, Edward Martin, 71 Laqueur, Thomas, 218 Law, John. See Harkness, Margaret law-and-order mail, 242–43 law-and-order news, 50–52, 117, 133–39, 158, 164–67, 199. See also crime news; murder news Leerssen, Joep, 17 LeQueux, William, 108 Lesser, Wendy, 2, 3, 254 letters to the editor, 238–52; about detection techniques, 241–42; about foreign suspects, 243–45; about law-and-order issues, 242–43; about social issues, 245–48; about suspects, 243 Levy, Joseph Moses, 58, 111 Lewinsky, Monica, 215 Lewis, ‘‘Monk,’’ 74

Macaulay, Thomas, 48 Macdonald, Roderick, 194, 196, 197, 232, 233, 241–42 Mackenzie, Compton, 256 Madge, William T., 60, 110, 111, 115, 117 magic candles, 235–36 Malcolm, Mary, 152 Mansel, Henry, 71–72, 74 Mansfield, Richard, 29, 78 Marshall, Inspector, 183, 184

349

INDEX

art, 87–90; motivations for, 84, 95; sexual aspects of, 31, 93; societal, 104–8; women as perpetrators of, 83. See also Bravo, Florence; Connor, Joseph Dennis; Kent, Constance; poisoning; Ripper murders; Wainwright, Henry murder news: euphemism used in reporting of, 93–94; fascination with, 10–12, 14, 67–68, 83–85, 94, 216; as Gothic horror, 106–7, 269; intertextuality of, 17; as lesson in morality, 86–87, 97–98, 101–2, 153; as narrative, 255–56; and power, 84; as reflection of society at large, 4, 8–9, 12, 15; selectivity involved in reporting of, 5–6, 9, 12–14, 90–93, 104; typical format of, 95–96. See also Ripper murders; sensationalism murderology, 2 Murphy, Thomas, 261 Murray, Major, 72

Massingham, Henry, 60, 63, 111, 112, 113, 115 Matthews, Henry, 116, 133, 137, 141, 149, 150, 156, 198, 207, 269 Maturin, Charles, 74 Maudsley, Henry, 86 Max, Gabriel, 216 Maybrick, Florence, 30 Maybrick, James, 30–31 Mayhew, Henry, 33, 80 McCarthy, John, 186, 195, 197, 199– 200 McKenzie, Alice (‘‘Clay Pipe’’), 23, 209 Mearns, Rev. Andrew, 37, 41 media. See newspapers medical examiners: as detectives in Ripper murders, 215, 217–19. See also Bond, Thomas; Brown, Frederick Gordon; Llewellyn, Rees; Phillips, George Bagster Meigs, Charles, 217 Mergenthaler, Otmar, 57 Merrick, Joseph Carey, 70 Meyer, Nathan, 267 Mill, John Stuart, 88 Miller, D. A., 80 Monro, James, 165, 207, 210, 268 Monson, Alfred John, 13 Montagu, Samuel, 245 Moody, Anne Marie, 72 moon, phases of, 29 Moore, Henry, 268 Mordaunt, Sir Charles, 70–71 Mordaunt, Lady Harriet, 70–71 Morison, Stanley, 62 Morley, John, 113 Morning Post, 109, 111, 127, 134, 144, 149, 189, 192–93, 199, 200, 220–21, 233 Morrison, Arthur, 45, 86 Morrison, William D., 85 Moses, Joseph, 67 muggings, 50, 51 Mulvey, Laura, 214 murder: domestic, 94–96, 105–6; as fine

narrative and reality, 17–18, 255–56 Neill, John, 118, 121 Neville, Thomas, 179, 180, 183 Newgate Calendar, 67, 87 New Journalism, 61–62, 66, 111. See also sensationalism Newnes, George, 60 news agencies, 58–59, 63. See also Central News Agency News of the World, 162 newspapers: crime news as reported in, 50–52; cultural criticism of, 4, 48–50; deviance as reported by, 53–55; and the New Journalism, 61–62, 66; readership of, 55–61; sensationalism in, 63– 64; technological progress in printing of, 57. See also London newspapers; murder news news reporting: as cultural construct, 49, 52–53; euphemism used in, 93–94, 215–16; emphases of, 63; fictions in, 52, 53–54; truth in, 48, 54, 63–64 Nichols, Mary Ann (Polly), 19–20, 26; inquest into murder of, 121–22, 219–

350

INDEX

prostitution: of children, 79–80; as factor in Ripper murders, 20–21, 22, 23, 24; in Whitechapel, 45–46 Pulitzer, Joseph, 60 Punch, 269, 270

220; newspaper accounts of murder, 115, 117–22 Nichols, William, 121 Norris, Joel, 272 novels: horror in, 74–79; sensationalism in, 73–74, 79

Radcliffe, Ann, 74 readership, of Victorian newspapers, 55– 61 Reid, Arnot, 61–62 Reynolds, George, 60, 73, 110 Reynolds’s Newspaper, 58, 73, 109, 110; and Ripper murders, 120, 135, 137–38, 143, 156, 191, 198, 225, 228, 230, 233 Richards, Thomas, 58 Ripperature, 1–2, 6–7, 19, 27–28 Ripper murders: aftermath of, 206–12, 268–71; Baxter’s theory about, 223–24, 225–27, 242, 248, 249, 255; circumstances of, 19–23; class implications of, 262–64; clinical descriptions of, 117– 18; confessors to, 239, 261–62; continuing speculation about, 206–12; discrepancies in reporting of, 117; early reports of, 115–17; and editorial opinion, 119, 133–39, 165–66, 192–200; fears inspired by, 256–57; and gender relations, 259–62; as Gothic horror, 128; horrifying aspects of, 104–5, 106, 107–8; inquests into, 121–22, 141, 149, 154, 194, 195–96, 215, 219–34; linked to Whitehall body, 181–82, 185; meaning of, 265–66; motives for, 144, 175– 77, 235–36, 244, 249–50; new angles on, 171–73; patterns in, 22–23; petitions to the Queen provoked by, 178– 79; in popular culture, 264–65; prostitution as factor in, 20–21, 22, 23, 24, 131; as reported by London journalists, 3–6, 15–16, 21, 23–27, 107–8, 110, 114–39, 145–63; sexual aspects of, 128, 146–47, 176–77, 214, 234–35; in social context, 36–37, 55, 118–19, 135–36, 137–39, 159, 245–48, 253– 54, 266–68; space devoted to coverage

O’Connor, T. P., 60, 62, 113 Openshaw, Thomas, 178 Orientalism, 244, 257 Orwell, George, 89 Osborne, Rev. Sidney Godolphin (‘‘S.G.O.’’), 37, 136, 150, 246–47, 248 Packer, Matthew, 153 Pall Mall Gazette, 61, 69, 79–82, 109, 113–14; and the Lusk kidney, 178; and Ripper murders, 116, 119–20, 125–26, 134, 135, 149–50, 162, 166, 190, 195– 96, 199, 206–8, 209, 220, 224–25, 232– 33, 235–36; and the Whitehall body, 179, 182, 183, 184 Palmer, Walter, 76 Palmer, William, 76, 99, 100 Parke, Ernest, 60, 113, 117, 118, 123–24 Parnell, Charles Stewart, 70 Payne, George, 261 Peace, Charlie, 256 Pennett, William, 210 People, 109, 110; and Ripper murders, 130–31, 135, 157–58, 191–92, 198, 223; and the Whitehall body, 180 Perceval, Spencer, 67 Perfect Diurnall, 67 petitions to the Queen, 178–79 Phillips, George Bagster, 126, 137, 196, 209, 210, 220–24, 226 Pike, Luke Owen, 85 Pizer, John, 30, 123–24, 127 poisoning: in Balham case, 101; by physicians, 99–100 police. See Scotland Yard police photographs, 265 Pomeroy, Jesse Harding, 11 Pritchard, Edward, 100

351

INDEX

sexual murder, 31, 254, 258. See also lust murder Shaw, George Bernard, 113, 262–63 Shelley, Mary, 74–75 Sheppard, Jack, 67 Showalter, Elaine, 217 Sickert, Walter, 29 Simonet, Enrique, 216 Sims, George, 41 Sivvey, Jacky, 20 Skinner, Keith, 19 Sleigh, A. B., 111 Smethurst, Thomas, 99–100 Smith, Eliza Anne. See Chapman, Annie Smith, Emma Elizabeth, 26, 93, 118 Smith, Mary Anne, 67 socialism, 153 social reformers: and East Enders, 36–37, 42–43, 173–75, 263, 266–68; and letters to the editor, 245–48 Spender, J. A., 60 Springfield, Lincoln, 108 Srebnick, Amy, 2 Stallybrass, Peter, 37, 246 Standard, 58, 59, 140 Stanley, Henry Morton, 35, 36, 38 Star, 59, 62, 113, 115, 116; and Ripper murders, 118, 122–24, 133, 147–48, 159, 188, 192, 194–95, 197–98, 200 Starr, Kenneth, 266 Stead, William T., 36, 37, 60, 61, 71, 79– 82, 113–14, 135–36, 149–50, 166, 207–8, 224, 244 Stephen, Sir James Fitzjames, 28 Stephen, James K., 28 Stephen, Leslie, 66, 88 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 32–33, 35, 77– 78, 86 Stokes, Alfred, 102, 103, 104 Stride, Elizabeth, 20, 22; inquest into murder of, 141, 149, 154, 227–28; newspaper accounts of murder, 140, 141–63 Stride, John, 20 Sue, Eugène, 73

Ripper murders (continued) of, 200–206; suspects in, 28–31, 41, 105, 115, 150, 159, 172–73, 243–45; weapon probably used in, 23, 218. See also Jack the Ripper; suspects Ripper victims, 19–24, 93, 116; ‘‘immoral’’ lifestyles of, 115, 131–32; wounds suffered by, 24–25, 118, 124, 125, 126, 129–30, 143–44, 148, 158, 188, 189, 191, 213, 214–15, 219–34. See also Chapman, Annie; Eddowes, Catherine; Kelly, Mary Jane; Nichols, Mary Ann (Polly); Stride, Elizabeth Ritter, Moses, 236–37 Roberts, William, 72 Rose, Edwin, 91 Roughead, William, 11, 13, 95 Rumbelow, Donald, 19, 214 Russell, Sir William H., 60 St. James’s Gazette, 114 Sala, George Augustus, 112 Salisbury, Robert Cecil, 3rd marquis of, 23, 193 Salvation Army, 36 Saunders, William, 171 Savage, George, 160–61, 250 Savage, Jane, 137 Schechter, Harold, 11 scopophilia, 214 Scotland Yard: letters about, 242–43; letters to, 251; and the press, 116–17, 119, 123, 132, 133, 134, 136–37, 141, 165–66, 190, 192–94, 254–55 Scotsman, 151 Scott, C. P., 111 Searle, Percy Knight, 208 sensationalism: in fiction, 73–74; horror element of, 74–79; in news reporting, 63–64, 65–70, 174; pictorial, 69; William T. Stead as practitioner of, 79– 82; and upper-class scandals, 70–73 Sequeira, George, 171 serial killers, 8, 17, 26, 29–30, 257–58, 272, 273

352

INDEX

Tuchman, Gaye, 49 Tunstall, Jeremy, 49 Tussaud, Madame Marie, 78–79

Sugden, Philip, 19, 107 suspects, 150, 159, 172–73, 251; Joseph Barnett, 29; David Cohen, 30; Thomas Neill Cream, 30; foreign, 243–45, 257; Jews as, 23, 30, 41, 123–24, 125, 150, 170–71, 197, 236–37, 245, 248, 260; Severin Klosowski (George Chapman), 30; Aaron Kosminski, 29, 30; letters to the editor about, 243; Michael Ostrog, 29; Alexander Pedachenko, 30; William Pigott, 124; Walter Sickert, 29; Robert Donston Stephenson (Roslyn D’Onston), 29–30; Francis J. Tumblety, 29. See also Clarence, Prince Albert Victor, Duke of; Druitt, Montague John; Gladstone, William; Gull, Sir William; Maybrick, James; Pizer, John; Stephen, James K. Sutcliffe, Peter, 212, 258 Sutherland, Henry, 249 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 88–89 syndicated news. See news agencies

Unwin, Theresa, 262 uterus: as missing organ in Ripper murders, 125, 158, 219, 220–27, 229– 31, 234–37, 265; myths about, 217; speculation about use of, 235–36 Valenti, Richard, 7 Victoria, Queen: concerns of about Ripper, 193; petitions to, 178–79 Victorian society, infrequency of murder in, 12 vigilance committees, 133, 138, 149, 162 violence, society as participant in, 14–15. See also murder; murder news; Ripper murders voyeurism, 14, 214, 273 Wainewright, Thomas Griffiths, 88–89 Wainwright, Henry, 101–4 Wainwright, Thomas, 102, 103 Walker, Edward, 121 Walkowitz, Judith R., 31, 167, 259–61 Walpole, Horace, 74 Walter, John III, 112 Waring, Jasper, 184 Warren, Sir Charles, 54, 55, 115, 116, 123, 132, 135, 136–37, 141, 153, 158, 162–63, 165–66, 168, 180–81, 187, 193, 197–98, 242; resignation of, 199, 200 Watkins, Edward, 141–42, 143, 147 Watson, Dr. John (Conan Doyle character), 12, 17, 90 Watts, Arthur, 87 Watts, Edward, 152 Weare, William, 68 Webb, Beatrice, 43 Weekly Times, 109, 110; and Ripper murders, 131–32, 158, 198, 221, 223, 225, 231, 233 Weeks, Jeffrey, 258

Tabram, Henry, 25 Tabram, Martha, 24, 25–26, 118, 121 Tape, Mary, 96–98 Tatar, Maria, 2, 11, 77, 254, 273 Tenniel, Sir John, 269, 270 Thelwall v. Yelverton, 71 Thomas, Charles, 261 Thomson, James, 34, 86 Thurtell, John, 68 Tichborne, Roger, 71 Tichborne Claimant, 70, 71 Times, 58, 63, 109, 112; letters to the editor of, 241, 246–47, 250; and the Lusk kidney, 178; and Ripper murders, 117, 124–25, 129, 131, 143, 172, 193–94, 219, 221, 223–24, 226–27, 229, 236– 37; and the Whitehall body, 179, 182– 83, 184 Tithecott, Richard, 2, 7–8, 17, 257, 265– 66, 272 Treves, Frederick, 70 Tucher, Andy, 2

353

INDEX

Williams, Raymond, 105 Wilson, Colin, 254, 257, 273 Winslow, Lyttleton Forbes, 125, 128– 29, 146, 175–76, 187–88, 189, 249– 50 wire services. See news agencies women: and homicide, 83; interest of in murder, 2–3. See also feminist critics; gender difference Wooler, Thomas J., 59 Woolf, Virginia, 28

Wells, Leonard, 137–38 Western Mail, 129, 132, 156, 196, 228 Westminster trunk. See Whitehall body Whicher, Jonathan, 98 White, Allon, 37, 246 White, Hayden, 16–17, 18 White, Jerry, 267 Whitechapel murders. See East End; Ripper murders Whitehall body, 179–85 Wiener, Joel, 61 Wiener, Martin, 86 Wild, Jonathan, 67 Wilde, Oscar, 63, 65–66, 88–89 Williams, John, 67, 87

xenophobia, 243–45 Yorkshire Ripper, 212, 258

354