“As with much of the evidence surrounding these murders, the data is ambiguous, a shifting cloud of facts and factoids onto which we project the fictions that seem most appropriate to our times and our inclinations.”
Alan Moore wrote that in the appendix to From Hell, his macabre tale of Jack the Ripper. (Technically Eddie Campbell shares the credit since he drew the pictures, but, we all know this is really Moore’s book.)
Jack the Ripper surely benefits from having a memorable nickname, but his hold on the imagination of people for a century and a half is remarkable. The guy (or maybe girl—there actually is a theory that the murderer was a woman!) murdered five prostitutes in the Whitechapel section of London in 1888, and people are still writing books about him in 2020. I must admit, I have never quite understood the fascination, but that is undoubtedly in part due to the odd way I first learned about him.
I was in high school, spending my lunch hour browsing in the school library, when I pulled a book off the shelf. It was a Sherlock Holmes story. I had heard of Holmes, never read him, so I figured it was a good time to start. There I am merrily reading away about Holmes and his battle with his arch-nemesis Moriarty. Troubling stuff. And then Watson makes a remarkable discovery. Holmes and Moriarty are the same person! Even more amazing: Holmes is Jack the Ripper.
As the Perceptive Reader has noted, this was not a story written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. My high school self did not know about canonical and non-canonical Holmes stories. The book was such a surreal mess, it was decades before I ever read another Holmes story, and I have steadfastly refused to read another Holmes story written by anyone other than Doyle. I have also never discovered an interest in Jack the Ripper; every time I hear the name, I think about Sherlock Holmes.
(I had never again seen or heard of the novel I read in high school. But, thanks to writing this post and the amazing internet, I discovered what it was. Michael Dibdin’s The Last Sherlock Holmes Story. I thought about buying a copy, but ten bucks exceeded the benefit I thought I might derive from rereading a bad novel for nostalgic purposes. Oddly, the Mount Holyoke Library does not own a copy of this book.)
About a decade ago, I finally read another book about Jack the Ripper. Moore’s book. It bored me. Four women, all prostitutes, decide to blackmail the Royal family for a trifling sum needed to pay off some local gang. The secret is that the Prince had an illegitimate child. Queen Victoria summons the court doctor, William Gull, and orders him to dispose of the women. Jack the Ripper is born. (The fifth women was murdered by Gull in a case of mistaken identity.)
Yep, the Queen of England was behind the murders. Suddenly Sherlock Homes seems like a relatively plausible candidate to be Jack the Ripper.
Moore, being Moore, of course doesn’t stop there. The murders are bizarre and gruesome because Gull is a Mason, and Moore thoroughly enjoys wild conspiracy theories. What starts out seeming like a straightforward tale of a serial murderer turns into a wild mystical journey into the chthonic forces operating along axes of power running beneath the surface of London. Hawksmore’s cathedrals play a role in tapping into these forces. The real meaning of Jack the Ripper can only be seen by stepping into the Fourth Dimension and looking at the pattern of violence in these locations through time. Moore is having a merry time.
On top of all that, there is a veritable Who’s Who of surprise appearances. Blake. Yeats. Wilde. Merrick (The Elephant Man). Crowley, whose inclusion prompted Moore to include this note: “The opportunity to include a fairly spurious cameo by one of the foremost occultists of all time seemed too good to pass up.”
The first time I read the book, I had no idea what was going on beyond the fact that the Queen of England was ordering murders and the fact that the victims were prostitutes gave Moore license to work in all sorts of lascivious bits. Yawn. The book has been collecting dust.
Then along comes a former student who tells me about a new book she is reading. The Five by Rubenhold. It is an archival journey into the stories of the victims. Lots and lots of archival work. The conclusion: only one of the five victims was actually a prostitute. Jack the Ripper just found the women sleeping on the ground and killed them, but the press decided to sensationalize matters by saying the victims were all prostitutes. Insert obvious moralizing by the author.
Now, when I was hearing this tale, I got to wondering about Moore’s book. I reread it, but this time, I read the appendix along with the story. Moore provides a page by page description of his sources for all the assorted scenes in the book. Reading the notes along with the story made sense of the story itself.
Moore seems to have read just about every Jack the Ripper book out there, and then freely wandered through the clues to craft a story. He acknowledges throughout which parts of his story are based on fact and which parts were purely his creations in order to weave the facts into a tale. (Spoiler alert: there is zero evidence the Queen of England ordered the murders. Whew.)
The history of Jack the Ripper theories turns out to be more interesting than Jack the Ripper. Moore plays fair with the facts (well, assuming his appendix is reliable). But, the facts are a hodgepodge of random details. We know five women were murdered, their throats were slashed, and they were disemboweled. Grisly stuff. There are conflicting and unreliable eyewitnesses to the activities of the women in the hours before the murders, but no witnesses to the murders themselves. The relative lack of blood at a couple of the locations suggests the women might have been strangled first or that they were killed elsewhere and their bodies were dumped where they were found. Now, amateur sleuth: Whodunit?
The police and newspapers also received quite a few notes from Jack the Ripper himself. Jack’s name comes from one of these notes. So, does the title of Moore’s book; one of these notes claims to have been written “From Hell.” To help you solve the murder, you can also try to figure out which, if any, of these notes were actually written by the murderer.
Surrounding the details of the case was an impressive amount of sensationalization. The Newspapers had a field day. An entire cottage industry arose, making profits off the deaths. The sites of the deaths became instant tourist attractions, and vendors popped up to sell merchandise. Moore again: “I include the scene to give an indication of just how long the public’s ghoulish fascination for the Whitechapel murders (from which the present author cannot in all conscience exclude himself) has been an established fact.”
If all these scraps and details are fascinating to you, you can easily join the band of Ripperologists. Yes, Ripperologist is a real term. My first foray into Ripperology came when I reread Moore’s book and thought about the book my former student read. If Moore is accurate about the known facts, then Rubenhold’s book is wrong. A quick glance through some of the Ripperologist forums reveals my amateur sleuthing is backed up by the less amateur sleuths. It simply is not true that nobody has ever examined the lives of the victims, and the story that they were all just sleeping on the street when the murderer found them is ludicrous.
This is the fun of being a Ripperologist, by the way. You get to make up your own theories. After all, we can’t prove that the Queen of England did not order the murders or that the Masons were not involved. What is the answer? In the second appendix to his book, Moore tells the tale of how he came to write From Hell: “Slowly it dawns on me that despite the Gull theory’s obvious attractions, the idea of a solution, any solution, is inane. Murder isn’t like books.”
It is hard to escape the conclusion that the reason Jack the Ripper lives so large in the public imagination is that his crimes were ghoulish and yet he was never caught. He killed five people. According to the ever-helpful Wikipedia, killing five people barely gets you onto the serial killer list. There are over 225 serial killers with more than five victims. I have only heard of a handful of names on that list, and none of them have the name recognition or cachet of Jack the Ripper.
I’d like to think there is an uplifting message here, but I am afraid there is not. Looking at Jack the Ripper, both the person and the fascination with him, is staring into the abyss. Sometimes, it is good to stare into that abyss just to remind ourselves of how far there is to fall if we get too close to the edge.
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