One interesting book I snagged recently at Half Price Books is Mysteries of Police and Crime: Victorian Murders by Major Arthur Griffiths. It is a facsimile of the 1889 edition. He was a prison inspector and deputy governor of Millbank and Wormwood Scrubs and is the fellow who first alluded to the three suspects the police favored as Jack the Ripper suspects. Although he did not name them, he described Kosminski, Ostrog, and Druitt. He is a writer of lively prose and tells interesting tales emphasizing the mystery and romance of police work.
The Murder of the Century by Paul Collins is another, about the discovery of a woman’s torso in NYC in 1897. It sparked America’s first tabloid war, which reached to the heights and depths of the Gilded Age.
Another of interest is Midnight in Peking by Paul French, not the Asimov pen name but a British journalist. It is about the 1937 murder of an Englishwoman in China that, according to the subtitle, ‘haunted the last days of Old China’. It looks to be very well written, concise, and has a lovely set of photo plates, some in color.
Then there is a classic of British horror that has not been in print for years, until the Wordsworth inexpensive paperback editions brought it back. This is a second edition, revised to restore the original, which had been rewritten by a few hacks anonymously. It is called A String of Pearls and, if the scholarship behind this edition is correct, the writer was the king of the Penny Dreadfuls published by Edward Lloyd, James Malcolm Rymer. This work introduced Sweeny Todd to the world.
The Demon Barber of Fleet Street monicker was first used in the tail-end of a long blurb advertising the book and probably written by Ed Lloyd himself. Authorship of A String of Pearls is sketchy due to Lloyd’s anonymous habits and wayward use of house names, so it’s possible Rymer merely polished a work submitted over the transom. We do not know. It does contain much of his prose, however, and is in his style.
A String of Pearls, and particularly Sweeny Todd as a character, proved a strong influence not only on how Jack the Ripper was covered a few years later, but how Dracula was written, right down to Bram Stoker cribbing entire scenes wholesale for his vampire novel, including the end sequence. Rymer, incidentallyl, also wrote Varney the Vampire prior to Stoker’s outing, with Dracula itself likely rewritten by Leigh Hunt. Polished, one should say. Mr. Hunt was the cause of Oscar Wilde’s sojourn in Reading Gaol for immorality, incidentally. All these things link in eerie ways.
Even Hannibal Lecter stems from Sweeny Todd, who was an entirely realistic psychopath portrayed in gritty realistic settings studded with witty set-piece social commentary of the Dickensian bent. A String of Pearls was a huge success at its first publication, then waited 20 years for a second edition, this time issued in serial form and padded out to its detriment by a greedy Lloyd, who waited so long due to legal shenanigans bearing upon is rights to the work.
This edition restores the original text and demonstrates how superior a work of horror and of prose it is.
In a related vein, I also picked up an anthology of thirteen Victorian ghost stories, Gaslit Horror edited by Hugh Lamb. It is a Dover edition and of high quality. It’s hard for me to find Victorian horror and ghost stories I don’t already have in my library but this one managed to present me with several.
Meanwhile I continue reading Jack the Ripper: The 21st Century Investigation by Trevor Marriott, an ex homicide detective. He essentially wrote an essay and has padded it with the transcripts of the coroner inquests for all five canonical Ripper victims, plus a couple. I am in the final third but the transcripts are revelatory, both because they sort a good deal of guff from subsequent accounts, and because they demonstrate how focused, intelligent, and articulate were the witnesses. This is true of both detectives and cart drives, city officials and laborers.
Sad to note how steeply we have been degraded in order to control us.
To discuss a couple details for any budding Ripperologists among us, it seems the Goulston Street chalk scrawl may have been unrelated to the Ripper killings. Marriott postulates that the apron fragment bearing blood and fecal matter found near the chalk scrawl, which matches perfectly the chunk missing from Catherine Eddowe’s apron at the murder scene, may have been left there by her after she used the stairwell as a toilet. She was killed at the fringe of Whitechapel, as were all the others, yet Goulston Street lies in its heart, where the Ripper, or any murderer, would not have fled, that being where the cops had a dragnet out, as well as undercover cops, vigilance committee members, and so on seeking him. Stepping a block out of Whitechapel in London City proper eliminated all that, so even a denizen of Whitechapel would have been an idiot to flee into and not from pursuit.
Feasible, n’est-ce pas?
There is no agreed-upon phrasing for the phrase scrawled in chalk at Goulston Street, either. THE JUWES (or Jews) ARE (not?) THE MEN WHO WILL (not?) BE BLAMED FOR NOTHING is the phrase. The spelling is contested, the placement of the word “not” is disputed, and police notebooks conflict, all because Commissioner Warren decided to have it sponged off before daylight, when a photograph could have been taken. Even he later acknowledged this as a huge mistake.
Marriott also wonders if the uterus and kidney may have been taken not at the crime scene nor by the Ripper but at the mortuary, where the deceased lay for twelve hours unattended until the autopsy. A lucrative theft is the possible reason, medical students needing such items. It is even possible the morgue attendant himself — a Ripper suspect in another book — was the culprit guilty of removing the organs for sale.
Quite a grisly sideline but nothing any self-respecting republicant capitalist would not do.
He says Liz Stride is not a Ripper victim both because she was not at Whitechapel’s fringes and because only her throat was cut. Well, if he were interrupted, and the cartman’s horse shied due to him standing right there in the darkness, unseen by the driver, then perhaps he did do it, but it’s equally possible she was an unrelated victim.
I find this pushing the coincidence button a bit too heavily.
When The Diary of Jack the Ripper came out aimed at Liverpool merchant James Maybrick as the Ripper, one of its “new” bits of evidence was the noticing of the letters F M on the wall near Mary Jane Kelly’s body. In the Maybrick scenario, F M stands for Florence Maybrick, his detested wife who later murdered him and was the first American woman convicted of murder in Britain. She served fourteen years and was released, went to America, and insisted upon her innocence.
In The Ripper Code by Thomas Toughhill, a more reasonable culprit is named. Frank Miles, artist and erstwhile cohabitor of Oscar Wilde’s house and bed, worked with Wilde to make Lily Langtry a famous beauty and later actress. His sketches of her, and other society beauties, proved incredibly popular and made him a fortune. It also brought him to ruin when Langtry came up pregnant by a royal; she had the baby in Paris and handed it to her mother, but interrupted Miles’s career. Worse, he suffered from syphilis caught in a bordello in college, where he was also often in trouble with Wilde and others for naughty activities frowned upon by straight society. He signed his work F. M.
Miles ended up bitter and estranged, increasingly poorer despite his wealthy family, and a failed artist. He hated whores openly and raged against them when drunk, which was often. His mind began to go away. He checked himself into an asylum, then checked himself out just before the Ripper murders began in the late summer of 1888. He was from the City, from near Whitechapel, and fit the description of the man seen talking with Mary Kelly and entering her apartment. This witness, who knew her, waited around 45 minutes and, when they did not reappear, wandered off.
She was murdered not long after.
This witness heard the man with Kelly say, “You’ll do for what I have described.” This could have a sexual undertone but it could as easily refer to her posing for him, as she had posed for Frank Miles several times previously. She likely posed nude on the bed for him to sketch, fell asleep, and was murdered, then taken apart. A lithograph of a Frank Miles drawing is said to have been on Kelly’s wall, and on it, some of her intestines. The initials are him signing his work.
Just after this ultimate Ripper murder, Miles checked himself back into the asylum. He later entirely lost his faculties to syphilis and died there.
It is thought that Oscar Wilde knew his friend and lover had been the Ripper and it is postulated Wilde was the anonymous source of the MacNaughten memo assertion that John Montague Druitt was the Ripper. Druitt had committed suicide, or had been beaten and hurled into the river, not long after Mary Kelly’s murder. He’d also been at Oxford with Wilde and had been among the gay circle denied entry into the debating club and so forth as punishment. He suffered from melancholy, which we’d call chronic depression or the shuddersome term ‘bi-polar disease’ cobbled up by demented drug pushers. (Gives you two things to medicate.)
So Druitt was a red herring for Miles, and why would a red herring be acceptable to Commissioner MacNaughten? Miles linked to Langtry, who linked to royalty. Why not simply accept a dead man as a good suspect, never name a culprit, and let the whole thing go, rather than risk stirring a royal scandal and end one’s career in disgrace?
Wilde never once mentioned Miles after the Ripper murders, despite having once been inseparable from him.
Interestingly, another artist who knew Wilde and Miles was Walter Sickert, who was Patricia Cornwell’s chosen culprit in Portrait of Jack the Ripper. Sickert painted at least two paintings with titles mentioning the Ripper and told the story at a dinner party that became The Lodger by Marie Belloc-Lowndes, who was there that night. The Lodger was the premiere Ripper fiction. Well, except that Sweeny Todd came first…
While fascinating, all the preceding lacks sufficient hard fact to confirm or deny any suspect definitively as Jack the Ripper. You could not design the ambiguity better.
And why did Sir Arthur Conan Doyle avoid writing about Jack the Ripper when he routinely mined true crime for plots and notions to be used in his Sherlock Holmes stories? The game’s afoot.
Just watch you don’t put it in your mouth.
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