London's Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City (20 page)

Figure 4 `The latest murder, Moonshine, November 1890. Here the power and perceived lack of responsibility of the press in carrying sensational stories of murder and crime echoes that of the earlier Punch cartoon.2"

London has a longer history of demonic semi-mythical characters within which `Jack' can be situated. Three (the London Monster, Spring Heeled Jack and Sweeney Todd) are of particular interest in that they all have claims to have existed but have now passed into myth with their stories told and retold until it is very hard to separate fact from fiction. I would argue that the same is becoming true of Jack the Ripper; the abundance of possible suspects, the destruction or renaming of the streets in which his victims died, the purported loss of `evidence' from police files, the Ripper letters, a number of films and television series, and above all the myth making by both contemporaries and more recent contributors, has muddied the waters to the extent that the truth is now almost completely obscured. Distance has a lot to do with this. History has a tendency to descend into myth the further removed from the events it becomes. Restructuring the past to serve the interests of the present is hardly new - witness Julius Caesar's self-justification in his histories, Shakespeare's demonization of King Richard III or indeed Hollywood's reinterpretation of the Second World War in numerous films that portray American involvement far beyond reality. History is traditionally written by the victors, or the descendants of the victors, but it is also being continually rewritten to serve the needs of the present or to assuage the guilt of the past. Our museums are redesigning their displays to take account of changing sentiments towards colonialism, slavery, the holocaust and other events. School curricula have also been adapted and altered to reinterpret the past and to be inclusive of changing ethnicity within modern Britain. I am not saying that this is a bad thing per se, merely that we need to be aware that the mythologizing of the past is a continuum within history writing and that we should be aware of it.

With that caveat in mind we might now turn to the three semi-mythical characters mentioned above, namely the London Monster, Spring Heeled Jack and Sweeney Todd. All three have links in common with the Ripper, all three allegedly terrorized London and the first two at least can - with `Jack' - be said to have been used by the press to suppress the activities of women. I will return to this point later. So, who were these three `monsters' and how real are their stories?

THE LONDON MONSTER, SPRING HEELED JACK AND SWEENEY TODD: SENSATION, OUTRAGE AND MURDER IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LONDON

In 1789, almost a century before the Ripper struck in East London, several women in the capital reported being attacked by an unpleasant man who followed them in the street, used foul, suggestive and abusive language and then stabbed them in the leg or thigh before calmly walking away. Both the number of attacks and their intensity increased in 1790. By now the attacks had escalated to include attempts to cut hair, clothes and to kick and stab at the buttocks of women. The attacker's final refinement was to conceal a long pin in a nosegay he wore and then offer to let ladies smell it: at which point he stabbed them in the nose. The fiend quickly earned the title `The Monster' and all London was in uproar about his actions. A reward for the capture of the Monster was offered by a wealthy insurance broker, John Julius Angerstein, who estimated that the Monster had struck over 30 times between May 1788 and April 1790. `Wanted' posters carrying a description of the culprit were pasted up all over London, these adding to the general air of panic surrounding the attacks. As a result all sorts of people were arrested as Londoners hoped to gain the £50 reward and rid the streets of such a notorious character. None of those detained were identified as the Monster by any of his victims and many were simply the victims of vindictive attacks or greed as their accusers sought to profit from the reward money. The panic was to be a foretaste of that surrounding the Whitechapel murders 100 years later.u

Monster-mania gripped London and the press and caricaturists fed the alarm with regular reports of fresh attacks on the city's womenfolk. The inabilities of the Bow Street Runners and Angerstein's campaign to capture the Monster were ridiculed and some women took to wearing protective underwear under their skirts. There were similarities here with reactions to the garrotting panics of 1856 and 1862 which saw Londoners donning neck guards and adopting antigarrotting tactics suggested by correspondents to the papers and entrepreneurs bent on cashing in on the widespread sense of alarm that the relatively few street robberies had caused.22 Eventually someone was arrested, charged and convicted of being the Monster. Rhynwick Williams, an artificial flower maker, was brought to trial at the Old Bailey in July 1790. Williams was identified by seven women and initially found guilty, before a retrial in December (where he was able to obtain better legal representation) confirmed his conviction for assault. He spent six years in Newgate Prison. Was Williams the Monster? His key biographer, Jan Bondeson, believes Williams was probably guilty of some attacks and was known to be uncouth and abusive to women that spurned his advances but it would seem unlikely that he carried out all the attacks on women in London. After all, Bondeson lists nearly 60 reported incidents of women being stabbed by the Monster and descriptions of the attacker varied considerably. So it is more probable that copycat `Monsters; reacting to the press coverage and moral panic, carried out a large number of these assaults which in turn built the phenomenon of the London Monster into a much greater event than it

There have been plenty of examples of similar attackers throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and so it is possible to make suggestions or explanations for Williams' behaviour. The most probable is simply that he was an individual who was unable to achieve sexual satisfaction in any other way. In more recent attacks the sexual nature of the crime has been more explicit - it may have been true of Williams but not reported for fear of offending readers. Phantom attackers in Paris, New York and elsewhere were all probably fulfilling a sexual urge that they were unable to satisfy in any normal way. Though less violent than `Jack' the attacks of the London Monster belong within the same psychological profile.

In what other ways can we read the story of the Monster? The attacks on defenceless women in the capital allowed some men to insist that all women went about accompanied by men or stayed at home, thereby reinforcing paternalistic relationships in a period when enlightenment ideas were promoting democracy, freedom and liberation. Across the Channel the French Revolution was in full swing with its very real threat to the ancien regime in wider Europe. As Bondeson has noted:

Monster-mania can be seen as a paradoxical reaction to this situation: an outburst of show respectability and sensibility against the sexual threat of the man-monsters surrounding the women. The Monster phenomenon identified sexual liberty with bloody violence: his sexual deviancy could be linked to political anarchy. In the act of catching a Monster, and putting him away in jail, the authorities demonstrated their ability to control even aberrant sexual urges, thus re-establishing the sentimental definition of human relationships that many people feared was under threat from the French revolutionaries 24

This might be taking things too far but there is, I would suggest, quite a striking similarity with characterizations of the Ripper in the 1880s: a semi-mythical monster that preyed on women (in `Jack's case those of the poorest class) in a period when bearded revolutionaries such as Marx and Bakunin stalked the capitals of Europe. The Ripper, like the Monster, was to become a representation of a threat to society.

If Rhynwick Williams was the fall guy for fears about a sex fiend on London's streets then the actions of our next case study were even more bizarre and threatening. Spring Heeled Jack, like Jack the Ripper, was never formally brought to justice and has entered folklore almost completely. One February night, in 1838, sisters Lucy and Margaret Scales were walking home from their brother's house in Limehouse at 8.30 p.m. It was already dark as they passed Green Dragon Alley. Suddenly, a cloaked silhouette leapt from the darkness and breathed blue flame into Lucy's face. The laughing figure jumped high over his victim and her sister and landed on the roof of a house. From there he bounded off into the night. Although the attack was shocking it was not without precedent. The previous September a businessman had taken a short cut across Barnes Common in West London (a well-known haunt for highway robbers) when a cloaked figure vaulted the railings of the cemetery as if from a springboard and landed in front of him. The figure had pointed ears, glowing eyes, and a pointed nose. The following night, the strange figure assailed three girls on the common. This time he grabbed at one of them, trying to tear off her clothing. More strange attacks then followed, in Lavender Hill and at Clapham. One victim gave this description of the man who had attacked her:

He wore a large helmet, and a sort of tight-fitting costume that felt like oilskin. But the cape was like the ones worn by policemen. His hands were cold as ice, and like powerful claws. But the most frightening thing about him was his eyes. They shone like balls of fire.

There were several other reported sightings of the fiend who was dubbed `Spring Heeled Jack' and some Londoners followed the lead of the Duke of Wellington and armed themselves to patrol the streets at night. Spring Heeled Jack became a popular subject for the penny dreadfuls, and for melodrama, popular musicals and songs. No one was ever positively identified as the devilish attacker although the Marquis of Waterford - a cruel practical joker and prankster who had gone to enormous lengths to bankroll previous, infamous hoaxes - was strongly suspected. Sightings of Jack persisted throughout the century and into the next, and were not confined to London alone: Spring Heeled Jack appeared all over Britain and in Europe. This semi-mythical creature became a bogeyman to frighten children with, as well as being a warning to those women who chose to walk about unaccompanied at night and a phantom that represented all of society's fears about crime and the underworld. Just like the Monster before him, the media had conjured a terror that stalked the streets of the capital of the Empire - no one was safe and the authorities were powerless.25

Finally in this section let us turn to the demon barber of Fleet Street, that seemingly archetypal melodrama character, Sweeney Todd. Immortalized in Stephen Sondheim's long-running musical and recently transported onto the big screen played by Johnny Depp, Sweeney Todd appears to be the most elusive of nineteenth-century fiends - more so even that the Ripper. In the musical Todd is a returning felon, wrongfully convicted by a corrupt magistrate, whose wife has died: a classic tragic figure seeking revenge. To get to the judge he sets himself up as a barber (his previous profession) under an assumed name and waits for the lawman to pay him a visit. In the meantime he slakes his thirst for revenge by slaughtering Londoners and destroying the evidence by way of a mechanical chair that sends their dead bodies down to the cellar to be made into pies by his neighbour, Mrs Lovett. This fiendish scheme is eventually discovered and Todd meets his own end along with his partner in crime. In true melodramatic style the judge dies but his daughter marries the only hero of the story, an associate of Todd's who little suspects the monster's true intentions. How much of this is fact? In truth probably very little but tales of a demon barber who preyed upon his customers do appear in the nineteenth century to suggest that Sondheim's musical has an element of truth about it.

The story of Sweeney Todd plays upon a number of fears. There is a great levelling in visiting a barber, especially in the days of the cutthroat razor: after all, one is literally putting one's life in the hands of a servant who, temporarily at least, is possessed of tremendous power. The vulnerability of Todd's victims is echoed by the common prostitutes who willingly acceded to being taken down a dark alley by Jack the Ripper: the level of trust required is not dissimilar. Todd is also an `avenging angel' driven by a powerful desire for revenge, something that several of the letters to the newspapers claimed `Jack' to be. The notion that a fiend killer was abroad on London's streets wiping out prostitutes or deciding who deserved to live or die (as in Todd's case) is a powerful metaphor for a broken or corrupted society. Those Victorians who believed that Great Britain, like Rome before it, was an empire that had become fattened and bloated beyond moral repair, would have perhaps seen Sweeney Todd and Jack the Ripper through a similar lens as a purifier.

Sweeney Todd has left most of his true self behind him; what we are left with is myth and legend. The Monster is unknown to most readers and Spring Heeled Jack so bizarre that my students thought I had invented him. One day Jack the Ripper may pass into the realms of fantasy as well, indeed one could argue that he has already achieved mythic status given that even that particular sobriquet was given him by a member of the fourth estate. Thus we come back to the influence of the press on popular culture and indeed the corresponding importance of prevailing cultures on the press' reportage.

So far this chapter has discussed the nature of sensation and sensational journalism in the context of the Victorian press' expansion in the second half of the century. It will now look at the way in which the press manipulated and was manipulated by other agencies in the period, such as government and the police, in its reporting of criminal activities. This again is not something new nor has it ceased in the modern period. The creation of moral panics and their usefulness will now be looked at in some detail to determine whether we can view the reporting of the Whitechapel murders in this way.

MORAL PANICS AND FOLK DEVILS: THE `GARROTTER'S LUNCH' EXPLORED

In the summer of 1862 Hugh Pilkington, a member of parliament, was accosted late at night after leaving the House of Commons. Two ruffians attacked him, choking him from behind and hitting him over the head. Having roughed him up they stole his watch and ran off. Pilkington had been the victim of a street (or highway) robbery; what we would identify today as a mugging. However, the incident prompted major consternation in the London press from July onwards and led to some important legislative and operational changes to policing and the wider criminal justice system. The method of attack on the unfortunate MP was not new, there had been similar robberies in the early 1850s and the press described them as `garrottings'. Presumably the term arose from the attack upon the neck of the victim with an arm or chord or other implement, which made it appear similar to the Spanish method of execution. In the immediate aftermath of the attack on Pilkington the press began to fan the flames of panic. Two days later, on 19 July and without referring to any other specific incidents, The Spectator reported that: `Highway robbery is becoming an institution in London and roads like the Bayswater road are as unsafe as Naples. Case after case has been reported' The Observer then followed this up and talked of `The wholesale highway robberies that are daily committed'. 2' Having now alerted the public to a spate of robberies or garrotings the press continued to build its story by identifying the sorts of persons they believed to be responsible. The Observer described them as `degenerate, coarse, brutal ruffians' while the The Guardian referred to them as `a race of hardened villains' Even the usually sober Times declared that: