London's Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City (4 page)

If the Maybrick diary represents one of the worst excesses of ripperology then one final example of a killer gentleman is equally deserving of a serious critique. In 2002 the American crime novelist Patricia Cornwell went to press with her own version of a Ripper whodunit. In Portrait of a Killer - Jack the Ripper: Case Closed she argued, using an earlier study as her starting point,16 that after deploying modern forensic science and large amounts of her own money she had at last unmasked the Whitechapel murderer. This time saw a return to the plot for Walter Sickert, although on this occasion as the central figure rather than a supporting character. Sickert, a fine English painter who enjoyed the atmosphere of the music hall and the company of women of loose morals, had apparently murdered five prostitutes and written gloating messages to the press. In addition he could not resist the impulse to revel in his success at evading the police by painting clues to his alter ego in several of his works of art. Cornwell busied herself in examining the hundreds of `Ripper letters' received by the London news agencies and in cutting up Sickert's paintings in the hunt for DNA evidence and examples of his handwriting or style of address. Naturally she found no matching DNA as Sickert was cremated, but she found links through the less exact process of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) profiling. Cornwell also found that several letters were signed `Nemo, a nickname Sickert was known to have used. Furthermore Sickert painted a picture entitled `Jack the Ripper's bedroom, and in `The Camden Town Murder' Cornwell argued that Sickert had drawn upon visual evidence only available to the Whitechapel killer. Finally, according to Cornwell, Walter Sickert suffered from a fistula on his penis which had left him impotent and with an intense hatred of women. This supposedly explains his desire to cut up five prostitutes in the East End. Thus, there was a small mountain of circumstantial evidence linking Sickert to the letters. However, there is very little evidence that stands up to any scrutiny.

The first problem with this theory is that Sickert clearly enjoyed female company and quite probably fathered at least one bastard child, Joseph. He did, however, frequent the music halls and was fascinated by the Ripper crimes. On one occasion he chased a group of female theatre-goers through the London streets shouting `I'm Jack!' This is hardly novel in the rarefied atmosphere of 1888. Most of London was enthralled or appalled by the murders in the East End and Sickert's love of low-life culture places him firmly in the same artistic boat as his French contemporary Toulouse Lautrec. That he drew upon the murders in his paintings is therefore hardly surprising; Lautrec painted prostitutes and dancers, Sickert was no different. As for the Ripper letters and the use of the sobriquet `Nemo, this was a name that was in common usage during the period meaning `no-name' Indeed Charles Dickens' law writer in Bleak House signs himself in just the same manner. Cornwell found some matches for mtDNA in some of the letters but this is not an exact science - it is more akin to blood typing - so for Sickert to share some mtDNA with one or more of the letter writers is neither impossible nor a reason to link him to the murders. Regardless of either of these pieces of `evidence, Cornwell is missing a vital point. It is highly likely that all of the letters are fakes or hoaxes and do not come from the killer at all. The only one that requires a second or third glance is the `From Hell' letter sent to the chairman of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee and even this is now widely believed to be a red herring. Notwithstanding this, it should surely have troubled Cornwell that she found no trace of Sickert on this letter at all. The final nail in Cornwell's theory is that Sickert is reported as having been in France with a female lover on at least one of the dates on which the killer struck. She cannot prove he was in London at this time. Her bold declaration of `case closed' therefore has a very hollow ring to it."

To some extent the very nature of the Ripper murders demands we find a culprit deserving of their particular depravity; that some mundane East London `Everyman' committed these crimes is simply insufficient for the legions of ripperologists, researchers and interested readers. The perpetual creation of new suspects is symptomatic of our desire for what the Americans would call 'closure'. As a result the five or more victims are slaughtered over and over again as if they were part of a modern computer game as theory after theory is propounded. Cornwell, Feldman (the proponent of the Maybrick diary) and Knight are all guilty of taking a theory and then searching for evidence that supports it. There is nothing wrong with this general approach to writing history, so long as evidence is neither manipulated nor stretched to fit the author's thesis. Worse still, if conflicting evidence is shamelessly misrepresented or ignored then the truth is buried deeper with every new study. Paul Feldman does this by swallowing the hoax diary story, Patricia Cornwell misinterpreted her forensic `evidence' in her desire to prove that Sickert was the killer, and Stephen Knight fell back on the Freemasonary cover up to paper over the holes in his conspiracy theory. History requires a level of academic rigour that is sadly lacking from many of the Ripper books. Conjecture replaces fact, hearsay is substituted for documentary proof. Needless to say if many of those presented as Ripper suspects were alive today they would have no problem in suing their accusers in the courts and walking away with large financial settlements. Unfortunately for them it is much easier to accuse a dead person than it is to place the same accusation at the feet of a living one. Moreover it is unlikely that a jury would convict any of these suspects on the evidence presented against them.

There are a number of more ordinary Ripper suspects but even these fall within Frayling's broad typology of cultural stereotypes. Aaron Kosminski, David Cohen/Nathan Kaminsky, George Chapman/Severin Klosowski, Jacob Levy and NikolayVasiliev are all East Europeans, all Polish (with the exception of Vasiliev) and mostly Jews. The McNaughten memorandum identified a'poor Polish Jew' as one of the prime suspects and this has led researchers to go looking for likely candidates within Whitechapel's large immigrant population. Once again the distortions of historical research are apparent.

First, Sir Melville McNaughten's 1894 memorandum has perhaps been invested with too much significance. This memo, written by an officer that joined the Ripper inquiry in 1889, was also referred to by Robert Anderson in his memoirs and he seems to have been convinced that the Ripper was a local Jew, an opinion he stuck to after his retirement. The hunt to identify who `Kosminski' was (McNaughten does not give him a first name and Anderson does not name him at all) has led local historians and ripperologists to scour the archives of the local Poor Law unions and asylums and has turned up a number of plausible characters. However, similar problems beset the Polish Jew candidacy as have plagued the English milord and the mad doctor, records have been lost or destroyed - deliberately or otherwise. Arguably there are enough poor Jews in the East End for us to keep the search for `Jack' going well into the twenty-first century.

So why are we looking for a Jew? Or a doctor? Or a gentleman? Because they are archetypes, representations of the `other'; they are not Eastenders but outsiders. They were, and are, convenient scapegoats for a range of contemporary fears and modern misconceptions. They also feed the growing myth making that surrounds the case. Crediting the murders to the Jewish community (both by accusing one of their number and then suggesting that he only evaded trial because Jewish witnesses refused to testify against one of their own) is a clear example of late nineteenth-century xenophobia. The mutilations allow both contemporaries and modern writers to point to the threat posed by `foreigners who are bent on undermining society in general via covertly ritualized murder'." Thus the murders are elided with anarchism and socialist revolution and firmly associated with Eastern European fanatics sheltering in liberal England and taking advantage of our freedoms. We might note that similar mud is being slung at the modern Muslim community in Britain in the wake of Islamist terrorism in London and elsewhere.

That `Jack' was Jewish is merely conjecture, that he was insane is less easy to refute. In 1894 the Sun suggested that the killer was locked up in Broadmoor prison as a criminal lunatic. In this instance `Jack' was a member of the London middle-classes-gone-wrong, in other theories he is a mad doctor or a crazed working-class mortuary assistant or slaughterman. He must be mad but there is little real attempt to understand his motivations beyond that. Once again it is convenient to simply dismiss the killer as someone unlike us, someone possessing animalistic, subhuman tendencies, a real-life Mr Hyde. `Jack' was, like the fictional alter ego of Dr Jekyll, a gothic monster who has been imbued with many of society's fears about itself. The 1880s were a turbulent period in European history, with revolutionary movements abroad and Irish terrorism at home. Britain was in the grip of an economic slump, if not a full-blown depression, the Queen was unpopular, the government even more so. The Empire was under threat from the newly united and expansionist German Reich and the economically powerful United States. As Clive Bloom suggests, `Jack' came to represent late Victorian fears about the future - he embodied approaching modernity and the `final frenzied acknowledgment of the coming of the age of materialism'." The victims fit in with this trope. As `fallen women' they carried both the prejudices of moral crusaders and the guilt of philanthropists. They are both to be pitied and denounced.

The real monster, however, is not `Jack' but the environment he inhabits. The very streets of East London become synonymous with degraded and neglected humanity. Every image we have of the East End in the nineteenth century is of ragged children, crowded slums and immigrants with blank stares. There is no colour, no life, no sense of community in any of these photographs. In the famous Punch cartoon (Figure 1) a spectral figure, a `phantom' of criminality, drifts through the fetid sewers of the capital brandishing a butcher's knife, undeniably a product of the slums in which he dwells.

Figure 1 `The nemesis of neglect', Punch, September 188820

We can push the metaphors too hard but in many respects it has become almost impossible to separate the real Whitechapel murderer from the cultural construction that is Jack the Ripper. So we can see that the Whitechapel murder mystery, perhaps uniquely in British crime history, allowed for the creation of a modern mythology that has in many ways obscured whatever truth there was in the Ripper killings. From almost the moment that the first victim's body was discovered in Buck's Row people have been debating the identity of the murderer. Because he was never apprehended, or at least never brought to justice and made to pay for his atrocious deeds, it has been possible to build a composite image of the person responsible that may well bear little resemblance to the reality. Historians are often guilty of interpreting facts in a way that fits their own personal, political or cultural viewpoints - I am not pretending otherwise or simply dismissing the work of the many amateur researchers that have attempted to find out who `Jack' really was. But I do believe that our ongoing fascination with the Ripper case deserves a study that tries to unravel the reality of the East End of the 1880s from much of the mythology that has surrounded it ever since. In looking at the area, its people and the attempts of the authorities to deal with crime, prostitution, poverty and slum housing, as well as considering this within the context of some of the other pressing issues of the period (such as unemployment, immigration, radical politics and Irish nationalism) this book can provide a useful overview of the East London of the time. At the heart of this is the fact that six prostitutes lost their lives in a most brutal manner between August and November 1888 and this should never be forgotten or misrepresented. However, `Jack the Ripper' was and is a cultural construction that has been used and misused for over a hundred years. In time I suggest he will have become as much a myth as Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street - the subject of films and scary stories rather than an historical character.

Murder is a most heinous crime and multiple or serial murder remains the rarest form of deviant human behaviour. However, despite or perhaps because of this, it is murder that continues to fascinate readers of novels and true crime books, film-goers and television audiences. Having outlined the structure of this study and introduced the theme of mythologizing the Ripper we can now attempt to contextualize those terrible events within the wider area of homicide and serial killing.

2

Murder and Mayhem in Victorian London:

The Whitechapel Murders of 1888 in Context

The Whitechapel murders still have the power to shock a modern audience; in the 120 or so years since the last victim of the Ripper was found - almost unrecognizable as a human being - subsequent generations have experienced world war, genocide, rampant street crime and hundreds of serial killers. While we are neither inured to violence nor can argue that our `modern' society is less violent or brutal than that in which the victims of Jack the Ripper struggled to survive, there have been vast improvements, not least in our ability to track and catch serial murderers. Nevertheless our newspapers remain full of violent attacks, muggings, rapes and killings. In this chapter we will look at the nature of murder in the Victorian period and in particular look at the extent of murder prosecutions at London's Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey. There were a number of murders in the Whitechapel area in 1888, both before and after the five murders that have been generally accepted to be the work of `Jack the Ripper, and how these differed from or were similar to `Jack's crimes will be explored here.