The Invention of Murder (62 page)

The newspapers may have printed anatomical details more freely than before, but for the most part they remained circumspect about the occupations of these women. ‘Unfortunate’ had been a standard euphemism for the best part of a century. At Mrs Chapman’s inquest, her friend told the coroner that Mrs Chapman had earned her living by needlework or making artificial flowers, two notoriously poorly paid types of piecework; those who undertook this work were frequently compelled to prostitution. Otherwise, she added, ‘she was not particular’. The newspapers repeated this innuendo-laden phrase, and added others: ‘She was out late at night at times’, and she would sell ‘anything she had to sell’.

The ‘anything’ was little enough. On her last night, Mrs Chapman had had no money to pay for a bed, so had gone to the street to earn her night’s sleep. Her mutilated body was found at six the following morning. Apart from the clothes she was wearing, her worldly goods at her death consisted of two combs and a used envelope. Mrs Nichols, too, was out on her last night because she had drunk her few remaining pence away: ‘Never mind,’ she said as she left the lodging house, ‘I’ll soon get my doss money. See what a jolly bonnet I’ve got now.’ After her death her belongings were itemized: the clothes she was wearing, a handkerchief, a section of a comb and a broken piece of looking-glass.

It was not the poverty, however, that many of the West End journals concentrated on, but its by-products, as they painted the East End as a jungle, ‘where well-armed Authority fears to tread,/Murder and outrage rear audacious head,/Unscanned, untracked.’ wrote
Punch.
A week later it returned to the theme in ‘The Nemesis of Neglect’, describing ‘Dank roofs, dark entries, closely-clustered walls,/ Murder-inviting nooks, death-reeking gutters … Red-handed, ruthless, furtive, unerect,/‘Tis murderous Crime – the Nemesis of Neglect.’ This was accompanied by a full-page illustration by Tenniel, showing a ghostly figure, headed ‘Crime’, carrying a knife through a decaying alleyway.
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Punch’s
attitude was fairly typical. It made no mention of disease or poverty, only of the presence of ‘thievish dens’ which produced a ‘vice to be nursed to violence’.

In response, the East End newspapers presented the crime as East vs West, working class vs middle class. The Home Office, said the
Star,
would long ago have offered a reward if the victims had been West End residents.
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It also suggested that locals should form their own vigilance committees, as the police – who had, it reminded its readers, used truncheons against unarmed workers on Bloody Sunday – were either unwilling or unable to deal with this horror. The
Pall Mall Gazette
also used Bloody Sunday as a symbol for the uncaring nature of authority towards the poor: the police could stop workers, it suggested, but they couldn’t (read wouldn’t) stop a murderer. Other, less political, newspapers were happy just to indicate sympathy. The
Sporting Times
ran a ‘leader’ of some five lines, the thrust of which was that when ‘the beast’ was caught, ‘we advise that he should be turned out to the Whitechapel ladies. and if there be two consecutive inches of that murderer left together, we should smile’.

Meanwhile, at the inquest on Mrs Chapman, the coroner and the doctor who had conducted the post-mortem had a set-to over what, precisely, should be revealed in testimony. The coroner’s view was that ‘all the evidence the doctor had obtained. should be on the records of the Court. however painful it might be’ – he hoped that the newspapers would show discretion in reporting it, but did not feel that it should be withheld from the court itself. Dr Phillips, however, ‘thought it would be better not to give more details’. The coroner told him pretty sharpish that this was not his decision to make. Phillips snapped back: as the mutilations were not the cause of death, he was therefore under no obligation to report them. Coroner: ‘That is a matter of opinion.’ They finally compromised, and the courtroom was cleared of women and boys before Dr Phillips gave his evidence.

The element that the press now concentrated on, however, was not so much the mutilations, as the coroner’s own injudiciously stated belief that Mrs Chapman’s uterus had been removed by someone who displayed some level of anatomical knowledge: ‘No mere slaughterer of animals could have carried out these operations.’ The newspapers immediately elaborated wildly on this phrase.
The Times
thought that the murder ‘belongs to an unspeakable class of crimes which are committed in order to secure the premium offered by certain anatomists and pathologists for the possession of human bodies and human organs’. Reviving the old anatomization fear, the article mentioned Burke and Hare, merging them with the more recent burial-society panics, reminding readers that the murder of children for insurance money was ‘so frequent’. Finally the newspaper quoted the coroner, who said that ‘an officer of one of our great medical schools’ had told him that an American had offered to pay ‘the sub-curator of the Pathological Museum’ £20 for each uterus he could supply, in order to ‘issue an actual specimen with each copy of a publication on which he was then engaged’.

Many other newspapers reported similar stories. The
Star
carried a letter saying that it was well known that ‘biologists’ were so ‘infatuated by their pursuits as to cause murder to be committed’: this was a ‘matter of history’. Therefore it was obvious, continued the letter, that ‘some half-mad physiologist’ was collecting tissues ‘for experiments on graftation’. Another letter added that the viscera beside Mrs Chapman’s body had been laid out ‘as if for inspection by the demonstrator at a post-mortem examination’, and suggested that ‘all dissecting room or post-mortem porters of the hospitals or mortuaries and even veterinary assistants’ should be checked for mental stability. (It is easy to see why the working classes felt unjustly singled out – the author did not think that mad anatomy professors, doctors or vets might be responsible, only their assistants.)

Even those papers that scoffed at the idea of a maniac killer also embraced it, seemingly without quite noticing what they were doing. The
Pall Mall Gazette
and the
Globe,
among others, returned again and again to
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,
suggesting that it was the double nature of the killer that made it possible for him to escape detection. The ‘maniac’ looked like an ordinary person, they warned, not Spring-Heel’d Jack.
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The reference to a penny-dreadful is significant. New printing technology had replaced the old-fashioned text-based playbills with vibrant illustrated posters. New technologies, new fears. The
Illustrated Police News
began to worry that these ‘highly-coloured pictorial advertisements’ promoting melodramas might unbalance the unstable: ‘Such pictures [have] the same effect that the taste of blood produces upon the tiger.’ In a
Punch
cartoon (opposite) the devil, dressed as a bill-sticker, gloats as he pastes up the image of a man wielding a knife, while a bill in his pocket, still to be posted, is inscribed ‘Murd—’.

The Whitechapel murders and the newspapers were now inseparable. The
Bath and Cheltenham Gazette
noted that ‘the excitement has been great. but it has been largely stimulated and fed by the great and unnecessary prominence given to the subject’. The Nichols and Chapman inquests, with their adjournments, occupied much of September. The pause that followed was bad for circulation, and the newspapers acted promptly. On 29 September the Central News Agency forwarded to Scotland Yard a letter which it claimed it had just received:

This letter, and many others that followed, were almost certainly written by journalists. Some went to Scotland Yard, some to the Central News Agency. The newspapers reprinted them, even while they sometimes cast doubt on them (although they never went so far as to suggest that they were the source).
Fun
magazine’s ‘The Crime Cauldron’, ‘as brewed by certain papers’, acknowledged via a
Macbeth
parody their effect on circulation. ‘Enter three Editors.’

Some papers, such as the
Observer,
did distance themselves, condemning the ridiculous reports ‘which immediately tempts some silly fellow to write letters in Yankee phraseology’. But real or fabricated, these letters created the persona and tone – a catch-me-if-you-can cheerfulness and a black humour that were retrospectively superimposed upon the all-too-unhumorous murders. Many misread, or misremembered, the source of the ‘Dear Boss’ letter, assuming that Scotland Yard had released it for publication.

Meanwhile the chastisement of the police became louder, and more open, every day.
Punch
was typical in its not-very-subtle mockery:

Detectives were no longer the omniscient Inspector Bucket and Sergeant Cuff, but merely PC Plods. A disdain for the people who were supposed to catch the criminals was becoming widespread once more. Even fictionally, professional detectives were now being outpaced by their amateur rivals. In
The House on the Marsh,
an 1883 novel by ‘Florence Warden’ (Florence Alice Price), a policeman elaborately disguises himself, as only fictional detectives could do, but instead of being superior to the criminals he ignorantly reveals his plans to the criminal himself, and it is left to the clever amateur to catch him. Even Wilkie Collins, Sergeant Cuff’s creator, by 1877 had a character ‘of considerable worldly wisdom’ say that the police are a ‘waste [of] time and money … who
can
believe in them, who reads the newspapers?’ Instead, in
My Lady’s Money
he uses a private detective, Old Sharon. Without any doubt, Old Sharon is an ancestor of Sherlock Holmes, who would make his first appearance the year before Jack the Ripper commenced work. There are differences between the two. Old Sharon is a detective because it pays – ‘You give me a guinea and I’ll give you half an hour.’ But, like Holmes, he discovers things that the police are too stupid to work out; and he is an outsider, a bohemian: he is first seen ‘through a thick cloud of tobacco-smoke … robed in a tattered flannel dressing-gown, with a short pipe in his mouth’. Holmes, in his first outing in 1887, is also an outsider, an artist of a sort – the title of
A Study in Scarlet
would have reminded readers of the Aesthetic movement’s penchant for ‘mood’ titles, especially Whistler’s paintings, with their titles such as
Arrangement in White and Yellow.
Holmes is not prosperous, originally taking lodgings with Watson because he cannot afford rooms on his own. Furthermore, his function is not to bring criminals into the justice system: only eighteen of the sixty Holmes stories end in an arrest.

At the beginning Holmes himself was fairly dangerous and violent; very soon, however, the crimes he investigates become quirky, even whimsical, as in ‘The Adventure of the Red-Headed League’ (1890), where the criminal advertises for a red-headed man to copy out the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
in order to lure a red-headed pawnbroker away from his premises. It may perhaps be that this lack of blood was one of the things that made Holmes so popular. There was enough blood, enough violence, in Whitechapel, and in the newspapers. Holmes also has certainty, a vast store of knowledge that would surely enable him to put his hand on this terrifyingly elusive killer. In
A Study in Scarlet,
he recognizes that ‘such an ash … is only made by a Trichinopoly [cigar]. I have made a special study of cigar ashes’; in
The Sign of Four
he is expert in ‘the tracing of footsteps’ and also on ‘the influence of a trade upon the form of the hand’. Eventually he is revealed as having written on the classifications of tattoos, the ‘distinctiveness of human ears’, ciphers, and document dating, although here he shows humility: ‘I confess that once when I was very young I confused the
Leeds Mercury
with the
Western Morning
News.’
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