The Invention of Murder (64 page)

Some were more complicit: a seamstress in Bradford was found to have sent a letter saying ‘Jack’ was planning ‘a little business’ in that city. And any murder of a woman was automatically attributed to ‘Jack’, no matter how far from the pattern it appeared. Jane Beetmoor was murdered near Gateshead, and it was thought a good use of police resources to send an officer connected with the Whitechapel murders and the surgeon who had performed the post-mortem on Mrs Chapman to Newcastle, despite the fact that Jane Beetmoor had not been mutilated, and her young man, who had been seen with her on the night of her death, had vanished. In Glasgow, reported
The
Times
solemnly, the police were taking ‘extra precautions’: if they heard ‘any cry of distress, such as “Help”, “Murder”, or “Police”, they are to hasten to the spot at once’. (What, one wonders, had their instructions been before?)

In Whitechapel, locals formed Vigilance Committees to patrol the streets. While no murders took place throughout October, ‘Jack’ was a busy correspondent. On 1 October, just after the double murder, a postcard was received that appears to have been written by the person who wrote the ‘Dear Boss’ letter: ‘I was not codding dear old Boss when I gave you the tip, you’ll hear about Saucy Jacky’s work tomorrow double event this time number one squealed a bit couldn’t finish straight off. had not the time to get ears for police …’ This harping on removing organs to send somewhere became an actuality on 16 October, when George Lusk, of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, received a parcel which contained the following note:

With this was a piece of something, although what exactly, was never determined: the newspaper reports ranged from the view that it was an animal kidney, to ‘half of the left kidney of an alcoholic woman aged around forty-five’ (that is, a description of Mrs Eddowes), to the
Evening News’
headline: ‘. HALF THE VICTIM’S MISSING KIDNEY RESTORED. THE OTHER HALF EATEN BY THE CANNIBAL ASSASSIN’.
*

Fun
magazine now printed a poem which blamed Scotland Yard for all the ills of the investigation, while exonerating the beat police. (The first verse refers to the grafitto found near Mrs Eddowes’ body, and Sir Charles Warren’s action in having it removed.)

Warren had had enough. He wrote an article responding to the criticism, all of which had been ‘stirred up’, he complained, by ‘restless demagogues’. The piece is a combination of extreme tedium – a long history of the Met, the legal statutes that underpin the force, disciplinary methods and hiring practices – and a proper whinge. The newspaper mockery had clearly driven this former soldier, unused to public oversight, well past breaking point. ‘Peace and order,’ he warned in his opening, ‘will be imperilled if the citizens … continue … in embarrassing those who are responsible for the security of the Metropolis.’ This is a revealing elision: Warren thinks the
knowledge
of police failure would lead to lessened public safety, not the police failure itself – civil unrest by embarrassment. That this was not simply bad syntax, but something he believed, is clear, for he went on to say that the 12,000 police in the city were necessary because the public had ‘an unreasoning habit of cavilling and finding fault’. Decent people, he added, should realize that bringing the police into contempt was a way of ‘encouraging the mob to disorder and rapine, and it very much increases the police rate’. After this Warren was directly forbidden to publish any more. He was also in conflict with the Home Office over who would control police budgets; the Bloody Sunday riots and the failure of the CID in Whitechapel cannot have helped. Warren resigned on 8 November.

The next night, 9 November, Mary Jane (sometimes Mary Anne) Kelly was murdered, in the most savage attack yet. Mrs Kelly’s death was atypical: she was twenty years younger than the other women, although she too was an alcoholic prostitute; and she was the only one to be murdered indoors. She was found in her room in Miller’s Court around mid-morning. The police waited for two hours after the discovery before entering her room: they had sent for Warren’s bloodhounds, not knowing that the useless animals, imposed on the CID by the baying press, had long since been sent back to their owner. Or, as one flash song said simply: ‘Assistance soon arrived but as usual was too late.’

Once inside the room, the police found that the scale of the violence was truly shocking. The murderer, indoors, had been able to indulge his desire for mutilation to the extreme. At the inquest, this time it was the coroner who refused to permit a description of the mutilations to be given, but by the next day most of the newspapers carried reports which included a description of Mrs Kelly’s body as it was found, and the blood-soaked condition of the room. The descriptions were detailed, and over the next week they became progressively more so – on 12 November the
Pall Mall Gazette,
which had hitherto concentrated on the lack of solution and the failures of the police, printed a positively ghoulish piece describing Mrs Kelly as she lay in the mortuary; the
Telegraph, Globe
and
Evening News
all discussed at length the state of the body, the mutilations, and whether or not organs were missing.

Other stories examined Mrs Kelly’s background. As with crime victims from Maria Marten and Ellen Hanley onwards, a certain amount of tidying-away of less attractive details was done. In the half-century plus of retellings, these earlier victims had been transformed from fallen women to ‘the pride of the village’; some newspapers now tried to do the same for Mrs Kelly. She was, the
Globe
advised in the week after her death, not Irish but Welsh, an important distinction, separating her from the large, predominantly impoverished Irish community in the East End. She was also – and here the reports moved into the realm of penny-dreadfuls and melodrama – ‘an artist of no mean degree’ and ‘an excellent scholar’ who had been led astray by an evil Frenchwoman. This was virtually a sensation-novel plot, but it was only an extreme version of the way the newspapers had blurred the distinction between fact and fiction. Sometimes it was overt, with the cunning murderer, according to
Lloyd’s,
appearing like ‘the shadowy and wilful figures in Poe’s and Stevenson’s novels’. Elsewhere the real and fictional characters were merged, as when the
Observer
listed its suspects: the ‘highly respectable householder during the day and an assassin at night. The Socialists, an escaped lunatic, the Jews, an unknown man who murdered twelve negro women in Texas, a chimpanzee, a butcher’s slaughterman, and a jealous woman. and, finally, a dark soul who has been supping on melodrama’ –
Jekyll and Hyde,
Poe (the chimpanzee) and East End melodramas.

The newspapers had been the most notable element of the entertainment industry’s response to the crimes, because of the quantity of their coverage. But others had not lagged behind. Madame Tussaud’s, usually so quick off the mark, found itself shut out this time, because no murderer’s face was known, and the gallery had made verisimilitude its selling point.
*
This troubled the makeshift East End exhibitions far less, if at all. While the crimes were still continuing, a waxworks in the Whitechapel Road displayed effigies of the murdered women, as well as the unknown murderer. An illustration outside advertised the exhibition, but given the public’s heightened fears, it was considered ‘too strong’, and removed, although no one seems to have stopped the show itself. By the spring of 1889 Jack the Ripper exhibitions were a commercial proposition. An advertisement appeared in the
Era
for ‘The Wax Head of “Jack the Ripper”, carefully Modelled from Sketches published in the “Daily Telegraph”, Furnished by witnesses who had actually seen him, also a Wax Head of Mary Jeanette [sic] Kelly, hi[s] last victim’. From the surrounding advertisements, it appears that this was placed by a manufacturer who supplied heads to waxworks exhibitions (it follows an advertisement offering ‘Seals, Guaranteed Feeders, Eighty Serpents, for Charming …’). By 1892, D’Arc’s Waxworks in Cardiff was advertising in the same professional classifieds: ‘Wanted, to Buy a Set of Jack the Ripper Victims’.

Fiction writers were quick off the mark too. After the double murder on 30 September, J.F. Brewer’s
The Curse upon Mitre Square
immediately took Mrs Eddowes’ death and its location as its theme. The novel opens in 1530, when the monastery of Holy Trinity Church, Aldgate, is threatened at the dissolution of the monasteries. The evil Thomas Audley, Speaker of the House of Commons, is promised the proceeds from this particular monastery if he can find a plausible excuse to shut it down. Brother Martin, suffering a breakdown, meets a mysterious woman, murders her, dances on the corpse and then mutilates the body as Mrs Eddowes’ would later be mutilated, before discovering that, set up by Audley, he has murdered his long-lost sister. Martin commits suicide, and the monastery falls into Audley’s hands, with only a ghost to mark the spot. The second section takes place in the eighteenth century, at the Mitre Pub, where the publican and his friends mock the ghost; ‘liquid fire’ appears from the heavens, striking the ‘fatal slab of stone’, and killing ten. In the final part, we return to Whitechapel in 1888: ‘Measure this spot as carefully as you will, and you will find that the piece of ground on which Catherine Eddowes lies is the exact point where the steps of the high altar of Holy Trinity existed. Who is there so bold as to say. that there is no
Curse upon Mitre Square?’

Despite being published by a mainstream, middle-class fiction publisher, this story has the schlock-horror feel of a penny-dreadful. More respectable was a novel that appeared the year after the killings.
*
‘John Law’ was the pseudonym of Margaret Harkness, who had written on the impoverished workers of the East End. This also formed the basis for
Captain Lobe: A Story of the Salvation Army,
where in one chapter the Salvation Army captain hears the deathbed confession of a Jewish butcher, who relates how his work produced unnatural longings: ‘I wanted to see the blood, and feel it all warm on my fingers,’ he tells Lobe. ‘It grew, that thirst did. I got to feel at last that nothing would quench my thirst but human blood, human flesh …’ He therefore murders ‘a miserable-looking woman’, before the shock restores him to his senses. ‘I left the place, and I hid myself here among the Jews, who hate blood and never spill it. I’m not a Jew, I’m a Gentile.’ he adds, before expiring.

Many novels used elements from Jack the Ripper like this, merely trading on the sensational elements. Mrs Braddon worked out the ideas of doubling and madness more thoroughly in
Thou Art the Man
(1894), in which she revived the now slightly old-fashioned female who turns to detection to rescue her doomed lover. Brandon Mountford has ‘a strain of madness in his blood’ and also suffers from epilepsy; his fears that he will waken ‘one day a creature of demoniac impulses, transformed from man to devil’ seem to bear fruit when he revives after an attack next to the corpse of a murdered woman. When his lover helps him escape to Africa, she wonders if ‘this first crime might not be the beginning of a series of murders?’

The link between the East End murders and the ‘savagery’ of ‘darkest Africa’ had already appeared in 1891, in
Back to Africa
by William Westall. Westall usually wrote historical romances, but here the narrator, the educated daughter of a doctor and a scientist herself, marries an explorer recently escaped from Africa, where he had been held captive by a cannibal tribe. Gradually it becomes clear to the reader that he had not been a captive as he claimed, but had rather been the king of the tribe, and is now continuing his cannibalistic habits in the East End. That same year,
The House of Mystery
by J.W. Nicholas also relied on a Jack the Ripper character in a melange of stolen children, mesmerism, hidden corpses, dogs that could sniff out impostors, and more.

Given the poor quality of these books, it is all the more remarkable that Jack the Ripper also influenced some of the greatest works of fiction. A novel that was originally thought of in the melodrama, or even penny-dreadful school, but whose extraordinary boundary-breaking nature was quickly recognized, appeared in 1897. On 6 October 1888, the
East London Advertiser
wrote that ‘It is so impossible to account … for these revolting acts of blood, that … the myths of the Dark Ages rise before the imagination. Ghouls, vampires, bloodsuckers, and all the ghastly array of fables which have been accumulated throughout the course of centuries. seize hold of the excited fancy.’ In March 1890, Henry Irving’s business manager made his first note for a novel about those ghouls, vampires and bloodsuckers – his name was Bram Stoker, and the novel was
Dracula.
While
Dracula
is about much more than a Ripper-type murderer, the 1888 crimes, and the sensations that surround them, are woven throughout the novel. Five women are attacked and mutilated by the vampire, as five women were murdered in Whitechapel; one character is a doctor, as the Ripper was suspected of being; the vampire-hunter van Helsing carries a black bag, as the Ripper was thought to have done; he and his friends form what Stoker in his notes calls a ‘vigilante committee’ to trap the mysterious being that threatens their community. And overall, the unnamed fear of the ‘other’, the stranger – particularly the Eastern European stranger – is as rampant in
Dracula
as it was in Whitechapel.