by James Carnac
The account of the murder of Stride is by far Carnac’s most detailed. The murder of Catherine Eddowes is mentioned almost in passing.
Chapter 23 claims he did not write the famous Dear Boss letter that gave the world the name “Jack the Ripper.”
Chapter 24 tells the story of Mary Kelly and afterward of an accident that deprived him of his right leg and ended the career of Jack the Ripper. There are some curious details about the account.
Carnac states that Kelly’s room was at the front of the house, whereas it was at the back. This is particularly interesting because Carnac claims to be unable to recall any of the preliminary conversation with Kelly, but to have the image of place firmly in his mind.
Carnac describes Kelly’s face as “heavily powdered” and her clothing as “flashily smart,” but this better fits a “theatrical” perception of the big-hearted, feather-boaed prostitute and is perhaps more suited to the demimonde of the 1920s than to the destitute and alcoholic prostitutes of the East End in 1888. It certainly doesn’t ring true about Kelly at all, there being no references to Kelly possessing face powder or flashy clothes.
As well as telling us that he took Kelly into a room in the “front of the house,” when in fact it was in the rear, Carnac says that the window was “draped with a thin muslin curtain,” when in fact it was covered by an old coat; that “the woman lit an oil lamp,” but the only illumination was a penny candle stuck in a broken wine glass; and that the bed was metal with one remaining knob, when from the photograph it is clearly wooden and is so described in The Star on November 12, 1888.
On the basis of these errors, one would have no hesitation about dismissing the account as a piece of poorly researched fiction, but perversely the opposite conclusion can also be drawn because these details were widely and accurately reported in the press and anyone doing even minimum research would have probably got them all correct, the bed being a possible exception. It could be argued that these errors therefore suggest that the manuscript was written by somebody misremembering the details, as, one can suppose, the actual killer might have done.
Curiously, Carnac refers to a small mirror at the head of Kelly’s bed that acquires a special significance for him and he writes in some detail about it. As far as I can tell, and I cannot claim to have gone through every newspaper, no English newspaper refers to this mirror, which is mentioned only in the New York Herald (November 10, 1888). Prima facie this is a very important detail that shouts loudly from the page, “How did the author get so much else wrong, but know about the mirror?” Such are Ripper studies, people will probably be littering Internet message boards or the Ripper periodicals with example after example of this mirror being mentioned, but as of the time of writing, it is curious.
What emerges from this is the intriguing possibility that the author may have had a very basic text lacking any detail and that rather than research the facts for himself, he used embellishments of his own imagination, picturing Annie Chapman bemoaning the loss of her singing canary, picturing Mary Kelly as an over-made-up tart with a heart, and so on, but retaining what was to the author of the original document the all-important matter of the mirror.
Part 3 contains chapters 25–28, and the epilogue. The opening page shows that it was fastened separately from the rest of the manuscript. It was written on a different typewriter and the line length is longer, stretching almost to the edge of the page, affording little or no right-hand margin.
The author claims that part 3 was written “some months” after part 2 and says he had originally intended to conclude his story with the murder of Mary Kelly and the end of his killing imposed by the loss of his leg, but that the manuscript had been discovered and read by his landlady, Mrs. Hamlett, and he had resolved to kill her. He explains how he intended to do this and then ends the manuscript confident that his plan will succeed, and, if S. G.’s explanatory note is to be believed, Carnac then packaged and sealed the manuscript and affixed a letter to S. G. requesting the delivery of the package to a specified literary agent.
This is all very fortuitous because Carnac’s plan backfires and he is killed, the short epilogue being a typewritten summary of the inquest hearing and verdict.
The style of part 3 does not seem the same as the rest of the manuscript and jars quite badly, having the look and feel of a work of fiction. There is evidence of crude plotting, an example of which is a reference by Carnac to a morbid fear of being burned alive, which lo and behold is precisely how he does die. It’s too corny, too much of a just retribution to be real. And so too is Carnac ending his manuscript on the eve of a murder and in anticipation of its success. Would a murderer really have done that, or would he have completed the manuscript after the murder and when assured of its success? Would Carnac have sealed his manuscript in a package and affixed a letter to his executor at a time when he had no expectation of dying? And if he sealed the manuscript, as S. G. claimed, how did the epilogue, with its account of the inquest into Carnac’s death, get inside, and who wrote it?
And why is the epilogue written on the same typewriter, with the same line length, as the rest of part 3?
Part 3 reads like fiction, looks like fiction, and smells like fiction, which, applying the old adage “if it barks like a dog,” means it probably is fiction.
The manuscript can therefore be separated into three parts: the explanatory notes; parts 1–2, with the numbered and unnumbered pages possibly representing an original manuscript and later revisions; and part 3, the stylistic differences suggesting that it was written by somebody else and is probably fiction. Whether Carnac, if he ever existed, actually did die in a fire is unknown.
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The Sources
Whether or not the manuscript is authentic, it is likely that the author will have used sources, either as research or to refresh his memory. Carnac confesses to having read about his crimes in the newspapers, and the accident that cost him his leg was caused through inattention while trying to get to a news vendor to buy a copy of a paper reporting the murder of Kelly. Anyone writing later would have visited a library, probably the Newspaper Reading Room in the British Museum in Great Russell Street. Only London and overseas newspapers were available there; all others were stored at a special newspaper repository built in 1905 at Colindale, and these had to be ordered in advance and were transported to the British Museum. By 1928, the repository at Colindale was full, and as a result of a recommendation by the Royal Commission on National Museums and Galleries, a new newspaper library was built, providing a public reading room (for just over fifty people) and other facilities. This was completed in May 1932. I don’t know how much disruption this would have caused to the easy availability of newspapers at the time The Autobiography of James Carnac was written, or, indeed, whether all newspapers would have been available for consultation.
Information about the Ripper crimes was otherwise available from books, although between 1888 and 1928, these were mainly police autobiographies or commentaries. For the most part, these books either claimed that the identity of Jack the Ripper was utterly unknown, or proffered one of a fairly standard number of theories.
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The Suspects
L. Forbes Winslow (1844–1913), probably the most controversial psychiatrist of the late Victorian period, wrote about or otherwise gave interviews about the Ripper crimes whenever the opportunity offered itself, and in his memoirs, which were published in 1910, he told for the umpteenth time the story that he had convinced himself was true: Jack the Ripper was a religious fanatic whom he’d have caught on the steps of St. Paul’s if the police had rendered him the assistance he’d requested.
In March 1910, the memoirs of the head of the CID at the time of the murders, Sir Robert Anderson, were published in serialized form in the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine and later in the year as a book. Anderson made the extraordinary claim that Jack the Ripper’s identity was known
and that he was a Polish Jew whom we now know was called “Kosminski.”
The chatty memoirs of Sir Melville Macnaghten, another senior CID officer, were published in 1915 and claimed that Jack the Ripper was a doctor who was drowned in the Thames at the end of 1888. (This man was actually a teacher-cum-barrister and was named Montague John Druitt.)
Charles Kingston, in 1925, in his book The Bench and the Dock, also wrote of doctor suspects, this time a well-known West End doctor (who was discounted because he was in Italy at the time of the murders) and an insane young medical student at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital.
In Masters of Crime, published in 1928, Guy B. H. Logan postulated that Jack the Ripper was a man of some surgical experience who was killing and murdering prostitutes because of a bloodlust, and that he had a secret lair in Whitechapel. Logan also claimed that some blood-soaked clothing was found months after the murder of Mary Kelly. It was in a locked trunk in the bedroom of the East End lodgings of a man whose movements had aroused some vague suspicions and who had left the lodgings in a hurry. He was an American, as was suggested by the buttons on a blue serge suit that bore the name of a Chicago tailor. A close secret at the time, said Logan, was that a Scotland Yard detective named Andrews had gone to America in December 1888 in search of the Ripper.
That Jack the Ripper was an American or had fled to America was offered by another detective, Tom Divall, in his 1929 book Scoundrels and Scallywags, where he claimed that Sir Melville Macnaghten had received information that the murderer had died in an asylum there.
A close analysis might reveal that some information was provided by these books, but nothing has leapt from the page. Otherwise, there are some very vague hints, such as Carnac’s self-professed authority on the occult, which might reflect the just-circulating story about the Ripper’s bloodstained ties being found in a box belonging to a student of the occult (a story that we now know related to a man named Robert D’Onston Stephenson). And there was the story about R. J. Lees, who had allegedly followed a man he believed from a psychic vision was Jack the Ripper, but who turned out to be an eminent physician.
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Leonard Matters
The most obvious inspiration and source for Carnac’s memoirs is the first English-language book about Jack the Ripper, The Mystery of Jack the Ripper by Leonard Matters (1881–1951). He was an Australian journalist who appears to have been talented and widely respected, and who in 1929, the same year as his Ripper book was published, was elected Labour MP for Kennington, a seat he held for two years. He afterward became the London correspondent for the Indian newspaper The Hindu and remained active in politics. In The Mystery of Jack the Ripper, he told the story of the murders and ended with a claim to have discovered the identity of Jack the Ripper while editor of the Buenos Aires Herald in Argentina. According to Matters, he came across a Spanish-language Argentinean journal that gave a lengthy account of the deathbed confession by a distinguished London doctor. Matters called him “Dr. Stanley” and said that Dr. Stanley had committed the murders while searching for the prostitute from whom his brilliant son had caught syphilis and died.
Matters had first proposed the theory in The People newspaper on December 26, 1926, in an article called “Jack the Ripper Sensation. Noted Murderer a London Doctor? Dying Confession.” The book was published in May 1929. Because no subsequent researcher has traced the article, Matters ’s “Dr. Stanley” has been generally dismissed as a fictional creation to provide a plausible motive for the murders, but considering Matters was a respected journalist and a politician, there is no obvious reason why he should have lied.
The publication of the article in 1926 and the book in 1929 could have inspired S. G. Hulme Beaman to write the “autobiography” of James Carnac. Equally, of course, it could have preempted him and stopped him from sending the manuscript to a literary agent or publisher. There are some slight similarities between the Autobiography and Matters’s book: for example, both are supposedly based on something else, a manuscript in Hulme Beaman’s case, an article in a Spanish-language journal in the case of Matters, but otherwise there is no hint that the former was aware of the latter, there’s no discernible stylistic similarity, and there is no evidence that it was used for research—in fact, quite the opposite.
Leonard Matters’s murderer was a prominent West End doctor. Carnac had studied medicine, but very soon abandoned it, and as we have seen, the theory that Jack the Ripper was a doctor was a common one, even as far back as 1888, so one can’t attribute Carnac’s abandoned medical studies to Matters or anyone else.
There are other significant differences. Carnac says that he met “Martha Tabron”—called Martha Tabram by Matters—on Commercial Street, whereas Matters says the Ripper met her on Osborne Street.
Carnac says he met Mary Nichols on Court Street, a street that Matters mentions as one of two “narrow bridge roads” across the railway from Buck’s Row and leading into Whitechapel Road, and Carnac left the scene by way of Bakers Row, whereas Matters pictures the murderer leaving by way of Brady Street.
Carnac refers to buying grapes for Elizabeth Stride, but Matters doesn’t mention these at all.
There were varied reports of what was written on the wall, among them, “The Juwes are not the men that will be blamed for nothing” (Daniel Halse, who saw the writing), “The Juwes are not the men who will be blamed for nothing” (Mr. Crawford, who wrote down what he saw), and “The Juwes are the men who will not be blamed for nothing” (P. C. Long, who found the writing). Matters followed the version given by Daniel Halse, but Carnac differs from all of them, and a quick perusal of the newspapers has so far produced only one instance of his phrasing, and that is in The Globe on March 17, 1910, in a short article about Anderson’s claim that the Ripper was a Polish Jew. Carnac, incidentally, says he didn’t write it, whereas Matters says it was “alleged” that the Ripper wrote it.
Curiously, the writing was noticed because a piece of bloodied apron, later found to have been torn from an apron Catherine Eddowes was wearing, had been discarded below it. Matters refers to it; Carnac doesn’t. This is odd because the piece of apron was almost unquestionably dropped by Jack the Ripper, so why doesn’t the author refer to it? On the other hand, would the real murderer have recalled where he disposed of the scrap, or even necessarily have remembered that he’d torn it from the victim’s apron and used it to wipe his knife, or even thought it sufficiently interesting to mention?
Carnac says Kelly was murdered in the downstairs front room of a house; Matters, who visited the house, now long demolished, says the murder was committed in the downstairs rear room.
These differences suggest that the author of The Autobiography of James Carnac did not use Matters as a primary source, and probably didn’t use him as a source at all.
One could argue that the author of a work of fiction written after the publication of Matters’s book in May 1929 would have used it for research or inspiration and that the author of the Autobiography either didn’t do so because he didn’t have to—his work was genuine!—or because he wrote before Matters’s book was published. Equally, of course, the author may not have known about Matters’s book.
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Ripperature
The rather silly but witty and useful word for the factual and fictional writings about Jack the Ripper is “Ripperature,” and while it doesn’t contain many literary confessions, they are not unknown, and the earliest dates from late November 1888, only days after the murder of Mary Kelly. The confession was published in a newspaper and was supposed to be the diary of Charles Kowlder, a New Yorker in London on business, who awakes from a dream—“a condition of hypnotism,” as the newspaper calls it—to discover himself in Mary Kelly’s room, a blood-dripping knife in his hand. There is no pretense that it was other than fiction, but another story published less than a month later did purport to be true, though it was obviously a fiction, and was alleg
edly found in a little book given to its customers by a London tailor.
Within a month of the murder of Catherine Eddowes on September 30, 1888, long, narrow posters distinguished by a bloodred splash at the top appeared on walls around London, advertising a shilling booklet called The Curse of Mitre Square. Written by John Francis Brewer, the short story claimed that Mitre Square had been cursed ever since the murder of a woman on the altar steps of Holy Trinity Church (which stood on the same site) by a mad monk, Brother Martin, during the reign of King Henry VIII. Even at the time it was published, the story was recognized as being a farfetched fantasy, and its reputation hasn’t fared better over the years, but it tried, as so many authors have tried since, to provide an explanation for the crimes. In this case, it was a supernatural one.
Other standard ideas were reproduced in fiction: slaughtermen were a class common in the East End and police suspicion fell on them with the first murder. In 1889, Margaret Harkness, who wrote socialist novels under the name John Law, published In Darkest London, which featured Jack the Ripper as a Gentile slaughterman hiding among the Jewish immigrant community in the East End.
Possibly the single most successful fiction about Jack the Ripper and one that could have influenced the Autobiography was Marie Belloc Lowndes’s story The Lodger. Published in McClure’s Magazine in 1911 and as a novel in 1913, the book ingeniously examines the changing emotions of a landlady, Mrs. Bunting, as she grows to suspect her lodger of being a murderer called the Avenger, but who in all other respects is Jack the Ripper. The story could have had an influence on the Autobiography in two respects. One is that it attempts a psychological portrait of suspicion, of getting inside the head of Mrs. Bunting, and the Autobiography tries to get inside the head of Jack the Ripper—and does so remarkably well. The other is that part 3 of the Autobiography is almost the same as the Mrs. Bunting story insofar as Mrs. Hamlett is the landlady and Carnac is the lodger, and Mrs. Hamlett is the one with suspicions and Carnac is the one to take action.