by James Carnac
Lowndes did not originate the lodger story; there were stories circulating in 1888 and afterward in which landladies expressed suspicions about lodgers, and L. Forbes Winslow’s suspect emerged because of a landlady’s suspicions.
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Summing Up
Overall, though, the Autobiography doesn’t seem to have taken inspiration from anywhere, or it took inspiration from everywhere, and it is this singularity, almost uniqueness, that makes this manuscript so intriguing. Carnac embodies many of the traits or facets of other “suspects”—a lodger, medical experience, an interest and perhaps an expertise in the occult, and so on—but he is his own man, a murderer who is driven to kill by a passion for blood, who kills because he enjoys it.
I have often thought that Jack the Ripper touches our primal fear of the unknown, that the desire to know who he was is so that we can give him boundaries: an insane doctor killing prostitutes as he searches for the one who gave his son syphilis means that the vast majority of people need not fear him. The religious fanatic killing prostitutes to clear the world of immorality likewise means that the victims belong to a small group and that everyone else has little to worry about. What is so frightening about Jack the Ripper and is so frightening about serial killers in general is that they move among us unrecognized, killing with no discernible motive. While almost every other commentator on the Whitechapel murders, even John Francis Brewer, was trying to make Jack the Ripper comprehensible, the Autobiography cut across the grain and presented a murderer who is today far more real.
The question is: was he real?
Although this manuscript could be dismissed as entirely the work of S. G. Hulme Beaman—and it would be a fascinating document if that were the case—many things draw one into wondering if it is a far more complex document than that.
To begin with, this manuscript is such an extraordinary and improbable departure from his usual output that it requires a leap of our imagination to suppose that Hulme Beaman would have written it, and not simply because it’s an adult crime book, but because it is a first-person narrative from the killer’s perspective and, apart from the oddly fictional part 3, it offers no even slightly redeeming motive. The proposed date when it was written also rests uneasy with the direction of Hulme Beaman’s career, with his models and stories really taking off and inevitably absorbing his interest and time.
This is followed by the oddities of Hulme Beaman’s explanatory remarks, which appear to have been directed to somebody unknown to us and prior to contact being made with a literary agent. The tone suggests that Hulme Beaman had already discussed the book with that person, albeit not in any great detail.
It is probably reading too much into the wording, but his concluding comment that the “narrative is presented exactly in the form in which it came to [him]” could be interpreted as meaning that the manuscript is not what was received from “Carnac,” but was a rewritten, possibly fleshed-out document that, sans some offending material, nevertheless followed the story (narrative) as received.
Although it is a common literary device for an author to divorce himself from a manuscript by claiming that it is a bequest or something found in a dusty attic or bought as a curiosity from a small, provincial auction house, the explanatory introduction is usually directed at you or me, the reader, or takes the form of a letter to an identifiable person such as a publisher or literary agent. Hulme Beaman’s explanatory remarks do not take that form. Instead, they are directed at somebody unknown, somebody with whom, from the tone, he has already discussed the manuscript, but not the literary agent or publisher or readers like us. This strikes me as distinctly odd, almost as if the manuscript is something he was bequeathed.
I am as a general rule wary of reading more into what an author says than was probably intended, but it is also worth observing that Hulme Beaman ends by saying that the “narrative is presented exactly in the form in which it came to [him].” Why didn’t he simply say that the manuscript is as it was received? Could the use of “narrative” be taken to mean that the story, not the manuscript, is intact? Such an idea opens the intriguing possibility that what we have is not the manuscript received from “Carnac,” but a rewritten, fleshed-out document that incorporates all that Carnac said, but with biographical details added by somebody else.
Other questions arise from an examination of the manuscript, particularly the use of three typewriters. Maybe nothing should be read into this—I had a portable and desktop typewriter and frequently wrote on them interchangeably—but what does prompt question is that these machines were not used interchangeably. The introduction used one machine; part 1 and part 2, including the unnumbered rewrite pages, were all written with another machine; and part 3 and the epilogue were all written on yet another typewriter. Either this is because these were written at different times on different machines, or the author is trying to convey that impression.
Also, why is part 3 not only written on a different typewriter and with different page layout than the rest of the manuscript, but also so stylistically different? It is such an obvious fiction, not least because the same machine was used to write the epilogue. This is odd because it would have plotted better if the epilogue had been presented as newspaper extracts appended by somebody, even by Hulme Beaman, to the sealed manuscript.
The questions arising from the manuscript are numerous, and every time you think you may have theorized a coherent explanation for them, the explanation is checkmated by other problems. However one looks at it, the book you are holding is intriguing. Very intriguing.
1 These page numbers refer not to this book but to the original manuscript, some pages of which are included in Appendix 2.
2 Hulme Beaman dated the murders 1880; on the first page of part 2, they are correctly dated 1888 but someone has put a question mark in the margin (the original page is reproduced in Appendix 2) so was obviously questioning the date of the murders. That Hulme Beaman dated the murders 1880 in the explanatory remarks seems to be too big of a coincidence to be dismissed as a typo, but instead suggests that Hulme Beaman was questioning the date himself. If so, then that is good for the manuscript not having been composed by Hulme Beaman, because anyone having researched the murders would certainly know the date of the crimes and would neither have written 1880 nor questioned the date 1888. (It’s possible that somebody else questioned the date, and presumably that person would have to be the person to whom the explanatory remarks were addressed.) On the other hand, if Hulme Beaman did write the manuscript, then he either intended it to be published as a work of fiction or he planned to pass it off as the genuine confession of Jack the Ripper. If the latter, then I’d expect to at least find some things about the manuscript intended to “distance” Hulme Beaman from his fake and also to bestow some verisimilitude upon it. One such would be to pretend that he thought the murders were committed in 1880 and to question the date 1888 in the text. Then, on it being established that the murders were committed in 1888, he’d be shown to have a poor knowledge of the crimes and the manuscript would be shown to be accurate.
Appendix 2
Facsimiles of Original Pages from the Manuscript
Appendix 3
List of Victims
Whoever you may believe to be Jack the Ripper, what must not be forgotten are the very real victims of these brutal attacks of innocent women in Whitechapel, whose descendants are still alive among us today, and who have still not received justice for what happened over a century ago.
The victims of Jack the Ripper include:
MARTHA TABRAM
Murdered Tuesday, August 7, 1888, in George-yard Buildings (now demolished, off Gunthorpe Street), body discovered at 3:30 a.m.
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MARY ANN “POLLY” NICHOLS
Murdered Friday, August 31, 1888, in Bucks Row (now Durward Street), body discovered at 3:45 a.m.
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ANNIE CHAPMAN<
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Murdered Saturday, September 8, 1888, outside 29 Hanbury Street, body discovered at 6:00 a.m.
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ELIZABETH STRIDE
Murdered Sunday, September 30, 1888, in Duffield’s Yard, Berner Street (now Henriques Street), body discovered at 1:00 a.m.
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CATHERINE EDDOWES
Murdered Sunday, September 30, 1888, in Mitre Square, body discovered at 1:45 a.m.
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MARY JANE KELLY
Murdered Friday, November 9, 1888, at 13 Miller’s Court, off Dorset Street (now demolished and the site of a parking lot), body discovered at 10:45 a.m.
About the Contributors
Alan Hicken was born in Worcester in 1949 into a military background. After leaving school, Alan had a short spell in the army, then he worked in the hotel industry before settling in the Somerset village of Montacute with his wife Marcia and their children Emma and Luke. Alan ran the village post office in Montacute for thirteen years while he set up the TV, Radio and Toy Museum there, which has now been open for twenty years. Starting with a small collection of thirty vintage radios from his father-in-law, Alan went on to collect a further five hundred to six hundred radios and TVs. To this, he added TV and radio program memorabilia that now consists of thousands of items. This manuscript was found by Alan in papers belonging to S. G. Hulme Beaman, the creator of the popular radio series based on his Toytown series featuring Larry the Lamb.
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Paul Begg has a career background in newspapers, television, and publishing. He became a freelance writer in 1979 and has written extensively for publication in Britain and abroad, and was for many years a respected reviewer of computer software. As well as writing about Jack the Ripper, he is the author of Into Thin Air, The Scotland Yard Files (with Keith Skinner), and Mary Celeste: The Greatest Mystery of the Sea. His books about Jack the Ripper include Jack the Ripper: The Uncensored Facts, Jack the Ripper: The Definitive History, and Jack the Ripper: The Facts. He is currently working on a book about Jack the Ripper for Yale University Press. He was formerly editor of Ripperologist magazine and has both appeared and been a historical adviser on numerous television programs. He currently lives in Kent with his wife Judy and daughter Sioban.