The Complete and Essential Jack the Ripper

by Paul Begg

  In the ensuing panic generated by the double murder, it was now a dangerous thing to be in possession of a shiny black bag. Around the country, totally innocent bystanders were being targeted for violence simply because they carried one, as this example from Birmingham demonstrates:

  The hue and cry after the Whitechapel fiend has exercised an almost irresistible influence over the minds of innumerable men and youths in all parts of the country. A feverish desire to run him to earth goads them on to be ever on the alert for a ‘dark man with a black bag.’ Under these circumstances the danger of carrying a black bag is very great. It resulted in the attention of the police being called to a suspect in Birmingham during the week. Late on Tuesday night a commercial traveller with a small black bag was hurrying down Stephenson Place to catch a train, when he was pounced upon by a strongly-built man. The suddenness of the attack took the possessor of the bag by surprise, and wishing to escape from the rather tight grip his assailant had of his throat, he began to struggle violently. The unknown retaliated and shrieked for help, but before the police arrived the pair were wriggling on the pavement. The strife having ended, the gentleman wished the constable to arrest his assailant for assaulting him, while the latter requested the policeman to lock the unfortunate owner of the black bag up for being the Whitechapel murderer.20

  The suspicion upon owners of such bags continued well after Mary Kelly’s murder, and the pictorial cover of the Illustrated Police News of 17 November 1888 contained no fewer than three illustrations of encounters with men holding them.

  As the Whitechapel murders progressed, the killer was already developing his mythical status: as ‘Leather Apron’ he was a by-word for terror; he had already exerted an early influence on what was considered entertainment; and he was tentatively beginning to acquire visual characteristics that would later refuse to go away. All he needed now was a name that would stick, and that came soon and easily enough in the form of the ‘Dear Boss’ letter and ‘Saucy Jacky’ postcard, received by the Central News agency on 27 September and 1 October 1888 respectively. Immediately after the double murder, it is assumed that the police gave the go-ahead for the content of these missives to be released to the press.

  The effect of these communications is a given. The excitement generated by their publication has been well documented, even though elements within the press and police felt that they were bogus. Melville Macnaghten, Robert Anderson and John Littlechild were convinced that a journalistic deception was responsible, and Littlechild, in his letter to George R. Sims in 1913, said that ‘it was generally believed at the Yard that Tom Bullen [sic] of the Central News was the originator, but it is probable Moore, who was his chief, was the inventor. It was a smart piece of journalistic work.’ The Star reporter Frederick Best has also been credited with the creation of the original Jack the Ripper letters,21 but whoever did write the ‘Dear Boss’ letter perhaps unwittingly created a name that resonated at the time and continues to do so.

  As the popular form of ‘John’, the name ‘Jack’ already had built-in associations with legendary characters from folklore and popular history: Jack-o’-Lantern, Jolly Jack Tar, Jack the Giant Killer and Spring-heeled Jack. ‘Ripper’ is self-explanatory. It was catchy, spoke volumes for the vicious intent and anti-heroic cockiness of the alleged author and would soon overtake the cumbersome ‘Leather Apron’ as the ideal name for this already most infamous of killers. ‘Jack the Ripper’ was a ‘Jack-the-Lad’ from a world of nightmares.

  Throughout the lull of October of 1888, the myths surrounding the Ripper began to grow. The fear of the unknown was beginning to take its toll, and as a dense fog descended over London for much of that month22 imaginations began to run riot. The murder of Catherine Eddowes, or specifically its location, Mitre Square, became a focus for supernatural supposition in The Curse upon Mitre Square, a lurid piece of fiction written by J. F. Brewer and published soon after the ‘double event’.23 Tapping into the late-Victorian fascination for superstition and gothic horror, it claimed that the site of Catherine Eddowes’s murder was haunted by the ghost of Brother Martin, a monk of the former Priory of the Holy Trinity, Aldgate. The Priory had stood on the site until its dissolution in 1538, after which the buildings were sold off and subsequently demolished. Brother Martin had, according to the legend, murdered a woman at the altar steps in a fashion not unlike that of the Ripper:

  The monk had seized the woman by the throat; a dozen times he gashed the face; the knife descended with lightning rapidity – pools of blood deluged the altar steps. With a demon’s fury, the monk then threw down the corpse and trod it out of very recognition. He spat upon the mutilated face, and, with his remaining strength, he ripped the body open and cast the entrails round about.

  The monk then plunged the knife into his own heart after realizing that he had killed his own sister.

  As preposterous as the idea of a malevolent, unavenged spirit being guilty of the Whitechapel murders is, such a story was no doubt devoured with great interest by literate Victorians, and it attached a mythology not just to the murder of Catherine Eddowes, but to the very place where it occurred. In Brewer’s words; ‘woe to anybody who would live on that spot; woe to him, who remained there at night and out of reach of help!’

  The day before the shocking events that inspired Brewer’s histrionics, the satirical magazine Punch published a poem entitled ‘The Nemesis of Neglect’, a lengthy verse which espoused the wrongs of the slums and how failure to right such wrongs had resulted in the visitation of awful crime.24 The final verse was particularly evocative:

  Dank roofs, dark entries, closely-clustered walls,

  Murder-inviting nooks, death-reeking gutters,

  A boding voice from your foul chaos calls,

  When will men heed the warning that it utters?

  There floats a phantom on the slum’s foul air,

  Shaping, to eyes which have the gift of seeing,

  Into the Spectre of that loathly lair.

  Face it – for vain is fleeing!

  Red-handed, ruthless, furtive, unerect,

  ’Tis murderous Crime – the Nemesis of Neglect!

  The poem was accompanied by a most evocative illustration; it depicted a translucent phantom floating through a slum alley, large knife drawn, staring out like some form of supernatural predator, its eyes piercing and its jaw hanging loose in a horrifying gape. The left hand was extended out with the bony fingers posed into a claw. On its forehead was the word ‘CRIME’. This illustration was without doubt the most striking image from those fearful times – a perfect embodiment of the Whitechapel ‘fiend’, a product of hell.This was echoed in descriptions in other limbs of the sensationalist press:

  A nameless reprobate – half beast, half man – is at large, who is daily gratifying his murderous instincts on the most miserable and defenceless classes of the community … The ghoul-like creature who stalks through the streets of London, stalking down his victim like a Pawnee Indian, is simply drunk with blood, and he will have more.

  Here then was not a man but a creature of the night, conjuring images of ghouls or vampires to inflame the superstitious Victorian imagination. It was reports like the one above that caused Mary Burridge of Blackfriars to collapse in a fit and die. Elizabeth Sodo was another possible casualty – suffering depression and having become increasingly distressed and agitated by the reporting of the murders, she hanged herself from the stairwell at her home in Hanbury Street on the morning of 11 October.25

  Following the murder of Mary Kelly, the 17 November edition of the Penny Illustrated Paper, which had included the depictions of men with black bags, unwittingly contributed to the most notable iconography of the mythical Ripper. The illustrator had obviously been influenced by George Hutchinson’s description of the gentleman seen with Mary on the morning of her murder:

  Description age about 34 or 35. height 5ft6 complexion pale, dark eyes and eye lashes slight moustache, curled up each end, and hair dark, very sur
ley looking dress long dark coat, collar and cuffs trimmed astracan. And a dark jacket under. Light waistcoat dark trousers dark felt hat turned down in the middle. Button boots and gaiters with white buttons. Wore a very thick gold chain white linen collar. Black tie with horse shoe pin. Respectable appearance walked very sharp.26

  Whereas some illustrators attempted to show the man as described, the version in the Penny Illustrated Paper revealed a certain amount of artistic licence; it showed Mary Kelly entering 13 Miller’s Court with a ‘gentleman’ tall enough to be looking down on her. He was sporting a distinguished moustache, suggesting grandeur but, more importantly, he wore a top hat, a long coat and was carrying a bag. This was the first depiction of Jack the Ripper in the iconic form that so many recognize today. The following year, clairvoyant Stuart Cumberland’s Mirror article did pretty much the same thing, and the accompanying illustration, showing a head-and-shoulders portrait of a ‘toff’, with delicate features and a ‘chimney-pot hat’, suggested again that the Whitechapel murderer was not of the poorer class, but from a more privileged background. Lyttleton Forbes Winslow, that disgraced theorist, said as much in his letter to the press in September 1888.27 A correspondent from the Evening News went visiting lodging houses and interviewed some of the lodgers, one of whom believed that ‘the murderer was a “toff” and deserved to get off’ just for clearing the streets of prostitutes.28 The idea had not gained much currency at the time, but the concept of the upper classes visiting the East End, or ‘slumming’, as it was known, was very in vogue:

  The most intense amusement has been caused among all classes of the London world by the arrest of Sir George Arthur on suspicion of being the Whitechapel murderer. Sir George is a young baronet holding a captaincy in the regiment of Royal Horse Guards, and is a member of most of the leading clubs in town. He is also a well-known amateur actor, and was a great friend of the late Prince Leopold.

  Since the past few weeks the old mania for ‘slumming’ in Whitechapel has become fashionable again. Every night scores of young men who have never been to the East end in their lives prowl around the neighbourhood in which the murders were committed, talking with the frightened women and pushing their way into overcrowded lodging houses.29

  By the time the Whitechapel murders had run their course, the attributes of a mythical Jack the Ripper had already begun to form. These attributes, which would lie dormant for decades, suggested not a deranged lunatic or crazed butcher, nor a volatile sailor or homicidal syphilitic, but a sinister, calculating and almost gentrified stalker. With developing overtones of the supernatural, Jack was becoming a ‘character’, already poised for exploitation, set against a backdrop that verged on the apocalyptic:

  Horror ran throughout the land. Men spoke of it with bated breath, and pale lipped women shuddered as they read the dreadful details. People afar off smelt blood, and the superstitious said that the skies had been of a deeper red that autumn.30

  17.

  The Lodger and Other Stories

  The idea that Jack the Ripper was a solitary man who lodged in the East End and kept himself to himself had a number of contemporary points of reference. The strange case of the ‘Batty Street Lodger’, where a mysterious tenant left a bloodstained shirt for his landlady to clean, only never to return to his lodgings, was one. Lyttleton Forbes Winslow’s suspect, G. Wentworth Bell Smith, with his obsession with religious tracts and peculiar overnight excursions, was another. A third was Nicolai Wassili (or Vassili or Vasilyef), a suspect suggested by Richard K. Fox, a journalist with the National Police Gazette.

  According to Fox, Wassili was a financially self-sufficient member of the fanatical ‘Shorn’ sect which condemned sexual relations, yet had a faction which devoted itself to violence. After the Russian Orthodox Church attempted to suppress the sect, Wassili went into exile in Paris and there attempted to continue his work by trying to convert prostitutes, largely unsuccessfully. Apparently, he became infatuated with a young woman who rejected his attentions and, reeling from this rebuff, he chose to ‘save’ prostitutes by killing them, committing five murders in the space of a fortnight. He was subsequently put into an asylum in 1872 but on his release in January 1888 he declared his intention of going to London. Wassili had actually been mentioned in the international press during the period of the murders,1 apparently lodged among the underclass of the East End and pored over religious tracts in his rooms before scouring the streets for the ‘fallen’. He was known as ‘the Avenger’.2

  As the daughter of a French barrister, Marie Belloc may well have been familiar with the Wassili case. In January 1911, under the pen-name of Mrs Belloc-Lowndes (she had by then married Frederick Lowndes), she published a story in McLure’s Magazine3 entitled ‘The Lodger’. Despite having shades of G. Wentworth Bell Smith and not a little of Nicolai Wassili, the idea for the story actually came from a chance encounter at a dinner where Marie was told by a lady sitting next to her about a mysterious lodger they had had many years before, his behaviour generating suspicion that he may have had something to do with the Whitechapel murders. She later turned the tale into a novel, published in 1913, which helped turn the Ripper story into a classic melodrama which would subsequently provide a rich vein of fictional interpretation, particularly in film.

  ‘The Lodger’ tells the story of Mr and Mrs Bunting, who own a house in Marylebone Road and who, at the start of the story, are suffering grave financial problems. However, their fortunes appear to change when they take on a new lodger, the enigmatic Mr Sleuth, who pays them handsomely for the use of their upstairs rooms. By this time, a series of horrific murders have taken place across London, the killer leaving a ‘calling card’ at each one and calling himself ‘the Avenger’. Despite the peculiar nature of their new tenant, the Buntings are happy in their new-found security. Mr Sleuth spends his time poring over and reciting from the Bible and a concordance, particularly on issues of drink and women, for which he has an obvious distaste. Most notable is his habit of leaving the house in the early hours of the morning and creeping back in before the Buntings have risen. It predictably transpires that Mr Sleuth is indeed ‘the Avenger’, casting a strange influence over the household.

  The story is loaded with melodrama and borrows heavily from the real events of 1888: the name of the local detective who visits the household frequently is Joe Chandler, which also happened to be the name of the first police officer at the scene of Annie Chapman’s murder. ‘The Avenger’ commits a double murder, and the newspapers report on the potential use of bloodhounds. Mrs Bunting’s occasional ‘turns’ suggest, as the lodger continues to maintain an increasingly malevolent hold over the home, that there are perhaps darker forces at work.

  What is worthy of note is the description given of Mr Sleuth on his first appearance at the door of the Buntings’ home:

  On the top of the three steps which led up to the door, there stood the long, lanky figure of a man, clad in an Inverness cape and an old-fashioned top hat. He waited a few seconds blinking at her, perhaps dazzled by the light of the gas in the passage. Mrs Bunting’s trained perception told her at once that this man, odd as he looked, was a gentleman, belonging by birth to the class with whom her former employment had brought her in contact.

  He also possesses a bag to which he seems attached to the point of paranoia. It is a classic description of the mythical Jack the Ripper, set in print decades before it would become the standard.

  As a rapidly developing symbol of fear, the Ripper provided a rich vein to tap into for film-makers and the story of ‘The Lodger’ would become a most exploitable tale for them. His first appearance on celluloid was in a nightmare sequence in Paul Leni’s expressionist Waxworks (or Das Wachsfigurenkabinett).4 His appearance was a peripheral one, but the character was blessed with a disturbing presence, marking him out as an emerging motif of unease and psychological dread. But it was that master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock who first brought ‘The Lodger’ to the screen in his first directorial outi
ng, aged only twenty-six.5 The film was subtitled A Story of the London Fog, drawing heavily on the original storyline and starred matinee idol Ivor Novello in the title role. It was filled with gloomy set-pieces of London locations, shrouded in foggy darkness save for the hint of dim street lighting, close-ups of faces expressing terror and, of course, the overpoweringly sinister portrayal of the lodger himself. His first appearance became a truly iconic image: Mrs Bunting opens the door of her home to reveal the figure of a man dressed in a long coat and tall hat and carrying a bag, with the swirling menace of a London fog in the background.

  Expressionist cinema had another crack at the Ripper story in 1928 with Georg Pabst’s Die Büchse der Pandora or Pandora’s Box.6 This was essentially a remake of Lulu, a morality tale which had its roots in a play first penned by Frank Wedekind in 1893 and which was subsequently filmed in 1917 and 1923. Lulu was a ‘good-time girl’ or vamp whose loose living would culminate in a final encounter with a man considered to be the epitome of evil, namely Jack the Ripper. Her resulting death is represented as some sort of ‘wages of sin’. Lulu would later go on to be a popular production, even being made into a successful musical, and variations on its story have become the most filmed fictional treatment of the Ripper story.

  Similarly, so successful was the impact of The Lodger and the brooding menace it created that the film was remade numerous times – and with variations in content – over the ensuing decades: Novello reprised his role in The Phantom Fiend (1932), which was followed in 1944 by The Lodger, Room to Let (1950) and Man in the Attic (1954) with Jack Palance. The frequency of these movies indicated a growing schism between myth and reality, as screenwriters began to mould Jack the Ripper, or variations of him, into a horror genre character, something which transformed the Whitechapel murderer into a character of fiction. The same had happened with Dracula: Bram Stoker’s vampire count, created in 1897, was fiction of course, an amalgam of various influences, predominantly Eastern European vampire legends and ancient superstitions about shape-shifters such as werewolves. But beginning with Bela Lugosi’s definitive portrayal of the sinister aristocratic bloodsucker in the 1930s, later reinforced by Christopher Lee’s numerous films thereafter, the movie industry very quickly produced an iconic visual interpretation of him that became set in stone. The same would happen to Jack the Ripper in the eponymously titled 1959 film by Robert S. Baker.7