Commonplace 103 George & Jack the Ripper. Read All About It!! PART ONE.
On the 31st August 1888, the body of a murdered woman was found in Whitechapel, one of the poorest areas of the East End of London. It kick-started a torrent of weirdness that has now become part of the fabric of British culture; it has established a world-wide preoccupation with homicide, and has spawned an entire branch of tourism for London. Paris may have its tours of the sewers click, but London has its Ripper Walks click.
Murder of women by men was not an uncommon offence in the East End
of that time, and often, the means of murder was stabbing and throttling, but the incidence was never as frequent as the Free Press of the time would allow. That a number of murders of women occurred in fairly quick succession within the
district of Whitechapel, was cause for alarm. And, though all shared a common finding - that the deceased had been
stabbed repeatedly - there was no consistent pattern or modus operandi. The women victims have been lumped together under the term ‘prostitute’, but there is no
clear evidence they were all soliciting at the time they were attacked. However, the Press, eager to sell newspapers, invented a single perpetrator of these attacks and gave us the legend of Jack the Ripper, a name almost certainly invented by a journalist.
Shaw had in mind the demonstration attended by William Morris in 1885 (see Commonplace 99)
The Socialist Worker website archive on William Morris' political activism click, contains a mention of George:
On one occasion Morris was arrested and charged with hitting an officer. But the magistrate, confronted with a furious and unrepentant Morris, was forced to drop the charges. This episode scandalised Morris’s respectable contemporaries. The writer George Gissing moaned, “It is painful to me beyond expression. Why cannot he write poetry in the shade?”
We know George's sympathies were not on the side of Demos, unless they were meek and mild, uncomplaining and accepting of their lowly lot in life. In and amongst the claims the Ripper was a man from the mean streets of Whitechapel, there was the solid belief that he was really an outsider from the middle classes - hence the suggestion James Maybrick was a possible candidate. Likely candidates from the Queen's physician, to Freemasons' conspiracies and back to the Royals for the Duke of Clarence, Prince Albert Victor. So, when did our George become a suspect in these dreadful crimes?
JOIN ME IN COMMONPLACE 104 TO FIND OUT MORE.
On the 31st August 1888, the body of a murdered woman was found in Whitechapel, one of the poorest areas of the East End of London. It kick-started a torrent of weirdness that has now become part of the fabric of British culture; it has established a world-wide preoccupation with homicide, and has spawned an entire branch of tourism for London. Paris may have its tours of the sewers click, but London has its Ripper Walks click.
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| Sites of the five canonical killings. |
The context for these attacks is crucial in understanding how the
disparate crimes were grouped together to be classified as the work of a single
perpetrator. The capital city’s problem of cramming poor people into places
where there was limited opportunity for employment, leaving them not much
choice but to turn to crime, had been a national scandal for decades. The English
northern cities had work opportunities for the poorest, in factories and mills,
and in the manufacturing trades; London had no such infrastructure.
Reformers and social campaigners had been highly critical of the
State’s lack of leadership on the matter of poverty in London, and the impact this had on the lives of women. In an age when women received a fraction of the wage of a man even when they did the same sort of work, was a national disgrace, and contributed to many women having to supplement their incomes with prostitution. Amongst the endeavours to address these iniquities was the campaign lead by Josephine Butler click to over throw the Contagious Diseases act of 1853,
and the scandal attendant on WT Stead's, editorials in the Pall Mall Gazette, entitled 'The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon' of 1885 click.
Stead was a big fan of George's early works, mistaking him for a kindred spirit; Stead, a man much too straight-talking to appreciate George's 'irony' (which is how George described his writing to Gabrielle Fleury) thought our man cared about those poor folks in Whitecross Street. Anyhoo, in 1894, Stead wrote to George asking him, in his capacity as one of the foremost novelists of Great Britain (Stead played him like a violin haha), to sign a bid to support the proposal to have a monument to the International Peace cause. Of course, George, all modesty cast aside, signed it.
Stead had refused to report the grisly details of the five murders. In 1890, he resigned from the PMG and set up the Review of Reviews with Sir George Newness, whom he swiftly bought out to take sole charge of it. In 1893, Stead visited the World's Trade Fair in Chicago (a place George knew a little) to study the appalling spiritual and temporal conditions there. This was the same year that Chicago-based Herman Webster Mudgett, better known as HH Holmes took advantage of the Fair to murder his victims (a possible candidate to be Jack The Ripper, too click), and we can look forward to Martin Scorsese teaming up with Leonardo DiCaprio again to tell this bloody tale.
In that late summer and autumn of 1888, five 'canonical' victims were identified as being killed by a single assailant. A series of confessional letters from a wide variety of sources arrived at various newspaper desks, including the News Desk of the Central News Agency, some written by mischief makers, some done by attention-seeking blackguards, all of them contributing to boosting the circulation of newspapers. Letters written in fake blood, some claiming to have committed the crimes, were eventually trumped by the arrival of a portion of human kidney in a box, sent to the man organising the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee. Many letters poked fun at the police for not being able to catch the murderer. This sort of malarkey was copied in the Yorkshire Ripper case of the 1980s and '90s, with tape recorded 'confessions' sent to taunt the policeman in charge of the investigation. These claimed to be by the murderer, but turned out to be written by a wannabe fantasist who subsequently had blood on his conscience as the police followed his Geordie accent to Newcastle, and ignored the Bradford-born real perpetrator, thus allowing him to carry on killing.
Stead was a big fan of George's early works, mistaking him for a kindred spirit; Stead, a man much too straight-talking to appreciate George's 'irony' (which is how George described his writing to Gabrielle Fleury) thought our man cared about those poor folks in Whitecross Street. Anyhoo, in 1894, Stead wrote to George asking him, in his capacity as one of the foremost novelists of Great Britain (Stead played him like a violin haha), to sign a bid to support the proposal to have a monument to the International Peace cause. Of course, George, all modesty cast aside, signed it.
Stead had refused to report the grisly details of the five murders. In 1890, he resigned from the PMG and set up the Review of Reviews with Sir George Newness, whom he swiftly bought out to take sole charge of it. In 1893, Stead visited the World's Trade Fair in Chicago (a place George knew a little) to study the appalling spiritual and temporal conditions there. This was the same year that Chicago-based Herman Webster Mudgett, better known as HH Holmes took advantage of the Fair to murder his victims (a possible candidate to be Jack The Ripper, too click), and we can look forward to Martin Scorsese teaming up with Leonardo DiCaprio again to tell this bloody tale.
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| Mitre Square site of one victim's death. |
Depressing as it is, there were some who suggested at the time that Jack the Ripper was a social reformer. We should take 'social reformer' to mean more than one who makes the lot of the disadvantaged better. The dreadful events of that time proved every worse thing the middle and above classes thought about poor people. It was as if all the talk about poverty, vice and destitution had burst at the seams, and spilled out into the public consciousness in one short season. It looked like they were right to blame the poor for their own predicament when they were all murderous drunken whores or predators. But, there was a backlash as readers of newspapers became bored of the Shock! Horror! accounts of grisly deaths. The vast majority of the population were sickened into apathy about the murders, and lost their salacious interest in crime and poverty and despaired of reforming the lower orders. Is this why George never again wrote about the poor after The Nether World - not because of the catharsis of Marianne aka Nell's death, but because the reading public had suffered a surfeit of reportage from the front line of deprivation? If he couldn't sell books about the poor, then George would have to make a detailed study of the next strata up - but that would mean fishing around for middle-class bods to observe.
To illustrate this point, here is the letter George Bernard Shaw wrote to The Star, on September 24th, 1888:
To illustrate this point, here is the letter George Bernard Shaw wrote to The Star, on September 24th, 1888:
SIR,-- Will
you allow me to make a comment on the success of the Whitechapel murderer in
calling attention for a moment to the social question? Less
than a year ago the West-end press, headed by the St. James's Gazette, the Times, and the Saturday Review, were literally
clamouring for the blood of the people--hounding on Sir Charles Warren to
thrash and muzzle the scum who dared to complain that they were
starving--heaping insult and reckless calumny on those who interceded for the
victims--applauding to the skies the open class bias of those magistrates and
judges who zealously did their very worst in the criminal proceedings which
followed--behaving, in short as the proprietary class always does behave when
the workers throw it into a frenzy of terror by venturing to show their teeth.
Quite lost on these journals and their patrons were indignant remonstrances,
argument, speeches, and sacrifices, appeals to history, philosophy, biology,
economics, and statistics; references to the reports of inspectors, registrar
generals, city missionaries, Parliamentary commissions, and newspapers;
collections of evidence by the five senses at every turn; and house-to-house
investigations into the condition of the unemployed, all unanswered and
unanswerable, and all pointing the same way. The Saturday Review was still frankly for hanging the
appellants; and the Times denounced them as "pests of
society." This was still the tone of the class Press as lately as the
strike of the Bryant and May girls. Now all is changed. Private enterprise has
succeeded where Socialism failed. Whilst we conventional Social Democrats were
wasting our time on education, agitation, and organisation, some independent
genius has taken the matter in hand, and by simply murdering and disembowelling
four women, converted the proprietary press to an inept sort of communism. The
moral is a pretty one, and the Insurrectionists, the Dynamitards,
the Invincibles, and the extreme left of the Anarchist party will not be
slow to draw it. "Humanity, political science, economics, and
religion," they will say, "are all rot; the one argument that touches
your lady and gentleman is the knife." That is so pleasant for the
party of Hope and Perseverance in their toughening struggle with the party of
Desperation and Death!
However, these things have to be faced. If
the line to be taken is that suggested by the converted West-end papers--if the
people are still to yield up their wealth to the Clanricarde class, and get
what they can back as charity through Lady Bountiful, then the policy for the
people is plainly a policy of terror. Every gaol blown up, every window broken,
every shop looted, every corpse found disembowelled, means another ten pound
note for "ransom." The riots of 1886 brought in £78,000
and a People's Palace; it remains to be seen how much these murders may prove
worth to the East-end in panem
et circenses. Indeed, if the habits of duchesses only admitted of their
being decoyed into Whitechapel back-yards, a single experiment in
slaughterhouse anatomy on an aristocratic victim might fetch in a round half
million and save the necessity of sacrificing four women of the people. Such is
the stark-naked reality of these abominable bastard Utopias of genteel charity,
in which the poor are first to be robbed and then pauperised by way of
compensation, in order that the rich man may combine the idle luxury of the
protected thief with the unctuous self-satisfaction of the pious
philanthropist.
The proper way to recover the rents of
London for the people of London is not by charity, which is one of the worst
curses of poverty, but by the municipal rate collector, who will no doubt make
it sufficiently clear to the monopolists of ground value that he is not merely
taking round the hat, and that the State is ready to enforce his demand, if
need be. And the money thus obtained must be used by the municipality as the
capital of productive industries for the better employment of the poor.
I submit that this is at least a less disgusting and immoral method of
relieving the East-end than the gust of bazaars and blood money which has
suggested itself from the West-end point of view.--Yours,
The Socialist Worker website archive on William Morris' political activism click, contains a mention of George:
On one occasion Morris was arrested and charged with hitting an officer. But the magistrate, confronted with a furious and unrepentant Morris, was forced to drop the charges. This episode scandalised Morris’s respectable contemporaries. The writer George Gissing moaned, “It is painful to me beyond expression. Why cannot he write poetry in the shade?”
We know George's sympathies were not on the side of Demos, unless they were meek and mild, uncomplaining and accepting of their lowly lot in life. In and amongst the claims the Ripper was a man from the mean streets of Whitechapel, there was the solid belief that he was really an outsider from the middle classes - hence the suggestion James Maybrick was a possible candidate. Likely candidates from the Queen's physician, to Freemasons' conspiracies and back to the Royals for the Duke of Clarence, Prince Albert Victor. So, when did our George become a suspect in these dreadful crimes?
JOIN ME IN COMMONPLACE 104 TO FIND OUT MORE.
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