Jack the Ripper & the London Press

Jack the Ripper and the London Press

JACK the RIPPER and the LONDON PRESS

L. PERRY CURTIS, JR.

Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Philip Hamilton McMillan of the Class of 1894, Yale College.

Copyright © 2001 by Yale University

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

Designed by Mary Valencia and set in Simoncini Garamond type by Keystone Typesetting, Inc., Orwigsburg, Pennsylvania.

Printed in the United States of America by Vail-Ballou Press, Binghamton, New York.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Curtis, L. Perry (Lewis Perry), 1932–

Jack the Ripper and the London press / L. Perry Curtis, Jr.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0–300–08872–8 (alk. paper)

1. Jack the Ripper. 2. Serial murders—Press coverage—England—London.

3. Serial murderers—Press coverage—England—London.

4. Serial murders—England—London—History—19th century. I. Title.

HV6535.G72 L663 2001

070.4'493641523'092—dc21

2001002530

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

In Memoriam

LEWIS P. CURTIS

(1900–1976)

Father, Teacher, Anglophile, and Man of Letters

The desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it.

Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 The Whitechapel Murders: A Chronicle

Chapter 2 Images and Realities of the East End

Chapter 3 The Theory and Practice of Victorian Journalism

Chapter 4 Sensation News

Chapter 5 Victorian Murder News

Chapter 6 The First Two Murders

Chapter 7 The Double Event

Chapter 8 The Pursuit of Angles

Chapter 9 The Kelly Reportage

Chapter 10 The Inquests: Reporting the Female Body

Chapter 11 Responses to Ripper News: Letters to the Editor

Chapter 12 The Cultural Politics of Ripper News

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

Introduction

Since 1960, at least thirty books—not to mention scores of articles and chapters—have dealt with the exploits and identity of Jack the Ripper.¹ One of the fastest-growing light industries of the late-twentieth-century publishing world, what is known as Ripperature has attracted a worldwide audience, owing in part to exotic film and television variations on the theme of whodunem. Writers who relish playing the game of hunt the Ripper tend to thrive by the rule that even the flimsiest circumstantial evidence can serve to buttress a foregone conclusion. No matter how exhaustive the archival hunt and how personally gratifying the discovery of the real Jack may be—especially if he turns out to have been a gentleman or a royal—the results of this exercise have brought us no closer to the real culprit than did the exertions of Scotland Yard in 1888. Of course, the fact that Jack’s identity remains a mystery explains much of his appeal today.

Given all the multimedia attention paid to Jack the Ripper in recent years, one may well ask why we need yet another study of his deeds and the myths swirling around them. My short answer is that long ago I discerned a significant gap in Ripperature. For years Ripper buffs have devoted so much energy to tracking down the killer that the subject of what the London press conveyed to the public in the way of murder news has been largely obscured. In other words, the story of Fleet Street’s construction of the Ripper story has yet to be told. Moreover, there has been an almost complete failure of communication between, on the one hand, the male essentialists who focus on the Ripper’s exploits and identity and, on the other, the theorized feminists, who have an entirely different agenda and see these sadistic murders as symptomatic of the deep-seated misogyny that pervades patriarchal societies.

The burgeoning field of murderology has been much enriched of late by some outstanding studies by a new generation of cultural critics and historians—most of them written by American women—of the representation of murder, murderers, and victims not only in newspapers but also in fiction and art. Scholarly studies by Helen Benedict, Karen Halttunen, Judith Knelman, Sara Knox, Wendy Lesser, Maria Tatar, Richard Tithecott, Andy Tucher, and Amy Srebnick have greatly expanded the horizons of this vital, if morbid, topic and made us more aware of how deeply we are all implicated as readers and as members of society in narratives of violent death. These studies are also studded with clues about the workings of culture as well as class and gender relations.² In short, they help to remind us that at some level of our psychic lives the familiar emotions of love, hate, anger, jealousy, lust, and greed (almost all the seven deadly sins) make us complicit with the principal actors in murder cases, however strenuously we may try to distance ourselves from the victims or the victimizers. In the words of Sara Knox, The teller of the tale of murder touches upon grand and unanswerable questions.³ These tales affect us directly, if only because we are all at risk when it comes to random, familial, or domestic acts of lethal violence. No matter how far removed we may be from the actual crime scene, we are drawn to such tales because the horrific reality of homicide reminds us of both the precariousness of life and the immanence of death.

Although feminist critics attribute the media’s fondness for sensationalizing murder to the voyeuristic or prurient impulses of male journalists and their primarily masculine audience, there can be no doubt that murder cases and trials in the Victorian era appealed deeply to many women, judging from their presence in the visitors galleries of courtrooms. They also made up at least a third of the spectators at public executions in England up to 1868. In other words, the representation of murder and its aftermath in newspapers, pamphlets, leaflets, and books reveals much about the tastes or needs of the populace as a whole. At the outset of her study of the legal, social, and moral issues arising out of a condemned prisoner’s wish to have his own execution videotaped and shown on a television station in California, Wendy Lesser admits that she is interested in our interest in murder. So am I. But whereas she is most concerned with the increasingly blurry borderline between real murder and fictional murder, between murder as news and murder as art, between event and story,⁴ I am intrigued by the illusions of reality purveyed by the print media, and I keep wanting to know more about the efforts of editors and reporters to fill as many of the empty pockets of murder news as possible with messages of moral, if not political, import. Although not fully deserving of the label fiction because they were not the products of pure imagination, the feature articles about murder in the Victorian press contained many of the basic ingredients of the novel or short story—with the obvious exception of the clinical details of bodily injuries that Victorian newspapers served up to readers in an almost pornographic manner. The larger focus of this study, then, falls on representations of different kinds of murder in the London press since the 1840s, including all the extra baggage that accompanied feature stories about homicides deemed newsworthy by editors.

While most Ripperologists have treated Jack the Ripper as a unique hero-villain, some feminists have interpreted his activities as a paradigm of the modern phenomenon of sexual murder, configuring him as an extreme expression or epitome of the patriarchal order. In other words, this icon of evil represents a huge milestone in the long war of the sexes that has been variously called gynocide, gendercide, or femicide.⁵ When one surveys the different approaches taken to studying the Whitechapel murders, what stands out is the absence of any serious dialogue or exchange between the (mostly British) male essentialists and the (mostly American) feminist cultural critics. Like ships in the night, the two schools pass each other by with barely a foghorn or semaphore message to acknowledge the presence of the other. (Much the same could be said about historians of murder in nineteenth-century Britain and America, but that is another story.) One notable exception, Christopher Frayling, has confronted the cultural implications of the Ripper mythos and pointed out how the press occasionally went so far as to chastise itself—ever so gently, one might add—for exploiting the lurid aspects of these mutilation murders.⁶

My own point of entry into the heavily trafficked highway of Ripper studies may be likened to a roundabout in the midst of two highly gendered streams of traffic. Among my principal concerns—in no order of importance—are first, the constructed nature of news in general and murder news in particular; second, the handling of the Ripper’s mutilations by reporters; third, the pervasive presence of law-and-order imperatives in Ripper news during a time of tense class relations; fourth, the imaging or Othering of the East End as the natural site of such horrors; fifth, the relation of Fleet Street’s representations of the Ripper’s victims to contemporary (male) images of the female body; and sixth, the public responses to these murders in the form of letters published in some leading papers. In one way or another all these themes arise out of my conviction that Ripper news and its spin-offs afford insights into the preoccupations, indeed obsessions, of the late Victorians. To put this another way, into the partial vacuum created by all the unknowns in this horror story rushed the kind of fears and fantasies that were usually hidden behind the doors of reticence or repression and therefore deemed unfit to print.

Cast in a more empirical mold, the first two chapters offer an overview of the crimes and a brief survey of the crime scene—Whitechapel—as constructed by both contemporaries and historians. These are followed by three chapters in which I seek to contextualize the industry and the art of journalism and deal with the various meanings of sensationalism and the nature of murder news in Victorian England. To aid and abet my understanding of the theory, practice, and politics of journalism I have drawn on both the pioneering work on the twentieth-century British press carried out by Stuart Hall, Steve Chibnall, and their colleagues at Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies during the 1970s, and also the sociological investigation of the Canadian news industry (both print and television) orchestrated by Richard Ericson a decade later.⁷ Despite their differences, these cultural critics have likewise illuminated the ideological and/or political nature of news about crime and other forms of deviant behavior. Their studies of media-driven crime waves in the late twentieth century help us to understand better the workings of Victorian crime news, so much of which was designed to achieve a well-ordered or well-policed society. To that end, many (but not all) Victorian journalists drew sharp distinctions between normative and deviant behavior, thereby reinscribing the dominant codes of social and sexual respectability. With these critical journalistic studies in mind, I have treated murder news as a social and cultural construct assembled by reporters who both influence and are influenced in turn by standards of approved behavior. News, in sum, is not just about politics, it is politics.⁸

In Chapter 6 I begin the process of analyzing Ripper news by comparing the various accounts of the Nichols and Chapman murders. The next four chapters are devoted to the coverage of the last three Ripper murders (Stride, Eddowes, and Kelly). In Chapter 11 I deal with several hundred letters to the editor sent by readers with various agendas to express. And, finally, in Chapter 12 I reflect on the political-cum-cultural ramifications of Ripper news. Among the many omissions in this study are the countless resurrections of the Ripper murders in our own time, whether these assume the form of fiction, opera, film, television dramas, comic books, East End walking tours, or tacky memorabilia sold in Whitechapel pubs. Such topics could easily fill another book.

To appreciate the nuances of Ripper news, we must first examine the conventions of crime reporting and murder news and then see how Ripper news reinforced West End impressions of the East End as a den of unrelieved depravity. After this comes the gore. Since so much of the Ripper reportage consisted of graphic descriptions of the injuries inflicted by the killer, I have addressed the subject of sensation-horror news with all its prurient and voyeuristic implications. In this regard, both the evening and Sunday press took top honors by featuring the Ripper’s abdominal mutilations as revealed at the various inquest sessions. While some of these passages contained intimate glimpses of female anatomy that seemed much more appropriate for a medical journal, even these papers omitted some of the clinical details found in the autopsy reports. At the same time, the upmarket morning papers did not lag far behind their penny competitors when it came to serving up gore to readers, few of whom ever complained in print about undue shocks to their sensibilities.

Years of reading newspapers both past and present have driven me to the rather depressing conclusion that news is more or less whatever editors and journalists deem newsworthy on any given day or night. In other words, our daily or weekly diet of news represents the result of much sifting, selecting, blending, and narrating of discrete facts or events, in ways that reflect the values of reporters, editors, and publishers. Without entering into a long and no doubt tedious disquisition about how we can ever know what really happened in any reported event given the insistence of poststructuralist critics on deferred meaning and the always unstable and self-referential nature of language, I should point out that murder news is treated here as another form of social knowledge as well as a cultural production that falls somewhere along the broad spectrum between fiction and lived reality. Just as "perceptions are perceptions of perceptions and so on ad infinitum ... [that] never reach—say their critics—the realities which are the referents of truth," so my approach amounts to a series of representations of the media’s representation of five brutal homicides that took place in Whitechapel between August 31 and November 9, 1888.⁹ Written without benefit of semiotic theory, this study analyzes the feature articles and editorials about these murders in order to illuminate some of the deeper concerns of those who composed and consumed the texts in question.

There are several deafening silences in the texts of murder news. Not only has the victim been silenced forever, but the perpetrator, when and if caught and convicted, rarely says anything truthful, least of all if coached by a lawyer. Even when a Victorian murderer did confess, the results could hardly be trusted to contain the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Into the vacuum created by these silences rush all kinds of speculation and fantasy on the part of journalists and their readers. And then, so obvious as to be virtually ignored, there are the silences surrounding the composition and publication of the stories. Journalists are not given to explaining just how they went about gathering and selecting the materials for their articles, and editors do not leave elaborate notes about why they chose to make a front-page splash out of one particular murder while burying another in fine print at the foot of a column deep inside the next day’s edition. Mindful that the truth about what really happened and why during the Ripper’s murder spree can never be known, I have focused on the representations of these bloody events in more than a dozen London newspapers. Because Ripper news depended so heavily on the codes of [Victorian] culture to give them meaning, we cannot neatly separate the newspaper accounts of what happened on each occasion from such contextual issues as sexual propriety, class relations, masculine images of women, fantasies about male and female sexuality, and constant fears of the hard-core criminal element in the East End.¹⁰ In addition, the rigid codes of social and sexual respectability made it hard for both the producers and consumers of murder news to deal with lust murder, especially when the pelvic mutilations were bound to cause some readers acute distress.

Ever since Marie Belloc Lowndes published her short story about a religious fanatic and misogynist (improbably named Mr. Sleuth) who murdered women ostensibly out of fear and loathing of their sexuality, the exploits of Jack the Ripper have inspired a number of male writers to act as historical detectives in pursuit of the true perpetrator.¹¹ Apart from this familiar form of Ripperature, plays, operas, movies, and television dramas have also embellished the Ripper legend, serving up villains who run the gamut from proletarians to gentlemen and at least one member of the royal family—the Duke of Clarence.¹² Even today, the custodians and sellers of Ripper mementos in London continue to depict Jack as a tall, thin gentleman with a top hat and expensive black opera cloak. To paraphrase a ranking police official who worked long and hard on the case, there has been enough nonsense written and said about the murders to sink a Dread-nought.¹³ For this reason I see no point in adding more dead weight to the sunken hulk by proposing yet another candidate for the leading role, especially when I do not share Donald Rumbelow’s faith that someday "the mystery will be solved. On the other hand, I have to agree with his surmise that the killer—if ever discovered—will probably have a face not so very dissimilar from our own."¹⁴ Leaving all the speculation about Jack’s identity to the armchair detectives, who are convinced that they can solve crimes that baffled the combined forces of Scotland Yard and the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) at the time, I have concentrated on the news of his handiwork served up by Fleet Street to millions of eager as well as alarmed readers around the country and abroad.

In recent years two very different books have insightfully addressed the cultural implications of serial murder in America. Concerned with why we—proverbial middle-class readers all—are so susceptible to the social panics engendered by serial killers, both works consider our (over)reactions to such perceived threats and the natural reluctance of men to admit any resemblance between themselves and these monstrous or bestial killers. In Killer Among Us, Joseph Fisher explores the social and psychological impact of serial murder on the communities wherein they occur. Drawing on various serial murders in the United States—from Richard Valenti’s attacks on young women in South Carolina in 1973–74 to Jeffrey Dahmer’s necrophilic acts in Milwaukee—Fisher constructs a semisocial scientific model of the responses of the media and local residents to the monster lurking in their midst. His final chapter, based largely on the coverage in the Pall Mall Gazette, deals with The Classic Case of Jack the Ripper. Addressing the media circus that always arises in cases of sexual serial murder, he contends that the public’s insatiable desire for news, the media’s commercial interests in providing it, and the killer’s need to publicize his invincibility can create a synergistic situation that spirals out of control.¹⁵ Whether or not Fleet Street and the public ever spun out of control in the autumn of 1888, there can be no doubt about the presence of a synergistic response to the Whitechapel murders in the press as well as the metropolis.

The second work, Richard Tithecott’s Of Men and Monsters, contains a series of illuminating as well as disturbing messages about the ways in which our culture constructs serial murderers like Jeffrey Dahmer. Stressing the paradoxical nature of the killer’s image, Tithecott conceives of him as one who must not be fully represented and one who is made in our own image. Far from producing an essentialist portrait of Dahmer, Tithecott ruminates about our collective response to the so-called cannibal-killer, whom we imagine to be either a maniacal monster, a sane embodiment of pure evil, or an emotionally handicapped outsider. Such conventional categories are designed to distance him or it from us. Seeking a logical motive for his atrocities, we rummage through Dahmer’s childhood looking for clues about where he and his parents went wrong and how an ordinary boy grew into an alcoholic, necrophilic man. Tithecott insists that we are asking the wrong questions and are guilty of accepting the flawed findings of the experts—whether psychologists or criminologists—who reassure us that we have nothing in common with such monsters. Instead of wasting time trying to understand the inexplicable reasons for such predatory behavior, we should be exploring the dominant culture and its relationship to our own unarticulated dreams of violence, of racial or sexual purity, of closure, of death. In short, Tithecott asks us to search our own souls for answers that will always remain problematic because there are no natural or clear distinctions between sanity and insanity or between normal and perverse. To demonize the Ed Geins, Ted Bundys, or Jeffrey Dahmers of recent notoriety is to delude ourselves into thinking that serial killers are not real human beings who resemble us (at least us males) in ways that are bound to undermine our complacency. In a moment of startling self-reflexivity, Tithecott looks into the mirror of his own soul and finds there a composite image of himself alongside Dahmer: The serial killer I see haunts his common representation. He is the monster within, or rather he is monstrous normality within the monster of serial killer mythology. Identifying myself with the normal and remarking on its monstrosity is to have a contradictory perspective, allowing me to confess, Frankenstein like, that the serial killer I see is my monster, my creation—that I write the serial killer and I write my self.¹⁶ Since the Victorians lacked the convenient category or label of serial killer and knew so little about lust murder, they had a better excuse than ourselves for demonizing or Othering the Whitechapel murderer.

My study of murder news is much less reflexive than Tithecott’s ruminations and far more concerned with them—namely, the Victorians who wrote and read all those lurid articles about the Whitechapel horrors and who felt the panics, shocks, and thrills arising therefrom. The core chapters herein deal with newspaper texts as though they were ideologically charged and fragmented images of events that had passed through the filters of witnesses, reporters, editors, and, of course, readers, all of whom carried their own preconceptions. The distorting effects of all this filtering prevent us from ever attaining a complete grasp of the original events, despite the apparent authority of each newspaper account. Equally important, reporters often devoted some time and space to their own surmises and rumors gleaned from contacts or witnesses. In other words, all the unknowns in these murders created a thousand and one openings for imaginations to run riot. Whether by means of feature articles, leaders, or letters to the editor (and the police), Jack’s contemporaries contributed much to the nightmarish story he inscribed with his knife on the bodies of his victims.

If murder is a social (as well as antisocial) act, then its telling and selling by the press are significant cultural events that reveal much about what journalists think the public wants or needs to know. Murder news by definition both whets and feeds an appetite that disapproving critics deem perverse or voyeuristic. Why, we may well ask, are so many of us drawn to images of violence that frighten or disgust us? What is the source of our ambivalent response to scenes or images of horror in films, on television, and in newspapers? (Why do we slow down and stare at a car crash while driving along the highway when we have no intention of helping any of the victims?) Some tentative answers to these questions lie scattered through the following pages. For the present we need but allude to Cynthia Freeland’s observation that pornography and the horror film share in common not only multiple participants and body parts, but also "the embodiment of humans or intimacies of the flesh."¹⁷ Murder news, then, is not just about extreme violence inflicted on someone else. As Tithecott points out, it is also about our own fantasies and the culture out of which they arise. Implicitly or explicitly, feature stories about homicide convey powerful messages about morality, respectability, and normality. For example, the Victorian press often garnished murder news with allusions to the wages of sin, which had the effect of moving readers to imagine themselves as either victim or victimizer, thereby giving rise to the thought There but for the grace of God go I.¹⁸

Crime news is, of course, only one form of storytelling. Because most of us have been immersed in stories of one kind or another since childhood, we find it hard to resist narratives and narrativizing. Some years ago Joan Didion addressed our collective hunger for stories that contain a moral, especially those dealing with violent death: We tell ourselves stories in order to live.... We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.¹⁹

This notion of freezing the ever-shifting phantasms of our own lived experience conjures up another vital aspect of murder stories—namely, the ways in which the narrative form helps us to cope with the fears that well up inside us whenever we encounter scenes of terror or sites of horror. As Wes Craven, the director of the notorious Scream films, observed, It’s like boot camp for the psyche. In real life human beings are packaged in the flimsiest of packages, threatened by real and sometimes horrifying dangers, events like Columbine. But the narrative form puts those fears into a manageable series of events. It gives us a way of thinking rationally about our fears. Craven then went on to reveal how much he enjoyed the search for ways to heighten the fears of his audience: They see patterns, and they try to think logically about how to escape the lurking danger. Our job is to always stay one or two steps ahead and keep them scared.²⁰

Because the Whitechapel killer was never caught and put on trial, the murders became the kind of mystery that resisted simple, let alone seamless, emplotment. Detective fiction buffs need no reminding of the pleasure of the denouement, when the master sleuth (more often nowadays the medical examiner or forensic pathologist) unmasks the villain and thereby helps to restore order and heal the gaping wound in the community. The Ripper’s elusiveness denied both the police and the public the kind of closure that comes with the arrest, conviction, and (in Victorian England) execution of the murderer. Instead of a reassuring end to the story, these mutilation murders left gaps into which all kinds of theories, daydreams, and nightmares rushed pell-mell. Bereft of an explanation, contemporaries also had good reason to fear that the perpetrator would soon strike again so long as he remained free. Thus the silences in our newspaper texts problematize the narrative and create countless breaks or ruptures that invite more speculation. When dealing with the Ripper reportage, then, one would do well to bear in mind the warning phrase still heard every day in the London underground: Mind the gap.

Beyond our love of stories lies the attraction of news about sex and violence involving people other than ourselves and our families and friends. Such news usually sends shudders of horror or frissons down our spines, and may well inspire a fleeting sense of schadenfreude. Sometimes we justify our fondness for the gory details by intellectualizing them. In the words of Theodore Dalrymple: Murderers and their deeds raise acutely the fundamental moral and psychological questions of our existence, which is why there are so many murders in literature. The proper study of mankind is murder.²¹ In any event, the priority given by the media to murder news reveals much about the anxieties of any culture and society, and this applies with special force to the Ripper reportage. As Maria Tatar has shrewdly observed about another time and culture (Weimar Germany), the representation of murdered women must function as an aesthetic strategy for managing certain kinds of sexual, social, and political anxieties and for constituting an artistic and social identity.²² Seen in this light, murder news is not only heavily laden with gender conflicts and social inequities, it also reveals how the media package such reports with an eye to either raising or allaying the fears of readers, and to enhancing the appeal of the next day’s edition.

Stories of real murder continue to fascinate, especially if they deal with bizarre perpetrators and unusual modes of killing. Harold Schechter, a professor of American literature and culture in New York City, has raised the narration of homicidal acts to an art form in a book that dwells in the twilight zone between the fictional and the factual. In Fiend: The Shocking True Story of America’s Youngest Serial Killer (2000), he recounts with some of the novelistic skills of Caleb Carr the sadistic crime spree of Jesse Harding Pomeroy, a deeply disturbed youth from South Boston who between 1872 and 1874 tortured and sexually molested over a dozen small boys before stabbing to death and severely mutilating a four-year-old boy. For this latter murder the perverse Pomeroy earned the enduring epithet the Boy Fiend, and spent more than fifty years in prison.

Although written more than thirty years ago, Richard D. Altick’s Victorian Studies in Scarlet (1970) remains the best starting point for any inquiry into the import of murder news in Victorian England. Drawing on the trial transcripts compiled by such murder buffs as Henry B. Irving and William Roughead, Altick ranged over some fifteen high-profile murders between 1849 and 1903. However, his blithe assumption that the public’s passionate interest in such cases helped to ease the social tensions of the time seems rather wide of the mark.²³ By featuring certain homicides and by employing reporters who specialized in murder, the London press had by midcentury succeeded in taking this subgenre of news out of the hands of publishers of ha’penny broadsides or street cocks and had begun to captivate a huge audience—young and old, male and female alike—by means of blood-curdling stories of violence and mystery. Altick’s final chapter, Murder and the Victorian Mind, begins with a rhetorical question: Who can account for the prevalence of murder in Victorian England?²⁴ However, one remarkable feature of Victorian society was the relative infrequency of murder, considering the hordes of pauperized people crowded together in dirty and fetid tenements, the extent of class antagonism, and the amount of alcohol consumed. While the population of England and Wales rose from roughly twenty to twenty-nine million between 1861 and 1891, the annual number of recorded homicides between 1857 and 1890 averaged only 369.²⁵ Rarest of all murders were those committed by middle-and upper-class perpetrators, especially women or ladies, even though females were more likely to be indicted for murder than for any other felony.²⁶ The banality of most murders in England meant that newspaper editors were constantly on the lookout for good or unusual homicides that would grab and hold the attention of readers for days or weeks on end.

Following in Altick’s wake, various Victorianists have cultivated the fertile field of murder, ranging from the single crime of passion to serial killings.²⁷ Thomas Boyle’s engagingly subjective tour of sensational crimes in the mid-Victorian period draws heavily on the press clippings of an English naval surgeon obsessed by such morbid fare.²⁸ The literary critic John Cawelti has speculated about the ways murder news affected Victorian readers, who were supposedly filled with feelings of guilt, anger, and sexual desire.²⁹ Needless to say, cases of domestic murder, involving family members, friends, lovers, or servants, held a special fascination for respectable Victorians, who were well aware of the emotions or desires that might drive someone to commit the ultimate crime. Few of these studies, however—with the notable exception of Altick’s Deadly Encounters (1986)—directly address the reporting of murder in the press, though at least one late-Victorian crime aficionado, Dr. John Watson, knew just how widely the accounts of any given crime varied from one newspaper to another.³⁰

The history of murder news raises many questions about the criteria used by editors to decide which crimes deserved special attention. Why, we may well ask, were some homicides assigned feature status while others were relegated to mere filler at the bottom of the page? Alas, we know so little about the inner workings of the Victorian press, especially the reasons behind the editorial decisions made every day about the content and layout of every newspaper. (As a youthful copyboy working for the New York Times, I often wondered what went on when the senior editors or newsroom moguls gathered together in the bullpen at night to discuss the next day’s paper.) Apart from the anecdotal memoirs of the leading lights of Fleet Street, who relished tales of their more eccentric colleagues, all we have in the way of evidence are the printed results of the editorial decisions taken; and unlike today, we have to contend with anonymity in the Victorian era, when most journalists never knew the joy of a byline. While one murder trial might earn three full columns, another would merit only a short paragraph. That seasoned connoisseur of murder trials William Roughead once declared, We have in Scotland a really good murder about once in five years, while England, more favoured in matters criminal, boasts one a week. Chief among his criteria of a good homicide were striking circumstances, the picturesque, unusual setting, and the curious character of the chief actors.³¹

Such criteria help to explain why Fleet Street made such a splash out of the ten-day trial of Alfred John Monson in the High Court of Justiciary, Edinburgh, in December 1893. A moneylender and opportunist, Monson was accused of murdering his well-born pupil Lieutenant Windsor Dudley Cecil Hambrough, aged twenty, while shooting rabbits at Ardlamont House near the Kyles of Bute in Argyleshire. Monson told the police that Hambrough’s gun had discharged while he was climbing over a wall. But there was conflicting evidence about the gun that fired the fatal shot, and Monson turned out to be the beneficiary of a large insurance policy in the event of Hambrough’s death. At first the London papers ran only a few short articles about the shooting. But their response to Monson’s trial was overwhelming. More than a hundred pressmen from all over the country covered the proceedings—including seventy reporters, twenty-one descriptive writers, and fifteen artists. The Times alone ran a total of twenty columns on the trial, consisting mostly of the paraphrased testimony of witnesses.³² Dismissing the prosecution’s argument that Monson was a consummate liar, the jury returned a verdict of not proven, and the defendant left the courthouse to cheers from the crowd waiting outside.³³

The media hype surrounding this case says a good deal about the nature of journalistic sensationalism. What exactly was it about this case that drew so many reporters as well as spectators to the trial? Was it the elitist ambience of the shooting party, the victim’s Oxonian ties, or Monson’s financial intrigues? Here was a murder laden with mystery and scented with snobbery. How very different was the media’s response to the trial in 1889—also in Edinburgh—of a plebeian baby farmer named Jessie King, who had strangled three illegitimate infants whom she had adopted for a cash advance. While the trial attracted many spectators, the Times awarded it only twenty-three lines of small print.³⁴ In almost every respect the contrast between these two stories could not have been greater. Clearly Fleet Street regarded infanticide in a Scottish slum, without any element of mystery and devoid of elitism, as undeserving of feature status.

Fascination with murder was not confined to newspapers. Witness all the shilling shockers, penny dreadfuls, ha’penny broadsides, penny gaffs, and melodramas about unnatural death in plebeian settings. The crowded galleries in courtrooms during highly publicized murder trials also attest to the drawing power of this crime. For all the curious people—many of them women—who could not get into the courtroom, the press provided the only access to the case. When it came to bloodshed, Victorian readers seemed to relish the details of what knives, axes, bullets, or other lethal weapons had done to the victims’ bodies. Many of the morbid details revealed in the press would be deemed unfit to print today even in the most Murdochian tabloids. Descriptions of bodies stabbed, shot, poisoned, and dismembered—what I call sensation-horror news—composed the centerpieces of feature stories about the inquests and trials in homicide cases. Thus a good deal of Victorian murder news qualifies as gorenography because the clinical or anatomical details published offered a fine feast for the eyes of more prurient readers.

Although terms like pornography and violence lack any fixed or stable meaning and invariably become matters of personal judgment, we should bear in mind Tatar’s reminder that the representation of violence cannot but become deeply implicated in the violence of representation.³⁵ This in turn should move us to contemplate not only the varieties of violence but also the cultural significance of images of death—especially when the bodies are those of young women. Alluding to paintings or photographs of dead female bodies, Elisabeth Bronfen has observed that whenever we look at these images we are not only voyeurs but also participants in an act of violence. Thus, narrative representations of death ... serve to show that any ‘voyeur’ is always also implicated in the field of vision. In her view, ‘death’ is always culturally constructed ... can only be read as a trope, and although ubiquitous, it remains outside clear categories. Paradoxically, it is both nowhere and everywhere.³⁶ The import of these reflections should become clear in Chapter 10, in which I deal at some length with Fleet Street’s disparate accounts of the Ripper’s pelvic mutilations as revealed at the various inquests. Since our culture is no readier to accept a standard definition of violence than we as readers (or editors) are prepared to agree on what is fit to print or see, we cannot deal in absolutes. Where Ripper news is concerned, the paucity of letters to the editor complaining about all the gore suggests that most readers were at least willing to tolerate the thrills arising out of the lurid accounts of knife wounds.

Embedded in a matrix of moral and political imperatives about law and order, Ripper news also engendered something akin to a social and moral panic. Because the murders were motiveless and random, and because the killer seemed to be taunting the police with boastful letters, the press had a surfeit of disturbing as well as sensational material on its hands. Some papers took advantage of these extraordinary crimes and the bafflement of the police by focusing on ordinary crime and insisting that Londoners had every reason to worry about their safety and property. Many an editorial asked why the killer had not been caught and called for drastic reform of Scotland Yard and the CID. If the extent of law-and-order news varied from one paper to another, Fleet Street had no trouble turning the Ripper murders into the crime story of the century.

In sum, the press coverage of the Whitechapel murders reveals much about late Victorian culture, or what Raymond Williams called structures of feeling and "the informing spirit of a whole way of life. Like other kinds of news, the reporting of murder involves the structures of meaning based on historical constructs," while reflecting the ideological and material interests of the newspaper industry at large.³⁷ Murder news also reinforces the codes of normative or respectable behavior that are supposed to protect the integrity of the family—indeed, the whole social order.³⁸ Since murder represents the ultimate social and moral transgression, readers of these stories yearned for reassurance that the criminal justice system worked and that the villain would pay dearly for his wickedness. In an increasingly secular age, editors or leader (editorial) writers took on the clergy’s traditional task of preaching about the wages of sin and the necessity of avoiding temptation. Not just keen to sell more papers, they also wished to remind readers about the terrible fate that awaited anyone who succumbed to the desires that had ended in this particular tragedy or scandal. After all, one did not have to be a born criminal to progress (or regress) rapidly from venial to mortal sin and thence to prison or the scaffold. Murder news thus reflected the Victorian obsession with character and virtuous conduct. No matter how much the Whitechapel murders differed from the standard fare of domestic murder, the fundamental issues of morality and depravity also underlay the reporting of these horrors.

In stark contrast to the classic domestic homicide, which contained an understandable motive, the Whitechapel murders were palpably sadistic and apparently motiveless. They also caused readers untold horror, suspense, fear, and uncertainty for more than three months. Instead of a coherent newspaper novel based on a familiar (or familial) plot, the Ripper saga comprised a series of highly cobbled or disjointed articles laden with unknowns, contradictions, and silences. The lack of hard clues and the absence of a trial forced the press to fill the gaps with descriptions of conditions in Whitechapel, reports of sightings of suspects and minor attacks on women, suggestions for catching the killer, sharp criticism of the police and government officials, discussions of reward money, and stories taking many other angles on the case. If the Ripper story had a beginning, reporters and the police disagreed over who was his first victim. And if this narrative had a series of middles, it lacked a clear ending. The villain never even had a conventional name—only an epithet of dubious provenance. Denied a visible culprit to revile, the public and the press were forced to rely on such metaphors as fiend, monster, and assassin, while conjuring up a generic male suspect—dark-complexioned, black-bearded, black-coated, and foreign-looking—in short, a stereotypical Jew living in the East End. Initially, Fleet Street may have agreed about the ethnic features and origins of this outsider, but there was no consensus about his motive, that all-important staple of domestic murder. The absence of any reasonable explanation for these mutilation murders stimulated all kinds of speculation by journalists and readers as well as the so-called alienists who specialized in criminal insanity.

The primary sources for this study consist of some fifteen London newspapers, including three East End weeklies. These papers were chosen with an eye to striking a rough balance between the morning and evening, the daily and weekly, and the Tory, Liberal, and Radical press. Except for the Times, Globe, Morning Post, and several East End papers, the papers used here all enjoyed circulations of over 75,000 in 1888. Two of the Sunday papers—Lloyd’s Weekly and Reynolds’s Newspaper—dwarfed the dailies with circulations of 900,000 and 350,000, respectively. Based on these mostly national papers, the core of this book consists of comparisons of the Ripper reportage from late August to the end of December.

Besides relying on some valuable studies of the mass media in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I have also gained insights into the always problematic relationship of history, journalism, and fiction from exposure to the metahistorical musings of Hayden White about language, tropes, rhetorical strategies, modes of emplotment, and narrativity. Although he does not address journalism directly, White’s discussion of the fictions of factual representation spurred me to rethink many cherished assumptions about the content and form of historical narratives and their relationship to reality.³⁹ As for the methods used in this study, these may be best described as cautious and eclectic empiricism—insofar as I do rely on a firm documentary base composed of newspaper texts—combined with the hypotheses and inferences of the cultural studies school. Several decades of exposure to practitioners of hard-core theory at Brown have helped to distance me from the (oc)cultist camp occupied by the votaries of Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, and other French philosophes. Apart from the occasional genuflection toward Michel Foucault, whose radical episteme opened my eyes to the rule of language, the dominance of discourse, the genesis of genealogy, and the nature of power/knowledge, I am certain that readers versed in the kind of high theory imported from France after 1968 will realize early on that my