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Jack the Ripper and the London Press JACK the RIPPER and the LONDON PRESS L. PERRY CURTIS, JR. Yale University Press / New Haven and London Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Philip Hamilton McMillan of the Class of 1894, Yale College. Copyright ∫ 2001 by Yale Un...

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Jack the Ripper and

the London Press

JACK the RIPPER and

the LONDON PRESS

L. PERRY CURTIS, JR.

Yale University Press / New Haven and London

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

1

Chapter 1 The Whitechapel Murders: A Chronicle

19

Chapter 2 Images and Realities of the East End

32

Chapter 3 The Theory and Practice of Victorian Journalism

48

Chapter 4 Sensation News

65

Chapter 5 Victorian Murder News

83

Chapter 6 The First Two Murders

109

Chapter 7 The Double Event

140

Chapter 8 The Pursuit of Angles

164

Chapter 9 The Kelly Reportage

186

vii

CONTENTS

Chapter 10 The Inquests: Reporting the Female Body

213

Chapter 11 Responses to Ripper News: Letters to the Editor

238

Chapter 12 The Cultural Politics of Ripper News

253

Notes

275

Acknowledgments

343

Index

345

viii

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 1

INTRODUCTION

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 2

INTRODUCTION

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 3

INTRODUCTION

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 4

INTRODUCTION

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 5

INTRODUCTION

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 6

INTRODUCTION

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 Dreadnought.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)reacti...