Murder by Candlelight (31 page)

Just as the Ripper legend was taking form, the infamous “double event” occurred: two murders which were committed within a short time of each other on September 30. Elizabeth Stride was found in Berners Street with her throat cut; she had not, however, been mutilated. This, Sir Melville surmises, was because “the murderer was disturbed at his demoniacal work by some Jews who at that hour drove up to an anarchist club in the street.” The killer's thirst for blood unslaked, he “started off in search of another victim, whom he found in Catherine Eddowes.” Her “body, very badly mutilated,” was discovered “in a dark corner of Mitre Square.”

There followed a respite of forty days and forty nights, during which the frenzy of the public gradually died down, only to be fearfully revived when, on the morning of November 9, the mutilated corpse of Mary Jane Kelly was found in her room in 13 Miller's Court. She was, Sir Melville writes, a “comparatively young woman of some twenty-five years of age,” and was “said to have been possessed of considerable personal attractions.” On the last night of her life, she entertained several men in her room, and was heard to sing a popular song, “A Violet from Mother's Grave.” Her murder, Sir Melville writes, was “the last of the series, and it was by far
the most horrible.” The mutilations “were of a positively fiendish description, almost indescribable in their savagery, and the doctors who were called in to examine the remains averred that the operator must have been at least two hours over his hellish job. A fire was burning low in the room, but neither candles nor gas were there. The madman made a bonfire of some old newspapers, and of his victim's clothes, and, by this dim, irreligious light, a scene was enacted which nothing seen by Dante in his visit to the infernal regions could have surpassed.”
^‡

Whatever Sir Melville's virtues as a cicerone, it is his limitations and blindnesses that are most palpable. Where are the swirling fogs and lurid, gaslit alleys of the metropolitan Maleboge? Where are the crowds of the undernourished and unemployed standing about in the streets in a “dull, aimless, discouraged way,” “too apathetic to move”? Where are the fallen women who filled the squalid lodging houses, resignedly or drunkenly practicing the saddest of professions? Where is the erotic cannibal himself? Sir Melville is probably right when he says that “the fury of the murderer, as evinced in his methods of mutilation, increased on every occasion,” and that “his appetite appears to have become sharpened by indulgence.” (He who has a taste for “unnatural luxury” does not “relapse into inertia.”) But although Sir Melville recognizes that
the killer is a “sexual maniac” with “a lust for blood,” that is the extent of his insight. Still, it is not deficiency of imagination alone that makes Sir Melville a less-than-desirable guide to the darker places in Whitechapel; it is his want of sympathy for those who have had the misfortune to fall into its pits, and in an especially unfeeling passage he dismisses the killer's victims as scarcely worthy of his attention, belonging as they did “to the lowest dregs of female humanity.”

*
Sherlock Holmes, T. S. Eliot writes, “was deceiving Watson when he told him that he had bought his Stradivarius violin for a few shillings at a second-hand shop in the Tottenham Court Road. He found that violin in the ruins of the house of Usher.” Perhaps; but Poe must not be blamed for the inanities of the detective fiction his work inspired. “Robbery and murder have degenerated into Chinese puzzles,” Charles Whibley says of the detective novel, “whose solution is a pleasant irritant to the idle brain. The misunderstanding of Poe has produced a vast polyglot literature, for which one would not give in exchange a single chapter of Captain Smith [an old writer of Newgate lives]. Vautrin and Bill Sykes are already discredited, and it is a false reflection of M. Dupin, which dazzles the eye of a moral and unimaginative world.”

†
On April 3, 1888, more than four months before the first of the “canonical” murders, Emma Smith was found “horribly outraged” in Osborne Street; she afterwards died in the London Hospital. On August 7, Martha Tabram was discovered dead in George Yard. Her throat had been cut, and she had sustained a number of wounds in the chest and abdomen. But neither victim seems have been mutilated in the way all but one of the “canonical” five were.

‡
Dr. J. R. Gabe, who examined the body of Miss Kelly in Miller's Court, said that “in all his experience in dissecting-rooms he never had seen such ghastliness. The corpse was found nearly naked, on a blood-engorged woolen mattress. The victim's hair was flung upward on a pillow and matted with gore. The fingers, nose and ears were sliced away. The throat was cut from left to right. Below the neck was the appearance such as the carcass of a sheep presents in an abattoir, with the ribs and back-bone exposed and cleared of the stomach, entrails, heart, and liver. These organs were placed carefully beside the mutilated trunk, after the fashion in a butcher shop. As on previous occasions the uterus and ovarian adjuncts were missing. The flesh on each side of a cut on the median line was carefully folded an inch or two away from the cut. From the hips to the ankles the flesh was shredded more or less. It must have been the work of perhaps a full half-hour, said the physician. Both her breasts, too, had been cut clean away and placed by the side of her liver and other organs on the table.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Vital Lamp

From shadowy types to truth

—
Milton

U
nlike the slaughter in Wapping, the Whitechapel murders inspired no work of literary art in which their horrors were recreated through the power of a master. Yet the murders nevertheless made an impression on English literature, or rather on that part of it which was true to the old Tory theory of evil, which held that the best way to understand the horrors of the present is to study them in the light of the poetries of the past.

The Whig theory of evil, which reduced it to a problem of social hygiene, had come to dominate European letters in the nineteenth century, as it did nearly every other department of life. It found its most articulate expression in the realism or naturalism of such writers as Gissing and Zola, who were “quite sure that the soul is a nervous fluid.” But there were always writers, both in England and
on the Continent, who were faithful to the older methods. Balzac's Vautrin, under a semblance of realistic portraiture, is an infernal fiend, with this additional distinction, that as a character he is not unsympathetic and is for that reason the more disturbing. The character that is
wholly
evil disturbs no one's self-complacency, precisely because few people think of themselves as wholly bad and therefore see no connection between themselves and the villain they read about; they fail to see that the worst people differ from the best only in degree.

Dostoevsky (who incidentally admired De Quincey and thought of translating him) wrote the two best murder mysteries of the century; but the murders in
Crime and Punishment
and
The Brothers Karamazov
are solved, not with the detective's magnifying glass or an appeal for reform legislation, but through the author's understanding of the struggle between good and evil that is continuously taking place in the human soul, which he depicts as a contest between the philosophies of Christ and Anti-Christ.

I find, in the works of certain writers who lived through the Whitechapel murders, passages that conjure precisely the
fiendishness
which is the dominant note of the Ripper, and do so in a language closely related to the old Gothic rhetorics of diabolism. Henry James fled to the Continent, he told his brother William, to get “away from Whitechapel” and the “hundred other constantly thickening heavinesses” that oppressed him during the “detestable summer” of 1888. A decade later, he conjured a similarly mysterious evil in
The Turn of the Screw
, in which two children are the victims of an “infernal” ghoulishness. Only it is never clear whether the governess who tells the story is doing her best to protect the children from the lurking evil, or whether she is herself the ghoulish being, the parasitic vampire, who preys upon them in the insane belief that she is saving them from perdition.

The fiendishness of Whitechapel has its echo, too, in certain of the characters of Joseph Conrad, most notably “Mr. Jones,” the living ghoul in
Victory
, and Mr. Kurtz, the cannibal anti-hero of
Heart of Darkness
. On going back, just now, to
Victory
, I find that Conrad has drawn so copiously on the Gothic idioms that I wonder whether he has not perhaps overdone it. The “dark, sunken stare” of Mr. Jones, the misogynist villain of the book, is that of “an incurious spectre”; and his voice “somehow matched his sunken eyes.” It is “hollow” and “distant,” as though spoken “from the bottom of a well.” His “handsome but emaciated face” is corpse-like, and the “spectral intensity” of his glance has the power to “dissolve the last grain of resolution” in the man upon whom he chooses to fix it. His “lifeless manner” seems “to imply some sort of menace from beyond the grave” and a mastery of “horrors worse than murder.” He resembles nothing so much as an “insolent spectre on leave from Hades, endowed with skin and bones and a subtle power of terror.” Conrad has laid it on pretty thick; but it must be remembered that I have here gathered in one place descriptions which in the book itself are spread out over the course of many pages. So dispersed, they are, I think, entirely effective.

E
PILOGUE

The Decay of Murder

I believe that all minds which have contemplated such horrors as deeply as I have done, must, for their own protection from utter despondency, have early encouraged and cherished some tranquillising belief as to the future balances and the hieroglyphic meanings of human sufferings.

—
De Quincey

T
he Ripper murders were an instance of the evil De Quincey diagnosed in his essay on the Wapping murders—the evil of the erotic cannibal, the modern serial killer. But although the evil had taken root in England long before the Ripper himself struck, the Victorian mind was unfit to comprehend it and was therefore taken by surprise by the carnage in East London in 1888. De Quincey, had he been living at that hour, might have written something that did justice to the Gothic psychology of the
Whitechapel murderer: no contemporary writer did. The Romantic wave had crested.

And yet there was at least one Victorian literary man who, where murder was concerned, saw a little farther than his contemporaries. Quite as much as De Quincey, Leslie Stephen
^*
deplored the trivialization of murder. De Quincey, in his 1827 essay “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” mocked the shallowness of the modern attitude toward homicide; he imagined a “Society of Connoisseurs in Murder” whose members professed “to be curious in homicide; amateurs and dilettanti in the various modes of carnage; and, in short, Murder-Fanciers. Every fresh atrocity of that class which the police annals of Europe bring up, they meet and criticise as they would a picture, statue, or other work of art.” In a similar vein, Stephen, in his 1869 essay “The Decay of Murder,” lamented the disintegration of sensibility which was coarsening the modern perception of murder. No “power of imaginative insight” was, he said, being brought to bear on the subject; and as evidence of the degeneration, he pointed to the rise of the modern detective novel. The murder mystery, he said, had become “a weariness to the flesh,” and the “intelligent detective” a “drug in the market.”

It was not that Stephen objected to murder literature per se. “If all novels and dramas turning upon startling crimes were to be expunged from our literature,” he wrote, “we should have to make a surprisingly clean sweep.
Hamlet
and
Othello
and
King Lear
would have to go at once; Richardson's great novel would be put into the critic's
Index
; even Sir Walter Scott would require expurgation. . . .” What Stephen regretted was the loss of grandeur in murder writing. The infernal mystery inherent in the act of one man deliberately doing another to death without the justification of war, self-defense, the executioner's writ, or the code duello, was
being lost in the pleasant whimsies of the
whodunit
; the spirit of Wilkie Collins and Paul Féval was coming to prevail over that of De Quincey.

Quite true; only Stephen was less satisfactory in explaining
why
the Victorians wrote murder's epitaph. Like De Quincey before him, he fingered, as his scapegoat, Progress, that mysterious force which, he said, was “insidiously transforming us into a very dull, highly respectable, and intensely monotonous collection of insignificant units.” But he failed to isolate the particular strain of dullness which had proved so fatal to murder. As a “Godless Victorian,” Stephen could not, perhaps, bring himself to admit it, but the dullness he lamented was that of a people too engrossed in their day-to-day material well-being to rise to the
spiritual
apprehension of evil.
^†