The Invention of Murder (65 page)

Perhaps, though, the strongest Ripper element was another entirely unspoken one, that of the doubling, the man who presents two faces to the world. Stevenson’s
Jekyll and Hyde
created one of the archetypes of doubling, and a variation on the theme was developed by Oscar Wilde in
The Picture of Dorian Gray,
which was published in
Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine
in June 1890, only two months after Stoker made his first note. Not coincidentally, it was at the same dinner party that Wilde was commissioned to write this story and Conan Doyle
The Sign of Four.
The febrile atmosphere of London during these years of uncertainty and fear, the sense that no one was what he seemed, that everyone might have a secret life, was an influence on Wilde’s frank, open, beautiful Gray, with his sinister portrait hidden away. Gray has ‘mysterious and prolonged absences’ from home, giving rise to ‘strange conjecture’, while ‘there are other stories – stories that you have been seen creeping at dawn out of dreadful houses and slinking in disguise into the foulest dens in London’. Ultimately Dorian becomes a murderer, killing the painter who created his portrait, and cutting up his body.

The case of Jack the Ripper also influenced fictional accounts across the world. Several novels (some truly fiction, some claiming to be ‘real’ accounts of the killer) were published in the USA from 1888 onwards. A particularly enjoyable example is a dime-novel (an American cousin of the penny-dreadful),
Lord Jacquelin Burkney
by ‘Rodissi’, the pseudonym of Jacob Ringgold, a man who had clearly never set foot in England. Burkney, the ‘heir to an English Lord’, is disinherited after falling in love with a poor but honest shopgirl. He moves to France, where he becomes ‘the most adroit and scientific dissector in all Paris’. On his father’s death he returns to Burkney Manor, ‘a real Sir Christopher Wren house’, where his devoted servants refer to him with remarkable impartiality as ‘Your highness’ or ‘Your lordship’. He leaves these quaint West Country customs behind and heads for London, where he meets his old love, now a streetwalker. He murders her, using his ‘old skill’ as anatomizer to remove her heart, which he ‘toyed with’ amid ‘peals of demoniacal laughter’. He then takes up slaughtering prostitutes wholesale, the locations and the descriptions matching the Ripper killings, including some of the wilder press rumours, such as the Gateshead murder, before returning to his Christopher Wren house where, after communing with his dead father, he writes a final letter: ‘… THE AVENGER HAS COME! I SHALL SMITE THEM ALL!’

Back in the UK, ballad-writers had been busy. By the early 1880s the street stalls on the New Cut, near what had been the Victoria Theatre (and was now a coffee room and temperance hall), each carried ‘about a hundred grimy octavos’, magazines and books, as well as a hundred or so ballads covering murders from Maria Marten and the Red Barn, through the more recent cases. We know little about these sheets, as few have survived. Their audiences, however, were probably wider than is generally credited. One collection of murder broadsides and pamphlets in the British Library carries a bookplate naming its original owner as Alfred Harmsworth, later the founder of the
Daily Mail.
But little remains today: just a few scattered mentions appear in the press of ‘printed pamphlets relating to the Whitechapel murder’, and pamphlets entitled ‘The Whitechapel Blood Book’ and ‘A Complete History of the Whitechapel Horrors’.

One series of sheets has survived: the first is illustrated on the front with a drawing of a garishly uplit man waving a knife over a supine woman, while the reverse has a prose account of the double murder, followed by a defiantly cheerful comic song:

There were also two songs to be sung, the reader is informed, to the tune of ‘My Village Home’. A later compilation,
Jack the Ripper at Work Again,
contained five songs, including the comic song above, and appears to have been put together from earlier broadsides. In September 1888 the
Daily News
reported that ‘men with verses round their hats’ were singing flash songs to the tune of ‘My Village Home’ everywhere in Whitechapel, and the
Observers
‘Special Reporter’ saw three ‘mere girls’ singing a flash song ‘in praise of the dread “Jack the Ripper”’. The same reporter later heard ‘itinerant vendors of street literature’ shouting ‘’Ere you are. All about Jack the Ripper,’ while another offered ‘The truth about the Vitechapel murders’. MacNaghten, in those memoirs that proved so unreliable in the case of Eleanor Pearcey, remembered the following piece of doggerel in the Ripper files when he joined Scotland Yard in 1889:

This sounds more like the refrain from a flash song than anything of use to a detective. A more middle-class approach appeared in the
Sporting Times
the week after the murders of Mrs Stride and Mrs Eddowes. It is a poem of ‘slumming. down the dark frowsy East’. The narrator recounts how

The sporting papers regularly referred to the East End rather insouciantly as ‘Jack the Ripper land’, and in October this attitude attracted hostility. The
Belfast News-Letter
reported that at a coursing event a dog named Jack the Ripper was announced, to the jeers and hoots of the crowd, which cheered when it lost. By December, however, the dog appeared again, quietly taking its place with no comment at all from the newspaper; in 1890 three more dogs with the same name appear in the coursing reports, again without any editorial remarks. From 1889 a number of horses named Jack the Ripper appeared, both racehorses and hunters – at least ten different animals in the next eight years. Not a single newspaper found the name worthy of remark.
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The reality was that while the murders were terrifying to those who lived in Whitechapel, many who lived elsewhere, and did not feel personally threatened, were perfectly happy to accept them as part of daily life: after the double murder, ‘Zadkiel’s Almanac’ for 1889 was advertised in
The Times:
‘Zadkiel foretold the rainy summer, the Whitechapel Murders, &c.’ – there wasn’t much difference to the publisher, apparently, between the weather and violent death. Others made jokes. This wasn’t something shamefaced, to be done privately. The genteel
Myras Journal of Dress and Fashion
carried an advertisement for M.J. Haynes & Co., in Peckham, which sold ‘Specialities’ (below): ‘The Great SURPRISE WATCH’, had ‘a secret spring, which liberates a noted character, namely, “Jack the Ripper”, to the horror and astonishment of all beholders. Price. 1/3 each, three for 3/6.’ More fun could be had from a parlour game, with, at its centre ‘the familiar but sinister subject of Jack the Ripper … The mysterious object of the policeman’s vigilance and the newspaper man’s imagination has to escape through a series of squares, past twelve constables and twelve reporters … This game will hardly commend itself to heads of families,’ acknowledged the
Pall Mall Gazette
in January 1889, only two months after the murder of Mrs Kelly, but it highlighted it in its ‘Shows in the London Shops’ column nonetheless.

Even less did theatrical versions commend themselves to the respectable. In September 1889 the British allowed themselves a frisson of luxurious disgust at the decadence of foreigners. The
Era
reported, ‘Horrible but true! Jack the Ripper is to make his apparition on the stage’ in Paris. The
Pall Mall Gazette
added that ‘A Dutch version is filling an Amsterdam theatre nightly, and an American version is being played at the Brooklyn Opera House.’
Jack l’Éventreur,
by Gaston Marot and Louis Péricaud, opened in Paris in August 1889. Sir Stevens, the head of the London police, arranges to have Ketty, the girlfriend of Jackson, the man suspected of committing ‘le crime de Piccadilly’, followed by one of his secret force of women detectives. Jackson has meanwhile disguised himself as ‘sir Peters Wild’, the New York Chief of Police. The fact that the supposed American has a title does not tip Sir Stevens off, and thus he outlines to the disguised criminal all his plans. Ketty catches Jackson in the act of killing an informer and, ‘recoiling with horror’, she says ‘Ah!’ as the curtain falls. In the next act we learn that she has attempted to commit suicide by throwing herself into the ‘Tamise’, after which ‘La Blackornn’, a procuress, reveals to her that she is in reality the long-lost daughter of Sir James Plack, stolen by La Blackornn in infancy. Ketty still wants to die, but is not brave enough to attempt suicide again, so she returns to Jackson, ‘to kill myself by you’. Jackson refuses, revealing just as the police burst in that he too was stolen as a child, and that his mother is La Blackornn. This newly found mother throws herself in front of him to save him as the police fire, and is killed as Jackson and Ketty escape. In the final act, Jackson is burgling Sir James’s house when Sir Stevens providentially appears: ‘In the name of the Queen, I arrest you!’ Jackson: ‘Ah! Jack l’Éventreur dies! But Jack l’Éventreur is not dead! For others will replace him to revenge the Newgate hanged!’ (According to the
Era,
this brought a round of applause from the audience.) Ketty, who has apparently undergone a conversion in the previous eyeblink, says, ‘Oh, shut up! I hate you!’ Jackson: ‘You hate me? Then I am glad to die. (Dies.)’ And the comic amateur detective gets the curtain line: ‘I have saved England!’ According to
Lloyd’s,
Jackson wore a Glengarry cap and a tartan cape, and the orchestra played ‘God Save the Queen’ as he died.

It was not until 1893 that a theatrical work of any quality grew out of the subject. When it did, however – as with
Dracula
– it produced a work of seminal importance. Frank Wedekind’s two ‘Lulu’ plays,
Erdgeist (Earth Spirit,
1893) and
Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box,
1904), follow Lulu, a cabaret dancer who first rises in the world then falls into the abyss, finally, as a streetwalker in London, bringing home ‘Jack’, and meeting death at his hands.
*
Jack, played by Wedekind himself in the first production, is ‘A thickset figure with elastic movements, a pale face, inflamed eyes, scrofulous nose, a high, strong, forehead, and a drooping moustache, tangled side-curls, bright red hands with chewed nails.’ He is, in fact, a compilation of standard stage-devil figures, with more than a touch of stage Jew (when he argues over Lulu’s price, he says, ‘I am not Baron Rotschild’). He takes Lulu into a back room, and she cries, ‘He’s ripping me open!’ (Jack’s part, and Lulu’s when she speaks to him, are in heavily Germanified English in the original.) After her death, he reflects on his crime as he washes up: ‘That is a phenomen [sic], what would not happen every two hundred years … When I am dead and my collection is put up to auction, the London Medical Club will pay a sum of threehundred [sic] pounds for that prodigy, I have conquered this night.’

British theatres did not follow suit.
The Doctor’s Shadow,
by H.A. Saintsbury (who as an actor would later give more than 1,400 performances as the detective in Gillette’s
Sherlock Holmes),
was staged in Accrington in 1896, but after a few token nods to the Ripper it relied more heavily on
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
A few music-hall performers also touched on the subject, but little information has survived. In 1889 a performance was said to be ‘based on’ the death of Mrs Kelly, but what that means is unknown. In 1892, at the Royal Albert, Canning Town, Miss Edith Manley, ‘extempore vocalist’, produced topical songs on subjects chosen by her audience, including Gladstone, Keir Hardie (who had recently become the area’s MP) and Jack the Ripper, but while the reviewer judged her performance ‘equal to the occasion’, he gave no particulars.