Jack the Ripper and the London Press (review)

Rather than writing yet another book about the elusive identity of Jack the Ripper, Curtis has done something much more interesting. He hasexamined the way in which the Ripper murders were covered in theLondon press, and discussed what that coverage reveals about late-Victorian society. "Into the partial vacuum created by all the unknowns in this horror story," Curtis writes, "rushed the kind of fears and fantasies that were usually hidden behind the doors of reticence or repression and therefore deemed unfit to print" (4). In effect, he turns over the stones of domesticity, decency, civility, and respectability, bringing the many disturbing and unpleasant things that he found crawling underneath into the light.

As Curtis points out, there was an enormous nineteenth-century demand for sensation-horror news, and the press quickly adjusted its product to suit the market. The most popular themes concerned respectable family men who killed to keep their reputations intact, or who succumbed to greed and lust. Such stories were particularly appealing in a society in which private probity and public image were of central importance; sensation-horror news supplied a license to explore the forbidden world of deviance, while simultaneously reinforcing dominant social values by highlighting the wages of sin. Violence was explored in pornographic detail, but a discreet veil was drawn over matters sexual. Murder reports contained graphic accounts of gore, but editors rarely risked shocking the readers by using such taboo words as "prostitute."

Blood and guts sold newspapers, and London's newspapers were locked in intense competition for more readers. Against this background came the apparently inexplicable, exceptionally brutal, psychotically misogynistic Ripper murders of 1888. Once it became clear that a serial killer was at work, the London press went into overdrive; the papers were full of stomach-churning accounts of mutilated female bodies, although the stories remained characteristically vague about the removal of the women's reproductive organs.

Along with the gore went the search for explanations, and speculations about the killer's identity. Robert Louis Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde, which had just opened on the London stage, provided a central trope for the murders; the actor who played the central role was so convincing that he himself was rumored to have been the Ripper. Others, believing that no Englishman could commit such crimes, equated the murders with the savagery of the African jungle, the American West, or the "wilds of Hungary" (126). The area in which the killings occurred, Whitechapel, was seen as a depraved district, an internal colony, where foreigners and Jews rubbed shoulders with the degraded and the diseased. Xenophobia jostled with antisemitism; stories spread that Jack the Ripper was Jewish. Meanwhile, liberal and radical newspapers pointed the finger at police incompetence, linked the murders to poverty and inequality, and pressed for social reform; conservatives, equally as predictable, emphasized the importance of law and order, individual responsibility, and moral improvement.

The book is fascinating as far as it goes, but it could have gone further. Although Curtis argues that the press coverage "should move us to reflect on man's inhumanity to women" (18), he remains curiously agnostic about the meaning of the murders. The book is mired in detail and suffers from repetition; much of the narrative space could have been used to analyze later interpretations of the Ripper murders. Nevertheless, by approaching the murders from a strikingly new perspective, Curtis has prepared the way for others to follow the story into the twentieth century.