Jack the Ripper: 110 Years Later

Book Reviews Jack the Ripper:1l0 Years Later Richard Whittington-Egan. The Quest for Jack the Ripper. Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith, 1999. 800 pp. Price not available. IN THE BRIEF TIME between 1888 and 1892, two great crimes of the nineteenth century occurred, the Jack the Ripper murders in Britain (1888) and the Borden murders in America (1892). Both are unsolved to this very day. The question of Lizzie Borden's innocence may be largely a technical matter, but there is no denying that both cases have secure places in the history of the time, have exercised an unusual fascination for a half-dozen generations, and have spawned bodies of literature, movies, television programs, and Internet sites that might cause a Joyce or Yeats scholar to goggle. Each crime offered something new. In Lizzie Borden, there was the spectacle of the privileged heiress of the Yankee ruling class, accused of butchering her stepmother and father. In Jack the Ripper, the world was introduced to its first modern sexual serial killer . Both crimes continue to fascinate us, and this continued fascination is not strictly a popular phenomenon either, thriving only in a lurid underworld of B-movies or comic books. Readers oÃ- ELT know the Jack the Ripper case has captivated writers and intellectuals like Walter Sickert, Lewis Carroll, George Bernard Shaw, A. C. Swinburne, and Arthur Conan Doyle. Such celebrity is whispered about and even woven into the literature of the past 110 years as potential suspects, informed commentators , or would-be sleuths. One's shelves would sag to hold all the literature the two cases have spawned. The truly unfortunate aspect of this enduring attention has been that, down the years, the facts of the matters have become obscured, suppositions and theories have been bent, twisted, and repeated so often that they have hardened into "facts." The "solutions" to the two crimes have grown evermore outlandish as publishers have encouraged, publicized, and made good money from the offerings of half-informed "experts," fast-buck artists, and occasional goofballs with bees in their bonnets and preposterous stories to tell. In the literary sense, the case of Jack the Ripper matured long ago, and the slow, steady trickle of books and pamphlets, of "solutions" and 70 BOOK REVIEWS "suspects," that appeared down to about 1930, has since become a veritable flood, a flood which perhaps crested about the time of the centenary of the events themselves. In 1975 a few hundred copies of a very little volume of less than 40,000 words slipped almost unnoticed into the growing stacks of Ripper studies, which were just then beginning to discover and broadcast that perverted Royals and dark Masonic plots were at the bottom of the terrible mystery. The gem-like book was Richard Whittington-Egan's A Casebook on Jack the Ripper (London: Wildy & Sons Ltd.), about which the authors of a recent encyclopedia of Ripperana noted that WhittingtonEgan 's "great contribution to Ripper studies has been his insistence on scholarly accuracy." The authors of this tribute also note that those responsible for recent Ripper books might easily be divided into two camps—the first being those who heeded Whittington-Egan's warning, the second, of course, being those who have not. Whittington-Egan's Casebook examined and insisted upon the known and verifiable facts of the case, and applied them to a few of the better-known solutions in general circulation with the quiet, dogged skill of a Scotland Yard inspector. Needless to say, those who ignored Whittington-Egan's warning have spread confusion. As the extensive bibliography at the back of The Quest for Jack the Ripper indicates, the field of Ripper studies has truly exploded since the mid-1970s. Of a sudden, it seems, sensational television specials, public challenges to the Queen of England, and faked diaries became staples in the field. I haven't counted myself, but the book makes the point that there are now about 140 Ripper suspects, and there is no reason to doubt that number, or to doubt that it will grow ever larger. In 1998 Whittington-Egan entered the lists again, still distressed at the way Ripper studies have tended since his last...