Ripping Yarns (Jack the Ripper and the London Press - L. Perry Curtis Jr)

Member Name: hogsflesh

Product:	Jack the Ripper and the London Press - L. Perry Curtis Jr
Date:	28/02/02 (279 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: ...

Disadvantages: ...

The Jack the Ripper murders of 1888 were a lot more important than they should have been. Five (or maybe six) prostitutes were killed in Whitechapel during the space of about two and half months, and their bodies were mutilated in unpleasant ways. The police never caught the perpetrator. And that was it, really. But somehow the crimes became bigger than they actually were. The public was outraged and alarmed, people were obsessed, there was something akin to mass hysteria in certain areas, and the end of the crimes coincided with the resignation of the Metropolitan Police Chief, the widely hated Sir Charles Warren.

The press was largely to blame for this, of course. The crimes took place at a time when the popular press as we know it today was being born. The less reputable newspapers loved to print gruesome and sensational details of crime stories, and they didn't get much more gruesome and sensational than Jack the Ripper. This book is the first to examine the press coverage of the crimes, how that coverage impacted on late-Victorian society, how it created the myth of Jack the Ripper which is with us still, and laid out the ground-rules for the way that the media of the future would deal with serial killers.

I have long awaited the arrival of such a book. I lost interest in the identity of the killer years ago. We'll never know anyway. The best that can be said is that there are two or three suspects who feasibly could have been Jack the Ripper given what we know about them, but there's a good chance that none of them were. (We can say with some certainty that any famous candidates can be disregarded, whether they be Royals, artists, children's authors, Freemasons or philanthropists.) But this book seemed likely to address the exact things that I still find interesting about Jack the Ripper, and so I took the almost unprecedented step of actually buying it in hard-back when it came out.

It's pretty good, too. It take
s 14 different newspapers and describes the way each of them reported the facts. The papers examined range from the ultra-respectable (The Times) to the rather more lurid (The Star). Three of the papers were local East End newspapers, some were published only weekly, others daily. There's a pretty good range, anyway.

The book begins with a rather unpromising introduction. L Perry Curtis is an American academic, and the introduction includes a lot of dry academic language and a fair amount of dry academic argument. After that, though, things improve immeasurably. He starts with a brief account of the crimes and a list of some of the major suspects (it contains various little errors that Ripper anoraks will spot a mile off). He then talks about the Victorian press in general, and crime reporting in particular. It seems that what the Victorians really wanted to read about as they sat around the breakfast table in their starched clothes and restrictive underwear, was gore, and plenty of it. The papers would rush with indecent haste to cover any unusual murder, or natural disaster, or war, reporting horrific details that would never be printed today. There was also a rise in radical content in editorials at about this time, as certain newspapers began actively campaigning for social reform. Trailblazing editors like WT Stead of the Pall Mall Gazette were combining radical politics with sensationalism, and in doing so making their papers very successful.

The book then deals with the Jack the Ripper case chronologically, allowing us to see how the story would have developed to those reading it at the time (according to what they were reading - each paper's coverage was different). The first murder wasn't treated as anything particularly special, but when a second happened in the same area, and seemingly by the same killer, the press went crazy. The details of the inquest were reported exhaustively (with a few odd omissions) and the press kept
interest high. The third and fourth murders took place on the same night, and a day later the first of the (probably fake) Jack the Ripper letters appeared. This produced a veritable orgasm of lurid reportage and speculation from the press. Interest died down a little, as nothing happened for a few weeks. Then the last victim, Mary Kelly, was found in her room, mutilated beyond recognition. Weirdly, the most shocking of the crimes didn't keep press interest for anything like as long as the others had (possibly because the inquest was completed with almost indecent haste, which was probably done to stem the tide of press speculation anyway). The killer didn't strike again, and so the press had to find something else to write about.

There are some fascinating details that emerge from all this. A big part of the press clamour was down to the rather uneasy relationship that the East End had with the rest of London. The East End (especially Whitechapel, Spitalfields and Limehouse) was regarded as a foreign country of sub-human troglodytes by those Londoners who didn't live in it. Debate had raged for years about a possible solution to the privations of the East End, a sore on the lip of the mighty British Empire, and Jack the Ripper re-ignited all the argument and unease about the place. The fact that Whitechapel had a large community of immigrant Jews fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe added to the problems immensely. There was a general feeling that the Ripper couldn't possibly be an Englishman, and the presence of a large number of foreigners in the area naturally added fuel to the fire. The press had to tread a fine line between reporting allegations against Jews and deploring the anti-Semitism that led to those accusations in the first place. (Not that it's impossible for the ripper to have been Jewish, of course, but none of the suspicions that were actually reported were based on anything more than prejudice).

There was al
so a lot of politics involved. Then, as now, each paper subscribed to a political view. So the left-wing radical press used the murders to call for the resignation of Charles Warren and the Home Secretary, while the Conservative papers called for more lighting and policemen in Whitechapel (probably the more sensible response - there were no extreme right-wing papers in those days).

The attitudes towards the victims are quite instructive. On the one hand they were trying to whip up some (deserved) sympathy for them, what with them having just been murdered and all. But on the other hand, they were prostitutes (or 'unfortunates', as the press euphemism had it), and so there was always an underlying sense that they brought it on themselves through their despicable lifestyles. (Very few reports were willing to acknowledge the economic circumstances that had driven them to prostitution in the first place.) And although the papers would gleefully report on the majority of mutilations to the victims' throats and intestines, they all became curiously bashful when it came to wounds below the waist. Specifically not mentioned was the fact that at least two of the women had had their uteruses removed. It's as if the press only wanted to dwell on polite gore, that injuries that hinted at the existence of anything between the stomach and the thighs were inappropriate.

The book ends with a chapter about the social implications of Jack the Ripper. Curtis examines various feminist interpretations of the case, which he mostly agrees with, although he's rather more moderate than some of the writers he discusses. He also takes the time to criticise Colin Wilson, which can only be a good thing. One of the main points about Jack the Ripper is that, while he wasn't the first serial killer, he was the first to be treated in a modern way by the press. He's become the blueprint for all others.

This is probably the best book I've re
ad on the subject. It isn't one to go for if you want to know the facts of the case in any detail, but it places Jack in his proper historical context, and is a lot more thought-provoking than any number of theories about the man's true identity. (A few more illustrations might have been nice, though.)

(I don't seem to be able to get away from Jack the Ripper at the moment, as Mary Kelly no doubt said in 1888. Four out of my last 20 opinions have been about him. That's one fifth. I won't do any more now, honest.)

Summary: