The Complete Jack the Ripper

[Books]

Review by Hisham Zulkifli

2004 Edition

By Donald Rumblelow

Publisher: Penguin Books, 367 pages

FACT is sometimes more frightening than fiction. More than a century ago in the streets of Whitechapel, London, roamed one of the most terrifying killers in recorded history – the infamous Jack the Ripper.

Over the years, speculation about the Ripper’s identity and the motive for his short reign of terror has continued, unabated it seems, and has resulted in many written works. Most of these are fiction, even those which contend to be fact.

Donald Rumblelow’s The Complete Jack the Ripper is – happily or unhappily, depending on your point of view – not in that class. Far from attributing romantic notions to the Ripper legend, he sticks to the facts, sometimes in gruesome detail.

To set the context in which Jack committed his foul deeds, Rumblelow begins with a description of the deplorable conditions of late19th-century East End, London, which embraces Whitechapel. The citizens there, at that time, lived wretched lives.

In Whitechapel in 1883, “out of three schools with children from 1,129 families, 871 families had only one room to live in and in the majority of cases the number of people sharing with them was as many as five and sometimes as high as nine,” he writes.

He quotes Andrew Mearns’ The Bitter Cry of Outcast London: “Every room in these rotten and reeking tenements houses a family, often two. In one cellar a sanitary inspector reports finding a father, a mother, three children, and four pigs! In another room a missionary found a man ill with smallpox, his wife just recovering from her eighth confinement, and the children running about half naked and covered with dirt.”

Women frequently turned to prostitution to pay for their rooms and meals. Rumblelow continues: “The Lancet, in fact, had estimated that one house of every 60 in London was a brothel and one woman in every 60 a whore.” (Since the Ripper targeted prostitutes, it appears he had plenty to choose from.)

Even so, women’s bodies were not of great value as “a man would pay more for half a pound of cheese than he would for sex with one of these women.” Although here he was describing conditions relating to Jack London’s visit to London 30 years after the last Ripper murder, conditions there were much the same.

Despite that, the most common kind of job was sweatshop tailoring, which required one to work 17 hours a day to earn tenpence or a shilling. People who could not afford the eightpence double beds or the fourpence single beds might have tried for the twopenny rope lean-to. This was a rope stretched across the room that the men could lean on and, if they could, sleep on.

Children, of course, suffered greatly under such conditions: “Most children were physically and mentally underdeveloped .... Fifty-five per cent of East End children died before they were five.”

Over three chapters, Rumblelow described Jack the Ripper’s killings in detail, from the time and place, right down to the clinical descriptions of the cuts and mutilations on his victims, as well as the subsequent actions of the police and medical examiners.

Reading the gruesome details is akin to watching the most horrid of horror movies, for this was real life. Here is a quote from divisional surgeon Dr George Bagster Phillips, who examined the body of Annie Chapman:

“The abdomen had been entirely laid open and the intestines severed from their mesenteric attachments which had been lifted out and placed on the shoulder of the corpse; whilst from the pelvis, the uterus and its appendages with the upper portion of the vagina and the posterior two-thirds of the bladder had been removed.”

The killings grew worse as Jack went from one victim to the next. The most gruesome attack was on Mary Kelly, purportedly his last victim. I won’t quote the description of her mutilated body, despite my morbid interest in the details. In addition, Kelly was distinct in that she seemed to be the only woman killed indoors.

Note that initially, it was assumed that the Ripper had murdered 10 women. Now, it is generally accepted that he was only responsible for five of the victims.

The chapter From Hell is interesting and, at times, funny because it describes the various letters sent to the police and the newspapers during the killings. Many readers offered suggestions on how to capture the Ripper; one even suggested setting up “female dummies” in dark and lonely spots. The dummy should have “powerful springs” as its arms and legs. These springs would be released should anyone lift the dummy’s chin or press its throat, and entrap the attacker. Meanwhile, “a sound resembling a police whistle might proceed from the machine.”

Many letters were signed “Jack the Ripper”, supposedly from the murderer himself. Some of these were apparently written by two journalists to “keep the story in print, to ‘keep the business alive’.”

But Rumblelow indicates that a few of the letters purportedly signed by the killer were authentic and that a “ruthless weeding out process” left just one that might have come from the real Ripper. It was not signed using that name. But I will not mention the signature – which is not a name – for the sake of readers who do not know this other aspect of Ripper history. Best you read the book, okay?

You may realise by now that the Ripper might not have called himself Jack the Ripper, at least initially. That name could have sprung from “Springhealed Jack, the Terror of London”, supposedly a bat-like creature that terrorised London in 1837-38. Thus “ripper” would have been a possible connotation.

But Rumblelow suggests that “Ripper” might have had links with the character of Hannibal Chollop in Charles Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit. Chollop carried a swordstick which he called “Tickler” or “Ripper”.

The killer’s possible identity takes up the longest chapter of this book, titled Suspects. Here, the author examines named suspects to see how they could have been the Ripper. Based on available evidence, many were unlikely candidates, including the Duke of Clarence, who has been portrayed more than once in fiction as the Ripper!

However, Rumblelow’s own suggestion that the first four victims were killed by one man and the last, Kelly, by another, is intriguing.

Today, we still do not know who Jack the Ripper was and the lack of authentic evidence that has survived from that time is partly to blame. Many police documents concerning the case have perished, as a result of various causes.

Perhaps it is the gaps in available evidence, as well as the puzzle of the killer’s identity that has spawned the vast amount of literature (as well as films) on the Ripper (not to mention the brutality of the killings, of course). Rumblelow lists many works centred on the murderer, including one in which Jack is an evil presence that somehow manages to get aboard the Starship Enterprise.

Some works which claim to be serious can be dismissed as fiction disguised as fact, like Stephen Knight’s Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, which the author examines in detail.

Will we ever know the Ripper’s real identity? Probably not. But by reading this book, you may be able to make some inferences. And why not? You are not the first to try, and I doubt you will be the last.