Victorian Psycho

THE Jack the Ripper murders in Whitechapel, London, caused a sensation that has never died out. Between the autumn of 1888, when the grisly murders took place, and World War II, half a dozen books on the case were published. Between the end of the war and 1980 nine books appeared, and since 1980 there have been more than twenty. Jack has turned up in novels, short stories, films, and TV shows (Robert Bloch even brought the Ripper onto the USS Enterprise in one of the most daring episodes of Star Trek). No other murder case has provoked anything like this ballooning bibliography. There is now even a quarterly journal devoted to the topic, Ripperana. Philip Sugden’s Complete History of Jack the Ripper (Orbit, 1994) offers the most thorough, sober, and scholarly narrative that has yet appeared, as well as the most painstaking analysis of the evidence. Anyone who wants to look into the case without wasting time on tosh linking the killings with the royal family or the Freemasons should start with Sugden. To be sure, his account will not be the last word.

Why all the interest? In our day we have become unhappily familiar with serial killers and sex maniacs. To the Victorian mind, however, the Whitechapel murders represented something new, strange, and terrifying. They were reported and embellished in the London newspapers and immediately picked up by the foreign press. In this way the Ripper murders sent shock waves throughout Europe, the United States, and what was then the colonial world.

MH

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Michael Harrington

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THE Jack the Ripper murders in Whitechapel, London, caused a sensation that has never died out. Between the autumn of 1888, when the grisly murders took place, and World War II, half a dozen books on the case were published. Between the end of the war and 1980 nine books appeared, and since 1980 there have been more than twenty. Jack has turned up in novels, short stories, films, and TV shows (Robert Bloch even brought the Ripper onto the USS Enterprise in one of the most daring episodes of Star Trek). No other murder case has provoked anything like this ballooning bibliography. There is now even a quarterly journal devoted to the topic, Ripperana. Philip Sugden’s Complete History of Jack the Ripper (Orbit, 1994) offers the most thorough, sober, and scholarly narrative that has yet appeared, as well as the most painstaking analysis of the evidence. Anyone who wants to look into the case without wasting time on tosh linking the killings with the royal family or the Freemasons should start with Sugden. To be sure, his account will not be the last word.

Why all the interest? In our day we have become unhappily familiar with serial killers and sex maniacs. To the Victorian mind, however, the Whitechapel murders represented something new, strange, and terrifying. They were reported and embellished in the London newspapers and immediately picked up by the foreign press. In this way the Ripper murders sent shock waves throughout Europe, the United States, and what was then the colonial world.