Help with The Crazies

[Jibby Reznor]

hello all, as I am a new poster i hope this wont be seen to be cheeky, but this post is asking for help. I am a third year history student writing a dissertation on Jack The Ripper, his media and public portryal. After reading several books i am already at the conclusion that the media portrayed the killings as negative. However i have come across a group labelled "the crazies" these were people who both in public and private letters saw the killings as a positive action for several reasons. I am hoping to find more information on these people to show a different sides to how the killings were recieved. So if anyone has any articles or links that think would point me in the right direction, i would be very grateful.

Thanks again for any help,

Jibby

[Bob Hinton]

?

Bit confused here. If you've come across this group surely you've found them? Why do you need help in tracking them down?

[Mike Covell]

So your looking for people that wrote letters in praise of the murders as a catalyst for social change?

I would suggest reading Stephen P Ryder's ""Public Reactions To JTR", or take a trawl through the "Press Reports" on the side bar <----

[Limehouse]

There is an interesting article written some years ago by the cultural historian Christopher Frayling. The article was called The House That Jack Built and it appeared in a periodical but I can't recall which one. Your university library should be able to track it down through the inter-library loan service.

One academic book I would recommend is The City Of Dreadful Delight by Judith Walkowitz. I am sure you will find this most helpful as it describes a whole range of reactions to the murders, from early-day feminists to social reformers.

Good luck.

[Jibby Reznor]

thank you both for your help. Both articles look great. Thanks very much again

Jibby

[Mike Covell]

Another great title, and one I am reading at the moment, is "Jack the Ripper and the London Press", written by, L. Perry Curtis Junior and published in 2001 by Yale University.

The book looks at the press and it's impact on cultural history, but also looks briefly at the "Crazies"

[Sam Flynn]

There's also a fine (IMHO) collection of essays in "Jack the Ripper: Media, Culture, History", Manchester University Press (2007), edited by Alexandra Warwick and Martin Willis. The Frayling essay mentioned by Limehouse is in there, as are contributions from Perry Curtis and Walkowitz. I just checked Amazon.com, and the paperback edition (which came out this year) is in stock.

[Mike Covell]

I purchased that one quite recently, totally slipped my mind! Nice book with plenty to read!

[BookEmDano]

Book reference!

The book mentioned above is a chapter from an edited volumne:

Frayling, C (1986) ‘The House that Jack Built: Some Stereotypes of the Rapist in the History of Modern Culture’, in R.Porter and S.Tomaselli, eds, 'Rape'

The Walkowitz book would be useful, especially Chapter Two

There's also a really useful chapter on Victorian Crime in

Fishman, W (1988) East End 1888

Interestingly the perception of Jack the Ripper is very different in France than in the UK, there he seems to be celebrated more as a folk hero.

[Limehouse]

The book mentioned above is a chapter from an edited volumne:

Frayling, C (1986) ‘The House that Jack Built: Some Stereotypes of the Rapist in the History of Modern Culture’, in R.Porter and S.Tomaselli, eds, 'Rape'

The Walkowitz book would be useful, especially Chapter Two

There's also a really useful chapter on Victorian Crime in

Fishman, W (1988) East End 1888

Interestingly the perception of Jack the Ripper is very different in France than in the UK, there he seems to be celebrated more as a folk hero.

Yes, that is the periodical that my Frayling article came from. It is a very interesting read. Walkowitz is an author I have read extensively and enjoyed very much.

[Leatherface]

While not a direct Jack book, Jack London's People of the Abyss is an outstanding and insightful look at late 1800s life in London slums.

R

[diana]

A Parallel Type of Situation

Every once in awhile a situation occurs which is reprehensible in and of itself, but good comes out of it. Many have said that the Whitechapel murders, while in and of themselves horrible, led to positive social change.

I think the same thing is true of the Columbine massacre. As terrible as it was it forced the culture to take a hard and for the first time serious look at the issue of school bullying. In this respect my own childhood was not pleasant. I grew up when this issue was glossed over and ignored. I suffered. I have scars.

Think back to your childhood. I would be interested to know how many other posters went through this.

While I deplore what happened at Columbine, I am pleased with the changes I'm seeing. For the first time people in a position to do something are taking a hard look at this issue and pursuing it.

There is a long way to go and it is true that the problem has spread to the internet, even causing one suicide, but at least people are not ignoring it any more.

Perhaps Jack was the ultimate bully.

[alex]

Hi Jibby

All the books and articles mentioned by other posters are well worth acquiring.

More immediately, however, although I would not consider him a “crazy,” George Bernard Shaw’s letter to The Star, 24th Sept. 1888, might be of interest to you.

This is how The Star presented Mr. Shaw’s view:

We publish a letter to-day from Mr. SHAW. It is on the hideous and squalid tragedies which, occurring in the East, have stirred up the West-end to unusual and unaccustomed interest in the fate of the poor and the disinherited of the nation. Mr. SHAW writes with what will be considered violence by many, if not by most of our readers, and his proposals are far in advance of those which even some of our most advanced Radicals will be disposed to adopt. They are certainly in advance of any measures that we ourselves are ready to recommend. But we willingly give Mr. SHAW the opportunity of ventilating his ideas; first, because we are in favor of free discussion; and secondly, because though we may not accept his remedies, we sympathise largely with the protest he makes against the fashion in which some of our contemporaries have treated the Whitechapel murders. His revolt against the gush and the cant which are now appearing in certain aristocratic journals, is timely and called for. These journals, which are now calling upon the West to do its duty to the East, are the very journals, as Mr. SHAW points out, which but a few months ago were applauding Sir CHARLES WARREN as warmly and enthusiastically as though he were another Mr. BALFOUR. In the House of Commons, and still more in the drawing-rooms of the West-end, gilded youths and Primrose matrons were pluming their feathers on the spirited way in which the mob had been taught to conduct itself; and after the triumphant reply of Mr. MATTHEWS in the House of Commons, and the splendid majority – largely made up of men calling themselves Liberals – all the reactionaries were congratulating themselves on the excellent results of a policy of coercion in London, as well as in Ireland. On these gratulations come four hideous and squalid tragedies, and at once the same society, that was exultant with class triumph, has grown pale with class terror, and follows with babbling, childish, unctuous proposals – as much a remedy for the state of things revealed as the buns of the French lady for the starvation of the French revolutionaries. We may ask why it required these murders to call attention to the state of the poor at all? The deaths of these unhappy women certainly call aloud for vengeance, and the officials through whose incompetence such things are possible, will be called by-and-bye to a heavy account. But death, sudden, swift, possibly painless – and especially to those who have tried the game of life and have lost honor, self-respect, hope, everything – is infinitely less of a tragedy than the daily struggle for work that can’t be got; for food that can’t be earned. Give to many of the thousands that stand shivering every morning outside the portals of our great dockyards; give to the man that haunts the coffee shop or the newspaper office every morning to search out the places that are vacant; give to the father of children that meet him at night with the cry for food he hasn’t to give – give to many of these the choice between the continuance of life and the painless passage through sleep to death, and the result would be that death would be their choice. It is the tragedy of defeated life, and not the calm of triumphant death, that should appeal to our hearts and imaginations.
And now as to the remedies. First we want better, truer, more honest teaching in our churches. As will be seen from another portion of our impression, a parson is very indignant with us because we have opened our columns to a discussion on the failure of Christianity. The free discussion of any subject is doubtless a soreness and an affliction to many reactionaries – especially when they wear a black coat and have taken service in the Established Church. How can anybody – how can the poor, especially – think well of Christianity when those who are its most eminent – its most highly paid teachers – always take the side which means the further enrichment of the rich, and the deeper impoverishment of the poor? When the landlords had the tax on corn, starvation walked abroad through the land. When reformers like COBDEN and BRIGHT proposed to bring food home to the poor, the clergymen of the Establishment were among the most active apostles of the continued reign of high rates and dear bread, and starved homes. Take the whole talk which is the outcome of these Whitechapel tragedies; does anybody suppose that the interest, shallow and purposeless and resourceless as it is, would have shown itself at all in the days before the people had got some voice in the control of the country? It is the voter and not the man that has excited the interest; and did not, again, the clergymen of the Establishment head the party in town, and still more the country, that opposed by every means in their power the admission of the artisan and the laborer to the franchise? How, we ask again, can we expect humble men to believe in a Christianity which is always on the side of privilege, unjust burdens, deeper poverty, greater helplessness of the weak?
But we can place little confidence in the good teaching of others – or even in their goodwill. The salvation of the disinherited must come largely, if not mainly, through themselves. We have no objection to men like Mr. SHAW preaching their gospel of social regeneration, though we may regard some of their opinions as unwise and impracticable, and the majority of them as unattainable for a considerable time to come. What we ask is that they and their friends shall not neglect the political machinery through which ultimately all changes – social as well as political – have to be attained; and that if they care but little for these things, they will allow others who have taken this work in hand, to go forward without interruption. For our part, we think some of the humblest of these political changes would do much to solve some of the most gigantic of our social problems. Suppose, for instance, that our politicians and our divines, and our social philosophers, and even our Home Secretaries and Police Commissioners, had to deal with a London in which every citizen had a vote – does anybody think that the cry of distress would be drowned in the tumult of bayonets and the clanging of swords? As it is we have to deal in London with masses that are still almost unenfranchised. The vote of London is not a working class, but a middle-class, vote. As long as that state of things lasts, we shall have no proposals for the fundamental changes that will reduce our poverty. We shall have to put up with such canting and shallow philosophy as that which Mr. SHAW so triumphantly assails in our columns to-day.

BLOOD MONEY TO WHITECHAPEL.

TO THE EDITOR OF “THE STAR.”
SIR, - Will you allow me to make a comment on the success of the Whitechapel murderer in calling attention for a moment to the social question? Less than a year ago the West-end press, headed by the St. James’s Gazette, the Times, and the Saturday Review, were literally clamoring for the blood of the people – hounding on Sir Charles Warren to thrash and muzzle the scum who dared to complain that they were starving – heaping insult and reckless calumny on those who interceded for the victims – applauding to the skies the open class bias of those magistrates and judges who zealously did their very worst in the criminal proceedings which followed – behaving, in short as the proprietary class always does behave when the workers throw it into a frenzy of terror by venturing to show their teeth. Quite lost on these journals and their patrons were indignant remonstrances, arguments, speeches, and sacrifices, appeals to history, philosophy, biology, economics, and statistics; references to the reports of inspectors, registrar generals, city missionaries, Parliamentary commissions, and newspapers; collections of evidence by the five senses at every turn; and house-to-house investigations into the condition of the unemployed, all unanswered and unanswerable, and all pointing the same way. The Saturday Review was still frankly for hanging the appellants; and the Times denounced them as “pests of society.” This was still the tone of the class Press as lately as the strike of the Bryant and May girls. Now all is changed. Private enterprise has succeeded where Socialism failed. Whilst we conventional Social Democrats were wasting our time on education, agitation, and organisation, some independent genius has taken the matter in hand, and by simply murdering and disembowelling four women, converted the proprietary press to an inept sort of communism. The moral is a pretty one, and the Insurrectionists, the Dynamitards, the Invincibles, and the extreme left of the Anarchist party will not be slow to draw it. “Humanity, political science, economics, and religion,” they will say, “are all rot; the one argument that touches your lady and gentleman is the knife.” That is so pleasant for the party of Hope and Perseverance in their toughening struggle with the party of Desperation and Death!
However, these things have to be faced. If the line to be taken is that suggested by the converted West-end papers – if the people are still to yield up their wealth to the Clanricarde class, and get what they can back as charity through Lady Bountiful, then the policy for the people is plainly a policy of terror. Every gaol blown up, every window broken, every shop looted, every corpse found disembowelled, means another ten pound note for “ransom.” The riots of 1886 brought in £78,000 and a People’s Palace; it remains to be seen how much these murders may prove worth to the East-end in panem et circenses. Indeed, if the habits of duchesses only admitted of their being decoyed into Whitechapel back-yards, a single experiment in slaughterhouse anatomy on an aristocratic victim might fetch in a round half million and save the necessity of sacrificing four women of the people. Such is the stark-naked reality of these abominable bastard Utopias of genteel charity in which the poor are first to be robbed and then pauperised by way of compensation, in order that the rich man may combine the idle luxury of the protected thief with the unctuous self-satisfaction of the pious philanthropist.
The proper way to recover the rents of London for the people of London is not by charity, which is one of the worst curses of poverty, but by the municipal rate collector, who will no doubt make it sufficiently clear to the monopolists of ground value that he is not merely taking round the hat, and that the State is ready to enforce his demand, if need be. And the money thus obtained must be used by the municipality as the capital of productive industries for the better employment of the poor. I submit that this is at least a less disgusting and immoral method of relieving the East-end than the gush of bazaars and blood money which has suggested itself from the West-end point of view. – Yours, &c.,
G. BERNARD SHAW.

Best Wishes
alex chisholm

[Jibby Reznor]

Thank You!

Heya everyone

Just to say again Thanks so much for all your help, every post as lead me onto something. And to say what a great community this is, thank you all very much. I hope i can be of help to some of you guys in the future.

yours,

Jibby