Where comes the "gentleman" image from?

[K-453]

Contemporary newspaper illustrations show "Jack" as average looking man, only clad in dark clothes. Marie Belloc Lowndes, about 25 years later, already uses the well-known image of a "tall, thin gentleman" with top hat, Inverness coat and leather bag. I wonder if it was her who invented it or if she used something she found.

MfG, K

[Wickerman]

Hi MfG, K.
I'm not sure which illustrations you are referring to. Most of them which come to mind are only caricature-type representations. No-one knew what he looked like with any degree of certainty.

We might suppose that the seeds of this later "well-to-do" popular image were sown at the Inquest on Annie Chapman. The last man seen with Chapman wore a dark coat, deerstalker hat, looked shabby-genteel with a dark complexion.
This is not the description of your average dock labourer or Doss-house dweller. Couple this with the Coroner's summary that...

"...the injuries have been made by some one who had considerable anatomical skill and knowledge. There are no meaningless cuts. It was done by one who knew where to find what he wanted,..."

With reference to the removal of the uterus...
"...No unskilled person could have known where to find it, or have recognised it when it was found..."

"..It must have been some one accustomed to the post-mortem room..."

On the subject of the skill of the murderer...
"...His anatomical skill carries him out of the category of a common criminal, for his knowledge could only have been obtained by assisting at post-mortems, or by frequenting the post-mortem room. Thus the class in which search must be made, although a large one, is limited..."

Then, similar observations concerning the skill of the murderer were made after the subsequent murder of Catherine Eddowes.

"A good deal of knowledge as to the position of the organs in the abdominal cavity and the way of removing them."

Re; the removal of the kidney.
"It would require a great deal of knowledge as to its position to remove it. It is easily overlooked. It is covered by a membrane."

The picture which is being slowly built-up is that this killer was not to be found among the lower classes of society, he had anatomical & medical knowledge, therefore was a man of learning, dare we even label him a doctor?

In the 19th century it was customary to dress according to your status in life. A banker had a particular mode of dress, as did a Clerk, a Labourer, a shopkeeper, a doctor/surgeon, gentleman of means.
Medical men did carry a black leather bag and this bag makes an appearance every so often throughout the case and has become part of the myth.
What has developed, and appears to have been used by Lowndes, is this possibly false image of the killer being a medical man.

Lowndes did not need to copy the creation of someone else, the image had already emerged from the facts of the case. The image evolved from one particular interpretation, however other interpretations were possible.

Regards, Jon S.

[Jonathan H]

To K-453

I would direct you to the press section of this site, and the writings of George R. Sims.

This popular and famous writer of novels, plays, non-fiction, an upper class socialist and self-styled 'criminologist', second only to Dickens in grabbing the 'better classes' by the scruff of their collective neck to make them face the squalor of mass industrialisation, is the overarching source for the image of 'Jack' as a gentleman.

I mean in terms of cementing that concept, in the Edwardian Era, as opposed to competing images of the swarthy foreigner, or the working class ruffian, or the despicable Jew -- rich or poor (this had begun with Major Arthur Griffiths in 'Mysteries of Police and Crime' in 1898 who first mentioned the suicided doctor alleged prime suspect.)

Edwardians thought, thanks to Sims, that the Ripper mystery was solved in 1888, and that it was a middle-aged, English, Anglican, Gentile doctor, who had not worked for years due to a ferocious mental illness which manifested itself in killing and mutilating harlots. He had been in an asylum, but in a penny-pinching blunder had been released and, being so affluent, was idle and reclusive until the next homicidal explosion.

A murderer without family but with concerned, hovering friends who were aware off his record from the asylum.

This was a shocker of a tale but one middle and upper class readers of 'The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde' (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson were comfortable with because real life had adhered so closely to best-selling fiction.

Yet an exhaustive and efficient police investigation had locked in on the mad doctor and was closing fast when he drowned himself in the Thames after his most horrific murder had left him nothing but a shrieking husk -- with just enough energy and cognition to stagger to the river to kill himself (quite a feat really!?).

Of course the public, and press, were denied the medico's name, as what good would it do to know, and as Sims wrote in 1917, without a trace of irony: '... for the dead cannot defend themselves.'

But they did know what the fiend looked like. He was Sims' double (which was true of the much younger, much thinner Sims -- minus the naval beard) which delighted the writer.

Sims never actually described the fiend as a top-hatted toff with a medical bag, but he did not need to. With top police contacts, Sims had consolidated 'Jack' as 'one of us' not 'one of them' -- to the exclusion of all other suspects, or archeetypes -- and popular illustrators could do the rest.

Lowndes' hit novel 'The Lodger' (1913) had based her tale partly on an urban myth of the Ripper as a medical student lodging with strangers, but her lunatic murderer is, arguably, a closer fit for the historical figure who lies behind Sims' semi-fictional 'Drowned Doctor'.

The 'Avenger' was young, and thin-faced, just like Montague Druitt. He was an unbalanced religious fanatic, whilst Druitt may have confessed to a priest about his crimes, rather than a doctor in an asylum before the murders as Sims has it.

The 'Avenger' takes his own life discreetly once the people he lives with have come to suspect the terrible truth, just as Druitt killed himself perhaps when his immediate circle, or maybe just one person knew, rather than because a monolithic Scotland Yard was inexorably closing -- which never actually happened.

Lowndes' tale was thus a variation of 'Jack the Gentleman' which fit with the broadly understood 'police' solution to the Whitechapel horrors.

It would take decades to discover that this was not received police opinion, nor that the gentleman figure was not a middle-aged surgeon; that 'Jack' was, inadvertently, more like the 'Avenger' than 'Dr Jekyll'.

The controversial police chief who orchestrated the 'Drowned Doctor' ruse, via his pal Sims, mentioned 'The Lodger' in his 1914 memoirs, 'Days of My Years', in a chapter he called [I]'Laying the Ghost of Jack the Ripper'[/I. He goes out of his way to dismiss Lowndes as being historically accurate:

'Only last autumn I was very much interested in a book entitled The Lodger, which set forth in vivid colours what the Whitechapel murderer's life might have been while dwelling in London lodgings. The talented authoress portrayed him as a religious enthusiast, gone crazy over the belief that he was predestined to slaughter a certain number of unfortunate women, and that he had been confined in a criminal lunatic asylum and had escaped therefrom. I do not think that there was anything of religious mania about the real Simon Pure, nor do I believe that he had ever been detained in an asylum, nor lived in lodgings. I incline to the belief that the individual who held up London in terror resided with his own people ; that he absented himself from home at certain times, and that he committed suicide on or about the 10th of November 1888, after he had knocked out a Commissioner of Police and very nearly settled the hash of one of Her Majesty's principal Secretaries of State.'

[Stewart P Evans]

Top-hatted

Contemporary newspaper illustrations show "Jack" as average looking man, only clad in dark clothes. Marie Belloc Lowndes, about 25 years later, already uses the well-known image of a "tall, thin gentleman" with top hat, Inverness coat and leather bag. I wonder if it was her who invented it or if she used something she found.
MfG, K

The top-hatted, long-coated, bag-carrying, image of 'Jack the Ripper' was already there in 1888. As witness this illustration of the Ripper with Kelly from the front page of the Penny Illustrated Paper of December 17, 1888.

[Robert]

I think Leon Goldstein may have been inadvertently responsible for the bag bit.

[Tom_Wescott]

The Jack as toff bit originated with Dr. Phillips' testimony at the Chapman inquest where he all but praised the Ripper's prowess with a knife. Following this we have coroner Baxter introducing a mysterious doctor wanting uteri specimens. Then a liberal press tired of the little man always getting blamed, and all it took was Leon Goldstein and Albert Bachert's 'black bag' men and the rest is history. Or at least that's how I see it.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[Raoul's Obsession]

I think that George Hutchinson's description of Mr A. also has a lot to do with the Ripper as Toff image.

Raoul

[Wickerman]

I think that George Hutchinson's description of Mr A. also has a lot to do with the Ripper as Toff image.

Raoul

You will notice that the sketch posted above by Stewart is intended to represent the very same Hutchinson character, Mr A.
(if you look careful that might even be Hutchinson in sillouette at the end of the passage :-))

Yet, if you notice this sketch is nothing like Astrachan (why not?).
Mr A's hat was not a top hat, he did not carry the leather bag, and the coat shown does not appear to be trimmed with Astrachan.

These inconsistencies, as Stewart noted, might suggest the die was already cast before December 1888, (see post #2 above).

Regards, Jon S.

[Jonathan H]

I diagree that the 'die was cast'.

This is a common fallacy regardingt the retrospective 'autumn of terror', when the Ripper murders went on for years. They just became more infrequent -- or so police, press, and public believed before 1898.

"At the time, then, of my joining the Force on 1st June 1889, police and public were still agog over the tragedies of the previous autumn, and were quite ready to believe that any fresh murders, not at once elucidated, were by the same maniac's hand. Indeed, I remember three cases - two in 1888, and one early in 1891, which the Press ascribed to the so-called Jack the Ripper, to whom, at one time or another, some fourteen murders were attributed-some before, and some after, his veritable reign of terror in 1888."
Macnaghten, 1914

The arrest of working sailors in 1891 and 1895 also competed in the popular imagination as to the Ripper's true identity, class, and appearance.

There were also contemporaneous illustrations of Lawende's 'Jack the Sailor' suspect.

Though not illustrated, there was also the locked-up lunatic suspect, of which the most prominent was the un-named Cutbush of 1894.

Then in 1898, the competing strands gave way to the 'Drowned Doctor' paradigm, so that by 1910 Anderson and his treacherous Jews, perhaps quite wrongly, were kicked to the curb for being out of step with the hegemonic notion of the 'real life' Jekyll and Hyde.

[Wickerman]

Jonathan.
I suspect you misunderstand the point being made.

You will agree that during the spate of the murders there were several competing 'popular images' of what this Ripper looked like?
The Lunatic Jew, the foreign sailor, a 'medical man'?, a 'dark complexioned foreigner', etc.

You might also agree that the image implied by police reports differed from the 'popular image' presented by the press and rumored by the public.

Also, I think you will agree that the 'well-dressed' villain with tophat, black bag and long coat did not simply emerge in later decades. That there is sufficient contemporary evidence that this particular image was up for consideration at the time.

No-one is saying that the 'well-dressed' man was the only image. What is evident is that, among other considerations, this specific 'look' took form early in the investigation (this die was cast early-on). Like I referred to in post #2, the seeds were sown during the Chapman investigation. Subsequently, this one particular 'image' gained more popularity than the others.

Regards, Jon S.

[Scott Nelson]

Then in 1898, the competing strands gave way to the 'Drowned Doctor' paradigm, so that by 1910 Anderson and his treacherous Jews, perhaps quite wrongly, were kicked to the curb for being out of step with the hegemonic notion of the 'real life' Jekyll and Hyde.

Who could argue with that?

[The Grave Maurice]

It was Christopher Frayling, I believe, who noted that the possible suspects for JtR fell into three categories: the toff, the mad doctor, and the foreigner. All three were discussed in 1888 and they have pretty much stayed with us, with variations, ever since. The toff, or maybe the toff/doctor, appeared very early and has stayed late. He is by far the most common suspect in novels and films simply because he makes a better story.

[Robert]

I think the key thing might be the idea of Jack as "not one of us." The audacity of the crimes and the killer's ability to evade detection would have suggested the he was someone a bit special, someone from "high up." On the other hand the barbarity and filthiness of the crimes, while seeming to place the murderer more firmly in the lower-class income group, could be safely assigned to a foreigner, which in those days meant a Jew.

[Wickerman]

It was Christopher Frayling, I believe, who noted that the possible suspects for JtR fell into three categories: the toff, the mad doctor, and the foreigner. All three were discussed in 1888 and they have pretty much stayed with us, with variations, ever since.

Agreed, which takes care of the 'when'....but the thread asked 'where'.

The toff, or maybe the toff/doctor, appeared very early and has stayed late.

So 'where'... do you think this 'popular image' originated?
Do you agree with previous suggestions or do you have another view?

Regards, Jon S.

[Jonathan H]

I would clarify my point like this:

I was not locating when 'Jack the Gentleman' first appeared, but rather responding to a poster's query -- as I understood it -- about when it became a pop paradigm, which Lowndes' exploited in her late Edwardian hit novella, 'The Lodger'.

If Macnaghten, via Griffiths and Sims, had propagated to the public that the top-hatted toff and the foreign flim flammer were far less significant than the Slavic-Jewish lunatic, then the latter would have locked in as the popular image of the Ripper.