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I’ve just bought a 1947 book on English murders, which contains a section on jtr. The preference to the 1888 section is truly bizarre:
“Jack was at once the most fiendish and most playful of English murderers. He committed a series of atrocious crimes and yet – even when he was at his nefarious work – he preserved his irrepressible gaiety. He wrote jocular letters to the police, he snipped of ears, he sent kidneys to the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee. But his career is interesting not only because he was a whimsical fellow but because he flourished in the dark, the fantastically squalid world of Whitechapel – city of ginshops and flop houses, where elderly women went to bed dead drunk with their clothes on and arose to by rum, where young women staggered home with their lovers in the early hours of the morning and, just before they were murdered sang “Sweet Violets”.
Jack of course never revealed his identity, and many people have advanced theories to explain is behaviour. Some think he was a lunatic, others that he was a doctor, still others that he was a midwife in disguise. It seems more likely that he was a middle – aged professor with a passion for practical jokes who was no longer able to supress his homicidal tendencies. Perhaps he occupied a chair at one of the London collages, and carried in his little black bag nothing more dangerous than manuscripts and lecture notes. Such a theory helps explain the one fault that can reasonably be attributed to Jack – his in corrigible long windedness, his inability to stop, when it was perfectly clear that his public had had enough.”
Even more bizarre is that, despite its age (1947) the rest of the section was amongst the best I've read on the murders, comprising solely of the London Times articles from the period. Something not seen until Casebook arrived on the scene some fifty years later.
“Jack was at once the most fiendish and most playful of English murderers. He committed a series of atrocious crimes and yet – even when he was at his nefarious work – he preserved his irrepressible gaiety. He wrote jocular letters to the police, he snipped of ears, he sent kidneys to the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee. But his career is interesting not only because he was a whimsical fellow but because he flourished in the dark, the fantastically squalid world of Whitechapel – city of ginshops and flop houses, where elderly women went to bed dead drunk with their clothes on and arose to by rum, where young women staggered home with their lovers in the early hours of the morning and, just before they were murdered sang “Sweet Violets”.
Jack of course never revealed his identity, and many people have advanced theories to explain is behaviour. Some think he was a lunatic, others that he was a doctor, still others that he was a midwife in disguise. It seems more likely that he was a middle – aged professor with a passion for practical jokes who was no longer able to supress his homicidal tendencies. Perhaps he occupied a chair at one of the London collages, and carried in his little black bag nothing more dangerous than manuscripts and lecture notes. Such a theory helps explain the one fault that can reasonably be attributed to Jack – his in corrigible long windedness, his inability to stop, when it was perfectly clear that his public had had enough.”
Even more bizarre is that, despite its age (1947) the rest of the section was amongst the best I've read on the murders, comprising solely of the London Times articles from the period. Something not seen until Casebook arrived on the scene some fifty years later.
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