How did you get interested in Jack.

[Pcdunn]

... But what really got me hooked wasn't the crime itself but an appendix in Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell's From Hell, a brief overview of the theories and a description of Ripperology as a blood sport, called Dance of the Gull Catchers. Just fascinated by all the extra around the killings.
....

Hi, Shaggy,
I just wanted to agree wholeheartedly with this portion of your previous post, as I found Moore's after-text as fascinating as the graphic novel itself. I am an academic librarian, and what I've observed since joining Casebook last year reminds a lot of how scholars in other disciplines can get caught up in debate over competing theories.
The Moore & Campbell graphic novel, which I just read for the first time last summer, together with the recent "Shawlgate", reignited my interest in Jack the Ripper and led me here to Casebook.

[Shaggyrand]

The Moore & Campbell graphic novel, which I just read for the first time last summer, together with the recent "Shawlgate", reignited my interest in Jack the Ripper and led me here to Casebook.

Hi PcD,

It was for similar reasons I started posting. Was going on a work trip that was going to involve a lot of down time & after a few years of not looking at anything JtR, I just grabbed From Hell & Prisoner 1167 (something like that... 1176? Anyway, it was one I hadn't finished despite having it for years) off my shelf for something to read a day or two after hearing about approval to exhume MJK. Which led to stalking Casebook again, which led to marathoning through Rippercast & the unstoppable urge to join and comment when I saw something that I could comment on. Well, comment usefully on at any rate. 90% of the time I'm talking out my butt. I'm good with it.

[hanway3]

I first got interested in the JTR case from reading a book which I found in my mother's bookshelf. It was the Donald McCormick book- which although now discredited- set me off on this long never-ending mission.
This was in the early 1970s, and I was about 12/13 at the time. Shortly after the BBC series staring Stratford Johns and Frank Windsor, Barlow and Watt from the TV series Softly Softly was shown and I went on my first Ripper Walk.
So that was in 1973 for the TV series and 1974 for the Walk.

[Patrick S]

I became aware of Jack the Ripper when I was around 12 years old, I think. I remember reading about it in magazines around my grandmother’s house. There must have been some resurgence in the Druitt craze because I recall believing for years the case was solved, it was Druitt. That was the early 1980s. A few years later I went to work as a landscaper and the topic came up. The company employed an older man, Ray, who kept the plant material watered. He didn’t talk much. Usually said hello and that’s about it.

Anyway, he pipes up and tells us that was born in the East End of London in 1906. He told us stories his dad told him about the Ripper. He said all the parents used to use the Ripper to scare their kids straight. “Be home by dark or Jack the Ripper might get you”, that kind of thing. Over the years and moths to come we spoke a lot. He told us about his dad sleeping “on the ropes” in the lodging houses. His dad worked on the docks and was – to hear Ray tell it – one mean, tough son-of-a-bitch. He said his dad never owned a home or had an apartment up until the time he got married. He told me that his dad new Leather Apron (John Pizer). I had no clue who that was, of course. I asked him about Druitt one day. I remember he spat the word, BULLSHIT! in response. He said his dad told him that everyone knew who Jack was. He was a local idiot that couldn’t help what he did. I don’t think there is much of value in what he told me. I think it was likely a father telling his son tales because he was there around that time. Much like a guy who went to school with a guy who ended up playing in the majors, thirty years later he’s telling his son they were pals and he used to strike him out in practice every day.

So, I’ve been researching some aspect of Jack the Ripper for, what is now, 32years? More? I re-read the same books. Pour over the same articles. I make notes, write observations. Kick things around with my brother, who is peripherally interested in the subject. I have other interests to be sure. I played baseball in college and after. I competed in Olympic weightlifting. I am married with two boys. I coach baseball, basketball, lifting. I train local athletes. I sometimes play guitar in a crappy band. I still love to do landscaping (for free when my neighbors or friends ask). Some foolish people pay me to run a technology division of 70+ people and manage a system with 60,000 users. Yet, there I’ve been at the end of the day, reading some new bit of something someone found, making notes in the margins of one of my Sugdens. Writing a dissertation only I will ever read. I’m an odd bird, no doubt. My wife can’t figure it out…Baseball, lifting, guitar, Jack the Ripper. Makes no sense.

[Ginger]

I have loved Victoriana since 'The Water Babies' movie

Oh, my! I hadn't known that there was a "Water Babies" movie! I'm glad you posted that!

[Ginger]

I came here by a rather roundabout method. My mother is a devotee of that old-fashioned sort of murder mystery where someone is found murdered under curious circumstances, and eventually the local vicar / village busybody / retired professor, etc. quietly works it out while the police energetically chase red herrings. Her secondary interest, as you might expect, lies in reading about unsolved murders and other crimes.

For myself, I was fascinated by horses from a young age. I was born in 1961, and as I was growing up, there were still abundant traces of horses in the town and city - garages that had obviously begun as stables, often with the hayloft still in place, and sometimes old rusty shoes discarded in a corner; hitching rings still visible at businesses; drinking troughs downtown that had been transformed into flower planters, etc. The idea of a city filled with working horses delighted me at first, although as I got older and realized what their lives were often like, and that people who lived beside horses from necessity rather than choice might not really care about their welfare or happiness, the picture turned rather darker for me. The idea of urban horses still fascinated me, though.

My interest in urban horses slowly expanded into a general interest in the middle and late Victorian periods, into how people lived and how they experienced their world back then. About 1976 or so, my mother got the Donald Rumbelow book from her book-of-the-month club. The world was a much different place before the internet. An interesting book, indeed, information about specialized topics in general, was much harder to come by then, so that a book or two arriving in the mail every month was a bigger thing that it would be today. I ended up at least looking through most of her club books, if not actually reading them in any engrossed way. I knew from the jacket blurbs and my mom's comments that this one dealt at least as much with the times and life in the East End as it did with the murders, so I was keener than usual to get at it after she was done.

I was vaguely aware of who Jack the Ripper was, but possessed few details. I chiefly associated him with this remarkable old movie that sometimes played on the Saturday night horror movie show on TV, the one where he's a mad doctor who gets gruesomely crushed by a descending elevator (his blood bubbles up through the floor boards) as he attempts to escape.

Two things really stayed with me about Inspector Rumbelow's book. First, the descriptions of the neighborhood, and how the people lived. For whatever reason, Rumbelow's single chapter on social conditions drew a much more vivid picture for me than "People of the Abyss" or "London Labour and the London Poor", perhaps because it was written by a contemporary who shared my expectations about how the world should work. The plight of the East End poor mirrored, to some degree, the plight of the city horses. They lived with their horizons closed in, amid the smoke and filth, having every last bit of value carefully extracted from them before they died. It was eye-opening to me to picture London as the Abyss, that sucked in healthy, happy creatures, and callously destroyed them. The Ripper just seemed a rather over the top manifestation of a general trend.

The other was the picture of Mary Kelly. The poor woman looked as though a bomb had gone off in her lap, but someone had actually done that to her intentionally, one deliberate cut at a time. And he'd done that while all around them people slept peacefully, oblivious, in their beds, the one place where, for a few hours each night, they might feel cozy and safe. And then there was Annie Chapman, killed in plain sight, in the backyard, beneath the bedroom windows of the lodgers in the house, quite possibly as the sun was coming up. That image, of the murderer at work right below someone's bedroom window, spooks me most of all, I think.

At any rate, here I am almost 40 years later, poking at stuff that still disturbs me in ways that I have trouble fully understanding myself.

[Pcdunn]

Hello, Ginger.

I well remember reading "Black Beauty" and learning about the lives of horses used as saddle, carriage, cab, and wagon horses in Vicorian England. I was another horse-crazy girl, and read anything about horses I could find.

It's very interesting the British societies to prevent cruelty to both children and animals began at about the same time in the Late Victorian Period.

[Rosella]

The Royal Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Animals actually began in 1824. It's the oldest animal welfare organisation in the world. The then Princess Victoria was asked to become its patron in the 1830's and, because she adored her spaniel Dash, she immediately agreed.

The National Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Children was set up in Liverpool in the late 1880's in imitation of one in New York. At about the same time the first laws against cruelty to children were passed in Parliament. Queen Victoria was the first patron but they didn't become the RSPCC because of the probability of muddle in the public's mind with the RSPCA.

[Mayerling]

When I was a teenager I went into the local branch of the Queens Public Library in Flushing, New York, and discovered that in the 300s of the Dewey Decimal System were books on crimes and on trials (legal results). One of these books was by a man named John Brophy called "The Meaning of Murder", which I read and reread several times. In it he touches on many cases of murder, especially Jack and also George Chapman. It was such a good book that thirty years later I bought a copy at a second hand book store and it is still in my crime library.

Jack himself was just one of many villains of the past, like Dr. William Palmer of Rugeley. But one day I found Tom Cullen's "Autumn of Terror" (in it's American title of "When London Walked in Terror", which I still think is a cool, better title - but one that would not have been original for Cullen). I read through it and was impressed by the complexity of the murders. At the same time I read a book by Irving Wallace, the novelist, called "The Sunday Gentleman" which had essays on many subjects but one in particular about the original for "Sherlock Holmes" - Dr. Joseph Bell. Wallace (whose scholarship has been attacked) claimed Bell and Dr. Henry Littlejohn were involved in the investigation of the Ripper murders, and both (WALLACE CLAIMED!!!) solved it or apparently solved it when on their own they came up with the same man (of course no name was given in the essay). The description of poor Mary Kelly's body always was rather vivid to me - and made me seriously consider studying up on thumbtacks which Wallace's description suggested held up parts of Mary on the wall (I said his scholarship was questioned). Anyway I decided to consider (when not pursuing other interest or my education or my career) further investigation into crime and the Ripper. Being a history major helped.

During the 1970s I discovered the reading room of the New York Public Library and began going through their card catalogs and reading up on crime, criminals, and the Ripper. This while writing a history honors thesis on the American Civil War. I started jotting down information. And I began accumulating Ripper books. The first two was the paperback of Cullen's book, still with the better but wrong title, and Donald Rumbelow's book. Unfortunately there would be one set-back there - Mr. Rumbelow included for the first time the photo of Mary Kelly's body. This turned me a bit reluctant from fully pursuing it, but I have since found that photo (or those photos) reappear almost everywhere in crime books and even television shows. I'm not thrilled about it - her photos are still the worst atrocity pictures of the 19th Century (possibly of all time*).

I began writing some of my findings (on peripheral matters I admit) in the late 1970s, but did not begin publishing any essays until I got to know Jonathan Goodman in the late 1980s. So it continues to this day - although my writing has been curtailed of late as far as essay writing occurs. Moreover most of my views seem inconsequential or out of date given some really smashing research I read on this board by many of you.

By the way GUT, apparently you were the person I referred to on another thread as having mentioned some connection to Druitt. Sorry I forgot it was you.

Jeff

*I could not resist this. Although for my religious reasons the Shoah and the photos of the death camps really make me furious, the second or tied photos of a murder victim (single) that would be the 20th Century worst, would be those of Elizabeth Short, the "Black Dahlia", especially those that show her body cut in half. While we will never know how long Mary's moments of horror (or her four or more fellow sufferers' moments of horror) were, I always think Elizabeth definitely had the worst for it - she was tortured if you recall by her killer, and he/she apparently cut her in half while she was still alive. Truly horrendous.

[GUT]

When I was a teenager I went into the local branch of the Queens Public Library in Flushing, New York, and discovered that in the 300s of the Dewey Decimal System were books on crimes and on trials (legal results). One of these books was by a man named John Brophy called "The Meaning of Murder", which I read and reread several times. In it he touches on many cases of murder, especially Jack and also George Chapman. It was such a good book that thirty years later I bought a copy at a second hand book store and it is still in my crime library.

Jack himself was just one of many villains of the past, like Dr. William Palmer of Rugeley. But one day I found Tom Cullen's "Autumn of Terror" (in it's American title of "When London Walked in Terror", which I still think is a cool, better title - but one that would not have been original for Cullen). I read through it and was impressed by the complexity of the murders. At the same time I read a book by Irving Wallace, the novelist, called "The Sunday Gentleman" which had essays on many subjects but one in particular about the original for "Sherlock Holmes" - Dr. Joseph Bell. Wallace (whose scholarship has been attacked) claimed Bell and Dr. Henry Littlejohn were involved in the investigation of the Ripper murders, and both (WALLACE CLAIMED!!!) solved it or apparently solved it when on their own they came up with the same man (of course no name was given in the essay). The description of poor Mary Kelly's body always was rather vivid to me - and made me seriously consider studying up on thumbtacks which Wallace's description suggested held up parts of Mary on the wall (I said his scholarship was questioned). Anyway I decided to consider (when not pursuing other interest or my education or my career) further investigation into crime and the Ripper. Being a history major helped.

During the 1970s I discovered the reading room of the New York Public Library and began going through their card catalogs and reading up on crime, criminals, and the Ripper. This while writing a history honors thesis on the American Civil War. I started jotting down information. And I began accumulating Ripper books. The first two was the paperback of Cullen's book, still with the better but wrong title, and Donald Rumbelow's book. Unfortunately there would be one set-back there - Mr. Rumbelow included for the first time the photo of Mary Kelly's body. This turned me a bit reluctant from fully pursuing it, but I have since found that photo (or those photos) reappear almost everywhere in crime books and even television shows. I'm not thrilled about it - her photos are still the worst atrocity pictures of the 19th Century (possibly of all time*).

I began writing some of my findings (on peripheral matters I admit) in the late 1970s, but did not begin publishing any essays until I got to know Jonathan Goodman in the late 1980s. So it continues to this day - although my writing has been curtailed of late as far as essay writing occurs. Moreover most of my views seem inconsequential or out of date given some really smashing research I read on this board by many of you.

By the way GUT, apparently you were the person I referred to on another thread as having mentioned some connection to Druitt. Sorry I forgot it was you.

Jeff

*I could not resist this. Although for my religious reasons the Shoah and the photos of the death camps really make me furious, the second or tied photos of a murder victim (single) that would be the 20th Century worst, would be those of Elizabeth Short, the "Black Dahlia", especially those that show her body cut in half. While we will never know how long Mary's moments of horror (or her four or more fellow sufferers' moments of horror) were, I always think Elizabeth definitely had the worst for it - she was tortured if you recall by her killer, and he/she apparently cut her in half while she was still alive. Truly horrendous.

i must have missed that one Jeff, my ancestors actually had a few connections to Montie's family.

some served at the same Church, some were baptised by thomas Druitt, my GG Gradfather lived on the site of Kings school,
where Thomas would later be head master, so a few connections there.

[Damaso Marte]

I was fascinated with unexplained things as a child. About 6th grade or so, when I was about 12 years old, I owned a book that had a title similar to "110 greatest mysteries of all time".

Jack the Ripper was #20 or so. I found it chilling and fascinating and did more research by renting videos at the local Blockbuster. They had Jack the Ripper related episodes of several "mysteries of the unexplained" type TV shows available to rent, as well as a few BBC specials. Within a few weeks I already had a favorite suspect (Druitt, whom I have long since abandoned, but who was certainly the suspect of my youth).

[Ginger]

Hello, Ginger.

I well remember reading "Black Beauty" and learning about the lives of horses used as saddle, carriage, cab, and wagon horses in Vicorian England. I was another horse-crazy girl, and read anything about horses I could find.

It's very interesting the British societies to prevent cruelty to both children and animals began at about the same time in the Late Victorian Period.

Oh, yes, I loved that book, even though it made me cry. I have an 1878 cab driver's free edition, too, which is one of my treasures. Have you seen the excellent 1994 live action film? IMHO, it's head and shoulders above the rest.



It is, indeed. I tend to attribute the rise of the anti-cruelty movement to the rising standard of living. Once people have their basic needs met, they can begin to contemplate how they'd wish the world to be, and what can they do to move things toward that state of affairs. It's no coincidence, I think, that public libraries, relief funds for the poor, and veritable hordes of missionaries at home and abroad, all began in the Victorian Age.



Have you ever read The Horse World of London? It goes into detail about the lives of horses in various sorts of work. It's well-written, and filled with lots of information about horsekeeping in the city, the cost of various types and conditions of horses, what roles horses play in various businesses, etc. The author never preaches, but is careful to speak here and there of things one might do unthinkingly that make the lives of horses harder. It makes a wonderful companion work to Black Beauty.

[Barnaby]

I too was fascinated by unsolved mysteries: Oak Island, Atlantis, Jack the Ripper, etc. Specifically, it was the centennial publicity, the Michael Cain movie, and also reading the Robert Bloch "Yours Truly" story that year that got me hooked.

[Pcdunn]

Ginger: Thank you so much for the link to Horse World of London at Project Gutenberg; it looks great as a fiction writer's reference, and I will look into getting a download.

I wonder if 2018 is likely to bring another round of JtR books and documentary films? It certainly seems as if some people have been getting a head start on it already.

[Rosella]

How many people, including several posters on this Forum, were converted to a lifetime of fascination with Jack after reading Cullen's 'Autumn of Terror/ When London walked in Terror'? I have a feeling it must be one of the most influential books ever written on the subject!