I dissect the ‘Dear Boss’ letter.

[Richard Patterson]

Hi,

Well you have certainly thought things through.

When you say that Thompsn was looking for his lost love, what do you think he intended when he found her?

Thanks, but not much to think through. Having a timeline of the Ripper crimes and Thompson together made it easier. I think his intentions, once he found her, was to make sure she would not leave a second time. (Though I very much doubt she was in a condition to be found in one piece)

[lynn cates]

crossing every t

Hello Mr B. Also, the left sample has t's crossed near dead centre; right sample, badly skewed right.

Cheers.
LC

[Hatchett]

Hi,

I think that there is a danger of reading too much into this. Thousands of people would have read Shakespeare and Dickens. Dickens was an unprecendented popular writer, and as for Shakespeare .... all those millions who attended the plays, let alone acted in them.

[Richard Patterson]

Hi,

I think that there is a danger of reading too much into this. Thousands of people would have read Shakespeare and Dickens. Dickens was an unprecendented popular writer, and as for Shakespeare .... all those millions who attended the plays, let alone acted in them.

Hi Hatchet.

I’m afraid I can do nothing else apart from read too much into this. Having been told that the contents of the, ‘Dear Boss’, letter with its underlined, Ha Ha suggested that the subject was someone with a liking for Dickens and Shakespeare. As you know, I explained here how Thompson fell in love with the daughter of Dickens’ very close friend and who herself was close to Dickens. I have shown that Thompson did not just like Shakespeare, he was obsessed with him. Up to the point of failing in love with just drawings of women from his plays. Not figuratively in love but actually in love. So strong was his fixation that he could not sustain a real relationship with a woman. This was apart from the yearlong affair with the prostitute who, to use the kindest possible term, ‘disappeared’. I’m still told that thousands of people read Dickens’ and Shakespeare. Even though I know only a handful of people who could qualify to be so obsessed simultaneously with both writers and certainly no other Ripper suspect. Now here’s funny thing. When I showed in post #12 of this thread the letter Thompson wrote to his future publisher with his submission of poems and an essay. I gave a shortened version. (you may have noticed I used ellipses ….) this was because I deliberately omitted parts. Why? Because its references to Shakespeare were so obscure hardly anybody on Casebook would have understood it. In fact even a literary student on Shakespeare would be lost on its meaning. Not Thompson though and he knew, not the publisher he wrote to. Here is the full letter with the Thompson’s Shakespearean reference retained:

‘Feb. 23rd, ‘1888—Dear Sir,—In enclosing the accom*panying article for your inspection I must ask pardon for the soiled state of the manuscript. It is due, not to sloven*liness, but to the strange places and circumstances under which it has been written. For me, no less than Parolles, the dirty nurse experience has something fouled. I enclose stamped envelope for a reply, since I do not desire the return of the manuscript, regarding your judgement of its worthlessness as quite final. I can hardly expect that where my prose fails my verse will succeed. Nevertheless, on the principle of’ Yet will I try the last,’ I have added a few specimens of it, with the off chance that one may be less poor than the rest. Apologising very sincerely for any intrusion on your valuable time, I remain yours with little hope, FRANCIS THOMPSON. Kindly address your rejection to the Charing Cross Post Office.'

Thompson tried to cover up his faults by depicting himself as Parrolles. This is a character from Shakespeare’s, ‘All's Well That Ends Well’. He was a coward, a liar and a braggart. He is exposed and shamed as someone who pretends to be a great soldier. Not only Thompson’s future career, but being destitute on the streets, as far as he was concerned, his life was on the line with this letter. When his publisher shelved it, Thompson tried to kill himself with an overdose. Thompson had followed Meynell’s journalistic career for years, as well as his wife, a family friend of Dickens. This was arguably most important letter in Thompsons’ life. It references Shakespeare and it seems so did the ‘Dear Boss’ letter, the most important letter of the Ripper investigation. As Thompson wrote to Meynell using Shakespeare I suggest that Meynell, with the ‘Dear Boss’ letter wrote to Thompson. The ‘Dear Boss’ message held the double reference to Thompson’s ‘Nightmare of the Witch Babies’ poem and to Shakespeare

Finally, returning to Assistant Commissioner Anderson. Consider all that we now know of Thompson, the homeless ex-student-doctor with his dissecting knife wandering the streets of London seeking out a prostitute and Wilfrid Meynell, the journalist who ‘rescued’ Thompson. It is not much of stretch to suppose Anderson was not talking about 1 person but 2 when he wrote,

‘I am almost tempted to disclose the identity of the murderer [Thompson] and the pressman [Meynell] who wrote the letter.'

Respectfully,

[MayBea]

Could his lost love be Mary Jane Kelly and could she be from Lancashire too? We've been looking at candidates from Liverpool.

[Richard Patterson]

Could his lost love be Mary Jane Kelly and could she be from Lancashire too? We've been looking at candidates from Liverpool.

Kelly was perhaps not Thompson’s lost love, but she might have been his friend. Thompson told that his lost love lodged in Chelsea and I have some reason to believe that the woman was a prostitute named Elizabeth Jackson. Her whose body was found floating in the Thames on June 4 1888. This information is gained from the English writer Robert Thurston Hopkins (1884-1958), and his 1935 book, “Life and Death at the Old Bailey,” Here Hopkins introduced a relatively early account of the Ripper murders. It introduced an unknown suspect, who he dubbed, Moring,’ an opium-addicted poet who was friends with Mary Kelly. Here is some of what Hopkins wrote.

‘...Obviously, too, the cunning of Jack the Ripper was needed at this time to " get away with " such a crime. No mere amateur could have escaped arrest with the whole police intelligence of the metropolis concentrated on this type of murder…One small point in the case of Elizabeth Jackson suggests that the murderer may have been a member of the medical profession. One of the last portions of the body which turned up was enveloped in a piece of medicated gauze similar to that used by students engaged on surgical cases...One of Mary Kelly's friends was a poor devil-driven poet who often haunted the taverns around the East End. I will call him " Mr. Moring," but of course that was not his real name. Moring would often walk about all night and I had many long talks with him as together we paced the gloomy courts and alleys…He had black, lank hair and moustache, and the long, dark face of the typical bard…. Moring, who knew every opium den in the East End, although at that time they were not counted in with the sights of London, often gave himself up to long spells of opium smoking. "Alcohol for fools; opium for poets, was a phrase which recurred constantly in his talk. "To-morrow one dies," was his motto, and he would sometimes add " and who cares-will it stop the traffic on London Bridge?" After reading the above statement [George Hutchinson’s inquest testimony for Kelly.] I looked back on my memories of the wandering poet and curiously enough that description fitted him down to the ground! But I could not connect a man of such extraordinary gentleness committing such a dreadful series of outrages...."

Hopkins remarked that his poet dressed the same as the man seen by George Hutchinson outside Miller’s court with Mary Kelly on the night of her murder. Hutchinson said ‘The man was about thirty-five years of age, five feet six inches high, of a dark complexion, with a dark moustache. He wore a long, black coat with astrakhan collar, spats with pearl buttons over button boots." Thompson was about five foot seven inches, he was aged 29, and many portraits have him with a moustache. Thompson’s hair was so dark as to appear as jet black at first. It was in the very weeks before the last murder that Thompson who had destitute and almost penniless was given a sum of money, enough to buy a suit, for an Essay published in the November 1888 edition of a Catholic literary magazine. In this essay, published on the eve of the murder of Mary Kelly, Thompson couldn’t help himself remarking,

'He had better seek some critic who will lay his subject on the table, nick out every muscle of expression with light, cool, fastidious scalpel and then call on him to admire the "neat dissection"'

[Pcdunn]

Very interesting concept.
Are you a scholar of English Literature, Mr. Patterson? I suspect as much.

Thompson wasn't "dumbing down" his writing by writing in dialect. It was common in humorous writing, with many authors (including Charles Dickens, "Bret Harte", and Mark Twain) using it to great effect in suggesting a particular "character" as the speaker.

Indeed, Mr. Thompson strikes me as a very witty fellow, particularly when he tells his editor where he can "send your rejection." A very humorous comment from a struggling author, recognizable by modern members of the clan.

Still, your novel sounds fascinating, and I would check it out.

[SirJohnFalstaff]

The police, investigating the Whitechapel murders, believed the ‘Dear Boss’ letter was genuine.

Everything I read so far points in the contrary.

[Ausgirl]

But who would know that news agencies even existed apart from a journalist.

An aspiring journalist? From the OP:

---

Thompson, having studied for six years to become respected surgeon, was a failed doctor who was now reduced to wearing rags. He endured three London winters, largely sleeping on the pavement before being ‘discovered’, at the end of 1888, as a journalist.

---

I actually find this all very interesting. Don't see much use insta-pooh-poohing any theory that's at least plausible, until it becomes patently IMplausible.

I'm not sure why it's become fashionable to cry "SOLVED!" with undisguised sarcasm every time somebody "dares" to raise a new suspect. Some are for sure ridiculous (thinking of a certain Dutchman, there..). Some are not so much, and I find the exploration of these interesting historical reading, if nothing else.

Thompson is certainly as good a suspect as the much-discussed Druitt. Or I think so, at this juncture.

I must point out though, I agree that the t's in the Jack letter are both consistent throughout that text AND distinctly different to those in Thompson's writing example. At the moment, I am seeing the letter as poor evidence for the argument.

The rest is interesting, though.

[pinkmoon]

An aspiring journalist? From the OP:

---

Thompson, having studied for six years to become respected surgeon, was a failed doctor who was now reduced to wearing rags. He endured three London winters, largely sleeping on the pavement before being ‘discovered’, at the end of 1888, as a journalist.

---

I actually find this all very interesting. Don't see much use insta-pooh-poohing any theory that's at least plausible, until it becomes patently IMplausible.

I'm not sure why it's become fashionable to cry "SOLVED!" with undisguised sarcasm every time somebody "dares" to raise a new suspect. Some are for sure ridiculous (thinking of a certain Dutchman, there..). Some are not so much, and I find the exploration of these interesting historical reading, if nothing else.

Thompson is certainly as good a suspect as the much-discussed Druitt. Or I think so, at this juncture.

I must point out though, I agree that the t's in the Jack letter are both consistent throughout that text AND distinctly different to those in Thompson's writing example. At the moment, I am seeing the letter as poor evidence for the argument.

The rest is interesting, though.

Sorry for the sarcasm but still recovering from the shawl fiasco where we had SOLVED! thrown at us.Why didn't our killer make sure there was no doubt that this letter was genuine .

[Trevor Marriott]

Sorry for the sarcasm but still recovering from the shawl fiasco where we had SOLVED! thrown at us.Why didn't our killer make sure there was no doubt that this letter was genuine .

Exactly many way he could have done that !

"Jack the Ripper-The Secret Police Files"

http://amzn.to/1tMEImh

[pinkmoon]

Why not send an ear or a finger or a piece of clothing it wouldn't be that hard to do that letter would have much more impact then one that left doubt if it was genuine.

[GUT]

Why not send an ear or a finger or a piece of clothing it wouldn't be that hard to do that letter would have much more impact then one that left doubt if it was genuine.

Except that with "From Hell" a kidne was sent and we stll debate it's origin.

[pinkmoon]

Except that with "From Hell" a kidne was sent and we stll debate it's origin.

Yes a kidney was sent and there is more chance of this been genuine but why not include a piece of the apron with it and leave no doubt .

[Richard Patterson]

Everything I read so far points in the contrary.

Then you must not have read that the Metropolitan Police placed handbills with facsimiles of it all over the East End. In the belief that someone would recognize the handwriting and be able to provide information that would lead to an arrest.