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There are two individuals I know of on this board who enjoy the subject of Egyptology. One is myself, and one is Steve. Frequently (in personal conversations) we end up dropping 1888 and concentrate on subjects regarding archeology and the ancient Egyptians. Now most of you will consider this unimportant, but sometimes when one reads something that is not involved in an immediate subject under discussion, you find it validates a point you dismissed earlier, or it casts a light on what you have been talking about but from a different angle.
[This, by the way, happened when I read a book a couple of years back about J. Bruce Ismay, and his behavior in the Titanic Disaster. It mentioned that the surviving senior officer of the liner, Charles Lightoller, when talking about Ismay's behavior that night, kept changing details and matter depending on his audiences. This - oddly enough - validated Jonathan's point concerning Sir Melville Macnaughten's similar habit of altering information regarding Montague Druitt over the years, depending on current situations and his audiences. In both cases the actions were to protect a target - Lightoller to protect Ismay and the White Star Line that Ismay had headed, and Macnaughten to protect the still hidden identity of the Druitt family from ostracism or ruin. But now back to Egyptology.]
I was reading Howard Carter's account of the opening of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922. The book is "The Discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamen" by Howard Carter and A.C. Mace (New York: Dover Publications, 1977, which is a republication of volume 1 of "The Tomb of Tut*Ankh*Amon* Discovered by the Late Earl of Carnarvon and Howard Carter (London: Cassell & Co, 1923, 1927, 1933). In chapter IX, Carter discusses the problems of publicity on the event, especially with the press and visitors. I first bring this interesting passage to your attention:
"Archeology under the limelight is a new and rather bewildering experience for most of us. In the past we have gone about our business happily enough, intensely interested in it ourselves, and not expecting other folk to be more than tepidly polite about it, and now all of a sudden we find the world takes an interest in us, an interest so intense and so avid for details that special correspondents at large salaries have to be sent to interview us, report our every movement, and hide round corners to surprise a secret out of us. It is, as I said, a little bewildering for us, not to say embarrassing, ad we wonder sometimes just exactly how and why it all came about. We may wonder, but I think it would puzzle anyone to give an exact answer to the question. One must suppose that at the time the discovery was made the general public was in a state of profound boredom with news of reparations, conferences, and mandates, and craved for some new topic of conversation. The idea of buried treasure, too, is one that appeals to most of us. Whatever the reasons, or combination of reasons, it is quite certain that once the initial Times dispatch had been published, no power on earth could shelter us from the light of publicity that beat down upon us. We were helpless and had to make the best of it.
In short, Carter is suggesting that due to a lack of really important news to keep the public's attention on regular matters or importance, and the sensational aspect connected to buried treasure, the opening and revealing of the contents of King Tut's tomb captured global attention in November 1922. Change that a bit, and think of blood-thirsty murders in the similarly dull autumn and early winter of 1888, and you have the world staring in horror (like people looking at a car wreck on a highway) in Whitechapel.
Timing is essential, in more ways than one - in 1888 what were the major, non-Whitechapel news stories of the day.
1) The Northeast U.S. was hit by a major blizzard (now recalled as "the Blizzard of '88), that buried most of the states from Maine down to Washington, D.C. in some of the deepest snow drifts in records of snow storms. It literally paralyzed the region for nearly two weeks.
2) The deaths (from March to June 1888) of two German Emperors in a row: the 91 year old Wilhelm I in March, and his son Friedrich III, who was crowned while fatally ill with throat cancer, who died in June 1888.
Those were the only events of importance in that year - outside of Whitechapel. And both were over by June 1888.
Yes there was the Parnell Commission, but it was still lumbering on at the time gathering information pro-and-con regarding Parnell's link to the Phoenix Park Assassinations of 1882 and similar bloody events in Ireland. It would not be until 1889 that the Commission's work came to a stunning upset when Richard Pigott was revealed to be the forger of the letters that started the investigation due to their publication in the Times.
There was still a war against the followers of the Mahdi in the Sudan, but it was falling into a period of routine warfare, with little worth discussing. It is not until 1898 that Omdurman is fought and the British avenge Gordon.
There was little worthy of note in the obituary columns. The dead that year included: Matthew Arnold, General Philip Sheridan (then Commander in Chief of the U.S. Army), former New York Senator Roscoe Conkling (from pneumonia due to exposure in a snow drift in the above mentioned "Blizzard of '88", Lord Lucan, the Cavalry General who was at Balaklava when the Charge of the Light Brigade occurred in 1854 (Lucan was in command of all the Cavalry in the Crimea), U.S. Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Morrison Waite - who died from overwork having taken upon himself the job of writing the longest opinion (a single volume by itself) the Court ever delivered on a case, involving the patent rivalry of Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray over the telephone), Theodore Fontane (German novelist), Louisa May Alcott and her father, "Transcendentalist" Bronson Alcott.
The crime scene was not much better. 1887 had ended with a mysterious death in France, of the sports reporter Duncan M'Neill. He was found drowned off a beach, and was probably murdered, but despite some cooperation between French and British police the chief suspect (a local man) was never arrested. But none of the murders of 1888, until Whitechapel, was particularly important except to the victims. The biggest case in London in 1888 was prior to Whitechapel, was that of Joseph Rumbold in Regent's Park, not because of the type of killing, but because Rumbold appears to have been targeted in a 19th Century "wilding" crime, and it revealed the existence of gangs throughout London - even in the nice neighborhoods.
There were no major ship disasters or coal mine disasters in 1888 either. This does not mean no disasters occurred, but it means that nothing on the scale of major tragedy occurred. The next major disaster is the 1889 Johnstown Flood.
Under these circumstances then, with a lack of really earth shattering news items, Whitechapel becomes THE news item of the year. It's a horrifying series of crime, with a killer who is not caught, and it reveals a less than pleasant series of truths about Victorian society - about the bottom of that society.
By the way, the most notable KNOWN murderer that year was the French killer Prado, who was executed in December 1888. His crimes (dating back to 1886) were against women, but he was clever enough (using his wits) in forcing the police to believe another person who did not exist was the killer. An interesting side-light to this was that among the people standing outside the French prison where they were beheading Prado was the painter Paul Gauguin, possibly wondering how that nutty roommate of his at Arles, Vincent Van Gogh was doing, as a month before Van Gogh injured himself cutting off his ear lobe in an act of self-mutilation violence against Gauguin for rejecting his friendship. It was the second most notable body mutilation event of November 1888, but it just didn't make the newspapers at the time.
Certainly like the other, far more complete mutilation event did.
If one keeps this in mind, one can see that Whitechapel got an historical uniqueness that was just as odd in considering criminal history as the circumstances making the opening of King Tut's tomb in 1922 did in archeological history. Again, apparently a matter of historical timing.
Jeff
[This, by the way, happened when I read a book a couple of years back about J. Bruce Ismay, and his behavior in the Titanic Disaster. It mentioned that the surviving senior officer of the liner, Charles Lightoller, when talking about Ismay's behavior that night, kept changing details and matter depending on his audiences. This - oddly enough - validated Jonathan's point concerning Sir Melville Macnaughten's similar habit of altering information regarding Montague Druitt over the years, depending on current situations and his audiences. In both cases the actions were to protect a target - Lightoller to protect Ismay and the White Star Line that Ismay had headed, and Macnaughten to protect the still hidden identity of the Druitt family from ostracism or ruin. But now back to Egyptology.]
I was reading Howard Carter's account of the opening of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922. The book is "The Discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamen" by Howard Carter and A.C. Mace (New York: Dover Publications, 1977, which is a republication of volume 1 of "The Tomb of Tut*Ankh*Amon* Discovered by the Late Earl of Carnarvon and Howard Carter (London: Cassell & Co, 1923, 1927, 1933). In chapter IX, Carter discusses the problems of publicity on the event, especially with the press and visitors. I first bring this interesting passage to your attention:
"Archeology under the limelight is a new and rather bewildering experience for most of us. In the past we have gone about our business happily enough, intensely interested in it ourselves, and not expecting other folk to be more than tepidly polite about it, and now all of a sudden we find the world takes an interest in us, an interest so intense and so avid for details that special correspondents at large salaries have to be sent to interview us, report our every movement, and hide round corners to surprise a secret out of us. It is, as I said, a little bewildering for us, not to say embarrassing, ad we wonder sometimes just exactly how and why it all came about. We may wonder, but I think it would puzzle anyone to give an exact answer to the question. One must suppose that at the time the discovery was made the general public was in a state of profound boredom with news of reparations, conferences, and mandates, and craved for some new topic of conversation. The idea of buried treasure, too, is one that appeals to most of us. Whatever the reasons, or combination of reasons, it is quite certain that once the initial Times dispatch had been published, no power on earth could shelter us from the light of publicity that beat down upon us. We were helpless and had to make the best of it.
In short, Carter is suggesting that due to a lack of really important news to keep the public's attention on regular matters or importance, and the sensational aspect connected to buried treasure, the opening and revealing of the contents of King Tut's tomb captured global attention in November 1922. Change that a bit, and think of blood-thirsty murders in the similarly dull autumn and early winter of 1888, and you have the world staring in horror (like people looking at a car wreck on a highway) in Whitechapel.
Timing is essential, in more ways than one - in 1888 what were the major, non-Whitechapel news stories of the day.
1) The Northeast U.S. was hit by a major blizzard (now recalled as "the Blizzard of '88), that buried most of the states from Maine down to Washington, D.C. in some of the deepest snow drifts in records of snow storms. It literally paralyzed the region for nearly two weeks.
2) The deaths (from March to June 1888) of two German Emperors in a row: the 91 year old Wilhelm I in March, and his son Friedrich III, who was crowned while fatally ill with throat cancer, who died in June 1888.
Those were the only events of importance in that year - outside of Whitechapel. And both were over by June 1888.
Yes there was the Parnell Commission, but it was still lumbering on at the time gathering information pro-and-con regarding Parnell's link to the Phoenix Park Assassinations of 1882 and similar bloody events in Ireland. It would not be until 1889 that the Commission's work came to a stunning upset when Richard Pigott was revealed to be the forger of the letters that started the investigation due to their publication in the Times.
There was still a war against the followers of the Mahdi in the Sudan, but it was falling into a period of routine warfare, with little worth discussing. It is not until 1898 that Omdurman is fought and the British avenge Gordon.
There was little worthy of note in the obituary columns. The dead that year included: Matthew Arnold, General Philip Sheridan (then Commander in Chief of the U.S. Army), former New York Senator Roscoe Conkling (from pneumonia due to exposure in a snow drift in the above mentioned "Blizzard of '88", Lord Lucan, the Cavalry General who was at Balaklava when the Charge of the Light Brigade occurred in 1854 (Lucan was in command of all the Cavalry in the Crimea), U.S. Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Morrison Waite - who died from overwork having taken upon himself the job of writing the longest opinion (a single volume by itself) the Court ever delivered on a case, involving the patent rivalry of Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray over the telephone), Theodore Fontane (German novelist), Louisa May Alcott and her father, "Transcendentalist" Bronson Alcott.
The crime scene was not much better. 1887 had ended with a mysterious death in France, of the sports reporter Duncan M'Neill. He was found drowned off a beach, and was probably murdered, but despite some cooperation between French and British police the chief suspect (a local man) was never arrested. But none of the murders of 1888, until Whitechapel, was particularly important except to the victims. The biggest case in London in 1888 was prior to Whitechapel, was that of Joseph Rumbold in Regent's Park, not because of the type of killing, but because Rumbold appears to have been targeted in a 19th Century "wilding" crime, and it revealed the existence of gangs throughout London - even in the nice neighborhoods.
There were no major ship disasters or coal mine disasters in 1888 either. This does not mean no disasters occurred, but it means that nothing on the scale of major tragedy occurred. The next major disaster is the 1889 Johnstown Flood.
Under these circumstances then, with a lack of really earth shattering news items, Whitechapel becomes THE news item of the year. It's a horrifying series of crime, with a killer who is not caught, and it reveals a less than pleasant series of truths about Victorian society - about the bottom of that society.
By the way, the most notable KNOWN murderer that year was the French killer Prado, who was executed in December 1888. His crimes (dating back to 1886) were against women, but he was clever enough (using his wits) in forcing the police to believe another person who did not exist was the killer. An interesting side-light to this was that among the people standing outside the French prison where they were beheading Prado was the painter Paul Gauguin, possibly wondering how that nutty roommate of his at Arles, Vincent Van Gogh was doing, as a month before Van Gogh injured himself cutting off his ear lobe in an act of self-mutilation violence against Gauguin for rejecting his friendship. It was the second most notable body mutilation event of November 1888, but it just didn't make the newspapers at the time.
Certainly like the other, far more complete mutilation event did.
If one keeps this in mind, one can see that Whitechapel got an historical uniqueness that was just as odd in considering criminal history as the circumstances making the opening of King Tut's tomb in 1922 did in archeological history. Again, apparently a matter of historical timing.
Jeff
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