Can anagrams ever be used as evidence?

[Bridewell]

Long Anagrams

And they're not just 12 letters long, but, as I wrote in the thread message, included whole sentences and even paragraphs.

Hi R. Wallace,

The greater the number of letters, the larger the number of anagram possibilities. Give me the number of a Shakespeare sonnet (your choice which one) and I pretty much guarantee I'll be able to come up with a Ripper anagram from the first two lines.

Regards, Bridewell.

[Bridewell]

The Only Author

I think I'm the only author on the subject of JTR to make myself available to the Casebook blog

You're wrong about that, I'm afraid.

Regards, Bridewell.

[johns]

In reply to the original post... No

[R Wallace]

To Sally,

I appreciate your straightforward comments. Re his diaries: Although I agree that diary entries are not always written on the date referenced or could be intentionally deceptive I chose to accept them as they were so it would not appear that I was being selectively manipulative to make my case. Likewise I did not speculate as many have about the few excised pages from the diaries and what they contained. I did read the hand-written diaries at the British Library in addition to the published version, did find a few things of interest.

Re the access to London from Oxford or Eastbourne to London: The only point I ever made is that he had access to London on the dates of the murders, found nothing to prove that he was there, also did not find an alibi. If diary entries placed him in Plymouth, for example, he would have had an alibi, but not if in Oxford or Eastbourne or if an entry had him doing some activity at night. It 's worth noting that my case only made him a suspect. In JTR I rendered my opinion that I thought he did the crimes but know I did not prove the case beyond doubt and said so. Bloggers should not assume that the "evidence" in the thread means a rock solid court case but rather evidence to support suspicion. A circumstantial case is pretty much all interpretation and coincidence.

Re looking into his life: It surprises me that bloggers would render their opinions about something they have no acquired knowledge about. Perhaps that's something that anonymous tags encourages. Pretty much the only controversy in the various biographies is the pedophilia issue. I think the most recent interpretive biography is Karoline Leach's "Dreamchild," which I had difficulty getting through. My recollection of it is that she's trying to dismiss the pedophilia charge. Morton Cohen has the most complete biography, but I think he changed his opinions somewhat later on, especially about the pedophilia issue.

Good reading! I look forward to hearing from you when you've gotten through them.

Regards,

R Wallace

[Sally]

Hi R.Wallace

The issue of the anagrams is critical to my books and my having LC as a suspect. That's why I opened the thread, to get at the crux of the matter. Is anyone likely to place him at the murders? No. Is anyone going to come up with motive from all that's been written about him? No. Bloggers and others critical of my book JTR don't even seem able to accept the concept that LC had ready access to London by train whether from Oxford or Eastbourne, don't know that he was in London regularly, and believe that since his diary places him at Oxford or Eastbourrne he could not have been in London on the same day.

Fair enough. I expect you're right, not many know that - I didn't - but then, most people haven't made it their business to look into LC's life, so that should probably be expected. Even so, none of those factors incriminate him - as they would not incriminate anybody else, either. A lot of people could and did visit London regularly. A diary can be misleading - in that it purports to be written on a strictly contemporary basis and may not be - but unless there is independent evidence which suggests that this so in the case of LC, all you have is conjecture based upon your belief that he was a guilty man.

And, there seem to be very few bloggers who have read my case or even the better published works on his life.

Perhaps that is true. I haven't read your case. Now I will, which will put me in a better position to comment upon your discovery and analysis of his alleged anagrams.

The other possible reality is that blogger attitudes toward the anagrams prevents acceptance of anything I've included in the books or the blogs as being the product of fairly extensive research. So, we'll see how it goes.

I think that the presence of anagrams is intrinsically unlikely, for reasons which I've already given here. That doesn't mean that it cannot happen. I will let you know what I think once I've read your case.

[Robert]

For a dyslexic, there aren't even the anagrams.

[Phil H]

LC is not a suspect at all without the anagrams

There you have it in a nutshell!!!!

Phil H

[R Wallace]

To Raven Darkendale

I appreciate your comments and concerns re the new thread. At the moment I don't think I'll close it (don't even know how to). Without the anagrams I never would have written the first book AOLC and certainly not the second JTR. For me, LC is not a suspect at all without the anagrams, whose content contributed significantly to the profile.

So, the issue for me becomes, not dropping the thread, but withdrawing from the blog. In the past several weeks I've read portions of the blogs on other suspects and find precious little relevant or constructive commentary and too much invective (for lack of a better word). It suggests to me that there's a lot of people with time to waste or who have made a hobby for themselves, or both. Or, for whatever reasons, the Casebook blogs fills some need in their lives.

The issue of the anagrams is critical to my books and my having LC as a suspect. That's why I opened the thread, to get at the crux of the matter. Is anyone likely to place him at the murders? No. Is anyone going to come up with motive from all that's been written about him? No. Bloggers and others critical of my book JTR don't even seem able to accept the concept that LC had ready access to London by train whether from Oxford or Eastbourne, don't know that he was in London regularly, and believe that since his diary places him at Oxford or Eastbourrne he could not have been in London on the same day. And, there seem to be very few bloggers who have read my case or even the better published works on his life.

The other possible reality is that blogger attitudes toward the anagrams prevents acceptance of anything I've included in the books or the blogs as being the product of fairly extensive research. So, we'll see how it goes.

Regards,

R Wallace

[RavenDarkendale]

@ R Wallace

You know I respect your research and find your PROFILE of Lewis Carroll very interesting. But I said then that the anagrams were a long shot. Why expose yourself to this type of negative reaction? You believe in your anagrams. Stick to that. But posting this new thread is going to have little positive reaction. I say this for your own good and because I respect you. Drop this thread entirely. People cannot see the anagrams you found as anything other than you rearranging letters until you find something that fits your feelings about the secret life of LC. I would rather not see you take these hits, it isn't worth it.

And to the rest of you that have posted here, remember Mr. Wallace is very sincere in his belief in the anagram evidence. It is possible to disagree without personal remarks. Let it go, it's not worth it.

God Bless

Raven Darkendale

[R Wallace]

To Phil H

Quoting from your posts:

Post 11: A theory based on such a method will never convince me and I regard its aherents [sic] with about as much respect as I would someone who builds a model of the Victorian London sewer system out of matchsticks.

One can admire the effort and application, but what a waste of time, frankly.

Post 12: Since you are clearly not interested in any views contrary to your own, why pose the question?

My response: Since you've made yourself clear that you will never be convinced, find it all a waste of time and disdain anyone who might agree with me I assumed you would not continue to blog on the thread. In Post 12 you may be projecting your own intolerance of alternative views onto me. Does it surprise you that as the author I'm here to defend my position and perhaps gain adherents? But I'm also here to listen. I think I'm the only author on the subject of JTR to make myself available to the Casebook blog, ready to deal with the slings and arrows. Lastly, have you read the books?

R Wallace

[Phil H]

Since you are clearly not interested in any views contrary to your own, why pose the question?

Phil H

[R Wallace]

To Bridewell

I probably should have used "occurrence" rather than "coincidence." But the issue is whether they are coincidental or if the number of them suggests design. The two books, which took a year each to research and write (more than full time but not quite 24/7), lay them out in a mostly organized way running from childhood to old age. And they're not just 12 letters long, but, as I wrote in the thread message, included whole sentences and even paragraphs, selected as suspect by clues I believe he left pointing to them. Of course, I'm the one who "discovered" the clues; but following them led to most of the anagrams, especially the most revealing. Eventually I found the meaning for there being an Index in Sylvie and Bruno, which helped me find suspect text. But I made no effort to solve them all.

At times I'd like to but can't and won't try to republish the books in the blog. I suspect you haven't read the books. And while bloggers are certainly entitled to blog without doing so, their posts and the blog in general will suffer. I'd much rather see blogs from readers who take issue with the analysis of how I got to the anagrams, etc., and the biographical or psycho-biographical points raised which supported the content of the anagrams. Only the first one "came out of the blue." Then patterns emerged; sometimes the theme of the anagram was from an entire written sentence – one particularly from Sylvie and Bruno; "I was a terror from all my incestuous family genes," which answered to the text and to the events of his origin.

This is a long answer to a short question. Of course they COULD be just coincidental but the totality of the books suggests or proves, depending on your view, that they were not. I think the Casebook expects bloggers to be quite aware of the written works which make the case before blogging. To blog Cornwall's case against Sickert and the arguments against begs the question of what the blog entry is all about. I appreciate Casebook putting Carroll on the list for discussion, without regard as to whether or not they like the case I made.

Regards,

R Wallace

[Bridewell]

The Coincidence of Anagrams

Dear R. Wallace,

If the argument for Lewis Carroll as the Whitechapel Murderer is based on "a whole array of anagrams" it's unlikely to find favour on Casebook. Have you thought that the 'coincidence of anagrams' to which you refer may be exactly that?

To address the question posed in the thread:

Can anagrams ever be used as evidence? In this context - no, not in my opinion anyway.

Regards, Bridewell.

[R Wallace]

To Sally

I agree with you re the mystery novel, but in that genre the solution of cryptic messages IS the story. Lewis Carroll did not write in that genre so that's not what I'm talking about.

My theory does stretch credulity and is highly implausible. That's exactly the point. But my argument is that we are dealing with a genius in words and a sociopath. Such a writer would not bury anti social things in his works to be discovered, but to be able to serve his extreme narcissism by entertaining himself (and perhaps a few insiders) and getting away with it FOREVER. ("Bluff a rough, sordid, heathen world and cheat death" is the anagram from a message found under the floor boards in the family home; the original poem is an interesting construct.) The laugh is on the world. His attitude would be that NO ONE would ever accuse him, an Oxford don, a churchman, and a beloved nonsense writer, of such content in his works so he'd get away with it. He would forever have deniability if he were caught when alive – the very argument you give – or faithful readers of his works who would provide deniability in the future. He could always claim that the dirty thought is in you, not me. So, we're not talking about a normal person doing this and can't assume there was a normal mental process going on. Why such a surprise when no one considers him a "normal" man? How many sociopaths get away with their crimes forever because getting away with it is their goal? Yes some prefer the adulation of the world with or without clues left behind, but more often those that are caught switch from getting away with it to adulation by the public.

I'm going to infer that you haven't read my books to see the whole array of reasoning, biography, and coincidence of anagrams and would guess that you're not inclined to read them. Hopefully I'll succeed in making you less comfortable with your position and explore it further.

As to creating (you claim to not have left any to solve) anagrams from your post, it's not as easy as it sounds if a requirement is that the anagram be coherent. I won't take up your invitation to try as at my age I don't have either the motive or mental agility. Many people who love to work with anagrams find things like names that work; most don't work, and they never keep or publish them; very frustrating to work and find nothing. There are some samples in the books, especially AOLC. As I indicated in my message for this thread, Carroll left clues that they were present (I believe), which made it much easier once one knew details of his biography that left him in, not anger, but rage. Of course, much of that is interpretive, too, as psychobiography usually is, because he never seemed to have complained or talked about it in the clear, at least. Ah, what a tangled web!

I don't see myself as a sociopath but I tend to be an iconoclast; they, too are often not loved.

Regards,

R Wallace

PS Did you know that Carroll's Sylvie and Bruno books have an Index (much of which points to anagrams)? Why was he breaking new ground by indexing a novel? It's just like a Victorian book written in the clear as pornography; it, too, had an index which ... (you fill in the rest).

[R Wallace]

I'm going to guess that by the tone of your rejection of the notion of anagrams that you won't be posting much on this thread. Perhaps you can clarify whether you've ever read the books cited in the thread message.

Regards,

R Wallace