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I think that Montie (which is how a member of the family spells his nickname) may have requested that the whole story come out for the sake of the truth, to salve his cosncience or because he believed that he was seriously ill and thus not entirely responsible for his actions.
This is the the theme of the Vicar's tale: the fiend was not a fiend at all, but a gentleman who was good but destroyed by a mental affliction over which he had no control.
Either the Vicar was told by a family member -- or he is a family member -- that he would bring ruin to them all and so a compromise was made. A compromise not accepted by 'The Daily Mail' which refused to publish his story, only publish a story complaining about not being able to publish it.
My own suspicion-theory is that this compromise, trying to 'keep everyone satisfied -- even the dead murderer -- was thought up by Macnaghten. After all, what the Vicar characterises as 'substantial truth under fictitious form' begins with Mac in the meagre extant record.
Using the same logic as those who advocate the Maybrick Diary as likely to be authentic because it is so dodgy, you would not construct a tale as convolucted and unsatisfying as the Vicar's if the whole thing was made up and/or the clergyman did not even exist.
In that sense Sims, three days later, tidies up the Vicar's dodgy tale as to what it should be in terms of meeting the narrative-dramatic needs:
Sims as Dagonet in 'The Referee' body slamming the Vicar's Ripper by rewriting it (January 22, 1899).
'There are bound to be various revelations concerning Jack the Ripper as the years go on. This time it is a vicar who heard his dying confession. I have no doubt a great many lunatics have said they were Jack the Ripper on their death-beds. It is a good exit, and when the dramatic instinct is strong in a man he always wants an exit line, especially when he isn't coming on in the little play of "Life" any more.
I don't want to interfere with this mild little Jack the Ripper boom which the newspapers are playing up in the absence of strawberries and butterflies and good exciting murders, but I don't quite see how the real Jack could have confessed, seeing that he committed suicide after the horrible mutilation of the woman in the house in Dorset-street, Spitalfields. The full details of that crime have never been published - they never could be. Jack, when he committed that crime, was in the last stage of the peculiar mania from which he suffered. He had become grotesque in his ideas as well as bloodthirsty. Almost immediately after this murder he drowned himself in the Thames. his name is perfectly well known to the police. If he hadn't committed suicide he would have been arrested.'
That's better!
The Vicar himself hears the confession.
Why is the fiend confessing at all? He's on his deathbed. He wants to receive some kind of churchy absolution as the grave and Judegment Day yawns before him.
That's much, much better.
And ... even better is the tale that Sims says is the real story.
The Real Jack killed himself in a fit of maniacal self-loathing after what he did to Mary Kelly.
Better and better!
What I can never get anybody to debate me on, ever, is that here we have two semi-fictional versions of Jack competing with each other. One is overtly a mixture of fact and fiction, the Vicar's, and the other is covertly a mixture of fact and fiction, Mac's via his cronies (eg. a surgeon's son into a surgeon; the family into 'friends').
That to me is too much of a coincidence to be about different Jacks.
And the covert version makes the police look a whole lot better.
Plus the covert Jack's persistent advocate, Sims, denounces the former's advocate, the Vicar, as false.
Why?
Because the real Jack, Sims claims, had no time to confess anything to anyone.
After what he had done to that poor woman's remains, Jack was incapable of such nornal and coherent behaviour.
According to Sims in 1907 the un-named 'Dr. Druitt', far from being able to sit down and have a heart-to-heart with a cleric, was 'raving' and 'shrieking' as he staggered to his watery grave (raving, shrieking, homicide, and suicide are all symptoms of what Victorians called 'epileptic mania', exactly the disease which the Vicar claims his Ripper suffered from).
What we know now is that the Ripper of Major Griffiths and George Sims, really Mac's Jack, is Montague Druitt a young barrister who had three weeks to confess whatever he liked to whom ever he liked, as he functioned outwardly, at least, until the final implosion which was carried out coolly and methodically.
Therefore, bizarrely, the Vicar's Ripper fits Druitt better, yet we know the 'drowned doctor' is definitely Druitt.
The reason Sims gives for why they cannot be the same man is not because the Vicar heard his confession (who told Sims that?) but because the timeline is wrong. Not only wrong -- ludicrous.
In 1907 Sims will write that the real Jack could not function for even 'a single day' after Miller's Ct.
In 1914, Macnaghten will extend the timeline of murder and self-murder by a day and a night (perhaps it was longer, he implies) which means the un-named Druitt could function to get away from the East End, and then be found to be 'absented' by 'his own people' (he could still square it with Sims by claiming he meant to write the 9th and not the 10th).
By 1914 Mac has arguably aligned his tale with the Vicar's more than Tatcho's.
At the inquest we are not sure what happened in terms of the details; whether there was two notes or one, or whether behind that there were any notes at all because a key witness, George Valentine, was not there.
What we do know is the cricket club sacked Montie because they thought he was overseas. In the one source which mentuons his dismissal from the school it is not linked to his suicide, and no other source bothers with this bit of data at all.
The cricket club would not fire somebody who might have gone and killed themselves if the notes had been found earlier to that date.
Once it was known that the man was in fact deceased, and tragically by his own hand, they added condolences to their next meeting's minutes.
We can theorise that nine days after the club sacked Montie, if the date is correct in that 1889 source, William Druitt arrived at the school -- where his brother had also been sacked for being AWOL -- because Will was worried about his supposedly o.s. brother and wanted to search his belongings (which were still at the school, strange if he had been sacked to his face). William claimed, a few days later at an official inquest, that he found a note addressed to him which alluded to suicide and their mother's madness as a deux ex machina, and this neatly shut down any further enquiries.
By 'no other relative' it can mean just the immediate members: father (deceased) mother (sectioned) William (present) and Montie (deceased). No other living relatives. Everybody had cousins, and this is how the Druitt names could be interpreted at the funeral. Big deal.
William was an experienced solicitor and he knew that the danger to his family at the Lamb Tap could be fixed and fixed quickly, and that he could play fast and loose with the facts as he saw fit (he had actually seen his brother since the 9th of Oct as they were in the High Court together celebrating their franchise victory on the 22nd of Nov). He could be confident that no local press hacks were going to turn in to Woodward and Bernstein about such an unfortunate tragedy about a minor figure of the establishment -- and they didn't.
This is the the theme of the Vicar's tale: the fiend was not a fiend at all, but a gentleman who was good but destroyed by a mental affliction over which he had no control.
Either the Vicar was told by a family member -- or he is a family member -- that he would bring ruin to them all and so a compromise was made. A compromise not accepted by 'The Daily Mail' which refused to publish his story, only publish a story complaining about not being able to publish it.
My own suspicion-theory is that this compromise, trying to 'keep everyone satisfied -- even the dead murderer -- was thought up by Macnaghten. After all, what the Vicar characterises as 'substantial truth under fictitious form' begins with Mac in the meagre extant record.
Using the same logic as those who advocate the Maybrick Diary as likely to be authentic because it is so dodgy, you would not construct a tale as convolucted and unsatisfying as the Vicar's if the whole thing was made up and/or the clergyman did not even exist.
In that sense Sims, three days later, tidies up the Vicar's dodgy tale as to what it should be in terms of meeting the narrative-dramatic needs:
Sims as Dagonet in 'The Referee' body slamming the Vicar's Ripper by rewriting it (January 22, 1899).
'There are bound to be various revelations concerning Jack the Ripper as the years go on. This time it is a vicar who heard his dying confession. I have no doubt a great many lunatics have said they were Jack the Ripper on their death-beds. It is a good exit, and when the dramatic instinct is strong in a man he always wants an exit line, especially when he isn't coming on in the little play of "Life" any more.
I don't want to interfere with this mild little Jack the Ripper boom which the newspapers are playing up in the absence of strawberries and butterflies and good exciting murders, but I don't quite see how the real Jack could have confessed, seeing that he committed suicide after the horrible mutilation of the woman in the house in Dorset-street, Spitalfields. The full details of that crime have never been published - they never could be. Jack, when he committed that crime, was in the last stage of the peculiar mania from which he suffered. He had become grotesque in his ideas as well as bloodthirsty. Almost immediately after this murder he drowned himself in the Thames. his name is perfectly well known to the police. If he hadn't committed suicide he would have been arrested.'
That's better!
The Vicar himself hears the confession.
Why is the fiend confessing at all? He's on his deathbed. He wants to receive some kind of churchy absolution as the grave and Judegment Day yawns before him.
That's much, much better.
And ... even better is the tale that Sims says is the real story.
The Real Jack killed himself in a fit of maniacal self-loathing after what he did to Mary Kelly.
Better and better!
What I can never get anybody to debate me on, ever, is that here we have two semi-fictional versions of Jack competing with each other. One is overtly a mixture of fact and fiction, the Vicar's, and the other is covertly a mixture of fact and fiction, Mac's via his cronies (eg. a surgeon's son into a surgeon; the family into 'friends').
That to me is too much of a coincidence to be about different Jacks.
And the covert version makes the police look a whole lot better.
Plus the covert Jack's persistent advocate, Sims, denounces the former's advocate, the Vicar, as false.
Why?
Because the real Jack, Sims claims, had no time to confess anything to anyone.
After what he had done to that poor woman's remains, Jack was incapable of such nornal and coherent behaviour.
According to Sims in 1907 the un-named 'Dr. Druitt', far from being able to sit down and have a heart-to-heart with a cleric, was 'raving' and 'shrieking' as he staggered to his watery grave (raving, shrieking, homicide, and suicide are all symptoms of what Victorians called 'epileptic mania', exactly the disease which the Vicar claims his Ripper suffered from).
What we know now is that the Ripper of Major Griffiths and George Sims, really Mac's Jack, is Montague Druitt a young barrister who had three weeks to confess whatever he liked to whom ever he liked, as he functioned outwardly, at least, until the final implosion which was carried out coolly and methodically.
Therefore, bizarrely, the Vicar's Ripper fits Druitt better, yet we know the 'drowned doctor' is definitely Druitt.
The reason Sims gives for why they cannot be the same man is not because the Vicar heard his confession (who told Sims that?) but because the timeline is wrong. Not only wrong -- ludicrous.
In 1907 Sims will write that the real Jack could not function for even 'a single day' after Miller's Ct.
In 1914, Macnaghten will extend the timeline of murder and self-murder by a day and a night (perhaps it was longer, he implies) which means the un-named Druitt could function to get away from the East End, and then be found to be 'absented' by 'his own people' (he could still square it with Sims by claiming he meant to write the 9th and not the 10th).
By 1914 Mac has arguably aligned his tale with the Vicar's more than Tatcho's.
At the inquest we are not sure what happened in terms of the details; whether there was two notes or one, or whether behind that there were any notes at all because a key witness, George Valentine, was not there.
What we do know is the cricket club sacked Montie because they thought he was overseas. In the one source which mentuons his dismissal from the school it is not linked to his suicide, and no other source bothers with this bit of data at all.
The cricket club would not fire somebody who might have gone and killed themselves if the notes had been found earlier to that date.
Once it was known that the man was in fact deceased, and tragically by his own hand, they added condolences to their next meeting's minutes.
We can theorise that nine days after the club sacked Montie, if the date is correct in that 1889 source, William Druitt arrived at the school -- where his brother had also been sacked for being AWOL -- because Will was worried about his supposedly o.s. brother and wanted to search his belongings (which were still at the school, strange if he had been sacked to his face). William claimed, a few days later at an official inquest, that he found a note addressed to him which alluded to suicide and their mother's madness as a deux ex machina, and this neatly shut down any further enquiries.
By 'no other relative' it can mean just the immediate members: father (deceased) mother (sectioned) William (present) and Montie (deceased). No other living relatives. Everybody had cousins, and this is how the Druitt names could be interpreted at the funeral. Big deal.
William was an experienced solicitor and he knew that the danger to his family at the Lamb Tap could be fixed and fixed quickly, and that he could play fast and loose with the facts as he saw fit (he had actually seen his brother since the 9th of Oct as they were in the High Court together celebrating their franchise victory on the 22nd of Nov). He could be confident that no local press hacks were going to turn in to Woodward and Bernstein about such an unfortunate tragedy about a minor figure of the establishment -- and they didn't.
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