Tweet
Carl Feigenbaum vs Francis Thompson: A Question of Reach, Motive, and Method
Carl Feigenbaum vs Francis Thompson: A Question of Reach, Motive, and Method
Carl Feigenbaum is less a suspect than a symptom — proof of how far the Ripper debate has strayed from its own evidence in search of safety. When modern writers reach for Feigenbaum, they’re reaching for the foreigner’s shadow: the itinerant killer, monstrous and anonymous, who can be blamed without reflection. But once the detail is unpacked, Feigenbaum collapses into what he always was — an American afterthought pressed into an English puzzle he never fit.
Feigenbaum’s story begins on the other side of the Atlantic. He was a German sailor convicted of murdering his landlady in New York in 1894 — a full six years after the Ripper murders ended. His own lawyer, William Sanford Lawton, later claimed that Feigenbaum had “confessed” to a lifelong mania for killing women and could have been Jack the Ripper. That claim, made conveniently after Feigenbaum’s execution, is the foundation for every link that followed. There are no shipping records placing Feigenbaum in London in 1888, no evidence of him having ever set foot in Whitechapel, and not a single contemporary mention connecting him to the case until Lawton’s retrospective tale. The argument survives on hearsay and distance — and on the comforting notion that the killer must have been an outsider.
The appeal is psychological. Feigenbaum offers an easy narrative: a traveling foreigner, likely deranged, who drifts through ports and leaves horror behind. It suits the late-Victorian hunger for moral separation — the idea that no English gentleman, scholar, or poet could have sunk to that level. The fact that Feigenbaum murdered with a knife helps the illusion along, but his crime against his landlady was domestic, impulsive, and clumsy. The Ripper killings were methodical, escalating, and bound to symbolic pattern. The two temperaments are miles apart. Feigenbaum killed the woman he lived beside; the Ripper stalked strangers with ritual purpose.
Even geography betrays the myth. No trace of Feigenbaum appears in the East End’s dense web of sailors, dockers, and lodging-house registries. Whitechapel was catalogued to exhaustion by the police and press. If a German seaman matching his name or description had been found in proximity to the murders, it would have surfaced. It didn’t — because he wasn’t there. The only evidence of his “presence” is posthumous imagination.
When you weigh him beside Francis Thompson, the contrast becomes uncomfortable. Thompson was there — living rough in Whitechapel through the very months of the murders, equipped with surgical skill, carrying dissecting knives, mentally unstable, sexually conflicted, and steeped in religious visions of purification through blood. Every line of the contemporary medical evidence, from Dr. Phillips’s comment on “great anatomical knowledge” to Sir Henry Smith’s description of the killer’s precise control, leads toward a trained hand with obsessive intent. Feigenbaum was a sailor who butchered a woman once. Thompson was a lapsed medical student who wrote obsessively of sacrificing “women of scarlet” upon an altar of divine fire.
The deeper irony is that Feigenbaum’s candidature survived because it threatened no one. He was safely foreign, already dead, and irrelevant to the reputations of Victorian London’s moral institutions. Thompson, by contrast, exposes a wound. He was a man of letters, a mystic celebrated by Chesterton and Hopkins, who walked the same streets as his victims. To accept him as the Ripper is to admit that civilization itself may wear the killer’s mask. Feigenbaum allows the guilt to stay offshore.
What remains, then, is motive and method — the twin tests any serious case must face. Feigenbaum’s motive was a vague “blood-lust” offered second-hand. Thompson’s was written in his own verse and prose: women as vessels of sin, blood as cleansing, death as atonement. Feigenbaum’s method was a single domestic stabbing. Thompson’s mirrors the surgical eviscerations of the Whitechapel victims. The former’s pathology is random brutality; the latter’s is ritual precision.
If the Ripper case is to move forward, it must grow out of its fear of proximity. Feigenbaum’s continued inclusion reveals not evidence, but avoidance — a century’s worth of scholars looking away from what fits too well. The German sailor was a story London could live with. The English poet is the one it can’t.
Carl Feigenbaum vs Francis Thompson: A Question of Reach, Motive, and Method
Carl Feigenbaum is less a suspect than a symptom — proof of how far the Ripper debate has strayed from its own evidence in search of safety. When modern writers reach for Feigenbaum, they’re reaching for the foreigner’s shadow: the itinerant killer, monstrous and anonymous, who can be blamed without reflection. But once the detail is unpacked, Feigenbaum collapses into what he always was — an American afterthought pressed into an English puzzle he never fit.
Feigenbaum’s story begins on the other side of the Atlantic. He was a German sailor convicted of murdering his landlady in New York in 1894 — a full six years after the Ripper murders ended. His own lawyer, William Sanford Lawton, later claimed that Feigenbaum had “confessed” to a lifelong mania for killing women and could have been Jack the Ripper. That claim, made conveniently after Feigenbaum’s execution, is the foundation for every link that followed. There are no shipping records placing Feigenbaum in London in 1888, no evidence of him having ever set foot in Whitechapel, and not a single contemporary mention connecting him to the case until Lawton’s retrospective tale. The argument survives on hearsay and distance — and on the comforting notion that the killer must have been an outsider.
The appeal is psychological. Feigenbaum offers an easy narrative: a traveling foreigner, likely deranged, who drifts through ports and leaves horror behind. It suits the late-Victorian hunger for moral separation — the idea that no English gentleman, scholar, or poet could have sunk to that level. The fact that Feigenbaum murdered with a knife helps the illusion along, but his crime against his landlady was domestic, impulsive, and clumsy. The Ripper killings were methodical, escalating, and bound to symbolic pattern. The two temperaments are miles apart. Feigenbaum killed the woman he lived beside; the Ripper stalked strangers with ritual purpose.
Even geography betrays the myth. No trace of Feigenbaum appears in the East End’s dense web of sailors, dockers, and lodging-house registries. Whitechapel was catalogued to exhaustion by the police and press. If a German seaman matching his name or description had been found in proximity to the murders, it would have surfaced. It didn’t — because he wasn’t there. The only evidence of his “presence” is posthumous imagination.
When you weigh him beside Francis Thompson, the contrast becomes uncomfortable. Thompson was there — living rough in Whitechapel through the very months of the murders, equipped with surgical skill, carrying dissecting knives, mentally unstable, sexually conflicted, and steeped in religious visions of purification through blood. Every line of the contemporary medical evidence, from Dr. Phillips’s comment on “great anatomical knowledge” to Sir Henry Smith’s description of the killer’s precise control, leads toward a trained hand with obsessive intent. Feigenbaum was a sailor who butchered a woman once. Thompson was a lapsed medical student who wrote obsessively of sacrificing “women of scarlet” upon an altar of divine fire.
The deeper irony is that Feigenbaum’s candidature survived because it threatened no one. He was safely foreign, already dead, and irrelevant to the reputations of Victorian London’s moral institutions. Thompson, by contrast, exposes a wound. He was a man of letters, a mystic celebrated by Chesterton and Hopkins, who walked the same streets as his victims. To accept him as the Ripper is to admit that civilization itself may wear the killer’s mask. Feigenbaum allows the guilt to stay offshore.
What remains, then, is motive and method — the twin tests any serious case must face. Feigenbaum’s motive was a vague “blood-lust” offered second-hand. Thompson’s was written in his own verse and prose: women as vessels of sin, blood as cleansing, death as atonement. Feigenbaum’s method was a single domestic stabbing. Thompson’s mirrors the surgical eviscerations of the Whitechapel victims. The former’s pathology is random brutality; the latter’s is ritual precision.
If the Ripper case is to move forward, it must grow out of its fear of proximity. Feigenbaum’s continued inclusion reveals not evidence, but avoidance — a century’s worth of scholars looking away from what fits too well. The German sailor was a story London could live with. The English poet is the one it can’t.
Comment