Acquiring A Victorian Diary

[David Orsam]

"Anne worked as a secretary so unless she was considerably more literate than Mike was, bless him, I'm not sure how she'd have held down a job like that for long."

That's hilarious. For two reasons.

Firstly we've been told repeatedly that Mike wasn't literate enough to have written the Diary. Now Anne couldn't have written it because she was too literate!!

Secondly, the number of secretaries I've known who don't understand the difference between "your" and "you're" is huge.

A secretary needs to know how to type. That's it. They might prepare a first draft from, say a Dictaphone tape, with any spelling and punctuation errors being corrected by the author. It strikes me as ludicrous to say that someone who was a secretary couldn't have written the Diary.

[caz]

Thanks John. Link to the annotated diary below

http://www.jtrforums.com/~jtrforum/s...ead.php?t=8456

Afternoon Gareth,

As you know, I have considerable reservations about the value of this type of analysis, in that it can only really demonstrate the as yet unidentified author's minimum writing skills. This wasn't an application for the post of English teacher at one of the top schools in the country, completed and sent in by the person who wanted the job. There is no way of knowing that the diary author was writing to the very best of their abilities, without finding examples of their normal written correspondence which demonstrate similar usage and ability. And if you could do that you'd have identified your hoaxer without the need for a detailed analysis to convince anyone!

Had Maybrick been the author, whether he ever murdered anyone or was playing out a private fantasy about being Jack the Ripper, we would have learned from his diary just how good or bad the real JM's informal writing style was, and pretty much the exact limits of his language and literacy skills.

But assuming we are dealing with someone who set out to invent a fictional version of a real person, for whatever reason, and was therefore impersonating a Sir Jim/Jack who never existed, the creative options for their chosen character were wide open.

The real Macbeth was nothing like the fictional monster conjured up for the Scottish play. In my best Philomena Cunk voice: "Will.i.am Shakespeare wrote his biography of Macbeth using a load of really really hard words so women would never know he was actually warning the men of future generations never to talk to witches or listen to their wives".

If someone who only knew about Wilfred Brambell from his life in Oil Drum Lane were to conclude that he was common as muck, a poor reader and a dirty old man who ate pickled onions in the bath, you'd think they were having a laugh. Similarly, if they pointed to Richard Wilson's limited vocabulary because their only experience of it was when he used to come out with "I don't believe it!" three times in the space of half an hour.

I suppose the best example has to be a rather more relevant one: the 'From Hell' letter. You or I could spend all of two minutes posting an analysis of the literary/literacy skills on display, for what good it would do us in narrowing down potential authors, so we can all thank Christ it didn't run to 63 pages. The verdict would presumably be that the letter and kidney sent to Lusk were hoaxes most probably by a semi-literate Irish medical student.

Have a great weekend all.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

I can't see why the scribe couldn't have had several practice runs with the pen long before the guard book was acquired, Caz.

"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy Battlecrease dog... Jackdaws love my sphinx of green Abberline quartz... All at once I seen a crowd, a host of golden daffodils... etc"

Indeed, but David, the world's greatest hoax buster since Mighty Mel Harris, seems to think Mike wouldn't have gone to the expense of purchasing the materials needed until after he had ascertained, around March 10th 1992, that someone might actually be interested in seeing a diary supposedly written by Jack the Ripper.

But maybe I got that wrong and David was only including the book and the ink in his reasoning and would allow Anne the luxury of a suitable dip pen and a bottle of Quink to practise with at her considerable leisure, between holding down a full-time job, being a Mum to a daughter nearing puberty, seeing to any outstanding domestic chores that Mike had managed to fvck up, 'tidying up' any of his ongoing literary efforts and composing the diary text on their word processor.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

I can't imagine that many scratches would accumulate on part of a gold watch that had been largely covered up for most of its lifetime, Caz.

Absolutely, Gareth. Why would there be? There seems very little reason for that surface to have sported any visible scratches before it was defaced by whoever put the Maybrick/ripper markings there. And that's what the reports indicate.

That said, I can't see how we can know categoricallly that there were no scratches present prior to the initials, unless the watch had been microscopically examined before the engravings were made.

All the superficial scratches were found to be later than all the Maybrick/ripper engravings using electron microscopy. These random superficial scratches could clearly be seen to go across the engravings. The 'am J' and 'Maybrick' were found to be the earliest visible markings. All others were found to overlay these where crossing occurs, including the 9/3, which was put there after the 'J' of 'Jack'.

I certainly don't have the expertise to question any of this. But if Ron Murphy did try to buff out several scratch marks on that surface, they must have been visible to him without the need for any microscope, so they'd have been visible to a bandwagon hoaxer too, and infinitely clearer to Turgoose and Wild, which would mean that this hoaxer managed, for some unknown reason, to render those scratches invisible to all intents and purposes before making the Maybrick/ripper engravings and everything else that came after them.

Love,

Caz
X

[Sam Flynn]

I can't see why the scribe couldn't have had several practice runs with the pen long before the guard book was acquired, Caz.

"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy Battlecrease dog... Jackdaws love my sphinx of green Abberline quartz... All at once I seen a crowd, a host of golden daffodils... etc"