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Originally posted by Tom Mitchell
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Rather than asking what is the Diary’s biggest ‘fault’ (a recent thread) ...
Sixteen years have passed since first it came to light. Experts remain divided on its authenticity. The 13 year old who wrote this diary one wet weekend probably had no idea that he or she would probably never again in their lifetime write such a spectacularly complex work, and one so complex and so brilliant that it would be called both infantile and genius in equal measure.
To Michael Barrett (God rest your soul) and Anne Graham, thank you for bringing the journal to us but - next time - could you be a bit less obscure? Your choice of villain was outstanding – outstandingly surreal and utterly obtuse. Why on God’s good earth did you decide that an otherwise unremarkable middle class cotton merchant from Liverpool should be the perpetrator of the Whitechapel crimes when we all can see that Liverpool wasn’t a Real option in this particular league? Did his inadvertent fame through the questionable nature of his death not make him even less of a candidate for them? From the very start you were willing to fly in the face of established protocol, leaving fools such as I tilting at Windows 7-10.
You must have laughed out loud when you discovered that Florence Maybrick’s trial was attended by a friend of the viper Alice Yapp and that that friend just happened to be one of Anne’s relations (through marriage).
You must have squealed like a wee snorting pair of piglets when you discovered that Florence left gaol in 1904 and took the surname ‘Graham’. Shurely shum mishtake?
But the snorting of piglets in the feeding trough must have gone into over-drive when the two of you uncovered so many other implausible coincidences and conveniences. Chief, for me, amongst these, include:
1) A Whitechapel in both Liverpool and London
2) V marks on Catharine Eddowes (‘left my mark’)
3) The FM on the wall of MK’s room
4) Florence’s comment in a letter to Brierley (‘The tale he told me …’)
5) The remarkable ‘photofit’ of Oct 6 which looked so much like Maybrick
6) The ‘Who is Jim?’ newspaper article (though the whole article was less helpful, thank you m'Lord!)
7) Maybrick’s established addiction to arsenic
8) Maybrick’s known presence in Whitechapel
9) The spelling of Jack from Maybrick’s name
10) The convenience of Juwes appearing much like James (and don’t start me on Thomas, William, Michael, Edwin, and Florence!)
11) The Diego Laurenz letter
12) The extravagant swirl at the end of a sentence (see Feldman, ‘The Final Chapter’)
You must have popped the bubbly time and time again (before Mike started to piss it up a wall every night) when each month went past and your evil genius was not unmasked, even when Mikey gave away the very process for the crime which even the aristocracy are still seeking vainly to validate two decades later? Without a shadow of a doubt, your hoax has truly fooled the world, and we should mark its possibility at this very auspicious time, if hoax it ultimately proves to be.
And to James Maybrick, if this infernal journal ever proves finally that you were Jack the Spratt McVitie, hang your head in shame and rot in Hell you piece of scum for whom seven innocent, brutalised lives had to be sacrificed because you were aging and hypocritical and a truly sad example of the human species. Far better that you’d gone to the top shelf of WH Smith and bashed a few out than embark on your foul ‘campaign’. In that event - that Maybrick it was - then that would be enough said on the matter.
In the last ten years, there has been much said on the matter, and I for one have cherished most moments. Adversaries have come and gone - some very sadly so - but they are remembered still even if the keyboard may now also be still.
Ladies, gentlemen, m’Lord, and all others who lurk amongst the dark, foggy alleyways of this digital Whitechapel, please crack open the Brown Ale (it’s never too early, and it's never too late to lift a glass to a merciful God which keeps the bannerboys in the Chumpionship for at least one more season), refill your glasses, be upstanding, and join with me in toasting “The Next Glorious Ten Years on The Greatest Thread of All”!
I'm going to have to give this some thought, you know ...
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