Originally posted by c.d.
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It seems to me that your question still hasn't really been addressed, so here is some background on how Anne Graham came to be a published author in 1999 - seven years after her husband brought the Victorian scrapbook to London for the first time.
It was Paul Feldman who sold Headline the idea about the book – the marketing angle being that it would be written by the great granddaughter of Florence Maybrick whose husband was JtR (Feldman never allowed the known facts to limit his imagination). Anne had become extremely interested in the story and wanted to do a book on the case based on the unpublished Home Office files at The National Archives – a large quantity of which had already been photocopied for Paul Feldman by his research team. Carol Emmas, (who was a photographer and Robbie Johnson’s girlfriend) first met Anne around 1994 and together they did a lot of research for Paul in Liverpool. When he secured a publisher, it was agreed that Carol would help Anne with the book and have co-author status, although the majority of the writing would be done by Anne. Anne apparently would have much preferred to do a straight study of the case and leave the JtR element out, but that - unsurprisingly - was part of the deal. In the end it fell to Carol to fill in the JtR detail – neither of them having much interest at all in the subject. Anne came to London for a few days and Keith Skinner worked with her at The National Archives whilst she sifted through the boxes of Home Office documents and catalogued them – a copy of which she presented to The National Archives.
It is interesting to note that the lady who stands accused (by many) as the author of the JtR scrapbook had very little interest herself in documenting his crimes in the late 1990s. Perhaps she had exhausted her interest by 1992 when her brilliant hoax had been finalised, and wanted to move on to the intriguing story of Florence Maybrick? Or perhaps she had little interest in JtR in 1999 (actually, 1998 when the main preparatory work was being completed) and little interest in JtR in 1992 (which is why she gave the scrapbook away so casually), just as she had little interest in JtR in 1968 or 1969 when she stated that she first saw the document amongst her father's possessions? If Anne Graham played a central role in the creation of the Victorian scrapbook, she was quite Machiavellian about it: first she stayed in the shadows whilst her husband Bongo Barrett brought the document to the world's attention, then she stepped-in at exactly the right moment to remove Bongo from the deeper provenance just when he was destroying the superficial version of it which the world had first been fed; then she reached her absolutely apogee of brazen cunning when she published a book on the subject thereby revealing her research and writing talents. Actually, Machiavelli would have blushed to know his name was being associated with such a calm, cool, calculating crime (as the hoaxing of the Maybrick scrapbook would therefore be).
I hope you enjoy the book you ordered from Amazon (you don't say which it is), and I hope you access Graham's book too. In truth, you have inspired me to review it myself again!
Hope this is helpful.
Ike
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