Fake!

[Steven Russell]

Hi Steve,


I didn't think our diarist had too much trouble with apostrophes where he/she bothered to use them.

Love,

Caz
X

Hello, Caz.
Don't have the book to hand at the moment but the problems are (as I remember) when he misses them out, which he frequently does.

Best wishes,
Steve.

[Casebook Wiki Editor]

People can disagree, we all have our own theories. That's the point of the casebook.

Of course. But you were saying James Maybrick had no ties to Whitechapel. Base on the historical record, that's incorrect. So no one should have that notion as part of their theory.

Maybrick may have been a sexist pig, but he did'nt 'hate' women.

I would like to think that several of us here know a fair amount about the "real" Maybricks, and I wouldn't pretend to know how he felt about women, and prostitutes in specific. I would imagine he wasn't happy about getting kicked out of Flo's bed but that doesn't make him a serial killer of course. But as we don't have very much of his correspondence I wouldn't hazard a guess about what was going on in his drug addled brain. But drug addicts do strange things at times.

But do all serial killers of prostitutes hate women? Serious question.

[caz]

Victorians were taught handwriting at school[ copperplate] so there is a generic similarity with the hand writing.

Why would Liverpool businessman Maybrick, unpleasant and drug addicted as he may have been take trips to the East end of London to mutilate and murder obscure whores. There is no evidence for this or that he was intimate with the area There is no motive, he had a mistress and a normal sex life. The dangers involved in going to the east end are far greater and more complex for a middle class man from a different city than a local. If he had such murderous instincts, and hated women so much, he could have started with Flo.
I think he was far too self obsessed to be a murderer, obsessed with his health and selfish. Not the sort of guy to take the sort of uncomfortable risks and gambles involved in being a serial killer.

I didn't know where to start with all this, but I see that others have already addressed the main issues.

Why did unemployed Colin Ireland take trips by train from Southend in Essex to one gay pub in Fulham, west London, purely for the purpose of picking up strangers to murder and mutilate in their own homes? He did this on at least five occasions in 1993, after the diary emerged but before it was published. How lucky could our hoaxer have got, describing a travelling man's well-planned campaign of murder and mutilation so uncannily similar to the real life example given by Ireland, even as the diary was being researched in the run up to going public?

The diarist clearly knew very well how 'intimate' the real James was with the area, how he regularly used prostitutes, lived a semi-secret double life with two families and an addiction to a range of deadly poisonous substances.

How many men with murderous instincts do you know who 'started' with their own wives and were able to go on indulging those instincts? How many murderers do you know who were not totally 'self obsessed'? Good grief. The real James Maybrick needn't have killed anyone, but you don't know the man at all if you think he didn't take potentially lethal, never mind uncomfortable risks with his health and safety from morning to night! The serial killer operating in the anonymous East End of 1888 arguably took fewer risks, only needing to avoid being caught in the act, just like the thousands of men who were never seen in the act of being serviced by a street prossie.

Love,

Caz
X

[Graham]

Miss Marple
Graham it is exceedingly insulting the working class Victorians to suggest they could barely hold pens. My working class grandparents who left school at 14 both had good copperplate handwriting

.

Miss Marple, I wasn't insulting anyone and I think you've over-reacted here. From my own personal experience, going to an English working-class primary-school in 1951, a lot of the kids had never held a pen before, and had to be shown how. I was fortunate in that I was encouraged at home to read and write from an early age. I also happen to know people of my age and younger who are barely literate, so for you to suggest, as you seem to be, that all working-class Victorians were able to write as soon as they were given a pen, is something of an exaggeration. Why, for example, should a farm-labourer feel the need to read and write in Victorian times?

'Copperplate' is the script which these days can still be seen on, for example, business-cards, posh invitations, and so forth. It used to be referred to in earlier times as 'a clerkly hand', and I really have to take issue with you on this, because it was not used as everyday hand-writing by the vast majority of Victorians. My brother is (amongst other things) a calligrapher, and it takes him a long, long time to write anything in what he describes as 'copperplate'.

Graham

[miss marple]

By normal sex life I simply mean Maybrick had sexual intercourse with women, he was not repulsed sexually by them.
There is an indication that Jack was repulsed by women and their sexual organs,that he hated them, there is no suggestion that he had intercourse with them before murdering them. There is an element of control in Jack's actions and I do not believe he was a regular user for sex and it is possible his hatred goes back to his relationship with his mother, she may have been a prostitute, he may have been abused as a child. I don't believe sexual satisfaction was his motive.

People can disagree, we all have our own theories. That's the point of the casebook.
Maybrick may have been a sexist pig, but he did'nt 'hate' women. Many Victorian men led double lives, keeping two wives, examples being Wilkie Collins and George Cruikshank, as divorce was almost impossible and scandalous. I cant see a motive for that form of murder and mutilation. The diary has coloured the view of him.

Miss Marple
Graham it is exceedingly insulting the working class Victorians to suggest they could barely hold pens. My working class grandparents who left school at 14 both had good copperplate handwriting.

[caz]

It just strikes me as odd that someone with a Victorian middle class education would mistake 'there' for 'their' or 'of' for 'off' etc. Both of my parents had decidedly working class upbringings and neither went on to further education. Yet both would be mortified by mistakes like this. Our diarist does not understand apostrophe use either. One might think that Victorian teaching would have been firmly rooted in the three Rs and simple rules like these would have been drummed into pupils.

Hi Steve,

My parents would have been similarly mortified by mistakes like that. But you can find similar and worse - much, much worse - scattered all over the boards, and made by otherwise intelligent and educated posters who want to be taken seriously. You'd think that writing in public would make a difference from writing for oneself, in one's diary for instance, but it doesn't seem to in many cases!

I didn't think our diarist had too much trouble with apostrophes where he/she bothered to use them. Could you give me a few examples? St. James's is correct, for a start, where lesser folk would get that one wrong.

Rules can be 'drummed' into pupils only if the pupils are willing and able to use them. There have always been failures from any school, however good the teaching.

Love,

Caz
X

[Livia]

In furtherance of what Sir Bob has posted....

In the days following the Grand National, Florence
told Dr Hopper that she couldn't stand to have Maybrick
near her and they'd not shared a bed for two years.
Maybrick had blackened her eye the night before, so
perhaps had he lived long enough he may have done
worse. But to say Maybrick had a "normal" sex life,
does not appear to be true. Maybrick often told
friends his medicine strengthened him and to the
Victorian mind, arsenic and strychnine were aphrodisiacs.

Maybrick gambled every day of his working life. He
was a commodities broker (cotton), where the aim
was to buy low and sell high. He dealt in futures,
so every time he placed an order, he was betting
that whatever he paid for cotton in the US,
could be recouped in the UK market at a profit.
In fact, he was such a gambler that the week
before he died, he left his sickbed and rode out
to the Wirral races in the rain.

Liv

[Casebook Wiki Editor]

Nothing will convince me the diary is other than a fake, it has more in common with all the great fakes than any real literary discoveries.

Then there isn't much point to discussing it, is there? Well, you are upgrading to the company of "great fakes"....that's progress of a sort.

Why would Liverpool businessman Maybrick, unpleasant and drug addicted as he may have been take trips to the East end of London to mutilate and murder obscure whores. There is no evidence for this or that he was intimate with the area There is no motive, he had a mistress and a normal sex life. The dangers involved in going to the east end are far greater and more complex for a middle class man from a different city than a local.

Please see below; reposting this yet again until perhaps it is read....you can believe whatever you wish about the Diary and the Watch, but the "real" James Maybrick had real ties to London and specifically Whitechapel. This is all from books and court records dating looooooooong before Mike Barrett got his mitts on the Diary. And the real James Maybrick got kicked out of his wife's bed once she finally realized there was another Mrs. Maybrick, so I don't know what you mean by normal sex life.

I think he was far too self obsessed to be a murderer, obsessed with his health and selfish. Not the sort of guy to take the sort of uncomfortable risks and gambles involved in being a serial killer.

Major league druggie, gambler, another FAMILY on the side, and always one step ahead of the creditors - the real James Maybrick was a risk taker.

Once more for Miss Marple:

I will add this to what I originally wrote - In 1871 Maybrick went into business with Gustavus A. Witt, Commissioning Agent, in Knowsley Buildings, Tithebarn Street, Liverpool. Witt, by 1888, was running a London office in a tiny street called Cullum Street, which was about 400 yards from Mitre Square. Witt testified in an affidavit that Maybrick did his firm's London business.

To say he had no ties to the area is demonstrably false. Not a matter of opinion, but of historical record.

Maybrick did extensive business over the years for a cotton broker that had their London office in Whitechapel, Cullum Street to be precise. His "wife" lived in Whitechapel when he met her and she later lived at 55 Bromley. The affair lasted for almost 20 years and there were 3-5 children as a result of it.

So Maybrick was a reasonably frequent visitor to the Whitechapel area. That's not even including visits to his brother at Wellington Mansions.

This had to be excised from my talk at York. (I am in the process of getting all my notes up in the moderated Maybrick forums at JTRForums.) The section was to be entitled "Let's Meet Those Wild and Wacky Maybricks" and was co-written by Livia Trivia, Mark Ripper, Katja Nieder and myself. If something is wrong it's safe to assume I wrote it....

Sarah Ann Robertson (1837-1927) Sarah Ann is an interesting person in a case chock full of interesting characters. There is little doubt she was James Maybrick's mistress and for all intents and purposes passed for his wife at times. Some believe she was actually married to James and never divorced, making Maybrick not only an adulterer but a bigamist as well. In the 1850s she was living in Tower Hamlets on the edge of Whitechapel and probably met James when he moved to London in 1858 to work in a shipbroker's office. She lived with him off and on for almost 20 years and it is alleged she bore him 5 children, two of them after his marriage to Florence. It is possible that she was the woman Florence learned about in 1887, leading Florence to sever marital relations with her husband. And if the Diary is to be believed, this and Florence's own infidelities were the impetus that lead to the series of gruesome murders of prostitutes we now know as the "Autumn of Terror" in 1888 Whitechapel. Certainly many of Sarah Ann's relatives believed she was married to James Maybrick; her aunt's husband, Thomas Conconi's 1868 will has a bequest to "Sarah Ann Maybrick, the wife of James Maybrick of Old Hall Street Liverpool". Keith Skinner has tracked down Sarah Ann's Bible containing the touching note "To my darling Piggy. From her affectionate husband James Maybrick. On her birthday August 2nd 1865". I note the Americanized date and the Piggy/Bunny zoomorphic nicknames. According to Trevor Christie (Etched in Arsenic) AFTER his honeymoon James went to Sarah Ann and "informed her of his marriage in what must have been a stormy scene. Amid tears and recriminations he promised to give her an allowance of Ł100 a year to support his children, but this was never paid regularly." A stand up guy was James Maybrick..... In the 1871 census Sarah Ann Maybrick is listed as a "merchant clerk's wife" living with her aunt and uncle, the Conconi's at 55 Bromley Street, Commercial Road London. Please note the location in terms of Whitechapel. At her death in 1927 she was listed as "Sarah Ann Maybrick, otherwise Robertson." There is no mention of her in the Diary, but the mysterious woman referred to as "mine" may well be Sarah Ann Robertson. Throughout the diary, Maybrick is a man more sinned against, than sinning.

[Graham]

Journals perhaps, but not in ordinary letters, post-cards, note-books, etc. In many Victorian working-class primary schools, both rural and urban, it was probably hard enough for teachers to get the little darlings to hold a pen properly, let alone write in copperplate.

No way was copperplate taught as a regular manner of hand-writing in British schools in the 1950's; and in 1957 I went to an old-fashioned grammar-school, were the masters (not 'teachers' and all male) wore academic gowns and some even their mortar-boards on a daily basis, and there wasn't a sentence of copperplate in sight.

Are you posting from the USA, perchance?

G

[miss marple]

Graham.
Copperplate was taught in schools,I even have an exercise book from 1859 just of copperplate handwriting practice. it was the most widely used form of joined up writing in the 19th century because it could be done with an ordinary dip pen, instead of a flat calligraphy nib. It created a flow and at its best could be very elegant or at worst, make it easier to do joined up writing.
And in all the written journals i have seen copperplate is the standard. Some tidy some untidy. The modern hand developed from copperplate.

Miss Marple

[Graham]

It is simply not true that 'Victorians were taught copperplate at school'. Some were, but the majority most certainly were not. I started school in 1951 (I don't mind admitting) and I was not taught copperplate, merely to write clearly and legibly - which to an extent is a forgotten art, for me at least, courtesy of the computer.

I would argue about many aspects of the 'Diary', but not that its writing is anachronistic. As I posted earlier, I have hand-written family documents going back to about 1880, and with only a couple of exceptions none of the private letters, postcards, etc., are in copperplate. Perhaps the hand-writing in these documents is somewhat more disciplined than you might find these days, but it really isn't a lot different to a modern hand.

G

[miss marple]

Can you be more precise about that letter Tempus? i have not the diary book at hand as it is in storage. I do have letters from Hell is it in there? Victorians were taught handwriting at school[ copperplate] so there is a generic similarity with the hand writing. It was taught in schools until the 1950s. I was taught it. My handwriting is untidy but I can produce a good style if necessary.

I have gone on in other posts about the tearing out of the pages, having seen handled and owned many Victorian journals, diaries scrap books etc I can only say again, the majority of them are only half or three quarters filled, so acquiring one and tearing out the written pages is a given. Thirty odd years ago Liverpool was one of the great places for dealers to buy Victoriana. when I was doing Portobello market there were several dealers who went up there on a regular basis and come back with very interesting stuff. Scrap books were easy to pick up.
Nothing will convince me the diary is other than a fake, it has more in common with all the great fakes than any real literary discoveries.
Also rationality flies out the window when discussing the diary.
Why would Liverpool businessman Maybrick, unpleasant and drug addicted as he may have been take trips to the East end of London to mutilate and murder obscure whores. There is no evidence for this or that he was intimate with the area There is no motive, he had a mistress and a normal sex life. The dangers involved in going to the east end are far greater and more complex for a middle class man from a different city than a local. If he had such murderous instincts, and hated women so much, he could have started with Flo.
I think he was far too self obsessed to be a murderer, obsessed with his health and selfish. Not the sort of guy to take the sort of uncomfortable risks and gambles involved in being a serial killer.
Innocent people don't need alibis. A guilty person with standing in the community, would make sure he had some.

Cheers Miss Marple

[Casebook Wiki Editor]

Forgeries succeed because they fill a gap and people want to believe in them.

The Maybrick Watch and Diary have met with withering (and much of it superficial) criticism from the moment they crawled out into daylight.

Its not in his handwriting, but that does not matter because of the content. Its in an old scrape book with half the pages torn out.

In twenty years, I've never seen anyone argue that it's in Maybrick's handwriting. I wish we had more examples of JM's handwriting, but it is pretty obvious that the Diarist made no effort to copy said handwriting.

BTW I showed a slide at York with several examples of the handwriting in the Diary. It varies widely -and wildly.

The watch turning up is two good to be true too, anyone can scratch marks inside a watch cover.It was necessary to reinforce the diary.

Read up on the tests done on the Watch before you make this assumption. And bear in mind the Watch popped up for sale in that window right at about the time Barrett made his fateful call to London.

[Tempus omnia revelat]

Forgeries succeed because they fill a gap and people want to believe in them. For example the great forger Mark Hofman forged many documents proving the founding if the Morman church by Joseph Smith and recieved huge amounts of money from the church for these. No one questioned how he had accessed so many previously unknown documents. He also forged many other important documents including a poem by Emily Dickinson, it was written in her style and in a copy of her hand.
The' Diary' has been obscured by too many trees [the content] so you cant see the wood.
Let me give you a scenario,
Imagine someone has discovered a missing journal of Charles Dickens, an account of his relationship with his mistress Ellen Ternan [ which would be one of the great literary discoveries ever]
'' Where did you find this document? ''
'' it turned up under a floorboard in Gads Hill I was told.[ Dicken's country house]
'' How do you know its by Dickens? Well the content is really interesting and could have been written by him as it is in a Dickens style.''
So it was written by him?
Its not in his handwriting, but that does not matter because of the content. Its in an old scrape book with half the pages torn out.
Stop right there and put your rational hat on. When a thing is too good to be true, it usually is.
The watch turning up is two good to be true too, anyone can scratch marks inside a watch cover.It was necessary to reinforce the diary.
I love reading about great forgeries, forgers go to great lengths, but usually slip up somewhere. For a famous person, forging the hand would be important, but if you did not have a record of the person's hand and thought none existed then in the forgers mind, no one would know.
Forgery is about desire, and dreams.

Miss Marple

Unfortunately, Miss Marple, the handwritting of the diary does look like handwriting on ripper letters of the time. One particular letter being sent from the same district as another letter - that the original diary team picked out as being in Maybrick's handwriting - that was sent the day before. More coincidences.

Kind regards,


Tempus

[miss marple]

Forgeries succeed because they fill a gap and people want to believe in them. For example the great forger Mark Hofman forged many documents proving the founding if the Morman church by Joseph Smith and recieved huge amounts of money from the church for these. No one questioned how he had accessed so many previously unknown documents. He also forged many other important documents including a poem by Emily Dickinson, it was written in her style and in a copy of her hand.
The' Diary' has been obscured by too many trees [the content] so you cant see the wood.
Let me give you a scenario,
Imagine someone has discovered a missing journal of Charles Dickens, an account of his relationship with his mistress Ellen Ternan [ which would be one of the great literary discoveries ever]
'' Where did you find this document? ''
'' it turned up under a floorboard in Gads Hill I was told.[ Dicken's country house]
'' How do you know its by Dickens? Well the content is really interesting and could have been written by him as it is in a Dickens style.''
So it was written by him?
Its not in his handwriting, but that does not matter because of the content. Its in an old scrape book with half the pages torn out.
Stop right there and put your rational hat on. When a thing is too good to be true, it usually is.
The watch turning up is two good to be true too, anyone can scratch marks inside a watch cover.It was necessary to reinforce the diary.
I love reading about great forgeries, forgers go to great lengths, but usually slip up somewhere. For a famous person, forging the hand would be important, but if you did not have a record of the person's hand and thought none existed then in the forgers mind, no one would know.
Forgery is about desire, and dreams.

Miss Marple