The Diary — Old Hoax or New or Not a Hoax at All?​

[John Wheat]

Who believes the Ripper is a "top hated toff"? Would that be Randolph Churchill? Top politicians are often hated, I've hated a few in my time.

Seriously though, the only people nowadays who believe he was a toff who wore a top hat, are those who have no in depth knowledge of the case.

Does that change the way Bury is overlooked for being an ordinary loser type? Also people believe Maybrick was the Ripper and he was a top hated toff.

[The Baron]

He is detailed, clinical, and unsensational. The victim's face, unlike her viscera, was not dissected, nor where her ears, eyes, nose, or eyebrows amputated. It was 'gashed' indiscriminately and no parts were removed. There is no room for reasonable doubt, no matter how the special pleaders wish to muddy the Thames.

You’ve confidently stated that ‘no parts were removed,’ yet Bond’s own report which you’ve just held up as the gold standard of clinical precision, clearly states that the nose, cheeks, eyebrows, and ears were partly removed. Not ‘gashed near,’ not ‘damaged’ .. partly removed.

So which is it? Are we to believe Bond was both detailed and precise, but also completely incorrect in using that phrase?

You can’t have it both ways.

You’re trying to eliminate all room for interpretation, yet your own claim blatantly contradicts the report you're relying on. Bond didn’t say 'no parts were removed'.. you did. And that, ironically, is the distortion.

You seem to imply that unless something is fully severed, it wasn’t removed at all. That’s not how trauma language or injury documentation works, especially not in Victorian era post mortem reports. 'Partly removed' may well describe mutilations that, in visual terms, looked total or near total, especially to the person who inflicted them.

So the discrepancy between the diary and Bond’s report isn’t as binary or damning as you insist. What is damning is the attempt to erase nuance and present opinion as absolute fact.

If anything, this rigidity weakens the anti-diary case, not strengthens it.

Bond wasn’t photographing the crime scene with modern forensics, he was reporting in language common to 19th century medical notes, in a case involving extreme mutilation. 'Partly removed' could describe a severed, dangling, or slashed structure. It wasn’t a clean, measured surgery, it was a face described as ‘gashed in all directions.’ Pretending that Bond's term excludes all room for interpretive nuance is misleading.

Your claim that nothing was removed, that it was only gashed, contradicts the report itself, which says the 'nose, cheeks, eyebrows and ears' were 'partly removed.' Either Bond was being metaphorical (which you deny), or something was removed in part. That alone shows ambiguity.

‘cut off the bitch’s nose, all of it this time’, it’s boastful and graphic. But that’s what you'd expect from a confessional voice, not a coroner. The idea that this has to be an error rather than a personal recollection, dramatized or misremembered, is not a hard fact, it’s your interpretation. Reasonable people can see a difference between a surgical account and a personal one, especially when filtered through rage or ego.

A hoaxer could have known that. A killer could have remembered it in his own distorted way. Neither is provable.

You say there’s no wriggling room. I’d say the certainty of your claim rests far more on tone than evidence. And that’s where the argument thins.

For someone so certain, you spend an awful lot of time twisting yourself around contradictions. You sound sure of everything except what your own argument actually proves, like a man who just read the report for the first time.



The Baron

[Herlock Sholmes]

No idea what you're on about.

It’s clearly a complex point….

You said that you, for the first time ever, wrote “Herlock”, in quotations marks, because I don’t post under my real name.

Ok.

Lombro doesn’t post under his real name (likewise Abby and Ike and others) but you didn’t write “Lombro.” So let’s not pretend it wasn’t a dig Scott.

[Herlock Sholmes]

I think it would be very difficult to credibly argue that 'Maybrick' could accurately recall that he hadn't cut off all of Kate Eddowes' nose in the brief, dark encounter in Mitre Square but somehow got confused and later wrongly boasted of cutting all of Mary Kelly's nose during a longer encounter in a room in which there was a fire.

We are down the rabbit hole yet again Roger. Tragic isn’t it?

[erobitha]

In my very succinct view, the diary rests on two major points on which the Barrett Hoax believers have placed all their eggs. Modern language and handwriting. These two points are the strongest arguments they have. Everything else is a nuanced debate that doesn't get us very far.

However, are they the killer blow they constantly promote them as? I do not believe James Maybrick wrote the diary. I think the handwriting is too big a hurdle for me to overcome as it stands, but I am not absolutely wedded against the possibility of it being in his hand if the evidence can be provided, he did so elsewhere.

The language debate is interesting but by no means conclusive. When looking at Google Ngrams or the newspaper archives, you are accessing data based on formalised writing, not everyday spoken vernacular. It is possible that such phrases existed in the informal spoken language long before they managed to find their way into formal print. There may even be such examples in letters people wrote to each other at the time. We do not have the same level of access to that kind of data as the other sources. So we look at what we can see. Rightly or wrongly.

I find the defence of the Barrett hoaxers strange. The Barrett hoax makes very little sense with any actual, hard, conclusive evidence. No recepts. No witness corroboration. Just oral stories presented by proven liar Mike Barrett, Anne Graham's own story and her dying father's last interview. None of these is actual evidence of anything. They are just words, and every one of those people has presented issues. When you actually set these aside and examine the evidence, which is backed by corroborated witness statements and paperwork, a very different story emerges.

Therein is the intrigue.

[rjpalmer]

Hi Herlock - There's a useful saying: 'don't feed the trolls.'

If a poster is not arguing in good faith, a judicious use of the 'ignore' button works wonders.

[The Baron]

Ignore buttons don’t fix weak arguments, but I understand the need for escape routes.


The Baron

[rjpalmer]

From The Diary of Jack the Ripper, pg. 242.



With the key I did flee
I had the key
And with it I did flee


From the inquest deposition of Inspector Frederick Abberline (Reading Observer, 17 November 1888 and multiple other sources):



Discuss.

[Geddy2112]

Discuss.

The author of the diary is telling porkies?

[Herlock Sholmes]

Hi Herlock - There's a useful saying: 'don't feed the trolls.'

If a poster is not arguing in good faith, a judicious use of the 'ignore' button works wonders.

Good advice Roger. There’s a point when it goes past poor understanding and into ‘deliberate’ territory.

[Herlock Sholmes]

From The Diary of Jack the Ripper, pg. 242.



With the key I did flee
I had the key
And with it I did flee


From the inquest deposition of Inspector Frederick Abberline (Reading Observer, 17 November 1888 and multiple other sources):



Discuss.

This is proof of forgery. ‘Maybrick’ took away a key that didn’t exist. How desperate would someone have to be to defend this?

[Herlock Sholmes]

In my very succinct view, the diary rests on two major points on which the Barrett Hoax believers have placed all their eggs. Modern language and handwriting. These two points are the strongest arguments they have. Everything else is a nuanced debate that doesn't get us very far.

However, are they the killer blow they constantly promote them as? I do not believe James Maybrick wrote the diary. I think the handwriting is too big a hurdle for me to overcome as it stands, but I am not absolutely wedded against the possibility of it being in his hand if the evidence can be provided, he did so elsewhere.

The language debate is interesting but by no means conclusive. When looking at Google Ngrams or the newspaper archives, you are accessing data based on formalised writing, not everyday spoken vernacular. It is possible that such phrases existed in the informal spoken language long before they managed to find their way into formal print. There may even be such examples in letters people wrote to each other at the time. We do not have the same level of access to that kind of data as the other sources. So we look at what we can see. Rightly or wrongly.

I find the defence of the Barrett hoaxers strange. The Barrett hoax makes very little sense with any actual, hard, conclusive evidence. No recepts. No witness corroboration. Just oral stories presented by proven liar Mike Barrett, Anne Graham's own story and her dying father's last interview. None of these is actual evidence of anything. They are just words, and every one of those people has presented issues. When you actually set these aside and examine the evidence, which is backed by corroborated witness statements and paperwork, a very different story emerges.

Therein is the intrigue.

The flaw in your post isn't hard to find though Erobitha.

"When looking at Google Ngrams or the newspaper archives, you are accessing data based on formalised writing, not everyday spoken vernacular."

The evidence that the diary isn't fake isn't based off Google Ngrams and newspaper archives. What is literally astonishing though is that you don't even mention the Oxford English Dictionary, or any other dictionary. How it's possible for you to ignore that I have no idea but it just shows the mindset that makes some unable to deal with the overwhelming evidence which proves that "one off instance" is a 20th century expression. Phrase origin reference books also state that "one off" is a 20th century expression. Further, the research which has been conducted into the origin of the phrase includes hard copy books, hard copy journals and every accessible and searchable digital database. It all shows plainly that there was an evolution of the expression "one off" from a mere quantity in the nineteenth century, to a unique manufactured product, pattern or job in the early twentieth century through to a figurative or metaphorical usage (as in the diary) after the Second World War.

There is also a huge amount of supporting evidence of this. The newspaper in the 1970s which said that "one off" was what was known in the trade as "an experimental feature", the person writing to a newspaper in 1979 who said that "one off" in "normal parlance" generally meant "one less than" and was annoyed by people using the expression "one off situation", the journalist in the 1980s who referred to "one off" as a contemporary expression, the writer who compared a Scotsman to someone who an engineer would call a "one off job" shortly after the Second World War and the actual known usage of "one off" in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

It's also amazing that you don't seem to care that Maybrick managed to mistake his wife's godmother with her aunt, that he managed to flee from Miller's court with a non-existent key and couldn't remember where he'd left the woman's breasts, all mistakes incredibly enough which can also be found in newspapers and books, and that you have no interest in three other anachronistic expressions being found in the diary.

Perhaps most strange of all is that you refer to people who say diary is fake as "Barrett Hoax believers" even though you also say that you think the diary is fake! How should we describe you? I'm just someone who can see that the diary is very obviously a fake and that all the evidence of fakery points to the Barretts who are, after all, the only credible suspects. Sure, there may not be much hard evidence (although I can't think of any other reason for Mike wanting a Victorian diary with blank pages) but there's nothing at all which points to anyone else. In this respect, given that you say you think the diary is fake, who do you think created it?

Oh, and I haven't yet seen a single "corroborated witness statement". Nor have I seen any "corroborated paperwork", whatever that may be. If you have, you must be very lucky and privileged. But it's interesting that you seem to urge everyone else to set aside anything to do with the Barretts and "examine the evidence". Well, how do we do that? Where do we find this magical evidence to which you refer in order to examine it?

[erobitha]

The flaw in your post isn't hard to find though Erobitha.

"When looking at Google Ngrams or the newspaper archives, you are accessing data based on formalised writing, not everyday spoken vernacular."

The evidence that the diary isn't fake isn't based off Google Ngrams and newspaper archives. What is literally astonishing though is that you don't even mention the Oxford English Dictionary, or any other dictionary. How it's possible for you to ignore that I have no idea but it just shows the mindset that makes some unable to deal with the overwhelming evidence which proves that "one off instance" is a 20th century expression. Phrase origin reference books also state that "one off" is a 20th century expression. Further, the research which has been conducted into the origin of the phrase includes hard copy books, hard copy journals and every accessible and searchable digital database. It all shows plainly that there was an evolution of the expression "one off" from a mere quantity in the nineteenth century, to a unique manufactured product, pattern or job in the early twentieth century through to a figurative or metaphorical usage (as in the diary) after the Second World War.

There is also a huge amount of supporting evidence of this. The newspaper in the 1970s which said that "one off" was what was known in the trade as "an experimental feature", the person writing to a newspaper in 1979 who said that "one off" in "normal parlance" generally meant "one less than" and was annoyed by people using the expression "one off situation", the journalist in the 1980s who referred to "one off" as a contemporary expression, the writer who compared a Scotsman to someone who an engineer would call a "one off job" shortly after the Second World War and the actual known usage of "one off" in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

It's also amazing that you don't seem to care that Maybrick managed to mistake his wife's godmother with her aunt, that he managed to flee from Miller's court with a non-existent key and couldn't remember where he'd left the woman's breasts, all mistakes incredibly enough which can also be found in newspapers and books, and that you have no interest in three other anachronistic expressions being found in the diary.

Perhaps most strange of all is that you refer to people who say diary is fake as "Barrett Hoax believers" even though you also say that you think the diary is fake! How should we describe you? I'm just someone who can see that the diary is very obviously a fake and that all the evidence of fakery points to the Barretts who are, after all, the only credible suspects. Sure, there may not be much hard evidence (although I can't think of any other reason for Mike wanting a Victorian diary with blank pages) but there's nothing at all which points to anyone else. In this respect, given that you say you think the diary is fake, who do you think created it?

Oh, and I haven't yet seen a single "corroborated witness statement". Nor have I seen any "corroborated paperwork", whatever that may be. If you have, you must be very lucky and privileged. But it's interesting that you seem to urge everyone else to set aside anything to do with the Barretts and "examine the evidence". Well, how do we do that? Where do we find this magical evidence to which you refer in order to examine it?

On the subject of dictionaries. Taken from ChatGPT:


In the late Victorian period (roughly 1870s–1901), it could take several decades—or longer—for a vernacular phrase (like slang or regional speech) to be included in a standard dictionary, and here’s why:


1. Slow Documentation Process

• Lexicographers of the time, such as those working on the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), relied on written examples—mostly from books, newspapers, and journals—not everyday speech.
• Spoken vernacular wasn’t considered “respectable” language unless it appeared in print, usually from a reputable source.
• This meant a slang phrase had to gain wide usage and show up in published literature to even be noticed.

2. Cultural Gatekeeping

• Victorian society had strong distinctions between formal vs. informal and proper vs. vulgar speech.
• Working-class slang, street language, and dialects were often seen as low-status and ignored by mainstream dictionaries.

3. Examples

Some phrases from Victorian slang eventually made it in:

• “Blimey” (a softened form of “God blind me”) shows up in print in the 1880s but wasn’t accepted widely in dictionaries until decades later.
• “Bobby” (slang for police officer, from Sir Robert Peel) was first used in the 1830s and appeared in dictionaries by the late 1800s, because it had become institutionalized.

How Long Did It Take?

• On average, 10–50 years, depending on:
  • How widely the phrase was used across regions and classes.
  • Whether it appeared in print.
  • Whether the editors considered it worth including.

The OED’s Role

• The first edition of the OED was being compiled during this period (started in 1879, finished in 1928). It was descriptive, not prescriptive—meaning it included words that were used, not just “proper” ones.
• Still, the OED needed evidence in print, which delayed the inclusion of purely spoken phrases.

[Herlock Sholmes]

On the subject of dictionaries. Taken from ChatGPT:


In the late Victorian period (roughly 1870s–1901), it could take several decades—or longer—for a vernacular phrase (like slang or regional speech) to be included in a standard dictionary, and here’s why:


1. Slow Documentation Process

• Lexicographers of the time, such as those working on the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), relied on written examples—mostly from books, newspapers, and journals—not everyday speech.
• Spoken vernacular wasn’t considered “respectable” language unless it appeared in print, usually from a reputable source.
• This meant a slang phrase had to gain wide usage and show up in published literature to even be noticed.

2. Cultural Gatekeeping

• Victorian society had strong distinctions between formal vs. informal and proper vs. vulgar speech.
• Working-class slang, street language, and dialects were often seen as low-status and ignored by mainstream dictionaries.

3. Examples

Some phrases from Victorian slang eventually made it in:

• “Blimey” (a softened form of “God blind me”) shows up in print in the 1880s but wasn’t accepted widely in dictionaries until decades later.
• “Bobby” (slang for police officer, from Sir Robert Peel) was first used in the 1830s and appeared in dictionaries by the late 1800s, because it had become institutionalized.

How Long Did It Take?

• On average, 10–50 years, depending on:
  • How widely the phrase was used across regions and classes.
  • Whether it appeared in print.
  • Whether the editors considered it worth including.

The OED’s Role

• The first edition of the OED was being compiled during this period (started in 1879, finished in 1928). It was descriptive, not prescriptive—meaning it included words that were used, not just “proper” ones.
• Still, the OED needed evidence in print, which delayed the inclusion of purely spoken phrases.

Thanks for the unsourced AI lesson dealing with slang and regional speech which has nothing to do with the issue at hand Ero.

What should I draw from your failure to answer my question as to how we are supposed to examine the evidence in this case if it hasn't been provided?

Would it be reasonable for me to infer from your failure to identify any "corroborated witness statements or paperwork" that such things do not exist?

Did you miss my question: "Where do we find this magical evidence to which you refer in order to examine it?"

[Lombro2]

Joe Barnett wasn’t living with Mary Jane for 10 days. That’s another key to the story that went conveniently missing.

Could something have taken place during those 10 days when he wasn’t there?

Nice cherry though!