The True Face of Francis Thompson.

[Richard Patterson]

A few corrections and clarifications about Francis Thompson, since some points above either rely on hagiography or mix up timelines.


1) We’re not “reading poems like tea leaves.”

Most of the disturbing quotes I posted are from Thompson’s private letters, not his published verse. That matters: private correspondence (the London diatribes, the razor/scalpel remark, the child letters, the arson quip) shows mindset without the mask of “poetic persona.”




2) “Nice man helped by kind friends” ≠ exoneration.

The Catholic Encyclopedia piece is a laudatory sketch that gets basic facts wrong (e.g., calling him a “boy” when his mother died; he was 21). It’s a devotional bio written to build a saintly literary image—not a forensic source.




3) Whitechapel presence is not conjecture.

Thompson lived rough in the East End through 1888, including Providence Row (Crispin St.), which places him within yards of Mary Jane Kelly’s murder site. He habitually carried a dissecting scalpel and sharpened it. That’s means + opportunity, not a vibe.




4) The “he got help in April 1888, so he’s out” line is false security.

He had brief assistance in spring ‘88 but was still on the streets in the autumn. The decisive removal from circulation comes after Kelly (Nov 9): he’s hospitalized for exhaustion, then shipped off to monastic seclusion—exactly when the murders stop. That cessation pattern (incarceration/institution) is consistent with serial-killer casework.




5) Frailty doesn’t exclude capability.

He survived years of street living, walked the city for nights on end, and used blades daily in dissection. The murders did not require overpowering healthy, resisting victims in daylight—they involved intoxicated, exhausted women, grabbed in darkness in tight spaces. “Effete poet” is a stereotype; the logistics don’t demand a weightlifter.




6) “Why didn’t police look at him?” They probably did—under another name.

Major Henry Smith (City Police) describes a Rupert Street/Haymarket suspect: ex-medical student, asylum history, consorts with prostitutes, passes polished farthings. Thompson uniquely ticks all five. He had a Panton St. address (one block from Rupert St.) and collected mail at Charing Cross. The odds of some other man matching all five traits in 1888 London are vanishingly small (approx. 1 in 20 quadrillion). That’s not hand-wavy numerology; it’s basic rarity compounding.




7) Creative work is relevant only because it aligns with biography and timing.

No one is claiming “poems = confession.” The point is convergence: surgical training (Owens College; obsessive dissections), a carried/scarpened scalpel, hatred of prostitutes in prose, stalking a vanished prostitute, sustained East End vagrancy, and then a 1889 story (“Finis Coronat Opus”) with a midnight sacrificial murder and a first-person “post-mortem examen of my crime” voice switch—written the year after Kelly. On its own, art proves nothing; alongside the rest, it’s probative texture.




8) “Too famous” objection fails on dates.

In 1888 he was not famous. The polishing of his image (and suppression of awkward material) came via the Meynells in the years after.




9) Bond’s 1888 profile doesn’t clear him.

“Quiet, inoffensive looking,” solitary, eccentrically housed, irregular employment, possible small income—this fits Thompson, not excludes him. Debates about “middle-aged” vs. ~30 are semantic; Thompson was 29–30 in 1888, which sits inside modern serial-offender onset ranges.




10) On “conjecture vs. evidence.”

No single Victorian suspect has modern forensic closure. The standard, then, is cumulative weight: rare biographical traits aligning with place and time, supported by behavioral and textual markers, and a clean stopping mechanism (institutionalization). By that evidentiary yardstick, Thompson outperforms Druitt, Kosminski, and the gallery of weakly evidenced suspects.


If anyone wants to falsify the identification, there are two clean outs:

• Produce a different Haymarket/Rupert St. man in 1888 who also matches Smith’s five rare traits; or
• Produce a verified, contemporaneous alibi that puts Thompson away from Whitechapel on the murder nights.

Until then, the unique Rupert Street profile match + East End residency + surgical means + hostile motive + disappearance post-Kelly = the most coherent, evidence-led case we have.

[SuperShodan]

This is some of Francis Thompson’s Finis Coronat Opus. He talks of confession, of tearing open his own psychological scars for analysis and the act of murder itself. I find this fascinating from a guy who lived so close to Mary Kelly and is a very close match for the Hutchinson witness description.


If confession indeed give ease, I, who am deprived of all other confession, may yet find some appeasement in confessing to this paper. I am not penitent; yet I will do fiercest penance. With the scourge of inexorable recollection I will tear open my scars. With the cuts of a pitiless analysis I make the post-mortem examen of my crime.

It was close on midnight and I felt her only ... I reared my arm; I shook; I faltered. At that moment, with a deadly voice the accomplice-hour gave forth its sinister command. I swear I struck not the first blow.

Some violence seized my hand and drove the poniard down. Whereat she cried; and I, frenzied, dreading detection, dreading above all her awakening, - I struck again and again she cried; and yet again and yet gain she cried...


I know you and myself. I have what I have. I work for the present. Now, relief unspeakable! that vindictive sleuth-hound of my sin has at last lagged from the trail; I have had a year of respite, of release from all torments ….What crime can be interred so cunningly, but it will toss in its grave, and tumble the sleeked earth above it? Or some hidden witness may have beheld me, or the prudently-kept imprudence of this writing may have encountered some unsuspected eyes … I shall perish on the scaffold or at the stake unaided by my occult powers; … the fanged hour fastens on my throat, they will break into the room, my guilt will burst its grave and point at me; I shall be seized, I shall be condemned, I shall be executed; ... I am at watch, wide-eyed, vigilant, alert. ... I am all a waiting and a fear. .... I do not repent, it is a thing for inconsequent weaklings...To shake a tree and then not gather fruit- a fools act ...What a slave of fancy was I! Excellent fool.''

[Richard Patterson]

I was not trying to read anything into this poem other than what it says. Neither did I analyse it in relation to the crimes or Thompson. Your very first response to my initial post on this thread, which was on his his personal, private letters was,

'I don't think, though, that it's helpful to offer up dissections of his creative works as proof of him being a murderer.'

When I was not offering his creative works or offering up dissections of them.

[Ausgirl]

Why do you think I am talking about his poems? On this thread I have not tried to deconstruct his poems to prove he was the Ripper. I have simply shown the content of his private correspondence. His professional work as a poet is not something I am considering.

Because:

Amongst the poems he had first sent them was ‘the Nightmare of the Witch Babies’ which was very explicate in its talk of cutting women up with a knife. The Meynell’s son, Everard, then just a child wrote of his mother's Alice Meynell's opinion,

'Told by A.M at 21 Philimore Place, Mother read in bed the dirty ms of Paganism and along with it some witch-opium poems which she detested.'

Here are sections of this poem which features a lusty knight hunting down woman and ripping their stomachs open with a knife, to look for their ‘witch’ babies in their womb, (This is a short version of the poem, I am happy to supply the full version)

'Two witch-babies,
Ha! Ha!...
A lusty knight,
Ha! Ha!
Rode upon the land…
What is it sees he?
There he saw a maiden
Fairest fair,…
'Swiftly he followed her
Ha! Ha!
Eagerly he followed her
Ho! Ho!
Lo, she corrupted
Ho! Ho!
Comes there a Death
And its paunch [stomach] was rent
Like a brasted [bursting] drum;
And the blubbered fat
From its belly doth come
It was a stream ran bloodily
Under the wall
O Stream, you cannot run too red…
It was a stream ran bloodily
Under the wall.
With a sickening ooze-Hell made it so!
Two witch babies, Ho! Ho! Ho!'

Nobody would have accepted that these literary folk were so naive as to take it all as art.

.....and like claims you've made on other threads.

[Richard Patterson]

As well they should, Mr. B. Here's the problem though: events as you just described didn't happen to Thompson. In fact, he was never looked at by the police at all, was he?

Which is odd, when you think about it. Thompson would've stuck out like a sore thumb what with being a posh bloke in the worst of the worst East End streets, known to have studied surgery, known to carry a blade, known to be on drugs, and banging out hate-speech about whores ten to the dozen while he's at it.

Why he wasn't frogmarched to Scotland Yard quick smart is beyond me. Unless he went under the radar completely, for some reason. Like being, say, nowhere within coo-ee of Whitechapel at the time.

The point I was making (to briefly return to the point ) is: poems can well and truly be 'based' in reality and at the same time have very little to do with it.

Now Thompson might have jumped the gun on Sexton and Plath where 'confessional' poetry is concerned, and might indeed have been using poetry as a murder journal. But wasn't exactly the same thing claimed just recently by Cornwell, regarding Walter Sickert and his paintings, and wasn't that theory absolutely rubbished into the ground by all and sundry here -- because Pat Cornwell offered up -precisely- the same quality of 'evidence' as is being provided here.

Looking further into the parallels there, Cornwell also claims her suspect was hanging about in the Ripper's hunting grounds during the period of the murders. And (I believe, according to updates) offers a deal more proof if it than simply stating "he MIGHT have been" in the area during the murders, as well.

Which for me, aside from poems offered as substantial "proof" of guilt, is the major sticking-point in this particular theory (now all that saint's days rubbish has been put to bed, anyway).

What offers the Thompson theory any credibility at all are hard, concrete facts which don't need additional vast creative flair on the theorist's part in order for him to sell them: a/ he knew, without doubt, how to find organs and find them quickly, under stress; b/ he carried a sharp instrument habitually; and c/ he really was down on prostitutes (along with every else in the East End, apparently) and perhaps can be shown to have had motive, which is more than can be said for several other much-discussed suspects.

But all this other embellishment actually weakens the case against him, because -until some concrete facts of a similar vein show up - it's incredibly weak and completely arguable. Ridiculously so.

Why do you think I am talking about his poems? On this thread I have not tried to deconstruct his poems to prove he was the Ripper. I have simply shown the content of his private correspondence. His professional work as a poet is not something I am considering.

[Ausgirl]

Ausgirl,

No one is rejecting the idea that poets often write from their imagination. But they also often write from personal experience.

I would imagine that if your local police force discovered you wandering the streets at night near where those dismembered bodies where found carrying a meat cleaver and a manuscript of one of your angry poems describing the dismemberment of a former boyfriend, they would probably want to ask you one or two questions.

MrB

As well they should, Mr. B. Here's the problem though: events as you just described didn't happen to Thompson. In fact, he was never looked at by the police at all, was he?

Which is odd, when you think about it. Thompson would've stuck out like a sore thumb what with being a posh bloke in the worst of the worst East End streets, known to have studied surgery, known to carry a blade, known to be on drugs, and banging out hate-speech about whores ten to the dozen while he's at it.

Why he wasn't frogmarched to Scotland Yard quick smart is beyond me. Unless he went under the radar completely, for some reason. Like being, say, nowhere within coo-ee of Whitechapel at the time.

The point I was making (to briefly return to the point ) is: poems can well and truly be 'based' in reality and at the same time have very little to do with it.

Now Thompson might have jumped the gun on Sexton and Plath where 'confessional' poetry is concerned, and might indeed have been using poetry as a murder journal. But wasn't exactly the same thing claimed just recently by Cornwell, regarding Walter Sickert and his paintings, and wasn't that theory absolutely rubbished into the ground by all and sundry here -- because Pat Cornwell offered up -precisely- the same quality of 'evidence' as is being provided here.

Looking further into the parallels there, Cornwell also claims her suspect was hanging about in the Ripper's hunting grounds during the period of the murders. And (I believe, according to updates) offers a deal more proof if it than simply stating "he MIGHT have been" in the area during the murders, as well.

Which for me, aside from poems offered as substantial "proof" of guilt, is the major sticking-point in this particular theory (now all that saint's days rubbish has been put to bed, anyway).

What offers the Thompson theory any credibility at all are hard, concrete facts which don't need additional vast creative flair on the theorist's part in order for him to sell them: a/ he knew, without doubt, how to find organs and find them quickly, under stress; b/ he carried a sharp instrument habitually; and c/ he really was down on prostitutes (along with every else in the East End, apparently) and perhaps can be shown to have had motive, which is more than can be said for several other much-discussed suspects.

But all this other embellishment actually weakens the case against him, because -until some concrete facts of a similar vein show up - it's incredibly weak and completely arguable. Ridiculously so.

[Richard Patterson]

Richard a reference to a child doesn't necessarily mean a child n the sense we use the term today, I have seen many letters [late 1800s early 1900s] referring to the dear child who was indeed the writer's fiancee, often I grant when there was a largish age gap.

Just a quick follow up. Walsh’s 'Strange Harp, Strange Symphony. The Life of Francis Thompson.' tells that the child of which he confessed, ‘we have fallen in love with each other… I haven’t slept for two nights’ was no more than 6 years old. This was in 1890 when Thompson was aged 30.

[Richard Patterson]

Richard,

Your posts here got me interested in the man and I managed to get hold of a three volume set of his works in a second hand bookshop on the Dorset coast.

Interestingly, the bookseller claims to know the man who owns the original MS of The Hound of Heaven. He described it as 'a journal'. I wonder what else it contains?

For me, one of the strange things about Finis Coronat Opus is the way it suddenly switches into the first person at the point of the confession.

MrB

As an English teacher I can say that this change of perspective, from 3rd to 1st person is discouraged in a short story unless it relevant to the plot. The man who owns the original MS of the hound of heaven is most likely a descendent of Wilfrid Meynell's Thompson's literary air. On his deathbed he left his works, including 'Hound of Heaven' to the Meynells. The will was made about 12 hours before he died, by Caleb Saleeby, Husband of Monica Meynell and son-in-law of Thompson’s publisher, Wilfrid Meynell. I said.

‘Nov. 12 1907

I leave absolutely my literary copyright and papers. Including my manuscripts of published and unpublished poems. To Wilfrid Meynell of 4 Granville Place Mans. W.’


A photo of Thompson's will.

A close up of Francis Thompson's signature.

[MrBarnett]

Richard,

Your posts here got me interested in the man and I managed to get hold of a three volume set of his works in a second hand bookshop on the Dorset coast.

Interestingly, the bookseller claims to know the man who owns the original MS of The Hound of Heaven. He described it as 'a journal'. I wonder what else it contains?

For me, one of the strange things about Finis Coronat Opus is the way it suddenly switches into the first person at the point of the confession.

MrB

[Richard Patterson]

Richard,

I was going to ask if you knew when Finis Coronat Opus was written/published.

As you know, the 'confession' in the story takes place three years after the killing and the number three is significantly the number of times the cathedral bell tolls at midnight, the number of thrusts of the poniard and the number of times the victim cries out 'Oh, my god.'

While on a country walk the killer (Thompson/Florian?) finds a leaf with caterpillar damage that forms the number 3 and he takes that as an omen that retribution for the murder will come on the third anniversary of the deed.


MrB

You certainly know your Thompson. Here is some background on it. Francis Thompson's only published tale was written in autumn 1889. His short story, which is called “Finis Coronat Opus”, (Latin for the “End Crowning Work”) was set in a future kingdom, during autumn. It is narrated by a poet, named Florentian who wanting to be crowned the city's chief poet, holds a pagan sacrifice and stabs a woman to death. It has these words,

'If confession indeed give ease, I who am deprived of all other confession, may yet find some appeasement in confessing to this paper...I make the post-mortem examine of my crime.'

[MrBarnett]

Ausgirl,

No one is rejecting the idea that poets often write from their imagination. But they also often write from personal experience.

I would imagine that if your local police force discovered you wandering the streets at night near where those dismembered bodies where found carrying a meat cleaver and a manuscript of one of your angry poems describing the dismemberment of a former boyfriend, they would probably want to ask you one or two questions.

MrB

[MrBarnett]

Richard,

I was going to ask if you knew when Finis Coronat Opus was written/published.

As you know, the 'confession' in the story takes place three years after the killing and the number three is significantly the number of times the cathedral bell tolls at midnight, the number of thrusts of the poniard and the number of times the victim cries out 'Oh, my god.'

While on a country walk the killer (Thompson/Florian?) finds a leaf with caterpillar damage that forms the number 3 and he takes that as an omen that retribution for the murder will come on the third anniversary of the deed.


MrB

[Richard Patterson]

Of course it could have been taken as art, and that's almost certainly what it was.

But if a serial killer were also a poet, I think the chances are that his poems would contain at least obscure references to his crimes. And if the urge to confess was strong enough, he might go further.

Thompson wrote a story about a poet who sacrifices his lover to the gods in exchange for an increase in his poetic abilities.

It's a rather strange tale that a third of the way through switches to a first person confession of the murder of a woman in a dimly lit chamber. The killing takes place at midnight and the victim cries out 'Oh, my god ' at the point of death and opens her eyes. For me it has strong echoes of Millers Court, although some of the detail doesn't quite fit.

Given Thompson's presence in the East End in 1888, I think it's likely this tale was at least influenced by the murder of Mary Kelly.

Even if it is just likely his story was only influenced by these dreadful murders, it means Thompson was happy to make money from these murders, even before the 1st anniversary of Kelly’s death. His story was first distributed by a firm called Simpkin, Marshall and Co. They also dealt with other written works for Wilfrid Meynell. Out of all the hundreds of publishing houses in London, the first grab for money on the Ripper murders was by Simpkin, Marshall and Co. This was with the story ‘The Curse Upon Mitre Square: A.D. 1530 – 1888’. By a John Francis Brewer, concentrated on a specific Ripper murder too, that of Catherine Eddowes. It was published during the Ripper murders in October 1888.

Not all written adaptions of the Ripper murders had failed to maintain an audience. ‘The Lodger’, by Marie Belloc Lowndes was released by the Methuen publishing house which was founded a year after the Jack the Ripper murders. Out of the hundreds of publishing houses in London, they also released Thompson’s “Selected Poems” in 1908. It included a biographical note by Wilfrid Meynell. He would later become sometime manager of the firm. Unlike Simpkin, Marshall and Co, which required a carriage ride. Methuen Publishing had their offices at 36 Essex Street, London. On the same street, four doors down from his publishing house at number 44. Here was where Thompson had first let his first submission drop into the Meynell clan's mailbox for their literary magazine in February 1887.

[Ausgirl]

I -really- hope no-one turns up dead with a beehive stuffed down his throat.

[Ausgirl]

I have written several poems and short stories involving the concept of dismemberment. Some of the poems are very angry ones indeed, and are directly inspired by an ex-boyfriend.

Recently, a body turned up in my local river, male and cut into pieces.

Should I be a suspect? I do own a meat cleaver and all.