Jack the Ripper's Secret Confession-(Monaghan, 2010)

[David Monaghan]

Can't see Alice is a relative I know of. The Irish forebears had emigrated to Australia by 1913, but who knows, I could carry DNA of someone who thought they knew!!

regards
David Monaghan
Author
Jack the Ripper's Secret Confession

[DarkTaleProductions]

Cool, thanks. I found a website that has all the volumes.

http://www.my-secret-life.com/

[Tom_Wescott]

Hi Darke. It's about 11,000 pages. Multiple volumes. It's available online.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[DarkTaleProductions]

Where do you think I can buy the entire diary, don't know much about it. But would like to read the diary before I read the Ripper book so I could understand what I'm reading.

[harry]

David Monaghan,
Are you by any means connected to a Alice Monaghan.Alice wrote that Sir Basil Thomson,Assistant Commisioner metropolitan police(1913),believed Alexander Pedachenko to be the ripper.
Just curious.
Regards.

[David Monaghan]

I read the book. It is thought provoking that the fictional character "Walter" could have been the Ripper. But who wrote Secret Life?

Roy

Dear Roy,
a very good question. The book I wrote about Walter was specifically meant to argue his candiditure as Jack the Ripper, rather than expose his non de plume. A number of scholars have wrestled with that intriguing question. Bibliographer Henry Spence Ashbee was named as Walter by author Gershon Legman in his introduction to the Grove Press edition of My Secret Life in 1966. Legman said that he had been
told that Ashbee was the author by St George Best, himself an
author, who in turn said he heard it from Charles Carrington. Best smuggled Carrington’s prohibited
publications into the US and other countries.
Legman also suggested another candidate – Captain Edward
Sellon. However, Sellon committed suicide
in 1866. In My Secret Life, the author refers to reading earlier
volumes in print, so he must have been alive after 1888. Another suspect, in Legman’s eyes, was Richard Monckton
Milnes. Gordon Stein, a literary detective who worked for the Center
for Inquiry in Buffalo, New York, also investigated George
Augustus Sala, a journalist friend of Charles Dickens. Another Stein candidate was John Walter – born in 1818,
died in 1894. Stein also suggested John Stephen Farmer, thought to be the
author of the erotic work, Suburban Souls; William
S. Potter, who wrote the four-volume pornographic novel,
Romance of Lust, published between 1873 and 1876; and August John Cuthbert Hare, author of the six-volume, The
Story of My Life, published in 1876. However, Stein and his later collaborator Vern L Bullough used the clue of a trial mentioned in the text to come up with two friends
of of barrister William Overend who might qualify as Walter. One was banker Charles
Stanley. The other was Overend’s nephew, Thomas James
Overend, born in 1822, died in 1895. In 2002, John Patrick Pattinson of the New Jersey Institute of Technology came up with a new candidate, engineer and surveyor Lt. Col. William Haywood.

It is worth noting that despite disagreements on the author, no seriously scholar dismisses "My Secret life" as work of fiction. Although acknowledging it's embellishments and purposeful camouflage of facts, all agree Walter is not a fictional character but the pen name adopted by an auto-biographer.

regards
David Monaghan
Author
Jack the Ripper's Secret Confession

[Roy Corduroy]

I read the book. It is thought provoking that the fictional character "Walter" could have been the Ripper. But who wrote Secret Life?

Roy

[Tom_Wescott]

The Grave Maurice is no doubt an expert both in pornography and the lacking of knowledge, so I'd pay his words great heed.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[The Grave Maurice]

Hmmm. I find it interesting that a reviewer who appears to know little about either subject is, nonetheless, more than willing to offer an opinion. If Mr Cole knew about Victorian pornography, he would probably recommend The Romance of Lust, and, if he knew anything about JtR, he would probably point people to one of the standard texts. But lack of knowledge is, I suppose, one of the advantages of being a blogger.

[David Monaghan]

A Review of Jack the Ripper's Secret Confession posted to Pessimystic by blogger Tom Cole

And so we turn to Jack the Ripper’s Secret Confession, a book in which David Monaghan and Nigel Cawthorne claim that the man who made whoring in the East End decidedly dangerous was none other than ‘Walter’, the author of the infamous (and voluminous) Victorian erotic memoir, My Secret Life.

Jack the Ripper’s Secret Confession is quite the page-turner. The authors quote liberally from the more lurid episodes in My Secret Life, which are as shocking (and consequently entertaining) as you might imagine, as well as from reports into the underworld of 1890s London, and spare no detail in describing the Ripper murders. The book revealed to me a wodge of facts about the case and Victorian society at the turn of the 20th century of which I was previously unaware. The writers’ tactic of alternating chapters which focus heavily on the facts of the Ripper murders with others focusing intently on My Secret Life is effective and makes the book seem pacy and urgent.

While this book won’t tell you who the Ripper is (nor indeed will it firmly settle on the authorship of My Secret Life for that matter), it will entertain and engage you ‘til its end. Even approached with as sceptical a set of prior assumptions as my own, the book is an entertaining summary of the agreed facts around Jack the Ripper, a whistle-stop tour of late-Victorian London and an engaging discussion about one of English literature’s most hotly debated and notorious works, all of which are assets of the work to be commended. Well worth a read.

David Monaghan
Author
Jack the Ripper's Secret Confession

[Pontius2000]

I finished reading the book last night. It was interesting enough on it's own right, but I wouldn't say a strong argument was made for Walter being JTR.

The only thing I came away with was that Ashbee was not Walter. The strongest case being made was the last man discussed, the architect. '

Whoever Walter was, he was clearly a sexual sadist and a very disturbed individual, but there really wasn't one shred of evidence to link him to JTR.

The only thing that is really thought provoking is he wrote or edited it close enough to 1888 to make a passing remark about one of the Torso murders, but not one single mention about JTR. Someone as twisted as Walter would undoubtably have SOME interest in the JTR killings. That's really the only thing I found puzzling at all.

[Celesta]

Hi Mike,

I'm sorry. I've got some things on my mind this evening, and I just misread what you wrote. I'm certainly not dismissing David's book.

Hope you're well.

[The Good Michael]

Hmmm. Maybe I'll put this one off awhile, afterall, Mike.

Cel,

Maybe David has created a convincing argument. I'm keen on giving it a go. I was referring to 'My Secret Life' as BS.

Cheers,

Mike

[Celesta]

My opinion: My Secret Life reads like BS. It appears to be an early attempt at pornography with all the lewdness one might expect. It is strange and unabashed, but it doesn't seem real. Neither does it seem to be something that I would associate with JTR being utterly, openly sexual, when the debate of sexual intent in the Whitechapel murders has strong arguments for either side. Still, the book may be a good read.

Cheers,

Mike

Hmmm. Maybe I'll put this one off awhile, afterall, Mike.

[belinda]

I'm sorry, did you say "cunning"?

Thought I might sneak that one past