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

[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.

[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.

[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

[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.

[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

[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

[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

[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.

[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.

[Tom_Wescott]

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

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[DarkTaleProductions]

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

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

[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

[David Monaghan]

Good luck the with the reading!

regards

David Monaghan
Author
Jack the Ripper's Secret Confession

[David Monaghan]

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.

You are wise to read the Diary - all million words of it. However, I'd written my book specifically as a breakdown of, and introduction to the diary, to give a roadmap to understanding it. All previous efforts since the mid 1960s - when the diaries reappeared - had been more or less associated with the re-marketting of "My Secret Life" as an "erotic" product. This had shockingly misdirected any reader from the sheer brutality of the text, as publishers seemed to find it more palatable to highlight Walter as a great "lover", rather than a violent rapist and sex criminal.

regards
David Monaghan
Author
Jack the Ripper's Secret Confession

[David Monaghan]

Shreds that link Walter to JtR

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.

Glad to hear my book is getting a reading. But quite puzzled you could see no "shred" linking Walter to JtR. The mere fact this man was a sexual sadist aroused by blood who used low class East End prostitutes must be some sort of shred. The fact he chose to describe one of his major secret sexual liasons as poor and beautiful "Mary Davies" - married name of Mary Jane Kelly - is a strange co-incidence indeed. That Krafft-Ebing, the periods pre-eminent homicide psychiatrist who had studied sex mutilation murderers and predicted abdomen mutilation killers with innard removal would be men who fetishised virgin breaking, is fascinating when one consider's Walter's pre-occupation was this Victorian criminal cult. To link himself to the Thames Torso killing of 1889 is a link to the JtR killings in itself and must make him a suspect the year's previous carnage. From his boyhood Walter atrributes his sexual leaning to an incident in Whitechapel, when he glimpsed a woman's genitals and saw the "slit throat of a dog" - a shred that put's him in the frame both psycho-sexually and geographically. The absence of mention of the Ripper crimes in Walter's vast memoir is the dog that did not bark in the night. The author describes casting 80 page chunks of his sex diary "to the flames" for containing crimes worse that the rape, sadism, paedophilia and threats to kill during sex that Walter boasts of.

Very pleased you've given my theory some thought.

I hope you might reconsider what makes a shred!

Regards
David Monaghan
Author
Jack the Ripper's Secret Confession