Jack the Ripper and Black Magic: Victorian Conspiracy Theories, Secret Societies and

[auspirograph]

Academic Angles

It is always curious to read academia's perspective on Jack the Ripper such as in this review of the book for Inquire: Journal of Comparative Literature.

It was found in Issue 2.2: June 2012 on the theme of Literary Violence that some may find interesting.



Review by
Neale Barnholden



Dimolianis, Spiro. Jack the Ripper and Black Magic: Victorian Conspiracy Theories, Secret Societies and the Supernatural Mystique of the Whitechapel Murders. Jefferson, NC; London: McFarland & Company, 2011. 228 pp.



In the case of Jack the Ripper, not only do we not know who did it, we don’t even know what was done. What we do know about Jack the Ripper is that the murders of several women in London in late 1888 have come to be grouped together under that name. Beyond even the question of who committed the murders, it remains unclear how many of the murders are genuinely related. At this point, more than a century after the murders apparently ceased, most researchers are even convinced that the letter that gave the world the name Jack the Ripper was a hoax. As the events of this particular unsolved case – and the related actions of the police and society at large – recede farther into the past, the interest of researchers has shifted to consider Jack the Ripper more as history and less as a criminal. Spiro Dimolianis’ book Jack the Ripper and Black Magic is part of the wave of Ripper scholarship that is less interested in “whodunnit” than it is interested in what the case, with more than a hundred years of theories attached to it, says about the time and place of its origin. Unfortunately, Dimolianis’ book, despite its subtitle Victorian Conspiracy Theories, Secret Societies and the Supernatural Mystique of the Whitechapel Murders, requires the reader to come to the text already fairly familiar with the vortex of theories and mystique that Dimolianis, an Australian independent scholar, is interested in exploring. Because he is interested in the origin and significance of Jack the Ripper theories, Dimolianis focuses on presenting documentary evidence to debunk theories but fails to explain those theories. Jack the Ripper and Black Magic draws on an impressive amount of research to discuss the historical context of the Ripper cultural phenomenon, but remains frustratingly inaccessible.


The title of Dimolianis' book is an inversion of Black Magic and Jack the Ripper, the title of an unpublished 1958 manuscript by crime reporter Bernard O’Donnell which, Dimolianis demonstrates, not only includes fabrications concerning the case, but also became an authority for later, even less grounded theories. Dimolianis is, by contrast, forming a theory about the vortex, the mystique of theories that surrounds the historical reality of Jack the Ripper. In Dimolianis’ words, “a historical vacuum has expressed itself in conspiracy theories about corruption in high places at the expense of the lower classes” (190). Similar historical vacuums express themselves in other unfounded but common convictions about the Ripper: that he was a practitioner of black magic, that he was tracked to America by Scotland Yard, that he was a woman. The task of this book is to revive the “period associations” – the historical context – of the “suspicions, perceptions and theories” of the murders, which have become “lost in the politicized labyrinth of intervening years” (26). Dimolianis’ research is largely concerned with finding and illuminating the original sources of different theories about the Ripper killings and providing historical and social context for the history of Ripper theories.


To that end, Dimolianis has sifted through a mountain of evidence to produce a somewhat smaller mountain of evidence – evidence in the sense of significant documents, that is, rather than any new clews of the sort that Scotland Yard would have been seeking in 1888. Dimolianis admirably resists the temptation to make his book another explosive theory that supposedly reveals the guilt of Madame Blavatsky, Bram Stoker, Sir William Gull, Inspector Athelney Jones, the Loch Ness Monster, etc. In Jack the Ripper and Black Magic, the reader is dealing instead with a study of a cultural moment, and Dimolianis is presenting us with a theory about Jack-the-Ripper-theories. In the face of some of the reasoning that has previously been applied to the case, the fact that Dimolianis focuses on the idea of Jack the Ripper rather than the person Jack the Ripper demonstrates the author's critical awareness. Dimolianis demonstrates that, for example, the simple fact that no killer was caught became the evidence for Sir Robert Anderson’s statement that the killer was a Jew being sheltered by his kind, Aleister Crowley’s belief that the killer was a mystic rendered invisible, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s deduction that the killer went about dressed as a woman. That these theories, as Dimolianis notes, tell us more about Anderson, Crowley and Doyle than about the killer, suggests the constant movement of his criticism from actual events towards the culture in which they took place.


Since the book is not an introduction to the world of so-called “Ripperology” (the preface recommends two other books as appendices to this work) the book can be quite confusing to a reader unfamiliar with the at times obscure elements of Ripper theories. For example, Chapter 4 discusses “Dr. Roslyn D’Onston,” an odd character who introduced many ideas that would later be taken as evidence that D'Onston himself was the murderer – and later, evidence that the Ripper was a magician of some kind. Part of D’Onston’s theory, aside from a truly bizarre deduction about the killer being French, involves a map of the murder sites, which form a mystical cross. Dimolianis includes a section of D’Onston’s article for the Pall Mall Gazette in which D’Onston explains the theory. Dimolianis does not, however, provide a map, a decision that is symptomatic of a larger problem with the book. Maps of Whitechapel with the relevant locations marked out are not difficult to find: Jack the Ripper and the East End, edited by Alex Werner, includes a chapter by Laura Vaughan discussing maps and the East End of London, with no less than five maps on which the reader can visualize the supposed cross. Since, ultimately, Dimolianis argues that D’Onston and W.T. Stead were engaged in tabloid journalism to save a floundering newspaper, a map may not be necessary, but its absence stands for the way that this book can easily become a labyrinth itself. The text does not explain what Parnellism was, who the Theosophists were, what was involved in the Maybrick diary controversy, or what the Special Branch of the Scotland Yard CID was, despite Dimolianis' acknowledgement that these, and other equally unexplained reference points, are highly significant for understanding the context of Jack the Ripper theories.


This problem is not helped by the book’s confusing syntax. On page 77, in the context of a police report on D’Onston, the form of the book shifts to a timeline written in the present tense, leading to sentences such as this: “Though documentation of the outcome of the police interview or of [Chief Inspector] Swanson’s conclusions is not available, Inspector Root’s previous knowledge of him appears to discount D’Onston as Jack the Ripper.” Does Inspector Root’s knowledge discount D’Onston to us, the readers, in the absence of documentation? Or does Inspector Root’s knowledge discount D’Onston as a suspect to Chief Inspector Swanson at the time, an event for which there is no available documentation? I remain unsure what Dimolianis is asserting in this sentence and this ambiguity is unfortunately representative of the entire book.


The value of Jack the Ripper and Black Magic is in the amount of primary source research Dimolianis has assembled. Each chapter contains ample quotations from police documents, private letters, out-of-print books, and difficult to find newspapers and newsletters. If a reader is interested in learning about the immediate context of the Ripper murders, this would serve as a guide to particular sources. Dimolianis’ focus is on a few particular nodes of Ripper history, and therefore his book does not address the shadow of the Ripper in popular culture, or even try to theorize most of the winding, elaborate corners of Ripperology. The book, in conjunction with others on the subject, could provide a resource for the reader to form his or her own theories – theories about the solution to the murder, or their cultural significance. That this is the most valuable part of this book, rather than Dimolianis’ vague theory about mysteries becoming the site of overdetermined cultural work and anxiety, demonstrates the need for further development of this body of research.


It becomes clear in this book that the particular problem of Jack the Ripper is in the cultural illegibility of what I will euphemistically call his actions. Dimolianis points out that “it is with the subjective question of motive that conspiracy theories are born in unsolved murder inquiries” (28), but elides the fact that all the theorizing surrounding the killings is an attempt to understand particular acts of violence: it is the actual specific outrages performed on the women in Whitechapel that fuel the theorizing. Contemporaries and later theorists suspected a doctor or a butcher (whether Jewish or gentile) because of the precision of the wounds; they suspected a magician because Catherine Eddowes’ uterus was removed. In theory, an analysis like Dimolianis’, which deliberately chooses not to make the Ripper the subject of a horror novel or a conspiracy thriller, should have the effect of dispelling lofty and distant theorizing and reminding us that at the base of Jack the Ripper the cultural node centers on violently murdered women. Robin Odell’s 2006 Ripperology is also ostensibly a study of the phenomenon of Jack the Ripper, but while it begins with a fact file explaining each murder in turn, which could seem ghoulish or cold, in context the work is grounded by the recollection that murder, rather than relatively comforting police reports and newspaper articles, is the ultimate historical vacuum here. While Dimolianis provides much information shedding light on how the Jack the Ripper theories can have very little to do with those murders, he also replaces a vortex of misguided conjecture pointing nowhere with an overwhelming chaos of confusing information that sprawls endlessly outward.


Works Cited

Odell, Robin. Ripperology: A Study of the World’s First Serial Killer and a Literary Phenomenon. Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 2006. Print.

Werner, Alex, ed. Jack the Ripper and the East End. London: Chatto & Windus, 2008. Print.


Bio

Neale Barnholden is a PhD student at the University of Alberta, and the PhD Co-Chair of the Graduate Students of English Collective.

http://inquire.streetmag.org/articles/84

[auspirograph]

Could that not simply be to cover a change of policy?

Absolutely, but you need also to explain what that change would be. The elections were some 2 years away, Salisbury's government was enjoying the 'splendid majority' and 86 members of the opposition in the House of Commons were imprisoned on changes of the Crimes bill of 1887.

Face saving? Perhaps, but Matthews does refer to evidence that had since come to the government's attention which was missing in the earlier murders.

[Phil H]

Or why the Home Office would for the first time issue grant of a Royal pardon to any accomplice in the crime.

Could that not simply be to cover a change of policy?

Ministers and officials dislike (and undoubtedly disliked) reversing a firmly stated policy - it makes them look foolish and undermines confidence in other similar decisions.

After saying for so many weeks and so adamantly - no rewards - they offer one (in extremis and the face of mounting pressure) but mask it asbeing directed to an "accomplice". It would also allow them not to reverse their wider policy or set a precedent for future cases.

There may have been other, or additional reasons, but the one I have stated works for me.

Phil H

[auspirograph]

The Politics of Serial Killing

Thanks fellas (chaps),

So Millen was as likely to not be involved in the Whitechapel murders as Kosminski was more likely than Cutbush without any shadow of proof.

It only remains to explain why the police, according to the Scotland Yard Crime Index of 1888, considered involvement of the Irish Party on the murder of Mary Kelly. Or why the Home Office would for the first time issue grant of a Royal pardon to any accomplice in the crime.

As the responsibility of police investigations rested ultimately with the Secretary of State, and whom Swanson and Anderson supplied with a steady stream of paperwork, do Victorian politics explain subsequent senior police scenarios for a serial killer they didn't catch?

Any takers for a theme explored liberally in my book?

[mklhawley]

Hi Lynn,

Bad news, I'm afraid.

On Wednesday 14th November 1888 General F.F. Millen was in New York, a dinner guest at Delmonico's restaurant to celebrate the recent Republican victory at the polls.

Source: New York Tribune, 15th November 1888.

Regards,

Simon

Hi all,

Yes, General F.F. Millen, our 'Fenian skirmisher', was the night editor of the New York Herald in 1888, which was coincidentally the newspaper pushing Inspector Andrews' Canadian trip as collecting anti-Parnellite evidence.

Sincerely,
Mike

[lynn cates]

fabric-ation

Hello Simon. Thanks.

Actually, that's good news. A-man must have been a fabricated story. (heh-heh)

Cheers.
LC

[Simon Wood]

Hi Lynn,

Bad news, I'm afraid.

On Wednesday 14th November 1888 General F.F. Millen was in New York, a dinner guest at Delmonico's restaurant to celebrate the recent Republican victory at the polls.

Source: New York Tribune, 15th November 1888.

Regards,

Simon

[lynn cates]

getting warmer

Hello Simon. Of course I will thank you.

Let me know when we get to first half of November.

Cheers.
LC

[Simon Wood]

Hi Lynn,

I realise you may not thank me for this, but I can now also place Millen in New York on 23rd November 1888.

Regards,

Simon

[lynn cates]

window

Hello Simon. Thanks. Certainly narrows the window a bit.

Cheers.
LC

[Simon Wood]

Hi Lynn,

I can place Millen in New York on 24th September 1888, if that's any help.

New York Tribune, 25th September 1888—



Regards,

Simon

[lynn cates]

Millen to one

Hello Spiro. Thanks. Had not noticed this post before.

Yes, it is the resemblances to which I refer. The physical descriptions greatly limit the overall male population; that both had been employed by Sir Ed makes an intersection of two sets. Hence, the probability of mere coincidence decreases.

Can you present evidence that Frank Millen was not in London at this time? I would be much obliged.

Cheers.
LC

[auspirograph]

Not to mention McDermott (Blotchy) and Millen (Astrakhan).

Hi Lynn,

Do you have any evidence for the assertion that McDermott was Blotchy and Millen Astrakhan Man? That is, apart from what is presumed to be resemblances?

McDermott might be placed in London but not at Dorset Street and it is probable that Millen wasn't even in the country at the time.

Thanks

[lynn cates]

cast of characters

Hello Barbara. Not to mention McDermott (Blotchy) and Millen (Astrakhan).

Cheers.
LC

[auspirograph]

Alice in Ripperland

Thanks Beowolf, I'm pleased you are enjoying the book's narrative journey. Just wait till you get to the last extended chapter, "Whitechapel Secret Service" where the 'dark arts' of Victorian British intelligence are laid bare in the hunt for Jack the Ripper.

Fortunately, this is the only full account on the Whitechapel murders documented, now that the Special Branch investigation index books have been redacted and restricted to FOI requests. The entire story had to be re-constructed as historically, the period is blank before WW1.

Special Branch in the period, and in their formative years, did also investigate unsolved cases of suspected serial murder apart from their other duties. The Dr. Cream Lambeth poisoning case was another such example as the Whitechapel murders.

It is not a theory, but plausible, internal and parallel lines of police enquiry signed off by Anderson, Swanson, Monro and Chief Constable Macnaghten during tense political power struggles for a suspected serial killer with presence of mind to evade capture by three London police groups. Or perhaps, in spite and despite them.