R.L.S., H.J., & E.H.: a questions of sources and results

[David Orsam]

Forgetting Pierre for the moment, what do you think of the possibility of some kind of influence by reading or (if seeing the play with Mansfield in it) on the killer?

I really have no comment to make on this Jeff.

Happy new year to you though!

[David Orsam]

It is not "the same queen". It is one victim: one Mary with the attributes of two queens.

Like I said, Pierre styling it out. The attributes of two queens indeed!

[John G]

Have you been reading Alice in Wonderland again, Pierre? Are there any other fairy tales that you also enjoy? Apart from the one about your suspect, of course.

[Pierre]

Well Dave, it is the New Year. Let's try to be a little forbearing here - after all my own ideas can be totally wrong too.

Forgetting Pierre for the moment, what do you think of the possibility of some kind of influence by reading or (if seeing the play with Mansfield in it) on the killer?

Jeff

Thanks Jeff,

And David is continuing his attacks on me in his discussion with you, trying to correct you and misinterpreting me.

Mary is represented by the two queens: One for Lord Mayor´s Day in Tennysons play, one for the position of the arm in the painting.

Mary Kelly was killed on Lord Mayor´s Day and the killer positioned her arm as in the painting.

It is not "the same queen". It is one victim: one Mary with the attributes of two queens.

At least one could expect that people here were serious. But David is constantly making up lies about me and he is systematically misinterpreting everyting I write. So David is the one who is wrong.

Very sorry to bother you with it, Jeff.

Regards, Pierre

[Mayerling]

Jeff, you give the guy way to much credit, as if there might be some consistency in his thinking.

The portrait he linked to showing the arm in the position of Kelly's arm was to one of Mary, Queen of Scots.

The subject of Tennyson's play, to which he has also referred, was Queen Mary of England.

Yes, of course, he got the two Marys confused but has tried to style it out.

Well Dave, it is the New Year. Let's try to be a little forbearing here - after all my own ideas can be totally wrong too.

Forgetting Pierre for the moment, what do you think of the possibility of some kind of influence by reading or (if seeing the play with Mansfield in it) on the killer?

Jeff

[Henry Flower]

"I will have to analyze it again"

Yes. You will. Try to avoid absolutely basic errors of fact old chap.

[David Orsam]

I seem to recall last year your attempt to link the positioning of Kelly's arm (I think it was Kelly's) to a picture of Mary I of England ("Bloody Mary), and a reference (correct me, as you probably will) to Tennyson's play about Queen Mary. That suggests some kind of literary background may have been involved.

Jeff, you give the guy way to much credit, as if there might be some consistency in his thinking.

The portrait he linked to showing the arm in the position of Kelly's arm was to one of Mary, Queen of Scots.

The subject of Tennyson's play, to which he has also referred, was Queen Mary of England.

Yes, of course, he got the two Marys confused but has tried to style it out.

[Pierre]

Hello,

Perhaps you are right, but I seem to recall last year your attempt to link the positioning of Kelly's arm (I think it was Kelly's) to a picture of Mary I of England ("Bloody Mary), and a reference (correct me, as you probably will) to Tennyson's play about Queen Mary. That suggests some kind of literary background may have been involved.

Also, although this is just a guess, your constant suggestion of coded messages left for the killer's adversaries may (although I can't tell of any literary models) have been based on somethings in code that appeared in some writings that the killer came upon in the past.

Thank you for taking notice anyway. Happy New Year.

Jeff

Hi Jeff,

I forgot about the arm. Anyway, that was just a discussion, and I am not at all sure what I think about it right now. I will have to analyze it again. Thanks for reminding me.

Happy New Year, Jeff!

Pierre

[Mayerling]

Hi,

I have no reason to think that the killer had any strong literary interests ruling his thinking and acting. He knew of course about literature and was educated in it. But I think that he used a few literary references, and here I also include purely linguistic expressions, for the purely practical reason of getting what he wanted through his communication with a reciever of his messages.

So how many literary references (LR) / linguistic expressions (LE) might he have used in connection to the murders if you ask me?

1. Nichols: none.
2. Chapman: one LE.
3. Stride and Eddowes: one LE = the GSG.
4. Kelly: one LR, one LE.
5. Jackson and/or McKenzie: one LR.

Regards, Pierre

Hello,

Perhaps you are right, but I seem to recall last year your attempt to link the positioning of Kelly's arm (I think it was Kelly's) to a picture of Mary I of England ("Bloody Mary), and a reference (correct me, as you probably will) to Tennyson's play about Queen Mary. That suggests some kind of literary background may have been involved.

Also, although this is just a guess, your constant suggestion of coded messages left for the killer's adversaries may (although I can't tell of any literary models) have been based on somethings in code that appeared in some writings that the killer came upon in the past.

Thank you for taking notice anyway. Happy New Year.

Jeff

[Pierre]

Instructive to occasionally read outside the website - especially when annoyed by claims of great discoveries that never get anywhere.

Recently I took advantage of one of the other threads to discuss a curious situation concerning Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde, and possibly Melville MacNaughten. Served me right that it was basically ignored - it just touched on some other matters on the thread, but I was holding back for some time on the subjects.

One of my failings (an admitted one) is an interest in Victorian literature and it's connections to actual events of the day - something that happens in all literature when you think about it. When I wrote that piece in the book "Who Was Jack the Ripper" about the GSG and a possible link to Conan Doyle's use of a similar clue in the 1887 novella "A Study in Scarlet" I was showing my hand a bit on this. The explosion I mentioned in the last paragraph was of a similar nature (as Conan Doyle was involved) but it was part of a grander plan to discuss Conan Doyle and true crime influences in his works.

Well, today I am not talking about ACD. Instead I am going to talk about his contemporary, RLS - Robert Louis Stevenson. For years it has been a kind of side footnote to the Whitechapel Murders that Stevenson's great novella, "Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde" happens to have a relationship (of sorts) with the killings. This is because, in 1887, a dramatization of that story was made that soon was packing the West End theatres in London, starring the great actor Richard Mansfield. With it's tale of a killer who is a respectable doctor to most people, and who prowls the slums for fun, it was soon afterwards associated with the Whitechapel Case of the next year, and Mansfield (whose performance must have been staged remarkably) suspected by some of being the actual killer. In fact, in the 1988 television film with Michael Caine, Armont Assante is Mansfield, and is regarding with some suspicion.

I was looking up "Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde" today on "Wikipedia", and was surprised to find that the source of the story is more complex than I always thought. It seems I had been brought up hearing that Stevenson was deeply impressed by the career of the 18th Century Town Counselman (or Edinburgh) and master carpenter, Deacon William Brodie, who was also a highly successful burglar at night, because his job as a carpenter enabled him to case the homes of many of his well-to-do neighbors, and discover how to avoid their burglar traps. Brodie was usually considered the model for Dr. Jeckyll, and (aside from Brodie never killing anybody - like Hyde kills Sir Danvers Carew in the story) that seemed to be the basis for the background. Still Brodie's story fascinated Stevenson, and in 1882 he and W.E. Henley collaborated on a play called "Deacon Brodie".

The only attempt I ever found of another possible source for Jeckyll's turning into Hyde was the career (in the 1870s) of the notorious burglar and murderer Charles Peace, who in the daytime hours lived as a retired merchant named Mr. Thompson in Peckham. The latter idea was voiced by Richard Altick in his book "Victorian Studies in Scarlet".

I could see that Peace's career would somehow gell nicely with Brodie (they are both successful burglars, after all) with Stevenson. But while Brodie was a craftsman who served in a public office, and turned to crime for fun and to pay gambling debts, Peace pretended to be a gentleman, but was actually a career criminal from the start. Still when a writer wishes he/she picks and chooses what elements he finds similar in his sources to create his/her fiction.

So the Wikipedia surprised me a bit. The psychic researcher, Frederick W. H. Myers, wrote to Stevenson after he had read the published story. Myers was aware of a recently discussed case of one Louis Vivet, a man with one of the earliest discussed cases of multiple personality disorder. He asked if the Vivet case had influenced the writing of "Dr. Jeckyll" Stevenson politely said it did not.

The circumstances for the writing of the story were somewhat melodramatic. While ill from a bad hemorrhage he had suffered, Stevenson had a nightmare that his wife Fanny Osborne interrupted. Stevenson claimed the nightmare was giving him the plot of a story. Later he would write down his dream, and read it to Fanny, but she said it was an allegory. He supposedly (there is some question of this) destroyed the original version and rewrote it as we now have it.

The Wikipedia information also led to a feature I never knew of before. In the 1870s Stevenson, when visiting his former French teacher Victor Richon, had met a well-regarded French teacher (and author on the subject of French grammar) named Eugene Marie Chantrelle. Apparently they got to know each other a bit. Chantrelle would eventually be tried and convicted (in 1878) for the murder of his wife Mary Cullen Dyer Chantrelle, with opium poisoning, that he tried to disguise as death by misadventure with an open gas tap in her room. Chantrelle's trial was attended by Stevenson, who would learn from the Proscurator Fiscal that Chantrelle was suspected of several similar murders in France and England. The trial is of interest too because the government used as a forensic witness Dr. Joseph Bell, teacher of Arthur Conan Doyle and model for Sherlock Holmes. Chantrelle was convicted, and was executed on May 31, 1878.

The connection of Stevenson and Chantrelle is in a biography about Stevenson by Jeremy Hodge. It gives another potential source for the model of Jeckyll/Hyde that was even closer to Stevenson than his knowledge of Deacon Brodie's career. Also Chantrelle's legal disaster is parallel in time to the rise and fall (1876 - 1879) of Peace. So one can imagine the three strands joining together at this point in time. And eventually creating the central pair of figures, representing good and evil in one human being, in the novella.

Of course, the same issue that I wondered about dealing with the GSG and the "Rache" clue in "A Study in Scarlet" holds true here as well. Did the Whitechapel killer have any awareness of Stevenson's creation(s) from the novella or the play with Mansfield, as I asked regarding Conan Doyle's published first "Sherlock Holmes" story. Certainly it is something to ponder. If we dismiss a well educated and read Ripper from our minds, considering only a lower class working man who has no interest outside of his work and lifestyle, than the issue is not important. But if the Ripper was well read, one wonders if he was building up a private reading list for ideas or inspiration. However, one thing is certain. As of now we have never linked the Ripper to the murder of any benevolent Members of Parliament like Sir Danvers Carew. Possibly our unknown killer was too sharp to go that far with any attempts at imitation.

Hi,

I have no reason to think that the killer had any strong literary interests ruling his thinking and acting. He knew of course about literature and was educated in it. But I think that he used a few literary references, and here I also include purely linguistic expressions, for the purely practical reason of getting what he wanted through his communication with a reciever of his messages.

So how many literary references (LR) / linguistic expressions (LE) might he have used in connection to the murders if you ask me?

1. Nichols: none.
2. Chapman: one LE.
3. Stride and Eddowes: one LE = the GSG.
4. Kelly: one LR, one LE.
5. Jackson and/or McKenzie: one LR.

Regards, Pierre

[Mayerling]

Complete message from before.

QUOTE=DJA;404925]First question.....where did Mr Hyde live?
Who was Inspector Newcomen modelled on?
What did the "real" Sir Danvers Carew die from?

Think the 1888 West End season started in August 1888,weeks before Nichols moved next door to Eddowes.[/QUOTE]

Hi DJA

Hyde has a set of rooms in the story (they are visited by the police after Carew's murder, but he has flown. He also enters and exits a side door on the street with his own key - the door leads to the home of Jeckyll, via Jeckyll's laboratory. I don't know where Hyde lives. By the way, I wonder how many readers of the story from 1886 to the present realize that the two names of the single individual who is both characters actually do suggest what Stevenson was thinking of them. Henry Jeckyll (respectable physician and healer of the sick, seeking to release hidden passions) as a "jackal", and his alter ego who is himself in disguise (as it were) is Mr. Edward Hyde (as in "hiding"?). Stevenson may have had less pity about Jeckyll than we suspect.

Can't tell you about Inspector Newcomen at all. If you ideas of your own, feel free to express them.

The death of Sir Danvers Carew opens up a curious note about Victorian crime. Despite the use of titled corpses in a slew (pun intended) of novels, stories, and plays, very few Victorian English (or British) noblemen ended up dying violently by murder. Some got tied badly to murder cases, but usually as an unwilling participant/witness.

1840 - Lord William Russell (of the famous family that produced Lord John Russell, his nephew and twice Prime Minister of Britain, as well as the philosopher Bertram Russell): throat cut in bed by his valet Francois Benjamin Courvoisier in his flat on Park Lane. Well known case due to the antics of Courvoisier's gifted barrister, Charles Phillips, who conducted a skillful defense for the first day or so of the trial, when the prosecution sprung a surprised witness on the defense - a woman who knew Courvoisier had deposited a sachel of valuable stole items within a day of the murder. Courvoisier and Phillips had a quick conference in which the valet confessed he did kill his boss, but he insisted Phillips continue with the "non guilty" plea, and that he continue his tactics (which smeared another servant as the guilty party). Phillips did so, opening a legal ethical conumdrum that has lasted until the present day. The Courvoisier case also led to William Makepeace Thackeray's famous essay against capital punishment ("On Going to See A Man Hanged" which helped ignite the public clamor to end public executions (Dickens joined it in 1849, when he went to see the double executions of George and Maria Manning for the murder of Maria's lover and his burial under some llooring in their Bermondsey flat).*

[*Both Dickens and Thackeray took a keen interest in law and punishment, Dickens even visiting model prisons on occasion. Both men show elements of crimes in their fiction: Dickens used Maria Manning as a model for the murderess "Madame Hortense" in "Bleak House, while the mysterious death of Jos Sedley at the end of "Vanity Fair" by Thackeray, supposedly by his mistress Becky Sharpe, is somewhat suggested by the 1830 mystery of the death of the last Prince de Conde, possibly by his mistress Sophie Daws (from one of the Channel Islands), Baroness de Feucheres. Conde also was afraid of his younger mistress at the time of his demise (he was found hanged). Stanley Loomis, in his study of the 1847 murder of the Duchess of Praslin by her husband - "A Crime of Passion", suggests that elements of that crime are also in "Vanity Fair" (which was published in 1848). Thackeray had severe questions of the validity of the death penalty, and in 1839 wrote an essay about the Peytal Murder Case in France, where a French lawyer was executed for killing his wife and a servant - but claimed the servant had attacked them, and he had defended himself when threatened. He also wrote a novel previous to "Vanity Fair", "Catherine" about the 18th Century wife murderer Catherine Hayes, and her co-conspirators. Thackeray's interest in homicides would last until his death, and in 1863 wrote an essay mentioning the 1860 murder of a French jurist on a train by an Alsacean named Jud. Ironically he mentioned that it could happen on a British train, and in 1864 it did - when Thomas Briggs was killed probably by Franz Muller. Yet throughout his life, Thackeray had a peculiar joke. When he dropped in unexpectedly on a friend he would have himself announced by using the name of the currently well-known defendant in a homicide case! Ironically, after his death, his expensive, palatial home in London was sold by his daughters to a wealthy man, Mr. Joseph Bravo of Jamaica - the step-father of the ill-fated Charles Bravo, who is at the center of the 1876 "Balham Poisoning Mystery".]

2) The Earl of Mayo - Richard Bourke, an Anglo-Irish public servant and aristocrat, was stabbed to death (1872) while Viceroy of India by a native Indian serving a life term for another murder. The Indian had killed an enemy in a blood feud, and did not understand why he was being punished for what he considered was normal behavior. So he was determined to kill the next important public official visiting the prison on the Andaman Island compound he was in (shades of "Jonathan Small" and his co-defendants in Conan Doyle's "The Sign of the Four". The Indian was hanged, and Mayo mourned. He would be the only sitting British Viceroy assassinated in India up to it's independence, but not the only one to be assassinated. The last Viceroy was Lord Louis Mountbatten, and he was blown up by a bomb on his yacht with his grandson and others by an I.R.A. member in 1977.

3) William Stanley, Third Earl of Leitrim (1878). Charming fellow. Liked to throw tenants off his farms if they voted against the Tory overclass. Even refused the use of his hotel for paying guests to visiting members of the Liberal Party. He and his estate manager were killed by three men when they were riding through a forest on the estate. There were arrests by the authorities, and at least one of the prisoners died in custody, but no convictions from the trials. The "fix" was in (as our current President-elect, author of "The Art of the Steal" might say). The jurors knew who were the killers, but didn't care. Everyone who knew Lord Leitrim hated his guts. So no convictions were possible, and the case was "officially unsolved". I like the coda to this story. Leitrim's area eventually became part of Eire, not the Northern Ireland portion. In the 1960s a monument was set up in the local cemetery in honor of the three men who did kill Leitrim, naming them, and proclaiming them heroes in the war against Leitrim's form of "Landlordism"!

4) Lord Mountmorres (1880). Another victim of the land wars in Ireland. I have to admit I don't know much about his case, but I believe it was never "officially" solved either.

5) Lord Frederick Cavendish and Thomas Burke (1882) - possibly the most famous assassinations in modern (last two hundred years) of British history, the "Phoenix Park Assassinations". The unfortunate Lord Frederick is the only British Cabinet Official (Lord Chief Secretary for Ireland) to have been murdered, on his first day in office. This apparently was not the plan. A group called "the Invincibles" led by a Dublin town councilor named James Carey, staged an attack in Phoenix Park (near the government buildings, to kill Burke, whom they regarded as a traitor to Ireland. Cavendish was walking with him, and made the brave but foolish attempt to stop the attack and was killed as well. Carey, who was recognized near the scene (he had signaled the killers when Burke was approaching), was one of several to turn state's evidence to save his own skin. Eight men would be executed in 1883 for the murder. Carey himself was hustled with his family onto a ship going to South Africa, and then to a second ship headed for the eastern south African colony of Natal. While on the second ship, off the coast, he was shot and killed by one Patrick O'Donnell. O'Donnell would be hustled back for trial in London, defended by the great Sir Charles Russell who put up a spirited defense of self-defense, but convicted and hanged in December 1883. O'Donnell was related to several of the Irish immigrants to the U.S. who emigrated to the coal mining regions of Pennsylvania, and founded the "Molly Maguires" as a workers association against the mine owners and the railroads, and who were later smashed by a spy (James MacParland, of the Pinkerton Detective Agency) in a series of trials in 1876-77. This connection of O'Donnell to the Mollies was revealed in the early 20th Century to Conan Doyle by William Pinkerton, and when Conan Doyle writes the last of the Sherlock Holmes' novels, "The Valley of Fear", he adds a post-script that the anti-Molly (here call the "Scowlers") spy, John Douglas/"Birdy Edwards", when on a ship off St. Helena (which is actually on the west coast of Africa) is lost overboard and nobody knows how. Holmes, who has gotten a cryptic message from an old nemesis (Professor Moriarty) realizes that the Professor arranged the death of Douglas (and informer) because he (the Professor) had been advising the surviving Scowlers on how to hunt down this informer, and could not afford to let Douglas get away. So Carey's murder becomes (in slightly different method) Douglas' murder.

There was one other murder where an unwelcome connection forced an aristocrat (a well-known one) to be called as a witness. In 1872 the "Park Lane" Mystery occurred where a Madame Riel was slaughtered in her mansion there (as Lord William Russell had been thirty two years earlier) by her maid, Marguerite Dixblanc (a Belgian born servant). Apparently Madame Riel was a very difficult employer, and there is a similarity to the later 1879 killing of her employer by Kate Webster, but Miss Dixblanc did not seek to sell off Madame Riel's property for her own benefit, nor boiled the deceased's remains down to make it easier to cut the body up (nor apparently sell the "drippings" to neighbors for cooking - although I wonder if that actually was done by Webster). Dixblanc fled to Paris, but was brought back (ironically by a future jail-bird, Chief Inspector Nathanial Druscovitch - later convicted with Meikeljohn and Palmer in the 1877 "Trial of the Detectives"), and stood trial. I am glad to say she got some mercy, and just got a stiff prison term, not the death penalty (unlike Kate Webster). Madame Riel was the mistress of a prominent aristocrat and army officer, head of the cavalry units, who had served in the Crimean War - somewhat to the detrement of six hundred light brigaders. Her sugar daddy was the Earl of Lucan. Lord Lucan had to testify as to the financial arrangements of the Riel household to give background to how much was paid to Dixblanc. He gave the testimony, and left the courtroom with a bit more mud on his reputation (but not as much as at Balaclava). In 1887 Lucan was finally made (at age 90!) a field marshal. He died on November 10, 1888, so he also survived Mary Kelly by a day or so. And of course, his descendant apparently disappeared a short time after the murder of his children's nanny in 1974, and was never heard from "officially" again, and legally declared dead last year.

Although Lord William Russell had been an MP in the 1820s and 1830s, he never really made as much of a note in Parliament as his nephew Lord John Russell did. Mayo and Cavendish did hold important jobs, but were not (strictly speaking) recalled as MPs - in fact, Mayo would have been in the House of Lords. Leitrim probably despised all politicians, tolerating those who were Tories because they did what he wanted to see done in Ireland. I can't speak for Lord Mountmorres. As for Lucan, he concentrated (however dimly) on military affairs when he wasn't conducting other affairs.

There is also an 1870 case in Greece involving a traveler (Lord Muncaster) who was captured by brigands for ransom - several in his party were killed, and the incident had a negative affect on the relations between the British and the Greeks.

Those are the best known "aristocrat" related kilings from 1837 to 1901 I could find. None resemble the killing of Sir Danvers Carew.

[Mayerling]

First question.....where did Mr Hyde live?
Who was Inspector Newcomen modelled on?
What did the "real" Sir Danvers Carew die from?

Think the 1888 West End season started in August 1888,weeks before Nichols moved next door to Eddowes.

Hi DJA

Hyde has a set of rooms in the story (they are visited by the police after Carew's murder, but he has flown. He also enters and exits a side door on the street with his own key - the door leads to the home of Jeckyll, via Jeckyll's laboratory. I don't know where Hyde lives. By the way, I wonder how many readers of the story from 1886 to the present realize that the two names of the single individual who is both characters actually do suggest what Stevenson was thinking of them. Henry Jeckyll (respectable physician and healer of the sick, seeking to release hidden passions) as a "jackal", and his alter ego who is himself in disguise (as it were) is Mr. Edward Hyde (as in "hiding"?). Stevenson may have had less pity about Jeckyll than we suspect.

Can't tell you about Inspector Newcomen at all. If you ideas of your own, feel free to express them.

The death of Sir Danvers Carew opens up a curious note about Victorian crime. Despite the use of titled corpses in a slew (pun intended) of novels, stories, and plays, very few Victorian English (or British) noblemen ended up dying violently by murder. Some got tied badly to murder cases, but usually as an unwilling participant/witness.

1840 - Lord William Russell (of the famous family that produced Lord John Russell, his nephew and twice Prime Minister of Britain, as well as the philosopher Bertram Russell): throat cut in bed by his valet Francois Benjamin Courvoisier in his flat on Park Lane. Well known case due to the antics of Courvoisier's gifted barrister, Charles Phillips, who conducted a skillful defense for the first day or so of the trial, when the prosecution sprung a surprised witness on the defense - a woman who knew Courvoisier had deposited a sachel of valuable stole items within a day of the murder. Courvoisier and Phillips had a quick conference in which the valet confessed he did kill his boss, but he insisted Phillips continue with the "non guilty" plea, and that he continue his tactics (which smeared another servant as the guilty party). Phillips did so, opening a legal ethical conumdrum that has lasted until the present day. The Courvoisier case also led to William Makepeace Thackeray's famous essay against capital punishment ("On Going to See A Man Hanged" which helped ignite the public clamor to end public executions (Dickens joined it in 1849, when he went to see the double executions of George and Maria Manning for the murder of Maria's lover and his burial under some llooring in their Bermondsey flat).*

[*Both Dickens and Thackeray took a keen interest in law and punishment, Dickens even visiting model prisons on occasion. Both men show elements of crimes in their fiction: Dickens used Maria Manning as a model for the murderess "Madame Hortense" in "Bleak House, while the mysterious death of Jos Sedley at the end of "Vanity Fair" by Thackeray, supposedly by his mistress Becky Sharpe, is somewhat suggested by the 1830 mystery of the death of the last Prince de Conde, possibly by his mistress Sophie Feuche

[Mayerling]

"Did the Whitechapel killer have any awareness of Stevenson's creation(s) from the novella or the play with Mansfield"

Interesting premise Mayerling.

I consider it entirely possible, if we consider the following points.

Dickens' book "Pickwick Papers" was published from 1836 -1837, over a period of 19 months.
It sold for the princely sum of 1 shilling per monthly publication.

It was a huge success among the working classes, who somehow managed to find the shilling per month to purchase the next installment.

"Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde" was published in 1886, and sold for the sum of 1 shilling.

If the working classes of London could find a shilling per month for each installment of "Pickwick Papers", I think it is entirely within the realms of possibility that they managed to fond a shilling to but Stevenson's book.

Bear in mind of course that a shilling in 1836 -37 was a larger sum in value than a shilling in 1886.

So to answer your question, yes I think it entirely possible (no more than that) that our killer had read Stevenson's book and possibly others.

However I think just as likely that our book loving killer was a working class resident of Whitechapel, than a literate toff.

Good points all. The reason Dickens got such a really princely sum for what his first novel was that he had been publishing smaller pieces that were collected (in later years) as "Sketches by Boz" (the Dickens pen-name, which was given him in the fact that his illustrator, Hablot Browne, was known as "Phiz"). "The Sketches" were a great, unexpected success, particularly in introducing the first of a long line of Dickens characters, "Horatio Sparkins". Because these short pieces got a popular following the novel was given a nice salary increase to the so-far "penny-a-liner" Dickens.

My original piece in "Who Was Jack the Ripper?" on the GSG was due to it's striking similar "double word meaning clue" to the "Rache" in Conan Doyle's "Study in Scarlet". I was considering that since "Scarlet" was first appearing in a relatively expensive Christmas publication ("Beeton's Christmas Annual" of December 1887 - please note the date), it could have influenced that clue on Goulston Street. But you are right - some working type who liked literature could have been willing to save or scrimp some money (especially if he was a loner) to buy the latest sensational literature (as both the first Holmes story and the tragedy of Dr. Henry Jeckyll were). I just thought the price to pricy for the average worker with a family to feed or with other expenses (like rent, clothes, etc.).

All of which is subject for conjecture - at this time. I must swear that this was not intended as my attempt at a "Christmas gift" to the board. But Happy New Year anyway.

Jeff

[barnflatwyngarde]

"Did the Whitechapel killer have any awareness of Stevenson's creation(s) from the novella or the play with Mansfield"

Interesting premise Mayerling.

I consider it entirely possible, if we consider the following points.

Dickens' book "Pickwick Papers" was published from 1836 -1837, over a period of 19 months.
It sold for the princely sum of 1 shilling per monthly publication.

It was a huge success among the working classes, who somehow managed to find the shilling per month to purchase the next installment.

"Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde" was published in 1886, and sold for the sum of 1 shilling.

If the working classes of London could find a shilling per month for each installment of "Pickwick Papers", I think it is entirely within the realms of possibility that they managed to fond a shilling to but Stevenson's book.

Bear in mind of course that a shilling in 1836 -37 was a larger sum in value than a shilling in 1886.

So to answer your question, yes I think it entirely possible (no more than that) that our killer had read Stevenson's book and possibly others.

However I think just as likely that our book loving killer was a working class resident of Whitechapel, than a literate toff.

[DJA]

First question.....where did Mr Hyde live?
Who was Inspector Newcomen modelled on?
What did the "real" Sir Danvers Carew die from?

Think the 1888 West End season started in August 1888,weeks before Nichols moved next door to Eddowes.

I love the story, but haven't really looked at the history or back story.

I must do.