The biggest fault

[Suzi]

Heeeeeeeeeeeeeee!! Love the 'Eloquent upstyle' Must get one of those...and as to the 'Goose'....well a girl lives in hope of such a thing!!!

Suz xx

[Sam Flynn]

Hi Sam,

Nicely ducked.

I thought I'd answered, Caz. I certainly intended to, so apologies if I didn't.

So you don't find it interesting that your modern forger seems to have gone out of their way to avoid using apostrophes

I doubt the examiners of today's English GCSE exams would surmise that some of their teenage candidates had deliberately adopted a smilar tactic.

Is anyone here a qualified expert on Victorian handwritten documents by the way?

I admit I'm not - but I'm adequately qualified to note that there's nothing about the diary's handwriting that doesn't scream "common-or-garden, typically bland mid/late 20th Century penmanship".

Enough of them over the years have seen the diary up close and declared that the writing style compares perfectly well with genuine articles they have examined

Maybe, but then perhaps they were thinking of the odd exception they may have seen in the C19th, as opposed to the rather more common mid/late C20th hands that the diary resembles.

If you seriously think a 13 year old could put together something akin to the diary over a weekend, it should be a piece of cake for you to knock one up at your leisure.

If only I knew where I'd put my old school books, I might dig out one of the essays I wrote when I was 13. OK, it was about a convicted prisoner who was tethered in a darkened cell, whose gaolers would drug him and cut off "steaks" of his own flesh to feed him the next day - but it was all "inner-thoughts" stuff, a bit like a diary. I recall that the prisoner used the usual "they're all fools!" and "vengeance will be mine!" soliloquisms that teenagers seem to believe villains use all the time.

[Omlor]

...'vengeance will be mine!' soliloquisms that teenagers seem to believe villains use all the time."

Including Stewie Griffin.

--John

[miss marple]

Diaries

Just picked up on this thread again.
Oh Caz in reply to your question. I handled over 20 diaries and keepsake books in the last two months, a lot of stuff bought by my book dealer friend. I do basic paper washing.Over years I have handled a lot more than that. I used to have a stall in Portobello rd and go to a lot of auctions and acquire them. In the trade there are fairly common. I am simply stating my experience. Miss Marple
If want one, I can get you one or two Tomorrow

[Uncle Jack]

For the diary to be true, you have to accept the 'Dear Boss' letter as being genuine, which it isn't, as it was written by a journalist from Central News.

[Carol]

Forgive me for being a bit slow, but I was wondering what in your eyes would be the biggest fault in the whole diary thingy.
What would be the nr1 thing that proves the diary to be a fake?
If you could just point out one thing that would convince a newbie (like moi) that it indeed is nothing more then a fake, what is it?

Hi Marloes,
I'm very new to the Maybrick diary as well. I've read it several times and my main problem with it is the naming of the Poste House hostelry at the beginning. At the time the diary is supposed to have been written (about April, 1888 - May 1889) there was no pub called the Poste House - it was called The Old MM (Muck Midden). The future Post Office came into being in 1899 and at the time of the Ripper murders the site was occupied by a foundry. The pub called the Poste House nowadays is the nearest pub to the Post Office (both being in Cumberland Street). Have a look at Melvin Harris's 'The Maybrick Hoax; A guide through the labyrinth', and the Appendix by Roger Wilkes. You will find more detail there.
Carol

[Uncle Jack]

I didn't know that Carol. The authenticity of the diary gets worse!

Best regards,

Adam

[Omlor]

Indeed.

What's really funny is the way some people will try to excuse that obviously glaring mistake (giving the precise proper name, complete with unique spelling, of a pub that didn't even exist there until the late 20th century) with far reaching excuses, searching high and low for anything that has ever had the word "Post" anywhere in the title or that might have once been called the post-something by someone even if it isn't the name that actually appears in the book. It's sheer desperation, of course, because what the words actually say is just impossible for them to believe. But the words themselves don't stop some people.

Just wait and watch this space...

--John

[Uncle Jack]

Most of us know that the diary is a load of tosh but there are still some, unbelievably, who still accept it as genuine. In my opinion, it does nothing but hinder research done on more plausable suspects. As far as I am personally concerned, the diary is a proven fake and it is a waste of time and effort on spending anytime looking into it.

On a more positive note, it is a great book to read as it should be read: as a work of fiction, which it envirably is.

Best regards,

Adam

[Soothsayer]

For the diary to be true, you have to accept the 'Dear Boss' letter as being genuine, which it isn't, as it was written by a journalist from Central News.

Adam,

Many thanks for this - this is really key information that Ripperologists have been arguing over for years!

How did you solve the mystery and prove who wrote 'Dear Boss'?

Brilliant work, well done.

[caz]

Hi All,

Back in August, I wrote:

Tell you what, Sam - I consider you and Dan to be probably up among the top twenty brains on the message boards. Here's a challenge for either of you:

If you seriously think a 13 year old could put together something akin to the diary over a weekend, it should be a piece of cake for you to knock one up at your leisure. How about a handwritten Zodiac confession, running to say, 50+ pages?

You will need a real person for the role, who has never been suspected before, plus a few known associates, family members etc for the cameo roles. The 'author' need not be well known, but there must be plenty of information available about him for verification purposes, alibi checking and so on. No details should need to be invented, if you believe the Maybrick diary contains nothing that wasn't already in the public domain. But you should stick to roughly the same number of sources that you believe a modern hoaxer needed to put together Sir Jim's confession.

If you have a legitimate excuse for not wanting to use the Zodiac, feel free to pick another unidentified criminal of your choice, from any era apart from the present day.

Good luck chaps!

PM me when you are done and I'll give you my postal address so you can send the results to me. No need to publish and risk embarrassing anyone.

Well frankly I wasn't expecting too much, so I can't pretend to be disappointed by the pathetic response.

If only I knew where I'd put my old school books, I might dig out one of the essays I wrote when I was 13. OK, it was about a convicted prisoner who was tethered in a darkened cell, whose gaolers would drug him and cut off "steaks" of his own flesh to feed him the next day - but it was all "inner-thoughts" stuff, a bit like a diary. I recall that the prisoner used the usual "they're all fools!" and "vengeance will be mine!" soliloquisms that teenagers seem to believe villains use all the time.

Nicely ducked Sam. (Now where have you heard that before?)

Mark Papazian, a man with a plan to become a serial killer, recorded his thoughts in his diary but only managed to kill once before he was caught. Not very bright at all in fact. ‘I’m a genius’, he crowed. ‘I have it down to a fine art’, he bragged to himself, with the admirable melodrama of a Casebook know-it-all's secret thoughts.

So he was a teenager, was he, writing an essay for school? That’s funny because I could swear he was an emotionally stunted man of 50, who lacked the healthy mind of even a schoolboy of 13, despite being a psychiatric nurse by profession. But what do I know? And what did the Maybrick Diary author know? Sod all apparently.

All I do know is that I haven’t had a PM yet, from anyone aged 13 or over, to make me take seriously any of the claims made by the clever clogs over the years that the diary would have been a piece of cake for a child to put together.

Just picked up on this thread again.
Oh Caz in reply to your question. I handled over 20 diaries and keepsake books in the last two months, a lot of stuff bought by my book dealer friend. I do basic paper washing.Over years I have handled a lot more than that. I used to have a stall in Portobello rd and go to a lot of auctions and acquire them. In the trade there are fairly common. I am simply stating my experience. Miss Marple
If want one, I can get you one or two Tomorrow

Many thanks for this, Miss Marple. Yes please, and make it two if they are reasonably inexpensive. Doesn’t have to be tomorrow, next week or the week after will do. But could you let me know roughly how much they are likely to cost and I’ll PM you about payment and delivery etc. Obviously I'll expect them to be broadly comparable to the guardbook used for the diary and fit enough for the purpose.

For the diary to be true, you have to accept the 'Dear Boss' letter as being genuine, which it isn't, as it was written by a journalist from Central News.

Nobody has to ‘accept’ anything, Uncle Jack, least of all that Jack the Ripper’s diary is ‘true’, whatever that means. Hoaxers and serial killers don’t deal in the truth, last time I looked, whether they are writing for themselves or others. (See this very post for two examples.) Dear Boss doesn’t need to be accepted as the ripper’s own work, any more than it has to be accepted as the work of a certain enterprising journalist, just because you say so.

Love,

Caz
X

[Omlor]

And from all of this, we can conclude...?

--John

[caz]

That you just couldn't resist responding within an hour, even when I did not refer to you once (unless you recognised yourself in there somewhere )?

That nobody has yet been willing or able to support their claims about the diary being child's play to produce?

I'm surprised you had to ask, but I'm happy to supply the above answers, neither of which fly in the face of the facts - and I wasn't even asking anyone to 'conclude' anything.

Love,

Caz
X

[Omlor]

Caroline tells me what we should conclude from her recent post (that no one has answered one of her earlier challenges), and then she tells me that she wasn't asking anyone to conclude anything.

Rhetoric is fun.

--John

[caz]

Omlor,

I wasn't telling you what 'we should' conclude.

You asked what 'we can conclude' from 'all of this'.

So I offered a couple of very reasonable suggestions.

Another thing we can now conclude, apart from it not being child's play to put together a diary like this over a wet weekend, despite the silly claims made by certain posters who really should be bright enough to know better, is that the following claim, made by Miss Marple some time ago now, has similarly failed the suck-it-and-see test at the first hurdle:

'If want one, I can get you one or two Tomorrow'

I was informed that although there are indeed plenty of Victorian guardbooks knocking around, like the one used for the Maybrick Diary, the dealer who has them in stock has no current plans to sell any of them and evidently no interest in even finding out how much I might have been willing to pay for one.

Must be nice in the current financial climate to be able to hold onto stock in the expectation that it will fetch more in the future than some unknown price that it could have fetched yesterday.

I say 'yesterday' because I lost interest as soon as I suspected that 'tomorrow' would never come.

Funny old world, ain't it?

Love,

Caz
X