The biggest fault

[downonwhores]

Tin box

If the diary is an old forgery, how did they know about tin box which wasn't released until 1989. If the diary was forged after 1989, how did the ink and paper tests come out tens of years? How does one answer those questions? I do not believe the diary is genuine as the content is so full of mistakes that it's ridiculous.
I know that people often compare it to the Hitler diaries but did anyone notice that the Maybrick diary, and i use that term loosely, came out after the Gospel of Judas was sold for over 1 million dollars?
I also noticed that the terms for publication were kept secret. Why? That stinks of hoax and fake right there. If Shirley Harrison was so sure of it, then why hide the publication details and such?

[Nicola]

Hello,all.


I just don't believe JTR was the type to write down his thoughts. He wanted to attack,subdue,and get to killing. I don't think he gave a second thought to pondering why he did such things or morose paragraphs. This diary is something a talented writer or someone with a dark and vivid imagination could put together easily. It reminds me of myspace ramblings or an exceedingly demented emo diarist.


The idea that JTR would get through killing,go home and fondle some organs, clean himself and then get to writing is just silly to me. He had his morbid trophies and memories that he could use to relieve his horrible acts. Once that wore off,out he went again. JTR sitting down to write a diary is just ridiculous to me.

Whoever came up wth this diary did a very good job. Much like the journalists who coined JTR's name and the down on whores letter.

[Uncle Jack]

What would be the nr1 thing that proves the diary to be a fake?

Well, call me boring but the fact that Mike Barrett confessed he had faked it...... that gave me a rough idea it was a fake.... Lol

[Graham]

Well, call me boring but the fact that Mike Barrett confessed he had faked it...... that gave me a rough idea it was a fake.... Lol

....and then he withdrew his confession! Barrett could hardly write his name and address. He may have conceived the bloody Diary, but write it? Never!

Cheers,

Michael Maybrick

[caz]

It's the kind of thing a 13 year old could put together in a weekend.

Should be easy to prove then, Dan. Offer this kind of project to as many 13 year olds as you like and let’s see what they come up with in the course of one weekend.

I grant you the writer comes across as childish and childlike, but that’s something a bit different from the bold claim you make here.

Even if one ignores the contents and just looks at the book itself that would confirm it as a fake surely?
Is not the diary written in a Victorian scrapbook with the first few pages torn out?
In my time I have worked for an antiquarian book dealer. I have handled victorian scrapbooks, keepsake annuals, diaries and ledgers by the dozen.You develop a feel for them after a while. I would make this observation.The Victoria era was the great age of stationary, and they produced blank books of every variety including every kind of diary from leather bound, cloth bound hard covers to tiny paper pocket books. The quality of paper in scrapbooks for sticking is of a different quality from blank books designed for writing, Many victorian scrapbooks have a few filled pages at the front, the rest blank.
The easiest fake is to acquire one of this scrapbooks at auction or from a dealer [ there are much commoner than you think] and pull out the first few pages and get writing.
The same techiques was used in the Hilter diaries[ the first few pages missing.
If Maybrick wanted to keep a diary he would have bought one of the many diaries available at the time, not a scrapbook.
Any way the diaries are not in his handwriting,not clever.
Miss Marple

Dear God, where do I start?

Have you ever seen or handled the diary yourself to get a 'feel' of it, Miss Marple? It felt right to the curator of 19th century manuscripts at the British Museum, and the owner of the well known antiquarian bookshop opposite, back in 1992. So what would make your opinion take precedence?

You claim that Victorian guard books with mostly blank pages are ‘much commoner than you think’. If you know this from personal experience, when was the last time you came across one, how often do they come up at auction and how quickly in your experience are dealers able to supply one? Dan's 13 year olds could use that kind of information.

Maybrick probably did keep a diary and probably did buy one for the purpose, along with so many of his generation. Maybe the 13 year old who wrote in the guard book, using a hand that would be unrecognisable as Maybrick’s, did so because they had the wit to realise it would not have been ‘clever’ for Jack the Ripper to have started recording his murderous thoughts in his usual hand in a book that was expected to contain his personal diary.

To my eyes the content of the diary isn't just simple, Jeff - it's almost infantile.

Hi Sam,

In your opinion, could this explain the rather noteworthy lack of apostrophes in the text? Not an isn’t or an it’s in sight. Is that because the diarist wasn’t taught, or didn’t grasp, how and where to use them when being schooled in the 60s and 70s, so just had to leave them out completely to be on the safe side? Or did he/she discover that Victorians tended not to use them much, so made a determined effort to do likewise and to go all formal with is not and it is?

Love,

Caz
X

[Sam Flynn]

In your opinion, could this explain the rather noteworthy lack of apostrophes in the text? Not an isn’t or an it’s in sight. Is that because the diarist wasn’t taught, or didn’t grasp, how and where to use them when being schooled in the 60s and 70s, so just had to leave them out completely to be on the safe side?

The punctuation - or lack of it - is a minor issue compared to the limited imagination that wrote the rest of it, Caz. I'd think that anyone dopey enough to have written such an obvious moustache-twirling text is unlikely to have had the nous to research Victorian writing habits - at least, not to the extent that they'd try to emulate their punctuation. If they had, why did they make no effort whatsoever to ape Victorian copybook writing, however informal? Or Maybrick's own writing, for that matter.

[Omlor]

The apostrophes thing again? Really?

Is it so difficult to imagine that someone who was trying to make their prose sound old and Victorian would just naturally avoid using contractions? And surely they wouldn't need to know anything at all about Victorian writing habits to do this either. They would just have to think, as so many ordinary people think, gee, those Victorians were really proper and prim and stuffy (even the cotton merchant serial killer ones) and so they probably wrote stuff out just like they all speak on Masterpiece Theater. And such an explanation fits in perfectly with all the other historically cheesy cliches, and the structual and prosaic ones, that you find in the nonsense on those pages.

The absence of contractions seems to indicate nothing at all about the writers knowledge or lack of knowledge.

--John

PS: There is a giant illogical leap in Caroline's response to Dan concerning his claim about a 13 year old being able to write this stuff. I'll leave it for others to decide whether it is worth arguing about.

[Omlor]

And another thing...

"...it would not have been ‘clever’ for Jack the Ripper to have started recording his murderous thoughts in his usual hand..."

Why? Why would "it not have been clever" for Maybrick to record his murderous thoughts in his "usual hand" when he was going to make it clear in those thoughts exactly who he was? (Or, at least, who he was supposed to be.)

This makes no sense.

Why would you disguise your handwriting in a text in which you clearly identify yourself?

Isn't it far more likely that the reason the handwriting isn't anything like the real Maybrick's is that the real Maybrick didn't write it and whoever did simply had no idea what the real Maybrick's handwriting looked like. So, rank amateurs that they were, they just wrote it in some writing they thought looked vaguely Victorian and hoped no one noticed?

Of course, you'd think the danger in that would be that someone with some expertise would find stuff written by the real James Maybrick, notice the two handwritings weren't even remotely similar in any way and everyone would conclude that the thing was just a cheap fake.

Hey, wait a minute...



I do love Diary World,

--John

[caz]

Take the Zodiac Confession Challenge

The punctuation - or lack of it - is a minor issue compared to the limited imagination that wrote the rest of it, Caz. I'd think that anyone dopey enough to have written such an obvious moustache-twirling text is unlikely to have had the nous to research Victorian writing habits - at least, not to the extent that they'd try to emulate their punctuation. If they had, why did they make no effort whatsoever to ape Victorian copybook writing, however informal? Or Maybrick's own writing, for that matter.

Hi Sam,

Nicely ducked.

So you don't find it interesting that your modern forger seems to have gone out of their way to avoid using apostrophes, in places where any modern writer who can string a few words together would almost certainly put them, if not consciously trying to come across all LVP?

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

Going along with Dan's 13 year old hoaxer, I imagine if they had access to more than one example of the real Jim's handwriting they would immediately have been faced with their first tiny hurdle: do I copy this one here, that one there, this other one over here, none of them, or just give up now and make it easy on myself?

Shall I have him writing it all at home, at work, on the train, down the pub, or a combination? Should I write it in a recognisable diary, or should I use something that would not normally have been used for writing in at all, in which case 'Sir Jim' would have had fewer worries about anyone coming across it and being overly curious about what he was keeping inside?

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.

Love,

Caz
X

[Suzi]

Good points and a great challenge Ca'z !! My life is haunted by the apostrophe!!! (and the exclamation mark!)

Sorry Carry on chap's (O'Mlor obviously has this concern too )

Suzi xx

[Omlor]

"Shall I have him writing it all at home, at work, on the train, down the pub, or a combination? Should I write it in a recognisable diary, or should I use something that would not normally have been used for writing in at all, in which case 'Sir Jim' would have had fewer worries about anyone coming across it and being overly curious about what he was keeping inside?"

Needles to say, in order to write the silliness and doggerel that actually appears on the diary pages, the writer need not have thought any of the above.

--John

[Suzi]

"Shall I have him writing it all at home, at work, on the train, down the pub, or a combination? Should I write it in a recognisable diary, or should I use something that would not normally have been used for writing in at all, in which case 'Sir Jim' would have had fewer worries about anyone coming across it and being overly curious about what he was keeping inside?"

Needles to say, in order to write the silliness and doggerel that actually appears on the diary pages, the writer need not have thought any of the above.

--John

Needles?? Are you missing the 'point' John?

[caz]

You've not actually read the diary yet then, John? As in really reading it, rather than sitting there 24 hours a day in case Caz writes something that will obviously require your immediate attention, to stamp out any question of anyone actually starting to think for themselves and see through all the old canards you need the lower orders to swallow?

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Hi Suzi,

http://moonlightambulette.blogspot.com/2006/04/needles-to-say.html

"needles to say
I think some of my favorite writing is bad student writing. Being a TA and teacher and grad student and regular student, I have had plenty of opportunities to experience the glory of the egregious malapropism. As in, "needles to say," "her hair was in an eloquent updo," "the old-timers would listen to the nickel odium," "I defiantly learned more," and the like. Those are all REAL examples. I wish I could remember more.

The English language, it's true, is a tricky thing to master. Particularly when you've only been using it for 18 years or so."

It always reminds me of old man Steptoe.

I assumed John was poking fun at himself there.

Love,

Caz
X

[Omlor]

Ah, yes. Internet post copy-editing.

You can always tell when someone in the discussion has run out of ideas.

I have indeed read the diary many times. That's why I was comfortable writing what I did above concerning what the writer did nor did not have to think about before scribbling the doggerel and cliched nonsense and easily available biographical snippets one finds there.

But thanks for asking, Caroline,

--John