The Book Shelf: November 2024

This Day In History: Jack the Ripper murdered Mary Jane Kelly on this day in 1888, becoming his final victim in the Whitechapel murders.

At the time of Kelly's death, she was approximately 25 years old, working as a prostitute and living in relative poverty.

The canonical five Ripper victims are Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly.

There have been many theories as to who the Jack the Ripper might have been, including Alice in Wonderland author Lewis Carroll, Prince Albert Victor, son of Edward VII and grandson of Queen Victoria, British artist Walter Sickert, a German sailor named Carl Feigenbaum who was executed for murdering a New York woman in 1894, and Whitechapel mortuary attendant Robert Mann.

Some believe that Jack the Ripper was an American. Richard Mansfield, an American actor working on the London stage was one such suspect. Mansfield was performing in the London production of the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in 1888 during the time that Jack the Ripper was murdering women in London. One frightened theatre-goer wrote to the police accusing Mansfield of the murders because he could not believe that any actor could make so convincing a stage transformation from a gentleman into a mad killer without being homicidal.

American serial killer H.H. Holmes has also been accused to being Jack the Ripper, and the timeline of his killings certainly makes that seem possible, and Holmes' great-great-grandson, Jeff Mudgett, certainly believes so, and he wrote the book Bloodstains to prove it.

Others actually believe that Theosophist Madame Helena Blavatsky may have been the killer. Even Sherlock Holmes author Arthur Conan Doyle faced scrutiny as the possible JTR.

Others, like Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle believed it might have been a woman, a Jill the Ripper, possibly a midwife. "The idea was that a midwife would be the only type of woman capable of killing in such a gory way. Rumors that Mary Kelly was pregnant at the time of her death fed into the theory, due to a midwife’s easy access to other women’s homes. No one would look twice at a midwife with blood on her clothing, and moreover she could slip away from her crime scenes unnoticed the way the Ripper was notorious for doing."~Emily Rose

Jack the Ripper is featured in hundreds of works of fiction and works which straddle the boundaries between fact and fiction, including the Ripper letters and a hoax diary: The Diary of Jack the Ripper. The Ripper appears in novels, short stories, poems, comic books, games, songs, plays, operas, television programmes, and films. More than 100 non-fiction works deal exclusively with the Jack the Ripper murders, making it one of the most written-about true-crime subjects. The term "Ripperology" was coined by Colin Wilson in the 1970s to describe the study of the case by professionals and amateurs.

See also: On Jack the Ripper by John E. Watkins 1919
https://thebookshelf2015.blogspot.com/2017/12/on-jack-ripper-by-john-e-watkins-1919.html

Jack the Ripper Identified
Unmasking Jack the Ripper more than 130 years after he vanished.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/wicked-deeds/201401/jack-the-ripper-identified

Your's Truly, Jack the Ripper by Robert Bloch
http://www.unz.org/Pub/WeirdTales-1943jul-00083