‘The Floodgates of Inkland were Opened’: Aestheticising the Whitechapel Murders

Abstract

The 1888 Whitechapel murders shook late Victorian society to the core. Violence was endemic to London’s East End, as has been catalogued exhaustively in fiction and in fact. To the area’s worn-down inhabitants, the deaths of five prostitutes would have been unremarkable were it not for the horrific manner in which these women were killed. Inevitably, newspaper coverage of these killings was sensational and lurid. However, the murders—for which the (possibly) self-styled ‘Jack the Ripper’ was one of many to claim responsibility—also swiftly made their way into fiction, as writers sought to attribute meaning of one kind or another to the vicious slayings. Then, as now, these murders exercised an extraordinary hold on the imaginations of writers from a range of backgrounds, partly because of their sensational nature and partly because the Ripper’s identity remained elusive. In this chapter I will examine the earliest attempts to textualise the Ripper murders, paying particular attention to three popular novels that emerged in the immediate aftermath of the killing spree—J.F. Brewer’s sensational The Curse Upon Mitre Square (1888), Margaret Harkness’s In Darkest London (1889) and Israel Zangwill’s The Big Bow Mystery (1892)—along with contemporary materials from newspapers and journals. I shall consider why these brutal murders made their way into fiction so swiftly, and ask what it meant to transpose a real-life killer into a work of fiction so soon after the murders had taken place. As Jess Nevins notes, The Curse Upon Mitre Square, published only six weeks after the Ripper claimed his first victim, ‘began the trend of portraying Jack the Ripper as a being of more-than-human evil’ (2014, p. 349). I shall also consider the role played by the media in creating a fictitious Ripper in the absence of any real knowledge of the killer, before examining his migration from the pages of the newspapers into popular fiction. My argument here is informed by Dallas Liddle’s astute assertion that dialogues between the press and novelists with an interest in sensational writing were seldom a question of influence in a single direction (2004, pp. 89–104).