Five women were murdered in London's East End in 1888. The killer was never identified. A century later, the BBC asked if newspaper stories and gossip were to blame.
On 9 November 1888, Jack the Ripper's fifth and final victim was murdered in east London. Playing at London's Lyceum Theatre at the time was a US production of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – and the theatre's business manager was Bram Stoker, who was about to begin writing Dracula. A year earlier, in December 1897, Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes had made his first appearance. It was in the context of this febrile collective imagination that a series of savage murders would move from historical fact to the realms of legend.
A century later, in 1988, the BBC revisited the original police and Home Office files – and asked whether the legend had obscured the murderer's true identity. The killings continue to fascinate, partly because the Ripper was never identified and the crimes remain unsolved – but also due to the tabloid myth-making of the Victorian era, and one campaigning editor in particular.
In a review of the 1886 gothic novella Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in a London newspaper, the Pall Mall Gazette, one critic wrote: "Scratch John Bull and you will find an ancient Briton who revels in blood, who loves to dip deep in murder, and devours the details of a hanging." The Gazette also praised the stage version of the book, which opened in August 1888, highlighting scenes where Hyde springs upon women.
"It was almost prophetic," Christopher Frayling, a professor of cultural history at the Royal College of Art, told the BBC in 1988. "Within three weeks, the Gazette was writing of a Mr Hyde who stalked the East End. Jack the Ripper of Whitechapel and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Spring-heeled Jack – and all the merchants of menace who populated the Penny Dreadfuls and Victorian melodramas – had become inextricably intertwined."
The actor Richard Mansfield, who had brought the play from the US to London, was so convincing in his portrayal of the dual leads that one concerned theatregoer wrote to the police suggesting the actor could be Jack the Ripper . Mansfield attempted to regain public support by organising charity performances of comedies, and one journalist wrote: "There is no taste in London just now for horrors on the stage. There is quite sufficient to make us shudder out of doors."
In October, the Gazette published a letter arguing that the play had influenced Jack the Ripper . Yet its own handling of the killings was perhaps responsible for what happened next. Rather than coming out of the slums of east London, argued Frayling, the story of the Ripper was developed in the gentlemen's clubs of west London, constructed from scant material by newspaper writers.
And it was the Gazette itself that was partly responsible for the Ripper's notoriety. Its editor WT Stead was experimenting with a new sensationalist style, which would become known as tabloid journalism. A liberal with strong ideas about reform, he had also developed a grudge against the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Charles Warren, after what he perceived as a wrongful conviction and the excessive use of force against protestors the year before.
When the first murder took place, on 31 August 1888, London newspapers – spearheaded by the Gazette – began to connect the story to a series of moral and social issues of the day. On 10 September, the Gazette suggested that the killer could be a decadent aristocrat. "There are a number of reasons why commentators [at that time]… imagine Jack the Ripper as a gentleman," Prof Judith Walkowitz, the author of City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London, told the BBC.
"For at least 20 years, there had been agitation around the issue of prostitution, first coming from middle-class moral reformers and feminist agitators… and then heightened and elaborated in a newspaper exposé of child prostitution by Stead, in which Stead documented how poor daughters of the people were snared… for the sexual delectation of upper-class gentlemen."
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Each of the Ripper's victims had been forced into prostitution because of poverty. The editor – who was to die in 1912, on board the Titanic – used the murders as a chance to highlight issues that needed reform, and campaign against vice in high places. They also provided him with an opportunity to attack Warren as often as he could, for not doing enough to find the killer.
The press began to speculate that, because of the way a knife was used on the victims, the killer might be a doctor – which tapped into fears of surgeons at the time. And conservative media pointed at the East-End slums populated by immigrant communities.
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This intense publicity and sensationalism had an immediate effect, said Frayling. "The murders were turned into fiction that very autumn, into a sort of morality play that still resonates."
He found that this tendency had even infiltrated the police investigation, as revealed in the original files held by the Home Office. In the main, they just contain "hundreds of letters from cranks, many of them signed with the trade name [Jack the Ripper], which caught on very quickly, spelled in various different ways".
But there is one memo from a senior police officer written in 1894, after the case had been closed, which names three suspects. Even this, however, appears to have been influenced by the media furore. "It's solid evidence of the existence of three enduring myths rather than the identity of Jack the Ripper," argued Frayling.
The first suspect named by Scotland Yard chief Sir Melville Macnaghten was Montague Druitt, a barrister whom the detective thought was a doctor. His body was found floating in the River Thames in December 1888, shortly after the last murder. The second was the barber Aaron Kosminski, a Polish Jewish immigrant in Whitechapel, who died in a mental asylum in 1899. And the third was Michael Ostrog, a Russian doctor and ex-convict.
"These are the only three suspects to be seriously named in the entire police file, and there isn't any police evidence to speak of in support of them," said Frayling. "Consider how they overlap with all those toffs and outsiders and doctors who were mentioned by the press in 1888 as part of their campaigns… Is this really the considered conclusion of a manhunt, or is it the gossip of the clubs? And were the police so bound up in the mythology of 1888 that they too were looking for characters out of Penny Dreadfuls, Victorian melodramas and press campaigns?"
In short, argued Frayling, anyone trying to find out Jack the Ripper's identity might have been looking in the wrong direction. And the same has been true of Ripperologists ever since. "We want to prove that the Ripper was a decadent aristocrat or a bohemian artist or a homosexual or an immigrant or a madman," he said. In fact, the killer might not have fitted into any of those neat, sensationalist categories. Whoever it was who murdered those five women, it wasn't "the character invented by the press, the police and late Victorian society".
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