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** This is an archived, static copy of the Casebook messages boards dating from 1998 to 2003. These threads cannot be replied to here. If you want to participate in our current forums please go to https://forum.casebook.org **
Thompson, Francis
Casebook Message Boards: Ripper Suspects: Specific Suspects:
Later Suspects [ 1910 - Present ]:
Thompson, Francis
Author: dclydew
Tuesday, 03 August 1999 - 08:07 am |        | | It rather likely that the poet took inspiration from his surroundings (JTR), as do most poets. |
Author: AlexG
Friday, 13 August 1999 - 01:49 pm | | | i was sooo wrong about the poet thing ive read this book(like i do always) and it detailed everything the suspect would fit.its weird but i think this author is right for once. |
Author: China Cat
Monday, 20 September 1999 - 11:54 am | | Hey Kitty Kats
I was just wondering if anyone here has any strong opinions on Francis committing/not committing these murders. I am quite intrigued by him and would like to see what everyone else thinks and why.
Thanks
Sherri |
Author: GRIECO
Thursday, 23 September 1999 - 05:21 am | | Hello there!
I'm really after a poem by Francis Thompson that I have NOT been able to find, even though I've surfed all there is on the net and more!! I think it starts off with 'Know what it is to be a child... and it explores that concept. Is there anyone who knows of it?
PGT. |
Author: Richard Patterson
Thursday, 23 September 1999 - 10:26 pm | | Hi Grieco. The answer is Thompson's essay on the poet Shelley. Called 'Shelley' it was published in 1909. Oh and by the way I still think Thompson was the Ripper, anyone is welcome to email me.
Richard Patterson. |
Author: China Cat
Friday, 24 September 1999 - 06:41 am | | Hi Richard,
It is nice to know that at least one person as the same idea as me (so far anyway) I just find his poems and his lifestyle to be to more represenative of a serial killer than any of the other likely suspects.
Sherri |
Author: Alan
Friday, 24 September 1999 - 10:39 pm | | | Let's get this straight, Thompson was not, is not, and never ever could be a Ripper suspect. Also Mr Patterson did not introduce this wayward theorising, it appeared years ago in The Criminologist and was ignored then much as now. |
Author: Diana Comer
Saturday, 25 September 1999 - 05:52 pm | | | Basic information please? Who was he? What is the evidence? |
Author: China Cat
Tuesday, 28 September 1999 - 10:30 am | | Hi Alan,
I was wondering if you could give me the reasons you feel so adamantly about why Thompson could not have been the killer. It strikes me as so funny that the man was such a recluse and was a vagabond on the very streets where our victims were found. This man would have been very knowledgeable of the coming and goings in this neighborhood considering the 'viewpoint' he had if you will. And what about all the various innuendos in his writing? Could these not be the same type of indicators that all serial killers leave? We all know and history has proven that serial killers like to leave a trace as they are generally proud of their work. And what about the great concidences that Thompson did not only study for the preisthood but also to be a doctor. Maybe this was his way of showing he was finally capable of being successful at both. Not only being nearer to God by taking of lives but also in the complete dissecting of their body parts in such a surgical manner. (shrug) I dont know its just a theory as we all have them. I would be very interested in hearing your viewpoint. :^)
Ta Ta For Now,
Sherri |
Author: Caz
Tuesday, 28 September 1999 - 11:55 pm | | Hi Sherri and All,
Presumably Thompson has an alibi, or Alan and the vast majority of ripper enthusiasts have an equally powerful argument against this man being JtR.
Unfortunately there must have been hundreds of eccentric people who knew the area well and could be plucked out as possible suspects. Without evidence which links one of 'em directly to the crimes we can't take any of them a step further.
However, having said that, I don't believe there can be much harm in exploring one's own 'pet' suspect and asking questions here. It all helps to increase our knowledge about Victorian personalities, and our resident experts will quickly put us right with the facts when we go badly awry with our theories. :-) What I find negative are the posts which tell us we are way off beam but don't explain why. Very irritating.
Carry on speculating, Sherri, until you get the information which convinces YOU that Thompson could not have been JtR.
Best wishes,
Love,
Caz |
Author: jock the lipper
Friday, 08 October 1999 - 12:09 am | | Francis Thompson actually sent poems setting out his murders, to the media. (newsprint)The poems describing the murders were actually withheld until months later. The selling power of Thompson's poems were a bonus to the newspapers circulation, thus the moral dilemma was posed.
The fact that he was a Catholic priest who murdered female protestants, would have inflamed the tense relations between Catholics and Protestants in London at the time. The political cover up of these murders by the media may have prevented a much worse scenario, where reglious riots at the time , may have threatened the political power of the protestant elite.
Thompson's poetry collegues knew of his actions. The evidence can be deciphered in many English poets at the time. T.s. Elliot knew of thompson actions. Look at elliot poems for clues!
Thompson was an surgeon he knew what he was doing. There is evidence that he killed his sister, check that out too in his poems!
he is number 1 suspect,that's why the police washed the blood of the walls near one scene, becasue it had religious graffti! fact! Big cover up!
20 years research I have no doubt, Francis all but the last one, difficult to say. Remember he smoked opium?....one witness saw a man smoking a pipe, just minutes before mary nicholls was killed
so I leave you all you ponder ??????? |
Author: lip the jocker
Friday, 08 October 1999 - 03:38 pm | | | Ponder over what? Your sanity? |
Author: George Wagner
Friday, 15 October 1999 - 02:16 pm | | | I find it EXCEPTIONALLY difficult to conceive of the author of one of the greatest post-Biblical Christian poems, THE HOUND OF HEAVEN, beloved by Catholics and Protestants alike (and Jews, for that matter) as the murderer of Mary Kelly - or anybody else. Francis Thompson suffered more in his short life than most of us can even dream, and in reward we subject the poor soul to THIS? Thank God Mothere Teresa wasn't alive in 1888 or else we'd have the all-time-perfect-no-doubt-about-it Ripper candidate!! |
Author: George Wagner
Tuesday, 19 October 1999 - 11:33 pm | | Earlier this evening I was copying some of Bishop Fulton J. Sheen's television programs from the mid-1950s, when his theological lectures were successfully competing with the standard network sitcoms and crime shows.
In two out of the three programs Bishop Sheen both quotes and praises Francis Thompson.
Somehow I still can't quite accept that he was quoting and praising Jack the Ripper.
poetdreamerscholar@yahoo.com |
Author: China Cat
Wednesday, 20 October 1999 - 11:11 am | | | I personally have no more comments on this or any other topic here on the message boards. I was very disheartned to find that there but seem to be the same 15-20 people who post here most of which are rude and really arent interested in helping someone who is nurturing a interest in The Ripper Case. So therefore I will but only read what is posted and keep my novice comments to myself as it is clear I am oh so not worthy. |
Author: Laurel Van Driest
Wednesday, 20 October 1999 - 12:19 pm | | China Cat/Sherri: I hope you don't stop theorizing - although Alan and George certainly stated their feelings strongly (and straightforwardly), I think they were polite. While I don't think Thompson was the Ripper, the topic has encouraged me to seek out information on his life. That's one of the fascinating things about this message board - someone mentions a name, and suddenly I have an entirely new piece of history to read about.
It's very easy to be angered and offended through e-mail, when one does not have the ability to see the body language/facial expressions of the person talking to you. I wish you luck - fellow (and usually taciturn) novice Laurel |
Author: Sara
Wednesday, 20 October 1999 - 07:38 pm | | Laurel:
Excellent points above - which I share with you. I've been enjoying the repartee. Only when it degenerates into down right nasty name calling (which I've only seen a time or two) does it really get unpleasant, otherwise, its only a challenge to do further research and dish it right back!
Remember, c.c., this is a wildly diverse group of people who wriggle with delight at the dropping of a pertinent footnote and bibliography - Laurel is dead on with the advice not to take it personally.
Ponder on...
All the best,
Sara |
Author: Alan
Wednesday, 20 October 1999 - 11:05 pm | | | Laurel is right, thank you for that. I suppose we must remember that some are easily offended and would perhaps be better off just reading these boards. |
Author: sarah r. jacobs
Thursday, 21 October 1999 - 06:02 pm | | Hey, All--
My name is Sarah Jacobs. I'm an obnoxious 22-year-old, Jewish Yank. I usually hang out on the Joseph Barnett board, but I got interested because I thought I remembered the name, "Francis Thompson," from somewhere.
I looked in my mother's Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. 2, from her college days as an English Lit. major, and, lo and behold, one of the first of what I like to think of as my "favorite Vampire poems" appears!
The Anthology has only two Thompson poems ("The Hound of Heaven," and, "The Kingdom of God"), which is a crying shame. I have felt so since I was around twelve years old and fascinated with the darker side of anything. I would not, however, ever dream that such an orderly, clean-seeming man, would, even if he **were** addicted to laudanum, kill people. The assertion that a man as gentle and productive as Thompson, a man with such a genuine and driving interest in creation (whether with a capital "C" or with a lowercase one), could rampage about destroying like that, without even burning his victims or anything "purifying" like that, is absolute, unvarnished rubbish.
I believe that if we are going to accuse him of this crime, we ought, also, to bring in Dante Gabriel Rossetti for his obsession with painting Sarah Siddons as a melancholy pagan anorectic.
We might also throw in Coleridge. If we deconstruct (and that is precisely the hateful, dihonest method of analysis that Thompson's accuser uses, is deconstructionism) The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, we may see that he belives that women are either "Life-in-Death," or, as in the very beginning and end of the poem, one-half of a wedding-couple.
Another poet we may wish to imprison is Edward FitzGerald, but only because his last name is Catholic. (Although, really, I've seen better translations of the Rubaiyat by actual Persians, and FitzGerald inserts a great number of Christian symbols into what is, essentially, a guide to courtly love, only in the style of courtly love's originators, the Sufis, who are and were ***Muslim*** mystics.)
Might as well arrest George Meredith, too. Here's something from his "Modern Love," taken completely out of context:
--1--
By this he knew...
[She was] strangled mute, like [a] little
gaping snake...,
[He was d]readfully venomous.... She lay
Stone-still, and the long darkness flowed
away
With muffled pulses. Then, as midnight
makes
Her giant heart of Memory and Tears
Drink the pale drug of silence, and so
beat
Sleep's heavy measure, [she] from head to
feet
[Was] moveless, looking through [her]
dead black years
By vain regret scrawled over the blank
wall.
Like sculptured effigies they might be
seen [(had the Constable not
taken their photos and hauled them
to the Morgue)]
Upon their marriage tomb, the sword be-
tween;
Each wishing for the sword that severs
all.
--2--
It ended, and the morrow brought the
task.
Her eyes were guilty gates, that let him
in........
Etc, etc.
So, ladies and gentlemen, don't you think that the poet thinks they "asked for it"? Don't you think that the line, "Like vain regret scrawled over the blank wall," is PROOF POSITIVE that George Meredith (1828-1909) wrote the Goulston Street Graffito? ;-)
Especially telling is this fact from the short biographical sketch immediately preceeding the extract: "At 21, at the outset of his career as a writer in London, he married a daughter of the satirist Thomas Love Peacock. Nine years later, after a series of quarrels, his wife eloped to Europe with another artist. The Merediths were never reconciled, and in 1861 she died."
Of course, I am having a bit of fun with people who make dangerous assumptions when they blur the line betweeen Artist and Art. I am also cutting out key bits of the poem and of the poet's bio (he later married again, and began to think of women in a much healthier manner, which showed up in his work). But this is to make a point.
I am an English major, and, as such, I would like to see evidence for the assertions made about the character and quality of the works of Francis Thompson. He is a fantastic writer (and I do mean that in both senses of the word, "fantastic"). |
Author: Peter R.A. Birchwood
Friday, 22 October 1999 - 08:08 am | | Sarah R:
A nice and timely summation of the sort of "research" that haunts this field nowadays. As I may have mentioned from time to time, there is a game in JtR research that involves taking a prominent Victorian and fitting him, her or in certain cases "it," into the skin of Jack. If you don't take it too seriously it's fun. But some people do and when that happens and they spend an awful lot of time being coy about their "suspect" and bringing in other supporters who seem to think that justifiable criticism is a breach of whatever ammendment it happens to be, then things get a little bit over the
top!
Peter. |
Author: Richard Patterson
Wednesday, 03 November 1999 - 05:58 pm | | Hi guy’s Richard here. It is true anyone, such as George Meredith, could have written the Goulston Street message, and Walter Sickert could have painted it. Perhaps however only Thompson committed the crimes and lived to write about it.
In the autumn, of 1889, on the first anniversary of the Whitechapel murders, Francis Thompson wrote a short story. It was his only one, and was called ‘Finis Coronat Opus,’ or the ‘End Crowning Work.’ It begins on page 116 in the third volume of the 1913, ‘The Works of Francis Thompson Volume III: Prose.’ The story concerned a poet, who wishing to be crowned as the city’s favourite, performs a black mass and sacrifices a women. A portion reads.
‘I swear I struck not the first blow. Some violence seized my hand, and drove the poniard down. Whereat she cried; and I, frenzied, dreading detection, dreading above all her awakening, - I struck again, and again she cried; and yet again, and yet gain she cried. Then her eyes opened. I saw them open, through the gloom I saw them; through the gloom they were revealed to me, that I might see them to my hour of death. An awful recognition, an unspeakable consciousness grew slowly into them. Motionless with horror they were fixed on mine, motionless with horror mine were fixed on them.’
Sorry to spoil the fun.
Rich. |
Author: Sarah Rachel Jacobs
Thursday, 04 November 1999 - 09:42 am | | If Thompson did the Goulston St. Graffito, why doesn't he mention anything about Jews in "Finis?"
If he didn't do the GSGraf., then why doesn't he curse eternally the soul of he who mocked his sanctified works?
With Raised Brow,
Sarah |
Author: Ashling
Thursday, 04 November 1999 - 04:33 pm | | Hi Peter, Sarah, Richard, Sarah & anyone else that wanders by.
Well, I try to remain open-minded, but after reading the ending to the above story, "End Crowning Work ... I can't even consider Thompson in the role JtR.
Thompson wrote a tale of ---
Evil Destroys Innocence (Him and thousands of other writers & poets since time out of mind).
A story of --- It's-not-my-fault-somebody/something-made-me-do-it (Every 5 year old on the planet, caught with their hand in the cookie jar or a newly broken heirloom at their feet.)
He wrote this story a year after the murders began. It sounds like Thompson used the headlines of his times as fodder to experiment with a new writing medium, hoping to make sense of the events of his era. (A fairly common practice among writers.) Agatha Christie wrote 80+ novels - many of her plots were thinly disguised headline stories. For instance, in Murder on the Orient Express (based on the Lindberg Baby Kidnapping) - she made the kidnapped baby a girl, instead of a boy.
Also, if Thompson wrote from first hand experience as the Ripper --- I'd expect a style not quite so "purple prose." SKs harbor an extremely high opinion of themselves, but "End Crowning Work" goes way over the top, melodrama-wise.
Regards,
Janice |
Author: ChrisGeorge
Friday, 05 November 1999 - 05:17 am | | Hi, Janice:
You make a very good point. We have to be careful where reality ends and fiction begins. Agatha Christie, a very good example, wrote scores of novels but we would not suspect her of murders such as those she used as plots in her books. Similarly, although Edgar Allan Poe's life has its melodramatic elements, we would not expect that he enacted the scenarios in his tales. If we accept Richard Patterson's thesis, we might think though that Poe committed a murder such as the one that the narrator contemplates in "The Tell-Tale Heart." Poe's tale comprises a much more direct and cogent example of plotting and committal of a murder than the Francis Thompson story that Patterson identifies as evidence that Thompson was the Whitechapel murder.
Chris George |
Author: ChrisGeorge
Friday, 05 November 1999 - 05:28 am | | Hi again all:
Although I do not believe that Francis Thompson was the Ripper and nor was Lewis Carroll, you may be interested to know that Karoline Leach, author of the recent book "Dream Child" a new interpretation of the life of Lewis Carroll (Charles Ludwidge Dodgson) will be speaking on the allegation that Dodgson was the Ripper and other myths surrounding the author of "Alice in Wonderland" at our upcoming convention in Park Ridge, New Jersey, in April 2000.
Chris George
Casebook Productions
jacktripper@fcmail.com
Organizer, "Jack the Ripper: A Century of Myth"
Park Ridge Marriott, Park Ridge, NJ, April 8-9, 2000
http://business.fortunecity.com/all/138/conference.htm |
Author: poetdreamerscho
Saturday, 20 November 1999 - 10:04 pm | | We have to fight the tendency to identify the author with his or her creations. Robert Bloch, the author of PSYCHO, "killed" more people than John Gacy - and in myriad ways no less horrifying than Gacy's. Yet I regard Robert Bloch as one of the kindest and most decent men I've ever met in my life - and I can't think of anybody I'd be less afraid to be holding a knife behind my back.
I wish I could have met Francis Thompson.
poetdreamerscholar@yahoo.com (George Wagner in Cincinnati) |
Author: ChrisGeorge
Sunday, 21 November 1999 - 04:48 am | | Hi, George and all:
I thought you might like to read the editorial I wrote for the last issue of "Ripper Notes" on the current fashion of naming of dubious suspects in the Ripper case:
Hunt the Ripper?
Ever since the allegation was first published 37 years ago that Prince Albert Victor, Queen Victoria's eldest grandson, was Jack the Ripper, it appears that it has been "open season" on naming new people for the dubious honor of being Jack. Of course, this fervor to name the killer is hardly new. It began in 1888 at the time of the crimes and has continued up to our day. However, the game of "Hunt the Ripper" seems to have reached an all-time high as we approach the end of our own century. Suspects continue to be named, and "theories" are published with little or no evidence beyond a suspicion that this finally is Jack, and the author's perception of a chain of suspicious circumstances which more careful research might reveal have an absolutely innocuous explanation. By various counts, depending whether you confine your count to the more famous suspects or include lesser ones, the number of named suspects in the murders is certainly over 60 and may be approaching 100 or more. Named recently, for example, have been Liverpool cotton merchant James Maybrick--himself supposedly murdered by his wife Florence in May 1889--former British minister William Ewart Gladstone, Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland, and the poet Francis Thompson. Boston child psychologist Richard Wallace's case against Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), made in Jack the Ripper: Light-hearted Friend, depending as it does on supposed anagrams in Carroll's post-1888 works, seems particularly dubious. However, it is not the only such highly debatable theory. Any adult male who took breath in the autumn of 1888 seems open to being accused of being Jack. The publication of so many questionable theories has hurt serious research and has also meant that more solid cases for certain suspects are ignored in the fall-out from the poorly made ones. As we enter a new century, book publishers and (yes!) editors of Ripper journals all bear a responsibility to make sure that any research that they publish is as solid as possible. The last thing we need is many more persons to be named as "Jack the Ripper" without good evidence that they actually did commit the crimes.
Christopher T. George, Editor
Ripper Notes
http://business.fortunecity.com/all/138/rn.htm |
Author: Richard Patterson
Wednesday, 24 November 1999 - 09:26 pm | | From Richard Patterson.
To those with wounded feelings.
All the above is all very interesting. All the pages, and pages, but what was Thompson doing in 1888? In Australia, we have this special remedy to help us find out about things we do not know. Reading. We also are unafraid to talk about it.
Thank you again, and I am sorry to be taking up your valuable time.
Rich. |
Author: Sarah R. Jacobs
Sunday, 01 October 2000 - 10:23 pm | | Hi! I'm Back...
I have read "Finis Coronat Opus."
I own (thanks to the photocopying facilities of the Hunter College of the City University of New York's library) a copy thereof.
First of all, here is a synopsis:
A young man who knows in his heart that it will take a miracle ... or something very, very different [cue organ music and Hitchcock closeups of YOUNG FOP WITH SERIOUS LOOK UPON HIS FACE]... to make him Poet Laureate of the Deliberately Unnamed and Also Deliberately Timeless City-State-Type Town he inhabits (which is a great deal like the Venice or Rome of one who has never left the English-speaking world) builds a temple to Art, including within this overdone chamber of aesthetic horrors a statue of Bacchus with a tri-tone laurel wreath upon it.
He sacrifices a woman at Art's Altar (the space below the sanctified Pagan Statue), just at midnight, and, as promised him by the dark thing which haunts his soul (portrayed as being something like the "dream-fiend" which Utterson, in nightmare, sees his friend Henry Jekyll dominated by), anyway, just at the stroke of midnight, the Young Fop KNOWS he will write the Laurel-Winning Work.
TO make a long, tedious and moralistic (if this man is a serial killer then Mary Baker Eddy HERSELF *was* the Sawney Beane Clan) story short, he writes the poem, but has what we would today call a panic attack when it is time to go get his laurels: You see, ever since killing the woman, he has not been able to smile or take pleasure in anything. His poem, though it is beautiful, and full of Decadence and all things which were popular at the time among the "Yellow Book" crowd of writers, IS STAINED WITH THE BLOOD OF THE INNOCENT WOMAN. As if to heighten his punishment (or so Thompson, in the delicate and understated manner of the nudgenudge-winkwink character of the Monty Python sketch, leads us to cough up, like good religious school students), a little girl sits down next to him as he is moping on a park bench facing what is painfully obviously the Thames ( I have never been to London, but the vista is a popular one for postcards -- this is not a skulking-in-the-shadows kind of guy. He may as well make the Artist wear the mid-19th-century version of Burberry's (coat), bowler, and bumbershoot.), anyway, the little girl sits down and enjoys a flower, and giggles, and her giggles are like "knives in his heart" or "accusatory, innocent angels' bells" (I forget which).
The punchline of the story is that he develops this panic attack the night he is supposed to go get his laurels, and the laurels we saw onstage in the first act, the ones upon the brow of Bacchus, spear him in the forehead --- AT THE STROKE OF TWELVE NOON!!!
Pan out, etc.
I still don't know if this was written before or after Wilde's "Picture of Dorian Gray," but I am almost certain that it was written afterwards. The feel is just too similar, and the tone of Finis is just too "I hate you, you colleague of mine. You are a naughty homosexual and your character should never have been allowed the luxury of suiciding so very long after killing his fiancee, Sibyl Vane. Her brother's ghost should have been allowed to do that!"
If I suspected him of anything, it would be the murder of Oscar Wilde, or, perhaps, instigating his trial. He probably laughed himself silly when Wilde, who was evidently better at short stories, ended up picking oakum and writing his own moralistic Latin-titled overworked stuff.
I laugh....;-D
Sarah |
Author: richard.a.patterson
Wednesday, 19 September 2001 - 04:05 am | | Those still reluctant to believe that Francis Thompson could have been Jack the Ripper can read the 'Internet Adaption of Jack the Ripper' by the
writer who first named Thompson as a suspect in 1997 at:
www.geocities.com/athens/troy/2057/index.html
Email me on what you think.
Thanks Richard.A.Patterson. |
Author: Chris Phillips
Sunday, 08 December 2002 - 01:12 pm | | A work described as "‘Jack the Ripper’ the 2002 Internet Edition" is online at:
http://www.geocities.com/darkly_burning/2002.html
This is a work by Richard A. Patterson, in which Thompson is accused of the murders. |
Author: Stan Russo
Sunday, 08 December 2002 - 09:14 pm | | Chris, and all
I have read Mr. Patterson's work and spoken to him. His claims to be the first to accuse Francis Thompson as 'JTR' are false.
He is a very nice person to talk to and will discuss issues and answer questions. I believe his e-mail is at the beginning of the link.
Thompson as a suspect is a real stretch. He was an arsonist and an opium addict. There is no history of violence toward women.
Could Francis Thompson have been 'JTR'? Theoretically yes. Was he 'JTR'? No.
STAN |
Author: Jeff Bloomfield
Saturday, 14 December 2002 - 02:29 pm | | I have nothing to add to this discussion of
Francis Thompson's possible identification as
Jack the Ripper, but I recall something that has
always been a favorite literary work by a leading
light of the period - and one who is currently the
subject of a recent new biography.
Max Beerbohm wrote an amusing book called SEVEN
MEN AND TWO OTHERS, in which he describes people
he knew in the 1890s. Many of them are literary
men. The best known of these sketchs is ""Savanarola" Brown" about a mediocre man who
is trying to write the great five act play on the
life of the Italian Renaissance reformer. Beerbohm's play fragment is a hoot on pretentious
historical dramas.
But one of the other sketches in the book is
"Enoch Soames". Set in London, in 1897, it describes how "Soames" sells his soul to the devil
to learn if his poetry (he claims he is a "Catholic Diabolist") have gained him literary
immortality. Soames goes into the future, to the
British Museum of 1997, to see if his masterworks
(one is called "Fungoids") have made the permanent
literary pantheon. He finds just one reference
to himself - in a story by Max Beerbohm about a
fictional creation who thinks himself a great
genius!
I don't know if Thompson and Beerbohm knew each
other, or if Beerbohm based "Soames" on anyone
in particular (he could have been thinking of
Ernest Dowson for that matter). But given the
suspicions arisen against Thompson, maybe someone should look into Beerbohm's story, and who (or
what he was thinking about).
Jeff |
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