Introduction
A writer does not normally feel obliged to explain why he has decided to write a book. In most cases it can be reasonably assumed that for the writer to go to the effort of researching a book and putting it into print, there must have been something compelling in the subject matter that was sufficient to motivate the putting of pen to paper or, more likely in these days, fingers to keyboard. However, the nature and history of the Whitechapel murders (commonly referred to as the Jack the Ripper murders) as a subject for research and authorship is such that I feel some explanation is necessary as to how this present volume came about and the intentions behind it.
To put matters bluntly, the faceless, nameless murderer who haunted the streets of Whitechapel in the latter half of 1888 has become an industry in his own right. This may seem odd, or even perverse, to anyone who has not been bitten by the Ripper "bug." The study of the Whitechapel murders still has the power to engender extraordinarily strong passions even 116 years after the events that spawned it. There are many ways in which the Ripper can be a passion, or even obsession. Some use the mystery of the Whitechapel murders as a gateway into whole areas of Victorian social and political history. Certainly during the years since I first made Jack's acquaintance it has led me into many obscure byeways that I think it very unlikely I would have read about had it not been for my interest in this nameless man. There are also, certainly, what I can only and perhaps unkindly term Ripper "anoraks," whose obsession with the minutiae of the case can be both awesome and baffling. If I need an obscure fact about a victim or a suspect I go and look it up. I don't feel the need to have every minute morsel of knowledge stored away for some supposed future occasion when I may need it.
It also has to be acknowledged that it is certainly possible to have what I can only term an unhealthy interest in the case. The physical details of the Whitechapel murders can be, and indeed should be, disturbing as can some of the contemporary items of evidence, such as the post mortem photographs of the victims. In my opinion we should never forget the victims as individuals and that they were living, breathing people whose memory should be perpetuated as women who met a violent and terrible end, not as pieces in some intellectual parlour game. The Whitechapel murderer was not a pantomime demon king, nor some bogeyman from folklore nor a devil in human form. He also lived and breathed and walked the streets of London, had parents and a childhood, died and was buried in an unknown grave. He was a demented, loathsome individual who ended the lives of at least five women in a savage and violent manner.
The continuing number of new publications on the subject of the Whitechapel murders continues and shows no signs of abating. It is not my intention to make comments on any individual book or author but the general point can be made that the available tomes on the subject fall into three broad categories:
1) Works that propound an identity for the killer either in terms of a class of person or a named individual.
2) Works that serve as reference and background material such as collections of documents pertinent to the case.
3) Works of fiction more or less strictly based on the murders.
The books that name a particular individual are, not surprisingly, those which make the headlines especially if the person nominated to wear Jack's dubious mantle is someone already well known. There is still a surprising amount of press mileage in a Ripper headline and the more recent additions to the Ripper canon - such as the Ripper diary and the recent Patricia Cornwell book on Walter Sickert - have all been greeted by a barrage of press attention. Jack still has the power to command public attention and can certainly still sell newspapers, as his contemporaries were not slow to realise.
So why, all this time after the events which form the historical basis of the case, does Jack still have the power to fascinate, even obsess, people of the 21st century? There is not, of course, one simple answer. Apart from a morbid obsession with the murders and their physical details, I would guess that the following reasons can account for Jack the Ripper still holding sway in the public imagination:
1) The setting - or more accurately the imagined setting - of the murders is the alien, nostalgic world of Victorian London, the realm of Sherlock Holmes, of swirling fog and big hearted Cockneys, of hansom cabs and top hatted "Toffs." The fact that this world is more a product of our collective will and imagination than the decidedly less than picturesque London of the 1880s does not diminish its potency.
2) The case is blessed with a potent and striking nom de plume that the killer may or may not have given himself. Not only was the appellation "Jack the Ripper" a godsend to the Victorian press, it has ensured the survival of Jack's memory, in however garbled a form, ever since.
3) The figure of Jack has passed from a flawed living person to a figure of folklore, perhaps the ultimate bogeyman. The facts of the case have little relevance to this figure of legend and the mythical Jack and the almost supernatural status that he has acquired have taken on a dark but powerful life of their own.
4) The Whitechapel case is a conspiracy theorist's dream come true. So many conspiracy based suppositions or half truths have passed into common currency and have taken on the spurious status of accepted fact. The two most common of these among acquaintances of mine to whom I have spoken about the case are "Well, of course there was a police cover up," and "I thought it was proved there was some connection with the Royal Family."
5) The simplest, and most enduring attraction of the case is simple human curiosity. Most us of love a good puzzle, an enigma, an unsolved riddle. The plain truth is that the greatest boost to Jack's enduring fame was the fact that he was never caught or posthumously identified with certainty.
Another question I am often asked is if I think the truth about Jack's identity will ever be known. Apart from the fact that for me the pinning down of Jack as a named individual like some insect in a collection is not the most important, and certainly not the most interesting aspect of studying the case, the question is, by definition, currently unanswerable. It may sound an absurd truism, but the only reason Jack has not been identified is because we do not have the evidence to do so. As such evidence is not currently to hand, we cannot possibly say whether or not it still exists, or, indeed, if it ever existed. Maybe only one person ever knew the truth, and he now lies somewhere in an unidentified grave.
So, why another book? Surely everything has been said, every avenue explored, every document wrung dry of all possible shades of meaning? Well, no, actually. By way of explanation, I should first explain what book is not. It is not a solution of the case, so there is no point in turning to the final page to see the name of some startlingly new suspect because there isn't one. I will not be commenting on any previous "solutions" to the case, or making any arguments for or against any of the already established suspects. I will readily admit here and now that I have absolutely no idea who the Whitechapel murderer was. Of course, I have my own thoughts about the various individuals put forward, and the strength, or otherwise, of the arguments for their candidature. But they will form no part of the present work.
The title "Jack the Ripper - A Cast of Thousands" is, of course, an exaggeration. But this work will concentrate on the "bit players", the supporting cast, the list of people who flitted briefly onto the stage of fame, or notoriety, for a moment and then were forgotten. The witnesses, the friends and families of the relatives, some of the police officers involved, the lesser known victims apart from the so called "canonical" five - these are the people I will be looking at. Their lives will cast no searing light onto the central questions of the case but there is still a surprising amount we can learn about them and, hopefully, by doing so, we can see them as more rounded persons who played a small, often very small, part in the Whitechapel saga, in the story of Jack the Ripper.
