The Whitechapel Fiend is a psychic conduit for the vilest aspects of Victorian sex and class, and a creature mainly of the imagination. In 1888, the year of the murders, John Francis Brewer published The Curse Upon Mitre Square, and novels have followed from such writers as Edgar Lustgarten, Colin Wilson and Iain Sinclair. Many are Ripper mash-ups in the style of Robert Louis Stevenson or Arthur Conan Doyle, as in the Holmes capers of Ellery Queen and Michael Dibdin.
Marie Belloc Lowndes’s The Lodger was made into a film by Alfred Hitchcock, A Story of the London Fog (1927), starring Ivor Novello as a sympathetic Ripper; and he features in many other films — in This is Spinal Tap (1984), for example, as the subject of Saucy Jack, a projected rock opera. From Hell (2001), named from the given address of one of the Ripper’s letters and starring Johnny Depp, was adapted from the graphic novel by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell. He has appeared in musicals, plays and operas (Lulu), on television in Star Trek and Babylon 5, in songs by Dylan, Morrissey and Nick Cave, and in video games.
Less interestingly, perhaps, Jack the Ripper is a historical figure, and the subject of many non-fiction books. Bruce Robinson has read them all, yet in the publicity photograph for They All Love Jack he still looks fairly sane. This may be because he thinks they’re all bollocks. ‘Ripperology’ is ‘an expulsion of syncopated crap masquerading as history’. That’s what one wants from the writer and director of Withnail and I, and his new book abounds in choice insults: ‘treacherous buffoon’, ‘fat little parasite’, ‘hopeless lickspittle’, ‘vainglorious oaf’. It’s also quite sweary, and Withnail’s Danny the Dealer supplies the epigraph for one of its chapters.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in