A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

Cratchits - seemed to have them. This is what created the sense of ‘alienation’ observed by Marx,
and the unrest that led to riots.
What the Victorians failed to notice - even perceptive Victorians like Dickens - was the increasing
number of alienated individuals -‘outsiders’ like Lacenaire, who no longer felt themselves a part of
society. The first literary expression of the phenomenon occurred in 1888; it was in the October of
that year that a sketch called Hunger appeared in the Danish literary monthly My Jord. Its author, a
twenty-year-old Norwegian named Knud Pedersen, described a man living alone in a bleak room in
Christiana (Oslo) almost delirious from hunger. He speaks of himself as ‘an exile from existence’,
as isolated as a city dweller in a jungle. Two years later, Pedersen expanded the story into a novel,
changed his name to Knut Hamsun, and achieved overnight fame. But his novel was regarded as an
indictment of an uncaring society; no one recognised it for what it was, the first ‘outsider’
document.
But it was in that same year, 1888, that England was suddenly shocked into an awareness of the
alienated ‘loner’. In the early hours of 31 August, a carter on his way to work noticed a bundle
lying on the ground in Bucks Row, in the Whitechapel district of east London. It proved to be a
woman, whose skirt had been pushed up around her waist, and the man’s first thought was that she
had been raped - an indication of the increasing frequency of this crime. He touched her face and
realised she was dead. At the mortuary, it was seen that the woman had been disembowelled. She
proved to be a prostitute named Mary Ann Nicholls, who had been wandering around trying to find
someone to give her a few pence for a bed in a doss house.
A week later, another body was found in the back yard of a lodging house at 29 Hanbury Street, in
the same area. The body was in a rape position, with the legs apart and the knees raised. She had
been killed - like Mary Ann Nicholls - by strangulation and then having her throat cut; then the
killer had cut her open from the chest downward and removed some of the inner organs. The
mutilations seemed to reveal a certain medical knowledge - or at least, a knowledge of where the
organs were located.
London became aware that there was a sadistic maniac on the loose. The first murder had caused
shock; this caused a sensation. It was recollected that another woman had been murdered in the
George Yard Buildings, Whitechapel, in early August, stabbed thirty-nine times. The murders
caused the same universal fear that had been experienced in 1811 at the time of the Ratcliffe
Highway murders. The police made dozens of arrests - anyone who was denounced by the
neighbours as eccentric was a suspect; dozens of unbalanced men walked into police stations
declaring that they were the killer. In late September, the murderer acquired a nickname when the
Central News Agency received a letter threatening more murders: ‘I am down on whores and shant
quit ripping them till I do get buckled’; it was signed ‘Jack the Ripper’. Confessions to being ‘Jack
the Ripper’ continued to pour in, mostly from drunks and mental defectives.
Two days after the ‘Ripper’ letter was received, the killer struck twice on the same night. In the
back yard of an International Workers Educational Institute in Berner Street he cut the throat of a
Swedish prostitute called Elizabeth Stride, but was interrupted by the arrival of a horse and cart and
escaped from the yard as the alarmed driver rushed into the club. He walked half a mile or so
towards the City, picked up a prostitute called Catherine Eddowes, who had just been released from
the Bishopsgate police station where she had been taken in drunk and disorderly, and took her into
the corner of Mitre Square. A police constable who passed through the square every quarter of an
hour found the body lying there. The face had been badly mutilated; the left kidney and entrails had