GEORGE HUTCHINSON

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Meynell, Thompson’s protector and editor, had a keen interest in the Ripper murders. His friend, the Irish writer Katharine Tynan, wrote about it in her autobiography, Twenty-five Years: Reminiscences, which came out in 1913. This was the same year when Thompson’s Complete Works were published, and the first successful novelization of the Ripper murders, The Lodger, by Marie Belloc Lowndes, was released by Methuen, the firm for which Meynell worked. Methuen’s offices were at 36 Essex Street, London. Four doors down Essex Street was Number 44, where Merry England, the magazine edited by Meynell, was located. In 1888, during the Ripper murders, Katharine was staying with the Meynells. In her autobiography she said that Meynell made it his practice to discuss the murders with the Catholic Cardinal and would taunt Tynan by stating that the murderer must be some Irish radical. While Thompson hardly knew anyone, Meynell, his editor, had friends in high places. He knew everybody, even prime ministers and church dignitaries. Of one particular meeting with the highest Catholic Church official in the land, Tynan wrote: I paid my last visit to the Cardinal just before I left for home at the end of September. The visit was made in the early forenoon, and as we walked along from Victoria Station, the newsboys were shouting the latest Jack-the-Ripper murder. We were the first to carry the intelligence to the Cardinal... When Wilfred Meynell told him of the murder, he closed his eyes and the strangest look came into his face, careful for a whole world of sin and pain. After Thompson’s death, Meynell sold his surviving manuscripts, which included a short story written in the autumn of 1889, a year after the Whitechapel murders, in which Thompson records to a fine degree the perceived thoughts of a knife-armed man in a killing frenzy. The story, entitled Finis Coronat Opus (The end crowns the work), concerns Florentian, a young poet who, pursuant to a pact with an evil power, sacrifices a woman in a pagan temple to become a great poet - like Thompson himself. An omniscient narrator begins the story, but at one point Florentian himself takes over for what he tells us is a confession. ‘If confession indeed give ease,’ he writes, ‘I, who am deprived of all other confession, may yet find some appeasement in confessing to this paper.’ As mentioned earlier, before training as a surgeon Thompson spent several years at a Roman Catholic seminary. He had excellent marks and was an altar boy, but then something came between him and the priests and just before he was to take the cloth he was dismissed. For him, a Roman Catholic and former seminarist, the use of a ‘confessional’ would have held special importance. Thompson’s story is not, as some have speculated, a take on the Ripper murders or the hallucinations of an opium addict. Long before the murders, Thompson wrote at least a dozen half completed, never published poems of the same gory nature. In his 1988 book, Francis Thompson, Strange Harp, Strange Symphony, John Evangelist Walsh wrote: The most painful of these poems was The Nightmare of the Witch Babies, never revived in a fair copy. But in the last of the notebook drafts, he added a reminder, rare for him, of the date of its completion: “Finished before October 1886” – that is within a year of his departure from home. The Nightmare of the Witch-Babies was one of the poems submitted to Meynell’s Merry England magazine on 23 February 1887. In his diary entries for 1888, when he was eight years old, Everard Meynell recorded the reaction of his mother, the poet Alice Meynell, when she read Nightmare on the torn ledger page it was written on: Told by A.M at 21 Philimore Place, Mother read in bed the dirty ms of Paganism and along with it some witch-opium poems which she detested. The protagonist of Nightmare is a ‘lusty knight.’ A lusty knight Ha! Ha! On a swart steed Ho! Ho! Rode upon the land Where the silence feels alone As he rides through a desolate landscape, the knight catches sight of a beautiful woman. What is it sees he? Ha! Ha! Ripperologist 146 October 2015 44
There in the frightfulness? Ho! Ho! There he saw a maiden Fairest fair: Sad were her dusk eyes, Long was her hair; Sad were her dreaming eyes, Misty her hair, And strange was her garments’ flow Soon he begins to stalk her. Swiftly he followed her Ha! Ha! Eagerly he followed her. Ho! Ho! But then he discovers she is unclean. Lo, she corrupted! Ho! Ho! The knight decides to kill her by slicing her stomach open in order to find and kill any unborn offspring she may have. The poem ends with his rapture at finding not just a single foetus but two. And its paunch was rent Like a brasten [bursting] drum; And the blubbered fat From its belly doth come It was a stream ran bloodily under the wall. O Stream, you cannot run too red! Under the wall. With a sickening ooze - Hell made it so! Two witch-babies, ho! ho! ho! This poem, which contains phrases like ‘the bloody-rusted stone’, ‘blood, blood, blood’, ‘No one life there, Ha! Ha!’ and ‘Red bubbles oozed and stood, wet like blood’ and a plot which reads like the description of a slaughterhouse, was not published. Instead, in November 1888, the month of Kelly’s murder, when Thompson was living a two-minute walk from her room, one of his essays was published in Merry England. In this essay, Bunyan in the Light of Modern Criticism, Thompson compared a good writer to someone skilled in the use of a knife on a corpse: He had better seek some critic who will lay his subject on the table, nick out every nerve of thought, every vessel of emotion, every muscle of expression with light, cool, fastidious scalpel and then call on him to admire the “neat dissection”. This is a boast from Thompson, the failed doctor, who now was a writer - unlike what he was just weeks previously, when the author of the ‘Dear Boss’ letter, incensed by newspaper reports about the thinking of the police, had stated, ‘I have laughed when they look so clever… They say I’m a doctor now. Ha ha.’ Even without hard proof that Francis Thompson was Jack the Ripper, the insurmountable wealth of circumstantial evidence makes him not just another suspect. RICHARD PATTERSON was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1970. He first speculated that Francis Thompson could be the Whitechapel murderer in 1997. He spoke about his findings at the 2005 Jack the Ripper Conference in Brighton, UK. In 2000, he released a short non-fiction book, Paradox 2000, examining this premise. In 2014, he wrote and published an experimental horror novel called Francis Thompson and the Ripper Paradox which has received five-star reviews in Amazon and in magazines. The world’s most visited website on the Whitechapel murders, Casebook Jack the Ripper, uses his article on Thompson to introduce him. Out of Ripperologist 146 October 2015 45 the hundreds of popular suspects listed on their site, Thompson is the 12th favourite.
Page 1 and 2: No. 146 October 2015 GEORGE HUTCHIN
Page 3 and 4: ‘Unfortunates’ and Bêtes Noirs
Page 5 and 6: Robinson also insinuates darkly tha
Page 7 and 8: Indeed, courtesy of modern profilin
Page 9 and 10: Crew and Passenger list of the Ormu
Page 11 and 12: He provides a colourful contemporar
Page 13 and 14: Had things become too much for Geor
Page 15 and 16: greyish man about 50 years of age,
Page 17 and 18: An Ungoverned Passion Journalistic
Page 19 and 20: Oliver Smith finds the body of a ba
Page 21 and 22: According to film critic Laura Mulv
Page 23 and 24: Winslow was blustery, self-importan
Page 25 and 26: Letters read during trial reveal th
Page 27 and 28: James Berry, the man sent to execut
Page 29 and 30: 86 “Central Criminal Court (Befor
Page 31 and 32: * * * * * In an uncustomary intervi
Page 33 and 34: The following poem, The Ruined Maid
Page 35 and 36: He accosted one woman after another
Page 37 and 38: Could the Ripper have offered his v
Page 39 and 40: Having secured a victim, how did th
Page 41 and 42: The Hound of Death: Francis Thompso
Page 43 and 44: speech: these girls whose very utte
Page 45: it to the necessity of the day… F
Page 49 and 50: acquaintance of a French woman in K
Page 51 and 52: Samuel Kelly and family in the 1861
Page 53 and 54: From the Casebooks of a Murder Hous
Page 55 and 56: George Pavey, and other images from
Page 57 and 58: Charles Dickens and The Murder Hous
Page 59 and 60: In his summing-up, Mr Baron Platt r
Page 61 and 62: Another Broadstairs house where Dic
Page 63 and 64: A Fatal Affinity: Marked for a Vict
Page 65 and 66: She turned her sweet face to his wi
Page 67 and 68: Victorian Fiction The Throne of the
Page 69 and 70: has earned a place in Ripperology,
Page 71 and 72: war. At that hour a coolness falls
Page 73 and 74: ‘Darest thou insult me, wench?’
Page 75 and 76: Chatteris! Immediately it occurred
Page 77 and 78: Reviews THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF JACK TH
Page 79 and 80: Telegraph. Craig Brown in the Mail
Page 81 and 82: I’m not sure that one can be ‘a
Page 83 and 84: ear missing. However, ‘obliquely
Page 85 and 86: Joseph Barnett stated that Mary Kel
Page 87 and 88: First, Whittington-Egan: ‘He [Ste
Page 89 and 90: Add to this a short history of the
Page 91 and 92: The third and final section, Themes
Page 93 and 94: Elizabeth Berry sported the same sh
Page 95 and 96: OVER 200 JACK THE RIPPER AND ASSOCI
Page 97 and 98:
Just as Nice Man Jack (the song) sw
Page 99 and 100:
And what makes a particularly bad o
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GEORGE HUTCHINSON

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