GEORGE HUTCHINSON

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Dear Rip Your Letters and Comments Dear Rip, Severin Klosowski In our article ‘The Jack the Ripper Museum - A Special Report’ (Rip 145), when discussing the plaque outside said museum which is dedicated to ‘George Chapman’, we made reference to Chapman’s birth name being ‘Severyn Klosowski’, and also to his being responsible for the deaths by poisoning of three women in the Southwark area subsequently to 1888. As Helena Wojtczak has pointed out to us since, in her book Jack the Ripper at Last? The Mysterious Murders of George Chapman she demonstrates that the first of these murders occurred in Finsbury and not Southwark; she also discusses her belief that his name would be more accurately transliterated as ‘Severin’. Although this was the only reference to Klosowski in the article, we are grateful to Helena for pointing out these matters to us, and clearly we should have consulted her work in order to ensure total accuracy. We would therefore like to take this opportunity to apologise for these unfortunate errors. Trevor Bond and Jon Rees Simon Wood: An Apology In the last issue of Ripperologist (145, August 2015) we published a report on the recent Jack the Ripper Conference at Nottingham. It was then brought to our attention that we neglected to mention the presentation of a ‘Book of the Year’ award to Simon D Wood for his Deconstructing Jack: The Secret History of the Whitechapel Murders. Our reporter at the Conference, Steve Rattey, told us that as the presentation was not listed on the programme of events he was unaware it was about to take place and left the lecture room to make an important telephone call. He therefore missed the presentation of the award, made by Amanda Lloyd and David Hall. We were also smacked on the wrist regarding a well-known photograph of a meeting of Ripperologists in the Golden Heart in 1988, in that when we recently referred to the photo and mentioned the attendees we neglected to include Simon alongside Don Rumbelow, Tom Cullen, Martin Fido, Paul Begg, Keith Skinner and David Andersen. Before we are accused of building a Bruce Robinsonesque conspiracy we would like to extend our apologies to Simon for our double oversight. We have published several of his articles in the past, and hope this will continue. Ripperologist 146 October 2015 64
Victorian Fiction The Throne of the Thousand Terrors By William Le Queux Edited with an Introduction by Eduardo Zinna Introduction In a lecture in 1948, Vladimir Nabokov, the putative father of Lolita and Humbert Humbert, famously said: ‘Literature was born not the day when a boy crying wolf, wolf came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big grey wolf at his heels: literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him.’ Nabokov thought it quite incidental that the shepherd’s boy who lied too often was finally eaten up by a real wolf; what counted in his view was that ‘the magic of art was in the shadow of the wolf that he deliberately invented, his dream of the wolf.’ ‘Literature is invention,’ said Nabokov, ‘Fiction is fiction.’ ‘To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.’ Fortunately, in old Aesop’s version of the story the shepherd’s boy who had cried wolf too often was not eaten by the beast. He lived, but the wolf ate his sheep, and when he complained that no-one had come to his assistance, the wise men of the village said: ‘A liar will not be believed, even when he speaks the truth.’ Aesop does not tell us whether the boy learned his lesson. By and large we can believe, with Nabokov, that every great writer is a great deceiver. We are safe in the knowledge that the characters in a book or a film are creatures of invention and that, regardless of how real they may look to us, they are but fictions, even less substantial than so many wisps of smoke. Still, Odysseus and Sindbad of the Sea, Othello and Raskolnikov, Jim Hawkins and Anna Karenina, Sherlock Holmes and the Count of Monte Cristo often occupy a far more important place in our lives than the people we cross daily in the street. Yet there are story-tellers, some of whom are writers, and some of whom are not, who claim to tell the truth when they are actually dreaming up their tales. There are those who embellish upon what is known and call it ‘faction’; there are those who make up their stories out of whole cloth and still call them true. Sacha Guitry, a French film-maker known for his fanciful historical adaptations, said of one of his films that it was ‘truthful - and sometimes plausible – since I believe it is not lying to assert brazenly irrefutable improbabilities. Yes, I claim the absolute right to imagine incidents that have remained secret and to narrate adventures of whose unlikelihood I have found no evidence.’ Some of the authors who have turned an inquisitive eye to the Whitechapel murders may legitimately be suspected of having embroidered their narratives a little too eagerly. William Le Queux occupies a special place among them. He was born in London in 1864 to a French father and an English mother, was William Le Queux educated in France and Italy and began his career as a journalist writing for French newspapers. In the late 1880s he returned to Britain where he edited the magazines Gossip and Piccadilly and joined the staff of the Globe. After a couple of years he abandoned journalism and became a full-time writer, both of fiction and non-fiction, although often the distinction between the two was tenuous at best. In 1893 Le Queux scored his first success in a field he would make his own: the speculative politico-military thriller. Brimming with patriotic ardour, he wrote a magazine serial about a future treacherous invasion of Britain by France and Russia, which was eventually repelled with the assistance of Germany. For a while French and Ripperologist 146 October 2014 65
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No. 146 October 2015 GEORGE HUTCHIN
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‘Unfortunates’ and Bêtes Noirs
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Robinson also insinuates darkly tha
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Indeed, courtesy of modern profilin
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Crew and Passenger list of the Ormu
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He provides a colourful contemporar
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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 and 46: it to the necessity of the day… F
Page 47 and 48: There in the frightfulness? Ho! Ho!
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: She turned her sweet face to his wi
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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
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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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