GEORGE HUTCHINSON

Overall, this hernia-giving doorstop of a book is a disgrace. It isn’t history. It is a lavatory-mouthed personal rant
vomiting up accusations against all and sundry with little or no supportive evidence to back them up. It’s offensive,
but far more importantly it obscures Robinson’s arguments. Robinson overwrites. If something can be explained in two
pages, Mr Robinson takes ten. And repeats it. Probably twice. I’m jesting, but not a lot. Richard Davenport-Hines in
The Times referred to this as the reader being ‘bludgeoned with unreliable facts and judgements’. If ever there was an
author who needed a fearless editor to get the writing focused, the repetition junked, and the rant stripped out, it’s
Bruce Robinson, but I suspect that a wound up Bruce Robinson going off on one is what the publisher wanted and what
this book is all about.
A decade or so ago conspiracism was popular. The shelves of bookshops groaned under the weight of titles describing
so many conspiracies that it seemed as if nothing was real. We were living in the Twilight Zone. But conspiracism has
had its day. The world is precisely what it seems to be: normal, boring, and full of screw-ups. My point is that Sir Charles
Warren went to Goulston Street because he had been told the writing could incite an anti-Jewish riot. Whether or not
it could or would have done is utterly irrelevant. It was a real world judgement call, perhaps based on a complete
misreading of the signs by Superintendent Arnold, back at work fresh from his holidays. It was a dull, boring, screw-up.
Real world.
Robinson’s arguments follow a well-worn and predictable pattern. One claim is piled on another, then another, and
another, until the sheer weight seems overwhelmingly persuasive, but each of the claims has to be rock solid. All it takes
is one weak link for the whole edifice comes crashing down like a a tottering Jenga tower. I genuinely hate to say it, but
I have a horrible feeling that in a few months we’ll see piles of this book on tables in the remainder shops.
However, there is definitely gold in them there pages. I have no doubt at all that it will repay careful reading. If
researchers cut through the crap and focus on the questions Robinson asks, such as the whole issue of Matthew Packer,
we might either get a completely new perspective on some things or tighten up what is already known. Either way, we’ll
find nuggets. I hope they’ll be worth the effort.
Jack the Ripper: Case Solved?
G. Alexander
Morrisville, N.C.: Lulu Enterprises, 2015
www.lulu.com
ISBN: 9781326389680
softcover; 176pp;
£8.49
The theory advanced by G. Alexander is that friends of Toulouse-Lautrec took revenge upon Mary
Kelly, from whom it is argued he contracted syphilis. Alexander does not state with certainty who this
assassin was, but suggests Dr Henri Bourges, a medical man who for a time shared an apartment with
Toulouse-Lautrec and was perhaps installed there to keep an eye on the painter’s activities. Henri
Bourges (1860-1942) was one of Toulouse-Lautrec’s best friends and a confidant of his family. Whilst
studying medicine in Paris he shared an apartment at 19 rue Fontaine with the artist for seven years
from 1887 and 1893, leaving to marry and take up what proved to be a very successful practice and medical career. It was
Bourges who, in 1899, persuaded Toulouse-Lautrec’s mother to admit him to a sanitarium to be treated for alcoholism.
Briefly the theory is that in the 1880s Henri Toulouse-Lautrec’s favourite model was red-headed Carmen Gaudin, a
young women who worked in a laundry near Toulouse-Lautrec’s studio in the Rue Ganneron. In a letter to his mother,
when mentioning an unnamed model believed, apparently with some certainty, to be Carmen Gaudin, Toulouse-Lautrec
wrote the name Jeanette Hathaway. G Alexander argues that this was Carmen Gaudin’s real name and from it that she
was English, from where it is but a short step to arguing that back in England Jeanette Hathaway became Marie Jeanette
Kelly.
It is supposed that Toulouse-Lautrec caught syphilis from Carmen Gaudin and that in reprisal and perhaps at the
behest of Toulouse-Lautrec’s mildly eccentric father, Dr Bourges sought her out and after several cases of mistaken
identity murdered her. The immediate obstacle to this theory is that it isn’t certainly known that Toulouse-Lautrec had
caught syphilis, be it from Carmen Gaudin or anyone else, but given his lifestyle it is quite possible that he did, so this
isn’t a hurdle too awkward not to be able to clear. Bet even if one accepts for argument’s sake that Toulouse-Lautrec
caught syphilis from Carmen Gaudin and that she was in reality an English woman named Jeanette Hathaway, that she
was Mary Kelly is a connection which is actually very hard to make.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 82