Edmund Reid

Proper Red Stuff: Ripper Fiction Before 1900
In this series we take a look at forgotten writers from the 1880s and 1890s who tackled the Jack the Ripper theme in their
novels and short fiction.
No 2: Fred W Rose: I Will Repay (1892)
Frederick W Rose (1849-1915) was born in Paddington, the second son of a Highland army officer.
He entered the Civil Service at the age of eighteen and remained there till his retirement more
than forty years later. So far as we know he enjoyed a happy and busy career, full of diverting civic
incident. For most of his adult life he lived at No. 4 Cromwell Crescent in South Kensington. In 1870
he married Catharine Gilchrist, also of Scottish descent, but filed for divorce in 1891, citing his wife’s
adultery. He fathered three sons.
Rose was a great European traveller and an accomplished artist and illustrator. His hugely influential
political cartoon maps are still very popular today. He also had a life-long interest in murder and true
crime, becoming an early member of Our Society (later the Crimes Club).
When he was forty-three, Frederick Rose published his second novel, I Will Repay (Eden, Remington & Co, 1892). Set in
Pimlico, it’s a grim, rather horrific tale based on the Jack the Ripper murders. It advances the theory that the killer was an
epileptic suffering from religious mania who believes he has received instruction from the Almighty to punish prostitutes.
The novel contains a fair amount of autobiographical detail in its descriptions of middle class and bohemian party life,
but it is the darker material that really impresses. Early on, we watch as the antagonist Wargrave Leinster learns to savour
the culling and gralloching of deer on the moorland estates around Perth. An old Spanish bull-fighter teaches him the art
of severing the buck’s spinal cord with a single slice of the knife. Later, there are several spectacularly grisly scenes where
Leinster dismembers his first female victim using his father’s surgical implements, disposing of the torso and body parts in
Epping Forest, Woking, and stations along the suburban East London line. There are episodes, too, verging on necrophily, where
Leinster drools over the contents of his large carved oak chest wherein are stored the dead bodies of his victims. One wonders
where the author’s venom came from to produce all of this, and it is tantalising to reflect that at the time Rose was writing I
Will Repay he was embroiled in an ugly divorce and a bitter public dispute over the custody of his children.
I Will Repay is certainly a macabre affair, but it has great merit and significance as perhaps the first serious fictional attempt
to understand the psychopathology of the Whitechapel serial killer: by presenting a credible scientific rationale for the Ripper
crimes, Rose’s novel stands apart from the shilling shockers and supernatural thrillers that typified most Ripper fiction in the
first quarter of a century after the murders.
Not unexpectedly, his novel provoked controversy. A reviewer for the Manchester Courier complained that ‘The public does
not wish to know about these ghastly horrors, and will decline to go back to the atrocities of the Whitechapel murders, even
when presented under the thin disguise of ‘Pimlico’ as the locality.’ The Freeman’s Journal regretted that the author’s obvious
literary talent had been wasted on such a ‘gruesome and somewhat undesirable subject’, while The Yorkshire Post dismissed
it as an ‘unpleasant novel of which little or nothing can be said in praise.’
Possibly Rose was stung by these hostile reactions, for he gave up fiction writing altogether. Yet it seems likely to me that
Rose will have returned to his speculations on epilepsy and murder twelve years later, when he and his fellow enthusiasts at
the Crimes Club met over lunch and drinks to debate celebrated murder mysteries such as the Jack the Ripper case.
References: For details of Rose’s membership of Our Society, see Arthur Lambton’s article ‘The Crimes Club’ in the London Magazine for
March 1923. Rose’s contribution to map-making is briefly covered in Gillian Hill’s Cartographical Curiosities (British Library Publishing, 1978,
pp. 46-49). For contemporary reviews of Rose’s novel see ‘Manchester Courier’, January 9, 1892; Freeman’s Journal, January 23, 1892; and
The Yorkshire Post, January 27, 1892. A biography of Rose has been announced by Rod Barron, the antiquarian map dealer. There is a copy of
I Will Repay in the British Library (shelf mark lsidyv3aed10a0).
IN THE NEXT ISSUE we take a look at the new three-part English language translation of Philippe R Welté’s novel
Jack the Ripper: The Secret of Mary Jane K., which was a best seller when released in France in 2006. Plus all the
latest Ripper fiction.
DAVID GREEN lives in Hampshire, England, where he works as a freelance book indexer. He is currently writing
(very slowly) a book about the murder of schoolboy Percy Searle in Hampshire in 1888.
Ripperologist 147 December 2015 71