In the autumn of 1888 London was in a state of terrified excitement over Jack the Ripper. There had never been a killer like this in England before, wrote Meredith Townsend and Richard Holt Hutton, the joint editors of The Spectator. They congratulated the British public on not succumbing to the continental habit of lynching (‘In Naples the doctors would have perished, in Berlin the Jews’) but warned that ‘this devil’ might never be caught.
By January 1889, Townsend and Hutton were calling for an end to all the ‘morbid interest’ in the Ripper’s crimes. I imagine them in their cramped office near Waterloo Bridge, fed up with Ripper mania, and with the banging from the building site opposite that was to be the Savoy, Britain’s first luxury hotel.
I’d like to have seen their faces had they known that this morbid interest would last not just another year, but another century. I’d like to have told them that 128 years later, in that same Savoy, a millionaire American crime novelist would be explaining to their magazine how and why she’d finally solved the Ripper mystery. And I expect, if I’d told them who Patricia Cornwell fancies for the killer, they’d have had a joint editorial faint.
Cornwell, author of the Kay Scarpetta novels, has been quite sure for close to two decades now that Jack the Ripper was in fact the artist Walter Sickert. She wrote a book about it in 2002 which seemed interesting if not quite Case Closed — the book’s tough-talking title. Sickert was certainly obsessed with the murders. There’s his painting of the Ripper’s bedroom and his nudes are posed, says Cornwell, in the manner of the Ripper’s victims.
Cornwell’s Ripper book attracted an astonishing amount of derision from all manner of people, whether or not they knew anything about the case.
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