The Dead Witness: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Detective Stories by Michael Sims

Author:Michael Sims [Sims, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2011-12-20T06:00:00+00:00

Anonymous

In the decades following the 1851 appearance of Charles Dickens’s article “On Duty with Inspector Field,” both real and fictional police detectives became common. Detective fiction grew out of, responded to, and soon influenced the allegedly nonfictional accounts of crime in the popular press. Instructive examples of both news-media response to crime and official investigative techniques can be found in the following newspaper article and inquest transcript, both of which concern the most notorious criminal of the Victorian era—Jack the Ripper.

In the summer of 1888, London was agog over the recent dramatization of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. As the following pages reveal, Stevenson’s now iconic portrayal of a divided personality, a latent dark side of humanity, was cited by journalists as soon as the first murder occurred. Whitechapel was known for its high crime rate, but in the two years preceding the arrival of the Ripper, no homicides had been reported in the area. Thus the discovery of the viciously murdered and mutilated Mary Ann Nichols was all the more shocking. A crime of passion might have been understandable; premeditated slaughter was not. And gradually the killer’s expertise with a knife led investigators to speculate that he was a medical professional, itself a kind of monstrous betrayal that made the crimes even more horrific.

The following article appeared in the London Evening News on September 1, 1888, the day after the first murder that is now considered among the five “canonical” Ripper murders—those, among eleven murders between 1888 and 1891, that seem most likely to have been perpetrated by the same villain. At the time, however, this murder was immediately linked to other recent crimes of a similar heinous nature. Frequent provocative subtitles were characteristic of sensational journalism at the time, the print equivalent of sound bites. Note that even in such an early account, journalists were turning to fiction and drama to help them explain the more horrific aspects of everyday life in the great unequal metropolis of London. By the end of this vivid and terrifying piece of daily Victorian journalism, the author is linking “homicidal mania” with the offhand cruelty of both monarchs and average citizens who walk among their fellow mortals without a flicker of compassion.

In the opening of this story there appears again, as it did in “On Duty with Inspector Field,” the evocative image of a constable (in this case John Neil, officer 97J), alone in an ill-lit alley, shining the light of his bull’s-eye lantern on a scene of poverty and crime. An oil lantern encased in a tin box, with on one side a bulging refractive lens that focused the light, the bull’s-eye was held by a side handle like a large coffee mug. It performed the role of the later battery-powered torch or flashlight; the light from the burning wick was hidden until the bearer slid aside a metal panel.

Following the Evening News article is the Daily Telegraph’s transcript, from two days later, of the first day of inquest into the death of Mary Ann Nichols.

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