They All Knew Jack

IF YOU ARE FAMILIAR at all with the Whitechapel murders, you might have heard of the usual suspects: artist, Walter Sickert; Duke of Clarence, Prince Albert Victor; Polish immigrant and certified psychiatric patient, Aaron Kosminsky, among others. Or, you might, like many, assume it’s one of history’s unsolvable mysteries.

Bruce Robinson doesn’t believe in the “mystery of Jack the Ripper.” And this is not because he claims to have identified the killer when all others have failed. Rather, in They All Love Jack, after 15 years of research into the 1886–1888 Whitechapel murders (and 800 pages of writing), Robinson suggests that this “mystery” is the result of a late-Victorian conspiracy. Robinson claims that a number of individuals in the upper echelons of Victorian society, law enforcement, and government staged a cover-up of the killer’s identity. Moreover, the very “industry” of Ripperology is, according to Robinson, either “flat-earth[ed]” in its thinking, or has a vested interest in keeping the mystery a mystery: “An almost endearing characteristic of Ripperology is its enthusiasm for taking some of the greatest liars of the 19th century at their word.” In other words, the crime remains mystery not due to the historical distance or the lack of evidence, but instead because it has been deliberately constructed as such.

In contrast to some speculations, such as a “psychological profile” in Psychology Today that suggests the asylum-inmate Aaron Kosminski was the killer, for Robinson the Ripper was “no more ‘insane’ than you or me.” Yes, Robinson maintains, the Ripper was a psychopath — but not a deranged maniac. He was calculated and deliberate in his crimes; they were carefully executed within a system he could orchestrate to conceal his identity. But Robinson argues that instead of the deviant and deranged killer, the Ripper was a product of the Masonic stranglehold on the Victorian ruling class, emerging from a culture of sacred oaths, ritual, cabal, and a “government within governments.” Contrary to other Masonic conspiracy theories, Robinson does not suggest the Masons were directly involved in the murders themselves; they were, instead, involved in the cover-up — one that facilitated the continued murder of innocent women and children. “Freemasonry,” he writes, “may not have asked for Jack the Ripper (it most certainly did not), but a combination of circumstance and moral turpitude made it his stupefied guardian.”

While drawing some connections to a number of high-ranking figures, such as Lord Salisbury and the Duke of Clarence, Robinson’s theory about Jack the Ripper’s true identity and its suppression centers on one individual and his connections to three key persons that would enable the Ripper’s emergence and escape: Michael Maybrick, popular composer, Masonic organist — and part-time serial killer; Sir Charles Warren, officer of the British Royal Engineers, archeologist, and head of the Metropolitan Police investigation into the Ripper Murders; James Maybrick, brother to Michael, Liverpool cotton merchant and arsenic-addict; and Florence Maybrick, James’s wife, as well as James’s accused and incarcerated murderer.

Robinson — who is also an actor and director, most notably of Withnail and I (1987), on top of being an expert on Victorian-era conspiracy — unravels the myriad of discrepancies in coroners reports, inquests, police records, and, of course, other research that claims to have identified the Ripper. Through extensive archival work, They All Love Jack documents how these four individuals come to form the Ripper mystery. With an elaborate set up and an even more elaborate trial (which takes up a substantial portion of the book to explain), Michael Maybrick poisoned his brother and framed Florence. Once James was out of the picture, Michael would float intimations that his brother was the killer to his fellow Masons, suggesting as motive that James hated his harlot wife. Half-mad by his arsenic addiction, James easily became the surrogate Jack. In turn, the Masons distanced themselves from the Maybrick family and anything to do with the Whitechapel murders.

Michael Maybrick, Robinson contends, had a vile hatred of women, especially for his brother’s wife, Florence. This served as his motivation, while his not-so-subtle clues fed his egomania and enabled the whitewash. Michael hated Florence for her living beyond her means, for marrying his brother, and especially for taking lovers. Robinson speculates that, although Michael had a preference for men, perhaps Florence rejected an advance, a serious blow to his vicious ego. In his investigation, Robinson makes a number of plausible connections between Michael’s hatred of Florence and hidden messages in the Ripper letters. Of all the convincing evidence in They All Love Jack, however, the motive is, perhaps, one of the least substantiated claims.

Beyond a questionable motive, Robinson makes a fair case for Maybrick having the means to commit and flaunt the crimes. Maybrick’s travels correspond with the different addresses from which the numerous Ripper letters originated. Moreover, these locations match up to other “non-canonical” murders which Robinson attributes to the Ripper. Robinson intricately lays out how Maybrick’s connection to “Toynbee Hall” a small university for poor boys, would have, first, given him easy access to crime scenes; and, second, happened to be where two murders that were not part of the official body count occurred (a detail that Robinson sees reflected in the cryptic language of a number of the Ripper letters). These are two points where he overtly challenges most Ripperologists: the vast majority of Ripper researchers contend, along with the Victorian police, that the letters are hoaxes and that there are only five “canonical” victims. Robinson couldn’t disagree more.

Robinson begins his narrative with Sir Charles Warren and his ties to Masonic history and archeology. According to Robinson, Michael Maybrick had more contempt for Masonry than anyone else. This is especially evident in the disfigurement of his victims and the history of the person responsible for investigating their deaths. He suggests that the victims’ mutilations (carving Masonic compasses on their face and the placement of their extracted viscera) were part of his “funny little game” — a quote from one of the letters — to taunt Warren in his investigation. Maybrick was identifying himself as a Mason to Warren by inscribing the symbolism and ritual of much of the historical work that Warren himself was involved in as an archeologist and historian on the victims’ bodies. In doing so, he forced Warren to obfuscate any signs of Freemasonry in the investigation: “Freemasonry was an arena in which the killer was omnipotent and the System was most exposed … that’s about the size of the mystery.”

In one of the more scandalous police “mishaps,” Warren cleaned the seemingly pejorative “The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing” off a wall near the scene of Catherine Eddowes’ murder. One of Robinson’s most convincing arguments is that while Warren argued (as a number of Ripperologists still do) that the writing on the wall could have potentially started a race riot, keeping the peace was clearly not his motive. There were numerous anti-Semitic scribblings all around the neighborhood, displayed much more prominently than the writing in question; furthermore, Warren could have easily taken a photograph for evidence. Through tracing Masonic histories and their rather simplistic cryptographic method, Robinson explains that “Juwes” was shorthand for three foundational figures in Masonic mythology. While Maybrick was taunting Warren, the Masonic code of secrecy obligated Warren to erase any links to Freemasonry. There are a number of other examples Robinson provides of Masonic symbolism in the Ripper murders, such as textual references in the letters, coins placed on the victims eyes, the particularly brutal disfigurement of the final “official” murder victim, Mary Kelly (especially the fact that her heart was incinerated in a kettle), and a female torso found near Scotland Yard which Warren refused to link to the official list of victims.

The Masonic “mystic tie” between “Bros,” which the book discusses and disparages at length, compelled Warren to derail the investigation, despite a number of reports in the periodical press that challenged Warren’s findings, or, better, the lack there of. At stake in the cover-up was not just the Masonic brotherhood but the entire system it infected: arresting Jack the Ripper would have “put an entire (and clandestine) ruling elite in the dock — its morals, its monarchy — and would possibly have had the cataclysmic side-effect of extirpating Freemasonry from the judiciary, the police and the royal family for all time.” Robinson likens the Ripper cover-up to the contemporaneous Cleveland Street scandal, the bust of a gay brothel that served a number of high ranking men such as the Earl of Euston and Lord Arthur Somerset (head of the Prince of Wales’ stables); ultimately, the male prostitutes were sentenced to jail time, while the gentlemen clients escaped with impunity, some of them merely ducking out of public life — precisely what Maybrick did after the trial and scandal of his framed sister-in-law Florence.

They All Love Jack doesn’t hide its agenda. Robinson sets out to eviscerate Ripperology, along with any sentimental notions of the Victorian era. The timing of the latter couldn’t have been better, in light of the recent viral story of Sarah and Gabriel Chrisman — the couple that received a bitter backlash for their romanticized lifestyle of “living as Victorians.” Sarah Chrisman lives a carefree version of Victorian life that unfortunate women like Mary Kelly (and the vast majority of Victorian women) never could have lived. The entire 800 pages, especially the introduction and certainly the final chapter, “Victorian Values” (a clever play on Margaret Thatcher’s plea for “a return to Victorian values”), de-romanticizes an era that was rife with poverty, disease, and corruption as much as it was with tea parties, bustles, and gentlemen’s clubs.

That said, They All Love Jack falters in its rhetorical crafting due to its frequently unfortunate tone. That we should assume that someone reading a history of Jack the Ripper could stomach the occasional edgy choice of words is not really the issue: “you could fuck for the price of tea” comes to mind, though it is on the tamer end of Robinson’s spectrum. Rather, a problem with this text is that it often reinscribes the kind of careless discourse that frames the very misogynistic monstrosities that the book seeks to condemn. Robinson writes about the hypocrisy of Victorian propriety, the mistreatment of impoverished women, and the boys club that let it all happen. If you are writing about murdered prostitutes, however, opening the book with a simile like “reactionary nostalgia for the proprieties of Victorian England is unfortunate, like a whore looking under her bed for her virginity” is neither provocative nor edgy; it is simply in bad taste. There is enough of this kind of language in the primary materials, most notably the Ripper letters, which the book transcribes at length. I’d like to give Robinson the benefit of the doubt: he truly hates the system that created the conditions for the Ripper to emerge and act with impunity, even as he adopts the voice and tone of such a system. It is clear that his purpose is to replicate the tone of the Ripper’s letters and the sexist disregard that allowed both the slayings to continue and for the framing of Florence Maybrick. Were it the only example, we might excuse it as an ill-fated miscalculation. This, however, is not the case. Unfortunate figurative language rears its ugly head often enough to disrupt what is otherwise an often engaging and provocative take on a mystery that would have seemed to have been investigated to death. There is already enough implicit sexism that readers have to put up with, as one of my colleagues would say; in this case, the subject matter is quite explicit about it, and Robinson’s presentation of misogynistic murder through a crude, misogynistic rhetoric — even if it is intentional and parodic — is overkill.

And yet, this issue does not expunge some of the important cultural work done by Robinson’s text. It is timely for reasons beyond the critiques of “living Victorian.” Not but three months before the publication of They All Love Jack did the Ripper reappear in the periodical press. In June of this year, a museum opened up in the East End of London under the aegis of being “the only dedicated resource in the East End to women’s history.” What it turned out to be, however, was a kind of “murder porn” museum, inviting morbid curiosity to histories and photographs of the Whitechapel murders and their crime scenes. They All Love Jack is an important contribution to this conversation insofar as it speaks to the cultural resonance of the Ripper: not only that he remains an object of fascination, but, more importantly, that the rhetorical devaluing of women’s lives and the violent crimes imposed on their bodies remains an issue. That said, like the Chrisman’s Victorian Life, the Ripper museum and especially the “cruel joke” in its proposed purpose sparked significant outrage. Here, I’m reminded of one of Robinson’s more incisive criticisms of the Ripper legacy. Discussing the disturbing image of Mary Kelly’s body, he writes:

We can look at the photograph as if it is some long forgotten sideshow, a waxwork or work of fantasy. But it isn’t, and it’s horrifying. This was a young woman, poor as dirt, but she had a life, it belonged to her, and the infinite sadism of this most horrendous of murderers has left her like this for others.

Despite its problems, They All Love Jack will likely prove engaging for many true crime aficionados or those with an interest in Ripperology. Yet, its most significant contribution is that it reminds us that while individuals are certainly to blame for atrocious crimes like the Ripper — or the Ripper museum’s cruel joke — it is worth considering, both historically and in our own contemporary moment, the milieus that fostered their emergence.

¤

Lorenzo Servitje is a PhD candidate in English at the University of California, Riverside, where he studies the intersections of medical discourse and literature, specializing in the Victorian era. He is on Twitter at @kilojoule_.