The Autobiography of Jack the Ripper (25 page)

—

Ripperature

The rather silly but witty and useful word for the factual and fictional writings about Jack the Ripper is “Ripperature,” and while it doesn't contain many literary confessions, they are not unknown, and the earliest dates from late November 1888, only days after the murder of Mary Kelly. The confession was published in a newspaper and was supposed to be the diary of Charles Kowlder, a New Yorker in London on business, who awakes from a dream—“a condition of hypnotism,” as the newspaper calls it—to discover himself in Mary Kelly's room, a blood-dripping knife in his hand. There is no pretense that it was other than fiction, but another story published less than a month later did purport to be true, though it was obviously a fiction, and was allegedly found in a little book given to its customers by a London tailor.

Within a month of the murder of Catherine Eddowes on September 30, 1888, long, narrow posters distinguished by a bloodred splash at the top appeared on walls around London, advertising a shilling booklet called
The
Curse
of
Mitre
Square
. Written by John Francis Brewer, the short story claimed that Mitre Square had been cursed ever since the murder of a woman on the altar steps of Holy Trinity Church (which stood on the same site) by a mad monk, Brother Martin, during the reign of King Henry VIII. Even at the time it was published, the story was recognized as being a farfetched fantasy, and its reputation hasn't fared better over the years, but it tried, as so many authors have tried since, to provide an explanation for the crimes. In this case, it was a supernatural one.

Other standard ideas were reproduced in fiction: slaughtermen were a class common in the East End and police suspicion fell on them with the first murder. In 1889, Margaret Harkness, who wrote socialist novels under the name John Law, published
In
Darkest
London
, which featured Jack the Ripper as a Gentile slaughterman hiding among the Jewish immigrant community in the East End.

Possibly the single most successful fiction about Jack the Ripper and one that could have influenced the
Autobiography
was Marie Belloc Lowndes's story
The
Lodger
. Published in
McClure's Magazine
in 1911 and as a novel in 1913, the book ingeniously examines the changing emotions of a landlady, Mrs. Bunting, as she grows to suspect her lodger of being a murderer called the Avenger, but who in all other respects is Jack the Ripper. The story could have had an influence on the
Autobiography
in two respects. One is that it attempts a psychological portrait of suspicion, of getting inside the head of Mrs. Bunting, and the
Autobiography
tries to get inside the head of Jack the Ripper—and does so remarkably well. The other is that part 3 of the
Autobiography
is almost the same as the Mrs. Bunting story insofar as Mrs. Hamlett is the landlady and Carnac is the lodger, and Mrs. Hamlett is the one with suspicions and Carnac is the one to take action.

Lowndes did not originate the lodger story; there were stories circulating in 1888 and afterward in which landladies expressed suspicions about lodgers, and L. Forbes Winslow's suspect emerged because of a landlady's suspicions.

—

Summing
Up

Overall, though, the
Autobiography
doesn't seem to have taken inspiration from anywhere, or it took inspiration from everywhere, and it is this singularity, almost uniqueness, that makes this manuscript so intriguing. Carnac embodies many of the traits or facets of other “suspects”—a lodger, medical experience, an interest and perhaps an expertise in the occult, and so on—but he is his own man, a murderer who is driven to kill by a passion for blood, who kills because he enjoys it.

I have often thought that Jack the Ripper touches our primal fear of the unknown, that the desire to know who he was is so that we can give him boundaries: an insane doctor killing prostitutes as he searches for the one who gave his son syphilis means that the vast majority of people need not fear him. The religious fanatic killing prostitutes to clear the world of immorality likewise means that the victims belong to a small group and that everyone else has little to worry about. What is so frightening about Jack the Ripper and is so frightening about serial killers in general is that they move among us unrecognized, killing with no discernible motive. While almost every other commentator on the Whitechapel murders, even John Francis Brewer, was trying to make Jack the Ripper comprehensible, the
Autobiography
cut across the grain and presented a murderer who is today far more real.

The question is: was he real?

Although this manuscript could be dismissed as entirely the work of S. G. Hulme Beaman—and it would be a fascinating document if that were the case—many things draw one into wondering if it is a far more complex document than that.

To begin with, this manuscript is such an extraordinary and improbable departure from his usual output that it requires a leap of our imagination to suppose that Hulme Beaman would have written it, and not simply because it's an adult crime book, but because it is a first-person narrative from the killer's perspective and, apart from the oddly fictional part 3, it offers no even slightly redeeming motive. The proposed date when it was written also rests uneasy with the direction of Hulme Beaman's career, with his models and stories really taking off and inevitably absorbing his interest and time.

This is followed by the oddities of Hulme Beaman's explanatory remarks, which appear to have been directed to somebody unknown to us and
prior
to contact being made with a literary agent. The tone suggests that Hulme Beaman had already discussed the book with that person, albeit not in any great detail.

It is probably reading too much into the wording, but his concluding comment that the “narrative is presented exactly in the form in which it came to [him]” could be interpreted as meaning that the manuscript is not what was received from “Carnac,” but was a rewritten, possibly fleshed-out document that, sans some offending material, nevertheless followed the story (narrative) as received.

Although it is a common literary device for an author to divorce himself from a manuscript by claiming that it is a bequest or something found in a dusty attic or bought as a curiosity from a small, provincial auction house, the explanatory introduction is usually directed at you or me, the reader, or takes the form of a letter to an identifiable person such as a publisher or literary agent. Hulme Beaman's explanatory remarks do not take that form. Instead, they are directed at somebody unknown, somebody with whom, from the tone, he has already discussed the manuscript, but not the literary agent or publisher or readers like us. This strikes me as distinctly odd, almost as if the manuscript
is
something he was bequeathed.

I am as a general rule wary of reading more into what an author says than was probably intended, but it is also worth observing that Hulme Beaman ends by saying that the “narrative is presented exactly in the form in which it came to [him].” Why didn't he simply say that the manuscript is as it was received? Could the use of “narrative” be taken to mean that the story, not the manuscript, is intact? Such an idea opens the intriguing possibility that what we have is not the manuscript received from “Carnac,” but a rewritten, fleshed-out document that incorporates all that Carnac said, but with biographical details added by somebody else.

Other questions arise from an examination of the manuscript, particularly the use of three typewriters. Maybe nothing should be read into this—I had a portable and desktop typewriter and frequently wrote on them interchangeably—but what does prompt question is that these machines were
not
used interchangeably. The introduction used one machine; part 1 and part 2, including the unnumbered rewrite pages, were all written with another machine; and part 3 and the epilogue were all written on yet another typewriter. Either this is because these were written at different times on different machines, or the author is trying to convey that impression.

Also, why is part 3 not only written on a different typewriter and with different page layout than the rest of the manuscript, but also so stylistically different? It is such an obvious fiction, not least because the same machine was used to write the epilogue. This is odd because it would have plotted better if the epilogue had been presented as newspaper extracts appended by somebody, even by Hulme Beaman, to the sealed manuscript.

The questions arising from the manuscript are numerous, and every time you think you may have theorized a coherent explanation for them, the explanation is checkmated by other problems. However one looks at it, the book you are holding is intriguing. Very intriguing.

1
These page numbers refer not to this book but to the original manuscript, some pages of which are included in Appendix 2.

2
Hulme Beaman dated the murders 1880; on the first page of part 2, they are correctly dated 1888 but someone has put a question mark in the margin (the original page is reproduced in Appendix 2) so was obviously questioning the date of the murders. That Hulme Beaman dated the murders 1880 in the explanatory remarks seems to be too big of a coincidence to be dismissed as a typo, but instead suggests that Hulme Beaman was questioning the date himself. If so, then that is good for the manuscript
not
having been composed by Hulme Beaman, because anyone having researched the murders would certainly know the date of the crimes and would neither have written 1880 nor questioned the date 1888. (It's possible that somebody else questioned the date, and presumably that person would have to be the person to whom the explanatory remarks were addressed.) On the other hand, if Hulme Beaman did write the manuscript, then he either intended it to be published as a work of fiction or he planned to pass it off as the genuine confession of Jack the Ripper. If the latter, then I'd expect to at least find some things about the manuscript intended to “distance” Hulme Beaman from his fake and also to bestow some verisimilitude upon it. One such would be to pretend that
he
thought
the murders were committed in 1880 and to question the date 1888 in the text. Then, on it being established that the murders were committed in 1888, he'd be shown to have a poor knowledge of the crimes and the manuscript would be shown to be accurate.