The Sexual History of London (28 page)

A day later, the body of Elizabeth Stride, nicknamed ‘Long Liz', was discovered about 1 a.m., lying on the ground in Dutfield's Yard, off Berner Street (now Henriques Street) in Whitechapel. There was one clear-cut incision on the neck; the cause of death was massive blood loss from the nearly severed main artery on the left side. That there also were no mutilations to the abdomen has left some uncertainty about the identity of Elizabeth's murderer, along with the suggestion that her killer was disturbed during the attack. Three-quarters of an hour later, the body of Catherine Eddowes was found in Mitre Square in the City of London: her throat had been cut and a major part of her uterus, and her left kidney, had been removed. On 1 October, a postcard written in red ink was sent to the police. In this, the writer called himself ‘saucy Jack' and referred to ‘the double event' before signing off as Jack the Ripper.
⁶⁰

The press seized on the gruesome potential of ‘The Double Event' and the murders became a source of public fascination, lurid, spine-chilling but sufficiently remote from most readers' cosy suburban world to pose a threat.
Reynold's Newspaper
ran with a piece of doggerel to the effect that ‘Murder is stalking red handed 'mid the homes of the weary poor' while newsboys ran up and down the streets crying ‘Latest Hawful Horror. A woman cut in pieces! Speshul!'
⁶¹
Chief Inspector Abberline noted the similarity between the victims and speculated as to the killer's motivation. All the victims were prostitutes, all middle-aged, all of medium height, and all with missing teeth, though the latter characteristic was not uncommon among working-class women of the period. Prostitutes interviewed by the press remained characteristically stoical. One, who had been on the game for twenty years, concluded: ‘Well, suppose I do get killed, it will be a good thing for me, for the winter is coming on and the life is awful. I can't leave it; nobody would employ me.'
⁶²

In their search for a culprit, vigilante gangs targeted Jewish immigrants. As obvious aliens with distinctive cultural features and religious beliefs, they were inevitably a focus for violent anti-Semitism. Jewish boys were chased through the streets with cries of ‘It was a Jew what did it!' and ‘No Englishman did it!'
⁶³
Immediately after the Eddowes murder, a piece of her bloodstained apron was found in a doorway in Goulston Street, Whitechapel. Above the piece of cloth, on the brick fascia in the doorway, was the legend, in chalk, ‘The Juwes are The men that Will not be Blamed for nothing.' To this day, expert opinion is divided as to whether this was a message from the murderer, a piece of anti-Semitic graffiti, or an enigmatic reference to a piece of regalia, the ‘juwes', which features in the ritual of the Freemasons.

The discovery of a female torso in the cellars of the new police building under construction at Whitehall added to the air of horror on 2 October 1888, while a deluge of copycat ‘Jack the Ripper' letters added to the problems of the overstretched police. Then the Chairman of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, builder George Lusk, suffered an extremely unpleasant shock. On 16 October 1888, he received half a human kidney in a cardboard box through the post. With this gruesome object was a letter scrawled in a spidery hand, addressed ‘From Hell' and concluding: ‘Catch me when you can Mishter Lusk.' The writer claimed to have fried and eaten the other half of the ‘kidne' [
sic
], which was ‘very nise'. The shaken Lusk took both kidney and letter to the police. While the police and the police surgeon felt it was probably a hoax by a medical student, others believed it was part of Eddowes' missing organ.
⁶⁴

The Whitechapel murders were becoming notorious, with newspapers from Europe to the Americas speculating on the identity of the killer. Alleged culprits included doctors, slaughterers, sailors and lunatics of every description. The image of the killer as a ‘shabby genteel' man dressed in black, wearing a slouch hat and carrying a shiny black doctor's bag began to take hold. The tabloids had seen nothing like this since the ‘Maiden Tribute' and they had a field day. Though there were no Whitechapel murders in October there was still plenty to write about, including dozens of arrests on suspicion, usually followed by a quick release.

Among those questioned were Aaron Kosminski, a poor Polish Jew resident in Whitechapel; Montague John Druitt, a thirty-one-year-old barrister and school teacher who committed suicide in December 1888; Michael Ostrog, a Russian-born multi-pseudonymous thief and confidence trickster, believed to be fifty-five years old in 1888, and detained in asylums on several occasions; and Dr Francis J. Tumblety, fifty-six years old, an American ‘quack', who was arrested in November 1888 for offences of gross indecency, and fled the country later the same month, having obtained bail at a very high price.

Friday, 9 November should have been a day of great celebration for Londoners, with the investiture of a new Lord Mayor. However, at 10.45 a.m., the body of Mary Jane Kelly was discovered in her room at 13 Miller's Court, off Dorset Street, Spitalfields. Mary Jane, who had taken to calling herself ‘Marie' following a trip to Paris but who was commonly known as ‘Ginger', was lying on the bed in her single room. She had been murdered with such ferocity that it beggared description. Her throat had been severed down to the spine, and her abdomen virtually emptied of its organs. Her heart was missing. The Ripper's latest atrocity completely overshadowed the Lord Mayor's celebrations, and led to the resignation of the Metropolitan Commissioner of Police, Sir Charles Warren.
⁶⁵

After the Kelly murder, and many more abortive arrests, the panic started to die down a little and a more quiescent atmosphere began to reign. In early 1889 Inspector Abberline left to take on other cases, and the inquiry was handed over to Inspector Henry Moore. His last extant report on the murders is dated 1896, when another ‘Jack the Ripper' letter was received. There were brief flurries of press activity and wild suggestions that the ‘Ripper' had returned on the occasions of subsequent murders. The last serious suspect was Tom Sadler, a sailor who was arrested in 1891 for the murder of the prostitute Frances Coles. When they tracked Sadler down to the Phoenix public house in Smithfield, the police were convinced that they had got their man. Sadler, a violent drunk with a history of assaulting women, fitted their profile. But when he went on trial for murder, the jury remained unconvinced of his guilt and Sadler walked free.

An entire genre of ‘Ripperology' has developed over the years, with historians, psychologists and retired police officers bringing their considerable acumen to try to identify the perpetrator or perpetrators of these horrors. The
British Medical Journal
suggested that the atrocities might have been committed by a ruthless but enterprising gang eager to sell wombs to medical students,
⁶⁶
while other theories as to the Ripper's identity laid the blame at the feet of Freemasons and even the Duke of Clarence, a younger son of Queen Victoria and thought to be mentally disturbed. In recent years, the American crime novelist Patricia Cornwell has put forward an ingenious case attributing the murders to the north London artist Walter Sickert, a theory as intriguing as any other in the dark realm of ‘Ripperology'. Sickert had a ghastly fascination with prostitution and cruelty, as one of his most famous paintings indicates. Based on ‘The Camden Town Murder', it shows the body of a prostitute lying on a bed, while her husband sits beside her, wringing his hands. A grim piece of social realism, it echoes the sentiment which must have run through the minds of those men whose women were murdered by the Ripper: as the man sits in his despair, one question is uppermost in his mind: ‘What Shall We Do For The Rent?'

Whoever the Ripper may have been, the consequences of his bloody swathe through the East End were lethal for prostitutes. While the flitting shade of Jack the Ripper took his place alongside Sweeney Todd as one of the grisly legends of Victorian London, his potential victims were forced to turn for protection to male pimps. Over the subsequent century, prostitution was to undergo a transition from a female-dominated industry into a lucrative division of organized crime.

The last rites of many a Victorian gentleman involved a discreet fire at the bottom of the garden. As the smoke and ashes floated far above the rose bushes and the scent of burning paper filled the air, an observer might have wondered whether this was some obscure religious observance, or a pagan custom retained into the nineteenth century. They would have been wrong. The fuel for these bonfires consisted of pornography, systematically destroyed to protect the reputations of the recently deceased and their families; under the Obscene Publications Act 1857, mere possession of these smutty tomes merited a hefty fine or even a spell in jail.

Those books which survived the attentions of the collectors' nearest and dearest are contained in the British Museum's private cases, accompanied by notes from the gentlemen's executors who, to a man, considered the British Museum to be the best place for them, away from the eyes of women and servants. The pornography which has been preserved offers an extraordinary insight into Victorian sexuality; books and magazines devoted to every facet of erotic behaviour, some familiar, some shocking and some decidedly perverse. As Pearsall has noted in
The Worm in the Bud
, pornography constituted another element of the mysterious, submerged world of Victorian sexuality.

Victorian pornography offered vicarious thrills for those who preferred their pleasures at second hand. The repressed and masochistic William Gladstone read pornography as a means of testing his resistance to sexual temptation, before he progressed to the greater challenge of keeping company with prostitutes. For the majority of Victorian gentlemen, pornography had a more obvious appeal in the form of escapism, forbidden pleasure and release from sexual tension. The genre has, after all, been described as literature to be read with one hand. Collecting ‘erotica' or ‘curiosa' was decidedly a gentleman's pursuit, a fact reflected in the price of the books and magazines, which appeared in limited editions (around 300 copies was the average print run) and at a cost which put them well above the reach of the working man or the grimy fingers of leering schoolboys. Erotica was generally restricted to the upper classes and men of the Church, as it had been since the Renaissance. And it is at this point, perhaps, that a brief history of pornography will serve to put the genre in context.

Early erotica was printed in Latin, meaning that ordinary people could not read it. This way, ‘curiosa' as it became known, was kept from the uneducated. The other consequence, of course, was that the greatest consumers of ‘curiosa' consisted of those well versed in Latin: the priesthood.

One of the first pornographers was Pietro Aretino (1492–1556), an Italian author, affectionately referred to as ‘
il flagello de principi
' (‘the scourge of princes') for his satires against royalty and the Church. A cheerful individual, Aretino actually died laughing: he fell backwards off a chair and struck his head after hearing his sister tell a dirty joke. In 1524, Aretino wrote a series of sonnets to accompany the drawings of sixteen sexual positions by Giuliano Romano, a twenty-five-year-old pupil of Raphael. Together, they produced one of the most notorious works of erotica, the
Sonnetti Lussuriosi
, or ‘Sonnets of Pleasure'. The publication caused such outrage that Aretino had to flee Rome and was lucky to escape a prison sentence. The Church burned as many copies of the book as they could get their hands on, and no complete surviving copy is known to exist.

The first pornography in English became available during the sixteenth century, with English translations of classical texts such as Adlington's 1566 translation of Apuleius's
The Golden Ass
. This picaresque novel was originally written in Latin around the second century
AD
. In 1567 Arthur Golding translated Ovid's
Metamorphoses
, which portrayed a dizzying array of classical deities engaged in a variety of sexual activities while disguised as animals. Christopher Marlowe, meanwhile, translated Ovid's
Ars Amatoria
(‘art of love', or more precisely in this context a celebration of extramarital sex), the original version of which resulted in the poet being banished from Rome.

While a restricted quantity of pornography circulated during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the genre really took off with developments in printing in the nineteenth century. Collectors tended to be wealthy businessmen or Anglican clergy who filed their pornography under the heading of ‘anthropology'. As one genuine scholar at the British Museum remarked, in 1885, ‘Of late the demand for bawdy books has become startlingly large. If the study of “Anthropology” goes on at this rate, heaven only knows what we shall reach in the next generation.'
¹

From the 1820s onwards, the heart of London's pornography industry was Holywell Street, off the Strand. Now long gone, it was demolished in 1901 to make way for the Aldwych and Kingsway. Holywell Street was otherwise known as Bookseller's Row, because it was full of print and book shops. By 1834, there were fifty-seven pornography shops in this one street, all with a display designed to attract the attention of passers-by. Pornographic novels, erotic prints, etchings and catalogues for prostitutes that contained their specialities were all sold here. Also on sale was
The Yokel's Preceptor
, an early guide to ‘gay London', advising the best places to pick up homosexuals, disguised as a rantingly disapproving tract. As these shops sat alongside ‘respectable' stores, Holywell Street drew a curiously mixed demographic of browsers looking for legitimate texts: lawyers from the nearby Inns of Court; professors from King's College, on the Strand; medical students searching out textbooks – all rubbing shoulders and jostling alongside prostitutes, homosexuals and curious young women, pressing their faces up against the glass. The
Daily Telegraph
deplored the fact that the young of either sex were to be seen there, ‘furtively peering in at these sin-crammed shop windows, timorously gloating over suggestive title pages conning [reading] insidious placards, guiltily bending over engravings as vile in execution as they are in subject'.
²

It was here that the cognoscenti might find publications devoted to every form of sexual pleasure, from representations of conventional copulation in numerous reprints and imitations of
Fanny Hill
to dirty comic verse such as:

Holywell Street also offered literary and artistic representations of the more recherché delights of homosexual and lesbian sex, and flagellation, which has never gone out of favour in the British Isles and was particularly popular with the Victorians. Translations from French masterpieces and oriental sex manuals were also popular, some of which had been brought in from abroad with an ingenuity and resourcefulness which would put modern drug couriers to shame.

A typical example from the 1840s was the list of Henry Smith of 37 Holywell Street. This included early sex manuals and tales of sexual initiation such as:
Onanism Unveiled, or the Private Pleasures and Practices of the youth of both Sexes exposed, The Connubial Guide, or Married People's Best Friend
(price 6d);
The Royal Wedding Jester or all the Fun and Facetiae of the Wedding Night with all the good things said, sung, or done on that joyous occasion
(reduced price 2/6);
The Wedding Night or the Battles of Venus
,
⁴
while
Venus in the Cloisters, or the Jesuit and the Nun
revisited that old erotic standard, clerics behaving badly.
The Jolly Companion, Woman Disrobed
(‘a most capital tale') offers similar content to a top-shelf magazine, while
Adventures of a Bedstead
, meanwhile, promises a variety of saucy escapades, as does
Tales of Twilight: or the Amorous Adventures of a company of Ladies before Marriage
(10/6, 8 fine coloured plates).
The Spreeish Spouter or Flash Cove's Slap-Up Reciter
is more perplexing, with its encoded title of Victorian sexual slang, but it appears to be popular verse, intended to be recited, about the adventure of a pleasure-loving young man (the ‘flash cove') the specific nature of whose enjoyments or ‘sprees' involve ejaculation (or ‘spouting'). Something of the original charm is no doubt lost in translation.

‘Confessions' were always a popular genre, and so our Victorian gentlemen could expect to sit back and find pleasure in tales such as
Adventures and Amours of a Barmaid
, a serial in a pornographic magazine entitled
The Boudoir
, in which our heroine picks up an elderly earl in Kensington Gardens, takes him home and enjoys watching ‘the variations of his face as picking up a decidedly naughty book he eagerly scanned its contents'.
⁵

One of the most successful pornographers was John Camden Hotten (1832–73), a founder of Chatto and Windus. Hotten succeeded in maintaining a toehold in the respectable world of mainstream publishing, operating out of a shop in Piccadilly, while bringing out clandestine texts such as
The Romance of Chastisement
, a sado-masochistic classic which inevitably attracted the attention of one of Hotten's most popular authors, the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909), who was a devotee of flagellation. It was suspected that Hotten blackmailed his author into producing pornographic verse alongside his more mainstream contributions, but such allegations did not prevent Hotten from gaining that final accolade, burial in Highgate Cemetery, marked by ‘a modest tombstone, erected in his memory by the London booksellers'.
⁶

Hotten was considerably more respectable than William Dugdale, ‘one of the most prolific publishers of filthy books '
⁷
, who, in the 1860s, traded under several aliases, including Henry Smith, Turner, Young and Brown. Dugdale was one of the first publishers to provide eye-catching blurbs, snagging jaded rack browsers with copy such as: ‘Nunnery Tales or Cruising Under False Colours – every stretch of voluptuous imagination is here fully depicted, rogering, ramming, one unbounded scene of lust, lechery and licentiousness.' And all for two guineas. Dugdale was a twisted, unpleasant character, whose CV included forgery and plagiarism; one trick of his was to take existing texts and reissue them with new names or take sections or chapters from existing texts and reissue them as new. He even published books with racy titles, such as Confessions of a Ballet Girl, which turned out to be completely innocent.
⁸
Dugdale's publications included Raped on the Railway, in which a woman is raped and then flagellated on the so-called ‘Scotch Express'.
⁹
By the 1870s, more specialist material was available, such as The Romance of Lust (1873), which features a man who has sex with his own sister, who also turns out to be his daughter; The Story of a Dildo (1880); Kate Handcock or A Young Girl's Introduction to Fast Life (1882) and Laura Middleton, Her Brother and Her Lover (1890). Dugdale also republished The Lustful Turk, one of the original sources for the myth of ‘white slavery', in which a young woman is kidnapped and taken to a brothel where she develops an infatuation with her abductor.

The pornography trade invariably attracted some eccentric and desperate characters. There was Edward Sellon, author of
The Ups and Downs of Life
(1867), who dabbled in Hindu literature and erotology, and wrote a treatise on snake worship. After losing his memory, Sellon became a fencing teacher, drove a mail coach between London and Cambridge and blew his brains out in Webb's Hotel, Piccadilly, at the age of forty-eight.
¹⁰

Gifted authors, desperate for money, also turned to writing pornography. They included young Arthur Machen, who was to become a celebrated writer of horror and science fiction, and the poet Ernest Dowson. Rejected from medical school but with some literary talent, the resourceful Machen earned a crust by spending his days in the reading room of the British Museum translating Casanova's
Memoirs
and then
Le Moyen de Parvenir
(
Table Talk
) by Béroalde de Verville, the poor man's Rabelais. This last was considered so obscene that the printers refused to go on typesetting it after eighty pages. Meanwhile, Dowson translated French erotica to eke out his modest income as a writer and critic. Sadly, the financial rewards were not sufficient to prevent Dowson, a tubercular alcoholic, from dying in poverty at the age of thirty-two, but not before he had bequeathed the quotations ‘days of wine and roses' and ‘gone with the wind' to the English language.

One of the most popular genres in Holywell Street was devoted to flagellation. According to the publisher John Cannon, this was ‘a letch which has existed from time immemorial',
¹¹
and the trade certainly reflected the continuing fascination with
le vice anglais.
As our celebrated bawds have observed in previous chapters, a taste for flagellation appears to have been the inevitable legacy of a public school education. In the battle to maintain discipline over the future empire builders, few boys escaped the lash. Indeed, as Pearsall suggests, corporal punishment constituted one of the tribal rituals of the upper classes: one elderly correspondent to
The Morning Post
declared that, after being soundly beaten by Dr Keate, the headmaster of Eton, ‘I am all the better for it, and am, therefore – ONE WHO HAS BEEN WELL SWISHED.'
¹²
The Old Etonian Algernon Swinburne was a devotee, his enjoyment of the vice having begun after one particularly savage flogging at school, from which he bore the marks for over a month. This formative experience led, in adulthood, to his patronizing a brothel in St John's Wood where he could be chastised by rouged, golden-haired ladies who wielded the whip upon their gentlemen ‘guests'.
¹³