Although it has been glamorized in film and legend over the years, the century-old story of Jack the Ripper remains a terrifying one, a
quintessential symbol of man`s inhumanity to woman.
This mysterious Victorian fiend, seemingly a prototype of today`s
”Silence of the Lambs” serial killer, murdered five London prostitutes on four nights in 1888, disemboweling each. He was never caught, and
criminologists and historians have labored long trying to determine his identity, producing numerous books in the process.
In a just-published historical novel, ”The Women of Whitechapel”
(Random House, 404 pages, $22), Paul West, a distinguished author, takes his turn. But just as shocking as his theory-that the killings were part of a ruling-class plot inspired by Queen Victoria-and the crimes themselves is another conclusion his research turned up:
That, despite our romanticized view of the manners and morals of the Victorian era, crimes like the Ripper`s were not only commonplace but also an upperclass gentleman`s sport.
That for much of the population, the Victorian era was not an idyll but a living hell of poverty in which hundreds of thousands of largely middle-aged women were driven into prostitution to avoid starvation.
That nearly one-tenth the population of London was made up of prostitutes at the time of the Ripper, and they were murdered by the hundreds every year. ”The population of Whitechapel (the East End slum where the Ripper`s victims lived) was 80,000,” West noted while on a recent visit to Washington, D.C., ”and 12,000 of them were prostitutes. Of London in general there were 80,000 prostitutes in a population of probably a million.
”What struck me as utterly horrible was that in 1887, the year before the Ripper got to work, there were 500 murders in Whitechapel, most of them unsolved, mostly of women, most of them prostitutes.”
West said it was a time of unbelievable poverty in Britain, which, like most of the nations in Europe, had far too many people for the available work. The British royal family ignored these conditions, he said, noting it was not until the 1920s, when the Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII, who abdicated to marry American Wallis Simpson) shocked the upper classes by visiting with the poor and publicizing their miserable lot.
Though Victoria is now viewed as a beloved, grandmotherly figure, West said she and her family were bitterly hated.
”I think her complete indifference to the poor is the thing that agitates me,” he said. ”Politically, she`s a dinosaur. She had seven attempts on her life. It`s not bad going, considering this is the Imperial Idyll. She shouldn`t be having all these attempts on her life. They (the royal family) were very unpopular. They were Germans. They were anti-Irish. And there was a tremendous poverty problem, and the poverty centered in places like Whitechapel.”
He said the thousands of women who turned to prostitution for lack of other work lived largely in the streets, with the clothes on their backs ”all they had.”
”They lived hand to mouth,” he said. ”They earned four pence (per assignation). If they had some hovel, they could charge five pence for providing a bed.”
Most, like the Ripper`s victims, were in their 40s or older.
West attributed a lot of it to the women`s customers, a substantial portion of whom came from the upper classes and preyed upon the slum women as a form of sport.
”It was the Johns. Exactly,” he said. ”It struck me as though there was a kind of hunting rigamarole, which took well-to-do guys down to Whitechapel for some kind of hunting spree, the culmination of which was to kill the whore.”
In his book, West proffers a theoretical solution to the Ripper crimes based on facts he says he discovered through his research: Victoria`s grandson and a prospective heir to the throne, Prince Albert, called ”Eddy,” a near illiterate who is believed to have died of syphilis, fell in love with and secretly married an artist`s model and prostitute named Annie Crook, who bore him a son. According to West`s theory, Victoria had the marriage invalidated, had the girl kidnapped and lobotomized-destroying her memory-and had the child removed from Crook`s keeping.
In his fictionalized account, West has four of Crook`s prostitute friends press the queen for news of Crook`s whereabouts, as well for custody of the child, implicitly threatening blackmail. The queen turns to her prime minister, Lord Salisbury, to have him get rid of the four as he best sees fit. An upper-class doctor, Prince Albert`s coachman and an aristocratic artist who hired prostitutes as models carry out Salisbury`s wishes with a vengeance, masking the political nature of the murder of the four and a fifth prostitute by making them seem serial killings. The sensationalist popular press compliantly lumps them together as the sex crimes of a mystery man they call Jack the Ripper.
West admits this is mostly a novelist`s confection, but contends that historians` conclusions have been so contradictory that his theory is as good as any other.
He said that, after the first Ripper murder, Victoria actually did send Salisbury a mysterious memorandum, saying, ”You promised to do nothing like this.”
”What a very strange thing to do,” West said. ”That was in August. There must have been 300 women murdered by then that year. Why single out that one? She must have had some idea of what was going on.”
West said that, after the final killing, Salisbury received a telegram from the queen that said, ”You promised you would consult your colleagues.” The English-born West lives in upstate New York with his wife, American poet Diane Ackerman, author of ”A Natural History of the Senses.” He is the author of 21 other books, including the critically acclaimed ”Rat Man of Paris” and ”The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg” (about the man who almost killed Adolf Hitler).
West was referred to as ”possibly our finest living stylist in English” by author Vance Bourjaily in a review of ”The Women of Whitechapel” in the Chicago Tribune and already has won widespread praise for the book.
However, according to reports in the publishing community, the Atlantic Monthly and Time magazine declined to run reviews because they feared the murder descriptions in the book put it in the same category with the much-despised thrill-killer exploitation novel, ”American Psycho,” by Bret Easton Ellis.
”They didn`t want to print a favorable view of a book that recommended the chopping up of women,” West said. ”It doesn`t recommend anything of the kind. It deplores it.”
He said that, on the contrary, numerous women of strong feminist beliefs have come forward to tell him they thought it was ”a seriously feminist book.”
”I was rather sad when I had to start losing my women (in the book),”
he said. ”There was something very forlorn about writing about them. Not like Agatha Christie. You really felt that their lives had been extinguished.”
He said one of the great tragedies of the story was that, had they not been murdered by ”the Ripper,” they might have succumbed within a year or two to other killers, or more likely, disease and malnutrition.
”Most did,” he said.
