If a guest had tried his hand at a verse or two, he thereby set himself up for a blasting, such as a rhyme by F. E. Marshall from Chester:
Misfortune overtook me here
Still had I little cause to fear
Since Hill’s kind care cause my every ill
To disappear – after a pill [the vandal added]
The vandal drew a cartoon face and remarked, “How Brilliant!!!” After another guest’s bad poem the vandal wrote:
A Poet is he? It would be rash To call one so who wrote such trash. The moon forsooth in all her glory Had surely touched his upper storey!!
The vandal corrects the spelling and grammar of guests. This seems to have been a habit of Sickert’s. In his copy of Ellen Terry’s autobiography, in which she makes no mention of Sickert, he has a good deal to say about her spelling, grammar, and diction. Sickert’s copy of the book, which I purchased from his nephew by marriage, John Lessore, is filled with Sickert’s annotations and corrections, all in pencil. He changed and added to Terry’s accounts of events, as if he knew her life better than she did.
Another bad poem by a guest at Hill’s Hotel ends with “Receive all thanks O hostess fare.” The vandal makes the correction “fair” and follows it with three exclamation marks. He turns the “O” into a funny little cartoon with arms and legs. Under this, he jots cockney slang, “garn Bill that aint a gal,” in response to a guest’s mention of having visited the inn with “my wife.”
“Why do you leave out your apostrophe?” the vandal complains on another page, and includes another cartoon. Turn that page and there is yet another cartoon, this one reminiscent of some of the impish, elfin sketches in the Sickert collection at Islington Public Libraries. The “S”s in the signature of “Sister Helen” and her address of “S. Saviour’s Priory London” are turned into dollar signs.
On the bottom of a page, obviously penciled in after that page was already filled, was “Jack the Ripper, Whitechapel.” On another page, a guest’s London address had been penciled over with “Whitechapel.” I noticed drawings of a bearded man in a cutaway exposing his circumcised penis, and a Punch and Judy-like drawing of a woman striking a child on the head with a long stick. Ink blots had been turned into figures. In some Ripper letters, ink blots were turned into figures.
On two other pages, the vandal signs his name “Baron Ally Sloper.” I suppose the “Baron” is ironical – a very Sickert-like snipe at English aristocrats. Sloper was a lowlife, sleazy cartoon figure with a big red nose and tattered top hat and a habit of eluding the rent man. He was very popular with the English lower class and appeared in a periodical and penny dreadfuls between 1867 and 1884, then again in 1916. “Tom Thumb and his wife” signed the book August 1, 1886, even though Tom Thumb (Charles Sherwood Stratton) had died July 15, 1883. There are far too many examples to cite here. The guest book – or “ASSES BOOK,” as the vandal called it – is remarkable. After Dr. Anna Gruetzner Robins studied it, she agreed. “Certainly no one could dispute that these drawings match the drawings in the Ripper letters,” she said. “These are very skilled pen drawings.” One of them, she said, is a caricature of Whistler.
Dr. Robins noticed many details in the guest book that eluded me, including a message in poor German and Italian written over one of the male cartoon figures. Roughly translated, the vandal is saying he is “The Ripper Doctor” and has “cooked up a good meat [or flesh] dish in Italy. News! News!” The play on words and the innuendos, which are difficult to convey in translation, says Dr. Robins, is that the Ripper killed a woman in Italy and cooked her flesh into a tasty meal. Several Ripper letters refer to cooking his victims’ organs. Some serial killers do engage in cannibalism. It is possible that Sickert did. It is also possible he cooked up parts of his victims and served them to his guests. Of course, the suggestions of cooking human flesh could be nothing more than taunts meant to disgust and shock.