It is obvious from other episodes in Sickert’s life that he had periods of severe depression and paranoia. He could have had good reason to be paranoid after Emily Dimmock’s murder, and if he wanted to make sure that at least somebody believed he was home in Camden Town the night the prostitute was slain, then he unwittingly placed the time of Emily’s murder at around midnight – or when the flaming neighbor rushed inside Sickert’s bedroom. Emily Dimmock usually took her clients home at half past midnight, when the public houses closed. This is only a theory. Sickert did not date his letters, including the one about his neighbor’s flaming hair. Apparently, the envelope with its postmark is gone. I don’t know why he felt inclined to tell such a dramatic story to Nan Hudson. But he had a reason. Sickert always had a reason.
He had studios at 18 and 27 Fitzroy Street, which is parallel to Tottenham Court Road and becomes Charlotte Street before passing Windmill Street. He could have walked from either of his studios to the Rising Sun public house in minutes. Mornington Crescent was a mile north of the pub, and Sickert rented the two top floors of the house at number 6. He painted there, usually nudes on a bed in the same setting he used in Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom, painted from the point of view of someone outside open double doors that lead into a small murky space, where a dark mirror behind an iron bedstead vaguely reflects a man’s shape.
Six Mornington Crescent was a twenty-minute walk from the rooming house where Emily Dimmock lived at 29 St. Paul’s Road (now Agar Grove). She and Shaw had two rooms on the first floor. One was a sitting room, the second a cramped bedroom behind double doors at the back of the house. After Shaw would leave for St. Pancras Station, Emily might clean and sew or go out. Sometimes she met customers at the Rising Sun, or she might rendezvous with a man at another pub, Euston Station, or perhaps the Middlesex Music-hall (which Sickert painted around 1895), the Holborn Empire (home of music-hall star Bessie Bellwood, whom Sickert sketched many times around 1888), or the Euston Theater of Varieties.
One of Sickert’s favorite spots for rendezvous was the statue of his former father-in-law, Richard Cobden, on the square off Mornington Crescent in Camden Town. The statue was presented to the vestry of St. Pancras in 1868 in honor of Cobden’s repealing the Corn Laws, and was across from the Mornington Crescent underground station. Even when Sickert was married to Ellen, he had a habit of making sarcastic remarks about the statue as he rode past in a hansom. To use the statue for a rendezvous years after his divorce was perhaps another example of his mockery and contempt for people, especially important ones, especially a man he could never measure up to and had probably heard about all too often from the time he first met Ellen.
Emily Dimmock usually left her rooming house by 8:00 P.M. and did not return while the couple who owned the house, Mr. and Mrs. Stocks, were still awake. They claimed to know nothing about Emily’s “irregular” life, and quite a life it was – two, three, four men a night, sometimes standing up in a dark corner of a train station before she might finally bring the last fellow home and sleep with him. Emily was not an Unfortunate like Annie Chapman or Elizabeth Stride. I wouldn’t call Emily an Unfortunate at all. She did not live in the slums. She had food, a place to call home, and a man who wanted to marry her.
But she had an insatiable craving for excitement and the attention of men. The police described her as a woman “of lustful habits.” I don’t know if lust had anything to do with her sexual encounters. More likely her lust was for money. She wanted clothes and pretty little things. She was “greatly charmed” by artwork and collected penny picture postcards to paste in a scrapbook that was precious to her. The last postcard she had added to her collection, as far as anyone knows, was the one artist Robert Wood, employed by London Sand Blast Decorative Glass Works, Gray’s Inn Road, had given to her on September 6, inside the Rising Sun. He wrote a note on the back of it, and the postcard became the key piece of evidence when Wood was indicted and tried for murdering her. His indictment was based mostly on handwriting comparisons, and after a long, highly publicized trial, he was acquitted.