In all likelihood, an illiterate cockney would not use the word “conundrum” or sign his letter “Mathematicus.” In all likelihood, an ignorant brute would not refer to the people he has murdered as “victims” or describe mutilating a woman as giving her a “Caesarian.” The Ripper also used vulgarities, such as “cunt,” and worked hard to misspell,
mangle, or write in snarls. Then he mailed his trashy letters – “I have not got a stamp” – from Whitechapel, as if to imply that Jack the Ripper was a low-life resident of the slums. Few Whitechapel paupers could either read or write, and a large percentage of the population was foreign and did not speak English. Most people who misspell do so phonetically and consistently, and in some letters, the Ripper misspells the same word several different ways.
The repeated word “games” and much-used “ha ha”s were favorites of the American-born James McNeill Whistler, whose “ha! ha!” or “cackle,” as Sickert called it, was infamous and was often described as a much-dreaded laugh that grated against the ear of the English. Whistler’s “ha ha” could stop a dinner party conversation. It was enough of an announcement of his presence to make his enemies freeze or get up and leave. “Ha ha” was much more American than English, and one can only imagine how many times a day Sickert heard that irritating “ha ha” when he was with Whistler or in the Master’s studio. One can read hundreds of letters written by Victorians and not see a single “ha ha,” but the Ripper letters are filled with them.
Generations have been misled to think the Ripper letters are pranks, or the work of a journalist bent on creating a sensational story, or the drivel of lunatics, because that was what the press and the police thought. Investigators and most students of the Ripper crimes have focused on the handwriting more than the language. Handwriting is easy to disguise, especially if one is a brilliant artist, but the unique and repeated use of linguistic combinations in multiple texts is the fingerprint of a person’s mind.
One of Walter Sickert’s favorite insults was to call people “fools.” The Ripper was very fond of this word. To Jack the Ripper, everybody was a fool except him. Psychopaths tend to think they are more cunning and more intelligent than everyone else. Psychopaths tend to believe they can outsmart those out to catch them. The psychopath loves to play games, to harass and taunt. What fun to set so much chaos in motion and sit back and watch. Walter Sickert wasn’t the first psychopath to play games, to taunt, to mock, to think he was smarter than anyone else, and to get away with murder. But he may be the most original and creative killer ever to have come along.
Sickert was a learned man who may have had the I.Q. of a genius. He was a talented artist whose work is respected but not necessarily enjoyed. His art shows no whimsy, no tender touches, no dreams. He never pretended to paint “beauty,” and as a draftsman he was better than most of his peers. Sickert “Mathematicus” was a technician. “All lines in nature… are located somewhere in radiants within the 360 degrees of four right angles,” he wrote. “All straight lines… and all curves can be considered as tangents to such lines.”
He would teach his students that “the basis of drawing is a highly cultivated sensibility to the exact direction of lines… within the 180 degrees of right angles.” Allow him to simplify: “Art may be said to be… the individual co-efficient of error… in [the craftsman’s] effort to attain the expression of form.” Whistler and Degas did not define their an in such terms. I’m not sure they would have understood a word of what Sickert said.
Sickert’s precise way of thinking and calculating was evident not only in his own description of his work, but also in the way he executed it. His method in painting was to “square up” his sketches, enlarging them geometrically to preserve the exact perspectives and proportions. In some of his pictures, the grid of his mathematical method is faintly visible behind the paint. In Jack the Ripper’s games and violent crimes, the grid of who he was is faintly visible behind his machinations.