One day, my dealer at an antiquarian bookshop in Chelsea, London, called to tell me he had found at auction a ledger book filled with, quite possibly, every Sunday Dispatch article written about the Ripper murders and others that might be related. The clippings, rather sloppily cut out and crookedly pasted into the ledger, were dated from August 12, 1888, through September 29, 1889. The story of the book continues to mystify me. Dozens of pages throughout the ledger were slashed out with a razor, enormously piquing my curiosity about their contents. Alongside the clippings are fascinating annotations written either in blue and black ink or with gray, blue, and purple pencils. Who went to all this trouble and why? Where has the ledger been for more than a century?
The annotations themselves suggest that most likely they were written by someone quite familiar with the crimes and most interested in how they were being worked by the police. When I first acquired the ledger, I fantasized that it might have been kept by Jack the Ripper himself. It seems that whoever cut out the clippings was focused on reports of what the police knew, and he agrees or disagrees with them in his notes. Some details are crossed out as inaccurate. Comments such as “Yes! Believe me” or “unsatisfactory” or “unsatisfactory – very” or “important. Find the woman” – and most peculiar of all, “7 women 4 men” – are scribbled next to certain details in the articles. Sentences are underlined, especially if they relate to descriptions witnesses gave of men the victims were last seen with.
I doubt I will ever know whether an amateur sleuth kept this ledger or whether a policeman or a reporter did, but the handwriting is inconsistent with that of Scotland Yard’s leading men, such as Abberline, Swanson, and other officers whose reports I have read. The penmanship in the ledger is small and very sloppy, especially for a period when script was consistently well formed, if not elegant. Most police, for example, wrote with a very good and in some instances beautiful hand. In fact, the handwriting in the clippings book reminds me of the rather wild and sometimes completely illegible way Walter Sickert wrote. His handwriting is markedly different from the average Englishman’s. Since the precocious Sickert taught himself to read and write, he was not schooled in traditional calligraphy, although his sister Helena says he was capable of a “beautiful hand” when it suited him.
Was the ledger Sickert’s? Probably not. I have no idea who kept it, but the Dispatch articles add another dimension to the reportage of the time. The journalist who covered crime for the Dispatch is anonymous – bylines then were as rare as female reporters – but had an excellent eye and a very inquisitive mind. His deductions, questions, and perceptions add new facets to cases such as the murder of Mary Ann Nichols. The Dispatch reported that the police suspected she was the victim of a gang. In London, at that time, roving packs of violent young men preyed upon the weak and poor. These hooligans were vindictive when they attempted to rob an Unfortunate who turned out to have no money.
The police maintained that Mary Ann had not been killed where her body was found, nor had Martha Tabran. The two slain women had been left in the “gutter of the street in the early hours of the morning,” and no screams were heard. So they must have been murdered elsewhere, possibly by a gang, and their bodies dumped. The anonymous Dispatch reporter must have asked Dr. Llewellyn if it was possible that the killer had attacked Mary Ann Nichols from the rear and not the front, which would have made the killer right-handed – not left-handed, as Dr. Llewellyn claimed.
If the killer had been standing behind the victim when he cut her throat, the reporter explains, and the deepest wounds were on the left side and trailed off to the right, which was the case, then the killer must have held the knife in his right hand. Dr. Llewellyn made a bad deduction. The reporter made an excellent one. Walter Sickert’s dominant hand was his right one. In one of his self-portraits he appears to be holding a paintbrush in his left hand, but it is an optical illusion created by his painting his reflection in a mirror.