Letters Ellen wrote to Blanche as late as 1893 with a 10 Glebe Place, Chelsea, return address are on stationery that also has the Joynson Superfine watermark. In the Whistler collection at Glasgow, there are seven Sickert letters with the Joynson Superfine watermarks, and it would appear that Sickert was using this stationery about the same time he was using A Pirie & Sons.
In the Sir William Rothenstein collection at Harvard University’s Department of Manuscripts, I found two other Sickert letters with the Joynson Superfine watermark. Rothenstein was an artist and a writer, and a trusted enough friend of Sickert’s that the latter felt comfortable asking him to lie under oath. During the late 1890s, Sickert had become friendly with a Madame Villain, a fishwife in Dieppe he referred to as “Titine.” Although there was no evidence he committed adultery with her, she did supply him room and board and a space in her small home that he used as a studio. Whatever the nature of their relationship, it would have been used against him in court had he contested Ellen’s divorce suit, which he did not. “If subpoenaed,” he wrote to Rothenstein in 1899, during the divorce, “you might truly remain as you are in ignorance of Titine’s very name. You might say I always call her ‘Madame.’ ”
Both Joynson Superfine watermarked letters that Sickert wrote to Rothenstein are undated. One of them – oddly, written in German and Italian – is on stationery that must have belonged to Sickert’s mother because the return address is hers. A second Joynson Superfine watermarked letter to Rothenstein, which includes mathematical scribbles and a cartoonish face and the word “ugh,” has a return address of 10 Glebe Place, Chelsea, which is the same return address on Ellen Sickert’s 1893 letter to Blanche. There is a Ripper letter at the PRO with a part Joynson mark. It would appear that Sickert used Joynson Superfine watermarked paper from the late 1880s through the late 1890s. I have found no letters with this watermark that date from after his divorce in 1899, when he moved to continental Europe.
Four letters catalogued in “The Whitechapel Murders” file at the Corporation of London Records Office were written on Joynson Superfine paper: October 8, 1888; October 16, 1888; January 29, 1889; and February 16,1889. Two of these letters are signed “Nemo.” Three other letters with no watermarks are also signed “Nemo.” On October 4, 1888 (four days before the first “Nemo” letter was written to the City of London Police), The Times published a letter to the editor that was signed “Nemo.” In it the writer described “mutilations, cutting off the nose and ears, ripping up the body, and cutting out certain organs – the heart, & c. -…” The writer continued:
My theory would be that some man of his class has been hocussed and then robbed of his savings (often large), or, as he considers, been in some way greatly injured by a prostitute – perhaps one of the earlier victims; and then has been led by fury and revenge to take the lives of as many of the same class as he can…
Unless caught red-handed, such a man in ordinary life would be harmless enough, polite, not to say obsequious, in his manners, and about the last a British policeman would suspect.
But when the villain is primed with his opium, or bang, or gin, and inspired with his lust for slaughter and blood, he would destroy his defenceless victim with the ferocity and cunning of the tiger; and past impunity and success would only have rendered him the more daring and restless.
Your obedient servant October 2 NEMO
I have already mentioned that Sickert’s stage name when he was an actor was “Mr. Nemo.”
Other unusual signatories in the some fifty letters at the Corporation of London Records Office are suspiciously reminiscent of those of some PRO Ripper letters: “Justitia,” “Revelation,” “Ripper,” “Nemesis,” “A Thinker,” “May-bee,” “A friend,” “an accessary,” and “one that has had his eyes opened.” Quite a number of these fifty letters were written in October 1888 and also include both art and comments similar to those found in the Jack the Ripper letters at the PRO. For example, in a PRO letter to the Editor of the Daily News Office, October 1, 1888, the Ripper says, “I’ve got someone to write this for me.” In an undated letter at the Corporation of London Records Office, the anonymous sender says, “I’ve got someone to write this for me.”