The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

It also explains the rise of socialism. The poor of the eighteenth century had taken it for granted that they were not born ‘gentlemen’, and accepted their lot; but the poor of the nineteenth century wanted to know why they lacked a home and regular income when everybody else – even the Bob Cratchits – seemed to have them. This is what created the sense of ‘alienation’ observed by Marx, and the unrest that led to riots.

What the Victorians failed to notice – even perceptive Victorians like Dickens – was the increasing number of alienated individuals -‘outsiders’ like Lacenaire, who no longer felt themselves a part of society. The first literary expression of the phenomenon occurred in 1888; it was in the October of that year that a sketch called Hunger appeared in the Danish literary monthly My Jord. Its author, a twenty-year-old Norwegian named Knud Pedersen, described a man living alone in a bleak room in Christiana (Oslo) almost delirious from hunger. He speaks of himself as ‘an exile from existence’, as isolated as a city dweller in a jungle. Two years later, Pedersen expanded the story into a novel, changed his name to Knut Hamsun, and achieved overnight fame. But his novel was regarded as an indictment of an uncaring society; no one recognised it for what it was, the first ‘outsider’ document.

But it was in that same year, 1888, that England was suddenly shocked into an awareness of the alienated ‘loner’. In the early hours of 31 August, a carter on his way to work noticed a bundle lying on the ground in Bucks Row, in the Whitechapel district of east London. It proved to be a woman, whose skirt had been pushed up around her waist, and the man’s first thought was that she had been raped – an indication of the increasing frequency of this crime. He touched her face and realised she was dead. At the mortuary, it was seen that the woman had been disembowelled. She proved to be a prostitute named Mary Ann Nicholls, who had been wandering around trying to find someone to give her a few pence for a bed in a doss house.

A week later, another body was found in the back yard of a lodging house at 29 Hanbury Street, in the same area. The body was in a rape position, with the legs apart and the knees raised. She had been killed – like Mary Ann Nicholls – by strangulation and then having her throat cut; then the killer had cut her open from the chest downward and removed some of the inner organs. The mutilations seemed to reveal a certain medical knowledge – or at least, a knowledge of where the organs were located.

London became aware that there was a sadistic maniac on the loose. The first murder had caused shock; this caused a sensation. It was recollected that another woman had been murdered in the George Yard Buildings, Whitechapel, in early August, stabbed thirty-nine times. The murders caused the same universal fear that had been experienced in 1811 at the time of the Ratcliffe Highway murders. The police made dozens of arrests – anyone who was denounced by the neighbours as eccentric was a suspect; dozens of unbalanced men walked into police stations declaring that they were the killer. In late September, the murderer acquired a nickname when the Central News Agency received a letter threatening more murders: ‘I am down on whores and shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled’; it was signed ‘Jack the Ripper’. Confessions to being ‘Jack the Ripper’ continued to pour in, mostly from drunks and mental defectives.

Two days after the ‘Ripper’ letter was received, the killer struck twice on the same night. In the back yard of an International Workers Educational Institute in Berner Street he cut the throat of a Swedish prostitute called Elizabeth Stride, but was interrupted by the arrival of a horse and cart and escaped from the yard as the alarmed driver rushed into the club. He walked half a mile or so towards the City, picked up a prostitute called Catherine Eddowes, who had just been released from the Bishopsgate police station where she had been taken in drunk and disorderly, and took her into the corner of Mitre Square. A police constable who passed through the square every quarter of an hour found the body lying there. The face had been badly mutilated; the left kidney and entrails had been removed and taken away. The next morning, before the news had had time to reach the newspapers, the Central News Agency received another ‘Jack the Ripper’ letter, regretting that he had been interrupted, and so could not send the victims’ ears as promised. (There had been an attempt to remove the second victim’s ear.)

Six weeks later, on 8 November 1888, the Ripper committed his last murder. This time he picked up the woman – a twenty-five-year-old Irish prostitute named Mary Jeanette Kelly – outside her lodgings in Miller’s Court, Dorset Street. She was killed in her room at about 2 a.m. – neighbours heard a cry of ‘Murder’ at this time but paid no attention – then the Ripper spent the remainder of the night mutilating her, burning rags in the grate to provide light. When she was found the following morning, the head had been almost severed from the body. Some of the entrails had been hung over a picture frame. The heart lay beside her on the pillow, but her breasts were on the table. One arm had been almost removed, and the killer had spent some time cutting the flesh from the face – including the nose – and the legs. These mutilations must have taken him at least an hour.

Then the murders ceased. The killer was never identified, although Sir Melville Macnaghten, the Commissioner of Police, later declared that the chief suspect had been a young and unsuccessful barrister named Montague John Druitt, who had committed suicide by drowning three weeks after this last murder. There have been many other candidates, from a sadistic midwife to the heir to the throne, the Duke of Clarence. But most of the books about the Ripper are based upon what is probably a false assumption: that the Ripper must have been known to many people as a maniac, and that he (or she) would have stood out from the crowd as an unusual personality. The truth is probably that the Ripper was some anonymous unknown, a street sweeper or market porter, whose sadistic obsession was totally unsuspected by those who knew him. But the assumption tells us a great deal about the impact of the murders. They seemed to be a deliberate outrage, like some terrorist bombing, an ‘alienated’ man screaming defiance at society and taking enormous pleasure in the shock he produces. The double murder, followed by the elaborate mutilation of the last victim – the photograph makes it look like a butcher’s carcase – gives the impression of someone shouting: ‘There – what about that?’

The odd thing is that the Victorians were only dimly aware that these were sexual murders. No contemporary newspaper refers to them as sex crimes, although the murderer is often described as ‘morally insane’. Bernard Shaw said jokingly that the killer was probably a social reformer who wanted to draw attention to the appalling conditions in the East End of London; but the comment was more apposite than he realised. The Ripper was clearly a man who was insanely obsessed with blood and stabbing and who was particularly fascinated by the womb. He was obsessively neat – the bodies were always carefully arranged, sometimes with the contents of the pockets placed symmetrically around them. But the most significant thing about him was that he felt totally separated from society. Like Lacenaire, he probably experienced a state of detachment, a sense of unreality, which vanished only when he killed or daydreamed about killing. Although he was probably indifferent to the social conditions in the East End of London, he was nevertheless an extreme product of Marx’s ‘alienated’ society.

The most sensational American case of the same decade was in some ways more remarkable than that of Jack the Ripper. Hermann Webster Mudgett was born in 1860 in New Hampshire, became a medical student at eighteen, got married, and practised his first swindle – an insurance fraud involving the faked death of a patient – while still at medical school. He practised medicine in Mooers Forks, New York State until 1886, then moved to Chicago, where he became ‘H. H. Holmes’. There he began his career of murder, killing a friend, Dr Robert Leacock, for his life insurance. He married a second time – bigamously – but ran into trouble when he forged his wife’s uncle’s signature. He became an assistant in a drug store run by a Mrs Holden on 63rd Street, Englewood, and in 1890 became a partner. There was some talk about rigged books and prosecution, and Mrs Holden vanished. Holmes became sole owner of the store. He was soon doing so well that he built himself a house opposite – it later became known as ‘murder castle’; one of its peculiarities was a chute leading to the basement; others were glass pipes with which he could flood rooms with gas, and peep holes into all the rooms. One of his tenants, Dr Russell, was killed with a blow from a chair; the body was sold to a medical school which apparently asked no questions about the injuries.