Diary of Jack the Ripper 

narrative by Shirley Harrison (Smith Grypon £15.99)

reviewed

by Paul Newman

One of the more enjoyable characters in the adult comic Viz is called Victorian Dad.  This gentlemen lives in an ordinary suburban dwelling with an ordinary drab modern family, yet he fiercely insists on Victorian values, dressing at all times in funereal black, raging at naked piano legs, excommunicating his married daughter because she has had a perfectly legitimate baby (Do not darken my door again!) and insisting that his family encase themselves in long, ludicrous woollen attire before going swimming.  The twist usually comes at the end of the cartoon strip, for after hours of bitter, passionate moralising, Victorian Dad will come across an archaic tome showing bare-breasted South Sea Islanders which will excite him so much that he will commit the dreadful sin of "onanism" with such fanatical vigour that his family will find him immodestly exposed in a state of total priapic exhaustion. In one particular episode, after a conducting a particularly bitter diatribe against ankle-length skirts, he is shown clutching a sinister black case and asking a horse-drawn carriage to take him to the area of Whitechapel.

Jack the Ripper emerges as a kind of Victorian Dad in this present "diary" which has recently come to light.  The argument is straightforward, though it has many ingenious ramifications.  In short, the identity of Jack is James Maybrick, a Liverpool cotton merchant, whose business called him to the Whitechapel area of London and who was married to a younger woman, Florence, who was unfaithful to him and who was finally imprisoned for  poisoning him - though many thought she was innocent.   Maybrick took large quantities of arsenic, which acted as both a narcotic and aphrodisiac.  Basically his surface was respectable but underneath he showed the vicious side of Victorian Dad: violent, sex-crazed, drug-addicted and barking mad.  

Many find the diary convincing although its manner of appearance has been suspiciously apologetic, a label ‘Is it Genuine’ being actually stuck on the cover.  The body of expert witnesses fronting the publicity video, including Paul Begg and Martin Fido, were admirably sedate in their criticism and excluded the rigorously sceptical Melvyn Harris. The Sunday Times (who originally made a £75,000 bid for serialisation) pulled out when their experts declared the diary a fake and the original American publisher, Warner Books, followed suit. In 1993 Scotland Yard investigated an accusation of fraud against Smyth Gryphon; they concluded that the diary was a recent forgery originating in Liverpool but found nothing to implicate the publishers in a deliberate deception. Ion migration tests conducted on the ink have elicited a date between 1912 and 1933 - but the accuracy of these tests is far from foolproof.  Victorian gall-ink is fairly easy to mix up and, although experts tell us that it is undoubtedly composed on Victorian paper, it is not actually written in a diary but a scrapbook?  Suspiciously half the pages have been ripped out - does one abruptly become a mass-murderer halfway through a document?  Or did the remainder of the diary contain innocuous material in a hand other than that of the forger's?   As for the style, this seems to me semi-literate; the writer punctuates in that modern, careless way, using commas like full-stops.  This could be excused as indicative of his frantic state of his mind, though Maybrick must have been calmly conducting his business life at the same time.   The intellectual content does not rise higher than the pantomime villain:  "Once more the bitch is in debt, my God I will cut her. Oh how I will cut her.  I will visit the city of whores and I will pay her dues and take mine, by God I will.  I will rip rip rip..."

Such writing seems embarrassingly melodramatic - as if Jack has the reader over his shoulder in mind - but maybe, as the famous 'Dear Boss' letter would seem to suggest, he was like that, exulting in his public personae, relishing the frisson of dread and horror which his antics provoked.    Psychologically we are offered fairly primitive fare:  Maybrick hates whores, wants to revenge himself on them, bury his knife deeply into them and later, in the privacy of his room, sample the assorted bits of them he has taken away.  The cannibalistic references make one wonder whether the document (if it is a recent forgery) might have been influence by Silence of the Lambs.

However, the fact that one can easily sneer at the Ripper Diary from a literary point of view does not discount the possibility of it being authentic.  We simply have no evidence upon which to base our assumptions about what such a killer would write down.  

What I find most suspicious is the source of the document.  It was allegedly "given" to Michael Barrett, a retired Liverpool labourer, by Tony Devereux, an invalid who lacked the ability to write such a work.   This is totally inadequate - on par with picking up from a bloke at a car boot sale the lost confessions of Lord Byron or Oscar Wilde. (However, there are recent developments which negate the Devereux story and point to the document coming from a far more plausible source.) Still, as it stands, a scrupulous researcher would insist on seeing samples of the handwriting of Michael Barrett, Tony Devereux and Maybrick himself, along with proper background research concerning Devereux and Barrett, what they read, how sound was their knowledge of criminal history.  But the reader is merely assured that these people "could not have forged" the document.  Certainly such omissions preclude the intelligent reader's full involvement, as one needs the basics to be cleared up before one can swallow the content entire.

Since the appearance of the document, a watch has come forward, bearing the signature J.M. (James Maybrick) with the initials of the five prostitutes killed by the Ripper and the admission I am Jack scratched on the surface.   This watch is of the Victorian period and the scratch marks may well be nineteenth century.  But again the timing seems a little too timely, although we are naturally assured that the owner of the watch, Albert Johnson, a semi-retired college security officer, (who turned out, incidentally, to be a keen Wilson reader) is a perfectly straightforward citizen and not part of a conspiracy.

In conclusion, if the Ripper Diary is a forgery (and the chances are it is), at least it is a cleverly coordinated one; the welding of the Maybrick Case, which was one of the great criminal trials of the Victorian era, and that of the Ripper mystery, is an imaginative connection and strongly suggests a Liverpool source for the fabrication - if indeed it is one.  Details in the Diary have been verified as accurate about such symptons as arsenic poisoning (depression, stomach pains, glacial numbness) and it is claimed that hitherto unpublished evidence is also set down. Of course, a Victorian date enhances the likelihood of the Diary being genuine but does not preclude it being a forgery of that period.  During his brief rain of terror, Jack the Ripper attained a mythic status, engendering in people all over the world  fantasies of a self-aggrandising type.

Had there not been such a spate of recent forgeries, I am sure this compilation would have picked up ten times the sales and publicity it has so far received.   As a social document, The Diary of Jack the Ripper throws a new perspective on the Maybrick case (and, of course, on Victorian Dads and their outdoor pursuits); also, physically speaking, with  its eloquent illustrations and blotchy purple cover, the volume will prove a literary curiosity in the years to come.