Jack the Ripper: The Letters That Named the Legend

In the autumn of 1888, in the crowded, gaslit streets of Whitechapel in London’s East End, a series of murders took place that were terrible in the specific way that violence against poor women has always been terrible: sudden, brutal, and easily ignored by everyone but the neighbours. The victims were women who lived at the very bottom of Victorian society, taking casual money for sex to pay for a bed in a doss-house, sleeping rough when they could not. They were killed one by one, their throats cut and their bodies mutilated, and for a few weeks the East End lived in real terror. There have been worse killers, by simple arithmetic, before and since. What separates this one from all of them, what makes his shadow fall across a hundred and thirty years of film, fiction and obsession, is not the number of the dead or even the savagery of the wounds. It is a name. On 27 September 1888 the Central News Agency in London received a letter, written in red ink, that ended with a signature no one had heard before: “Yours truly, Jack the Ripper.”

That signature is the most consequential act of branding in the history of crime, and there is a strong likelihood that the killer never wrote it. Before the letter, the Whitechapel murders were exactly that — the Whitechapel murders, or the work of “Leather Apron,” a clumsy early nickname. After it, there was Jack the Ripper: a name with a snarl and a swagger in it, a name that turned an anonymous butcher of destitute women into a character, an icon, a brand that could be printed on a placard and sold on a corner. To study Jack the Ripper honestly is to study how a story gets its name, and how the name, once loose, becomes more powerful and more immortal than any fact about the man it was supposed to describe.

The murders under the myth

Strip the legend away and the documented core is grim and small. Historians generally agree on five “canonical” victims, the murders most confidently attributed to a single hand between August and November 1888: Mary Ann Nichols, killed on 31 August; Annie Chapman, on 8 September; Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes, both in the early hours of 30 September, the “double event”; and Mary Jane Kelly, the last and most horrifically mutilated, indoors on 9 November. Each was a woman living in poverty in or around Whitechapel. Each was killed swiftly, with a knife, in the dark, in a district so crowded that the murderer’s ability to strike and vanish became part of the dread.

The Metropolitan Police and the City of London Police, whose jurisdictions overlapped in the maze of the East End, pursued the case with the tools of 1888: no fingerprinting in use, no forensic serology, no coherent theory of the offender, just witness statements, house-to-house enquiries and a rising public panic stoked by a press that had just discovered how much a good murder could sell. The investigation produced suspects but no charge that could hold, and after Kelly the canonical murders stopped as abruptly as they had begun. That is nearly all that can be said with confidence about the crimes themselves. Five poor women were murdered. No one was ever convicted. Everything else — the top hat, the black bag, the surgeon’s skill, the royal conspiracy — is accretion, and most of it began with the letters.

The letter that made a name

The “Dear Boss” letter arrived at the Central News Agency, which forwarded it to the police. It was jaunty, taunting, written in a confident hand, mocking the police and promising more murders: “I am down on whores and I shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled.” It was signed “Jack the Ripper,” and it added a chilling postscript boasting of clipping a victim’s ears off. A few days later came a postcard, the “Saucy Jacky” card, referring to a “double event” and again signed with the new name. When Eddowes was found with part of an ear damaged, and when the double murder of Stride and Eddowes did occur, the letters seemed to prophesy the crimes, and the police, in desperation, published facsimiles hoping someone would recognise the handwriting. That decision to publish was the moment the brand went national. Every newspaper in the country now had a name to print, and print it they did, over and over, until it fused permanently to the crimes.

Here is the fork, and it is a sharp one. The consensus among serious historians of the case is that the “Dear Boss” letter and the “Saucy Jacky” postcard were very probably hoaxes — and hoaxes written not by the murderer but by a journalist. Senior police officials came to believe this. Sir Robert Anderson, who ran the CID, and Chief Inspector John Littlechild both later pointed to a Central News man as the likely author; Littlechild named a journalist, Thomas Bulling, and the enterprising reporter Fred Best is also traditionally suspected. The motive was brutally simple and entirely modern: a sensational, personalised killer sold newspapers, and a killer with a name and a voice sold far more of them than an anonymous shadow. In an age of fierce circulation wars, a reporter with a flair for copy may have invented the most famous criminal alias in history to keep a story running.

If that is right — and it is the mainstream view — then the entity we call Jack the Ripper is partly a literary character, co-authored by the man who did the killing and by a newsman who did the naming. The murders were real. The persona was, at least in part, manufactured to sell papers. And the persona is the thing that survived.

Why the brand outlived the man

Consider the durability. There is a third letter, the “From Hell” letter sent to George Lusk of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee in October 1888, which came with half a preserved human kidney and is taken more seriously by some researchers precisely because it is cruder, less literary, less like a journalist showing off — it is signed not “Jack the Ripper” but “Catch me when you can Mishter Lusk.” Notice that this letter, the one more plausibly connected to real horror, is barely remembered by the public, while the theatrical “Dear Boss” note, the likely hoax, gave the legend its name and its voice. The public did not keep the artefact most likely to be authentic. It kept the one that told the best story. That is folklore selecting its own material in real time.

Once the name existed, it acted like a magnet for narrative. A named killer needs a face, so the culture supplied one: the top hat, the opera cape, the Gladstone bag, the fog — imagery that owes far more to Victorian melodrama and later cinema than to any Whitechapel witness, most of whom, when they described anyone, described a shabby, ordinary local man. A named killer needs a class, and the legend obligingly promoted him from a squalid slum murderer to a gentleman, even a surgeon, even a member of the royal household, because a monster with breeding is a more thrilling story than a nobody with a knife. The single most persistent grand theory — that the murders concealed a royal conspiracy involving Prince Albert Victor, Queen Victoria’s grandson, and a cover-up by court physicians and Freemasons — has been demolished by every historian who has checked its claims against the record, but it endures because it does what the name did: it lifts a sordid crime into the realm of the epic.

Ripperology and the endless suspect

For a century and a half the machine has kept running under the name “Ripperology,” a field of amateur and professional investigation with its own books, journals and feuds. The suspects proposed run into the dozens: Montague John Druitt, a barrister who drowned himself soon after the last murder; Aaron Kosminski, a Polish-Jewish barber whom senior policemen privately favoured; the artist Walter Sickert, championed most loudly by the novelist Patricia Cornwell; a Polish migrant named Seweryn Kłosowski; and many more, each with a book and a believer. In recent years a claim surfaced that DNA recovered from a shawl said to belong to Eddowes points to Kosminski — a claim that made headlines and then ran into serious doubts about the shawl’s provenance and the soundness of the genetic analysis, which is the usual fate of such certainties in this case.

What no historian will ever produce is a confession, a conviction, or a body of evidence that would stand in court, because the physical trail went cold in 1888 and cannot now be revived. And here is the quiet truth that Ripperology mostly declines to face: the reason the field never ends is not that the answer is nearly within reach. It is that the culture does not actually want an answer. A solved Jack the Ripper is a specific, probably unremarkable man — a local labourer or lunatic, dead in an asylum or a river within a few years, forgotten by everyone who knew him. An unsolved Jack the Ripper is eternal, endlessly castable, forever a top hat in the fog. The mystery is the product. This is the same appetite that keeps a hijacker forever falling into the dark rather than landing dead in the woods, and that would rather believe a killer’s tiny cipher hides his name than accept that thirteen symbols cannot carry one.

What the naming really tells us

The lesson of Jack the Ripper is a lesson about the power of the label, and it should make anyone cautious the next time a crime, a movement or a menace arrives pre-fitted with a vivid name. The name did not describe the Whitechapel killer; it created him. It gathered five separate, squalid tragedies into a single mythic figure, gave that figure a voice he may never have owned, dressed him in a costume no witness saw, and lifted him out of the East End slum and into a top hat, where he has stayed ever since. The women he killed — Nichols, Chapman, Stride, Eddowes, Kelly — have spent that same century and a half being pushed to the margins of their own murders, their real, hard, particular lives flattened into set-dressing for a legend that carries a journalist’s brand-name.

The most honest thing a modern reader can do with Jack the Ripper is to hold the two halves apart. There was a real killer, a coward who murdered destitute women in the dark, and he was almost certainly a local nonentity whom history has entirely lost. And there is Jack the Ripper, a character launched by a red-ink letter that a newspaperman quite possibly wrote to sell copy, a character who long ago outgrew the crimes and became a fixture of the imagination. The first is a tragedy. The second is a demonstration — of how a good name, applied to real horror at the right moment, can outlive the horror, outlive the truth, and go on paying dividends in fascination for as long as anyone is willing to be thrilled. We did not remember him because he was the worst. We remembered him because someone gave him the best name.