The Complete History of Jack the Ripper

The Complete History of Jack the Ripper by Philip Sugden



· Paperback: 544 pages

· Publisher: Robinson Publishing; 2Rev Ed edition (21 Feb 2002)

· Language English

· ISBN-10: 1841193976

· ISBN-13: 978-1841193977

Is there anything new to say about Jack the Ripper and the infamous 1888 Whitechapel Murders? Well, yes, there is, and Philip Sugden has said it. Most Ripper books suffer from two principle weaknesses: first, they set out to make a case for a favoured and predetermined suspect, and second, they exist in a close, almost incestuous relationship one with the other. That is to say that they are secondary works based on secondary works, which means that when errors appear they are rarely questioned, repeated to the point where fiction becomes fact and legend truth.

Sugden is having none of this. He is an historian with the instincts of an historian. He is also, it might be said, a superb detective, sifting through the evidence in a careful and forensic manner. He takes nothing for granted, plowing through the mythology perpetuated by others and taking the source material as his point of departure. He sifts carefully through contemporary police reports and other primary documents, building up his case piece by piece. His arguments proceed on this basis and are mustered with considerable care.

The other virtue of this book, at least so far as I am concerned, is that the author manages to humanise the victims, people who in most other accounts are depicted in lurid detail or merely as passing shadows. He makes one sympathise even with these poor and wretched girls. Above all he brings to life a London of long ago and the desperation of so many lives in the impoverished east-end of the city.

Altogether it is a thorough, well-written and exhaustive account of the murders and the circumstances surrounding the murders rather than just another piece of vacuous speculation. Those coming to the subject for the first time will obtain no better guide. Even seasoned ‘Ripperologists’ are likely to uncover one or two surprises.

In the end there is no definite conclusion because the evidence will simply not allow such closure. It is a mystery that will remain a mystery but one can only hope that Sugden’s magisterial work will help arrest the wilder flights of fancy. If you like good history, if you like a good detective story or if you simply like a good read this book is most definitely for you.

The Story of the Story of O

What can I say about The Story of O other than it is a tour de force, in my view one of the best novels, certainly the best erotic novel, ever written, all the more remarkable because the author was woman.

Anne Desclos, who went by the pen-name of Pauline Réage, has the most incredible style; tight, angular, and translucent; every word seems to count. I read the novel as a dark existential fairy-tale, one in which the subject achieves the purer form of freedom, or self-liberation, in a process of becoming an object for the pleasure of others.

It’s about desire, yes, and cruelty in desire; but it’s about so much more. I had to read it three times before I fully absorbed all of the complex subtleties that Desclos explores, all of the nuances of meaning, the contrasts of light and dark. It’s not a book for everyone, and some people-failing to read below the surface-are likely to find it highly unsettling.

O has an interesting history, written, in essence, to prove a point. Jean Paulhan, Desclos’ lover, admired the work of the Marquis de Sade, telling her that no woman could write the kind of texts in which he specialised. Taking up the challenge Desclos created a work that is better, and far better, than anything ever written by that verbose and flowery aristocrat. :))

The Burning Secret

The Burning Secret and Other Stories

By Stephan Zweig

Introduced by John Fowles

Penguin Books, 1989 reprint

In a way there is no point reviewing this particular anthology, insofar as a review is intended to encourage people to buy a book, because it has been out of print for twenty years. Even so, the individual stories, which include The Royal Game, Amok, The Burning Secret, Fear and Letter from an Unknown Woman will clearly be available in other anthologies, so some purpose will be served, even if it is only to interest people in the work of Stefan Zweig.

I intend this also as a companion to my review of The Post Office Girl, his posthumous novel, my first introduction to the work of this wonderful writer. I read somewhere that his mastery of the short story format was as good as that of Maupassant and Chekhov; so, with that endorsement sounding in my head, I rescued this particular collection from the bowels of my college library!

The theme that unites these stories is that of obsession; the obsession of a man with chess, a game that rescued him from madness, and then brought him back to its frontiers; the obsession of a doctor with a woman he had deeply wronged and then gave his life in an attempt to preserve her honour, and her secret, even though she herself is beyond caring; the obsession of a child with the secrets and duplicities of the adult world; the obsession of a woman with fear, a fear that threatens to destroy her world; and finally the obsession of a girl with a man she has loved through the various stages of her life, a man who barely acknowledges her existence.

This is just a sampler; I just want to give people a flavour of what to expect and, in the fashion of Ariadne, offer a thread through the labyrinth. There is no purpose to be served by retelling the stories blow by blow. Let me just focus on two: Fear and Letter from an Unknown Woman, the first which I loved and the second I hated.

Fear tells a story of a woman, Irene Wagner, caught in the midst of deception. Full of apprehension in the face of possible discovery, she is intercepted early one morning leaving her lover’s apartment by an unknown and unpleasant woman, who accosts her and accuses her of stealing the man in question from her.

Fear now grows by steady leaps. The woman discovers where she lives, a comfortable home with a husband and children, a comfortable bourgeois Viennese existence, with servants, governesses and wealth. Blackmail follows, the demands increasing time by time. Irene turns to her former lover for help, only to discover how worthless and shallow he is. Her husband, her children are her true moral centre. She brings herself to the threshold of telling her husband, but is fearful of the severity of his judgement. In the end the only alternative, the only way of breaking this vicious self-enforcing trap, would seem to be suicide, and it is this which Irene prepares for. But she does not kill herself, nor does she confess. The dénouement took me completely by surprise, no easy thing, as I usually discover patterns of resolution well in advance of the final curtain!

Letter from an Unknown Woman, later turned into a film, is, so I am told, Zweig’s most famous story. As I said, I hated it, not because the author has lost any of his narrative power-he has not-but because I hated the theme, I hated the mood. Fowler warns in his introduction that “An intelligent modern woman may well find the heroine’s endless self-denial hideously improbable.” This intelligent modern woman did find it hideously improbable!

Anyway, it takes the form of a posthumous letter of a woman to a man she has loved, largely from a distance, since she was a girl, a man who does not even know her name. From the briefest of physical contacts, quickly forgotten by her lover, she has a son, a son he never knew existed, a son who predeceased the protagonist, the occasion for the composition of her letter. For all her depth of feeling, for all of her obsessive passion I found the object of her love repellent, an example of the worst forms of narcissistic egoism, the kind of man who only looks for reflections of himself in the pool of life. If you love, love well, love what is worth loving. Having said that Zweig is a new discovery for me, and when I fall in love I do not do so by half measures.

Malleus Maleficarum-The Hammerer of the Witches

Another review, of sorts, this time of one of the most notorious books ever written!

The Malleus Maleficarum (Hammerer of the Witches)
Edited by P. G. Maxwell-Stuart
Publisher: Manchester University Press (31 Mar 2007)
ISBN-10: 0719064430
ISBN-13: 978-0719064432

I’ve cobbled together some thoughts on the Malleus Maleficarum. What follows is entirely impressionistic rather than a detailed exposition; so please do bear that in mind. I’m assuming, though, that most of the people who glance at this have never actually read this notorious book. So, if there is anything that is not clear, or if you would like to know any more, I will do my best to tackle any questions that you might have.

The book, of course, was originally published in Latin, translated twice into English; first by Montague Summers in 1928, and more recently-and accurately- by P. G. Maxwell-Stuart. The text that I am familiar with is the latter, published in paperback by Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York, in 2007.

Anyway, the Malleus Maleficarum-literally the Hammerer of the Witches-first appeared in 1487 under the name of two Dominican inquisitors: Heinrich Kramer, usually known by his Latin name of Institoris, and Jacob Sprenger, though it is generally thought that Kramer was the sole author.

Those of you who know nothing of the nature of the great European Witch Hunts may be surprised to learn that that the Catholic Church was originally highly sceptical about the whole phenomenon of witchcraft, a position reflected in canon law. The Malleus was composed specifically because Kramer had been frustrated by the failure of the prosecution of a group of alleged witches in Innsbruck, a process in which he had been personally involved. The task of his manual-and that is how it is best conceived-was both to provide a scholarly defence of the heresy of witchcraft-and it is important to understand that is how Kramer conceived the practice-and to provide guidance for inquisitors in the pursuit and prosecution of witches.

I would like to say that the book stands in relation to the Witch Holocaust as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion does to that of the Jews; but this would be a gross exaggeration; for it was only one of a number of similar texts, and by no means the most popular. It did, however, have a percolating effect, steadily influencing a large section of scholarly opinion on the matter, both before and after the Reformation.

As far as Kramer was concerned witchcraft was a huge diabolic conspiracy against Christendom, a terrorist threat, if you will, with Satan in the role of Osama Bin Laden and the witches as his agents. Witches were not ignorant of the faith, like Muslims. Rather they had chosen the deliberate path of apostasy and heresy, all the more dangerous for this. The diffuse nature of the practice-also like contemporary terrorism-made it a particular and pervasive threat.

The Malleus itself is by no means an original work, rather bringing together in one place a whole series of past opinions and judgements on the nature of malificiendum or harmful magic. Kramer’s unique contribution was to identify this principally with women, for the simple reason that witchcraft for him was a crime founded on carnal lust, and women were more susceptible to this than men. For Kramer the most powerful class of witches, whose crimes included the killing and eating of their own children, all practiced “copulation with devils.”

It would be wrong to assume, as often is, that the work is specifically misogynist; it does little more than reflect many of the prejudices of the day. Rather it was the carnal susceptibilities of women, their weakness in the face of temptation, which made them the Achilles Heel of the Faith. Kramer even argues, on the basis of a bogus etymology, that femina comes from the root fe and minus, meaning less of faith. It was this that made many females, those who chose the perverse path, to be liable to demonic seduction. In short it was the infidelity of women that could and did, in his mind, lead to perfidia, a betrayal of the Faith. This was not inevitable, but women needed all the help they could get to keep the dangers posed by their carnality under control.

The ideas presented in the Malleus gradually seeped downwards, linking witchcraft with diabolism in the popular mind, thus divorcing the practice from an older and less malign root. In this in made an important contribution to the forms of hysteria that formed such an important part of the psychology of the Burning Times.

So, this is what I would like you to hold in mind: that for Kramer and many of his contemporaries, witchcraft, linked with the Devil, was a malevolent form of supernatural terrorism. This was the essential fuel of the witch-hunt, then and in all subsequent times.

Now she rests!

The Post Office Girl

My first book review!


This is a novel for today, an odd thing to say, considering it was written almost seventy years ago. It’s a tragic version of the Cinderella story, a version with no glass slipper and no Prince Charming; it’s a story of a girl taken to the heights only to be plunged back into the depths.

The author, Stephan Zweig, though not that well known in the English-speaking world, is probably the best late representative of the culture of old Vienna, that urbane, tolerant, sophisticated and brilliant world, swept away forever by the rise of the Nazis.

His oeuvre covered such a wide area of intellectual life: he was a biographer, playwright, journalist, short story writer and novelist. After Hitler came to power Zweig left his native Austria, taking refuge in England, America and finally in Brazil, where he and his second wife committed suicide in 1942 in a mood of despair over a possible German victory in the War. The manuscript of his second novel was found among his papers. Remarkably it was to be forty years after his death it was published in Germany for the first time, under the title Rausch der Verwandlung-The Intoxication of Transformation. In 2008 it was translated and published in English as The Post Office Girl.

Written in a simple, fast-paced and intoxication style, it tells the story of Christine Hoflehner, a woman in her late twenties who manages a small provincial post office in Austria, a country only just emerging from the trauma of the First World War and the economic and social dislocation that followed.

The action begins in 1926, when Christine is twenty-eight years old and living with her elderly mother, whose health has been ruined by her past experiences. The Hoflehners, once a prosperous and middle-class family, have, like so many others of the time, been brought close to ruin by the war and its after-effects. Christine, a poorly paid civil servant, recognises that life is passing her by; that her horizons are always likely to be confining and confined. Even so, there is a kind of resigned acceptance in this destiny. But then a telegram arrives from Clara, her rich American aunt, holidaying with her husband in Switzerland.

As if a fairy-godmother had appeared, Christine is lifted out of the tedium and poverty into a brilliant world, a world full of rich and glamorous people. Dowdy and badly dressed when she arrived at the luxury Swiss hotel where her relatives are staying, she is transformed in dress and appearance by her aunt. Hesitant at first, Christine is drawn into the delights of her surroundings. All at once everything is possible. Losing all inhibition, Christine enjoys the company of new friends, of men who find her beautiful and beguiling, of people whose life and experiences have been so different to her own. She learns to forget. But then the dream ends, abruptly and cruelly. It’s midnight; the clock is striking. Discarded by her aunt, she is thrown back into her old world.

It’s at this point that the full tragedy of Christine’s story is realised. What was tolerable before is now intolerable. Before there was nothing that stood in contrast to the tedium of her daily life; now there is. A gate was opened briefly, only to close forever. New forms of bitterness and despair set in only relieved, to a degree, when she meets Ferdinand, even bitterer than Christine. What follows is a love affair of a kind, limping and unsatisfactory, of two people bound by a mutual sense of rejection.

This is a fairy tale with no happy ending. In fact it might be said to have no ending at all. Remember it’s an unfinished book, and the last few pages read almost as if the author is outlining possible future developments. To that degree the conclusion, such as it is, might even said to be abrupt. But there again, this might conceivably have been what Zweig wanted. After all, life is abrupt. No matter; it’s one of those books that make a lasting impression, one that will stay with me for a long time to come.