Abstract
Jack of Hearts, Jack O’Lantern, Jack the Giant-Killer, Jack the Lad — ‘Jack’ is a common name that represents ubiquity: the nomenclature of the ordinary. In the nineteenth century there was only one Jack — the Ripper; of the famous nineteenth-century criminals this one alone has endured into legend. Of Charlie Peace, Neill Cream or Israel Lipski little is remembered; of other famous murders only the victim is recalled: Maria Marten offering herself to melodrama and Fanny Adams to a coarse joke. Jack survives, but not merely because he was not caught.
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Notes
‘In appearance, a paper of the 1890s was a product substantially the same as our own … the phrase “new journalism” was first used by the poet Matthew Arnold of the lively work of the Pall Mall Gazette and its competitors in the late 1880s. This was indeed the seedbed of the twentieth century commercial popular press…. There was also a new group of evening papers circulating in London and going out aggressively for new readers…. It was these evening papers which first educated the morning papers into editorial policies suitable for the masses. Kennedy Jones and Alfred Hamsworth (later Lord Northcliffe) worked out their ideas for mass journalism for there was a new generation emerging in the years after the Great Exhibition of 1851 which had great curiosity but little education’ — Anthony Smith, The Newspaper: An International History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979) pp. 153–4.
Letters quoted by C. M. McCleod in The Criminologist, no. 9 (1968) 120–7.
Stephen Knight, Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution (London: Grafton, 1976).
T. A. Critchley, A History of Police in England and Wales (London: Constable, 1978) p. 161.
Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Stories, ed. Jenni Calder (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983.) All quotations from the story are from this edition. Page references are given in the text.
James Berry, My Life as an Executioner, ed. Jonathan Goodman (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1972).
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, tr. Alan Sheridan (London: Allen Lane, 1977) p. 53.
Gordon Honeycomb, The Murders of the Black Museum 1870–1970 (London: Hutchinson, 1982).
René Girand, Violence and the Sacred, tr. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977).
René Girard, ‘Myth and Ritual in Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ in Textual Strategies, ed. Josué V. Harrari (London: Methuen, 1980) pp. 189–212.
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© 1988 the Editorial Board, Lumiere (Co-operative) Press Ltd
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Bloom, C. (1988). The House that Jack Built: Jack the Ripper, Legend and the Power of the Unknown. In: Bloom, C., Docherty, B., Gibb, J., Shand, K. (eds) Nineteenth-Century Suspense. Insights. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19218-2_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19218-2_9
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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