The Women of Whitechapel

by Paul West

?Born from a pelvis that was blue with cold, and later swept southward to the somewhat darker green pastures of the Midlands, Annie Elizabeth Crook had sometimes heard her name pronounced as Cook, she knew not why, but concluded it all had to do with a change in the wind from up to down. The dropped r was what happened when you left Scotland. Nobody rolled it then, although you could still go on talking that clipped antiseptic brogue...? So begins Paul West's new novel set in the London of Jack the Ripper. Using the mythical involvement in the Ripper murders of men like the painter Walter Sickert and the Queen's surgeon, Dr Gull, West portrays a violent, frightening city in which women are seen as fair game for male lust. A mesmeric evocation of English life at the end of the nineteenth century, The Women of Whitechapel suggests that, now, one hundred years later, all is not well in this land. A dazzling performance by a writer whose linguistic dexterity matches his thematic ambition.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Novels, Horror, Mystery, Historical Mystery, True Crime

416 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Paul West (February 23, 1930) was an English-born novelist, literary historian and poet, the author of 24 novels, who lived in America since the early 1960s. He resided in upstate New York with his wife, the writer, poet and well-known naturalist Diane Ackerman, until his death in 2015. Paul, still remembered with affection by his old colleagues and friends in England as a big, jolly man, was born in Eckington, which is near (and now considered a part of) Sheffield in South Yorkshire, but was during West’s childhood a Derbyshire village associated with the famous literary Sitwells of Renishaw.
Paul was honoured with the American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award (1985), the Lannan Prize for Fiction (1993), the Grand Prix Halperine-Kaminsky Award (1993), and three Pushcart Prizes (1987, 1991, 2003). He was also a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Public Library Literary Lion (1987), and a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters 1996, France).
His parents, Alfred and Mildred, really cared for books, and created an environment which ensured that young Paul inherited a great passion for literature, which was enhanced when he went from his native village to study first at Oxford University in England and later at Columbia University in America. He never lived in England again after going to Columbia, and in later years Paul was involved with other US universities in teaching roles, notably Pennsylvania State University.
Paul West’s novels have included: ‘A Quality of Mercy’ (1961); ‘Tenement of Clay’ (1965); ‘Alley Jaggers’ (1966); ‘I'm Expecting to Live Quite Soon’ (1970); ‘Bela Lugosi's White Christmas’ (1972); ‘The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg’ (1980); ‘Rat Man of Paris’ (1986); ‘The Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper’ (1991); and ‘OK: The Corral, the Earps and Doc Holliday’ (2000).
His non-fiction has included the autobiographical ‘I, Said the Sparrow’, a delightful essay on his Eckington childhood; ‘The Growth of the Novel’ (1959), ‘The Modern Novel’ (in 2 vols, 1963); ‘Robert Penn Warren’ (1964); ‘Words for a Deaf Daughter’ (1969); ‘A Stroke of Genius: Illness and Self-discovery’ (1995); and the remarkable ‘The Shadow Factory’ (2008), the aphasic memoir he dictated with such struggle and resolve –it brings tears to the eyes and admiration to the heart, as we are reminded in reading it of the courage of this man. It is a ‘must-read’ in the context of the terrible stroke he suffered in 2003. Paul’s wife, Diane, also wrote about that stroke and its consequences in her book ‘One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, a Marriage and the Language of Healing’. Paul’s poetry collections include ‘Poems’ (1952), ‘The Spellbound Horses’ (1960), and ‘The Snow Leopard’ (1964).


Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.

Reviews

[Tony Vacation · Rating 4 out of 5]

Boy, Paul West sure knows how to pack a page with dense paragraphs, each sentence pregnant with elaborate metaphors, heady sensual imagery and nearly neurotic skeins of interior monologues. All in all, not what one expects from a book that can be labeled as "historical fiction." Covering the same sensational territory as Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's thoroughly annotated and thoroughly bleak From Hell, West's admitted work of the imagination presents the infamous murders of the five women in Whitechapel, London, during that dark Fall of 1888, as a Royal conspiracy to cover-up an illegitimate birth that gets, well, a little out of hand. Told prominently from the perspective of the artist Walter Sickert--portrayed here as a fairly submissive and lazy hack--who, in the early pages of the novel, patrons the languid sexual dalliances between bisexual Prince Albert and a poor Scottish peasant named Annie Crook. But once the two lovebirds pop out a kid, it only takes a few more years for Queen Victoria to get a whiff of this scandal and sic the demonic Dr. Gull on all parties involved. Lobotomies, imprisonments, murders and mutilations eventually do the trick of covering up the fallout of this princely indiscretion, and posterity is left with a genuine mystery that still titillates the morbidly minded today. The Women of Whitechapel is certainly not a read for the faint of heart, but West wisely focuses his grungy, Gothic prose pyrotechnics not on the actual ghoul Gull, but instead finds inspiration within the inner lives of the poor souls who suffered, presenting these women of the street as both tragic and sad as well as ribald and spirited, all of which adds a genuine dismay to the eventual required recordings of their gory outcomes. Admittedly, this book is dark, disturbing, demanding and probably several other adjectives brought to you by the letter “D”, but West’s undeniable artistry lifts up these lurid happenings from the grime of the streets and constructs a concerto that tackles gender roles, class prejudice and Time’s disconcerting ability to make all horrors as manageable and mundane as another load of laundry.

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

My current impression, as I luxuriate in the dewy aftermath of having but just read it: Paul West’s THE WOMEN OF WHITECHAPEL AND JACK THE RIPPER is the greatest novel written in the English language that I have ever read. Should there be any doubt, let me affirm that as it currently stands, my being a lifelong avid reader forty years of age, the number of novels written in the English language that I have read has to number somewhere in the thousands. I am also outspoken in terms of my own love affair, both vicarious and direct, with the literary imagination’s love affair with homicide. Interviewed by a Canadian literary journal, I once said that “I think if you wanted to sum me up, during the period of my life represented by these stories, you could say I was trying to find this ideal sweet spot somewhere between James Joyce and James M. Cain.” As far as that sort of business in concerned—and for the time being I will merely leave you to make of it what you will—nothing I have previously read touches West’s staggering, unforgivably neglected masterpiece. I came somewhat prepared. West has been a recent obsession of mine, one that kicked into high gear December of last year, this the sixth of his novels I have now read, though only the second of his singular historical novels. I already had a good handle on his dazzling stylistic prowess (primarily a sentence-to-sentence matter), his focus on depth work, and his big-picture game at the level of forms and structures. I am more than a little obsessed with West, he has quickly become one of my favourites. Still, WHITECHAPEL is utterly Next Level. The novel begins with a brief and very splendid mission statement, too short to be either a proper introduction or preface, which provides us with some useful precepts that inform the undertaking at hand as well as, I believe, the methodology behind West’s highly individual historical novel (shorter as they are on historical detail than on human detail). I think it would serve us the avail ourselves of a brief overview: 1) In researching historical events and the circumstances garlanding these events, West insists that he has had repeated occasion to note that the fictions of history have always begun immediately at the level of the collecting of facts (such that one historian’s facts are immediately another’s fiction); 2) the research is usually maximally stimulating and thus tending toward obsession, but as it is literary research it is likewise research done directly in service to the stimulation of the imagination, “giving the mind a ride, leading it a chase”; 3) “In the following pages, British speakers and musers get British spelling, but the American narrator otherwise writes in American English, except for certain moments of intense locutional empathy.” All of these principles are going to figure, but I’d like to sort of start at the third point before returning to the first. We might be inclined to call West an English author on account of his having been born in the Midlands, going on to study at Oxford, so forth. Of course, he went on from Oxford directly to Columbia University, taught in both Canada and the United States, spent the vast majority of his life in the United States, and ended his days on this planet in Ithaca, New York, having been married to an American woman (the same American woman) for forty-five years. I began my journey West, so to speak, with his early Alley Jaggers trilogy, which would have been written in North America but is set in the Midlands, the author’s way into milieu and environment primarily language itself, language being the principle consideration in his art and first inroad into anything. The Alley Jaggers novels already speak to a hybrid experience, much of this involving an othering of oneself from one’s original sociocultural context, such that much of the vernacular jargon and wider idiomatic field is put on like a costume or mask, manipulated with ironic remove and clinical sophistication. In telling us that THE WOMEN OF WHITECHAPEL AND JACK THE RIPPER counterbalances or counter-incorporates “British speakers and musers” and “the American narrator” (who happens to be quasi-omniscient third person), West is already indicating that his art and the practice of it come from and are informed by a sort of constitutive hybridity, but he then goes on to suggest that slippages between the two domains (American and English) are precipitated by the intensive experience (or mobilization) of empathy. This is absolutely key for two fundamental reasons: West’s conception of idiom comes from a place of experimentation and ironic remove but is nevertheless directed toward a kind of volcanic empathy, and more importantly, THE WOMEN OF WHITECHAPEL becomes a novel about personal struggle and psychic turbulence pertaining to twin monsters: the monster of libidinal homicidal compulsion and its double, the monster of empathy. Titillation and trauma as eternal yin and yang. We could say that the struggle plays out at the level of the drama of the tale, surely, but also at the level of art-making within the tale and at the level of the art-making that is itself the telling of it. In his little mission statement, West makes clear that the most inspiring research materials were Stephen Knight’s JACK THE RIPPER: THE FINAL SOLUTION (1976), and two related cultural objects, both based on research consonant with Knight’s: the BBC series JACK THE RIPPER (1973) and Melvin Harris’s THE RIPPER FILE (1989). This means that West, in undertaking the composition of THE WOMEN OF WHITECHAPEL, found himself very much in thrall to the same basic research (or the gist thereof) that captivated Alan Moore when he set out to undertake the graphic novel FROM HELL, which happens to have been published about two years before West’s novel. FROM HELL and THE WOMEN OF WHITECHAPEL tell something like different versions of the same version of this story of many versions, incorporating all the same major real-historical-figure-or-personage players in their allotted roles. These many years later, anybody doing a little digging will find that Knight’s books is largely believed to have been discredited or at least cast into very serious doubt, but West has already told us that he believes the fiction making to have begun at the level of the cultivation of facts, so it’s not a matter upon which I intend to spend any further time. Though the famous Whitechapel murders do not begin until 1888, West’s novel begins in 1884. We begin with Annie Elizabeth Crook, the Crook reduced to Cook in the migration from Scotland to England (where an r is seldom rolled). West has already told us (in his mission statement) that some believe Crook to have been born in North London, but that he would prefer her to be both from Scotland and Catholic, as others purportedly insist, strictly for the purposes of his novel. “Lying down in cow pastures after walking from Frecheton (an old French settlement) to Killamarsh, or from Sprinkfield to Dronhill, treading where Normans and Vikings once had been, she made daisy chains, nettled herself on purpose (rubbing a dock leaf against the rash), learned to skim dehydrated cow manure through the air, and, eventually, began granting sexual favors to sundry butcher’s lads, one of whom for novelty slipped his foot between her thighs and told her it was the normal thing to do. She would not mind if, one day, he raised her aloft on that foot, daring the heavens to strike her down. If this was all life was for, she decided, she would have been better off in Scotland, where people had no time to play.” This is all to say: before arriving in London, Annie has already begun to understand the silent arrangement that leads from poverty and desperation to coercion and sex work and danger, and will very rapidly come to apprehend, upon arriving in London, that she might well “have to become an unfortunate, a mott, or a dolly-mop, as whoring servant-girls were called.” Once in London, Annie becomes a familiar of the painter Walter Richard Sickert, the character who in this novel becomes, if not exactly the protagonist, the principal embodiment of its psychospiritual turbulence. He is a man perversely drawn to perfidy, desecration, and defilement, though equally a man empathically wrenched by the trauma he witnesses and is drawn into facilitating. There is a sinister early indicator when Annie poses nude in her “peasant amplitude” for a portrait in which Sickert makes her “look scarred and scratched.” Sickert’s studio is on Cleveland Street, a locality that happens to not to be in Whitchapel but by way of which three other characters enter the fray. First we have Prince Albert Victor Christian Edward, Prince Eddy, future Duke of Clarence and Avondale, son of the Prince of Wales. “So, in 1884, the same year that Annie Crook arrived in Cleveland Street, Prince Eddy turned up there too, to find art and men, to be weaned at once from his father’s bluff ridicule and the Court’s simpering routine.” Prince Eddy is brought to Cleveland Street to patronize a male brothel, aided in this covert business by the invidious coachman Netley, future accessory to the Ripper homicides (as represented in the second half of the novel). Eddy studies at Cambridge and is nominally an heir to the throne, though he is barely if at all literate. Bisexual and profligate in the extreme, Eddy becomes sexually involved with Annie, in due course the father of an illegitimate daughter produced with the destitute Catholic woman, a potential scandal of plural dimension. Enter Marie Kelly, the final and most ruthlessly dispatched of the Ripper victims, who likewise finds herself on Cleveland Street, having arrived to London from Ireland, County Limerick, attracted by the metropolis of her imagination. “The idea of London, where bears danced in the streets and Socialist rioters looted wineshops, began to nibble at her.” Likewise forced by desperation and pitiless circumstances to turn to sex work, it is the voluble and monological Marie—“She provided an eiderdown of raw and random chatter on which they could all repose”—who will hatch the fateful campaign to more or less extort the royals into action, hoping to restore the violently separated Eddy and Annie to rightful custody of their daughter, Alice Margaret, who has been secreted away to Windsor Castle. Marie's threatening letters are co-signed by the first three Ripper victims (Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols, Dark Annie Chapman, and Elizabeth “Long Liz” Stride), horrific reprisal is immediately imminent. A whole conspiratorial apparatus is mobilized, involving Queen Victoria, Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, and the Masons. It is this dizzying paranoiac palimpsest that has doubtlessly attracted the keen interest of so many fantasists (hardly Paul West and Alan Moore alone). None of this is a mystery. It doesn’t play out that way in West’s novel. Spoilers ought not be considered to figure. Though the ghoulish coachman Netley and the largely reluctant Sickert will become accessories, the wielder of the blade is William Withey Gull, “Gull of Guy’s, the most famous vivisectionist of his day,” also a Mason and a dabbler in lobotomy (or, in West’s majestic incantatory language, “the lord of brainpain himself”). “As well as a heart in one pocket, he should have had a brain in the other, for coat of arms, for the most heraldic version of himself, but he was untidy and only grateful that as he plied his ghastly trade, his own body remained intact, apart from the stroke.” Though the famous "canonical five" murders are presented in the context of the underhanded work of political fixers, they attain their anonymity in the context of an overpopulated and highly addled city in which the murder of impoverished women is a matter of routine (at least 500 the previous year alone). From the standpoint of Gull and Netley, the actual dirty work is obviously an aberrant metastasis of lust work, though in different ways for each man, both of them unique in their highly disturbed pathologies. Marie Kelley has a cynical clarity as pertains to the male libido. At one point she muses as to “What complexities a simple shudder below the waist could start.” Much later she bemoans caustically of men how “Any little touch down there will do for most of them. It’s like is was all connected up for trouble.” She goes to her death smirkily believing, until the last possible moment, that she is merely turning another sordid trick. It is her socioeconomic situation and thus her fundamental disposability, in addition to her gender, that cause her to believe herself and her sisters of the streets to be treated with total absence of any human feeling “as if you were a rabbit hole wrapped round in woman.” Though he will participate in destroying her, it is Marie with whom Sickert most especially sympathizes. The fourth "canonical" victim, strictly accidental as such, dies for Sickert's hapless attempts at protective deflection. It makes sense that Marie is the most exhaustively mutilated murderee, ripped in the supposed sanctuary of her own domicile, such that the marauders may take their time, perfect the work. The erruption of empathy in Sickert is of comparable scale insofar as concerns its potency and capacity to harm (yang to the yin). This is a man who for a long time has existed “believing that he painted frippery unless he delved and came up with moss and rot, bone powder and love manure.” His revulsion and horror are a direct product of his lust, not its antithesis. He can mitigate his own culpability as “a mere beholder who had interfered and now could not withdraw,” but in that inability to withdraw he calls attention to the generative seed of his desire, his art, and Paul West’s THE WOMEN OF WHITECHAPEL AND JACK THE RIPPER. The sickness of Sickert's desire is now also grief sickness. “He missed her, but in the weird transplanted sense that he might have missed something he had eaten. It was no longer on his plate, whole and enticing, but masticated and then shredded by the acids deep within him. She was like one of those ‘exploded’ drawings or blueprints that engineers made to show the assembly of something, but only he, with his brushes and his paints, would put her cheerily back together like some Platonic bricklayer, whose mind hurt him all the time and had whole areas where nothing healthy would grow again.” He may arrive at the beginnings of a vision of the immortality of the soul, but not the individual's soul, merely an individual soul that swallows up individuals. “He wanted his to be an art superior to that of words, communicating through bare vibration in some part of the spectrum the birth of a wormhole in slime.” Though earlier, it must be said, Marie Kelly has provided us what would seems a much lovelier (if bittersweet) picture of cosmic grief: "Had life not been wonderful, would the grief have been so vast?”

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book that people probably turned to as another pulpy take on the vicious murders of the Ripper, expecting surface-level violence and the kind of grotesquely obvious misogyny that people subconsciously love. But it is telling to say the least that this work is absent from the entire Wikipedia article dedicated to works of fiction based on Jack the Ripper; partly this is due to Mr. West's lamentable obscurity in general but also because this is not some weakly conceived crime novel for the masses. Because, for one thing, this is a book about the masses, not just the Ripper's victims, but the seething masses of Victorian London's underbelly, a masterclass in the fusion of bourgeois pretense and flighty style with a keen social awareness.

It should, in my humble opinion, be taken as a mark of skill that a murder does not occur until more than halfway through this book. This is a work about the terrible degradation of capitalism and industrialization, a criticism by Mr. West of a society that scorns and underappreciates artists, and mistreats and abuses women of the working class. It is also, as usual, a vehicle for the author's absolutely tremendous skill for prose-writing. If you care about either social commentary or high style, this book will speak to you on many levels.

[Rob Atkinson · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very psychological take on the Ripper murders, which attempts to give a voice and soul to the women victims, and to an (initially) unwitting accomplice to the murderous fiend himself. The culprit is never in doubt here, there is no 'whodunnit' element, and there is little suspense generated over the novel's course-- odd considering the subject. The interior, often stream of consciousness nature of the various characters' exposition also means that there is little in the way of objective description to anchor the story in its time and place; lovers of historical fiction may well miss a more evocative, concrete rendering of London in the 1880s. Much of the characters' ruminations are rather impressionistic and dream-like, or conflicted interior monologues -- which in the case of painter manque Walter Sickert, the character around whom the action swirls, can become repetitive and tiresome. This novel has its moments, but doesn't deliver the kind of thrills or sense of the macabre that the title would imply.

[Rupert · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has stayed with me for years - it conjures up the lives and circumstances of Jack the Ripper's victims incredibly clearly. Not a cheapo horror story in any way.

[Mazel]

L'affaire vue par les victimes, les prostituées de Whitechapel...

[Art · Rating 1 out of 5]

Awful, did not finish.

[Jill Heagerty · Rating 1 out of 5]

For such a riveting topic, this is one of the most boring books I have ever read.

[Jack Heath]

Synopsis: the author plumbs the lower depths of Victorian England. He believes that the Ripper was actually three men covering-up a royal scandal.