Interpreting the Ripper Letters: Missed Clues and Reflections on Victorian Society

by M.J. Trow

In the autumn of 1888, a series of grisly murders took place in Whitechapel in London’s East End, the Abyss, the Ghetto, the City of Eternal Night. The Whitechapel murderer, arguably the first of his kind, was never caught but the killings gave rise to the best known pen-name in criminal history – Jack the Ripper.

The Whitechapel killer was terrifyingly real but Jack was the creation of Fleet Street, the gallows humour of a newspaper hack whose sole aim in life was to sell newspapers. And where the ‘Dear Boss’ letter, with its ‘trade name’ signature led, thousands followed.

This book is not about the world’s first serial killer but about the sick, the perverted, the twisted souls who put pen to paper purporting to be the killer or suggested ever more lurid ways in which he could be caught. Innocent men were put in the frame by Victorian trouble-makers who would be perfectly at home with today’s Internet trolls, pointing cruel fingers in almost perfect anonymity.

The book takes the lid off Victorian mindsets, exposing a dark and unnatural place as topsy-turvy as that inhabited by the killer himself.

Genres: True Crime, History, Nonfiction

185 pages, Hardcover

Published June 27, 2019

About the author

Meirion James Trow is a full-time teacher of history who has been doubling as a crime writer for seventeen years. Originally from Ferndale, Rhondda in South Wales he now lives on the Isle of Wight. His interests include collecting militaria, film, the supernatural and true crime.

Reviews

[Eva Müller · Rating 2 out of 5]

Beyond "Jack the Ripper didn't write any of the letters" and "they were written by the Victorian equivalent of internet trolls" this book hasn't that much to say. Trow sorts the letter in some vague order that isn't always comprehensible, quotes passages and uses it as jumping-off point to talk about this and that; what happened to those that investigated the Ripper murders later in life, Peter Sutcliffe, various Victorian criminals, how did a police investigation even work in those days, more Peter Sutcliffe, some Ted Bundy, Victorian scandals, the conditions in the East End back then and he flogs his own Ripper theory a bit but mostly trashes Cornwall's and Knight's (no argument there). At the end there's a chapter in which he discusses the Zodiac, Son of Sam and the Una-Bomber who all did definitely write letters and we're sort of supposed to take from that that those were very different types of killers from Jack and so it's unlikely that someone like Jack would have written letters as well but a coherently presented argument it is not. In between all that he also finds some time to slag off the #metoo movement and generally yell at all technology that was invented post-1990.
I mean I actually think that most if not all of the letters were hoaxes but this was...a bit of a mess.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review: https://lifeandteablog.wordpress.com/...

[Katherine Addison · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the kind of book I've come to expect from M. J. Trow: interesting, easy to read, refreshingly commonsensical (a rare trait in a book about Jack the Ripper), slapdash in the research. He also loses points for being the kind of guy who thinks women accuse men of sexual harassment for fun, and in general he's pretty you-kids-get-off-my-lawn about the 21st century, but he makes a surprisingly cogent point at the end, that the people who wrote Jack the Ripper letters were basically the same thing as internet trolls.

Trow does not for a moment believe that the Jack the Ripper letters were written by the Whitechapel murderer (I forgive him SO MANY THINGS for his take on Patricia Cornwell), so his analysis of them is really an analysis of the darker corners of the public reaction to the murders. Since I've read Evans and Skinner's excellent Jack the Ripper: Letters from Hell, there weren't any big surprises for me: the people who claim to be Jack the Ripper, the people who claim to know who Jack the Ripper is, the people who are so chaotic and dysfunctional it's hard to tell WHAT they're claiming, if anything. Trow also traces the lines of misinformation that start the instant the police decide the Dear Boss letter is genuine and goes into some of the wackier "solutions," like Stephen Knight's infamous conspiracy theory involving Sir William Gull, Walter Sickert, and the Freemasons, and an idea apparently floating around the internet right now that Lewis Carroll was the murderer. And he talks about other serial killers who did write to the newspapers and the police, like Neill Cream and the Zodiac, although he doesn't really come up with any clear-cut explanation of what he's trying to prove.

I don't know how you ought to organize a book about the Ripper letters, but Trow did not pick the best way, since I'm hard-pressed to identify what his organizational principle was. Insofar as a book 179 pages long can feel meandering, this one did. But it was a very down-to-earth and rational discussion of an extremely irrational crop of letters.

Three and a half stars, round up to four.

[Deanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Looking at the the letters which were supposed to be attributed to Jack the Ripper and who were the most likely authors. The book looks at the list of suspects put forward and what can be used to discount or support the claims of those who believe they have solved the case.
Some of the letters received at the time are bizarre, didn't realise there were so many.