Murder by Candlelight

by Michael Knox Beran

  There is another reason why the crimes left short smart upon the collective psyche. Murder was coming to be looked at in a new way. Once it had been conceived as a demonic act, with mysterious springs in the reptilian depths of the soul. But in the age of Victoria, it was being rationalized into a social fact, with its ultimate cause in the material circumstances of the murderer’s life. The word “conditions” had come into vogue. By “conditions” was meant the various antecedent causes that contribute to particular results. The great thing about “conditions” is that they could be studied empirically, by means of the social and natural sciences. Moreover, they could be remedied politically, through social legislation. Murder, in the new theory—the Whig theory—differed from bad drains and inadequate plumbing in degree but not in kind; it, too, could be alleviated by Acts of Parliament. The criminal, it was pointed out, had had a hard childhood; had lived unhygienically; had been fed an unsatisfactory diet; was insufficiently educated. Alter the conditions, and you would have fewer criminals.

  The Whig theory of crime was sound, so far as it went; the vital statistics have long shown that in hard times, the number of certain kinds of crime (housebreaking, larceny, embezzlement) goes up. The trouble with the Whig theory is that in good times, the number of depraved crimes does not go down. Since the reign of Victoria, countless slums have been cleared and social welfare programs instituted; the poor, in Europe and America today, enjoy luxuries unknown to the rich of a century ago; and obesity has replaced hunger as the curse of the lower classes. Yet mass murders have become as innumerable as the leaves of Vallombrosa. Like cancer and mental depression, the phenomenon of the psychopath appears to be one of those malignancies which flourishes most abundantly in the sunshine of progress and enlightenment.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Trivialization of Evil

  For it is here that Fantasy with her mystic wonderland plays into the small prose domain of Sense, and becomes incorporated therewith. In the Symbol proper, what we can call a Symbol, there is ever, more or less distinctly and directly, some embodiment and revelation of the Infinite. . . .

  —Thomas Carlyle

  Plato spoke in figures, for he saw many things with the light of his mind which he could not express in words.

  —Dante (to Con Grande)

  The Times, June 7, 1865. The body of an unknown woman, aged about thirty-five, is fished up naked from the Thames. The Times, December 17, 1872. On Christmas Day, the body of a “good-looking girl” in her twenties is discovered dead in her room in 12 Great Corham Street, Bloomsbury, with “a wound on the left of the wind-pipe large enough to put a man’s fist in”; she is identified as Harriet Buswell, also known as Clara Bruton, a dancer in the Alhambra, the music hall in Leicester Square. The Times, September 20, 1873. Police continue their unavailing efforts to trace the murderer of a woman whose mutilated and dismembered body has been found, piece by piece, in the Thames. The left quarter of the trunk was discovered on September 5 in the river-mire near Battersea Waterworks, where, afterwards, the left thigh and the breasts were also recovered. On September 6, the face and scalp (which had been detached from the skull) surfaced off Limehouse; the nose had been cut away from the face and hung by a shred of flesh from the upper lip. The legs were found at Lambeth; one of the feet by the mouth of the Surrey Canal; an arm near the Albert Embankment; the right thigh and a portion of the pelvis at Woolwich Arsenal; a shoulder near Greenwich; and the left forearm at the Albert Bridge.

  Even in the heyday of the cult of progress, it was obvious to some observers that the certain kinds of mental and spiritual debility could not be entirely explained by reference to the price of corn or fluctuations in the cattle market, to the quality of the sewers or the state of the poor laws. Krafft-Ebing was among the first researchers to study depraved homicides in the light of medicine and psychology; and today his work is carried on by researchers in the fields of genetics and neurochemistry. Such studies are, of course, valuable; but like their counter-studies in the social sciences, they have had the effect of diminishing the evilness of evil.

  Evil loses a good deal of its horror when you succumb to the illusion that it can be done away with by means of better plumbing or a saving pill, the establishment of a more intelligent school curriculum or a reformation of the gene pool. The more one gets into the habit of thinking of evil as a byproduct of social or economic circumstances, or as an anomaly in the neural architecture of the brain, the harder it becomes for one to take it seriously as a permanent element in the soul, one’s own included. The first principle of goodness, it would seem, is to accord evil a healthy respect.

  De Quincey, a Tory of the old school, anticipated the psychological insights of Krafft-Ebing and discerned as clearly as any up-to-date Whig the element of monstrous sexuality in the character of the psycho. But he never lost sight of the residuum of mystery that remains after science has done its best to account for the degeneracy; never ceased to be conscious of the deeper spiritual horror of particular crimes, the diabolic imponderable which never will be apprehended by empirical science, or explained in crude prose.* Evil, if it be really evil, has in it something of the shadowy and indistinct. It is enveloped in an obscurity which the poet or the prophet may partly penetrate, but which the light of reason and science can never wholly dispel. There is that in it which “passeth understanding.” The rational or empirical investigator affects to solve the mystery of a particular evil when he has in fact but grazed the surface of its horror; it is as though he had lit a candle and, pleased with the little circle of illumination he had made, flattered himself that he had vanquished darkness.

  The Times, March 11, 1879. A white deal box is found floating in the Thames and, when opened, proves to contain pieces of a young woman’s body, each of them wrapped in brown paper. The Times, June 5, 1880. The decomposing body of an unknown woman is found in a cask covered with chloride of lime in the cellar of a house in Harley Street. The Times, March 11, 1884. The body of a woman in her twenties, Mary Ann (“Annie”) Yates, is discovered around noon on Sunday, March 9, in her room in 12 Burton Crescent. She lay on the bed partially undressed under the bedclothes, with her head resting on the pillow in a pool of blood. There was a “serious gash” on the left side of her head, and the towel that covered her mouth had been tied round the back of her head. Around three o’clock that morning, a man and woman in the next room had been awakened by screams coming from Miss Yates’s room, “but no notice was taken of the circumstance,” as Miss Yates “was subject to fits of hysteria, and frequently made similar noises.” The Times, July 13, 1887. An inquiry is opened in connection with a pair of human legs and human arms found wrapped in canvas in the Regent’s Canal on June 30. They were thought to belong to a human trunk which was discovered sewn up in canvas in the Thames near Rainham Creek on May 11. The trunk, on examination, appeared to be that of a woman in her twenties: the “internal organs were missing” from it, the “spine had been sawn through,” and the “thighs had been taken out at the sockets.” The trunk corresponded to the chest and thorax of a woman found in the Thames at Temple Pier on June 5: the collarbone and breasts “had been taken off,” but the “lungs were present.” The head of the woman was never found, nor was the identity of the killer ever discovered.

  * As much as Thoreau, De Quincey believed that there is “a chasm between knowledge and ignorance which the arches of science can never span.” The same conclusion was reached by the physicist Max Planck. Having devoted, he said, “his whole life to the most clear-headed science, to the study of matter,” he concluded that science “cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.” The solution to the ultimate mystery of evil is perhaps no less elusive.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Lesson of the Master

  Hell is naked before God.

  —Symmachus

  Surely it is
no coincidence that at the very moment when murder was being degraded into a socio-medical problem, to be alleviated by Acts of Parliament, it was simultaneously being trivialized into a form of light entertainment, the literary equivalent of a parlor game. The detective story, which grew to maturity during the reign of Victoria, begins, as a rule, with an instance of mysterious crime or terror, quite as unfathomable as De Quincey’s Wapping murders. The terror seems at first to partake of the weirdness of nightmare and the occult; it is bound up with an infernal hound, or a Peruvian vampire, or a man with a yellow face. But by degrees the mysterious mists are dissolved by the genial light of deductive logic, which it is the role of the detective (the hero of the story) to supply; and in the end the reader discovers that the hound of hellish aspect is in fact an ordinary canine got up with phosphorus by an all-too-human villain.

  The trick of transmuting an apparently infernal mystery into a merely rational one is not easily mastered, and in time writers of detective novels found that they need not master it. Their readers, they discovered, wanted nothing so much as to pass a few idle hours in as mentally unstimulating a way as possible. The main thing, then, was to get the first victim killed as rapidly and efficiently as possible, for only then could the guessing game (the chief pleasure of a detective novel) begin. The element of palpable evil is all but absent in these books; in its place we find a drawing-room comedy of butlers, vicars, dowagers, and retired colonels, phrased in an ironic-genteel prose such as Jane Austen might have written had she been drawn to empty subjects.*

  It is true that, as detective fiction grew more tepidly mannered, readers hungry for gore—for “rawhead and bloody bones”—became impatient. The thriller came to market. But the thriller has proved a difficult genre to sustain; authors are obliged to compete with one another to devise ever more improbable and outré forms of the grotesque, which they proceed to describe in painstaking detail. But just as there is beggary in the love that can be reckoned, so there is banality in the horror that is too ingenuously transcribed. When an author leaves the precise nature of the evil he is conjuring ambiguous, as Henry James does in The Turn of the Screw, the imagination of the reader cooperates with the language of the writer to fill up the cup of horror. But when, in a book like Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, written a century later, the light is too naïvely bright, the result is not horror, but something ludicrous and bouffe, and incapable of affording either amusement or instruction.

  While authors in the West End of London were busy contriving unreal stories in which genteel personages were being elegantly slaughtered in rural vicarages, in the East End real women were being murdered with every circumstance of degradation and horror.

  No one who was living in London in the autumn of 1888, says Sir Melville Macnaghten, who afterwards rose to be Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, “will forget the terror created by these murders. Even now I can recall the foggy evenings, and hear again the raucous cries of the newspaper boys: ‘Another horrible murder, murder, mutilation, Whitechapel.’ Such was the burden of their ghastly song; and, when the double murder of 30 September took place, the exasperation of the public at the non-discovery of the perpetrator knew no bounds, and no servant-maid deemed her life safe if she ventured out to post a letter after ten o’clock at night.”

  Sir Melville is as good a guide as any to the way in which the Whitechapel murders were perceived by those who followed them at the time. He supposes (as many Ripper authorities still do) that the first “real” Whitechapel murder was that which took the life of Mary Ann Nichols, who was found in Bucks Row in the early hours of August 31 “with her throat cut and her body slightly mutilated.”† Nine days later, the body of Annie Chapman was discovered behind a house in Hanbury Street; her throat had been cut in the same manner as Nichols’s, but she had sustained, Sir Melville writes, mutilations of “a much more savage character.”

  On September 27, the notorious “Dear Boss” letter, signed “Jack the Ripper,” was received in that rather louche bureau of public intelligence, the Central News Agency in the Strand. Professing to be “down on whores,” the writer made a vow: “I shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled.” Sir Melville detects in the letter “the stained forefinger of the journalist,” and he supposes it to have been the work of a newspaper-man intent on fabricating sensational copy. The letter soon became public knowledge, and many Londoners who (like the authorities themselves) believed it to be genuine were wrought up to a new pitch of fear and indignation.

  Just as the Ripper legend was taking form, the infamous “double event” occurred: two murders which were committed within a short time of each other on September 30. Elizabeth Stride was found in Berners Street with her throat cut; she had not, however, been mutilated. This, Sir Melville surmises, was because “the murderer was disturbed at his demoniacal work by some Jews who at that hour drove up to an anarchist club in the street.” The killer’s thirst for blood unslaked, he “started off in search of another victim, whom he found in Catherine Eddowes.” Her “body, very badly mutilated,” was discovered “in a dark corner of Mitre Square.”

  There followed a respite of forty days and forty nights, during which the frenzy of the public gradually died down, only to be fearfully revived when, on the morning of November 9, the mutilated corpse of Mary Jane Kelly was found in her room in 13 Miller’s Court. She was, Sir Melville writes, a “comparatively young woman of some twenty-five years of age,” and was “said to have been possessed of considerable personal attractions.” On the last night of her life, she entertained several men in her room, and was heard to sing a popular song, “A Violet from Mother’s Grave.” Her murder, Sir Melville writes, was “the last of the series, and it was by far the most horrible.” The mutilations “were of a positively fiendish description, almost indescribable in their savagery, and the doctors who were called in to examine the remains averred that the operator must have been at least two hours over his hellish job. A fire was burning low in the room, but neither candles nor gas were there. The madman made a bonfire of some old newspapers, and of his victim’s clothes, and, by this dim, irreligious light, a scene was enacted which nothing seen by Dante in his visit to the infernal regions could have surpassed.”‡

  Whatever Sir Melville’s virtues as a cicerone, it is his limitations and blindnesses that are most palpable. Where are the swirling fogs and lurid, gaslit alleys of the metropolitan Maleboge? Where are the crowds of the undernourished and unemployed standing about in the streets in a “dull, aimless, discouraged way,” “too apathetic to move”? Where are the fallen women who filled the squalid lodging houses, resignedly or drunkenly practicing the saddest of professions? Where is the erotic cannibal himself? Sir Melville is probably right when he says that “the fury of the murderer, as evinced in his methods of mutilation, increased on every occasion,” and that “his appetite appears to have become sharpened by indulgence.” (He who has a taste for “unnatural luxury” does not “relapse into inertia.”) But although Sir Melville recognizes that the killer is a “sexual maniac” with “a lust for blood,” that is the extent of his insight. Still, it is not deficiency of imagination alone that makes Sir Melville a less-than-desirable guide to the darker places in Whitechapel; it is his want of sympathy for those who have had the misfortune to fall into its pits, and in an especially unfeeling passage he dismisses the killer’s victims as scarcely worthy of his attention, belonging as they did “to the lowest dregs of female humanity.”

  * Sherlock Holmes, T. S. Eliot writes, “was deceiving Watson when he told him that he had bought his Stradivarius violin for a few shillings at a second-hand shop in the Tottenham Court Road. He found that violin in the ruins of the house of Usher.” Perhaps; but Poe must not be blamed for the inanities of the detective fiction his work inspired. “Robbery and murder have degenerated into Chinese puzzles,” Charles Whibley says of the detective novel, “whose solution is a pleasant irritant to the idle brain. The misunderstanding of
Poe has produced a vast polyglot literature, for which one would not give in exchange a single chapter of Captain Smith [an old writer of Newgate lives]. Vautrin and Bill Sykes are already discredited, and it is a false reflection of M. Dupin, which dazzles the eye of a moral and unimaginative world.”

  † On April 3, 1888, more than four months before the first of the “canonical” murders, Emma Smith was found “horribly outraged” in Osborne Street; she afterwards died in the London Hospital. On August 7, Martha Tabram was discovered dead in George Yard. Her throat had been cut, and she had sustained a number of wounds in the chest and abdomen. But neither victim seems have been mutilated in the way all but one of the “canonical” five were.

  ‡ Dr. J. R. Gabe, who examined the body of Miss Kelly in Miller’s Court, said that “in all his experience in dissecting-rooms he never had seen such ghastliness. The corpse was found nearly naked, on a blood-engorged woolen mattress. The victim’s hair was flung upward on a pillow and matted with gore. The fingers, nose and ears were sliced away. The throat was cut from left to right. Below the neck was the appearance such as the carcass of a sheep presents in an abattoir, with the ribs and back-bone exposed and cleared of the stomach, entrails, heart, and liver. These organs were placed carefully beside the mutilated trunk, after the fashion in a butcher shop. As on previous occasions the uterus and ovarian adjuncts were missing. The flesh on each side of a cut on the median line was carefully folded an inch or two away from the cut. From the hips to the ankles the flesh was shredded more or less. It must have been the work of perhaps a full half-hour, said the physician. Both her breasts, too, had been cut clean away and placed by the side of her liver and other organs on the table.”