Portrait of a Killer

by Patricia Cornwell

  Mrs. Wilson may have had a sweet bedside manner. Or she may have been strict and humorless. A typical requirement of a nurse in those days was that she be single or widowed so that all her time could be devoted to the hospital. Nurses were underpaid, worked long, grueling hours, and were exposed to extraordinarily unpleasant conditions and risks. It was not uncommon for nurses to “get into drink” a bit too much, to run home for a nip, to show up at work a bit mellow. I don’t know about Mrs. Wilson. She could have been a teetotaler.

  Walter’s hospital stay must have seemed to him an endless stretch of bleak, scary days, with breakfast at 8:00, followed by milk and soup at 11:30, then a late-afternoon meal and lights out at 9:30 P.M. There he lay, day in and day out, in pain, no one on duty at night to hear him cry or comfort him in his native tongue or hold his hand. Had he secretly hated Nurse Wilson, no one could really blame him. Had he imagined she was the one who destroyed his penis and caused him so much anguish, that would be understandable. Had he hated his mother, who was far away from him during his ordeal, that would come as no surprise.

  In the nineteenth century, to be born illegitimate or to be the child of an illegitimate parent was a terrible stigma. When Sickert’s maternal grandmother had sex out of wedlock, according to Victorian standards, she enjoyed it, which implied that she suffered from the same genetic disorder that prostitutes did. The common belief was that this congenital defect was passed down the bloodline and was a “contagious blood poison” routinely described in the newspapers as a “disease that has been the curse of mankind from an early period in the history of the race, leaving its baneful effects on posterity to the third and fourth generations.”

  Sickert might have blamed his boyhood agonies, his humiliations, and his maimed masculinity on a genetic defect or “blood poison” that he inherited from his immoral dance-hall grandmother and his illegitimate mother. The psychological overlays to young Walter’s physical curse are tragic to contemplate. He was damaged, and his language as an adult reveals a significant preoccupation with “things medical” when he was writing about things that were not.

  Throughout his letters and art reviews there are metaphors such as operating table, operation, diagnosis, dissection, laying bare, surgeon, doctors, fateful theater, castrated, eviscerated, all your organs taken out, anesthetized, anatomy, ossify, deformation, inoculated, vaccinating. Some of these images are quite shocking, even revolting, when they suddenly uncoil and strike in the middle of a paragraph about art or daily life, just as Sickert’s use of violent metaphors strikes unexpectedly, too. When he is discussing art, one doesn’t expect to run into morbid horror, horrors, deadly, dead, death, dead ladies’ hearts, hacking himself to pieces, terrify, fear, violent, violence, prey, cannibalism, nightmare, stillborn, dead work, dead drawings, blood, putting a razor to his throat, nailing up coffins, putrefied, razor, knife, cutting.

  In a 1912 article for The English Review he wrote, “Enlarged photographs of the naked corpse should be in every art school as a standard of drawing from the nude.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE GENTLEMAN SLUMMER

  The heaviest rain of the year fell during the last week of August 1888. On average, the sun burned through the mist no more than an hour each day.

  Temperatures remained unseasonably cool, and coal fires burned inside dwellings, gushing black smoke into the air and adding to the worst pollution in the great city’s history. In the Victorian era, there was no such thing as pollution monitoring and the word smog had not been coined. But the problems created by coal were nothing new.

  It had been known since the English stopped using wood for fuel in the seventeenth century that smoke from burning coal damaged life and all of its edifices, but this did not dissuade people from using it. In the 1700s, it is estimated that there were 40,000 houses with 360,000 chimneys in the metropolis. By the late 1800s, coal consumption had gone up, especially among the poor. The approaching visitor smelled London many miles before he saw it.

  Skies were sodden and blotchy, streets were paved with soot, and limestone buildings and ironworks were being eaten away. The polluted thick mist lingered longer and became denser as it took on a different hue than it had in the past. Watercourses dating from Roman times became so foul that they were filled in. A public health report written in 1889 declared that at the rate London was polluting itself, engineers would soon be forced to fill in the Thames, which was fouled with the excrement of millions every time the tide seeped in. There was good reason to wear dark clothing, and on some days the sulfurous, smoky air was so hellish and the stench of raw sewage so disgusting that Londoners walked about with burning eyes and lungs, handkerchiefs held over their faces.

  The Salvation Army reported in 1890 that out of a population of approximately 5.6 million in the Great Metropolis, 30,000 were prostitutes, and 32,000 men, women, and juveniles were in prison. A year earlier, in 1889, 160,000 people were convicted of drunkenness, 2,297 committed suicide, and 2,157 were found dead on streets, in parks, and in hovels. In the Great Metropolis, slightly less than one-fifth of the population was homeless, in workhouses or asylums, in hospitals, or ravaged by poverty and near starvation. Most of the “raging sea” of misery, to the founder of the Salvation Army, General William Booth, was located in London’s East End, where a cunning predator like Jack the Ripper could easily butcher drunken, homeless prostitutes.

  When the Ripper was terrorizing the East End, the population of his hunting ground was estimated at a million. If one includes the overcrowded nearby hamlets, the population doubles. East London, which included the London docks and run-down areas of Whitechapel, Spitalfields, and Bethnal Green, was bordered on the south by the River Thames, to the west by the City of London, to the north by Hackney and Shoreditch, with the River Lea to the east. The growth of the East End had been heavy because the road that led from Aldgate to Whitechapel to Mile End was a major artery for leaving the city, and the earth was level and easy to build upon.

  The anchor of the East End was the London Hospital for the poor, which is still located on Whitechapel Road but is now called the Royal London Hospital. When Scotland Yard’s John Grieve took me on one of several retrospective visits to what is left of the Ripper crime scenes, our meeting place was the Royal London Hospital, a grim Victorian brick building that doesn’t seem to have been modernized much. The depressiveness of the place is but a faint imprint of what a pitiful pit it must have been in the late 1800s, when Joseph Carey Merrick—mistakenly called John Merrick by the showman who “owned” him last—was granted shelter in two of the hospital’s first-floor back rooms.

  Merrick—doomed to be known as the “Elephant Man”—was rescued from torment and certain death by Sir Frederick Treves, a courageous, kind physician. Dr. Treves was on the London Hospital’s staff in November 1884 when Merrick was a slave to the carnival trade across the street inside a deserted greengrocer’s shop. In front was a huge canvas advertising a life-size “frightful creature that could only have been possible in a nightmare,” as Dr. Treves described it years later when he was Sergeant-Surgeon to King Edward VII.

  For twopence, one could gain admittance to this barbaric spectacle. Children and adults would file inside the cold, vacant building and crowd around a red tablecloth hanging from the ceiling. The showman would yank back the curtain to “oohs!” and “aahs!” and cries of shock as the hunched figure of Merrick cowered on his stool, dressed in nothing but an oversized pair of filthy, threadbare trousers. Dr. Treves lectured on anatomy and had seen just about every conceivable form of disfigurement and filth, but he had never encountered or smelled any creature quite so disgusting.

  Merrick suffered from von Recklinghausen disease, caused by mutations in genes that promote and inhibit cell growth. His physical aberrations included bony deformations so grotesque that his head was almost three feet in circumference with a mass that projected from his brow like a “loaf” and occluded one eye. The upper jaw was similar to a tusk, with the
upper lip curled inside out, making it very difficult for Merrick to speak. “Sack-like masses of flesh covered by . . . loathsome cauliflower skin” draped from his back, his right arm, and other parts of his body, his face frozen in an inhuman mask incapable of expression. Until Dr. Treves intervened it was believed that Merrick was obtuse and mentally impaired. In fact, he was an extremely intelligent, imaginative, and loving human being.

  Dr. Treves noted that one would have expected Merrick to be a bitter, hateful man because of the abominable way he had been treated all of his life. How could he be kind and sensitive when he had known nothing but mockery and cruel abuse? How could anyone be born with more against him? As Dr. Treves pointed out, Merrick would have been better off insensible and unaware of his hideous appearance. In a world that worships beauty, what greater anguish can there be than to suffer from such revolting ugliness? I don’t think anyone would argue with the notion that Merrick’s deformity was more tragic than Walter Sickert’s.

  It is quite possible that at some point Sickert paid his twopence and took a peek at Merrick. Sickert was living in London in 1884 and engaged to be married. He was an apprentice to Whistler, who knew the East End rag-shop scenes in the slums of Shoreditch and Petticoat Lane and would etch them in 1887. Sickert went where the Master went. They wandered together. Sometimes Sickert wandered about the sordid squalor on his own. The “Elephant Man” was just the sort of cruel, degrading exhibition that Sickert would have found amusing, and perhaps, for an instant, Merrick and Sickert were eye to eye. It would have been a scene replete with symbolism, for each was the other inside out.

  In 1888, Joseph Merrick and Walter Sickert were simultaneously living secret lives in the East End. Merrick was a voracious reader and keenly curious. He would have been all too aware of the horrible murders beyond his hospital walls. A rumor began to circulate that it was Merrick who went out in his black cloak and hood at night and slaughtered Unfortunates. It was the monster Merrick who butchered women because they would not have him. To be deprived of sex would drive any man mad, especially such a beast as that carnival freak who ventured out into the hospital garden only after dark. Fortunately, no rational person took such nonsense seriously.

  Merrick’s head was so heavy he could scarcely move it, and the stalk of his neck would snap if his head ever fell back. He did not know what it was like to settle into a pillow at night, and in his fantasies he lay himself down to sleep and prayed the Lord would one day bless him with the sweet caresses and kisses of a woman—best of all, a blind one. Dr. Treves thought it a tragic irony that Merrick’s organs of generation were nothing like the rest of him, but unfortunately, he was perfectly capable of the sexual love he would never have. Merrick slept sitting up with his huge head hung low, and he could not walk without a cane.

  It is not known whether the baseless rumors that he was the Whitechapel killer ever reached his safe little rooms crammed with signed photographs of celebrities and royalty, some of whom had come to see him. What a great act of benevolence and tolerance to visit the likes of him and not outwardly register horror. What a story to relate to one’s friends, to dukes and duchesses, to lords and ladies, or to Queen Victoria herself. Her Majesty was fascinated by life’s mysteries and curiosities and had been quite fond of Tom Thumb, an American midget named Charles Sherwood Stratton who was only forty inches tall. It was easier to enter the cloistered world of harmless and amusing mutants than to wade through the “bottomless pit of decaying life,” as Beatrice Webb described the East End, where rents were steep because overcrowding gave slumlords the upper hand.

  The equivalent of a dollar to a dollar-fifty a week in rent was sometimes a fifth of a worker’s salary, and when one of these Ebenezer Scrooge slumlords decided to raise the rent, sometimes a large family found itself homeless with nothing but a handbarrow to tote away all its worldly goods. A decade later Jack London went undercover in the East End to see for himself what it was like, and he related terrible stories of poverty and filth. He described an elderly woman found dead inside a room so infested with vermin that her clothing was “gray with insects.” She was skin and bones, covered with sores, her hair matted with “filth” and a “nest of vermin,” London wrote. In the East End, he reported, an attempt at cleanliness was a “howling farce,” and when rain fell it was “more like grease than water.”

  This greasy rain fell in drips and drizzles in the East End most of Thursday, August 30th. Horse-drawn wagons and barrows splashed through the garbage-strewn muddy water of narrow, crowded streets, where flies droned in clouds and people scratched for the next penny. Most inhabitants of this wretched part of the Great Metropolis had never tasted real coffee, tea, or chocolate. Fruit or meat never touched their lips unless it was overripe or rotten. There was no such thing as a bookstore or a decent café. There were no hotels, at least not the sort that civilized people might visit. An Unfortunate could not get out of the weather and find a bit of food unless she could convince a man to take her in or give her small change so she could rent a bed for the night in a common lodging house called a doss-house.

  “Doss” was slang for bed, and a typical doss-house was a hellish, decaying dwelling where men and women paid four or five pence to sleep in communal rooms filled with small iron bedsteads covered with gray blankets. Supposedly, linens were washed once a week. The casual poor, as the guests were called, sat around in crowded dormitories, smoking, mending, sometimes talking, joking if the lodger was still an optimist who believed life might get better, or telling a morose tale if the threadbare soul had been worn into a numb hopelessness. In the kitchen, men and women gathered to cook whatever they had been able to find or steal during the day. Drunks wandered in and held out palsied hands, grateful for a bone or scrap that might sail their way on the cruel winds of laughter as lodgers watched them grab and gnaw like animals. Children begged, and were beaten for getting too close to the fire.

  Inside these inhuman establishments, one abided by strict, degrading rules posted on walls and enforced by the doorkeeper or warden. Misbehavior was rewarded by banishment to the mean streets, and early in the morning lodgers were herded out the door unless they paid in advance for another night. Doss-houses were usually owned by a better class of people who lived elsewhere and did not oversee their properties and may never even have seen them. For a little capital, one could own a piece of a poorhouse and have no idea—perhaps by choice—that his “Model Lodgings” investment was an abomination overseen by “keepers” who often used dishonest and abusive means to maintain control over the desperate residents.

  Many of these doss-houses catered to the criminal element, including the Unfortunates who might, on a good night, have pennies for lodging. Perhaps the Unfortunate might persuade a client to take her to bed, which was certainly preferable to sex on the street when one was exhausted, drunk, and hungry. Another breed of lodger was the “gentleman slummer,” who, like thrill-seeking men of every era, would leave his respectable home and family to enter a forbidden world of low-life pub-hopping and music halls and cheap, anonymous sex. Some men from the better parts of the city became addicted to this secret entertainment, and Walter Sickert was one of them.

  His best-known artistic leitmotif is an iron bedstead, and on it is a nude prostitute with a man aggressively leaning over her. Sometimes both the man and the nude woman are sitting, but the man is always clothed. It was Sickert’s habit to keep an iron bedstead in any studio he was using at the time, and on it he arranged many a model. Occasionally he posed himself on the bed with a wooden lay figure—mannikin—that supposedly had belonged to one of Sickert’s artistic idols, William Hogarth.

  Sickert enjoyed shocking guests he had invited over for tea and cake, and on one occasion, not long after the 1907 slaying of a prostitute in Camden Town, Sickert’s guests arrived at his dimly lit Camden Town studio to discover the lewdly positioned lay figure in bed with Sickert, who was making jests about the recent murder. No one seemed to think much about that dis
play or anything else bizarre that Walter Sickert did. After all, he was Sickert. None of his contemporaries—nor many of the critics and academics who study him today—wondered why he acted out violence and was obsessed with notorious crimes, including those of Jack the Ripper.

  Sickert was in a superior and untouchable position if he wanted to get away with murdering Unfortunates. He was of a class that was above suspicion, and he was a genius at becoming any number of different characters in every sense of the word. It would have been easy and exciting for him to disguise himself as either an East End man or a gentleman slummer and voyeuristically prowl the pubs and doss-houses of Whitechapel and its nearby hellholes. He was an artist capable of changing his handwriting and designing taunting letters that are the mark of a brilliant draftsman. But nobody noticed the remarkable nature of these documents until art historian Dr. Anna Gruetzner Robins and paper conservator Anne Kennett examined the originals at the Public Record Office (PRO) in June 2002.

  What had always been assumed to be human or animal blood on the Ripper letters turns out to be sticky brown etching ground—or perhaps a mixture of inks that remarkably resembles old blood. These bloody-looking smears, drips, and splotches were applied with an artist’s brush, or are imprints left by fabrics or fingers. Some of the Ripper’s stationery is “vellum” or other paper with watermarks. Apparently the police never noticed feathering brush strokes or types of paper when investigating the Ripper murders. Apparently no one has ever paid any attention to the some thirty different watermarks found on letters thought to be hoaxes written by some illiterate or deranged prankster. Apparently no one has asked whether such a prankster was likely to have possessed drawing pens, colorful inks, lithographic or Chinagraph crayons, etching ground, and artist’s paints and paper.