truepenny | reading about Jack the Ripper (Reply)

I have thus far read four books about Jack the Ripper, two by Paul Begg, one by M. J. Trow, and one by Donald Rumbelow. Rumbelow's (Jack the Ripper: The Complete Casebook) is the seminal work in the field (by which I mean efforts to understand the murders, the victims, the detectives, the suspects, the newspapers, the public, the politicians, etc., in their historical context, rather than, Hi! I have a crazy theory about the Ripper's real identity!), and it is very good, very readable and thoughtful--and unfortunately, at this point, very outdated. New material has come to light, theories and "facts" have been disproved: the case against M. J. Druitt makes no sense; Mary Jane Kelly was not pregnant; the kidney sent to poor George Lusk cannot be proved to have come from Catherine Eddowes and probably didn't; that whole Freemason thing? Dude, don't even.

So Rumbelow is an untrustworthy Virgil for the Inferno that is Whitechapel in 1888 (and, no, if you read the social history background chapters in Ripper books, that comparison ISN'T an exaggeration), and I'm looking for a better one.

M. J. Trow (The Many Faces of Jack the Ripper) isn't it. TMFoJTR is a kind of weird book. It's like it wants to grow up to be a coffee-table book. It's oversized, glossy paper, and full of photographs, but the photographs are either the same double-handful of photographs you get in every Ripper book (and bad reproductions, too) or photographs of Whitechapel as it is now, which are all kind of small and cramped. And then there's the one photo with the girl posed as a chestnut seller Jack the Ripper allegedly spoke to, where she's all young and smooth-skinned and lovely and as a reader I am all WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT OVER. So a coffee-table book where the budget got slashed mid-project? I don't know. Trow's style is breezy and sensationalist, and his research is sloppy (which is why he can't be Virgil), but on the other hand, he has a lovely, common sense attitude toward the various sources/theories about the Ripper's identity and assesses them realistically.

Which contrasts him nicely with Paul Begg (Jack the Ripper: The Definitive History (2003), and Jack the Ripper: The Facts (2004)), who can't bring himself to let go of Sir Melville Macnaghten and especially not of Sir Robert Anderson, despite the fact that neither one of them stacks up well when you stop and think it over. Begg's Definitive History has some very good chapters on the social history surrounding the murders--although his chapters on the murders themselves aren't as well-organized as Rumbelow's--and I give him credit for keeping the theories about the murderer out of the discussion of the murders. But I find his hobby horse frustrating.

I'm sure I'm going to have that experience again as I read other people's books, and probably in the end I will have to jury-rig a Virgil for myself.