The Hidden Lives Of Jack The Ripper S Victims

An in-depth look at the lives of the women murdered by the infamous, 19th-century London serial killer. Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly are inextricably linked in history. Their names might not be instantly recognizable, and the identity of their murderer may have eluded detectives and historians throughout the years, but there is no mistaking the infamy of Jack the Ripper. For nine weeks during the autumn of 1888, the Whitechapel Murderer brought terror to London’s East End, slashing women’s throats and disemboweling them. London’s most famous serial killer has been pored over time and again, yet his victims have been sorely neglected, reduced to the simple label: prostitute. The lives of these five women are rags-to-riches-to-rags stories of the most tragic kind. There was a time in each of their lives when these poor women had a job, money, a home and a family. Hardworking, determined, and fiercely independent individuals, it was bad luck or a wrong turn here or there that left them wretched and destitute. Ignored by the press and overlooked by historians, it is time their stories were told. “Hume presents us with clear and concise biographies of the Ripper’s victims, and while it is tempting to think of them as all being prostitutes . . . their backgrounds, gone into in this much detail, shows them as something completely different. You will have to, you must read this brilliant book, it puts a whole new perspective into the canon of literature about the most infamous murderer of the last two centuries.” —Books Monthly

Miscast in the media for nearly 130 years, the victims of Jack the Ripper finally get their full stories told in this eye-opening and chilling reminder that life for middle-class women in Victorian London could be full of social pitfalls and peril.

With several million copies sold in the last fifty years, My Secret Life, first published by Grove Press in the 1960s, is one of the most famous pornographic works in literary history. What readers of this long-banned and troubling book of violent sexual fantasies failed to realize is that it is also the confession of history’s most fiendish killer. Written during the era of Jack the Ripper, it’s narrated by “Walter,” the pseudonym of textile millionaire Henry Spencer Ashbee. Walter was a voyeur and rapist obsessed with prostitutes, and his writing revealed his darkest sexual secrets. He died in 1901, long before his book would be widely read. Only now have researchers finally come to the conclusion that “Walter” and Jack the Ripper were, in fact, one and the same. Jack the Ripper’s Secret Confession puts all the pieces together, and its new theory will amaze and titillate scholars who for generations have pondered the true identity of history’s most brutal murderer.

Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Katherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly--the five known victims of Jack the Ripper--are among the most written-about women in history. Hundreds of books on the Ripper murders describe their deaths in detail. Yet they themselves remain as mysterious as their murderer. This first ever study of the victims surveys the Ripper literature to reveal what is known about their lives, how society viewed them at the time of their deaths, and how attitudes and perceptions of them have (or have not) changed since the Victorian era.

One of the most popular of all Ripper suspects, Montague Druitt appears on the surface an unlikely killer. Born into a comfortable bourgeois family, he was educated at New College, Oxford, qualified for the Bar and played cricket for a number of strong club sides. But, there was another side to the agreeable Mr Druitt. He moved in the artistic and aristocratic circles that overlapped with London's secretive homosexual culture, was summarily dismissed from his post at a boys' school, and a few weeks later was found drowned in the Thames, just months after the Jack the Ripper murders. Six years later, Chief Constable Sir Melville Macnaughten named Druitt as the murderer and gave the unhappy barrister a kind of immortality. D J Leighton has dug deep into the background to Druitt's unhappy life and uncovered a web of intriguing connections linking the eldest son of the heir to the throne, the Cambridge Apostles, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Virginia Woolf and the cricketing legend Prince Kumar Ranjitsinhji. The book is a fascinating period piece that deftly weaves together the criminal, sporting, aristocratic and homosexual worlds of late nineteenth-century London, in search of the truth behind Macnaughten's surprising allegations. This book is an excellent piece of of period crime history with a Jack the Ripper setting. It is a colourful Victorian underworld story, mixing high society with scandal, the golden age of amateur cricket and murder. It is the authoritative debunking of the case for Druitt as Jack the Ripper. This book weaves together the criminal, sporting, aristocratic and homosexual worlds of late nineteenth-century London in search of the truth behind Sir Melville Macnaughten's surprising allegations.