Here's a portion of Anthony Daniels' review of
Jack Ripper by Paul Begg
You can find the rest of the review here:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2003/01/05/bobeg29.xml&sSheet=/arts/2003/01/05/bomain.htmlWhitechapel is just as firmly associated with Jack the Ripper as Stratford-on-Avon is with Shakespeare, and tourists traipse through them both to absorb the atmosphere from which the two figures drew their inspiration. As much scholarship and amateur erudition has gone into the search for the true identity of the author of the murders as into that for the author of the plays.
And just as some people feel that the plays were beyond the capacity of an alleged semi-literate from Stratford, and must therefore have been the work of an aristocrat, so others have felt that the wickedness of the murders - at least five poverty-stricken casual prostitutes - was beyond the capacity of the lower classes, and must therefore have been committed by a member of high society. The identity of Jack the Ripper, indeed, is Whitechapel's riddle of the Sphinx.
A small library could be filled with books of what is now known as Ripperology. Many of their titles imply that they are the last word on the subject: The Final Solution, The Complete History, The True Story and so forth. This book is subtitled the Definitive History: no need for further books on the subject, then. Yet it does not pretend to reveal in the end the real identity of the Ripper: it merely reviews the evidence for the favourite candidates for that dubious distinction: most recently Patricia Cornwell's completely unjustified belief, based on flimsy evidence and worse reasoning, that the painter Walter Sickert was the Ripper.
Paul Begg's book provides a straightforward and useful account of the actual murders, but it also tries to place them in their historical context. It is therefore as much social history as true-crime narrative. Certain editorial oversights reduce one's confidence in its accuracy: for example, on page 30, a small area of the East End called the Nichol has a population of 6,000, but by page 33 it has expanded to 8,000.
Nevertheless, Mr Begg is a good guide to such arcana as the bureaucratic in-fighting within and between the Home Office and the Metropolitan Police that, he says, reduced the efficiency of the efforts to apprehend the perpetrator, and the contemporary newspaper coverage of the crimes. It was the recent and rapid expansion of the market for newspapers that gave the Ripper crimes their national and international resonance and established them in popular legend, where they have remained ever since.
(Check out the rest -- it's a really interesting write-up)
