‘Dear Boss, I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they wont fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. That joke about Leather Apron gave me real fits. I am down on whores and I shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled.’ [1] [2] Scribbled in red ink, these sentences marked the first of several letters attributed to the serial killer known as
Read moreTag: Jack the Ripper
A Tale of Two Whitechapels: Jack the Ripper and the Canonical Five in Contemporary True Crime
It wasn’t the best of times, and it wasn’t the worst of times. For Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elisabeth Stride, Cate Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly, Whitechapel, London in 1888 was the end of times. Known as “the canonical five” of Jack the Ripper’s victims, these women—largely invisible to London culture during their lives—can’t rest in their deaths. For 130 years writers, criminologists, armchair detectives, filmmakers, and artists have studied and reproduced all of the blood-soaked details of their murders
Read moreVicky Nagy, Video games, the Victorian Era and Sherlock Holmes
Although a huge Sherlock Holmes fan, Victoria M Nagy researched female criminality during the mid-nineteenth century in Essex for her PhD which she graduated with in 2012 from Monash University. She is currently an Honorary Associate with La Trobe University and is working on a new project focusing on female criminality in the colony of Victoria from 1860 to 1900. Her book Nineteenth-Century Female Poisoners: Three English Women Who Used Arsenic to Kill is now available from Palgrave MacMillan. Her
Read moreLara Rutherford-Morrison, Dracula as Prince Consort? Lord Ruthven as PM? The Vampiric Alternate History of Kim Newman’s ‘Anno Dracula’
Lara Rutherford-Morrison has a PhD in Victorian literature from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is currently an Affiliated Scholar at Concordia University in Montreal and blogs daily for Bustle. Her research considers the ways that contemporary culture reimagines and plays with Victorian literature and history, in contexts ranging from adaptations of Victorian novels in film and fiction to heritage tourism in the U.K. She can be found at her website and on Twitter @LaraRMorrison. With Halloween just around
Read moreLara Rutherford-Morrison, Jack the Ripper Was A Murderous Medieval Monk; Or, I Read The Curse Upon Mitre Square So You Don’t Have To
Lara Rutherford-Morrison earned her PhD in Victorian literature from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in December of 2013. She is currently an Affiliated Scholar at Concordia University in Montreal and blogs daily for Bustle. Her research considers the ways that contemporary culture reimagines and plays with Victorian literature and history, in contexts ranging from adaptations of Victorian novels in film and fiction to heritage tourism in the U.K. She can be found at her website and on Twitter @LaraRMorrison.
Read more‘CSI: Whitechapel’: Ripper Street and the evidential body
By Jessica Hindes (Royal Holloway) Though I understand the desire to dissect a period drama on the basis of its historical authenticity, I’ve never thought it a particularly profitable approach. Guy Woolnough may be right to criticise Ripper Street for condemning a 14 year old to an implausibly expedited hanging; but cataloguing this kind of historical inaccuracy contributes little to a critical understanding of the show. In this article, therefore, I set such questions aside in order to think more
Read moreImagining the Ripper
Jenny Pyke (Mount Holyoke College) As the new “Ripper Street” series begins on BBC, the many other versions from books, tv, film, and stage echo like footsteps in a dark alley. “Crime present,” says David Taylor “has a fascination, in part at least, rooted in fear; crime past has a fascination rooted in curiosity.”[i] Figure One: Front cover of the Police Illustrated News found here Teaching Victorian detective fiction, I am reminded regularly that the sensation of Jack the Ripper
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