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This chapter analyzes some modern assumptions about sexuality, gender, class, race, and civilization that led to the production of the subject of the “lust murderer” or “sex killer,” of which Jack the Ripper is the exemplum, in a series of discursive fields. The ways in which nineteenth-century European medicine and sexual science figured male and female sexuality, and “specified as an individual” the murdering sexual pervert, is examined in the first section. The second considers a near contemporary French response to the Ripper case and to Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis, and examines Zola's novel La Bete humaine, a work that functions as a fictional version of sexological and criminological discourse. The third section considers how Jack the Ripper provided the template for representing other sex-motivated multiple killers of both men and women that came after him.

This chapter explores the authentication of the purported diary of one of the world's most maniacal serial killers — Jack the Ripper. It begins by discussing his murders and the condition of the bodies found after the murder. More than a century after the slayings, a Liverpool scrap metal dealer named Mike Barrett allegedly came into possession of a remarkable diary, that if genuine, solved the gruesome mystery. The diary's author named James Maybrick, was a fifty-year-old cotton merchant from Liverpool, died of poison in 1889. Entries in the diary explained how Maybrick, seeking revenge on his unfaithful wife, committed the murders in drug-induced frenzies. This chapter also details the investigation made to prove the authenticity of the diary. It shows all the elements found in the diary are symptomatic of an amateurish forgery, indicating it is a hoax.

In “Penelope,” James Joyce uses a controversial debate on women's so-called diseases as a provocative intertext for the representation of Molly Bloom's sexuality. Her recollection of a gynecological visit, which took place in 1888, responds explicitly to the complex turn-of-the-century discourse that related womanhood, pathology, and social politics. Further, it recalls fin-de-siècle fears about medical abuse that were most sensationally captured in the image of Jack the Ripper. While doctors multiplied the number of surgical operations performed on women's anesthetized bodies, feminists and antivivisectionists ferociously condemned both the ideological foundation for and the consequences of the mutilations resulting from doctors' surgical interventions. Surprisingly, though, as “Penelope” reveals, the argument about women's social inferiority that the biological model had established received support by another, much more subtle medical interventionism. Patent medicine forms an equally central medical subtext in “Penelope”.

This chapter examines Sinclair's first novel, White Chappell. It shows that this novel drew upon the events of the autumn of 1888, namely the ‘Whitechapel Murders’ of Jack the Ripper, and even some popular literary novels (A Study in Scarlet and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde). From there the discussion focuses on the concept of temporal co-presence and multi-presence, and looks at how Sinclair uses the metaphysic of topographic presence to emphasize the mythic constructions of his narrative. This chapter also considers the ‘haunted’ nature of books and the dissection and division of human bodies.

Sometimes an object is known only by description, yet the subject opens a file for it in anticipation (‘Jack the Ripper’, ‘Neptune’). Appearances notwithstanding, this does not argue against the view put forth in previous chapters. The claim that mental files require a suitable acquaintance relation to the reference is a normative claim, distinct from the factual claim that there is no mental file tokening without some acquaintance relation to the referent.

Focusing largely on short stories of the 1890s and 1900s, this essay examines Richard Marsh's many similarities and connections with late-Victorian newspapers, particularly the tabloid press typified by George Purkess's Illustrated Police News. It argues that Marsh used the direct and accessible language of popular journalism to clothe his outlandish sensation fiction in the trappings of believability, while at the same time exploiting the literary possibilities of the news itself, notably in his responses to the infamous Jack the Ripper murders in Whitechapel in 1888 in stories such as 'The adventure of the phonograph' (Curios, 1898) and 'A member of the Anti-Tobacco League' (Under One Flag, 1906).

This chapter centres on Terry’s ‘divinely beautiful’ but controversial 1888 Lady Macbeth at the Lyceum theatre. Terry performed amidst hysteria over the Ripper killings and profound anxiety over the cognitive dissonance created by seeing a ‘good’ actress play a ‘bad’ woman. The results showed that a Shakespearean queen could interrogate the institution of marriage as fiercely as any fin-de-siècle problem play, with Terry’s underlying thesis stating that being a ‘good’ wife sometimes necessitated being a ‘bad’ woman. The chapter reassesses scholarly accounts of Terry’s ‘failure’ in the role via a thorough re-reading of fin-de-siècle periodicals’ anticipatory criticism and first-night reviews. It also examines the performance afterlives including Jess Dorynne’s The True Ophelia.

Of all the arsenic murders, the Maybrick case is the most intriguing. On 7 August 1889 Florence Maybrick was found guilty of murdering her husband James and sentenced to death, only to be reprieved two weeks later and her sentence commuted to life imprisonment. There are those who believe she should have been acquitted because she was innocent. There are those who believe that even if she was guilty she did the world a service in that the man she killed was really Jack-the-Ripper. That somewhat dubious claim was made in the 1990s with the publication of an old diary supposedly written by James Maybrick. In the furore which followed the trial, Florence was seen as a martyr by two groups: the supporters of the Women’s Rights Movement, and those who campaigned for a Court of Appeal. The first of these saw her as a victim of a male-dominated legal system, and the second saw her as a prime example of injustice which the British legal system as it then stood was unable to rectify. The Women’s International Maybrick Society even enlisted the support of three US Presidents, but to no avail because, unbeknown to them, Queen Victoria had taken an interest in the case and believed Florence to be guilty. Until the Queen died, there was no possibility of her release from prison, although she was set free soon afterwards. Legal problems raised by the Maybrick trial centred on the summing-up of the Judge, Mr Justice Fitzjames Stephens. In its latter stages this became little more than a tirade of moralizing generalizations that dwelt on Florence’s admitted adultery, implying that a woman capable of committing such a sin was indeed capable of murder. (Nothing was said at the trial about her husband’s mistress and the five children that she had borne him.) The summing-up was flawed in other ways; for example the judge introduced material that was not produced during the trial and he read accounts of what witnesses had said from newspaper cuttings of their evidence because his own notes were in such a poor state.

Severin Klosowski was born on the morning of 14 December 1865 in the village of Nagornak near Kolo in part of Russian-occupied Poland. He died 38 years later, as George Chapman, on the morning of 7 April 1903 in London, hanged for poisoning three of his partners with antimony in a way that was long and painful but which made it appear they were dying of natural causes. What is rather unusual about these murders were the many witnesses to the way that he carried them out. Antonio Klosowski was 30 and his wife Emilie 29 when their son Severin was born. They were Roman Catholics, and Antonio was the village carpenter. When he was seven years old, on 17 October 1873, Severin started primary school, which he attended for the next seven years, leaving on 13 June 1880, with a good final report. Later that year, on 1 December, he was apprenticed to Moshko Rappaport, in Zwolen, 90 km south of Warsaw. Rappaport would train him to be a feldscher, an occupation combining the roles of barber and minor surgeon. This qualification would allow him to perform small operations by himself, or to assist major surgery carried out by a fully qualified surgeon. In the summer of 1885, when he was 19, Severin left Zwolen and, armed with a good reference from both his employer and a local doctor, he set off for Warsaw with the idea of becoming a fully qualified surgeon. To finance himself through his studies he took a job as an assistant to a barber-surgeon in the suburb of Praga, and that October he enrolled for a three-month course in practical surgery at the Hospital of Infant Jesus nearby. In January 1886 Severin took a job as an assistant surgeon to a D. Moshkovski and continued working thus until 15 November that year. The following month he came of age: that allowed him to apply for a passport and he was also allowed to sit the entrance examination for the degree of Junior Surgeon at the Imperial University.