Reflecting on The Ripper legacy
I wanted this post to just be a brief note to record my thoughts about what The Ripper’s enduring legacy might be. It’s a significant day today, 31s August. It is the anniversary of the murder of Mary Ann Nichols; Polly, as her friends and family would have called her. Because she wasn’t just a corpse, a sum of torn-up body parts, a bloody mess in a dark corner of Buck’s Row in the East End of London. She was a mother, a daughter, sister, lover, wife. And above all, she was the victim of a heinous crime whose perpetrator was never brought to justice.
When Ciara Wild and I researched the subject of the Whitechapel murders for our book, Myth Monster Murderer, we were focused on the elements of how the story had been picked up and shaped and moulded to suit all sorts of ends, by the press, the local people, the community of the time, the media of the present, the leisure industry, amateur sleuths and pseudo detectives, and, like us, fascinated individuals who just wanted to dig around what are left of the facts and find out more.
The moulding and shaping of stories to suit ends is nothing new and our modern world is intensely skilled at manipulating information, at constructing apparent truths out of vapours of mists, at distorting facts to suit a pre-determined narrative. What does this have to do with Jack the Ripper, you may well be asking. Nothing and everything. The murderer did what he did. The police were unable to catch him. His identity has not been conclusively established even 137 years later. The women remain dead, another bloodstain on London’s streets.
But the story continues to resonate even now. Or perhaps, I mean, especially now. It is partly a story of the exploitation of deprivation and desperation by a killer. It went on to become a story of the prurient exploitation of the victims and their deaths, with no regard to those who once mourned them.
The exploitation of female victimhood continues unabated, it seems. From the press hacks who can’t help but buzz around corpses and murder sites like a pack of slavering hyenas in the name of the public service that is represented by the reporting of crime, to the yapping jackals of extremists who choose to select some crimes against women to target minority groups and turn public outrage into expressions of hatred and violence in a vague pretence to be wanting to protect women. Women and girls are daily the victims of violent crime, fuelled by misogynistic rage and facilitated by desperation and deprivation. Nothing has changed in 137 years and nothing can change until the root causes of that desperation and deprivation are eliminated.
Mary Ann Nichols, however, did not die in vain, because her story, alongside the stories of the other victims of Jack the Ripper, represents the mirror that can be held up to society by those of us who continue to explore and expound their stories, to remind everyone that what happened then, can and does happen now, and that, if we wanted to stop it, really wanted to prevent it, we could.
