After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Jack the Ripper: Invention of a Monster

Episode Date: August 28, 2025

Jack the Ripper as we think of him, is an invention of the Victorian media. They took the complete absence of hard facts about the killer, and populated it with the period's anxieties, fantasies and fears.We're joined again by Dr Bob Nicholson, presenter of ‘Killing Victoria’ podcast on BBC Sounds.Edited by Tim Arstall. Produced by Freddy Chick. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Please vote for us for Listeners' Choice at the British Podcast Awards! Follow this link, and don’t forget to confirm the email. Thank you!You can now watch After Dark on Youtube! www.youtube.com/@afterdarkhistoryhitSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello everyone. It's us, your hosts Maddie Pelling and Anthony Delaney. But before we begin the show, we want to ask for a few seconds of your time. If you're enjoying After Dark and we love you if you are, we would love you just a little bit more. If you could vote for us in the listeners choice category at the British Podcast Awards. So go to the show notes now, click the link and just then search for After Dark. Fill in your name and your email and don't forget to confirm. They will send you an email. You need to confirm. The whole process probably takes about 30. If you've already voted, we are so, so grateful. If you haven't, stop what you are doing

right now. Vote for us before you enjoy this show. Hello and welcome to After Dark. I'm Maddie. And I'm Anthony. And in true AfterDark form, we are journeying into one of the most sinister corners of the past today. Today we're talking about the story that epitomises so much of the shady past of the 19th century, the media's creation of the figure of Jack the Ripper. To help set out our store, we're starting with a quote. Helen Cork was a mid-20th-century writer who had nothing directly to do with Jack the Ripper. In the 1970s, when she was into her 90s, she wrote an autobiography. In that autobiography, she tells us what it was like being a young girl of about six years old in the year 1888,

the year of the Whitechapel murders. The daily paper is carefully kept out of my way and no hint of the Jack the Ripper murders reaches me at home. But the boys next door are well advised of them and have their story ready. There's a man in a leather apron coming soon to kill all the little girls in Tumbridge Wells. It's in the paper.

He stands before me vividly enough that man with the leather apron and the uplifted blood-stained knife. I scarcely ask myself, if the boys are lying. I delight the boys by running indoors screaming, begging Papa to take me away at once from Tumbridge Wells, nor is my confidence fully restored when Papa and Mama both insist that the story is silly nonsense, made up to frighten me. Mama and Papa, though generally right, can be mistaken.

Hello and welcome to After Dark. I'm going to start a little bit like Anthony today with a quote. But the quote that I'm about to read is from today's amazing guest, Dr Bob Nicholson, and he says this. Jack the Ripper as we think of him is an invention of the media. They take this void, this emptiness, this unknown, and into it pour all of the periods, anxieties, their fantasies, their fears. When we now picture Jack the Ripper, whether you're picturing him with a top hat and a cape, whether he's working class, a doctor, a member of the royal family, whatever it is, this fascination was created at the time by our media who were rabidly seeking readers and knew that this story would sell and sell and sell. Last week we spoke to Bob about the most scandalous journalist of the Victorian era, W.T. Stead

on what a man he was. Go back and listen to that episode if you haven't heard it already. But today, we're looking at when the Victorian press goes way, way over the edge. We've spoken about this case, Jack the Ripper, that is, several times before. So you can check out our miniseries that we did on The Four Men, who were not Jack the Ripper, but who were accused. But Bob is going to take us into the world of print media today. Welcome back to After Dark.

Thanks for having me back. It's wonderful to have you here. Now, before we get into the context of this case and the media that represented it, can you just explain the premise that we're taking into this episode that Jack the Ripper is, in fact, an invention of the media and not a real human being? Sure. I think it's important to stay at the outset that obviously somebody did murder those women in the east end of London. And that genuinely did happen. We are not suggesting that all of this is some elaborate conspiracy.

Those tragic events took place. And a person or potentially multiple people were clearly involved in that. But the thing is, we really know nothing about that person or those people, except, of course, their propensity for violence and their desire to perform that violence on vulnerable women. But beyond that, really, what do we know about Jack the Ripper? I bet if I was to ask you to picture Jack the Ripper, or even for listeners to do this now, that you will have an image that will form in your mind. And in fact, before we started recording,

I went and asked chat GPT, show me an image of Jack the Ripper, and it generated exactly what I imagine you're imagining here. I figure in a top hat, he's got a kind of a jacket with a turned-up collar, he's walking down some misty, foggy London Street, a knife in hand, a sort of gas lamp burning in the distance. That image of Jack the Ripper that is so familiar to us and has been repeated again and again and again in horror movies in the London Dungeon on TV, in posters,

you know, on the names of chip shops in the East end, all this stuff. That version of Jack the Ripper, that is a fiction, that is an invention. And if we want to know, well, where does this come from? Well, really, we have to look at the press. It was the press, above all else, it was central in formulating that vision of Jack the Ripper as we now think of him, this character today. So let's go back to that time then to get a better understanding of just what you're talking about, Bob, and we're in 1888, Queen Victoria is on the throne,

the British Empire is at its peak. We're witnessing a second industrial revolution almost. It's underway. Van Gogh has cut his ear off. But what we're talking about specifically here is that on the 31st of August 1888, the body of Marianne or Polly Nichols was found in Whitechapel in East London.

And we have what have now become widely accepted as the five canonical victims of the person we understand as Jack the Ripper. Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddows, Mary Jane Kelly, who was the final victim. in November 1888. That is the context of this time.

What I want you to talk to us about now, Bob, in setting this scene and in building this visual imagery, is how the newspapers started to concoct an image of a person who has lasted so long that even ChatGBT, GBT, an artificial intelligence, has been so profoundly influenced by this that we are stuck with it today. So how was this visual imagery invented around the case? Is there a particular newspaper that you think is responsible?

Yeah, it's certainly part of collective effort. I mean, every single newspaper is interested in this case. But I guess if you were to pick maybe two out, I would pick. One is a paper called The Illustrated Police News, which was a sensational illustrated paper interested in crime. And the other was a paper named The Star, which was a cheap evening paper that was right at the heart of the story. And in fact, may have played a role in inventing some of the key evidence that we associate with Jack the Ripper. So for me, if we're going to pin this on anybody, it's on those two papers. We have a cover of the Illustrated Police News in front of us, Anthony and I.

And I'm going to just describe it for listeners. I think we may have even seen this before on this podcast. But it's a sort of classic cover for this newspaper in particular, actually, this publication. But it's depicting the Jack the Ripper case. And it's almost like a graphic novel or a comic book. It has these kind of cartoon strips of events that are going on. And at the top, we have this strip that has, in the centre, one of the victims. It says underneath the Burner Street victim.

And it shows quite a sort of weathered face of a middle-aged woman. She's not named in this publication. And on the left-hand side, we have her body covered up, and there are police standing over her. And then on the right, we seem to have, I think it's the inquest for after her death. And again, there's a lot of men sat around in a room discussing it. And then underneath that, there's this really sensation. scene in this second strip. And it says two more Whitechapel horrors, when will the murderer be captured? And there are different scenes within this strip. There's a policeman finding one of the

bodies. There's other members of the public sort of coming across her as well, stumbling across her. We have a policeman kind of ushering people away. And in the background, we can see the remains of one of Jack the Ripper's victims and some of the blood and her hair kind of matted on the street on the pavement. And then there's a scene of sort of almost mob violence where crowds are rushing to the crime scene to see what's happened and to find out. And then at the bottom we have a similar scene. Again, we've got another victim, the fifth victim of the White Chapel Fiend is how it's subtitled. And again, we see a murdered woman on the floor and someone kind of stumbling across her in this really dramatic way. And there's a policeman whose lantern

is the beam of the lantern's kind of shining down onto her mutilated face. And it's all very gory. It hits the beat of every part of this story that people are going to read about, the discovery, the horror, the crowds crushing in to get a voyeuristic view of this. How effective were these illustrations, and this is front page of this publication, how effective were they at selling copy, but also at communicating the actual news? Is this, I think I can anticipate the answer, but is this a realistic depiction of what is going on at the time? Yeah, that's a great question and the editor of the newspaper would absolutely say yes. He's, uh, George Perkis, his name was, and his view was always that we want to present a truthful account of crime. So I think it's probably

worth us thinking a little bit about what kind of paper this was first and then we can kind of think a bit about that because it's an unusual newspaper. The illustrated police news it's called and I should say at the outset, it's no kind of official connection with the police force. This is not like the official paper of the police. What it was was an expansion of a feature you would get in most newspapers at the time, which was a police news column, which would be usually a description of whatever crimes have been happening that day that week and tried in court. This paper basically said, well, people like that. What if we expand it to an entire paper? And so every week, their front cover would be filled with exactly the kind of graphic images you just described

Maddie, of people being murdered, of tragic accidents, of assaults. And I guess here's what makes this so powerful and evocative is that this is an illustrated paper. And so it can do things that we couldn't do now in an age of photojournalism. If you think now about how crimes are typically reported in the press, we might see a mugshot of an alleged sort of criminal. We might see some images of the victim. What we won't see is the victim's body lying in a pool of blood with a policeman shining a light into their face.

We would now see that's been beyond the pale for a photographer to have done that. But what artists could do at this point was imagine those scenes. So in some other versions of this paper, we will see them imagining the moment a murderer plunges knife into someone's chest. In this case, what we're really seeing is the aftermath of these attacks. We're seeing them, and in gory details. So the women's bodies you were describing there, they're not just lying there in a kind of sanitised round of fall. They're lying in a pool of blood. So this is incredibly graphic. So to come back to your question about how effective

would this have been, the answer is very, because one thing that we know having looked through the police news week after week is that they continue to report on this story every week for months. It's not just a one-off thing. There are plenty of other murders and tragedies they could have been reporting on, but they knew that the Ripper murders in particular, while they were gold dust for any editor at the time that was willing to embrace them and to really lean into the horror and the sensation. And the police news did that in a visual way more than any other paper would do. This paper was really popular. It sold for a penny, so really cheap kind of paper that would be really popular with working class audiences. And big blown-up versions

of its front page would be placed in the window of the printing office, and we know that people would gather in crowds just to see it. This was a really influential paper, sometimes accused of turning criminals into celebrities. And in fact, in a previous episode, we were talking about WT Stead, editor of the Palmal Gazette. Well, a couple of years earlier, he ran a competition inviting readers to vote on what he termed the best and worst newspapers in England. And the illustrate police news was voted the worst newspaper in England because of its sensational reputation. In fact, I mean, W.T said he sent an interviewer, or maybe even went himself, to interview the editor and said, hey, so what do you feel about being the worst newspaper of England? And he basically said, well, you know, hey, we can't all edit the Times, some of us have to make a living in other ways, and insisted in that interview that all of his images were accurate, that he sent reporters to the scene. So on that cover we're looking at, there are sketches of the crime scene. I mean, in fact, there is even one, there is basically a sketch of a pavement with a blood stain on it, with a arrow pointing to it, and the text saying, the fatal spot. And it does suggest that an artist, has been there to look at it. But I think there's also a lot of artistic license here as well.

So whether these are showing as a perfectly accurate depiction of the murders, I think is up for debate. But what they were doing was shaping how thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of readers were thinking about the murders. And I think that's the key thing we're thinking about today. You're talking about this shaping, Bob, and it's so apt about what we're going to talk about next. And if you wouldn't mind, we have another picture here. And it's usually either Maddie or not that describes what we see in these images. But I really want to hand this over to Bob today because he's here to talk about the media inventing this image of Jack the Ripper. And something struck me when you were speaking there, Bob, and you said that the editor said,

you know, this is from crime scene reporting. Keep that in mind as Bob describes what happens next because here we have a depiction of the man himself. So Bob, if you don't mind taking us through these images and we can discuss them afterwards. Sure. So this is from the police new, illustrated police news again. And it's one of them many, dozens of front cover. about the murders. And what's interesting is that this is from a week where they don't have a fresh body to report on. So they need to find another angle.

You need to keep this story running. Keep it running. You can't take a week off. You've got to keep that momentum going. So it's another collage of images where they're trying to capture the kind of hysteria surrounding the crimes. So we have one where we have an image

of a lady being frightened to death by a man claiming to be Jack the Ripper and holding a knife. We've got others depicting these living conditions of poor outcast women to use their phrase. We've got another one showing a detective disguised as a lady out there to try and capture the Whitechapel murderer, but at the centre of it, and the one that I think is perhaps

most striking, is a more of a sort of satirical image in the sense that it's making a political point. And what we see is, firstly, another very graphic image of a murdered woman on the floor, blood streaming from her neck and head, a kind of gasp of agony on her face, which points towards the viewer. next to her is a kind of ghostly figure of justice, blindfolded in classic style, but looking forlorn as if justice is not being done.

And then behind her, escaping into an alley is a mysterious figure. We can't see his face. He's got a bloody knife in his hand, literally blood dripping from it as he runs. What we can see, though, interestingly, is just a little bit of the profile of his face and a sort of dark hat covering his hair, but a nose.

that looks, using the kind of stereotypical caricatures of the time, like a Jewish figure. So in this case, we have a vision of Jack the Ripper as sort of sinister Jewish immigrant, based, again, not on an actual sighting, not on anything, but purely on the imagination of an artist. And this is where we can start to see that image of the kind of Jack the Ripper that we would recognize being formed. It's so interesting, isn't it, that he's turned away from the viewer. And there's just that little hint, that little bit of information that just lays. the seeds for the anti-Semitic and sort of fear of foreigners generally in the East End at this point. And we've spoken on this podcast before about one of the Jewish men who is accused

of being Jack the Rippet within this community. And it's interesting to see here this in black and white and print and that the seeds are sown and we know the impact of these suggestions that the media do make early on. It's sort of fascinating. And what you were saying there, Bob, as well, about the fact that there is no new body this week when this particular issue is published and therefore these scenes have to be populated by someone and who better to put into that empty space than the killer themselves. But I guess the question I have now is we know this murderer today by the name of Jack the Ripper. And we have this recognizable image. I mean, the chat TBT version that you mentioned at the start this episode, you sort of do find

him here in the police illustrated news. You know, this sort of jacket with the collar turned up running away. He doesn't quite have a topper. He's got some kind of like bowler hat on, hasn't he, or something like that? But I mean, he's very much what you'd expect running away down some narrow alley across the cobbles. But the name Jack the Ripper, where and when does that start to come into play? Yeah, it's an important question because in many ways it's that name that gathers together all of these ideas into a kind of a character, a brand, almost that we're now familiar with. But it's really important to note that that wasn't there right at the start of the murders. So actually, when the first bodies are reported on, they'll talk about it being another tragedy in Whitechapel.

They'll talk about a quote, Whitechapel fiend. But Jack the Ripper, you know, as the kind of the name that we're familiar with, doesn't arrive until some time later. And it's in the middle, you know, sort of roughly halfway through the murders, that a letter is sent to the central news agency, which is kind of an agency that was sort of distribute news to lots of other newspapers, purporting to be from the killer, it's known as the dear boss letter. And that is signed Jack the Ripper.

And it's that letter that conjures that sort of name, that character into being. And even though we'll maybe talk about this in a minute, the origins of that letter are deeply questionable, the name catches on. And so we see in this image we're looking at from the police news, this man supposedly saying, I'm Jack the Ripper to cry and prank and threaten a woman on the streets, you can see that that name really caught on. People really sort of hooked onto it. And, you know, very quickly that becomes the name of the killer. but, you know, that letter in all likelihood was not sent by the murderer. I'm going to read that letter now, but I just want to warn listeners that there is some graphic language in this and some graphic description.

So please fast forward ahead if you don't want to listen, but I think it's important to hear this before we have the next part of the conversation because tying the two pieces of information together is quite key. It reads, Dear Boss, I keep on hearing the police have caught me, but they won't 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 shan't quit ripping them till I do get buckled. I have saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle over the last job to write with, but it went thick like glue and I can't use it. Red ink is fit enough, I hope.

Ha, ha. My knife's so nice and sharp. I want to get to work right away if I get a chance. Good luck. Yours truly. Jack the Ripper. So there it is, Bob. There is this name, this invention. Not only that, actually, there is this character. He has a voice. You are starting to build up a class profile of the person based on the words.

So you are bringing not just a physical description, but you're almost imagining him sitting in a certain type of house, in a certain part of London, writing this letter. It's actually doing a lot of work. But what I learned by watching a documentary that you were featured in recently, this is potentially maybe I want you to tell me exactly the work of a man named Fred Best. Talk to me about this, Bob. Yeah. So the origin of almost anything to do with Jack the Ripper is shrouded in mystery and debate.

And it feels as if saying anything for certain about him is fraught with difficulty. So I'm going to sort of do some caveats here. but there's certainly some compelling evidence to suggest that this letter was written, not just by a sort of random crank, as many letters would have been, but by a journalist who was at the centre reporting on this story. A journalist named Fred Best, who was a journalist for a paper called The Star. And The Star was a cheap evening newspaper. It saw just for hate-neast or really, really cheap, aiming at a mass audience.

And it was really active in reporting on the Ripper Murders, constant looking for a new angle and saw its circulation figures rise enormously as a result. So he was working, in other words, for a paper that was building its business on the Ripper murders and on continually being able to find a way to report on them. Now, it is alleged that this letter was written by him. And the evidence we have for this is a couple of bits of evidence. One is that supposedly he confesses to this many years later, I think the 1920s, he says, actually, yeah, me and another journalist at the star, we wrote that.

and one of the other postcards that is supposedly from Jack the Ripper. Now, maybe several decades later, perhaps he's just doing this to get a bit of attention, who knows. But, you know, there is some evidence there. The other bit of evidence is that he was fired from the star soon afterwards. And the sort of quote we have from the star's owners is that he was fired for, quote, misleading the central news agency, which is the agency to which that letter was sent. There's also been some handwriting analysis done on stuff, which has suggested it's a match for his, which I'm sort of less, not 100% convinced by it because that feels a little bit pseudoscience to me.

But nevertheless, there are several bits of reasonably compelling evidence there to say that he might have done this. Now, interestingly, he doesn't send it into his own paper. He sends it to the central news agency. And then his own paper basically say, this is probably a hoax, you know, all these credulous people believing it. So they try and sort of have it both ways. But we do see that that letter is reproduced in facsimile forms and not just typed out, but almost like a scan of it in modern terms, is produced in newspapers. And whether they believe it or not, it sort of doesn't really matter in the end. You know, lots of journalists will say, well, it might not be real, but their name sticks.

And in fact, it's interesting that at the end of it, he says, you know, what is it yours, truly, Jack the Ripper. And there's a little addendum. At the end, he says, I hope you don't mind me using the trade name. So even there, it's as if he's kind of aware of his own personal branding. And as it is so often the case in journalism, but particularly with Jack the Ripper, no one really seems to let the truth get in the way of a good story. and that character that has been conjured in it of this kind of maniacal figure wanting to write in blood. And we should say if readers haven't seen this letter, it is written in red ink, meant to mimic blood.

It all is conjuring this image of this sort of maniacal figure, toying with the police. And that is exactly what the papers were wanting to put forward. It seems to be what readers wanted as well. Everybody's looking for an answer, right? And this is one way of trying to answer that question of who he is. He is this sort of lunatic, semi-sort genius figure who is toying with everyone. you know, like a sort of a cat playing with a mouse. In a world where swords were sharp.

And hygiene was actually probably better than you think it is. Two fearless historians. Me, Matt Lewis. And me, Dr. Eleanor Yonaga, dive head, first into the mud, blood, and very strange customs of the Middle Ages. So for plagues, crusades, and Viking raids, and plenty of other things that don't rhyme, subscribe to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. talked about the ethics around W.T. Stead and some of his kind of journalistic endeavors and

where he maybe crossed the line. And I'm thinking today if a letter like the Dear Boss letter would even make it into print and what the ethical connotations of doing that are. But I think in this moment, what really strikes me why you've been talking is that in printing this, in reproducing this for thousands of readers to see, if not millions, that it's creating an intimacy between whoever the Ripper is as a brand, as an imagined figure and the reader themselves with the public, I suppose, and that the media is the conduit for that, that you have to go through journalists, you have to go through print media, through newspapers, in order to access that and that they are the route to finding who this person is, but also to hearing

his voice and to getting, I suppose, some insight into what he's doing. And I think it's a very savvy move to have created that intimacy, whether it's fake, or not, whoever the author is of it, that in deciding to print it alone, no matter its origin, that is a crucial turning point, surely, in terms of how the media is building this version of Jack Up. Yeah, they need to build a character who is more than just a murderer, more than just violent. They need a personality there, something that they can really sort of get their teeth into as journalists, and that readers can become fascinated by too. And you're right, that is exactly what they're doing.

The letter is just one example of it. There are so many stories at this time, either speculating about who he might be, or even just starting to talk about him as if he is now this character, this person, this Jack the Ripper. And you're absolutely right that it does create this larger-than-life figure, I suppose, that readers do feel a connection with it. It might be a sort of a connection of repulsion and horror and disgust or fascination, but it fills that void that I was talking about earlier, that in the absence of anything else, you know, the news servers need a character here.

He can't remain just a sort of shadow and nothingness and emptiness. They need something to talk about. And the repulsion as well, I suppose, like the language of this letter. I mean, we've only read part of it out and people can go and read the full things themselves. You know, it is quite graphic and it's very upsetting. But, you know, saying, like, I am down on haws, I'm going to rip them apart, my knife is ready kind of thing. That I suppose there is a level of sort of voyeuristic gratification to be had as a reader in that you can consume those words, that language. Especially in this letter, there's a sort of image of this particular man.

And he has quite a sort of working class voice, the way that he writes his actual script on the page, the language that he's using, any grammatical errors in there. It forms a picture of who he is. And it's someone who is repulsive in lots of different ways to particularly a middling, as well as a working class readership, I suppose, in this moment. And it's that repulsion that people sort of get the appetite for it. Then it's hard to satiate that. And I suppose as journalists, you can just keep feeding it. Yeah, absolutely right. I think it really is revealing what drew people to this story,

which in some cases might have been an outrage at the crimes. It might have been a fear. This could happen to them. But really, I think it's the bloodlust, right? And it's a fascination with murder and with all these kind of gory elements of the story. And you can see, of course, this is a society that is fascinated by true crime and with murder. You know, Madame Tuss has its chamber of horrors filled with all of these murderers, transformed into kind of waxwork celebrities.

You know, this is a society that loves looking or going to see theatrical productions, melodramas, based on murder. So the papers were giving people what they wanted here. It wasn't that they were forcing this on an unwilling public or a squeamish public who would have wanted to look away. They were feeding an appetite, a desire for buffer blood. And in its most graphic and horrifying and sensational style. And in a sense, the absence of a real suspect gives them free reign to sort of go

to every possible extreme in imagining who this figure might be. And that's what we see in this letter, I think, that it is sort of caricature, isn't it, of a serial killer, as we would now think of it, but very much being invented at the time. Within that imagining that you're talking about, that has real-life consequences, though. And some of the imagery and some of those invented voices start to coalesce around certain individuals at this particular time.

I mean, in hindsight, we have attached the links between Jack the River, and real historical people to a various plethora of people who, you know, in the vast vast majority cases, probably all cases are absolutely incorrect. But at the time, there was names floating around as well. So this wasn't just harmless storytelling. This had real-life consequences for people.

Tell us about the connections between leather apron, which we heard in Helen Cork's autobiographical extract at the top of the episode. We're hearing about it now in this dear boss letter again, but this starts to become a real person incorrectly. it starts to become a real person. Yeah, absolutely. So this is slightly before the name Jack the Ripper emerges,

and the press is sort of casting around for suspects. And one of the sort of names that gets sort of attached to the Ripper as a potential suspect is this guy who was known as leather apron, who supposedly had a history of been violent towards women in the East End and was therefore, I guess, sort of as viable as suspect as any. But rather than just allowing the police to sort of deal with that, the press do begin to print not just the name leather apron, but the name of the actual man, a guy named John Pyser,

who is then brought in for questioning by the police. But at this point, his name is all over the papers, suggesting that he's tracked the Ripper. And, well, as you probably know, the fact that we haven't caught the guy, Pyser is not the Ripper and has a very, very clear alibi. But by this point, it's already too late. His name is out there.

And it must have, I mean, if you think about what that must have felt like, even if this was a guy with a history of violence towards women and a person we might not be sympathetic to in other ways, to find yourself in the eye of the sort of, in the eye of the storm like that, when you've been accused of being the most wanted man in the country, when there were already mobs roaming the streets of Whitechapel trying to hunt this person down,

I mean, his life as he knew it would be over at that point, destroyed by the media. And all it takes, just putting his name, two words in a newspaper, in a newspaper like The Star that would have had, you know, hundreds of thousands of readers, that was enough to destroy someone. It really reveals the power of journalism, particularly in an era when they were rushing to press

with every little detail, you couldn't afford to wait. If you wait till tomorrow, if you wait to check, well, one of your arrivals is getting in ahead of you. You know, if you balk at the idea of printing sensational details, well, don't worry, your rival's going to do it and get ahead of you. I mean, to the point that there are some newspapers basically apologising, saying, look, we think it's awful that the press is full of all these details, but if we don't do it, you won't read us.

So we're going to do it as well. It reveals just how intense that competition was and how that intensity of competition might drive people to do things that we would now consider, you know, journalistically unethical. But let's be honest, it's not uncommon now for suspects to be plastered all over the tabloids well before their guilt is established, only to later be found that maybe they just looked a bit unusual. They had an unusual kind of haircut. They didn't sort of speak in a normal way. So that's something that we're still dealing with now, and it's very much something that happened to John Paiser. He, I think, would have had a very

strong case against the star newspaper for defamation potentially bankrupted him. He goes into the offices, supposedly, to complain. And very cleverly, one of the editors there manages to to pay him off with quite a large sum of money, but which could have been a lot larger had he taken them to court. So they do manage to kind of slip off the hook of the consequences there. But for PISA, I can't imagine his life was ever the same after that. Yeah, it's interesting these widespread effects. I'm thinking about, you know, not just the accusations against Pyser,

but also just the social unrest that happens in the East End. There's huge anti-Semitism. We've talked in a previous episode about the anti-Semitic graffiti that appears and some of the street corners. One thing that always fascinates me, And I think it says so much about Victorian society, Victorian imagination, and as you've mentioned, Bob, this kind of melodramatic blurring of fiction and reality that's happening in the press and now on the street as well is not only do we get, I'm pretty sure there's like a sort of Madame Tussaud-esque wax work that's put up in some shop front that is one of the crime scenes with one of the women killed, which is completely grotesque. But also, I'd never read this before until doing the research for this episode, that some people actually dress up in an attempt. to lure the Ripper to them and walk the streets of Whitechapel.

I mean, that's extraordinary. Yeah, you're absolutely right. But it speaks to the hysteria around this, as well as people's desire to be a hero, to insert themselves into this story that they've been reading about in the papers. You're absolutely right. There are examples of, in some cases,

men dressing as women, dressing as sex workers, and roaming the streets effectively as bait to try and bait him out in the hopes that they're going to be the one to capture Jack the Ripper. But in the end, it's not that hard to understand, is it? because we're still living in a world now where every year there'll be a new person who claims to assault this case, who claims they've found that mythical bit of evidence that unravels it all,

and they will be the one to finally put the mystery to bed. But that's happening, as you say, right in the middle of the murders. There is such a level of public interest around it that people want to insert themselves. And public interest, I suppose, as well, in the poverty and squalor of the East End, right, that people are coming and sort of cosplaying part of this world, when there are still real sex workers who are walking around actually at risk, in the same streets, in the same community. And now there are sort of true crime tourists, I suppose, you could say,

who are strutting around as well, pretending to be like them and pretending to live their lifestyle, having the privilege to be able to put themselves in danger in harm's way for the sake of potentially uncovering the case. It's grotesque. It is right. And it's a reminder that so much of what we know about the Ripper case and the world that was sort of uncovered in the course of reporting it

was written by people from outside of the East End, by journalists middle class, white journalists living in leafy suburbs or other parts of the city who were projecting their own images of the East End onto it. And typically, the East End at this time is imagined as this sort of badlands, a sort of what we might tell a no-go zone now, you know, to use sort of the language here now around, around some parts of the country. And their view of it was almost another country, right? You know, they talk about, you know, deepest, darkest London.

and they talk about it as almost as if they would talk about, you know, the far-flung reaches of the British Empire. And so they certainly view it as this other space, this sort of foreign country. And so you're right, when they go visit there, they are going almost as tourists to another part of their own city. It's dark tourism, as the phrase we've used for it now, right? This desire to experience firsthand these sites of crime and brutality. And, yeah, they want to insert themselves right into that.

So some people are doing it through the press. They're reading about it, you know, quite in their so well-to-do, suburban homes. Others, though, are going there first hand to see it for themselves. And, there are all sorts of stories of people renting out windows where you can go and view the crime scenes, in some cases, of even people being able to go and view the bodies before they were taken away. So there is, as early as, you know, the days of the murders, a Jack the Ripper industry beginning to take shape that is still with us now. You know, and you can't miss it when you go around the East End of London. And it's been there ever since.

In a world where swords were sharp. And hygiene was actually probably better than you think it is. Two fearless historians. Me, Matt Lewis. And me, Dr. Eleanor Yonaga, dive headfirst into the mud, blood, and very strange customs of the Middle Ages. So for plagues, crusades, and Viking raids and plenty of other things that don't rhyme.

Subscribe to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. We're talking here about the media and journalism and how that shaped and invented Jack the Ripper to a certain extent. touching upon this the entire way through this episode. And it's so blatantly obvious when we think about kind of, yeah, armchair detectives today, there would have been no need to invent a Jack the Ripper if the public appetite hadn't been so rabid to demand it. You know, you're talking, Bob, about this almost printed apologies that they're saying, I'm so sorry I'm having to do this, but you guys are absolutely demented for this. It's correct. And I think it's interesting. And it's true to say that this is a media invention, but fueling that media is us.

We are ultimately responsible for what the demand is and for what is selling and for what's absolutely flying off the shelves. And sometimes I think it's really easy to kind of moralize and handering and go, oh gosh, this is so terrible. But it's very easy to see the same thing happening right now. I mean, it does happen right now. We see it on maybe social media more than anything now because of, you know, journalism standards are far more regulated. But there have been significant cases in the last, what, two, three, four years where public appetite for neat narratives have derailed investigations or have shaped the ways in which that crime is reported. Suddenly it becomes more about people with mobile phones at riverbanks than it does about the person who has

died. And what I'm wondering with that in mind is, you'll know better than we will, but is this the start of that bob? Or is this just an explosion based on popularity of print? How pivotal is this case in feeding us what we desire in these types of cases? You're certainly right to say that the media isn't doing this in a vacuum, right? It is always responding to public demand. And that papers were incredibly sensitive to that. They knew what's sold. And, I mean, look, it's an old adage from editors, right, that if it bleeds, it leads. But that goes back to sort of the very early days of the press.

So it's certainly not the first time that murder was driving the sales of newspapers. That probably is as old as journalism itself. But I think just the sheer scale of it is what was unprecedented here. And it was the lack of a kind of an end point to it. Your classic Victorian murder story, most of the other ones you guys have talked about on AfterDart have a very clear end point. You know, they catch the guy. They go to trial. They get executed, though.

They go to prison. The story is rounded off in a nice little package. It's done. What's different about this one is that because there is no ending, it just runs and runs and runs. And that hysteria continues to build. People become so fascinated in it that it just takes on a life of its own, I think. You're absolutely right to say that this is not just something that the media create and impose upon us that is reflective, I think, of our fascination with the macabre.

And let's be honest, you know, we're talking about it on this podcast too. We are part of this. We are not separate to this as observers sitting apart from it. I'm drawn to this as a historian in part by that darkness as well. And I'm fascinated by people's response to it. So I think, you know, the Ripper Motors was definitely drawing on that in a way that was more sensational, more extensive and just more sort of extensive than it had ever been done before. But it's not new and it speaks to something deeper, something more ongoing and human that we are drawn to these stories. And this is just a particularly extreme example about that.

The press feeds that, as it does many other. of our sort of more base desires, our love for celebrity gossip, our love for rumors, all those things. You know, papers that are willing to feed that do very, very well. And I think, you know, we see that on the internet now, on social media just as much, right? The things that will get engagement, that will get quicks, are feeding into those things that people are fascinated by. And we might like to think of ourselves as being above that. We might long for a world where we can kind of filter out those base instincts. But if the Ripper Murders tell us anything, it's that that fascination is pretty deeply ingrained within us. And it's probably

not going anywhere. I think that's the perfect place to end. Bob, thank you so much for this week and last week. It's been so fascinating to delve into the world of Victorian journalism and all of its dark corners, all of its intrigues and all of its, I suppose, mysteries and grey moral areas in between the lines of those prints. So thank you so much for that. Thanks for having me. It's been a real pleasure. If people want to find out more about you or your work, where can they go to do that? Bobnicelson.com.com.org is your one-stop shop for everything I do. But if I can plug anything, I would say a podcast I did a few years ago for the BBC called Killing Victoria, which explores seven people who tried to assassinate Queen Victoria.

So very much the kind of thing that an after-dark listener might enjoy. You can get that wherever you get your podcasts.