The Myth of the Deserving Poor

1888: A Jack the Ripper Novel, is available to buy from Amazon now!

First of all, apologies for not having updated in a while. I have been away on holiday in (not-so) sunny Brighton so haven't been able to post as much as I'd like to. What follows has been brewing in my head for quite some time and is probably going to be a bit more political than my previous entries.

Writing about real life victims of a killing spree comes with a certain level of responsibility on behalf of the author. The tragic lives of the five women who form the heart of my book, had to be treated realistically but with an utmost respect.

In the past, the canonical five have been portrayed in wildly varying ways - sometimes as titillation in trashy horror movies, or a band of plucky sisters with a terrible secret to hide. Occasionally they have been drawn as down on their luck good-time-girls, tarts with hearts of gold and bosoms to match.

The truth was that the prostitutes of Whitechapel were far more likely to give you a black eye than they were to sing "Oom-Pah-Pah" atop a table in a tavern. The reason for this depiction is simple; it is easy to elicit sympathy from your audience when your victims are unburdened by unflattering characteristics.

Right from the beginning, I was determined that these women would be portrayed as accurately as possible, warts and all, to expose a dark truth of the Victorian era; that Polly, Annie, Liz, Catherine and Mary were victims of their society, long before the Ripper ever found them.

To the unsympathetic reader, it can be easy to blame the five for their predicament. They were all alcoholics, many of them drank several times the money they would require for a stay in a dosshouse of an evening, many were violent, one was imprisoned for drunk and disorderly conduct and was released less than hour before she was murdered.

However, there are interesting things to remember about these women. Mary Kelly spoke four languages and was a voracious reader. Annie Chapman came from a well-to-do household and enjoyed a very prestigious education for a girl in that age. Liz Stride once owned and ran her own coffee shop.

Sometimes it is easy to imagine that the poorest members of our society are there for a reason - they failed through laziness, incompetence or just plain idiocy. The myth of the deserving poor is that society is constructed in such a way that only those who asked for it, end up falling to the bottom. I hope that my book will help to prove that this is simply not true.

The worst failings of the Victorian era, always fell upon the women of the age. An unmarried woman of a certain age who had no savings of her own, would quickly plummet through the various levels of destitution until she found herself bereft of a home, penniless and with only her body left to sell.

This was a time in which there was no safety net. If you fell into poverty, there was no way out and there was no help. Society was so cruel, that to falter even once could lead to a lifetime of suffering.

The prostitutes of Whitechapel had to work all the hours they could muster and lived with the constant fear of violence, starvation, disease and an early death. Against this backdrop, who could not excuse them the simple, brief escapism that only gin could afford them - an indulgence that could numb the fear of another night of walking the streets alone.

It would take almost sixty years from the autumn of terror before the British welfare state was introduced. By 1945 and the Attlee parliament, security measures had been put in place to ensure that the chasms of inequality in society, could be reduced to cracks - and instantly hundreds of thousands of people were afforded a shred of hope that was previously denied to them.

Far too late for our unfortunate five, but perhaps my novel will in some small way, help to remind a British audience, just how far we have come since those dreadful, unforgiving days.

Yours truly,
Charlie Revelle-Smith.

Toby Baxter and the Victorian Diet

1888:A Jack the Ripper Novel is available to buy now from Amazon!

 When I first started writing 1888, the character of Toby Baxter was only going to appear in the first handful of chapters and then reappear, briefly towards the end.

His purpose was very straightforward. Of the three mashers, he was to be the comic relief; a nice, slightly dim, naive foil for the two other men to gently roast. What you can never really predict when you begin to write, is just how much affection you can develop for such minor characters.

I rather quickly decided that Toby was essential. The dining club events with Edward and Duffy would have proven too labourious to endure had there not been a more sympathetic character. I needed a character present who not only gave the reader somebody to root for, but someone whose very presence of mild mannered empathy, demonstrated the selfish arrogance of the other two.

Before I had started writing anything at all, I had plotted out the story arcs of every single character. Some of these were complex, others fairly simplistic. Each tale would be a journey through conflicts to a point of either triumph or downfall (and sometimes a little of both.) Toby's story was supposed to happen mainly offstage and originally concluded with him reappearing with a wife and moving to the country.

Instead, Toby was fleshed out and brought to the forefront and quickly became the fictional character of the novel of whom I am most proud of creating.

Toby Baxter is a young man, no older than twenty and "almost completely spherical," as I unkindly described him in my character notes. His size is seen as a joke to his friends and even his father, but it was only a couple of decades earlier that things would have been very different for him.

In an age of both dire poverty and conspicuous over consumption, to have a large belly was a marker of class - a fat man had money enough to be a glutton and clearly did not have to toil for work. To be large was to command respect.

This all changed in 1863 when William Banting, a food pioneer with the unlikely side job of undertaker, published what may have been the world's first diet book. Banting, who was formerly an obese man had lost a huge amount of weight by limiting his intake of beer, sugar and potatoes and increasing his meat consumption.

While he may not have known this at the time, Banting was essentially asking his readers to cut carbohydrates from their diets - an idea that would be retooled many times over the following decades to eventually become The Atkins Diet.

Banting admonished his readers for their slovenly ways and argued that obesity was not just a strain on health, but a vulgarity to be avoided at all costs. The book was wildly successful and was reprinted several times.

Toby Baxter never once addresses Banting's book, "Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public" but his change in dietary habits completely mirrors the advice laid out therein - indeed, this is why later on in the book, when he does return to drinking beer, it has a rather unexpectedly powerful effect on him.

The other inspiration for Toby's diet was that of James Salisbury, an American physician, who earlier in 1888 had published a book arguing that a high meat diet was to be desired, and perhaps most pertinently, that one should stop eating once they were no longer hungry.

Toby's weight loss is dramatic over the course of the three months in which my book is set, which is also helped by another Victorian fad which was sweeping London - walking.

Since the introduction of the hansom cab, a small, covered and often rather ornate cart pulled by a horse and led by a cabman, travel in London had been revolutionised. It was fast, it was affordable and most importantly to the style conscious Victorian, it was fashionable. Nowadays it is best known through adaptations of Sherlock Holmes books (and...well...Jack the Ripper films.)

The introduction of the underground train made commuting even faster and in doing so, meant that very few Londoners had much need to travel on foot anymore.

With every trend comes a counter-trend and towards the late Victorian era, many diet books were extolling the health-giving benefits of a brisk walk, something which Toby unexpectedly finds he adores.

By the end of 1888, Toby is a changed man, in more ways than just his weight loss. I shall not go any further, as his surprise confession is quite possibly my favourite passage in the whole book. For me he is a testament not just to all of our ability to change, but that the simple act of kindness to others in a cruel and unforgiving world, is in its own way, an act of bravery.

Yours truly,
Charlie Revelle-Smith.

Francis Tumblety: A Man on the Run

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For all the great scientists, inventors and engineers that the Victorian era birthed, it also seemed to be a great time to be an eccentric - a pastime that was not limited to the borders of the British Isles. Perhaps one of the most intriguing of such oddballs is Francis Tumblety; but was he mad, sad, or just plain bad?

Tumblety was an irresistible character to include in 1888 for many reasons. It seems as if he could have wandered off the pages of a Dickens novel and into the streets of Whitechapel. A shameless, arrogant self-promoter; a man who found himself incapable of staying on the right side of the law; a doctor with no qualifications who fled from country to country, selling worthless herbal remedies that were little more than coloured water (if you were lucky); and a man for whom everyday was a fancy dress party.

As a suspect, Francis Tumblety is unlike any other. He was an American, he was probably a homosexual (or, at the very least, had a taste for young men,) and he is the only suspect known to have been suspected by his peers and acquaintances. Perhaps more pertinently, he is the one of the few suspects of whom there is a shred of evidence to support those suspicions.

Questions will always surround this odd figure. "Was he really the Ripper?", "Did he help to plot the assassination of President Lincoln?", "Was that moustache real?"

Like so many aspects of Tumblety's life, his place of birth is a matter of conjecture, but it is generally agreed to be either Ireland or Canada, sometime around 1833. One among eleven children, his parents soon afterward moved the family to Rochester, New York.

Tumblety first found himself in trouble with the authorities for peddling pornographic drawings as a teenager and then ever after found himself at odds with the police. Claiming to be a doctor, the young Tumblety moved from city to city, peddling medical concoctions he claimed to be Indian herbal remedies for curing such maladies as pimples and impure blood.

Sometime around this point, it is believed that Tumblety married, though to whom is unclear. Though one testimony suggests she was somewhat older than him and that the marriage disintegrated when he discovered she was working as a prostitute.

One such medicinal elixir he sold at this time, contained mercury - and it was not long until this wonder drug claimed a victim. After amassing a small fortune from his compounds, Tumblety fled to Maine and then made his way through New England to Boston.

During this period of his life, Tumblety adopted the manner of dress which would come to define him - military uniform, replete with medals of which he had not been rewarded, a helmet, a cane and perhaps most ostentatiously of all, a moustache so grand it attracted attention in an age when facial hair was almost a necessity for men of a certain class. 

Allegations soon arose that Tumblety was working as an abortionist to prostitutes; a career that would have proven as profitable to him as it would be essential to the working women of Massachusetts. He also garnered a reputation for being a rampant misogynist - and for being in possession of a cabinet of human uteri "from every class of woman" - though the testimony in which this was stated seems shaky at best.

Soon Tumblety finds himself a person of public notoriety and moves instead to Europe where he claims to have met such luminaries as Charles Dickens and Louis Bonaparte, (although, the claims of a known liar must always be taken with a pinch of salt.)

After a handful of arrests for "gross indecency" - a coy term that usually referred to soliciting other men, Tumblety returned to America for what was to be the biggest allegation made against his name (at that time in his life, at least.)

A series of ill-conceived business ventures meant that Tumblety was soon mixing with the wrong crowd; perhaps the worst crowd imaginable, as when several members of his new found circle of friends were arrested for conspiring in the assassination of President Lincoln, Tumblety was charged alongside them, (though later acquitted.)

Paranoid that the police were out to get him, Tumblety travelled the country for many years, peddling his wares before skipping across the Atlantic to England. The year was 1888.

His whereabouts and habits in the UK have been a matter of speculation from almost that very same year onwards, and there is good evidence to believe that he may have been "The Batty Street Lodger," - the notorious figure many have claimed to have been almost certainly Jack the Ripper (and a story I will skip over here, as it forms a pivotal part of the novel!)

It is known that he was arrested once again for soliciting a man for sex two days before the murder of Mary Kelly but was out on bail when she was killed. Panicked and convinced he was the police's prime suspect in the slayings, Tumblety escaped to France and then onwards to America.

Perhaps all we can say for sure about Francis Tumblety is that he was a man of dichotomies; a man who married but exclusively reserved his affections for men; a man who was constantly on the run, but dressed in such a manner as to draw the maximum amount of attention to himself; and a man who seems to have lived almost everywhere and yet never once appears to have had a home.

Whatever else can be said about the enigma of Francis Tumblety, I hope to have answered within the pages of my book.

Yours truly,
Charlies Revelle-Smith.

Jack the Ripper and I

1888: A Jack the Ripper Novel, is available to buy now from Amazon!

Charlie Revelle-Smith

For today's post, I wanted to take a step back from writing about the details of 1888, and instead take a moment to recall just how I came to write it, and the weird hold Jack the Ripper has held over me and my sense of curiosity for over twenty years.

The first time I ever recall being aware of the name "Jack the Ripper," I must have been no older than eight years old. My primary school in Cornwall (ages 5-11) had a library wherein all of the books were separated into shelves that best reflected the abilities of each of the age groups of the school.

Being a voracious, and precocious reader, I proudly shunned my recommended reading material and (somewhat obnoxiously,) refused to read anything other than those books aimed at the older kids. Among copies of "Stig of the Dump," "Johnny and the Dead" and "The Hobbit," I discovered a book of unsolved mysteries.

To this day, I can vividly remember turning the pages of this fully illustrated hardback book. I can see the drawings of a deserted Mary Celeste, with all the dinner plates laden with food; I can see the trail of cloven footprints on the rooftops of a Devon village and most lucidly of all, I can see that image of Jack the Ripper.

My first glimpse of Jack the Ripper

It made me dizzy with panic. I had never seen anything quite so frightening. A skeletal figure with a shroud draped around it, brandishing a knife with an expression of pure evil. I read the entire double page entry with trembling hands, hardly able to comprehend that such a thing could have been real. Why had I never been informed? Why hadn't our parents warned us about this madman?

That night, I was haunted by visions of that spectre. Imagining his face at the window, his cold, empty eyes peering through the glass at me. I remembered reading that this killer had never been caught and that meant he could be anywhere...

When my mum came to kiss me goodnight, she must have sensed something was awry. I have never quite been able to comprehend or understand the ability parents have in sensing anxiety in their children, but whatever evolutionary pressure led to it, it is a powerful sort of magic.

I explained to her my frets and fears. I was reminded, once again, that I shouldn't read things which will scare me (a few months earlier a similar sense of terror had seized me upon reading the entry for "Ghost" in a an encyclopaedia for children.)

I was also informed of just how long ago Jack the Ripper had been around. "Over a hundred years" my mother reminded me (an impossibly long amount of time for the mind of someone so young.)

Two things struck me once she had calmed me down and settled my fears. Firstly, I really wasn't grownup enough to be reading books from the big kids' section of the library; and secondly, human beings lived alarming shorter lives than I had imagined.

Children can be fickle thinkers and I can actually recall using the bravery which only comes from the harsh light of the day, to return to that book the following morning. I really may not have been as smart as I liked to think I was.

Years passed and it was my teenage years that I returned to Jack the Ripper by borrowing a book from Truro City Library. This was clearly much more developed in tone and far gorier than I had anticipated. This time I was haunted not just by the image of Mary Jane Kelly torn asunder on her bed, but the tone of the mystery. The tiny, dark and cobbled streets, the gaslights, the aching mystery of the tale that would never be solved.

I first wrote a Jack the Ripper tale aged 19 as part of my creative writing course at university. I was instantly overwhelmed by the level of research I would have to put into this project, but thank goodness I did. When I returned to write 1888 a decade later, most of the heavy lifting had been done and the knowledge was locked away in my head.

1888, was not my first novel. Another tale of Victorian intrigue from that book of unsolved mysteries made it there first (I owe that book a lot in thanks for inspiration!) but a Jack the Ripper book was as inevitable as it was a joy to write.

So ever since I first saw, and was repulsed by that image, Jack the Ripper has held a shadow in the farthest corner of my mind, and while writing my book may have helped clear a little of that darkness away, I don't believe he will ever truly leave me alone.

Yours truly,
Charlie Revelle-Smith.

The Rise and Fall and Rise of Mediumship

1888:A Jack the Ripper Novel, is available to buy on Amazon now!

Aside from those on Gina and Toby, the chapters I enjoyed writing most of all in 1888, were those based on another fictional creation of mine - Mrs. Sparrow.

While the character of the fraudulent, agoraphobic Mrs. Sparrow may be my invention, she was inspired by the curious popularity of mediumship and Spiritualism that had grown in prominence in the later half of the 19th century.

The Fox Sisters

Spiritualism; the belief that the dead are able to be reached by those with the gift to contact them, is generally agreed to have begun sometime in the 1840's, establishing an initial wave of interest with the story of the Fox Sisters - two sisters who convinced much of New York that they were speaking with the departed through a series of knockings (questions could be answered with one knock for yes, two for no.)

They were a sensation, and as news of their abilities spread, so did the popularity of spiritualism. Mediums sprouted up all across America, and it was not long until the United Kingdom would follow.

This era saw the invention of spirit photography- utilising tricks and double exposure to capture images of supposed ghosts for an audience who still regarded the camera as a little understood mystery.

Nowadays, it is hard to look at these photographs and imagine how anyone was fooled, but the cynical age in which we live is far removed from Victorian times, where a naivety of new technology and a general trust of the good intentions of others, had not primed an audience for such subterfuge.

The popularity of spiritualism and the reaction to it, can perhaps best be summarised by the lives of two of the most famous men to be born in the 19th century. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini.

Conan Doyle was one of the most renowned and outspoken supporters of Spiritualism, though he only truly took to it in his later life; in the first decade of the 20th century, while the belief was at its most popular.

Conan Doyle had lost his wife and many other members of his family in a short space of time and was desperately looking for answers. Upon discovering the claims of mediums to be able to channel the words of the dead, he embraced it completely, much to the shock of many of his friends and the public at large, with whom he had fostered a reputation as a fiercely rational thinker thanks to his invention of Sherlock Holmes.

Houdini also found himself beguiled by the promises made by spiritualists following the death of his mother, to whom he was extremely close. After attending a seance, he was so horrified by the medium "channeling" the voice of his mother (in English, despite his mother only being able to speak Hungarian) that he vowed to expose fraudulent mediums across the world.

This led Houdini to become one of the worlds first, and certainly the most prominent Spiritualist investigator. It is perhaps the success of Houdini's ventures in exposing fraudulent mediums that led to their inevitable decline in the 1920's

While Houdini stopped believing in Spiritualism, he never gave up hope that he may have been wrong. Upon either one's death, he and his wife, Bess had established a secret code one would pass to the other as proof of an afterlife - a line from a  play in which Bess had performed, "Rosabelle...Sweet Rosabelle, believe!" - after he died, Bess attended a seance every Halloween (the anniversary of his death) but never did hear the message from a medium.

All of which may seem to be a long way from poor Mrs. Sparrow, confined to her tiny, narrow house on Commercial Road. However, all of the techniques used by Mrs. Sparrow, her sister and her daughter were genuinely in use at the time. The "talking cards" were an early precursor to the Ouija Board (invented and patented two years later,) while the broom, bell and candle were all methods exposed by Houdini.

As for the Fox Sisters, it was that very same year of Jack the Ripper, that the two younger siblings announced to the world how they had fabricated their communications with the dead all those decades ago - using nothing more than an apple on a piece of strings that could be dropped to the floor to create the sound of knocking.

Nevertheless, Spiritualism and mediumship never truly went away, and have in fact seen something of a resurgence over the past couple of decades (despite the work of renowned investigators such as James Randi and Joe Nickell, continuing the work of Houdini into the modern age.)

While I enjoyed writing about Mrs. Sparrow, let it not be forgotten that she, like the Fox Sisters, like every supposed medium Houdini investigated, was a fraud and exploited the anxiety of death and the grief of others.

 When looking at their modern day counterparts, never forget that there is every reason to suspect that they may be lying too.

Yours truly,
Charlie Revelle-Smith.

The Sad Tale of Polly Nichols

1888:A Jack the Ripper Novel, is available to buy from Amazon now!

The first prostitute introduced in 1888, is Mary Ann Nichols, the woman many believe to have been the Ripper's first victim.

"The Canonical Five," is a term used to refer to the five women identified by Assistant Chief Constable, Sir. Melville Macnaghtan, as being unquestionably victims of Jack the Ripper in an 1894 report on the crimes. For a long time, this was agreed upon by most historians, but the past couple of decades have led to others reevaluating the evidence and suggesting that a sixth, Martha Tabram, was also slain by the unknown killer.

To further complicate matters, some ripperologists insist Tabram was one of the "Canonical Five", in place of Elizabeth Stride, who many believe may have been killed after a quarrel in a tavern.

Whether or not Mary Ann Nichols was the Ripper's first victim is a matter of debate, but very few disagree that she was clearly murdered by that unnamed assailant, and no other.

On the night Nichols was killed, Whitechapel had recently been the scene of two previous murders of prostitutes; the aforementioned Tabram and an earlier victim; Emma Smith.


Mary Ann Nichols, who was known to all as Polly, would certainly have been aware of this, but like all of the desperate, poverty stricken and forgotten women of the district, she had no other means of supporting herself, and as such had no choice but to take to the streets.

She was murdered a few days after her 43rd birthday in the small hours of Friday, August 31st.

It is known that she had been drinking earlier that evening, and was in a somewhat worse state for it. it is known that she was in possession of a new bonnet of which she was very proud, and it is known that earlier that night, she had attempted to rent a room in a local dosshouse, but was turned away for having drunk the last of her money. Her movements from then on are unknown.

That is, until about 3.30AM when a cabman, Charles Cross found her body near a wooden fence on Buck's Row. Believing that he could detect a shallow breath, he ran for help.

She was reported dead at the scene. A deep incision had been carved along her abdomen as well as several other slashes around the area. Her throat had been cut, possibly after strangulation, which would explain why so little blood was found at the scene.

Polly Nichols may have been the first Ripper murders of that autumn, but she was not to be the last, and while her sad story shocked all of London, due to its brutality and seemingly unprovoked nature, the people of the city could have had no idea that the story that was about to unfold, would shake all of England to its core.

Yours truly,
Charlie Revelle-Smith.

The Whitechapel Map

1888: A Jack the Ripper Novel, is available to buy from Amazon now!

I have always loved books which begin with a map. When I was a kid these were usually fantasy stories, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Hobbit and others. I soon learned that mystery novels were oft to do this, (a personal favourite being, Agatha Christie's Death in the Clouds where the seating plan of each passenger is laid out.)

There was something thrilling about turning the first page of a new book and discovering that this otherwise fictional realm had been rendered physical, simply by being drawn on paper - as if the geography of the landscape was now something real, that could be navigated.

I'm no artist, and I'm certainly no cartographer, but I knew for certain 1888 had to begin with a map.

What you see above (and on the first page of the novel,) is a simplified version of a very famous map of the area from the time. Below is the original version.

The first and most apparent difference is just how simplistic my version is. Whitechapel is, and was, a labyrinth of narrow streets, constructed around a junction of main roads. However, the book itself limits its scope somewhat, not only to allow for efficiency in storytelling, but because Commercial Road, Commerical Street and Whitechapel Road, really were the hub of this overcrowded district. While almost everything else was domestic, these roads were the heart and thoroughfare of  Whitechapel.

The other concession I have had to make, is owing to the constrictions of an ebook. 1888 can be read on a screen as small as an iPhone's and as such, certain streets have needed to be enlarged for ease of reading. For instance, Goulston Street was a narrow lane that can barely be spotted on the authentic map, but it plays an important role in the story. Unfortunately this means that it appears to be as wide and important a road as Commerical Street, to which it runs parallel. The same is true for Buck's Row, which was far more constricted than my map would imply.

Miller's Court and Mitre Square were simply too small to expand sensibly, so instead, they have been indicated by lines pointing to their locations.

Nevertheless, I am rather pleased with my little map. It may not be winning many awards for either beauty or accuracy, but all the streets are where they're supposed to be, even if they are completely out of proportion. But most importantly for me, my book begins with a map! And for that, I could not be happier.

Yours truly,
Charlie Revelle-Smith.