Hi everybody. Well, today we’re going to get a little closer to why Cornwell insists that Whistler’s marriage drove her Ripper candidate over the edge. Next time, we’ll actually get there!

But hey, let’s look at something else first. If you came across the following description in a book or an article, what do you think you’d conclude about the person it described?

He had “blue eyes that were as inscrutable and penetrating as his secret thoughts and piercing mind. One might almost have called him pretty, except for his mouth, which could narrow into a hard, cruel line.”

Inscrutable, penetrating, secret, piercing, (almost) pretty, hard, cruel. These are the adjectives you have to work with… and this is how Cornwell describes Sickert’s facial features in her opening chapter. Think she might be loading the dice a little bit?

Hey, I’m not trying to “read into” Cornwell’s text or “read between the lines.” But Cornwell is a novelist. As a novelist, she controls, through her words, much of the imagery that the reader will “see” while reading the description. And the imagery she uses here is actually rather “stock” imagery for describing the villain in a novel. Sickert’s eyes penetrate, his mind pierces (and what do knives do?). His eyes are inscrutable, his mind secretive… hmmm, so, he cannot be “read.” To look at him, you would never know what he was thinking. And then, there’s his mouth, hard and cruel. Not much interpretation needed there! She’s instructing you on what to think.

Through the descriptive power of language, Cornwell plants an image in the reader’s mind of a hard and cruel man… piercing, penetrating, and utterly secretive.

Another way of putting it is that Cornwell is using her descriptive powers in place of argument. She’s trying to sway the reader on a somewhat subliminal level. And yes, using adjectives suggestive of cruelty and the type of secrecy necessary to be the Ripper is an effective rhetorical strategy. But in an argument–which relies upon facts, and putting facts together through a logical process–it’s cheating. Sickert’s facial features are irrelevant to the question of whether or not he is Jack the Ripper (unless, of course, they match a well-known description of one of the men seen with one of the victims on the night she was murdered… which, so far as I know, they don’t). But with just the right wording, his features can be made to suggest that he is the Ripper.

Okay, let’s put aside my little language obsession for now. Are you ready for the big revelation? The one that absolutely proves that Sickert was more likely than anybody else to be Jack the Ripper?

Well, without providing any evidence at this point in the book (though she does provide substantive evidence later on), Sickert had a genital abnormality, and he’d had three surgeries for it by the time he was 5 years old. In fact, according to his own nephew (whom Cornwell interviewed), the abnormality was in his penis. From these facts, and some of Sickert’s artwork, Cornwell extrapolates that Sickert may have had a short stump of a penis.

Well, that’s all well and good. Based upon the evidence she presents later on, it may well be true. But it’s a hypothesis. The problem is that Cornwell takes her hypothesis and argues as if it’s a certainty. And she even gives her case a head-start. She plants the notion in the reader’s mind before ever presenting any evidence to support it.

Okay, so what are some of the ways that Cornwell runs with her hypothesis? Oh man. Here is where it really gets “good.” Actually, she piles one hypothesis on top of another hypothesis on top of another hypothesis, and before we know it, Cornwell has reached certainty. But I just have to wonder… If the foundation itself is a hypothesis, and everything built on top of th
at foundation is a hypothesis, then how do we get to a certainty–at least in the “real world” of logic? I mean, am I dense or something? Is it really really obvious that if a guy might have had a mutilated penis, and the guy’s painting mentor was getting married in a few days… that the guy would have been driven (at least temporarily) over the edge into murdering and mutilating women? Ooops. I’m getting a little ahead of myself here.

Anyway, here’s a little bit of the process that gets Cornwell to her certainty. First, like most Victorian gentlemen, Sickert liked to use pseudonyms in writing letters to the editors. Secondly, Sickert (Cornwell, by now, assumes) could not have normal relations with a woman.

Well, guess what? One of the letters written to the police (and signed pseudonymously by “Scotus”) speculates that the criminal may have had his “privy member destroyed” (i.e. his penis mutilated), and is taking it out on prostitutes. Consequently, Cornwell takes this Victorian gentleman’s speculation about the state of the killer’s genitalia as fact. And then, from there, she implies that the letter writer may have been Sickert himself! (I mean, Sickert did like to write under pseudonyms, didn’t he? Never mind that “Scotus” was not known to be one of them!). Maybe Sickert was just playing with the police, laughing at them.

So here’s the status of the Cornwellian logic at the moment: Some Victorian guy suggested that the killer might have had mutilated genitals, so that means that the killer must have had mutilated genitals… particularly since the letter suggesting that theory just might have been written pseudonymously by Walter Sickert (who just might have had mutilated genitals). In the real world, though, the “Scotus” letter really has no authority without any solid evidence of its significance. It’s just another of the many pseudonymous theories floating around London at the time.

Along these same lines… One of the letters to the editors was signed using (more or less) an identity that Sickert was known to use in his letters (and had even used on stage). The letter was signed “Nemo.” And Sickert was known to use the pseudonym “Mr. Nemo.” The author of the “Nemo” letter claimed that his time in India led him to believe that the murders were were using “peculiarly Eastern methods and universally recognized, and intended by the criminal classes to express insult, hatred, and contempt” (Times of London, 4 October, 1888).

Now, unless Sickert had spent time in India (or thought it would be fun to pretend he had spent time in India), it’s unlikely that the letter was written by him. But since “Nemo” is a name that is actually associated with Sickert (while “Scotus” is not), it’s much more likely that the “Nemo” letter was written by Sickert than that the “Scotus” letter was. (Cornwell, incidentally, never mentions the “Nemo” letter). I’m not quite sure why Cornwell thinks that the theory voiced in the “Scotus” letter carries any more weight than any of the other theories that were going around… except that this theory happens to be the one that best fits her pet suspect.

Well, once again, it looks like I’m going to have to stop, so I don’t start to bore you. But here’s where we are at the moment (getting repetitious?)… Sickert may have had genital mutilation which impaired his ability to engage in genital sex, and a letter signed “Scotus” speculated that the murderer roaming Whitechapel had mutilated genitals.

Next time… we finally get to dissect the Whistler hypothesis, which only works, by the way, if we first accept these these two other hypotheses as fact.

Hope you’re having fun. I’ll be finished with my first impressions on Thursday. What’s wild is that these first impressions only took a couple hours of reading and note-taking. But there’s just a lot to talk about.

Who knows, maybe when she gets into the forensic evidence stuff, she’ll start to argue on more solid ground.

See the Blogcritics posting of this article.