Can you believe this has taken four parts just to get through the opening chapter? Don’t worry, though, I’m not going to tackle any more Cornwell for awhile once we’re finished here… unless, of course, there’s a wild outcry for more, more, more!

Well, last time I posted (I feel like I’m in a serial!), we learned that Sickert may have been sexually mutilated through surgeries in childhood. We also learned that one of the letter writers to Scotland Yard suggested that the Ripper was a sexually mutilated man. And last time, I also cautioned the reader to remember that, no matter how possible, the notion of Sickert’s mutilation is a hypothesis, not a known fact.

Yet, Cornwell takes this hypothesis and uses it to speculate on Sickert’s frame of mind right before the marriage of his mentor, James Abbott McNeill Whistler. She writes: “The anticipated connubial bliss of [Whistler] must have been disconcerting to his former errand boy-apprentice.” And that “Women were a dangerous reminder of an infuriating and humiliating secret that Sickert carried not only to the grave but beyond it, because cremated bodies reveal no tales of the flesh, even if they are exhumed.”

It must have been disconcerting? And women were a dangerous reminder of a humiliating secret? Well, for starters, Cornwell has just assumed the certainty of her hypothesis…. even though, as she herself admits, Sickert’s cremation makes it impossible to verify. (In fact, she almost implies–or perhaps does imply–that Sickert intentionally had himself cremated to wipe out the evidence of a physical debility that Cornwell is only speculating about). Secondly, she’s presuming to have access into Sickert’s mind and to know what he must have been thinking, how he must have been experiencing Whistler’s marriage. Yet, she has no direct access to that information because Sickert did not keep journals. Perhaps she is channeling Sickert?

Before she gets to the summation of these charges, let’s look at what is currently something of a side issue, but which will figure into Cornwell’s summation. She mentions that Sickert tended to read only stuff that affected him. He liked to see his name in the paper; he liked to read his own letters to the editor. And he loved to read about crime. In other words, he was somewhat narcissistic (as many artists are), and he was fascinated by crime stories. In fact, he had such an interest in crime that Sickert later drew sketches of murder scenes. Cornwell uses this evidence to damn him with the appellation “Jack the Ripper.” She assumes that this fascination is indicative of an unhinged and violent mind. And later in the book, she will argue that some of these artistic renderings may have been drawn of murders committed by the artist himself.

So, let me ask… Would you say that Patricia Cornwell has an interest in crime? She writes detective fiction and speculates on the identity of Jack the Ripper, doesn’t she? Judging by the fact that you are reading this, I would guess that you have some interest in crime. And I know I do. So, here we are… Walter Sickert liked to read about crime. I like to read about crime. You, right at this very moment, are reading about crime. Cornwell reads and writes about crime. Every Ripperologist in the world reads and theorizes on crime. Unless all of us (or even many of us) read about murder as a prelude to commiting murders of our own, then Sickert’s interest in crime seems about as sinister as mine or yours or Cornwell’s.

Ah, but as mentioned above, Sickert also liked to paint and draw crime scenes. (Never mind that he is much more famous for painting music halls!). Doesn’t that demonstrate a murderous inclination? The short answer? No!

Cornwell is a writer. She paints crime scenes with words. Sickert is a painter. He paints crime scenes with… well… paint (and pencil). Are we to assume that, because Sickert is a visual artist rather than a verbal artist, his portrayal of crime is somehow more sinister than Cornwell’s own portrayal of crime? Or, for that matter, Alfred Hitchcock’s visual/verbal portrayal of crime? Ummm, I think not. Each artist is using his or her own medium to artistically portray murder. Now, that’s not to say that Sickert is absolutely not Jack the Ripper. It’s simply to say that if the subjects of his artwork indicate an inclination towards murder, then we could say the same thing about Patricia Cornwell, Alfred Hitchcock, and any number of other visual and verbal artists.

Finally, Cornwell just pulls out the stops in her summation of the charges against Walter Sickert, as she writes: “For Walter Sickert to imagine Whistler in love and enjoying a sexual relationship with a woman might well have been the catalyst that made Sickert one of the most dangerous and confounding killers of all time. He began to act out what he had scripted most of his life, not only in thought but in boyhood sketches that depicted women being abducted, tied up, and stabbed.”

Okay, how much of that do I really need to parse at this point? We see, once again, Cornwell assuming the certainty of her hypothesis re: Sickert’s genitals. We see her beg the question, as she assumes the very thing she needs to prove in her argument… i.e. that Sickert actually was this killer. But we also see, in the final sentence, a rather tenuous grip on factuality. Without access to his thoughts, how does Cornwell know that Sickert scripted the actual performance of mutilations in his thoughts? And further, while the boyhood sketches depicting the murder of women may have been drawn by Sickert, they are actually part of a collection of his father’s artwork. Cornwell has no more certainty that these sketches were drawn by Sickert than she has certainty that Sickert wrote the “Scotus” letter. All she has is hypothesis.

And even if she knew for a fact that Walter , not Oswald, Sickert drew the sketches, would they necessarily indicate that he harbored murderous desires towards women?

And finally finally finally…

Cornwell ignores the “Nemo” letter to the editors of the Times of London (the letter about Eastern criminal methods). Yet in a set up to a major rhetorical flourish, she does make a point of “Nemo” having been Sickert’s stage name, only to instruct us that Sickert “dropped” this name “in the late summer of 1888 [and] he gave himself a new stage name that during his life would never be linked to him.”

Oh, the certainty of it all. Oh, the manipulation of it all! Need I tell you what that new stage name is? No, you know it. It has been played out on the world stage for over a century now. It is synonymous with evil and murder and blood on the streets of London in the fog.

But Cornwell’s flourish, no matter how effective rhetorically, still begs the question.

And Martha Tabram is still quite likely the victim of a different killer.

See the Blogcritics posting of this article.

Okay, I finally got a copy of the Patricia Cornwell book (Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper, Case Closed). I already knew about some of the research that she’s done on Walter Sickert, her suspect. So I expected a fairly straightforward, logical approach in her presentation of the evidence.

I think my first hint that this may not be the case occurred when I was flipping through the book, looking at the photos. In the very first section of photos, I came across a picture of Sickert’s first wife. But how is she captioned? As “the first wife of Walter Sickert, Ripper suspect”? (which would be the most intellectually honest way to do it). No, she’s captioned: “the daughter of a famous politician and the first wife of Jack the Ripper.”

Now, I don’t know about you, but when I read an argument (i.e. a piece of writing attempting to convince the reader of something), I want a fact-based, logical presentation of the case. Rhetorical bells and whistles are fine, but I don’t want to be manipulated into accepting an argument by rhetoric or repetition, and I do want the writer to anticipate potential objections to her case and refute them by using some type of evidence. This is what I taught my college students when I taught argumentative strategy at places like UCLA and Fullerton College. And it’s certainly what I expect from an argument written by a professional!

Instead, Cornwell loads her argument here, without having to produce evidence. She can just use a caption to make her argument for her, with no qualifier (like “first wife of the man most likely to have been Jack the Ripper”), and no indication of an opportunity for rebuttal. The caption to this photo “begs the question”–i.e. it assumes the very thing that it’s Cornwell’s job to prove.

Now, I’m not going to accuse Patricia Cornwell of sloppiness or dishonesty, but it is true that sloppy or intellectually dishonest writers try all the time to sway readers through these means. So today’s blog is really a lesson on the sorts of things to look out for when a writer crosses the line from legitimate argument into manipulation. And captioning a photo “first wife of Jack the Ripper” is nothing if not manipulative. I doing so, Cornwell is indicating her own certainty that Sickert is Jack the Ripper, and by that means is rhetorically bullying you to buy into her case.

Well, naturally, we assume that Cornwell will ultimately produce evidence of Sickert’s possible guilt in the actual content of her book, and eventually she does. So how is her presentation there? Is it tight? Is it sloppy? Does she leave a lot of hanging threads? Does she tie up her case nicely, by anticipating potential reader objections and refuting them?

Well, here’s one sample of a type of strategy she uses at least twice early on in the book: she mentions that since there was nothing really negative written about Sickert in his sister’s memoirs, entire sections of negative material must have been excised. Hello? She has no evidence that there ever was anything negative in the sister’s memoirs. All she knows is her own supposition that there must have been. And how does she know there must have been? Well, Sickert’s the Ripper, isn’t he?

One of the great divides in logic is between inductive and deductive reasoning. Inductive reasoning looks first at facts and information. It draws its conclusions from those facts–just like Sherlock Holmes does. (And don’t let Arthur Conan Doyle’s language fool you. He got the label wrong for Holmes’ “Science of Deduction”–which he should actually have termed the “Science of Induction“).

Deductive reasoning begins with a general principle and applies it to an individual instance of that principle. The deductive process could be represented like this:

•All men are mortal (general principle)
•Socrates is a man (individual instance of
principle).
•Therefore, Socrates is mortal (the deductive conclusion).

Inductive reasoning argues up from the specific to the general. Deductive reasoning argues down from the general to the specific.

So let’s take a look at the deductive process that leads Cornwell to conclude that negative material must have been excised from the sister’s memoirs.

Her starting supposition is that Walter Sickert is Jack the Ripper. Now, we don’t know whether she based this notion on an inductive process or whether she made an intuitive leap and somehow just knew he was the Ripper. But we can determine that this underlying supposition leads to the following line of deductive reasoning.

•(Sickert is Jack the Ripper)
•Jack the Ripper’s sister would naturally write terrible things about her brother in her memoirs. (general principle)
•The published memoirs of Jack the Ripper’s sister do not contain terrible things about her brother. (individual instance)
•Therefore, the terrible things that Jack the Ripper’s sister must have written had to have been censored for publication. (deductive conclusion).

The conclusion is logical if we start with the supposition that Sickert is the Ripper (which, once again, is the very point that it’s Cornwell’s job to prove) and if we assume that he was an absolutely dreadful child and young man and that his sister would have wanted to write about how dreadful he was. (She, of course, would not have known he was the Ripper… just that he was a famous painter).

Can you see some of the issues here? And I haven’t even gotten to the opening chapter yet. But, I’ll be back in a couple of days to provide yet more analysis of Cornwell’s argumentative strategies. Since she does have one of the more popular Ripper theories on the market today, it’s certainly worthwhile for members of her potential audience to know how she is presenting the case, and whether the argument she presents stands up to analysis.

I also have to say that I have not gotten far into the book yet. She may settle down as she goes, and focus on fact, and even present a good case and a good argument. If that occurs, I’ll be sure to report it. I mean, I have no dog in this fight… except a love of language and a distaste for seeing it used in order to manipulate an audience.

See the Blogcritics posting of this artcle.