Customer Reviews

Jack the Ripper: Light-Hearted Friend

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4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

As another reviewer has already pointed out, when an excerpt of this book appeared in Harper's Magazine, Francis Heaney and Guy Jacobson wrote a letter to the editor in which they came up with an anagram for the first paragraph of Wallace's excerpt that was far "superior" to any of the anagrams that Wallace had found in Lewis Carroll's work!

Since part of that review seems to have been cut off, I will repeat this wonderful anagram here. The original text was: "This is my story of Jack the Ripper, the man behind Britain's worst unsolved murders. It is a story that points to the unlikeliest of suspects: a man who wrote children's stories. That man is Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, author of such beloved books as Alice in Wonderland."

The anagram by Heaney and Jacobson reads: "The truth is this: I, Richard Wallace, stabbed and killed a muted Nicole Brown in cold blood, severing her throat with my trusty shiv's strokes. I set up Orenthal James Simpson, who is utterly innocent of this murder. P.S. I also wrote Shakespeare's sonnets, and a lot of Francis Bacon's works too."

It seemed so implausible to me that they could come up with such a perfect anagram that I actually checked on the computer to verify that it is an exact anagram! I think that this anagram shows (better than a thousand arguments about how easy it is to anagram fairly large passages!) that Wallace's thesis is bunk. Or else we must put Wallace at the top of our suspect list for Nicole Brown's murder!

Exhaustively analysing the letters of Jack the Ripper and the writings of Lewis Carroll, deriving lurid confessions out of anagrams and making numerous bold leaps from the most dubious of premises, Wallace comes up with a classic. Anyone who collects psychoceramic literature should have this book, preferably right next to a treatise on the connection between UFOs, the Vatican and the Loch Ness Monster or some similar topic.

First off, this book doesn't prove that Charles Dodgson aka Lewis Carroll was Jack the Ripper. It doesn't even come close. What it does do is show how a fertile imagination can take a few facts and run wild with them: it's speculative nonfiction at its finest, or more accurately, speculative non-narrative fiction. I'd be disappointed to discover that Wallace believes in his lunatic thesis, but I wasn't at all disappointed to read it. It's berserk and methodical at the same time, a shining gem of surreality.

Half-baked only begins to describe case made by Richard Wallace. Let's look at one of his conclusions in which he shows how every Ripper murder can be linked to the number 42 (a number used by Lewis Carroll many times in his works).

Martha Tabram was 39 and was stabbed 39 times. How does this relate to 42? As Wallace points out, 42 minus the "mysterious rule of three" is 39! Don't you get it? Emma was 45. Does this relate to 42? Yes, it's 42 plus the "mysterious law of three." And the next victim, Mary Ann Nichols, was exactly 42! No law of threes needed there!

Annie Chapman was next, and she was 47...err... lets go onto the next two victims, murdered on the same night. The first, Elizabeth Stride, was 45 (42 + 3, again!). The second victim that night was 43, which doesn't quite work, but that's perfectly reasonable because he was busy that night and probably didn't have time to ask her age. Wallace's most damning evidence comes next: the murder of Marie Kelley happened exactly 42 days after the night of the double murder. (Well, actually 41 days because the double murder happened just after midnight, but what's a few minutes here and there?) Oh, and don't forget that Marie Kelley was 24 according to some accounts (although the death certificate lists her as 25). Of course, 24 must be the right age because the inverse of 24 is 42.

Can't you see the remarkable string of 42 that runs through all the victims? Well...at least 5 of the 7 victims? "Could this be coincidence???" Wallace asks.

Probably the most telling thing about this entire string of "coincidences" is the final murder that Wallace mentions: Rose Mylett. Wallace freely admits that most accounts don't consider her a Ripper victim. Oh, but Wallace does. Why? Because of the "forensic" evidence on the scene? No! Wallace trusts not such things! (That's for his readers to supply.) He considers the possibility that she might be a Ripper victim because her death fits his pattern! It happened 42 days after Marie Kelley!

Like the anagrams he makes out of Carroll's words, much of his "proof" is nothing but twisting the evidence into patterns that Wallace himself has created. After all, who has any need for "forensic" proof when you have page after page of conjecture?

As another reviewer noted, this is indeed a classic of crackpot scholarship. Personally I love the thesis -- the idea that Lewis Carrol (or rather, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) acted out his repressed pedophilic longings by committing murders as Jack the Ripper, could be the basis for a ripping (no pun intended) NC-17 flick.

As for the scholarship, though, it's strictly for the birds. The best the author can prove -- according to legitimate standards of evidence, that is -- is that Carrol was unoccupied on the nights of the murders and so COULD have been Jack the Ripper (hmm, wonder how many thousand other Brits would pass that test?). The rest depends on the most torturous analysis of acrostics and anagrams since Ignatius Donnelly's legendary "Shakespeare Cipher" (or whatever it was called) of 1883. Even allowing for Carrol's verbal wit and literary ability, it seems highly unlikely that he would have had the ability (or the patience!) to write such sustained anagrams intentionally -- ascribing a sinister double meaning to various passages of "Alice In Wonderland." Still, some of the "unraveled" anagrams are laugh-out-loud funny.

The definitive rebuttal to Wallace's theory was produced by Francis Heaney and Guy Jacobson in a letter to Harper's

...P>We enjoyed Richard Wallace's revealing 'Malice in Wonderland' reading from your November issue. It soon became clear to us, though, that the author was trying to hint at something...perhaps even unburden himself of a great weight. He seemed obsessed with anagrams. Could that be some kind of clue? Sure enough, the very first paragraph of his article contains a grisly confession, thinly veiled in an anagram.

Rearranging the letters of:

This is my story of Jack the Ripper, the man behind Britain's worst unsolved murders. It is a story that points to the unlikeliest of suspects: a man who wrote children's stories. That man is Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, author of such beloved books as Alice in Wonderland.\

we arrive at:

...P>Painfully obvious once you spot it, isn't it? ...

Francis Heaney, New York, N.Y. Guy Jacobson Bridgewater, N.J.

Long the exclusive domain of crank scholars trying to prove that someone -- anyone -- else wrote the works of Shakespeare, anagrams found in the text have no intellectual respectability. In this supremely silly book, author Richard Wallace takes the works of Charles Dodgson and the letters attributed to Jack the Ripper, and discovers that he can find anagrams in both! To Wallace, this proves that they had to be the same person. To anyone rational, this proves nothing of the sort. Some of the anagrams Wallace finds are bizarre ("Urine! Sponge 't!"), some are hilarious ("Beg, dole whores! I tax all evil tits!") but most are tortured and nearly meaningless ("I believe the Fathers condemn penile nutrition"). To cap it off, the book is poorly organized and badly written. In short, if this is the best evidence available that Charles Dodgson was Jack the Ripper, you can confidently scratch Dodgson off your list of suspects.

I must applaud Wallace's efforts, despite the fact that there's no real insight into anything at all in this book. But I won't bother patting him on the back - he doesn't need any help from me. The book itself is entertaining and original enough, given that since the Ripper could have been Anyone Living In London (with the possible exception of the victims), I can concede that it may indeed have been Lewis Carroll, until it's proven that he wasn't... The truly intolerable characteristic of this book is the author himself. I have already alluded to his brazen self-promotion (Wallace's most-cited authority on Lewis Carroll is another of his own books). But there is no actual evidence of any kind offered to link Carroll and the murders, except for some vague and far-reaching anagrams, only a handful of which make any kind of sense, and indeed, these do translate to sound very incriminating but can also translate to a message totally benign, anagrammatically. It becomes obvious that Wallace himself is the one who is truly obsessed with anagrams, and will stretch however far he can in order to find a gruesome meaning in them. I would also like to mention Wallace's pedantic and trudging writing style, as well as his staggering ability to psychoanalyze 100-year-old corpses. Astounding talent, no? Perhaps Wallace got a poor grade in his middle school studies of Lewis Carroll and is exacting some kind of "revenge" on Carroll's character, in retribution for his own failure. (See, it's not too hard. Maybe I can write a book like this.) The bottom line is, this book remains a whimsical little opus, like The Bible Code - engaging at first, tiresome by the middle.

The preface of this book is a ripper expert saying in the nicest possible way that he thinks the idea of Lewis Caroll as the ripper is pure fantasy, but that Wallace makes it a fascinating read. Curiosity value (curiouser and curiouser!) is probably the best way to sell such a strange book, but you have to question the recommendation of said ripper expert when he says that the early pages gave him a "pleasant feeling". These pages detail murders so disgusting they've still got people more than a century later asking, who? why?

The first chapter made me realize two things: these murders really happened and while I ordered the book from Amazon in part for humour value, it hit me that this isn't really a joke. It's not like those websites that "prove" Barney the dinosaur is the devil - this evil was indisputably real. The second point is how well-researched it all is and how lucid Wallace seems. It's a fair overview of the ripper crimes and the society in which they occurred with only a couple of references to Caroll and anagrams to foreshadow the madness to come. It's like having a friend who's fine to talk to till you touch on his hot topic about which his rational mind has a blind spot.

As Wallace began establishing a ripper profile with subtle parallels to Dodgson, I started thinking perhaps other reviewers might be exaggerating the emphasis on anagrams as evidence - while he was a long way from supplying any evidence that Caroll was the Ripper, it at least seemed like he was going to be rational about trying to do so.

But when Wallace does pull out the anagrams they are not nearly as convincing as those that show Barney is satanic, and to Wallace if he can find a psychotic anagram in any of Lewis Caroll's writing, he seems to think it is as good as direct quote. He repeatedly refers to Caroll's children's books, poems and stories as "nonsense" - the implication being that in order to make sense they demand an anagrammatic "solution", with the flaw being that the anagrams Wallace finds are mostly more nonsensical than the "clear text" and half the time wouldn't prove much even if Caroll had written them "in the clear".

"Clear text" is one of the terms Wallace borrows from computer science, a field in which he has some background, and you can tell it would take a geek to write a book like this. I love the way he follows anagrams like "die scum" with comments like "scum was a valid Victorian word", as though that is the main objection the reader would have.

So ok, some of this is unintentionally funny if you have a dark sense of humor - although $70.28 new? Seems it's out of print and rare to find new. That brings me to a mystery which to me is as compelling as the ripper murders - does Wallace actually believe this stuff or was he only trying to sell a book using a provocative premise?

It's impossible to tell - he never falters in seemingly trying to be objective and scholarly, and the sheer amount of research on all sorts of obscure Lewis Caroll facts and seedy details about Victorian society make this worth buying secondhand. I guess I agree with the ripper expert's preface about curiosity value after all.

Anyone who still believes that there is some credence to the anagram idea, should simply go to google, type in "anagram generator" and choose one of the finds, and type in some sentence. You will get absolutely swamped by the output. Try it, see for yourself.