Tom Holland

Wow.

So...

I mean, it's kind of an amazing example of the way in which the great fictional archetypes of the late Victorian period are directly intersecting with the horror and the drama of the Jack the Ripper murders.

This is what they do.

And I mean, it's really striking that towards the end of 1888, the assumption that the Ripper is a toff is becoming so universal that, for instance, to quote Walkowicz, a gentleman making his way along High Holborn in the city was pounced upon by a man of the labouring class yelling, Jack the Ripper.

Yeah.

people are starting to take it for granted.

And if it's not a toff, then people are starting to think it must be a doctor.

And if the iconic image of the Ripper, you know, has him dressed in opera cloak and top hat, then it also invariably shows him carrying a black bag, which comes to be seen as being a medical bag.

And there are all kinds of reasons why people would be buying into this, which I think listeners to this series will already have picked up on.

So there's the fact that the London Hospital is very close to the scenes of the murders.

So there are lots of surgeons equipped with knives working there.

There's the fact that you have the mutilations and the organ thefts that many of the people conducting the inquests are saying displays a kind of detailed anatomical knowledge.

At Annie Chapman's inquest, Dr. Phillips had proposed that the removal of her uterus

that it's not about a mania or anything like that, that it's about someone wanting to sell the organ.

It is not necessary to assume lunacy, he said.

There was a market for that missing organ.

And so you start to get all kinds of theories

advancing medical men as the likeliest suspect so in october there's a very distinguished journalist on the daily news archibald forbes who proposed that the murderer was a medical student who'd caught syphilis and was out to revenge himself on prostitutes and that becomes a very very popular theory and there are others who suggest that the ripper is a vivisectionist so there's lots of

fear and anxiety about people operating on bodies and that he has been driven mad by his researches into, and I quote, the mysteries of the female sex.