LWIA 4.3: Walter Sickert (Patreon)

A somewhat arbitrary starting point, chosen largely because it both didn't require any deep research and wasn't a section I was especially interested in, letting me get some low stakes words on the page.

In terms of ordering fragments, I'm writing this chapter with a four act structure, and I intend to tackle the acts in sequence. Within each act, however, I'm going to jump around. I'll post omnibi of the individual acts as they're finished, but I'm not going to worry too much about trying to map out the order of the fragments until that point.

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Moore departs from Knight's theory in one key regard. Knight held that “Jack the Ripper was not one man but three, two killers and an accomplice,” Moore streamlines this, removing the second killer, who Knight pegs as Walter Sickert, the supposed father of his primary source. This was not entirely out of left field—Sickert was already an extant but dark horse candidate for the murders—Donald McCormick mentions him in his 1959 The Identity of Jack the Ripper as one of the names bandied about as a suspect (though McCormick favors the supposed Russian secret agent Alexander Pedachenko), and he later became the favored suspect of crime novelist Patricia Cornwell, who wrote two nominally non-fiction books to press her case. As with all Ripper suspects, however, he didn’t do it—he’s generally accepted to have been in France at the time. 

Although most accounts of Sickert’s life include at least a brief note that he was not Jack the Ripper, his more significant legacy is as one of the most important British artists of the early 20th century, typically lobbed in with the post-impressionists. An apprentice of Whistler and, informally, of Degas, his style was focused on human subjects, which he tended to capture staring off into the middle distance, caught in some private melancholy pointedly unrepresentable by his medium. His best known painting, Ennui, is a domestic scene of a banal marriage, the husband slouched in his chair smoking while the wife stands, facing the other direction from him, staring longingly at a case of stuffed birds. 

His most frequent and iconic subject, however, was the music hall, a subject he began treating around the time of the Ripper murders. This proved a controversial choice—one of his earliest music hall paintings, of the singer Katie Lawrence performing, was decried as “tawdry,” “vulgar,” and “the lowest degradation of which the art of painting is capable.” Sickert—initially trained as an actor, and a dedicated raconteur—was positively invigorated by the controversy, and made urban life his core subject, setting up studios in places like Cumberland Market, Highbury, and Camden.

This latter location helps to explain how a well-regarded British artist became an also-ran Ripper suspect. While living there he did a painting called Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom—a rare still life of an empty room so shrouded in darkness that its contents can barely be made out. The room was in fact Sickert’s own on Mornington Crescent, which his landlady told him had previously been rented out to a man she believed to be Jack the Ripper, including telling Sickert his name, which he wrote down and then lost. Or, at least, that’s the story as Sickert recounted it, which he did frequently, embellishing it with more and more details as time went on. 

This was part of a larger fascination with sensationalist murder. Around the same time, in 1907, there was a media frenzy around what is generally called the Camden Town Murder. The victim, Emily Dimmock, was a part time sex worker murdered in her bed, presumably by a client, and found the next morning by her partner, who professed to have no knowledge of what she was doing while he was away. Sickert quickly took advantage of the fuss, displaying a quartet of paintings collectively called The Camden Town Murder, each depicting a nude woman lying in bed and a clothed man sitting or standing nearby. 

These paintings were not, in fact, Sickert’s interpretation of the murder, and notably contain no blood or violence. They were simply part of a larger series of nudes he painted as part of a larger campaign against “the modern flood of representations of the vacuous images dignified by the name of the Nude” on the grounds that “the chief source of pleasure in the aspect of the nude is that it is in the nature of a gleam—a gleam of light and warmth and life.” His approach was to ground his nude figures in everyday reality, laying in natural positions on ordinary beds instead of posing for the painter’s eye. The most famous of them in fact had a previous title, What Shall We Do about the Rent?, which contextualizes the image in terms of Sickert’s usual interest in painting figures lost in thought and quiet despair. Naming them The Camden Town Murders was simply an effective publicity stunt from a painter who was pruriently intrigued by murder and relatively unconcerned with the titles of his work. Nevertheless, along with his specific fascination with the Ripper murders, it was enough to lodge Sickert in the canon of people who might have been (but plainly were not) Jack the Ripper. 

Sickert is too deeply lodged in Knight’s theory for Moore to completely excise him—his supposed son was Knight’s primary source, after all—but his role is largely limited to the story’s initial chapters. In Knight’s account the secret royal baby fathered by Prince Eddy came while the prince was secretly staying with Walter Sickert as part of a not entirely coherently defined scheme to help him grow up away from the stifling culture of the royal court. This forms the plot of the first chapter of From Hell, “The Affections of Young Mr. S.” But Moore keeps the focus on the prince, emphasizing the fact that, as he describes it in the script, “he’s naive to the point of being infantile,” although he also stresses the “childishness, almost innocence, of his emotional and sexual experience.” Moore also structures it so that the prince’s identity is a late reveal, coming only as the men dispatched by Queen Victoria call him “your highness” while dragging him and his lover Annie Crook away. The result is that there’s relatively little Moore can use Sickert for, since any substantial conversation between him and the prince would largely give the game away.  His role in the chapter is largely so that he can react to events—his unusually visceral astonishment at the news that Crook is pregnant, for instance, or the chapter’s closing image of him standing horrified in the street following the climactic abductions. He shows up again in the third chapter, named after one of his paintings variously called Blackmail and Mrs. Barrett, and theorized by Knight to be a portrait of Marie Kelly, the final victim of the Ripper murders, and the one who supposedly initiated the whole blackmail scheme, but there too he’s a secondary figure in a chapter that’s mostly about establishing Kelly as a character, present mainly because, as Moore reasons in the annotations, Sickert is “the only player with Royal contacts who would be personally known to Marie Kelly.”