LWIA 4.3: William Gull (Patreon)

There. Just the intro now to do.

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With Sickert largely sidelined, Moore was left with the more straightforward suggestion that William Gull was the Ripper, although Moore retained the accomplice, a coachman named John Netley who ends up becoming one of From Hell’s highlight secondary characters. Gull, of course, was also not Jack the Ripper. Indeed, he’s an almost aggressively unsatisfying choice, not least as he was seventy-one and had already had the first of several strokes, one of which would claim his life less than eighteen months after the murders. More to the point, however, Gull is simply a tremendously arbitrary choice. One gets the sense that, having decided the murders were to cover up a royal baby, Knight simply took the longstanding theory that the Ripper must have had a surgical background and decided that therefore it must have been a royal physician. 

There were, admittedly, no shortage of other options—Gull was in fact one of three Physicians-in-Ordinary to the Queen in 1888, along with William Jenner, and Edward Henry Sieveking, along with a handful of Physicians Extraordinary, and that’s just in England. But Gull had previously had a role in Stowell’s precursor version of the theory, and so was the one fingered. And Moore quickly found in Gull the raw material to craft one oft he most fascinating characters of his entire career. 

The actual William Withey Gull was a studious and hardworking physician who rose from being the son of a barge owner to his position in the royal household, and is best known for identifying the eating disorder of anorexia nervosa. The bulk of documentation of his life comes from an 1896 biography by his son-in-law, and gives not even the barest foundations of reasons to suspect him as a violent serial killer, describing instead a nature-loving man for whom “the sparrows were his teachers and his friends.” Contrary to Knight’s claims, he does not appear to have been a Freemason—a fact that the United Grand Lodge of England’s then-librarian claims to have relayed to Knight during research for his book, and that largely spells the end of any plausibility his theories may have had, not that this really needed doing. 

Moore, meanwhile, devotes the second chapter of From Hell to setting up his version, and it in the process it is clear that his ambitions for the comic began to shift. Initially Campbell had been sold on a comic consisting of sixteen chapters of eight pages each. This plan did not entirely survive contact with the comic’s debut, where “The Affections of Young Mr. S” ran to twelve pages, but that was nothing compared to “A State of Darkness,” which came in at thirty-two pages. Reading the chapter, it is impossible to imagine it being done in eight pages. Even in thirty-two pages there is a sense of being rushed to it—on two separate occasions Moore is reduced to having a character narrate Gull’s biographical details to him. 

Moore’s version of Gull starts from a conversation with his father aboard his barge in which he expresses hope that God will choose him to perform “a task most difficult, most necessary and severe. I should not care if none save I did hear of my achievement. Only the Lord and I shall know and that shall be sufficient.” This strangely fanatical devotion provides one of the key through lines for the character, who makes swift ascents through the ranks of both medicine and Freemasonry, but who laments repeatedly that this longed for higher purpose has not yet been revealed to him. Other historically attested character traits like his love of nature are maintained, but contorted artfully—Gull is shown opening and closing the eyes of his dead father, for instance, or dissecting a dead mouse as a child. Moore also takes care to emphasize Gull’s occasional harshness, depicting him callously informing a patient who begs for some hope of survival that “it wouldn’t be right to give you hope—there’s very little life left in you. In fact, you’re heart-dead already,” along with an incident in which Gull, against a woman’s wishes, removes her brother’s heart and walks off with it in his pocket because he “died of an interesting heart complaint.” 

The key divergence from history, however, comes around Gull’s stroke, which Moore uses as a major turning point in his life. Gull is first visited as he struggles up a mist-shrouded hill by a smattering of deceased friends and historical personages, lamenting once again that “I am almost seventy, and the lord has found me no special task.” But as he crests the hill he is overcome by a far more startling vision, depicted in one of the comic’s few splash pages, of the triple god Jahbulon—an alleged Masonic figure fusing Jaweh, Baal, and Osiris. Gull collapses to one knee (the same pose earlier seen in his Masonic initiation), and finds himself only able to helplessly repeat the monstrous deity’s name. Moore renders the consequences of this oblique, transitioning straight from it to a scene in which Gull has an audience with Queen Victoria, who tasks him with cleaning up the mess of Prince Albert Victor’s illegitimate child, a job that will, following Marie Kelly’s attempt at blackmail, mushroom into the Ripper murders. There are hints here of Gull’s mental state—he reassures the Queen that, following his stroke, he is “physically never better, your Majesty. Why, I feel quite another man,” and makes mention of hearing the footsteps of his long awaited divine purpose. But subsequent chapters make it evident that Gull’s encounter with the divine has changed him profoundly—that he is, as Moore puts it to Campbell in one of his subsequent scripts, “actually stark, staring mad; has been since his stroke.” Moore could not have known it when he wrote the scene in 1989, but this revelation would prove the first of many things he made up for From Hell that would soon come true anyway.