LWIA 4.3: Act I
🕑 Added 2025-08-10 00:19:41 +0000 UTCOh right, I never posted the omnibus of Act I.
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Moore, on the other hand, was a busy man indeed. This fact was largely why he found himself having to crank out silly Image comics on the regular. Or, perhaps more specifically, it was the fact that virtually none of his other projects at the time had any sort of commercial prospects. This was the basic dynamic of Moore’s Image period—a bevy of gigs writing high quality stupid comics taken entirely for the money, and a second set of of gigs creating esoteric and often obtuse works taken entirely because Moore believed in their artistic merits.
After the collapse of Big Numbers the biggest of these was From Hell. This would not remain uncommercial forever—once his collaborator Eddie Campbell did the work of collecting it as a trade paperback in 1999 it became a perennial backlist seller that moved a couple thousand copies a year. More to the point, it eventually would become established as Moore’s second great magnum opus—the comic that, along with Watchmen, provided the frontline defense of the claim that he was an all-time master of the medium. But during the period where Moore was writing Fire From Heaven and Violator vs. Badrock it was a black and white comic being published by a small time publisher with as much as nine month gaps between the issues. And this marked a significant improvement upon the initial terms on which From Hell was published back in 1989, a full decade before it finally became a stable-selling trade paperback.
From Hell started so small as to be nearly invisible, in the second issue of Taboo. This was a horror anthology published by Steve Bissette under his own Spiderbaby Grafix imprint. This was something of a high profile boondoggle. Its contributors’ list was stunning—S. Clay Wilson, Charles Vess, Chester Brown, Neil Gaiman, Michael Zulli, Moebius, Dave Sim, Ramsey Campbell, and Clive Barker all contributed at various points. But its pay was desultory—$100 a page, to be split between writer and artist—and even at that rate Bissette haemorrhaged money. But the very things that made it a disastrously unsustainable—the fact that, as Bissette later put it, it was “too fucked up, too big (one hundred pages plus per issue), too expensive to produce, too high a cover price, too selfless a business agenda, too generous with its royalties, too erratically scheduled, and too confrontational”—also made it, for the brief period of its existence, one of the most vibrant comics anthologies ever produced.
Unsurprisingly, given his then close friendship with Bissette, Alan Moore was involved from the start. His contribution to the first issue, published in the fall of 1988, was a nine page story with Bill Wray called “Come On Down” about a game show called Brief Candle in which contestants spin a wheel to determine the way in which they’ll be killed on stage. This, however, had been repurposed from Harris Comics’ abortive attempt to resurrect Warren Publishing’s Creepy, and Moore soon got to work creating From Hell as an bespoke contribution. But this remained a marginal piece—Moore brought it up fleetingly in a couple of interviews, but was not actually asked a question about it in any interviews prior to a 1991 Comics Journal piece, and even there Gary Groth leaves it for the end.
This initial sense of smallness is in many ways mirrored in the work’s beginning. Its opening section, a prologue entitled “The Old Men on the Shore,” is fascinatingly understated. Its title is wholly descriptive—its entire plot consists of two men, a Mr. Abberine and a Mr. Lees, having a conversation as they walk along the Bournesmouth shore in 1923. Their conversation is oblique—some matter from Abberline’s past as a policeman that he and Lees allowed to be covered up because, as Abberline puts it, “we didn’t want our throats cut.” Eventually they return to Abberline’s house and the chapter ends.
It is only with hindsight—the knowledge of From Hell’s eventual weight and the seismic changes to Moore’s life that it would unleash—that “The Old Men on the Shore” betrays its significance. Its key scene comes when Mr. Lees—evidently a spiritualist of some sort—confesses to Abberline that he is in fact a fraud who began claiming to have visions as a small, frail child because he liked the attention. Abberline is astonished, asking “what about the seizures, man? I’ve seen you meself, rigid as a sleeve-board; eyes like blessed millwheels.” But Lees proceeds to fake a seizure, offering a prediction that he sees death in five years (the real Frederick Abberline would in fact live six more). Abberline is still dumbfounded. “What you said,” he protests. “Everything you said, it all happened. It was all true.”
It is at this point that Alan Moore comes to write what would prove, perhaps, the single most consequential line of dialogue in his entire career—the pebble bouncing down the mountainside to prefigure the avalanche of change that would follow. Years later, when publishing the final epilogue of From Hell, Moore would cheekily use a blown up version of this panel as the whole of his author’s statement. In a real sense, it could serve as a statement on his whole career—his life’s work summarized in a single sentence the import of which he could not possibly have understood as he scripted it. Indeed, looking at the script it’s plain that he did not—he swallows the line in a panel with two other lines of dialogue, and requires Eddie Campbell to recognize the beat’s import and move it forward to the next panel, joining it with the wry “That’s the funny part” that concludes the thought. Moore describes how “As Lees looks out towards us in the foreground his eyes are still haunted and full of sorrow and tragedy, but one corner of his mouth lifts up slightly into a sad little half smile.”
And then he explains. “I made it all up, and it all came true anyway.”
But from the evidence of what was published in Taboo #2—“The Old Men on the Shore” prologue and the first chapter—it was not entirely clear what the comic was even about, little yet its import. Moore’s brief introduction talks around the matter, describing its subject only as “a notable and historic mystery,” and he was no clearer in interviews from the period. His cards are in fact played so close to the chest that, even as he talks about “the historical personage whose life is central to From Hell,” he doesn’t name him, and he doesn’t appear in the two chapters provided. Likewise, the chapters don’t point to anything clear—the prologue’s crypticness is followed by a the first chapter containing neither of the old men, presenting instead a contextless story about an illegitimate royal baby. It’s not even clear why this should be classified as a horror comic, although Moore is clear in the introduction that it is one.
The puzzle is not hard to figure out for a reasonably informed or savvy reader. Particularly clued-in ones could undoubtedly identify the subject from the title alone. And although it was not quite a simple matter in the pre-Internet days of 1988, the list of names provided—Fred Abberline, Walter Sickert, a “Mr. Druitt,” and a dedication to Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Liz Stride, Kate Eddowes, and Marie Jeanette Kelly—is more than enough to go on even without the prologue’s concluding line about Abberline’s house being “the house that Jack built.” But absent either a working knowledge of the subject or an afternoon in the library—which is to say for most readers—the matter was quite ambiguous.
Moore, for his part, arrived at his subject obliquely. As he tells it, “the initial point of gestation came with Debbie Delano, who has always been very interested in murder—not as a way of life, but just something that she’s interested in.” Through conversations with her, he came to the conclusion that “A murder is an extreme and extraordinary human event that touches the lives of all the people around it in a number of different and often subtle ways. A murder has a structure of its own. It might be interesting to take a real life murder as a starting point for a graphic novel of some sort.” As with Big Numbers, which is in many ways From Hell’s stillborn twin, this idea stemmed out of Moore’s disillusionment after Watchmen, and the question of “what the hell do I follow this with? This was so baroque, so complicated, and unfortunately it's all about superheroes. Is there anything I could do that would be as complex, as interesting, that was more rooted in the real world?”
The idea developed further when Moore saw an advertisement for Douglas Adams’s 1987 novel Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. The book itself—which Moore cheerily notes he’s not actually read—is a lightweight thing, bodged together from a pair of Doctor Who scripts Adams had written a decade earlier, replacing Doctor Who as a protagonist with the eponymous Dirk Gently. In Adams’s book the notion of a holistic detective is deliberately silly, riffing on the word’s use in new age contexts. As Gently explains it, “the term ‘holistic’ refers to my conviction that what we are concerned with here is the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. I do not concern myself with such petty things as fingerprint powder, telltale pieces of pocket fluff and inane footprints. I see the solution to each problem as being detectable in the pattern and web of the whole.” This leads Gently to somewhat dubious practices like billing clients for a trip to the Bahamas on the grounds that he “plotted and triangulated the vectors of the interconnectedness of all things and traced them to a beach in Bermuda which it is therefore necessary for me to visit from time to time in the course of my investigations.”
But Moore was taken by the title, reasoning that “holistic detective wouldn't have to just solve the whodunit of the crime, but they'd have to solve the entire culture, the entire world, the entire universe that that crime happened in.” Or, as he put it in the introduction in Taboo, “if you cut into a thing deeply enough, if your incisions are precise and persistent and conducted methodically, then you may reveal not only that thing’s inner workings, but also the meaning behind those workings… for my part, I am concerned with cutting into and examining the still-warm corpse of history itself.” The only thing to do was pick his murder. His first thoughts ran to “more obscure and unusual homicides, like the case of Dr. Buck Ruxton,” who he describes as “a kind of 1930s Lord Lucan figure who killed his wife and nanny but never managed to pull off the necessary subsequent disappearance.”
But Moore was pondering this in 1988, and the world would soon impress an altogether more infamous option upon him in the form of the centenary of Jack the Ripper. This was less an idea that Moore had discarded than one that he’d skipped over entirely, “simply because I figured they were worn out, drained of any real vitality or meaning by the century of investigation and publicity attached to them.” But amidst the blur of Ripper retrospectives Moore found himself captivated, and what had initially seemed a flaw became an advantage. The Ripper murders were “something mythical, something about which dozens and dozens of separate legends and stories and lies and hoaxes and myths had been woven—which are almost as interesting as the murder itself.” Moreover, as per his thoughts on holistic detective work, Moore found himself compelled by the 1880s, where “there were all of these vectors in art, science, politics, and thought that formed a sort of vortex in the 1880s. At least in my readings of the situation, in symbolic terms, the Ripper murders—happening where they did and when they did—were almost like an apocalyptic summary of those times, of that entire Victorian age. Also, they prefigure a lot of the horrors of the 20th century. There was a little apocalypse in miniature there that prefigured the larger apocalypses to come.”
It’s notable that this quote from 1991—when only the Prologue through Chapter Two had been published, and work was still being done on Chapter Four—largely and accurately maps out the overall arc of where From Hell was going. Moore claims in the same interview that From Hell was mapped out “pretty well. Not so intensely as I have Big Numbers mapped out. I’ve had to leave myself a little more stretch with From Hell because there’s new information turning up all the time.” And indeed, a 1992 outline of the project shows that Moore did in fact have the broad outline in mind, right down to the “Dance of the Gull-Catchers” appendix that would not actually be completed for another seven years. The outline is imperfect—a chapter called “The Unfortunate Mr. Druitt” is listed as Chapter 8, when in fact it would be Chapter 11, and several chapters are either still untitled or have working titles—“The Ascension of Dr. Gull” instead of the more poetic “Gull, ascending,” for instance. But it’s clear that the basic structure of From Hell was in place early on, as the casual flex of its subtitle “being a melodrama in sixteen parts,” already in place when the Prologue and Chapter 1 came out.
Moore expanded on this process in his mammoth fax interview with Dave Sim in the backpages of Cerebus, describing how he “explored the landscape of the murders in terms of the literature surrounding the event. By this, I mean that I made a very broad reading and mapping, as if from a considerable altitude, a considerable distance from the event itself.” This is sensible enough, and sounds much like you’d imagine any writer talking about the initial stages of a complex and research-based project. Moore explains that he “could see what features of the narrative landscape seemed the most significant and promising, even if I couldn't provide a precise soil analysis at that point to say exactly why they seemed promising,” those details being something he figured out when he actually reached the requisite parts of his outline and got into the mucky details. As he put it, “if that first high-altitude mapping is perceptive and accurate enough, whatever tiny surface details are unearthed upon closer inspection are bound to fit right into it somewhere. That's how I work, anyway.”
And yet it is clear that Moore’s high level mapping was a far stranger process than just reading a bunch of books about Jack the Ripper. He describes “some notes culled from a very old issue of The Fortean Times which deal with a group of alleged psychics being given photographs of cattle mutilations and asked to ‘read’ them Psychically. Phrases like ‘ears cut off...genitals mutilated...888...lines of force in the ground…’ seemed resonant to me, as did an article in another issue of Fortean Times in which one of their writers, possibly Matt Hoffman in his column of American arcana, drew parallels between a plotted graph of inexplicable cattle mutilations and a plotted graph of violent crimes against women during a similar period. Obviously, these snippets never found their way into the finished From Hell, but they formed a part of my high-altitude mental impression of the Whitechapel events: a kind of fuzzy, low definition map, as seen through cloud where nevertheless certain prominent features of the symbolic landscape could still be seen. Rivers of theory. High points of conjecture and ley-lines of association.” It’s clear from this that Moore’s map was not simply a compendium of Ripper trivia but something altogether more abstract, focused not simply on the five murders or his promising account of the prefigured twentieth century but on some larger notion of violence, symbol, and the hidden structures of the world.
In one sense Moore’s high level map proved accurate: the comic was finished largely as he initially imagined it. But Moore would soon find himself blindsided by the sheer depth of what he found once he began exploring these ideas in more detail. As with Big Numbers, this would quickly lead to From Hell becoming an overwhelming project. But whereas on Big Numbers the bulk of this burden fell on the artist, Bill Sienkiewicz, who burnt out on the project three issues in, dooming it, on From Hell, the burden would largely fall on Moore himself, who would have his entire world upended by the project. Thankfully on From Hell he had the most sturdy rock of a collaborator imaginable in the form of Eddie Campbell.
Campbell was one of the more unusual figures in the British comics scene, in that his career emerged entirely from self-published work, beginning in 1975 with a comic called, depending on what interview he describes it in, either Beem! A Comic Book for the End of the World or The Tale of Beem Gotelump, which Campbell printed five hundred copies of and sold a whopping forty, stashing the remaining four hundred and sixty in his parents’ loft. (In 2006, he recounted that “every time I go gome, I go up there and grab a handful. There’s probably still a hundred up there.”) After a several year break “where I reassessed what I was doing with my art” he tried again, this time getting involved in the growing British small press scene, of which he would later note that “By ‘small press’ I mean really small. If you have a ‘distributor’ you’re no longer small press—I mean selling from a wooden table at a market, taking them round backstreet bookshops in a suitcase, sending them out by mail entirely to fellow enthusiasts.”
The centerpiece of this scene was Paul Gravett, who would sell work from Campbell and other photocopier publishers from his Fast Fiction stall at the Westminster Comics Mart, and would later found Escape Publishing, who would put out the first collections of Campbell’s work in 1984. These were the earliest compilations of what came to be known as Campbell’s Alec series—a run of autobiographical comics featuring Campbell’s self-insert character Alec McGarry in short, generally elliptical stories in the same broad vein as Harvey Pekar, often including his friend Danny Grey, who famously never forgave himself for leaving Alec McGarry asleep at the turnpike (as the opening panels of the collected Alec memorably have it).
Unlike many of the other creators on the Fast Fiction table, most of whom eventually made the jump to 2000 AD or something in the course of establishing their careers, Campbell remained almost singularly focused on these autobiographical comics. Even after moving to Australia with in 1986 and, by necessity, becoming “immersed 100% in the very situation I had hoped to avoid, which is that every single thing I do now appears in the direct sales comics shop market,” he remained associated entirely with publishers like Escape and Harrier Comics that emerged from the small press scene and generally went out of business within a couple of years. It was not until 1987 that he commenced on Bacchus, his impish spin on the American superhero story, and even that took a strangely low key, domestic perspective on its subject.
Campbell explains this focus by noting that he’s “not trying to make ordinary life interesting: it is interesting. It’s exciting, unbelievably exciting. I was on my bike the other day and I overshot my turn-off and I found myself away down by the river and there were these trees growing out of the river. It was so crazy and beautiful I couldn’t believe it.” This, perhaps unexpectedly, was much of why he was chosen for From Hell—because he would, as Steve Bissette put it, “not be seduced by the violence inherent in the tale.” Campbell was not a completely left field choice—he’d contributed a four page true crime tale called “The Pyjama Girl” to the first issue of Taboo, and more to the point had been known to Alan Moore for virtually his entire career—back in 1983, when Campbell was just getting started, Moore proclaimed him “one of the most interesting talents, amateur or professional, working in comics at the moment” in one of his fanzine reviews back in The Daredevils, and they struck up a friendship not long after when Moore tried to set Campbell up to succeed him as the cartoonist for Sounds; Campbell lost the gig to Bryan Talbot, but would get it a few years later. (Campbell recounts their first meeting, which saw Danny Grey driving him to Northampton, giving Moore an interior monologue upon meeting Grey, “Just for an instant I have the sense of panel borders looming ont he periphery of my vision, framing me, the lorry, the handshake, the Sainsbury’s carrier bag in my other hand, the infants school over the road…”)
As previously observed, there is an impishly counterinuitive streak in putting Campbell on From Hell, especially when paired with Bill Sienkiewicz on Big Numbers. Campbell’s proficiency at and fascination with depicting the mundane and everyday would have been a natural fit for Big Numbers, and indeed he pitched Moore on drawing it after it collapsed for good. Sienkiewicz, on the other hand, was a born horror artist, seemingly perfectly suited to drawing Jack the Ripper. The decision to effectively switch their books was a clever one that enlivened both projects tremendously. But it also effectively doomed Big Numbers while ensuring From Hell would be the one that succeeded. Indeed, Campbell commented on this before Big Numbers had even collapsed, noting that it was “a mystery to me how they can’t get the books out more than once a year. I think the trouble with Mad Love is that Alan adopted the conventional big-business comics methods of the writer-artist team when he should have just set up his own shop and masterminded the thing under his own eyes. Then if the artist was too slow, fire the artist and get another one. That’s what I would do. Indeed, when I work with other people now, that’s what I do do. You can’t go into this with airy-fairy notions of the idealism of Artistic Brotherhood and then except some Flash Dan on the other side of the world to deliver the goods when Dan is also being wooed by Marvel and all the other corporate biggies.” Ultimately From Hell was just as turbulent as Big Numbers, and Campbell would soon come to intimately understand the annual release schedule, but for all the chaos he at no point did he waver under the pressure, pulling the book kicking and screaming over the finishing line, and even going so far as to set up his own Eddie Campbell Comics imprint to get a collected edition of it out in 1999.
As the selection of an artist who would maintain an emotional objectivity suggests, Moore was deeply uninterested in writing a whodunit in which the Ripper murders would be solved—a story that would build to some climactic reveal of the suspect. This was consistent with his larger desires in treating a murder, but moreover was a necessary factor in depicting a murder that is, in practice, unsolved. There are, of course, countless theories regarding the identity of Jack the Ripper—Moore would eventually give a history of them in the “Dance of the Gull-Catchers” appendix to From Hell. But none are definitive, and while some are plainly fanciful, there’s not even anything that could be pointed to as a leading contender. Moore, for his part, is firm that “nobody knows and probably nobody will ever know” the Ripper’s identity. And so building the entire story towards an innately unsatisfying reveal was simply an unappealing option. And so Moore instead structured the story, as he explained in the intro to Taboo #2, not as “a ‘Whodunnit?’ so much as a ‘Wha’happen?’”
Nevertheless, this still required that Moore pick a suspect for the purposes of telling the story. Moore is clear in his intro that this is not intended as any sort of claim of truth, describing the selection as “simply a convenience of fiction.” Nevertheless, contrary to the epigraph of Charles Fort declaring that “one measures a circle, beginning anywhere,” he did in fact have to construct a theory of the case. And so from the morass of Ripperologists with their pet theories Moore selected one—Stephen Knight’s 1976 Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution.
This was not a choice made on the basis of plausibility—indeed, Moore speculates that Knight “wrote it as a hoax,” although he describes it as an “ingenious hoax.” Instead he seems to have made the choice because Knight’s theory was simply more interesting, saying that, “whether true or not, [it] seemed to open up fascinating territories of lore and tradition.” Discussing the theory in “Dance of the Gull-Catchers,” Moore goes into more detail, describing it “a Swiss-watch work of art, ingenious in its incorporation of the Lees and Stowell theories.” Translated out of Ripper geek geneologies, Moore is describing here Thomas Stowell’s 1970 article “Jack the Ripper - A Solution?” in the Criminologist, which implied that the Ripper was Prince Albert Victor, Queen Victoria’s grandson and second in line to the throne. Adding to the theory’s splash was the fact that Stowell died shortly after the article’s publication and his son burnt all of his papers. The Lees theory, meanwhile, refers to a far older strand of thought, first recorded in The Chicago Herald in 1895, which reported a second hand account of the spiritualist Robert James Lees’ telling people how he had led the police to the door of the Ripper—a doctor in a fashionable house in London—and of how the doctor was institutionalized under a false name after a secret trial. Picking up on a detail in Stowell’s theory about the physician Sir William Gull’s peripheral involvement, Knight’s book splits the difference, abandoning the rather farcical notion of an insane and murderous royal in favor of the still scandalous but altogether more modest notion that Gull was the Ripper, with the murders intended as a cover-up of Prince Albert Victor’s illegitimate child.
Knight’s account is framed as a sort of escalating fascination. At the story’s start, Knight finds himself interviewing Joseph Gorman, who styled himself Joseph Sickert, claiming to be the secret son of the painter Walter Sickert. Gorman had appeared a few years earlier in the BBC’s six part Jack the Ripper TV series. This strange series was a hybrid drama/documentary, with popular detectives Charlie Barlow and John Watt from Z-Cars and Softly, Softly reviewing the evidence, interspersed with dramatic reenactments of crucial scenes. Its sixth and final episode meanders through Stowell’s theory and some other details around Prince Albert Victor before offering an interview with Gorman, introduced with triumphant flourish as “someone who is alive and well and living in London,” promising a “story that’s never been told before.”
Gorman unfurls his story with relish, working his way up over the course of five minutes to his headline claims so as to gradually ramp up the stakes and audacity of his tale. In the TV series the fictional detectives treat it as at once strangely plausible and impossible to nail down. The series ends with the detectives convinced that there’s been some sort of cover-up, but refusing to commit to any specific theory. Still, the fact that Gorman’s theory is presented in the final episode positions it as the show’s de facto last word, allowing it to pool vaguely with an earlier thread involving some graffiti discovered around one of the murders reading “The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing,” which the show presents as having masonic connections.
Knight takes pains to emphasize his tremendous skepticism in Gorman’s tale. “It all sounded terribly unlikely,” he complains. Nevertheless, he was fascinated, convinced that Gorman “may have been grossly misled, but he believed utterly in every syllable of his tale.” (This claim is, perhaps, undermined by Gorman subsequently recanting his claims, although he later retracted the retraction in a bid to get royalties on Knight’s book.) This, of course, is simply setup for the gradual conversion towards complete belief that he performs over the course of his book; he begins to pull on the threads of Gorman’s claims, and is repeatedly astonished to discover their plausibility. In practice these chains of association are always slightly overstated—a parade of vague corroborations stitched together with a bunch of “are likely to have been”s and other handwaving conjectures. But the breadth of its implications, including Knight’s decision to take the vague whiffs of Masonic connections and inflate them into a wholesale claim that the Ripper murders were “perpetrated according to Masonic ritual” makes it easy to see why Moore was drawn to the theory. If the Ripper murders were to be Moore’s lens on their times then the most audacious and far-reaching theory of the case had obvious sue, especially when it was so well constructed to remain vaguely plausible, allowing Moore to maintain the structural conceit that, even though it is a work of fiction, “the events detailed in ‘From Hell’ could have unfolded just the way we describe them.”
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 Albert Victor 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.”
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 was still far from fully grasping what his high-level map of From Hell was pointing inexorably towards, but this revelation would prove the first of many things within it that would soon come true anyway.
Perhaps the most interesting moment in “A State of Darkness,” however, is its first page, which consists, after the title, of eight panels worth of what Moore describes in his script as “nice, restful, undemanding blackness,” each adorned with a word balloon. As the issue stretches on it becomes clear that these are snippets of dialogue from throughout the issue, representing various moments of Gull’s life. But one line of dialogue repeats—“‘What is the fourth dimension?’”, a question offered in quotation marks, which appears three times, both opening and closing the reverie.
This turns out to be from an exchange between Gull and his friend, the surgeon James Hinton, in which the latter discusses his son’s theories, which are to be collected in a pamphlet called “What is the Fourth Dimension?” There are, undoubtedly, chronology problems here—Moore sets this scene in 1866, when Hinton’s son, Charles Howard Hinton, was but thirteen—but the pamphlet is a real one, first published in 1884. Indeed, the fourth dimension was a career-long fascination for the younger Hinton, who expanded on the ideas in his 1888 book A New Era of Thought, along with another book in 1904 simply titled The Fourth Dimension.
The idea did not, however, originate with him. Its earliest explication came in 1754, when Jean le Rond d’Alembert discussed the concept in the Encyclopedie. Over the course of the nineteenth century various mathematicians played with the notion, including August Möbius and Bernard Riemann, who both began pondering the notion of four-dimensional geometries. Its entrance into the popular consciousness, however, took until 1884 not only with Hinton’s pamphlet but with the publication of Edwin Abbott Abbott’s Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, which humorously works through how life would work in a two-dimensional world and how a three-dimensional object might appear to the denizens of such a world before musing briefly on the idea of higher dimensions.
Hinton’s pamphlet starts in similar territory, including, in his opening paragraphs, a brief meditation on what life would be like on a two-dimensional plane, noting that while “we think of a plane habitually as having an upper and a lower side, because it is only by the contact of solids that we realize a plane. But a creature which had been confined to a plane during its whole existence would have no idea of there being two sides to the plane he lived on.” But, Hinton argues, such a creature might be able to imagine the idea through reason alone, perhaps by contemplating what it would be like to live on a one-dimensional line. And so Hinton begins addressing the idea only humorously alluded to by Abbott, namely that of how four-dimensional space might work. He spends much of the essay describing the characteristics of what he would come to call a tesseract—a four dimensional shape consisting of eight cubes.
Interestingly, nowhere in Hinton’s essay does he offer the most common answer to his titular question, namely that the fourth dimension is time. It is not that Hinton was unaware of this notion, which dates back to d’Alembert in the 18th century; it’s simply not his focus. Nevertheless, he does approach it obliquely at one point. This comes in the course of a lengthy thought experiment about “a whole system of lines sloping in different directions, but all connected together, and held absolutely still by one framework” that is then passed slowly through a plane, which would give ”the appearance of a multitude of moving points in the plane,” with each of their speeds and directions dependent on the slope of the individual lines. Hinton describes the way in which shapes might briefly form in the plane, imagining “a number of threads to be so grouped as to form a cylinder for some distance, but after a while to be pulled apart by other threads with which they interlink. While the cylinder was passing throught he plane, we should have in the plane a number of points in a circle. When the part where the threads deviated came to the plane, the circle would break up by the points moving away. These moving figures in the plane are but the traces of the shapes of threads as those shapes pass on.” But then he takes a genuinely unexpected turn, declaring that “these moving figures may be conceived to have a life and consciousness of their own.”
Hinton spends only a little time elucidating this remarkable swerve. He extends the idea to the possibility that the shapes themselves might have consciousness, albeit “limited to those parts of the shapes that simultaneously pass through the plane. In the plane, then, we may conceive bodies with all the properties of a material system, moving and changing, possessing consciousness. After a while it may well be that one of them becomes so disassociated that it appears no longer as a unit, and its consciousness as such may be lost. But the threads of existence of sucha figure are not broken, nor is the shape which gave it origin altered in any way. It has simply passed on to a distance from the plane. Thus nothing which existed in the conscious life on the plane would cease.” He then extrapolates to the idea of a four dimensional object intersecting three-dimensional space, proclaiming that “we should have to imagine some stupendous whole, wherein all that has ever come into being or will come co-exists, which passing slowly on, leaves in this flickering consciousness of ours, limited to a narrow space and a single moment, a tumultuous record of changes and vicissitudes that are but to us.”
Moore uses this line as an epigraph to “A State of Darkness,” and has the elder Hinton restate it to Gull, describing his son’s theory that “time is a human illusion… that all times co-exist in the stupendous whole of eternity.” Indeed, the line seems to have held some weight for Moore, who cited it to Dave Sim, noting that “unless I’m missing something, this seems to rule out the conventional notion of free will,” and later observed that Hinton’s notion is “very similar to the concept in Jerusalem.” But within From Hell his focus is narrower; he has the elder Hinton describe to Gull the notion of four dimensional patterns that would “seem merely random events” from a three dimensional perspective, using the idea that “something peculiar happens in 1788; a century later related events take place. Then again, 50 years later… then 25 years… then 12 1/2. An invisible curve rising through the centuries.” Moore would eventually unpack the points along this curve in the final installment of From Hell, but in some ways his more important articulation of the notion comes in Gull’s response. “Can history then be said to have an architecture,” he muses. “The notion is most glorious and most horrible.”
Comments
Daibhid Ceannaideach
It's just occurred to me that "I made it up and it all came true anyway" is also how Dirk Gently's career operates, much to his annoyance.
Peter McDonald
Just started reading From Hell last week and this is all fascinating insight into it
