Borzois Book

In recent years the market has been glutted by books that claim to be the final word on Jack the Ripper’s identity. (I haven’t been convinced by any of them yet.) Once in awhile, however, we get a rare gem that just presents the known facts, without the author’s pet theory ebbing below the surface. The News from Whitechapel is one of these.

You won’t find any whispers of murderous Freemasons, homicidal artists, or syphilitic princes in this volume. The News from Whitechapel is a transcription of the Daily Telegraph’s coverage of the Ripper crimes, accompanied by footnotes that cross-reference official sources such as Metropolitan Police files, explain terms that might not make sense to post-Victorian readers, and in some cases correct statements later found to be untrue. Each chapter ends in thoughtful commentary from the authors, but because these opinion pieces are separate from the newspaper transcripts, they do not detract from the unique experience of reading about the Whitechapel murders as our forefathers did- provided that they were regular readers of the Daily Telegraph.

Those who lived in Jack the Ripper’s London are all dead now. But thanks to The News from Whitechapel, twenty-first century students of the Ripper crimes can obtain some sense of what it was like to open your morning paper and read about “another horrible murder” in the downtrodden East End.