I, Ripper

had advanced in my career to the point of being the intermittent substitute music critic for Mr. O’Connor’s ambitious Star, an aggressive afternoon paper among the more than fifty that were trying to prevail in the incredibly competitive London newspaper market. It was a four-page broadsheet that was published six times a week. I liked its politics, which were liberal if much softer than my own, in that they favored the mugs of the lower classes over the prisses of the upper, and cast a snide eye on Queen Vicky’s propensity to have a Tommy stick a bayonet in the guts of every yellow, brown, or black heathen who defied her. Thomas Power O’Connor, besides being Irish to the soles of his shoes, was a visionary, to be sure, wiring his building up to the telegraph for the absolute latest from any place in the empire, including far-off, desolate, forgotten Whitechapel, as we were about to see. He also had gotten us wired for the new-to-London telephone system, which connected the paper by instantaneous vocal transmission to its reporters in the press rooms of such places as Parliament, the Foreign Office, the Home Office, and most important, the Metropolitan Police HQ at Scotland Yard. He made war with the Pall Mall Gazette, the Globe, the Evening Mail, the Evening Post, and the Evening News. He seemed to be winning, too, leading them all in circulation with 125,000. His product was full of innovation – he ran maps and charts before anybody and broke up the dread long, dark columns of type with all kinds of space-creating devices, loved illustrations (and had a stable of quick-draw artists who could turn the news into an image in minutes), and embraced the power of the gigantic headline. He had converted from uncertain penmanship to the absolutism of the American Sholes & Glidden typewriters more vigorously than some of the sleepier rags, like the Times.

It happened that on that night, August 31, 1888, I had returned to the offices of the Star to hack out a two-hundred-word piece on that night’s performance of a Beethoven sonata (No. 9 in A Minor, the “Kreutzer”) by a pianist and violinist at the Adelphi named Miss Alice Turnbull and Rodney de Lyon Burrows. They are forgotten now by all but me.

I can even remember my leader: IT TAKES NERVE, I wrote in the all-caps face of the Sholes & Glidden typewriter, TO PLAY “SONATA FOR VIOLIN AND PIANO NO. 9 IN A MINOR” IN MODERATE TEMPO BECAUSE ALL OF THE MISSED NOTES AND HALF-KEYS STAND OUT LIKE A CARBUNCLE ON A COUNTESS’S PALE WHITE CHEEK-BONE.

It went on in that vein for a bit, pointing out that Miss Turnbull was forty but looked seventy and Mr. de Lyon Burrows was sixty-two but looked like a twenty-five-year-old – alas, one who had died and been embalmed by an apprentice, and so forth and so on for a few hundred prickly words.

I took my three flimsies to Mr. Massingale, the music and drama editor, who read them, hooked the grafs with his pencil, underlined for the linotype operators (notoriously literal of mind) all the caps that should be capitalized, crossed out three adjectives (“white”), and turned one intransitive verb transitive (with a snooty little sniff, I might add), then yelled “Copy down” and some youngster came by to grab the sheets, paste them together, then roll them up for insertion into a tube that would be inserted into the Star’s latest modernism, a pneumatic system that blasted the tubes down to Composing, two floors below, via air power in a trice.

“All right, Horn,” he said, using a nickname derived from my nom de Star, as my own moniker would have impressed no one, “fine and dandy, as usual.” He thought I was better than our number one fellow, as did everyone, but since I was not first in the queue, that was that.

“I’d like to hang by and read proof, do you mind, sir?”

“Suit yourself.”

I went down to the tearoom, had a pot, read the Times and the new issue of Blake’s Compendium (interesting piece on the coming collision between America and what remained of the old Spanish empire in the Caribbean), then returned to the city room. It was a huge space, well lit by coke gas, but as usual a chaotic mess covering a genius system. At various desks editors pored over flimsies, tightening, correcting, rewriting. Meanwhile, at others, reporters bent over their S&Gs, unleashing a steady clatter. Meanwhile, smoke drifted this way and that, for nearly everyone in the room had some sort of tobacco burning, and the lamps themselves seemed to produce a kind of vapor that coagulated all that ciggy smoke into a glutinous presence in the atmosphere.