I, Ripper

Dear Boss, I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they wont fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. That joke about Leather Apron gave me real fits. I am down on whores and shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled. Grand work the last job was. I gave the lady no time to squeal. How can they catch me now. I love my work and want to start again. You will soon hear of me with my funny little games. I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle over the last job to write with but it went thick like glue and I cant use it. Red ink is fit enough I hope ha ha. The next job I do I shall clip the ladys ears off and send to the police officers just for jolly wouldnt you. Keep this letter back till I do a bit more work, then give it out straight My knife’s so nice and sharp I want to get to work right away if I get a chance. Good luck

Yours truly

Jack the Ripper

Don’t mind me giving the trade name.

wasn’t good enough to post this before I got all the red ink off my hands curse it. No luck yet. They say I’m a doctor now ha ha

However, I rather like it. Whoever coined it is not without a certain low genius. Jack the Ripper. I, Jack. I, Ripper. It’s both violent and short, it combines two commonalities in an unexpected way, it uses the verb “to rip” in an equally unexpected way, as very little of what I’ve done involves ripping. But Jack the Cutter would not work, because cutting is a term, though accurately employed here, that more usually finds its place in discussions of tailoring. So Jack the Ripper it shall be.

I suspect it’s the business of the ear that drove it home. Whichever pusillanimous journo coined “Jack the Ripper” had no way of knowing that in my frenzy in Mitre Square involving what was left of Mrs. Eddowes, I indeed loosed an ear from its mooring on the side of the skull. I had no memory of doing so; that was a period of blur, although rereading my last entry, I see I retained enough recollection to record it immediately postcoitus, if ever so swiftly it vanished under the tidal swell of sleep that overwhelmed me.

But that freak of circumstance gave Jack the Ripper’s missive, with its lurid silliness about using blood as ink, a certain kind of instant celebrity. You need a vivid detail to nail something hard and permanent into the public consciousness, and whosoever my benefactor was, he provided that. He should be writing adverts!

Meanwhile, the “double event,” as the papers are calling it, seems to be seen as evidence of a particularly malignant higher genius. How I wish it were so! Were I that genius, I might not have had to improvise so desperately and to depend on luck so totally. But nobody seems to have cottoned to the fact that the second event existed purely because the first was so unsatisfactory, just as no one has an inkling as to why JEWS is spelled JUWES in my graffito, or why that sentence seems to make no sense, grammatically or otherwise. I have to laugh at how incompetent are our supposedly great minds. It appears that nobody has the gift of putting these things into their proper pattern and inferring where this campaign is ultimately going. That pleases me no end.