Project Description
Documentary Focus:
This archive focuses primarily on records that contributed to the spectacularization of the Whitechapel murders, including media portrayals, fiction inspired by the investigation, and correspondence said to have come from Jack the Ripper. We have included records relating to the victims and the suspects of this case both to give important context and to acknowledge the human lives affected by these crimes. In the same mindset as Elizabeth Yakel's view that "the creation of each inventory or guide [to archival records] negates, reinforces, extends, or transcends previous artifacts", this online archive hopes to reframe archival study of the 1888 Jack the Ripper case and investigation on scholarly sources and ethics-minded interpretation, rather than conspiracy (2003, p. 5).
Consideration of Archival Focus and Practice:
Our archive details the violent murders of five women, the canonical Ripper victims: Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Kelly. Their names and stories should be remembered and acknowledged, especially considering the context in which this archive is situated: notoriety. Their murderer has achieved a level of fame that, in many ways, stands outside of the gruesome reality of his crimes.
Given the content matter of our archive, we had to make many conscious decisions regarding what to represent and how. In approaching this archive, we tried to meditate on how to represent violence without re-enacting it. The victims of Jack the Ripper never got the chance to decide what was done with the macabre details of their deaths, which are easily accessible to the public. Mortuary photographs of the victims can be found with a simple Google search. With such visible violence apparent in this topic, we looked at archival literature such as Sutherland's "Making a Killing" for guidance.
Sutherland, while discussing online representations of racist violence, makes the claim that violence "that replays itself without purpose or context is traumatic" (Sutherland, p. 38). While the examples Sutherland discusses in her article are of a very different nature than those within our archive, this discussion of spectacle "without purpose or context" helped us make key decisions on how to represent the resources within our archive. For example, we made the conscious decision not to include mortuary photographs of the victims as there was no compelling purpose to include them. We also took to heart the need for context in representations of violence in the archive, which influenced our decision to include text within our archive about the victims and media portrayals of the murders.
This brings us to the final aspect of our focus: spectacle. To ignore the spectacularization of this case would be to ignore a central aspect of the Whitechapel murders’ lasting infamy. However, to allow these spectacular accounts to be put into the archive without proper context would, in many ways, be recreating the violence done to these women. In our archive, we have chosen to focus. In choosing records, we looked for a balance of media portrayals and hard evidence about the cases. The "Fiction" and "Newspapers, Political Cartoons, and Other Periodicals" sections of our website show the way the murders were portrayed in popular media outlets such as newspapers and how they influenced literature of that time. In both of these sections (and in other sections of this site as well), there are short articles written below the resources to better contextualize the records and the historical moment from which they arose.
Ethical representation of the 1888 Whitechapel murders is no easy task. Where legal questions are generally easily managed in this case, issues surrounding the ethics of representing violence are particularly difficult to navigate (for example, in the case of murder victims who never consented to their information or photographs being used). We hope that, in our pursuit of representation with context, we do not privilege the visual spectacle of violence. Through this project, we aspire to model a more ethical, compassionate way of approaching historical events marked significantly by violence, particularly when that violence was often inflicted on those with little socio-political power.
Criteria for Record Selection:
We decided that we wanted our records to be contemporary primary source documents about or relating to the Whitechapel murders. Our criteria for selection are detailed below. To be selected, a record must be:
- Contemporary: Sources created within 20-25 years of the actual events of the murders.
- Primary: Sources written about other sources that are not artistic in nature are to be excluded.
- Contextual: Sources that add to the discussion about the context and culture surrounding the Whitechapel murders without contributing to speculation. Conspiracy theories with no grounding in fact or cultural relevance are to be excluded.
In addition to the above three guidelines we used when selecting records, we brainstormed several types of records that we wanted to include: nonfiction media (typically news media), contemporary fictional media, correspondence (such as letters suspected to be from the murderer), and vital records relating to the suspects and victims.
Target User Group:
Although records from the notorious investigation of the Jack the Ripper killings may serve as research material for several topics and purposes, this archive aims to provide primary source records and interpretation for researchers specifically interested in the 1888 Whitechapel murders case. Possible such researchers could include historians, sociologists, forensic scientists and law enforcement personnel, as well as many others non-professionally interested in the case and related subjects. These users may be looking for materials by, as David Zeitlyn states, “work[ing like anthropologists] both inside and outside the official record,” and may have various levels of comfortability with archival collections or their metadata (2012, p. 464). Regardless of a user's purpose in visiting these collections, this archive seeks to support scholarly curiosity and give access to a selection of records which both represents the variety of historic information available on this topic and supplies trustworthy accounts of the case sourced from credible repositories.
Perspectives:
The records in our archive represent a variety of perspectives and agendas. Among the "voices" that can be "heard" in our archive are those of tabloid journalists seeking to shock; serious reporters seeking to inform; medical experts seeking to aid the police; artists seeking to entertain and edify; pranksters seeking to cause trouble; and, just possibly, even the killer himself. Taken together, these perspectives offer a vivid, dynamic view of the landscape in which the Whitechapel murders were committed, reported on, and investigated and in which the mythologization of the crimes began. Geoff Wexler argues that if a person's "soul" is defined as their "thoughts, ideas, misconceptions, prejudices, delusions, [and] aspirations," then "archivists are certainly in the business of saving souls" (Wexler and Long, 2009, p. 479). In this light, our archive preserves the "soul" of a moment in history.
Unfortunately, even the most diligently researched and respectfully written articles featured on the page "Newspapers, Political Cartoons, and Other Periodicals" cannot quite compensate for what our archive necessarily lacks due to the limited scope of the sources available to us: voices representing the victims. By this, we do not just mean the voices of the victims themselves (although this is the most tragic omission) but also of members of their community. Acquaintances of the victims are quoted in a handful of newspaper articles, but their voices, far from driving the narrative, are filtered through the perspective of the journalists. Besides, there is good reason to doubt the accuracy of some of these supposed quotations, given that contemporary newspaper reports on what was spoken at the inquests often contradict each other (Rubenhold, 2019).
In an untitled article in The Times, which in our archive is titled "Bodies of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes (Jack the Ripper victims) are discovered, Oct 1888," the reporter describes Catherine Eddowes as a "second woman [i.e. after Elizabeth Stride] of the unfortunate class." The term "unfortunate," a frequent descriptor of the victims in the contemporary press, can be read as both compassionate and condescending, and thus perfectly illustrates how a document can attempt to forge a connection between its creator and its subject while simultaneously exposing the distance between them (Morrison, 2019, p. 48-49). In a sense, our archive is a paradox: by striving to keep the victims at the heart of our project, we have essentially constructed an archive on a foundation of absence. This absence, while tragic, is also instructive. When it comes to understanding how these women were marginalized in life and death alike, perhaps silence speaks louder than words.