My Secret Knife: a review of Jack the Ripper's Secret Confession

Where would Whitechapel-based walking tour companies and fly-by-night paperback publishers be without the public’s continued fascination with Jack the Ripper? Yes, ever since Saucy Jack stalked those darkened backstreets near the old City at the close of the nineteenth century, the Ripper legend has continually piqued the interest of generation after generation of rubbernecking gorehounds and Angela Lansbury-esque armchair sleuths alike, resulting in an almost endless stream of theories about his identity and almost as many gaudy books to back them up.

And so we turn to the latest offering from the Ripper mill, Jack the Ripper’s Secret Confession, a book in which David Monaghan and Nigel Cawthorne claim that the man who made whoring in the East End decidedly dangerous was none other than ‘Walter’, the author of the infamous (and voluminous) Victorian erotic memoir, My Secret Life.

For anyone unacquainted with My Secret Life, the story goes something like this. Between 1888 and 1895 a Belgian peddler of erotica, Auguste Brancart, was summoned from his adopted city of Amsterdam to London by “a rich old Englishman, who desired to have privately printed for his own amusement a huge MSS”. What this manuscript contained was nigh on a million words of an anonymous erotic memoir, allegedly drawn from the author’s diaries of his day-to-day amatory life. Over a period of some years, and involving a chain of smugglers, stooges and rogue printers, this manuscript was printed up in 11 volumes, comprising some nearly 4000 pages in total (including a more-than-thorough 56-page index). According to the author only six copies of the whole work were printed, although as researchers Ian Gibson, Steven Marcus and others have demonstrated, a great many more copies were printed up than that. The book sold for the then-astronomical sum of £100 a set and was marked ‘Not for publication’ on its title page. This isn’t surprising: the content of the book is about as obscene as it’s possible to imagine. The author narrates his sexual development from childhood onwards, detailing literally thousands of copulations and other sexual indiscretions and exploring every possible type of perversion. Attempts to publish the book over the course of the 20^th century met with bans, obscenity judgements and prison sentences, and it wasn’t until 2004 that all eleven volumes were finally made available online (at this location).

The author of the text has never been definitively identified (much like the Ripper), but the most convincing attempt at identification I’ve read is Ian Gibson’s masterful and endlessly entertaining book The Erotomaniac, in which Gibson asserts that the author of My Secret Life was Henry Spencer Ashbee, a bibliophile, traveller and industrialist who wrote three huge bibliographies of erotic literature under the name Pisanus Fraxi in the last half of the nineteenth century. I have neither the time nor desire to attempt outline Gibson’s reasoning here but it seems to me pretty watertight and that Ashbee was indeed the author of the My Secret Life – he had the time, inclination (after a lifetime’s immersion in the field of erotic literature) and most importantly the wealth to see the book through the press. According to publisher Charles Carrington, who acted as the book’s distributor, it cost the author £1100 pounds to produce the work – a staggering sum of money, which would place the author in the country’s financial elite.

However, Gibson’s work and research rather scuppers Monaghan and Cawthorne because of one crucially important conclusion reached by the author: My Secret Life is a work of fiction. Despite the book presenting itself as memoirs drawn from a diary, a number of internal inconsistencies coupled with the sheer unlikelihood that anyone could possibly live as ‘Walter’ purported to do, mark it out as a fantasy autobiography rather than a true record of a life lived. Beyond this, Gibson demonstrates fairly conclusively from comparisons with Ashbee’s diaries that he and Walter share the shame stylistic tics as writers, the same problems with spelling and syntax, and the same character traits. And if Ashbee was the writer of My Secret Life, which he is generally assumed to have been, any possible link between ‘Walter’ and the Ripper completely breaks down. The very nature of Ashbee’s life as a businessman, author, head of a family and social butterfly are utterly at odd with what we know of the Ripper’s character and the facts of his killing spree.

I have to confess a personal fascination with the life, work and character of Ashbee. As he is described in the few books which exist about him, he amuses me enormously, and so I thought I’d buy …Secret Confession to see if there was any possible way that Henry Spencer could have been the Ripper. Unsurprisingly I came away from the book unconvinced.

The reasoning advanced by Monaghan and Cawthorne is at times ingenious and a glowing demonstration of their ability as lateral thinkers, but rests largely on the Christian names of one or two of the prostitutes mentioned in My Secret Life corresponding with those of the murdered girls in Whitechapel, as well as a few overlaps in locations described in the book and those in which the Ripper crimes took place. The writers also place their own interpretation on phrases in My Secret Life, making assumptions and guessing at (nonexistent) double meanings in order to bolster their case. Beyond this they rely on amateur psychoanalysis to arrive at the conclusion that Walter was a killer. The writer of My Secret Life certainly put a great deal of aggression into his work and expresses a fascination with the blood associated with sex acts (although it must be said that he expresses a fascination with anything even remotely connected with sex), but the authors’ assertion that Walter was a murderous paedophile who killed the girls who procured him young virgins is overstating the case and a quite unsubstantiated assertion. And besides, if My Secret Life was the work of Henry Spencer Ashbee, the book is very unlikely to bear much, if any, relation to the author’s actual life, movements and experiences.

That said, Jack the Ripper’s Secret Confession is quite the page-turner. The authors quote liberally from the more lurid episodes in My Secret Life, which are as shocking (and consequently entertaining) as you might imagine, as well as from reports into the underworld of 1890s London, and spare no detail in describing the Ripper murders. Of course this is material that’s been reshuffled many, many times for countless Ripper books, but not being particularly interested in Jack the Ripper myself, the book revealed to me a wodge of facts about the case and Victorian society at the turn of the 20^th century of which I was previously unaware. The writers’ tactic of alternating chapters which focus heavily on the facts of the Ripper murders with others focusing intently on My Secret Life is effective and makes the book seem pacy and urgent. And, as My Secret Life is not easily available as a book, nor a particularly quick or easy read, the quotes picked out in …Secret Confession are of such a length as to be almost a précis of that work, which is jolly useful. The mixture of extreme sex and extreme violence, which is what the book essentially boils down to, is well chosen, and the authors have been able to serve up their lurid source material in great and graphic detail whilst maintaining a scholarly air. While this book won’t tell you who the Ripper is (nor indeed will it firmly settle on the authorship of My Secret Life for that matter), it will entertain and engage you ‘til its end. Even approached with as sceptical a set of prior assumptions as my own, the book is an entertaining summary of the agreed facts around Jack the Ripper, a whistle-stop tour of late-Victorian London and an engaging discussion about one of English literature’s most hotly debated and notorious works, all of which are assets of the work to be commended. Well worth a read, but make sure to pick up a copy of Gibson’s Erotomaniac as a companion to avoid the potholes of occasional far-out and slipshod reasoning within.

Waiting for Bottom

“Oh come on, Eddie. There must be more to life than jugs…”-Richie

In their musings on drama the Greeks decided that the life was ultimately a curious blend of tragedy and comedy - hence those twin masks, one grinning, one in tears, which are the universal symbol of theatre. And nowhere is this idea better explored, understood and trumped than in Bottom, Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson’s existentialist-slapstick comedy which ran for three series on the BBC in the early ’90s, and carried on life as a series of stage shows for the rest of the decade.

Apparently Bottom was conceived by Rik and Ade while the pair were co-starring in a West End production of Waiting for Godot and the stamp of Beckett’s work looms large in the series. The pair, long-time comedy sparring partners, distilled their double-act in Filthy Rich and Catflap, an overlooked Ben Elton/Rik Mayall satire of showbiz life which succeeded The Young Ones in the mid ’80s. In the series Mayall played Richie Rich, a temperamental, narcissistic, self-pitying, sex-obsessed artiste while Edmondson played Eddie Catflap, a phlegmatic alcoholic. They’re basically Rik and Vyvian all grown up and the embryonic forms of the people who would take centre-stage in Bottom.

Waiting for Godot centres around two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, a pair of itinerant fools who spend both of the play’s acts sat by a roadside waiting for someone named Godot to appear, all the while discussing nonsense and triviality. It is obviously a symbolic work and one interpretation of the play is as a satire on the pointlessness of life, an idea which remained central to Beckett‘s work. Bottom is very similar in set-up: it is staged largely within the confines of the living room of a grubby Hammersmith flat and peopled almost uniquely by Richard Richard (Mayall) and Eddie Hitler (Edmondson).

The two are life’s losers writ large: middle-aged, single, largely unemployable, moronic and pig-ignorant. They’re like an all-male Wayne and Waynetta Slob, only deprived of even the most festering sort of romance. And like Wayne and Waynetta, the relationship between the two characters is that of a co-dependent but loveless marriage. Eddie is the drunkard husband with one foot in reality: he occasionally brings home money from some job or scheme, or else counterfeits it himself. He’s constantly pissed, supports QPR and occasionally gets out of the flat to hang around with his misfit friends, Spudgun and Dave Hedgehog, who refer to Richie as Eddie’s ‘wife’. It’s a role Richie fulfils well. He’s long-haired, does all the cooking and ‘cleaning’ around the flat and, from time to time, has to put Eddie to bed when the latter’s had a few too many. Through it all they profess to hate each other, but Richie owns the flat they share and allows Eddie lives there rent-free. It’s a marriage of convenience but, when push comes to shove, they’re all each other have.

As a set up, it’s almost a throwback to Hancock and Sid James living together on the breadline in East Cheam, but where Bottom differs from Galton and Simpson’s series is in its subtext: Hancock was very much a character study, while Bottom is more universal in scope.

There are moments of genuine poignancy in Bottom which escape obvious notice on first viewing. A recurring joke in the series is for Richie to reproach Eddie with a variation of the quote which heads this essay, and for the pair to stare contemplatively for a moment or two before affirming that there isn’t. Telly, booze, jugs, that’s all there is in life when it’s boiled down to its core. Even when the characters’ lives are saved by the hand of God at the end of one episode, they damn themselves by declaring their atheism and fall to their deaths. And indeed, death means nothing in Bottom. The characters ‘die’ at the end of each series (and occasionally at the conclusion of individual episodes) only to return, safe, well and no wiser at the beginning of the next. There’s no escape. This isn’t just a show about knob-gags and knockabout physical comedy, it looks at life deeply. And darkly.

If there’s one word which best sums up Bottom it’s ‘squalid’. The characters are all dirty old men, figuratively and literally, and the sets are a study in grime. Dirt streaks the walls of every set in the series and decay runs riot. Even Dick the Barman’s phone has its roto-dial caved in and boasts a shameful layer of grease. The show’s humour is similarly filthy, with most of the jokes concerning the toilet or a Fat Slags vision of sex. Of course there’s cerebral stuff in there too, and the humour arising from the characters’ relationship is first-rate but, well, the programme’s called Bottom. That one words sums it all up.

Eddie sums up the hopelessness faced by the characters, and by extension the rest of us, in a reproach he gives to Richie at the end of series three: “Look, you get born, you keep your head down, then you die. If you’re lucky.” Their lives are testament to this fatalism: they’re both too old and completely unsuitable for work or marriage, their day-to-day life is a pointless repetitive existence in which the only thrills are occasionally getting drunk and wanking. Their plight is hopeless; they’ll never achieve anything, they’ll never progress as human beings and are doomed to live this way until they die. If there is a message in Bottom it is this: life is meaningless, but that doesn’t mean you can’t laugh at it.

Each episode of Bottom sees the pair failing to engage with activities which most people see as life’s pleasures: when they go out and try to get laid they end up embarrassing themselves in front of a pubful of locals as Eddie, pissed as a newt, tries it on with Richie. In another episode they go camping but end up doing so on a field bearing the notice ‘Dog Toilet’ on Wimbledon Common. And then go condom fishing. When they try to play chess they completely fail to understand the game and beat each other senseless, and so it goes ever on. But in debasing each and every ‘positive’ thing about life, Rik and Ade are slyly affirming Beckett’s beliefs about life’s meaningless: even the joyous things are purposeless and crap. It’s a bleak vision until one looks at it all through the lens of the absurd.

Richie and Eddie are utterly human and depressingly normal men but are not bound by the same laws as the rest of us. When they wallop each other senseless and set each other on fire, or even blow themselves up, they’re never actually hurt. They’re like cartoon characters. And like cartoon characters, other concerns of the real world are meaningless to them. Bottom is more of a vehicle for looking at events of life in absurd, good-humoured isolation. We sit there laughing at these two arse-heads pitching camp on a dog toilet, but then remember when we ourselves accidentally pitched a tent on a cow-pat. Bottom is a sitcom and thus an exaggeration of reality, but the kernels of truth present in it are deeply, deeply resonant.

Even if you’re not naturally depressive, you have to concede that the chaps have a point in their nihilistic take on existence. The existentialist thinkers of the 20^th century, who were paid to gaze at their navels and contemplate life, concluded that life was ‘absurd’ and that man is a ‘meaningless passion’. A lot of them ended up as Catholics in a search for real, genuine, meaning in life. Not to disparage catholic, or indeed any other spiritual beliefs, but the conclusion we can take away from their work is that meaning in life is, at best, elusive and at worst nonexistent. But the thing seized on by Bottom is this idea of the absurdity in life which Camus popularised. Indeed, the very slant of Bottom’s writing is to expose and burlesque all that is absurd about being human and being alive. Deep down, we’re the same as Eddie and Richie -grasping for gratification, be it sexual or otherwise, and comfort, and their plight is an exaggeration of our own.

Yes Minister is one of my favourite comedy programmes for almost the exact opposite reasons that I enjoy Bottom: it’s cerebral, concerned with gravest matters of human life and somewhat aspirational. To draw a crude analogy: it is the Freudian superego to Bottom’s id. Bottom, in its lowly setting and brutish characters explores life at a much deeper level than most other TV series’. Again it was Freud who suggested that humour and our deeper subconscious are closely linked, and in Bottom this is entirely borne out. We laugh at a show like Yes Minister for its mastery of language, that very human trait. We laugh at Bottom for its burlesquing of our more primal nature.

Bottom then entirely encapsulates the two elements the Greeks saw as fundamental to life: it is tragic in its premise and characters, yet comic for those same reasons. It is a shame that Bottom is thought of by most people as mere crudity. Like Viz comic, there’s much more to Bottom than meets to eye. Indeed, once you peer deeply into Bottom, you’ll be surprised at how much there is to see.

Click here to watch Bottom on Seesaw.