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Casebook: Jack the Ripper - Message Boards » Books, Films and Other Media » Fiction Books » Jack and Jekyll and Hyde

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Chris Scott
Inspector
Username: Chris

Post Number: 383
Registered: 4-2003

Posted on Monday, August 11, 2003 - 11:13 am:

Thought this might be of interest - not a theory I have seen before.

The same special "crime" issue of The Oxford American in which Grisham's editorial appeared also contained an essay entitled "Murder and Imagination" by novelist Donna Tarrt, who speculated about the possibility that Jack the Ripper had read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and had used Stevenson's novel "as a kind of blueprint for his own unprecedented crimes" (50). Noting that "the similarities are numerous and striking" (50). Tarrt proceeded to make a case for what, if true, would be the most sensational instance of literature-mediated murder in history, far outstripping his precursor Jean-Baptiste Troppmann's 1869 slaughter of a family of eight after reading EugčneSue

from:
• Grisham's Demons
Journal article by Joel Black; College Literature, Vol. 25, 1998

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