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The Wages of Anachronisms
Casebook Message Boards: Ripper Letters: General Discussion:
The Wages of Anachronisms
Author: Yazoo
Tuesday, 17 November 1998 - 06:24 am |        | What are your thoughts on the idea that we may be guilty of anachronistic thinking regarding the letters? Whether we commit this error when arguing for or against their authenticity...anachronisms are a creeping, almost invisible germ.
Consider: I've read from secondary sources and in quotes from primary sources, that the Ripper series was thought to be "unprecedented" in British crime. Contemporaries seemed to have no experience/knowledge of serial killing before Jack the Ripper.
If that statement is true, what are the odds that not only the acts themselves would be "new" but that many (if not all) the full range of peripheral serial-killing phenomenon would spring to life at the same time like Athena from Zeus's brow?
Examples include: the murderer writing to the press and to a civic figure out to capture him? The proposed thesis that JtR had cotemporaneous "copy-cat" killers? Maybe you can think of others.
The 1888 police and public, with little or no experience with the phenomenon of serial killing, would hardly think it credible that a murderer would write a letter to them actually taunting them etc. So it would be easier to dismiss this prevalaent characteristic of a portion of the serial-killer population as an "obvious" hoax. Again, you may think of other examples.
In looking at the modern thoughts on JtR, I wonder how often the arrow of anachronism points back onto the past and, odd as it sounds, how often we continue to think as of it it were still 1888 and no fuller understanding of the serial-killer phenomena were in our possession.
Thoughts, anyone?
Yaz |
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