What if the world’s most notorious serial killer never meant to hurt anyone at all? Jack the Ripper is probably the serial killer to most often appear in fiction, as the unsolved mystery has led writers to conjecture about his motives and identity for well over a century. Interestingly, some of the earliest of these conjectural works present the Ripper himself as a victim rather than a ruthless killer. The Hypno-Ripper, edited by Donald K. Hartman, collects fictional accounts contemporaneous to the killings that posit the murders were committed (at least in part) by someone under a hypnotic trance. The Hypno-Ripper is part of Hartman’s series on the portrayal of hypnotism in Victorian and Edwardian literature, serving as a sort of sequel to his earlier collection, Death by Suggestion, which I reviewed back in 2019. The Hypno-Ripper came out in May of this year and is perfect for those fascinated either by the Whitechapel murders or by the turn-of-the-century phenomenon of hypnotic suggestion.
In The Hypno-Ripper, Hartman brings together two stories that were published within a year of the initial Ripper murders and offer similar explanations for the killer’s actions. The first is a novel titled The Whitechapel Mystery; A Psychological Problem by N.T. Oliver, published in 1889. The second is an anonymously published short story titled “The Whitechapel Horrors,” which was printed in newspapers just after the murder of the Ripper’s fifth victim, Mary Jane Kelly. In a preface to the book, Hartman provides some historical context explaining how it’s not entirely surprising that two different stories should conclude that the Ripper murders had something to do with hypnotism. The Victorians were obsessed with—and terrified of—the newly emerging pseudoscience known then as Mesmerism, and they imagined its power to be nearly without limits. They were also obsessed with following along with lurid accounts of recent crimes published in newspapers and sensationalist magazines. Of course the two would merge, with some writers suggesting that the killer used mesmerism to incapacitate his victims. But even more insidious than the fear that mesmerism might render you helpless is the idea that it could make you into a monster! Following the preface, a forward written by crime fiction scholar Rebecca Frost suggests that these stories help to answer the “why” of serial killer cases in a world before criminal psychology was well understood. N.T. Oliver’s novel appears first in the collection, followed by the anonymous short story. In a brief Conjectural Note afterwards, Hartman hypothesizes that the two stories were actually written by the same man and encourages readers to send in their thoughts. Hartman finishes off the collection with a fairly lengthy biography of the one known author, N.T. Oliver, whose given name is Edward Oliver Tilburn. Though his life story has little to do with hypnotism or the Ripper murders, it is a fascinating tale of an American con man whose fiction about hypnotized killers is hardly more fantastical than his real-life adventures in Wild West shows, snake oil salesmanship, church embezzling, and city government.
N.T. Oliver’s The Whitechapel Mystery; A Psychological Problem (“Jack the Ripper”) is a fascinating blend of genres and narrative styles. The novel opens with a frame story that uses the Found Document trope: a country physician recounts how a confessional manuscript was handed to him by a raving man on his deathbed, and he now presents that manuscript to the public with an exhortation to “solve it if you can!” In an unexpected shift, J.P. Dewey’s confession at first takes the form of a detective story in the vein of Edgar Allan Poe or Arthur Conan Doyle. Detective Dewey is a Sherlock-esque figure who derives solutions to unusual cases and travels about with various disguises to pursue his investigations. His story starts when he is called in to help solve a locked-room mystery—money was stolen from a bank vault without any sign of a break-in or tampering with a lock. When he learns that a powerful mesmerist, Dr. Westinghouse, may be responsible, Dewey tracks this dangerous doctor across the Atlantic from New York to London. But Dewey underestimates his quarry and soon falls under the doctor’s spell himself. As it turns out, bank robbery was only the beginning—that caper merely provided the funds for Westinghouse’s ultimate plan: avenging himself against the sex workers of London. Westinghouse’s power over Dewey is almost homoerotic in nature, and Dewey finds himself inevitably drawn toward and fascinated by the mesmerist, against his better judgement. Westinghouse takes advantage of the detective’s devotion and turns Dewey into his pawn. Dewey spends months fully under the doctor’s control, at first aiding and abetting the murders and then committing a few of them on his own. By this point, the story transforms from detective fiction to the type of crime fiction that is told from the perpetrator’s point of view. Particularly, it has an air of a criminal’s deathbed confessional, as Dewey knows that Westinghouse has used his hypnotic powers to decree the particular day that Dewey shall die.
The full title of the short story that follows is “The Whitechapel Horrors: A Conjectural Story relating the Facts Concerning Four of the Murders. They Were Committed by an American While in a Condition of Hypnosis—Weird and Thrilling Story of Unconscious Crime.” The story is a fairly straightforward first-person narrative, told by a rather unreliable narrator. Charles Kowlder is an American businessman who is a bit prone to obsessive fixations and overwork. He travels to London on a work errand that is meant to double as a vacation, where a doctor specializing in nervous disorders sternly tells Kowlder that he needs to actually relax his brain before he suffers a complete mental breakdown. Not fully comprehending the concept of mental rest, Kowlder takes a break from work only to completely fixate on solving the recently reported murder of Polly Nichols. When Kowlder begins having strange dreams of murdered women, he thinks he is developing some sort of clairvoyance or ability to astral project in his sleep. But the reality is even more outlandish—he managed to hypnotize himself into committing the murders during nighttime trances, merely from “too intense a study” of the initial Polly Nichols case. In this story, hypnotism is such a powerful force that it can act upon the vulnerable mind without even an evil mastermind to pull the strings. But if all it took was overwork and an inability to take a true mental break to lead one to commit a series of murders … I’d be in a whole lot of trouble!
If you find the Victorian understanding of mesmerism to be as fascinating as I do, you will definitely want to read these stories for yourself. You can find The Hypno-Ripper on shelves at your favorite retailer, or order it online and support The Gothic Library in the process using this Bookshop.org affiliate link. When you’ve read it, come back and let me know what you think—and whether you’re convinced by Hartman’s theory that these two stories are written by the same man!