"THE LODGER"
MARIE ADELAIDE BELLOC LOWNDES
The illustration of the Whitechapel monster appeared in issue 1293 of The Illustrated Police News on Saturday, Nov 24, 1888. The illustrations show drawings of what the murderer is supposed to look like while offering pictures of people and events affiliated with each of the cases. The top of the picture shows people that are involved in the most recent murder, the murder of a lady by the first name of Kelly, not much other information of who the actual lady is are shown in the illustrations. People affiliated with the murders include a Mr. McCarthy, who is the landlord of Kelly, an unnamed man who saw the body first, Inspector Aberline who was a criminal investigator, Joe Barnett who lived with Kelly, another inspector by the name of Beck, a Dr. Macdona who was the coroner, and one lady who’s name is not legible in the print. Although the pictures of the accused are quite interesting, they aren’t the most interesting. The majority of the page is taken up by an illustration of what the murderer is supposed to look like. The man in the picture is a well dressed man with a large coat, he has a had on his head with a handlebar mustache, it may be the large coat, or perhaps a poor drawing, but the man doesn’t seem to have a long enough neck, giving him the illusion of being short, although when compared to other people in different illustrations he seems rather tall. Probably the only thing that reminds me at all of the lodger that we have been reading about is the fact that even in the illustration this suspected man carries a bag in his left hand, much like our lodger does when he goes out at night. Surrounding the artist's depiction of the Whitechapel monster are different pictures of events, I’m guessing ones that had happened around the same time of the incident. There's one that shows the murderer talking to a lady in the street, with a man watching from a distance in the background. Maybe this illustration was drawn from an interview the police did with either the woman or the man in the background of this picture. Below this picture is one of two ladies reading something together with the words “Ladies at the West End threatened by Jack the Ripper. To the right of this is a drawing of a policeman with the words “I was on duty all night and didn’t hear a sound.” On the right side of the paper we see the murderer “accosting” a woman in Whitechapel, with one of inspector Aberline interviewing a man by the name of Matthew Packer. Last but not least we see the two pictures of the action, one has a picture of the murderer on top of what is most likely Kelly in bed, we see the murderer pulling a knife up to kelly’s throat, and in the picture below we see a before picture of the Murderer and Kelly walking into a room, and an after photo of Kelly most likely dead in her bed. I imagine the amount of people that would’ve seen this was a very large amount of people, being from a trusted source such as the police station in an age where the majority of entertainment comes from printed paper. I would also have to wonder why the Police decided to do the pictures instead of writing out detailed accounts and stories, was the large amount of media coverage getting boring to people and the police force needed a way of keeping people interested and helping solve the case? It just seems odd because I had never seen news, especially news as serious as a serial killer delivered in the way of drawn pictures. Unfortunately the name of the artist who drew all of these pictures is nowhere to be found on the document. The reason I liked this document so much is because it showed a different side of what the lodger could’ve been doing, we only read of what Mr. and Mrs. Bunting see him doing, which isn’t much. So seeing the other side of his life, the sort of stuff that he could be doing at night and the amount of people that are being affected by just one murder makes the Lodger seem like much more terrible of a person. Throughout the book it was hard for me to imagine the lodger as being that bad of a guy because we were kept in the shadows for so much of it. I think it would’ve been a lot different if the author would’ve included full articles or documents like my primary source every time Mr. Bunting received a new newspaper, although i guess that would’ve taken away from the mystery of whether or not the Lodger actually was a murderer or if it was just all in Mrs. Buntings head.
MLA Citation:
"The Whitechapel Monster." The Illustrated Police News 24 Nov. 1888, 1293 ed. Print.
"The Whitechapel Monster." The Illustrated Police News 24 Nov. 1888, 1293 ed. Print.