Morbid stories

Regular readers will know that I love history, and that murder mysteries are just one of my many morbid interests. When I first started seeing my boyfriend, I took him on a date to Wilton’s Music Hall via Ratcliff Highway so I could tell him about the famous murder case there.

So I get it, I do. The Whitechapel murders of 1888 are grimly fascinating, and the question mark over the killer’s identity is a magnet for myths and stories. The study of the murders and their legacy illuminate the historical and the contemporary context in valuable ways. One example is Judith Walkowitz’s superb book, City of Dreadful Delight. And Madame Guillotine has a great post exploring her interest in Jack the Ripper as a feminist.

But there are other tales we could tell. There are plenty of morbid stories to choose from (our other major historical export is the Krays) and it might even be nice to talk about some East London history that doesn’t involve murder. Although we know nothing about him, Jack the Ripper overshadows a cast of amazing East End characters, and the Whitechapel murders draw far more attention than any number of incredible events. Just one example: this year is also the 125^th anniversary of the Matchwomen’s strike which launched the modern trade union movement. Thanks to the efforts of Louise Raw, there was a commemorative event at the Bishopsgate Institute and a bit of media coverage. But will we be tripping over Matchwomen walking tours in Bow?

Jack and his victims

It’s not just the extent of it but the tone. Jack the Ripper is everybody’s favourite mystery serial killer. There is endless speculation about his identity, his knowledge of anatomy and even admiration for his ability to evade capture. In contrast, the women he murdered are reduced to objects for study or criminal evidence for analysis.

For example: my local paper recently contained a special 12 page Jack the Ripper supplement including a page entitled “The victims: How women met their gory deaths”, featuring detailed descriptions of the last movements and mutilated bodies of five women who were murdered – Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Lizzie Stride, Catherine Eddowes, Mary Jane Kelly – complete with pictures of their faces taken after death.

Where is the respect for these women? Poring over details like how drunk they were and how deep the gash in their throat was or how their intestines were arranged may be one thing in a history book, but why is it being printed in the Newham Recorder, along with photographs of their corpses? I don’t want these intimate and gruesome details exhumed for my entertainment.

Missing the big picture

Like almost all media coverage of the subject the article fails to connect the Whitechapel murders to any kind of context about violence against women then or now. Another article highlights the fact that six other women were murdered in the same area in the same year, three also working in prostitution and killed by punters (Emma Smith, Martha Tabram, Rose Mylett), three killed by their husbands.

Sadly this article reads like a masterclass in how to subtly blame victims and excuse perpetrators when it describes the three cases of women killed by their husbands – Hannah Potzdamer, Susan Barrell and Elizabeth Bartlett:

“ordinary people driven to the ultimate crime by circumstance, a fit of anger or a desire for revenge” (this is a quote from author Peter Stubley, included in the article)

“her throat is slashed… in a jealous rage”

“Hannah had left him and moved in with a bootmaker”

“Robert, suffering from delirium tremens, also shoots himself”

“she refused to give him money for drink”

Over a century on it’s felt necessary to include details like this which serve to exonerate the killers. I wish I could afford to send every journalist a copy of this guide to responsible media reporting of violence against women (PDF).

Ripper chic

Whether blasé or breathlessly excited, the tone used to talk about Jack the Ripper almost everywhere makes me feel queasy. Have a look at this New York Times article about how All Saints clothing store makes use of “the romance of Jack the Ripper” and its location in “the Ripper’s hallowed stomping grounds”. Big stomper was he?

And did you know the Ten Bells pub in Spitalfields (where one of the victims had been drinking before she was killed) was at one point called ‘Jack The Ripper’? They used to sell T-shirts, and a blood-coloured cocktail called Ripper’s Tipple. Tasteful. Obviously there’s a difference between the crimes of one serial killer and the carnage of the First World War, but that has an anniversary coming up too – can you imagine a WWI-themed bar serving ham and mustard gas sandwiches? Although I guess we’re getting close with ‘Blitz parties’, but that’s a rant for another day.

Ripperology

Many people do seriously study the Whitechapel murders without celebrating ‘Jack’, but as this brave article explains, unintentional sexism abounds in Ripperologist circles. The focus is firmly on the suspects and not the victims, whose suffering is silent or sensationalised. The LIFT campaign in Tower Hamlets have subverted this with an alternative Ripper tour which talks about the lives and the communities of the women who were killed. There are some interesting tweets from the walk in this Storify.

Here’s a classic response to criticism of Ripperology:

We do not celebrate, we commemorate. We do not idealise, but we condemn him. We examine the harsh realities of that world to allow us to understand where we came from, how society has changed and why we should be thankful for these changes, and recognise where it has not and strive to put this right.

While this may be the aim, and I fully admit I haven’t had time to research this post very thoroughly, I haven’t seen many examples of Ripperologists striving to end violence against women.

Violence against women

That is the issue at the heart of this, and the reason I can’t join in the fun: violence against women is epidemic, often lethal but frequently trivialised. The most uncomfortable parallel I found between Ripper fandom and damaging contemporary attitudes to violence against women was this, on the London Dungeons profile page for Jack the Ripper:

DOs and DON’Ts

DO look over your shoulder.

DO dress conservatively.

DO go unnoticed.

DO NOT flirt.

DO NOT walk alone.

DO NOT accept his offer to buy you a drink.

This is advice that is seriously but unhelpfully issued to women today in the guise of rape prevention. It is also a classic example of the victim blaming which prevents many women reporting violence let alone seeing their attacker convicted. Repeated in this context it’s ghoulish, and not in a good way.

Now, as then, women working in prostitution are particularly vulnerable to violence – especially trans* women and migrant women. A woman working in prostitution is 18 times more likely to be murdered than the general population. While I don’t want to be a party pooper, I can’t get that figure out of my head. I’ll sign off with this quote on ‘Jack’, from feminist academic Deborah Cameron:

The question for society is not which individual man killed, but why so many men have done and still do.

Some links

• End Violence Against Women campaign
• The excellent NHS Open Doors project
• International Union of Sex Workers

This is an especially grim state of affairs since in the rest of the museums, galleries and cultural heritage sector women actually outnumber their male colleagues – sixty percent to forty.

So it’s heartening that Dr Penelope Curtis, a specialist in sculpture and British art, should have taken up the mantle of Director of Tate Britain. Since her appointment in 2010 she has been largely overseeing The Millbank Project, whose most recent result is The Tate Rehang.

So they’ve got the hammer and nails out.

The London-dwellers among you might remember the old Tate Britain – pictures ordered roughly by category or theme. That big Pre-Raphaelites room with the dodgy John Martin landscapes next door. A room of Modernism. A room of sixteenth-century portraits. That’s all gone.

In its place is a ‘Walk through British Art’ – pictures ordered chronologically, swirling round the main hall, with a timeline at the beginning giving you not the potted history of art, but the history of the Tate itself.

Sugar pots and panopticons

The Tate & Lyle golden syrup tin, still emblazoned with a line from Judges 14 – ‘Out of the strong came forth sweetness’.

The Tate was founded from a bequest of Henry Tate, of Tate & Lyle – who also did (and do) sugar and golden syrup.

Like the Tate Modern, which was converted from a mid-century factory, the Tate Britain partially re-appropriates an earlier space. The Millbank Prison was originally going to be Jeremy Bentham’s pilot Panopticon, but it didn’t work out and the National Penitentary was demolished and replaced by the National Gallery of British Art – which then became the Tate.

Built on Henry Tate’s sugar- (which in practice means ‘slave-‘) money, and sitting there on the site of Bentham’s prison overlooking the Thames, the Tate has always felt strangely emblematic to me.

Unlike the National Gallery, which has a noble heritage more akin to the great educative state institutions – the Louvre, say, or the Uffizi – the Tate has an intrinsically London spirit and a capitalist soul, with something of the Protestant Work Ethic hanging about it.

Indeed, today the Tate group as a whole earns over sixty percent of its income – staggering when you consider the average equivalent for its fellow UK museums is more like two to three percent.¹

A woman’s work is never done

Most of the painting interpretation has now been stripped out entirely. I always read those explanations slavishly, but I have to say I didn’t miss them at all – in fact, I barely noticed they were gone.

Thoughts of the Past (1859)

But there is a little bit in one of my favourite new rooms of the rehang – the drawing and prints room covering the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On a preliminary drawing for John Roddam Spencer Stanhope’s alt-Pre-Raphaelite Thoughts of the Past, the curators comment on the depicted ‘sex worker’ in her lodgings which (like the Tate) overlook the Thames.

Her industry is compared with that of the Thames itself, and its corruption with the corrupt contemporary society the picture implicitly comments upon.

What was interesting for me here was not only the correct use of the term ‘sex worker’ (I notice that the interpretation available for the final painting on the Tate’s website sticks to the more trad-Art History ‘prostitute’) but also the connection between her work and the city as a whole, its bustle, its trade, its work ethic.

This sits alongside the (for me, at least) unprecedented acknowledgment of female artists and their productions through the ages. We had Mary Beale – seventeenth century, claimed as ‘the first professional female English painter’ – Mary Sargent Florence, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Georgina Macdonald, Mabel Nicholson and many others, all on display.

There was nothing of the tokenistic about this: you just casually bumped into female names in much the same way you might casually notice a few Raphaels in the Renaissance rooms at the National Gallery. They were just there.

The work of painting

Gwen John – Self Portrait

As an example of how ‘women’s painting’ was displayed, one particularly interesting juxtaposition for me was that of a self-portrait by Gwen John. It sat atop two paintings by male artists depicting female models – William Orpen’s The Mirror and Philip Wilson Steer’s Seated Nude. The choice of the John self-portrait here seemed to me to comment implicitly on the relationship between artist and model and, again, different kinds of work.

The Mirror shows a fully-clothed female model in a large hat looking glumly out at us – except she’s not looking at us, but at William Orpen, who can be seen working at his painting in the Van Eykian mirror above her.

Wilson Steer’s painting shows a naked female model, also in a large hat, sitting within roughly sketched unfinished surroundings, in the process drawing attention to painting’s backstage elements, its construction.

Gwen John shows herself fully clothed and looking at the viewer, but she is of course painting herself modelling herself.

These kinds of juxtapositions really bring out some of the nuances of the ‘History of British Art’, and the rehang is full of them. I could also go on about the new room of 1920s silent film responding to two Pre-Raphaelite paintings; the sudden influx of craft, sculpture and 3D works, and the re-instatement of the glorious Blake collection.

And other reviewers have talked at length about the choice to spread a single artist over multiple rooms, so you see the same artist appearing and reappearing at different points throughout the journey, depending on where you are chronologically. I won’t talk about it forever – I’ll just suggest that you go and see it.

1. In fact, my one gripe with this new rehang is that it has an actual, literal, break for the gift shop. As in, you have to walk through the gift shop to get between two rooms in the middle of the big Walk Through Art. Tacky, guys, tacky.