Jack The Ripper - The Final Solution

In the autumn of 1888, five women were brutally murdered in Whitechapel by a killer who was never identified. Nearly ninety years later, Stephen Knight announced The Final Solution, a title displaying the sort of confidence normally acquired before the evidence has had an opportunity to object.

Knight’s theory transforms the Whitechapel murders from the crimes of a solitary killer into an elaborate conspiracy involving Queen Victoria’s family, the Freemasons, the medical establishment, Scotland Yard and the painter Walter Sickert. At its centre is an alleged secret marriage between Prince Albert Victor and a working-class Catholic woman named Annie Crook. According to Knight, the murders were committed to silence women who knew of the union and protect the monarchy from an exceptionally awkward constitutional and religious scandal.

The principal killer in Knight’s account is Sir William Gull, Physician-in-Ordinary to Queen Victoria, assisted by coachman John Netley and, at different stages of the theory, Walter Sickert. The victims are said to have been lured into a carriage, murdered according to Masonic ritual and left in the streets of Whitechapel, while senior officials ensured that the investigation reached no dangerous conclusions. It is a theory containing royalty, secret societies, ritual murder and institutional concealment—the full luxury assortment of historical conspiracy.

Knight assembles his case from witness accounts, circumstantial connections, Masonic symbolism and the testimony of Joseph Gorman, who claimed to be Sickert’s illegitimate son. Gorman later admitted that his story had been a hoax, which was inconvenient. Numerous other details have also been contradicted by documentary evidence, and modern Ripper historians overwhelmingly reject Knight’s solution. The word “final” must therefore be understood in the traditional publishing sense of “certain to be followed by many more.”

Yet the book remains enormously important in the cultural history of Jack the Ripper. Knight’s royal-Masonic conspiracy seized the public imagination and influenced novels, television programmes and films. Most notably, it provided much of the underlying machinery for Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell, and therefore for the later film adaptation. Even readers who regard the theory as magnificent nonsense may recognise how thoroughly that nonsense has entered popular culture.

What makes The Final Solution compelling is not simply whether its conclusions are credible, but the ingenuity and momentum with which Knight constructs them. Victorian London becomes a vast mechanism of hidden influence in which street layouts, medical knowledge, official decisions and apparently minor coincidences all point towards the same dark centre. Once every absence of evidence can be explained as evidence of a cover-up, the investigation becomes wonderfully efficient.

First published in 1976, this Grafton edition dates from 1977. It is part true-crime investigation, part historical polemic and part guided tour through one of the twentieth century’s most durable conspiracy theories. It should be read critically rather than treated as a solved case, but it remains essential for anyone interested in the mythology that has grown around the Whitechapel murders.

This copy is in Good condition, having survived the years rather better than Knight’s theory. It remains sound, complete and suitable for readers of Ripper history, Victorian crime and books in which the British establishment has considerably more control over events than it generally manages in ordinary life.

Sold by Crappy Old Books, which can offer no final solution to the identity of Jack the Ripper but is prepared to add another suspect if sales require it.

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