A Handbook for Attendants on the Insane: The Autobiography of Jack the Ripper As Revealed to Clanash Farjeon

Clanash Farjeon has dared to unmask the horror from the killer’s point of view. Lyttleton Stewart Forbes Winslow was a well-known psychologist and ardent investigator of the crimes. In 1889 he had boasted to the press – “I am as certain that I have the murderer as I am of being here.” In his memoirs, Recollections of Forty Years , written in 1910, he insisted that there were eight murders, not five, and claimed that he had singlehandedly chased Jack the Ripper from England. ” . . I was more than satisfied . . that was the general opinion of everyone in England except the Scotland Yard authorities . . I should like to ask them one question though, ‘If I did not arrest the murderous hand of Jack the Ripper, who did, and what part did they play in the transaction?’ . .” Was this troubled scion of the Pilgrim Fathers uniquely in a position to know? ” . . Day after day and night after night I spent in the Whitechapel slums. The detectives knew me, the lodging-house keepers knew me, and at last the poor creatures of the streets came to know me . . To me the frightened women looked for hope. In my presence they felt reassured and welcomed me to their dens and obeyed my commands eagerly . . ” Has a tortured impulse to confess lain long buried beneath these words? Amidst a vivid evocation of London life in the 1880’s, Winslow unfolds the peculiar circumstances of his early years, the telling details of his family history, a shocking blow by blow depiction of each fatal encounter and his fond remembrance of the unfortunate victims of his unholy crusade. How did a ‘perfectly normal upper-middle-class father and reasonably successful professional man’ become the Whitechapel fiend? Why did the carnage begin? Why did it stop? What will your response be to the revelation of his all too human motives? Reality or fiction? This audacious work, though its concerns transcend any attempt to prove a particular identity, nonetheless paints such a compelling portrait that it may challenge the Ripperologists to reopen the case.