Lost in the myths of time

Between August and November 1888 five prostitutes were murdered and horribly mutilated in the same small area of the East End of London. Those are the facts. The killings were the work of Jack the Ripper. That is the myth. No one knows who was really responsible. Jack the Ripper is a fantasy figure.

The Ripper legend originated in contemporary press coverage of the crimes. That alone would be enough to make the question of how Fleet Street handled the story an unusually interesting one, but the newspapers of the day are also worth exploring for what they reveal about Victorian ideas and attitudes in general. L Perry Curtis Jr has hit on a promising subject.

Alas, the hopes raised by Jack the Ripper and the London Press are soon dashed. By his second paragraph Mr Curtis, who teaches media studies at an American university, is drawing a contrast between male "essentialists" and " theorising" feminists. After that, we plunge into talk about "Othering" the East End and subjecting it to "troping" (a trope is a metaphor), about the "emplotment" of a story and its "narrativity".

These are some of the buzz words of current literary theory, and the buzziest of all such terms is the verb "to construct". One commentator whom Curtis thinks worth quoting argues that "'death' is always culturally constructed". Another contends that "the feminine body is culturally constructed as the superlative site of alterity" (meaning "otherness"). He himself entitles one section of his book " Constructing Deviancy".

It you accept all this, the job of the critic is naturally to deconstruct such constructions, to lay bare the anxieties they conceal or the social and economic forces they serve. There are also, in principle, strong political implications. The literary or cultural theorist "sees through" the existing social order, much as the Marxist did before him.

Mr Curtis, however, seldom sounds very vehement about his subversive critical concepts. You half-suspect he uses them just because that is what professors of media studies are expected to do. And after 40 or 50 pages, indeed, he largely abandons the jargon and embarks on a fairly straightforward account, first of Victorian murder reporting in general, and then of the Ripper murders as they were covered by 15 London newspapers, including three local weeklies published in the East End.There are no fireworks in his narrative, but there are many points of interest. Not the least of them is the speed with which Victorian papers sometimes went to work. The body of the fourth Ripper victim, for instance, was found in the small hours of a Sunday, at 1.50am. The news reached the editor of Lloyd's, a popular Sunday paper, some 20 minutes later. By 4am he had prepared a special edition, and the presses were ready to roll. His readers were able to feast on the latest horrors at breakfast. Other themes include the kinds of clinical detail which the papers chose to report (they tended to dwell on violence rather than sex) and the currents of xenophobia that were stirred up. Curtis stresses the crucial role played by the name Jack the Ripper itself in establishing the legend - it was first used as the signature of a letter and a postcard sent to a news agency, which may or may not have been hoaxes - and he is good on the immediate political background. The case gave papers on the Left a chance to get back at the Home Secretary and the Metropolitan Police Commissioner for their part in suppressing a rally of the unemployed the previous year.

Well before the end of the book, however, we are back among the jargon. In attempting to draw a large general moral from his survey, Curtis chiefly reveals how easily intimidated he is by the more extreme varieties of feminism. He pays homage to such things as a "canonical" article on the "phallocentric male viewer" and his pleasure at watching pictures of "penis-lacking" women, and he ends up by insisting that "we must keep asking just how complicitous we (men) are with the serial killers we have so clearly demonised". This is a milder version of a slogan you sometimes saw chalked up 20-odd years ago - "Yorkshire Ripper, not Mad but Male" - but intellectually it is not much more respectable.