Hello, and welcome back to This Week in History! This week will be a particularly brief issue. Running alongside the column is my coverage of “The Moors” by Jen Silverman, a play running at the Connecticut Repertory Theater for most of the month. Consequently, to keep on theme with the eeriness of English moorlands, this week I want to discuss social invisibility in the past. It’s time to dive into some bloody history!
Let’s set the scene: Close your eyes (after you read the next line), you’re sitting in a 19th-century home, and you’re a well-off — and perhaps well-meaning — person. Your name is George Akin Lusk, the head of the household, and of some social organizations. Tonight, you just so happen to be going through the day’s mail.
One letter, a small, postmarked paper, catches your eye. It reads (slightly edited for clarity):
“From hell — Mr Lusk, Sor — I Send you half the Kidne I took from one women prasarved it for you tother piece I fried and ate it was very nise. I may send you the bloody knif that took it out if you only wate a whil longer. Signed — Catch me when you can Mishter Lusk.”
I don’t think Lusk had glasses, but if he did, then he no doubt took them off after reading that and sank his face into his hands. As the chairman of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, Lusk was responsible for what was essentially the civilian wing of the police force, now on high alert due to the constant murders around London.
It’s safe to say that Mr. Lusk likely didn’t get any sleep this week in history after receiving that letter on Oct. 16, 1888. Although highly debated, Lusk likely received one of the few genuine pieces of correspondence relating to Jack the Ripper; though it wasn’t signed with that pseudonym.
Next to the letter was a small package. Within was half a human kidney.
Lusk dismissed the letter, almost not even handing it to the police, considering it a fake. This is where I was stunned: How could a man receiving an actual kidney consider it a fake?
Well, it always comes back to the newspaper’s tendency to exaggerate. They relish off of the gasps of a shocked reader base, eager to get to the newspaper stand and get copies of the paper every day so that they can hear the latest brutal disembowelment. Indeed, the news industry boomed when murders began to spring up around London, attributed to the ghastly and demonically depicted Jack the Ripper.
Lusk, aware of the thousands of letters attributed to one murderer or another, believed that some medical students must have got an organ and pranked him, perhaps spurred on by the newspapers. In the end, after being convinced by some friends to bring the kidney to a surgeon, some tests were run; but ultimately, the mystery of the murderer remained.
I have one final tidbit of history to go over. Though not this week in history, have you heard of Adelaide Bartlett? I hadn’t, but learning of her story raised some interesting questions when looking at history. She, like Jack the Ripper, committed murder in a way that baffled witnesses and was let go/never found; yet her case remains a modern mystery.
Bartlett murdered her husband in what was an example of the fairly widespread use of arsenic as a poison by Victorian women. It remains a mystery to this day as to how high quantities of chloroform entered into her husband’s stomach without contaminating his mouth or throat. Likewise, her character seemed unassuming and nearly went unquestioned, except for her husband’s skeptical father. Supposedly, she eventually moved to Connecticut to spend the rest of her days after the media craze over her story died down.
With such an overlapping story to Jack the Ripper, how come we tend to prioritize the history of one over the other? Both are worth knowing, both stories are in many respects intertwined and yet one is far closer to being forgotten. So, in keeping with the theme of “The Moors,” I raise this point: “What can you do when no one is looking?”