L. Curtis Jr..jpg

L. Curtis Jr..jpg Rozmiar 376 KB

Filling a perceived gap in "Ripperature," Curtis examines how 14 London newspapers covered the Whitechapel murders attributed to Jack the Ripper in 1888. Curtis (history, emeritus, Brown) begins with a brief account of the crimes and a description of the impoverished East End of London, where the murders occurred. He then devotes three chapters to the state of Victorian journalism, with emphasis on how murders and other sensational news were reported. Only about half of the book actually analyzes the Ripper reportage, which, like today's journalism, reflected the social, political, and moral climate of the time. Although Victorian sensibilities dictated that certain details be sanitized or omitted altogether, competition among the daily and weekly papers led each to devote increasing space to the investigations and to the associated speculation and analysis. With its decidedly Anglocentric vocabulary and with close to 700 endnotes (many containing details that are far from marginal), this scholarly work may prove slow going for the amateur U.S. Ripperologist.