LWiA 4.3: The Downslope

Amazingly, the fact that "The unfortunate Mr Druitt" does not have a period after "Mr" while "The apprehensions of Mr. Lee" does is not a typo. I'm sure there is a typo, which someone will inevitably point out in comments, but that's not it.

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At the end of “The best of all tailors,” as Gull returns to Netley’s carriage, he tells his coachman that “I have been climbing, Netley, all my life, toward a single peak. Now I have reached it. I have stood and felt the wind. I have seen all the world before me. Now there is only descent.” As Moore explained it later, “your classic, textbook serial murderers will often seem to reach a point where whatever complex and iterative emotional equation they were working through has evidently been resolved.”[1] He cites the case of Ed Kemperer, who he also brought up in the annotations, noting that Kemperer, “after having killed his mother, seemed to feel that further murders ‘wouldn’t have a point’ (as if the rapes, decapitations, and other abuses heaped upon his previous victims did possess a point).” And in the chapters of From Hell that immediately follow “The best of all tailors,” it is easy to imagine that Moore was experiencing a similar sense of letdown.

The real problem is the eleventh chapter, “The unfortunate Mr Druitt,” which sees Moore pulled down a relative blind alley of dealing with the case of Montague Druitt, a schoolteacher who drowned in the Thames in December 1888, and was theorized at the time as a likely Ripper suspect. This has no particular reason to recommend it over the dozens of other false theories about who Jack the Ripper was, but Moore, presumably driven by a combination of the completionist instinct that animated much of From Hell’s fastidious quasi-accuracy and the intriguing fact that Druitt lived two doors down from Oscar Wilde, decides to make him the main character of an issue.

The result, however, is a clear mess. Druitt provides the chapter’s spine—it opens with him overseeing a game of cricket at the school he works at, and closes with his drowning, which Moore, following from Stephen Knight, presents as a police murder made to look like suicide in order to create a scapegoat to blame for the murders. And yet the issue’s sense of focus gives way on the second page as the scene introducing Druitt is interrupted by one featuring the discovery of Mary Kelly’s body before returning to Druitt on page three. This sort of alternating narrative is, of course, a standard technique for Moore, but here it derails itself almost immediately, with the scene about Kelly’s body taking over entirely as of page four, and Druitt not showing up again until page nine. It’s sensible enough—the reader has never seen Druitt before, and the Kelly scene is clearly far more central to the book’s plot. But it highlights the perversity of trying to do an issue focused on a newly introduced side character at this point in the narrative, even as Moore

Chapters twelve and thirteen, on the other hand, have almost the opposite problem. Both are uncharacteristically brief—chapter twelve runs twenty-six pages, while chapter thirteen is a mere sixteen—such that they were published together in From Hell #9, and seem as though they exist purely to wrap up plot threads. Chapter twelve, “The apprehensions of Mr. Lees,” reintroduces its eponymous fraudster psychic, unseen since the prologue save for a one page appearance in chapter nine where he’s humiliated by Gull. This humiliation proves to be the motivation for his unexpectedly accurate bit of fabulism as he volunteers himself to Abberline to help catch the Ripper and proceeds to lead him to the house of William Gull, who, to both men’s shock, confesses. Gull is given a secret Masonic trial (a scene foreshadowed in his visions during “The best of all tailors”) and institutionalized under a false name, with the official story being that he died, and that’s that for the chapter. Thirteen, “A return to Cleveland Street,” is similarly efficient, with Abberline discovering the existence of Prince Albert Victor’s illegitimate child and Gull’s true motivation and quitting the police in a rage. Both are necessary resolutions, but this is all either installment seeks to be. The impression both give is one of the fire running out—as if Moore, having reached the magical climax of the work, has lost interest and just wants to be done.

A more accurate reading, however, would be that Moore has come through the psychological ordeal of crafting “The best of all tailors” with a newfound sense of focus. “The apprehensions of Mr. Lees” and “A return to Cleveland Street” are short and direct because Moore has finally gotten away from the unwieldy sprawl of the middle chapters and is writing chapters with clear and singular purposes. Even the misguided “The unfortunate Mr Druitt,” for all its flaws, is still tremendously focused—twenty-seven of its forty-six pages are dedicated to Druitt’s story, and the other nineteen are dedicated fairly straightforwardly to Abberline. Moore hurries to get the Abberline material squared away early so that, as with “From Hell,” its denouement can be given over entirely to Druitt. Moore is undoubtedly aided by the material here—it’s easier to be focused as the story moves towards its conclusion and side plots begin to resolve themselves. But after eight years of wrestling with his unexpected magnum opus, Moore seems to finally have gotten a handle on what it is and what it’s doing.

[1] Dave Sim, “Correspondence From Hell Part 2,” Cerebus #218