LWIA 4.3: Chapter Nine ("From Hell")

Probably a few days before the next section, as there's research to be done.

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Magic was far from the only thing, or even the main thing that “From Hell” is concerned with, however. In his outline of the remaining chapters prepared for Don Murphy at the beginning of the year, he described chapter nine as being about “the increasingly chaotic period of thirty-nine days from the double murder of Catherine Eddowes and Elizbaeth Stride to the even of Marie Kelly’s murder on November 9th. All the characters are gradually driven to points of extremity in their approach to the final apocalyptic slaughter.”[1] The sense of increasing chaos is reflected in the page count, which ballooned to a plainly ridiculous fifty-eight pages.

And yet one place the chaos isn’t reflected seems to be in Moore himself. Yes, the page count is out of control and he’s still sending Eddie Campbell his pages in batches, but where previous installments felt as though they were at the edge of control, “From Hell” moves with a strangely methodical precision. It has no shortage of digressions, even above and beyond Moore’s smattering of occult references—old subplots like Prince Albert Victor are brought back for a concluding sequence, odd period details like an early effort at using bloodhounds for police work, and even a quick scene in which Gull bullies a museum attendant over the purchase of an Egyptian sarcophagus. This latter scene, set in the Egypt room of the British Museum, also sees Moore’s scripts in their most lyrical mode—indeed, Campbell suggests that “the concentration of phrases to be relished is denser here than in any other two pages of the scripts.” Moore describes how “Gull just stands there impassively and watches him go. colossal sleeping kings and jackal-headed deities keeping their eternal silent vigil all about him. Half-hour old echoes still whisper and clatter faintly. A zombie sibilance in the far corners of the room. Maybe Gull eats a grape,” specifies that “as the two men stand talking to each other, their reflections waver indistinctly in the polished tiles at their feet, their voices ringing and echoing in the stone ears of the dead pharaohs,” and explains how Gull’s “smile might be mistaken for a friendly one were it not for the cold, sardonic and unwavering superiority always evident in Gull’s eyes. To him, everyone else is a particularly amusing strain of paramecium.”[2]

It is worth comparing the issue to the two before it. With “Love is enough” it is in many ways difficult to even articulate a unifying theme of the issue. Its goal is simply to keep all of the plates spinning—no small task given the number of them in play, but nevertheless operating on a somewhat lower artistic level than, say, “What doth the Lord require of thee?” “A torn envelope” is in some ways even worse. It clearly has a primary purpose—to paint the tragic picture of Anne Chapman’s final days. Two-thirds of the issue is focused on Chapman or her murder, and she features on all but five pages of the book prior to her death. And yet Moore is stuck awkwardly giving a nine page coda after the murder in order to deal with other matters, resulting in an issue that’s oddly disjointed.

In contrast, for all of its sprawl and chaos, “From Hell” has a plain focus. This is perhaps clearest in its ending sequence. Starting from page thirty-seven the comic is unwaveringly focused on the buildup to the final murder—that of Marie Kelly. Every single scene from that point on either features her or is expressly about her. But the thirty-six pages before are equally focused on delivering the book to that monomaniacal focus. The issue opens with a man standing in Mitre Square the morning after Catherine Eddowes’s murder, ranting to a crowd about how the place is cursed and recounting an urban legend about a homicidal monk before switching gears and selling walking sticks and pamphlets about the murder. Abberline, standing at the outskirts of the crowd, reacts in horror: “Four women get killed and it’s like the start of a new industry! Only the start, mind you. Mark my words, in ‘undred years there’ll still be cunts like ‘im, wrapping these killings up in supernatural twaddle. Making a living out of murder.” Moore is, of course, poking fun at himself here, as he readily admits in the annotations (“Sometimes, after all you’ve done for them, your characters just turn on you”), but there’s a larger point in highlighting the cultural feeding frenzy that sprung up around the murders. It establishes that events have acquired an independent momentum.

This, in turn, ensures that once Gull enters the picture, positively jaunty on the back of his perceived triumph, he no longer feels as though he’s driving events, a point that’s made clear when, a few pages later, he finds out that he failed to actually kill Marie Kelly. Henceforth his actions feel largely inevitable—he becomes a fundamentally reactive figure. Even when he has Netley dictate the eponymous “From Hell” letter in a bid to “reclaim from them the myth they sought to shape for profit” and “give them truer legends, grand enough to slake their morbid thirsts,” he is plainly chasing events, as demonstrated when Abberline largely treats the letter as barely distinct from any of the hundreds of other supposed Jack the Ripper letters. “What kind of men write stuff like this,” he despairs, and Moore and Campbell move to a montage of people writing fake Ripper letters: a minister holed up in his room instead of reading to his children, a bloke at the bar, a man who’s masturbating as he writes, and a pair of grinning, impish teenagers, all caught up in the mad rush.

Only then does the comic enter its final stretch of singular focus on Kelly and her impending demise—a fate she’s acutely aware of, caught up in an almost nihilistic fatalism. The issue concludes with three pages focused almost entirely on her door, which Gull has obtained the key to. Seventeen of the issue’s final twenty-five panels are an identical composition of the door, sometimes with people entering or departing, but for seven of them simply a silent panel of a closed door. As with most seemingly simple things in the book, there is a fiendish complexity here—one that left Campbell “going back over and over the second half of chapter 9 for months after it was first published in December 1994, trying to figure out all the moves to be sure they made sense and to see if I’d done something wrong.”[3] He compares the sequence to a shell game—an elaborate sequence of comings and goings carefully set up to enable a future reveal Moore was considering but uncertain of. Such is the precision of the sequence that they even have the tiny structural conceit of having three consecutive pages in which Marie Kelly is seen to enter her flat in panel six—the first two times with a customer, and then finally alone—only to have Gull, on the final page, enter in the fifth panel, “creating a frisson of alarm in the reading by being one panel ahead of schedule.”[4] The comic then holds for four straight panels on the silent door, unchanging save for the subtle shifts of the light, focusing the reader on the terrible apocalypse commencing within.

[1] Quoted in From Hell Companion

[2] All from From Hell Companion

[3] From Hell Companion

[4] From Hell Companion