What Alice Knew: A Most Curious Tale of Henry James and Jack the Ripper

Chapter 19

The Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum was located in a remote terrain on the edge of the Berkshire Moors, thirty miles outside of London. Its only neighbor was an orphanage for wayward boys, society favoring the placement of the madman and the orphan conveniently out of sight of meddlesome politicians and reforming ladies.

The asylum itself was a massive stone structure in which two broad turrets flanking an archway seemed to stand open, like a giant maw, to swallow its occupants. The building’s placement in the ancient moor and the worn look of the gravel path leading up to it made William feel the weight of entrenched and unchanging experience. He could imagine written above the wide arch the lines from Dante’s great poem: “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”

Yet Abberline explained that the asylum had been built relatively recently, after a group of altruistic ladies got it into their heads to visit the Bethlehem Asylum in London. The conditions at “Bedlam” had appalled the ladies, and a wave of reform had followed. The result was the construction of more humane asylums like Broadmoor. Of course, a humane asylum was a relative thing. Broadmoor was not squalid or unhealthy in the way that Bedlam had been. There were provisions for proper exercise, diet was regulated, and sanitation was modern enough, but that was the end of it. If the bodies of the inmates were treated better here, their souls were no better tended than they had been before.

Entering through the vast portal, William and Abberline were met by a burly guard who instructed an orderly to take them to the director of the asylum. The orderly had sloping shoulders and a lazy eye and looked to William exactly the way an orderly in a lunatic asylum should look. If, as he had written, “to laugh was to be happy,” then perhaps “to have a lazy eye was to be a lunatic,” or at least, an attendant of lunatics.

They followed the lazy-eyed attendant through a large courtyard, where in one area, a sullen group of men were in the process of taking exercise. Under the supervision of another burly attendant, the inmates were linked arm in arm, walking in rote fashion back and forth. At intervals, someone would break off from this chain and loiter in a corner, at which time the attendant would walk over and strike him on the back of the legs so that the man would scurry back to rejoin the group.

“Do they engage in corporal punishment here, then?” asked William. “I thought it was a humane institution.”

Abberline grunted. “A swat on the legs is humane enough when compared to being pummeled senseless, and I suppose they do that too if they feel the need.”

William stood for a moment watching the inmates, their heads bowed, walking back and forth in a patient shuffle. Were they in identical states of torpor, or were they merely resigned, after months or even years of this routine, to submerge whatever sparks of selfhood they had into private reveries? Once again, he was bothered by the basic philosophical paradox of where the individual began and ended, of how social conditions and personal habits shaped the self, and how the worst aspects of character could be imposed on an individual as the result of the best intentions.

He and Abberline were finally led into a room that had been equipped with some of the amenities of normal society. An effort had been made to add color in the way of a carpet and a variety of bric-a-brac, but the effect was unwelcoming. The room was too large for its furnishings, and a quality of emptiness and desolation prevailed.

In one corner were several armchairs positioned around a low table. In the other corner was a large desk, strewn with papers and files, and behind the desk sat a scholarly-looking man of about William’s age, who rose as they entered and stiffly put out his hand. “Henry Maudsley,” he said. His handshake was overfirm in the manner of someone used to controlling situations, or at least determined to do so.

William felt a leap of pleasure at hearing the name. Henry Maudsley was a respected figure in the field of psychological research, someone allied with the materialist school, which believed that abnormal mental processes could be entirely explained by physical causes. Although William faulted the materialists for refusing to consider nonphysical aspects of mental illness, he valued their work for supporting the connection of mind and body, albeit from one direction only.

He therefore shook Maudsley’s hand with enthusiasm, and in introducing himself, expected that his host would respond to his name with equal pleasure. Maudsley, however, merely nodded and set about explaining his presence at the asylum with a pontifical air. “I am here at Broadmoor on an interim basis, following the retirement of the venerable Dr. William Orange. I find that the institution provides ample subjects for my research.” Abruptly turning to William with an accusatory air, he then said, “You hold to a nonmaterial view of mental debility, don’t you, Professor James? I reject that. My latest research, in keeping with Darwinian principles, shows that lunacy is the result of neurological deficiencies—debilities of mental process that cause images and ideas to take distorted and unnatural forms.”

William bristled. He had hoped to find common ground with Maudsley, despite their differences in approach, but the man’s confrontational manner put him on the defensive. He began to argue, somewhat shrilly, that social, cultural, and indeed spiritual factors certainly did contribute to mental illness.

Abberline intervened. “We are here to meet with an inmate by the name of John Pizer,” the inspector said curtly. “As you may know, he was an early suspect in the Whitechapel murders and would have been hunted down and torn to pieces had he remained in the community. Fortunately, he also happened to be mad. It’s a dire state of affairs when we have to send people to a lunatic asylum for safekeeping.”

Maudsley seemed to become more reasonable in the face of this professional exposition. He pulled out a file from the cabinet near his desk and read aloud, “‘John Pizer. Age: thirty-two years. Residence: East End, London; specific address unknown. Trade: Boot maker. Diagnosis: Mania alternating with melancholia. Treatment: Spinning, blistering, immersion in cold water.’” Maudsley glanced up. “That was the treatment prescribed by Dr. Orange; I have discontinued it.” He closed the file. “It’s a fairly routine case of mental imbalance. The patient has periods of lucidity but is given to unpredictable ravings and disorientation. No doubt there are lesions on the brain. But you’re welcome to speak to him if you think it will do you any good.”

He took a set of keys from his desk drawer and led the men from his office. As he approached the doors that led to the patient area, he paused. “I should like to take a detour before we proceed and have you visit someone you might find of interest. He’s mad enough, but he hardly fits the conventional mold of the madman.” Maudsley addressed William now with more consideration than he had shown formerly. They had reached the end of the corridor, and he motioned to a door. “We don’t bother with the locks in this case. This man poses no danger. He killed someone years ago, but here, as you’ll see, he’s found a modicum of peace.”

He knocked on the door and then opened onto a spectacular scene. The room was far more spacious than expected; in fact, it was two cells, the wall of the adjoining one having been removed to accommodate the prisoner’s needs.

In a small corner area was a bed and the accompanying hygienic necessaries, but by far the larger space was occupied with an oak desk, positioned in front of a window and affording a lovely view of the moorland. On either side of the window were bookcases, reaching to the ceiling and crammed with books, and above the desk was a cabinet made up of small cubbyholes. William could see that each cubbyhole was marked with a letter of the alphabet and was crammed full of papers. Books of various sorts were also piled on the floor, some open, some with multiple markers inserted in their leaves. The effect was of a vast and complicated scholarly enterprise. It reminded William of his study at home, though his own space, he acknowledged to himself, was not as well organized.

It took a moment, amid the great volume of books and papers, for the figure of a very thin man in his fifties with white, flyaway hair to come into view. He was hunched over the desk with a lamp at his elbow that infused the room with a strong odor of camphor. He had his spectacles low on his nose and was reading intently from a large book, which William saw had to do with the etymology of birds.

“William Chester Minor,” said Maudsley, “our resident lexicographer. William James, professor of philosophy and psychology at Harvard College.”

Minor looked up. “Professor James!” he exclaimed. “Psychic, psychologist, psychosis, psychological, psychosomatic—all words gleaned from your papers and relayed to my correspondent, Sir James Murray, editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, currently in the process of being compiled, and for which I am an indispensable resource. I also understand that I am afflicted by a debilitating psychological disorder, for which work on the dictionary, intense and unrelenting, has been a soothing and reclamatory activity.”

“You have medical training?” William asked. He sensed that the man understood his own affliction in a way that a mere layman would not.

Minor, whose hands had been rifling nervously through the pages of the book before him, paused a moment and then spoke in a surprisingly measured, thoughtful manner. “Yes, I am a trained physician. The training itself posed no problem. Indeed, I was a superlative student. My difficulty came with the practice. There, you see, there were problems of another dimension. In the end, I found them insuperable.”

William gazed at Minor with fascination. “The human dimension,” he murmured.

Minor’s hand shot to his forehead, as though he had suffered a sudden pain there. “It requires a kind of…thought. I must confine myself to the rote and the methodical, that which imposes order on that great furnace that produces our souls, be they our souls or merely the engines of our being. I cannot rest if I think on it. I cannot think on it, or I go mad.” His gaze remained fastened on William as he spoke, as if to say, You understand.

Indeed, William did. His own work on mental process, a huge enterprise on which he had been laboring for years, was a compendium of sorts, a way of organizing the chaos of mental life for the underlying end of preserving his own sanity. He knew to be true what Minor said, to think too much outside established forms and habits was to see the chaotic—and demonic—potential of the mind and be catapulted into the abyss.

William felt himself recoil at the kinship he felt with Minor, who, reciprocally, seemed disturbed by the human connection he had fleetingly established with his visitor. The calmness with which he had spoken began to give way to physical signs of distress. His shoulders twitched, and he shifted uncomfortably in his chair until, finally, shaking himself, as if throwing off a confining garment, he ducked his head and returned to his books.

“He is helping compile a dictionary?” William whispered to Maudsley as they backed away from the desk.

“It appears so,” said their host. “There is regular correspondence between Minor and this Dr. Murray. I wonder if Murray knows he is writing to an inmate in a lunatic asylum. His letters are simply addressed to Broadmoor, Crowthorne.”

“And you see no reason to illuminate him on the matter?”

“No. The work should speak for itself.”

William nodded in agreement and continued to gaze around the room, impressed by the care and method with which Minor had organized his materials. He would have liked to examine some of the bits of paper in the cubbyholes, but Abberline was looking impatient.

Leaving Minor’s room, they climbed the stairs to the floor assigned to prisoners believed to be dangerous. The atmosphere here was different from below—the air hot and stale, and the cells arranged closer together. Sharp, unsettling eyes peered out through some of the barred windows; invectives were hurled at them as they passed, and behind some of the doors, loud shrieks were punctuated by angry, garbled speech. Occasionally guards would enter a cell; there would be a few heavy thuds, and then silence.

“We put Pizer up here,” explained Maudsley, “less because he has proven to be dangerous than to protect him from others. He nodded to Abberline. “As you mentioned, many still hold to the idea that he is Jack the Ripper, though he’s been under lock and key since the second murder. The poor man—and I use the adjective with a certain latitude—is the victim of a kind of thinking that keeps half our population mired in falsity and superstition. They hit on an explanation that supports their prejudices and, despite all proof to the contrary, are unwilling to let it go.”

William nodded. In this, he and Maudsley were in complete accord.

They came to a cell at the end of the corridor. Maudsley knocked and then turned the key. A man of short but powerful build was sitting on the cot in the corner of the room. He had a broad, flat face and a shaven head with small eyes. His lips were closed in a thin, straight line, except when they twitched spasmodically to reveal a set of even yellow teeth. He did not look at the visitors directly. His gaze moved restlessly about the room.

It seemed to William that the man resembled a snake. He had a feverish alertness and a hard, coiled muscularity. He was not a prepossessing-looking individual, but confined to the small space, there was something profoundly vulnerable about him, much as a beast in a cage seems vulnerable in its uncomprehending captivity.

Maudsley introduced the visitors, but Pizer made no acknowledgment. He sat unmoving, only his eyes continuing to dart about the room.

“Perhaps if I could speak with him alone,” suggested William. It occurred to him that the presence of three men, one a police inspector and one the head of a lunatic asylum, was not conducive to intimate chat.

Maudsley considered this request and then nodded. “We’ll wait outside with an ear open in case you need us,” he said, and he and Abberline left the cell.

William sat down on the stool near the bed and addressed the inmate gently. “I want to speak to you about the Whitechapel murders,” he said.

The side of the man’s mouth twitched, but he said nothing.

“I came here in the hope that you might help us find the man responsible.”

Pizer’s eyes darted up for a moment.

William continued. “You were called Leather Apron and suspected of these crimes yourself. Could you tell me why?”

“Bloody sows’ll say anything,” Pizer burst out in a guttural accent.

“You are referring to…?” prompted William.

“Disgusting pigs, the lot of ’em,” Pizer snarled.

William paused. “Is your mother alive?” he finally asked, thinking this might be a way forward.

“Don’ know,” said Pizer morosely.

“Do you remember her?”

Pizer shrugged.

“What about your father?”

“On’y saw the bloody bastard when ’e was drunk and came round t’ beat me.”

“Who raised you?” asked William.

The man gave a shrill laugh. “Bloody pigs raised me.”

“Pigs?”

“Whores. Indentured to whores. I’d kill ’em all if I could.”

“You worked for prostitutes?”

“Washed their chamber pots. Beat me if I didn’t make up their filthy beds. And the gentlemen were worse. Kicked me if they felt like it, bloody, stinkin’ bastards. Saw ’em do filthy things, but they treated me as if I was the one as was dirt.” The man’s eyes darted about the room angrily.

“How old were you when you worked at the brothel?” asked William.

“Who knows? Too young to do nothin’ else.”

William tried to look sympathetic, but the man was so unsavory in his appearance and manner that it was hard to feel sympathy.

“But then I got strong, and they couldn’t do nothin’ more to me,” Pizer continued, having apparently lost his reticence. “I could make ’em do what I said. Jus’ show ’em a knife, and they done it.”

“You carried a knife?”

“’Course I did. Everyone feared Leather Apron.”

“Why were you called Leather Apron?” asked William.

“’Cause I wore a leather apron,” said Pizer with what William had to admit was impeccable logic.

“And why did you wear a leather apron?”

“’Cause I was a boot maker,” said Pizer, as though any moron should know that.

“Did you like your trade?”

“I liked usin’ a knife,” snarled Pizer. “Needed to, to cut the leather. But I’d rather ’ave used it to cut somethin’ else. That Ripper has it right, there.”

“Did you…know…Jack the Ripper?” William asked, suddenly taken with the idea that the two might be friends. Did demonic killers have friends?

“Didn’t know ’im, though they say as he wrote my name in one of ’is letters.” He noted this with a touch of pride. He then said scornfully, “But I wouldn’t ’ave done it his way, myself. He’s too fancy for me.”

“What do you mean ‘too fancy’?” asked William, intrigued by this comparative notion.

“All that slashin’ and cuttin’ up. I likes my knife,” growled Pizer, “but I use it spare. Ain’t that the point of a knife?” His eyes darted up at William in stating this professional view of the matter.

“So you feel Jack the Ripper cuts more than is necessary?”

Pizer snorted. “Don’t need to be fancy to cut shoes. Nor throats neither. Cut ’em clean and simple, I say.”

William pondered the idea a moment. What did that signify, to cut more than was necessary? There was something to be said for Pizer’s observation that the point of using a knife was to be economical in the realm of killing. But then, it wasn’t to kill these women that Jack the Ripper had cut them; they were dead when most of the cutting happened. Why, then, the need to cut more, to be “fancy,” as Pizer put it? Pizer had learned to cut sparingly in his trade as a boot maker. Even a surgeon was economical in his use of a knife. Under what circumstances, then, would fancy cutting be appropriate? He was back to the idea that the key to understanding a madman was to find the context in which his madness made sense, became, that is, perversely rational.

Pizer had resumed talking. “Not as I need a knife to do ’em harm,” he boasted. “I could use these.” He flexed his blunt fingers. “Did it once too.”

“You strangled someone?” There had been suspicion among the people of Whitechapel that Pizer was a killer, but no proof of it, as far as William knew.

Pizer did not respond to the question but snarled, “Can’t treat me like a dog! Cleanin’ up their messes, smellin’ their stench, emptyin’ their piss, makin’ me do filthy things so they could laugh at me.”

The man had again returned to the scene of his childhood, and William suddenly had a vivid image of the boy forced to perform all manner of ungodly acts for the amusement of his employers. But what had prompted him to kill later in life? “The person you strangled,” he pressed. “Why did you do it?”

Pizer seemed not to hear. “Can’t treat me like a dog. Can’t make me do that no more. Nobody gonna make me!”

William was staring with an expression of curiosity and disgust. “The person you killed…wanted to make you do something?”

Pizer began to twitch, and his speech grew rapid and wild. “Can’t make me! Can’t make me! Can’t shame me like that! Ain’t gonna be shamed no more!” His voice grew shrill with fury. “Ain’t shamed by you neither!” He fastened his eyes on William’s shoes and stared at them fixedly. “Even with yer nice shoes, you don’t shame me!”

“I’m a doctor!” William said sharply. “I’m here to get information about your condition, nothing more.”

Pizer was not listening. His eyes were again darting about the room. “All dressed up in good leather to do filthy things! You’re a stinking, bloody fraud with your fine shoes!”

“I’m Professor James from Boston,” William felt compelled to assert. He could sense that Pizer had lost track of where he was, if he had ever known.

His voice incensed Pizer further. “I can make ’em do as I say if I wants to,” he growled and flexed his fingers again. “I can make ’em, as they made me!” His eyes focused again on William’s shoes, and he stared at them for several seconds in a state of rapt attention. His face then contorted into a grimace.

It was then that William understood his shoes, bought before he left Boston from a very good boot maker at the insistence of his Alice (“A Harvard professor must have a good pair of shoes,” she had scolded), must put Pizer in mind of the men who had scorned and abused him. “Calm yourself!” he said sharply.

The sound of his voice seemed to be a trigger rather than a palliative. The man grimaced again, and William stood up in sudden awareness of the threat, but too late.

Pizer leaped from the cot and placed his hands around his visitor’s neck.

William felt a searing pain from the pressure on his throat, and a thought darted through his mind: This is how I will die, interviewing a madman, with a policeman standing outside the door, but the next moment, Abberline and Maudsley rushed into the cell. Abberline adeptly pried Pizer’s fingers from his neck, while Maudsley ran back into the corridor to call for help.

Within a few seconds, a guard twice the size of Pizer and with eyes even more snakelike entered the cell and, with a sweep of his arm, knocked the man onto the bed. “Don’t worry, sirs. I’ll have him in hand in a jiffy,” said the guard. “You best get yourselves out of the way.”

As Maudsley went off to get a compress for William’s neck, and Abberline helped him stagger out of the cell, they could hear the blows falling inside.

“So what did your visit do for you besides almost getting you killed?” asked Abberline, when they were once again seated on the train back to London.

William touched his neck and felt the dull ache of the bruise. He had fortified himself with a shot of whiskey in Maudsley’s office and had left Broadmoor with an improved feeling about his host. However much the two men differed in basic precepts, they shared an understanding of the horrors of mental illness. Perhaps more to the point, Maudsley’s guilt regarding the attack had softened him toward his visitors. It seemed that Pizer had never exhibited violent behavior before, despite his reputation for being violent in the East End. It was another case where salient information had been discounted. If the people of his neighborhood were convinced that he was Jack the Ripper, certainly there must be a reason for their conviction. William suspected that Pizer had not been violent at Broadmoor because no one had spoken to him long enough to elicit violence.

“What did the visit do for me?” he mused in response to Abberline’s question. “It taught me that shame is a powerful impetus for action, perhaps the most powerful. Pizer spent his childhood in a brothel, abused by women and men too. I reminded him of the men who frequented that place and used to demean him. His humanity was stolen from him as a child. It seems almost logical that he would become an animal himself, driven to abuse those who shamed and abused him.”

“You’re saying that Jack the Ripper kills out of rage for having been shamed?”

“I’d say killing of the sort he does must stem from extreme humiliation. It’s a frenzied kind of retribution. No knowing whether the initial trauma was even intended as such; it may have been accidental, a matter of circumstance, but I suspect there was shame involving a woman at its origin.”

“A prostitute?”

“Possibly, but not necessarily. Perhaps the women he kills remind him of someone in another sense. But like Pizer, I surmise it’s a pattern of substitution. We substitute in the present for people in the past. What happens with men like Pizer—and I suspect, Jack the Ripper—is that love and hope turn to resentment and hatred. Who knows what instigates this transformation, trauma or abuse or simple abandonment. Whatever it is, the emotions continue to haunt the victim and can be relieved only through violation of something that stands in place of the original source of pain.”

He paused a moment and then added, “There’s something else as well. Pizer’s attack was triggered by my shoes. He had worked as a boot maker, and his job became a conduit for his rage. Minor’s case is an example in reverse, of how gratifying work can relieve and rechannel destructive tendencies. Our vocation, in large part, makes us who we are. Pizer learned to use a knife as a boot maker, and it gave him his name, Leather Apron. One would want to know what this murderer did for a living and how it informs his crimes.”

Abberline considered this information. “There may be something to your ideas,” he acknowledged, “but I can’t say I’m convinced. Who among us hasn’t been shamed in some way? Or frustrated in work? I have, and I daresay you have too.”

“And both of us might have become murderers had our shame and frustration been great enough,” asserted William. “We were fortunate to have been loved enough to counteract our shame, and to have our work become a source of gratification and pride. Had that not been the case, who knows? Evil men are not born, but made.”

“You Americans think tolerance and justice can change things,” said Abberline with a touch of scorn in his voice. “It’s a pretty theory, but I’ve known plenty of evil men in my time, and it’s my opinion they came into the world that way.”

They had arrived at an impasse and, realizing that no amount of talk was going to make them budge in their views, retreated into silence for the remainder of the journey back to London.