The London Traveler

I’ve just taken a trip into Jack the Ripper’s London.

You can do this, of course, by taking one of the Jack the Ripper walking tours of Whitechapel – though there’s relatively little of Victorian Whitechapel left, and I’ve grown to love the area rather for its thriving street market and excellent curry shops.

But I did it by opening up writer Alan Moore’s From Hell, a brooding graphic novel starkly illustrated by Eddie Campbell.

Moore takes one of the numerous outlandish theories surrounding the Ripper – that he was actually William Gull, the Queen’s Surgeon – and spins it into a yarn that binds Freemasonry, psychogeography, the history of London’s East End, and the atmosphere of a good London fog, into a horrifyingly dark vision of the city.

William Gull’s descent into madness is clear – but his creation of a mythical Masonic London built to dominate and regulate wild feminine energies is utterly compelling. Nicholas Hawksmoor’s splendid churches play a major role in the work, as Gull explains the sacred geography and its meaning to his alarmed and uncomprehending coach driver.  Anyone who has read Iain Sinclair or Peter Ackroyd will recognise the bedrock of myth here, but it’s been twisted into something dark and horrifying.

Even better, Campbell’s decision to stick with scratchy, moody black-and-white lets the graphic novel create a special world. It’s the world of fog and night time and gas lamps – a claustrophobic London where there is no escape.

But though Moore has researched Victorian London in great depth, this is not just a costume drama. At the end of the novel, just before he dies, Gull sees other killers – Ian Brady, Peter Sutcliffe – and foresees the history of the twentieth century with its mass exterminations and wars. Moore has something to say about the darkness that lives in us all.

A compelling read whether or not you’re a Jack the Ripper fan. And a thoroughly convincing take on Victorian London.

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