Alice: Daughter Of The Ripper?!

There’s a funny phenomenon we have of adding artificial darkness and mystery to artists, insisting that wild rumors we hear about their sordid private lives are true. Consider the long-running urban legends of Walt Disney freezing himself or of Mr. Rogers being a Korean War sniper. Perhaps when we see a person create genuine innocent art we are intimated and assume that more is at work here, a shadowy side being loosely hidden from public view.

In the case of today’s post, we’ll be looking at an unusual hypothesis about Charles Dodgson (1832-1898), better known by his pen name of Lewis Carroll. Carroll was a mathematician but wrote fiction as well. Today the only works of his that are widely known are the Alice in Wonderland books, far from a poor literary legacy. In 1996, a man named Richard Wallace published a book promoting an alarming theory about Carroll being none other than Jack the Ripper, quite a scandalous claim to pin against the creator of the White Rabbit!

Wallace’s book, entitled Jack the Ripper, Light-Hearted Friend, is pseudohistorical schlock at its finest, the kind of the stuff I feel even the most desperate tabloids would publish on a slow news day. The idea has received nearly universal negative reception from scholars of both Carroll and the Ripper. Perhaps to add an air of credibility Wallace includes in his theory that Carroll was aided by his friend Thomas Vere Bayne, an Oxford academic.

The evidence provided by Wallace, such as it is, is that confessions are hidden in complex anagrams from Carroll’s popular writing. Observe as he turns this line from Carroll from this:

“So, she wondered away, through the wood, carrying the ugly little thing with her. And a great job it was to keep hold of it, it wriggled about so. But at last, she found out that the proper way was to keep tight hold of itself foot and its right ear.”

To this:

“She wriggled about so! But at last Dodgson and Bayne found a way to keep hold of the fat little whore. I got a tight hold of her and slit her throat, left ear to right. It was tough, wet, disgusting, too. So weary of it, they threw up - jack the Ripper.”

Another such example. The original:

“'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe.”

And the decoded:

“Bet I beat my glands til, With hand-sword I slay the evil gender. A slimey theme; borrow gloves, And masturbate the hog more!”

Wallace opines that further disturbing messages can be uncovered in the seemingly innocuous world of Alice. If one is to take everything from Light-Hearted Friend seriously, they’d be led to believe that Carroll was a homosexual who lusted for his mother and showed an interest in bestiality. The March Hare had better look out then!

Karoline Leach, one of Carroll’s most important biographers, has written a few essays criticizing Wallace and his “research” methods. She notes that many of the supposed anagrams omit and substitute letters not found in the Carrollian originals. In addition, Carroll’s known whereabouts don’t seem to match the Ripper’s chronology at all. Four of the five “canonical” homicides happened from August 31 to September 30 of 1888, a period in which Carroll was on vacation in East Sussex. The fifth murder occurred on November 9, 1888, when Carroll was in Oxfordshire, far from the dingy alleyways of London. Furthermore, some of the texts used as “evidence” were written well before the murders happened, and thus should’ve been discarded from the start.

As Leach points out, you can pretty much this system to implicate anybody in a crime. Taking the following passage from A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh, we can rearrange it in a dastardly, obscene way. Leach takes:

“Here is Edward Bear coming downstairs now,”

And transforms it into:

“Stab red red women! CR is downing whores – AA”

Harper’s, a popular magazine published their own similar rebuttal, written by Francis Heaney and Guy Jacobson, flipping the tables against Wallace.

“This is my story of Jack the Ripper, the man behind Britain's worst unsolved murders. It is a story that points to the unlikeliest of suspects: a man who wrote children's stories. That man is Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, author of such beloved books as Alice in Wonderland.” -Richard Wallace

Heaney and Jacobson turned it into:

“The truth is this: I, Richard Wallace, stabbed and killed a muted Nicole Brown in cold blood, severing her throat with my trusty shiv's strokes. I set up Orenthal James Simpson, who is utterly innocent of this murder. P.S. I also wrote Shakespeare's sonnets, and a lot of Francis Bacon's works too.”

Perhaps Wallace was simply a man ahead of his time, had he come up with an idea 25 years later he could’ve milked this dry in a popular “true crime” podcast.