I don't know how many of you are aware of this bit of fringe culture ephemera, but in 1996, a man named Richard Wallace published a book called Jack the Ripper: Light-Hearted Friend, in which he proposed that the identity of the most famous serial killer in world history was none other than Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known by his pen name, Lewis Carroll, author of, among much else, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. I stumbled across this book in 1999, while working in a bookstore, and I bought it very soon thereafter, because how could I not? I bought the book not with the feeling that this Wallace person might be on to something, but because I figured this simply must be the most ludicrous "solution" to the Ripper murders that anyone had ever had the balls to make public..
And as far as I know, it is. I might as well admit right off the bat that I haven't read Wallace's book in its entirety -- I don't know about you, but while my superficial interest in the scribblings of the mentally, yet enthusiastically, imbalanced seems to be limitless, my patience when it comes to actually reading the stuff is extremely thin. From what I can tell, the vast majority, by which I mean all, of Wallace's so-called evidence takes the form of anagrams, composed from Carroll's own writing. So, if you take, as Wallace did, the first verse of "Jabberwocky", from Through the Looking-Glass:
Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
...and put all the letters in a blender, mash down all the buttons at once, and then pour it all out on the table, you might end up with:
Bet I beat my glands til,
With hand-sword I slay the evil gender.
A slimey theme; borrow gloves,
And masturbate the hog more!
Which stands to reason, because about two-thirds of the alphabet is represented in that original verse, so you can make it say just about anything you want it to, provided you're not looking to talk about xylophones, zebras or quetzalcoatls. So, QED: Lewis Carroll was Jack the Ripper.
That's what the book is -- that and a lot of psychoanalysis of both Dodgson/Carroll, and the anagrams Wallace claims to have solved. Get a copy, flip through it, or read the whole damn thing, and you'll see. Fascinatingly absurd, but also tedious. However, what I did read clean through just recently (and for the first time, I'm embarrassed to admit) was both Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. And quite delightful they both were, though Through the Looking-Glass was a good deal stranger and more uneasy than its predecessor. Finishing that second book, I couldn't help but think about Wallace, and what he must have made of the ending. Briefly, Alice has been crowned queen, and the celebration goes entirely bonkers, with the White Queen and the Red Queen and everybody else persisting in the illogical nonsense that has driven Alice a little bit further around the bend than her adventures in Wonderland ever did. Not being able to put up with any more of it, Alice loses her shit, knocks over tables and dishes, and grabs the Red Queen, shaking her, and insisting that she is really a kitten. Which she is, because this has all been a dream, and Alice wakes up shaking not the Red Queen, but her cat.But Alice is blaming the Red Queen! The Red Queen! Red like blood! Plus, she's blaming the Red Queen, essentially, for turning everything insane. And what's another word for cat? Pussy. And you take my word for it when I say that Wallace will stop at nothing to find vagina imagery in his anagrams. Both the Alice books were written before the Ripper murders, but Wallace uses, for instance, his "Jabberwocky" anagrams as evidence that Carroll was predicting the murders, or at least the further disassembling of his psyche that would lead to them. Surely Wallace could have a field day with this stuff ("queen", too, since he seems to believe that Carroll had homosexual tendencies).
When I finished Through the Looking-Glass, I pulled down my copy of Wallace's book, and began scanning it for references to this ending. But, from what I can tell, if my skimming and the book's index are any indication, Through the Looking-Glass barely gets a mention, outside of "Jabberwocky". The Queen of Hearts from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, who is basically an earlier version of the Red Queen, gets far more of Wallace's ink (she was Carroll's mother, don't you know), but "Queen of Hearts" is far less evocative in this context than the "Red Queen". Are you seriously telling me, Richard Wallace, that you could do nothing with Alice giving the third degree to her pussy because she thinks it's a maniacal blood-red queen? This is your bread and butter, you big goofy lunatic! I mean, okay, if you're trying to find incriminating metaphors by way of anagrams, you're work has already pretty much been done for you, and your obsessive need to rearrange the letters of poems, to make them spell out brand new things about masturbation and knives, probably didn't find much of an outlet here. All the words you'd need are already spelled out correctly. But still! It doesn't have to be anagrams, does it!? If what you really want is to waste your time finding dark meanings in a piece of literature the entire purpose of which is to be nonsense (and here I can't entirely blame you, because there's some weird stuff in these books, particularly Through the Looking-Glass), then shouldn't you be willing to latch on to whatever works? What is it with you and anagrams, anyway?
You know what? I'm starting to think that maybe Lewis Carroll wasn't Jack the Ripper after all!
