The Autobiography of Jack the Ripper Read Online Free Page B

not, respectable formed a large part of my early home training. I am thinking now of the time when I was about seven or eight years of age, a period during which the lower orders “knew their place”; when those members of the middle-class community above the social status of the “working man” (who, however, was a working man in those days) were oppressed by the fear that by a breach of conventional conduct, the demarcation of class might become blurred. The “lower orders” were largely uneducated—quite a large proportion were unable to read or write—they received, from their betters, tips of two-pence for casual services with apparent gratitude, and they lived, ate and bred like animals—though, on the whole, fairly respectful animals. And I believe that they were, in their unthinking animal way, more content than is the so-called working man of to-day.
    To be guilty of any act or habit such as might be ascribed to the lower classes was, my mother drilled into me, a matter of special shame. She was more disturbed by conduct on the part of my father or myself which seemed “low” than by any other manifestation; and her conventional religious views were, I think, based more upon what seemed “respectable” than upon any conviction of divine benevolence. Her abhorrence of an atheist or free-thinker was due less to the realization that he might be an outcast from God than to the fact that his convictions were held to be not respectable convictions.
    Strangely enough my mother was not, to me, such a definite personality as my father, although I was, I suppose, more in her company. She had little to say apart from her outbursts on matters of religion and convention to which I have alluded. She moved quietly about on her household duties in a mood which may have been either sullenness or apathy—I cannot say. And she was much given to furtive weeping. It was not until I reached the age of, I suppose, ten that I realized that my father’s “habits” were the cause of this, and some further years elapsed before I knew the habits in question were connected with drink. It is quite evident to me now that he drank steadily and persistently and this, no doubt, accounted to some extent for his lack of professional success.
    I can touch but lightly upon these very early years for the memory of them is fitful, and the trivial incidents I am able to recall can have but little interest. I will pass over the period of my first schooling at what must have been, I think, a “dame’s” or church school, and try to describe my first boys’ school to which I was sent at the age of about twelve.

Chapter 2
    â€œThere is a fountain filled with blood
Drawn from Emanuel’s veins—”
    One of my earliest school recollections is the yelping of that hymn (then a new one) in the company of two or three dozen school- fellows; I suppose it is safe to say that the words held for us no religious significance whatever. In fact, I did not then realize who “Emanuel” was and only learned later by a species of deduction. It seems to me, looking back to those school-days, that most of our time was given to the receipt of religious instruction. The school was a small, private day-school of the kind which, happily, is now rapidly disappearing and the principal was, to all intents and purposes, a religious fanatic.
    He was an elderly man—to our boyish perceptions he seemed a very old man—with a nearly bald head and bushy white side-whiskers. A well-set-up man, he took frequent opportunities of mentioning to us his practice of bathing each morning in cold water and following this with an earnest supplication to his Maker. One or both of these procedures had given him a ruddy and wholesome complexion and an upright carriage in spite of his years, but had failed to mellow his temperament, which was harsh and utterly lacking in imagination.
    This Dr.