FICTIONS AND DREAMS

There is no mention of the Whitechapel murders in any of Virginia Woolf’s writings, and she had no particular interest in crime. In her diary for January 1931, she noted “Ripper murder on Blackheath”, in reference to the mutilation murder of a young maidservant, Louisa Steele. This is unusual, and she made no further mention of the case. However, when one considers her family connections, she was in an excellent position to have heard rumours about the Ripper crimes, which were now part of the folklore of London, and there are indications that she had a consciousness of some of the orally transmitted stories that appeared in print in later decades, becoming part of the Ripper mythology.

In 1933, Woolf published Flush: A Biography, an imaginative novel that recounted the life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s pet dog. This is the only novel in which Woolf gives a description of a quarter of the city which had “long been given over to the poor... In Whitechapel, or in a triangular space of ground at the bottom of the Tottenham Court Road, poverty and vice and misery had bred and seethed and propagated their kind for centuries…” Flush includes an account of the dog being kidnapped by an East End criminal gang who threaten to kill the animal unless they are paid a ransom.

Literary scholar Susan M Squier, in Virginia Woolf and London: The Sexual Politics of the City, has suggested that this section of Flush, with its description of mutilations, is a reference to “violence characterised for an entire generation by the Jack the Ripper murders. Furthermore, Woolf’s parallel phrasing and choice of details remarkably similar to those of the Ripper murder case imply that the link between the two seemingly diametrically opposed London environments – Wimpole Street and Whitechapel – was misogyny and sexual oppression.’

Hermione Lee, Woolf’s biographer, informs us that Woolf began work on Flush in January 1931. Was she thinking of the East End and its unsolved crimes as she researched and wrote the novel? The author’s diary offers some hints. On 8 June 1931, Woolf noted that she had awoken after “a dream of Daphne Sanger, and how she was proved to be the heir to the throne of England.” The idea of a missing girl, who is the lost Royal heir, haunts many stories linking the Ripper crimes and Prince Eddy. If one looks more closely at Virginia Woolf’s whimsical dream, one finds it has references to Whitechapel and the autumn of terror.

Daphne Sanger was the daughter of Woolf’s friend Charlie Sanger, a Cambridge academic and Apostle. Daphne herself was a pioneer in the professionalisation of social work and was active in social reform. Her only published work is a book chapter she wrote with Clara Collet, entitled “Changes in wages and conditions of domestic servants in private families and institutions in the county of London”, published in 1930.

It is notable that Sanger’s co-author Clara Collet spent time as a researcher in the East End during 1888. Clara Collet was engaged by Charles Booth to investigate the lives of working women, and was walking the streets of Whitechapel at the time of the murders. Collet and Sanger could also have heard, and shared, the stories that circulated about royal secrets and lost heirs. It’s interesting that Woolf’s dream attached the story of a woman