MURDEROUS STREETS
“being proved to be the heir to the throne of England” to one of her acquaintances with first-hand knowledge of the East End in 1888.
Virginia Woolf’s older half-brother George Duckworth was also involved with Charles Booth’s work of social enquiry, and used to visit the East End in order to help gather survey material. His sister Stella Duckworth was also there doing charity work, including an initiative to provide low cost housing. As a lady, Stella always went to the slums accompanied by servants when carrying out her acts of benevolence. The youngest girls of the family, Virginia and Vanessa Stephen, were sometimes taken on these excursions and made the fleeting acquaintance of paupers in the workhouse, to whom they presented baskets of strawberries.
Ladies visited Whitechapel in a spirit of generosity, while remaining distant and protected from the immediate society of the area. Gentlemen could be freer in their ways. The historian Alison Light records that George Duckworth “liked to join the raucous cockneys at the Music Hall in Bow and have the thrill of an evening spent in the slums”. This was in the years 1888-1898, the decade in which the murders took place and the rumours followed. Considering that George Duckworth is otherwise known for his disgraceful role in Virginia Woolf’s life – she revealed, in a later privately circulated memoir that he had sexually abused her during her youth – I am surprised that no one has fingered him as a Ripper suspect. He was, by our standards, a sex offender, and so might be seen as likely to commit greater crimes. He was certainly familiar with the East End in 1888. Stella Duckworth, a more benign figure than her brother, died at the age of just 28 in 1897. She had contracted an unspecified internal infection shortly after her marriage. While her own health was failing, she tried to look after her younger half-sister Virginia, who was then 15 years old and prone to nervous upsets. As a treat, she offered to take Virginia with her on charity visits to the East End of London, but this suggestion was met with the most extraordinary fear. According to Quentin Bell, a family member and Woolf’s first biographer, Virginia suddenly became horrified by the suggestion that she accompany Stella on carriage rides in 1897: “It seemed to her that the streets had become murderous”. Virginia started saying that she had seen a lady run over by a cart, a collision between wagons, and that a carthorse had fallen in the street in front of her. She was too terrified to go outdoors, and constantly repeated stories of a near-miss when a girl or woman had almost been killed in the street. Quentin Bell doubtfully asks: “Did these accidents really occur?”
Virginia had been under great strain, and her preoccupation with accidents was a sign that her mental health was affected. She spent much of 1897, after the sad death of Stella Duckworth, on a rest cure. Her illness, and psychological fragility, is not surprising, but the particular form of her delirious fear is worthy of notice.
As a delusion, this fear of murderous violence and vehicles on the street is markedly similar to a story recorded by Stephen Knight – that the “abominable coachman” John Netley several times made attempts on the life of the child Alice, Sickert’s ward, by attempting to run her down with his carriage: “At the height of the Ripper murder the child was knocked down by Netley’s coach in Fleet Street or the Strand, said Sickert. She was nearly killed... The incident was repeated in February 1892. On this occasion Netley charged along Drury Lane in his carriage just as Alice Margaret was crossing the road with an elderly relative...” Similar stories are recorded by Jean Overton Fuller, who attributes to Florence Pash a story that she was walking with Alice near Charing Cross “when a coach came straight at them.”
One wonders when these stories about a murderous coachman began, and how widely they circulated. Knight heard the tales about John Netley in 1975. If he was receiving a much older legend, which had echoed down from street talk in the late 19th century, it is possible that the young Virginia Stephen heard similar tales. Her fear of the coach that menaces a female pedestrian is vivid, and uncharacteristic of her. None of the hallucinations attributed to her during her illnesses, except this one, are in the form of threats or accidents. Usually, when insane, she experienced delusions such as hearing the birds singing in Greek. Woolf was not afraid of motorcars in later life, and also once witnessed the wreck of a crashed plane on a hill, but regarded it with stoic indifference.
However, the haunting fear of the girl and the horse-drawn coach remained in her mind till the end of her life. In her last novel, Between the Acts, one of the characters is described thus: “Wife of the gentleman farmer, a goosefaced woman with eyes protruding as if they saw something to gobble in the gutter, said... how odd it was, as a child, she had never feared cows, only horses. But, then, as a small child in a perambulator, a great cart-horse had brushed within an inch of her face.”
It is possible that Woolf knew of the legend of a Royal heir, the girl chased by a menacing coach, associated with the Whitechapel murders. It is also possible that these frightening and strange stories lodged in her consciousness and appeared in fragments during dreams and deliriums, times when her guard of reason was dropped.
Exactly why so many writers have discerned family connections between Virginia Woolf, so eminent a literary figure, and so otherwise transcendent of histories of crime, and the Ripper lore is not clear. However, the story continues, even past the age of the Whitechapel murders.
In 1995, Killing for Company by Brian Masters was published. This well-referenced book told the story of Dennis Nilsen, a serial killer who preyed on young men in London during the 1980s. Masters traces Nilsen’s ancestry and reveals a link to “JK Stephen, who was eventually committed to hospital and never released. One account goes so far as to name him as the notorious Jack the Ripper... Through his great-grandmother, then, Dennis Nilsen must be a very distant cousin of Virginia Woolf...”