Victoria-Arcana and the Misogynistic Poetics of Resistance in Iain Sinclair's White Chappell Scarlet Tracings and Alan Moore's From Hell

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Notes

Thanks to Top Shelf Productions for permission to reproduce the images from From Hell.

Indeed, at the time of its 1987 publication, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings became the most commercially successful of all of Sinclair's works, allowing him the entrance to mainstream publication venues that had hitherto evaded him.

See, for example, Alex Murray's Recalling London: Literature and History in the Work of Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair (2007). Here Murray notes, “Sinclair's practice of literary history is similar in both politics and method to that of Foucault, attempting to undermine the discursive structures of power by uncovering those moments that have been obliterated from the record of literary history” (80).

For examples of these various critiques of New Historicism, see J. Hillis Miller's “Presidential Address, 1986: The Triumph of Theory, the Resistance to Reading, and the Question of a Material Base” and essays by Marcus, Newton, Graff, Fox-Genovese, and Pecora in H. Aram Veeser's The New Historicism Reader (1994).

Pseudonym for Sinclair's real-life friend, the performance artist Brian Catling.

As Paul Begg, Martin Fido, and Keith Skinner point out in their introduction to The Jack the Ripper A-Z (1991), the actual number of Ripper victims remains in much dispute. This confusion is a result of the depressing regularity of violent attacks on Whitechapel's women, some of which approximated the brutality of the Ripper murders without ever being directly linked to the case. While some “Ripperologists” speculate that the Ripper may have attacked as many as thirteen women, all of the case's commentators agree that the following five were verifiable Ripper victims: Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly (Begg et al. 2).

See also Judith Walkowitz's City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (1992) for a further feminist critique of the Ripper myth.

David Cunningham's and Alexandra Warwick's excellent contributions to Jack the Ripper: Media, Culture, History (2007) form notable exceptions here; being largely centered on the respective issues of the East End heritage industry and narratology, these essays are only able to briefly touch on White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings's implicit misogyny before moving on to tackle their main critical concerns.

Another version of this (partial) defense of White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings's compromised politics comes in David Cunningham's “Living in the Slashing Grounds”: “[A] politicized poetics of place may find itself in a double bind—compelled to resist this progressive ‘sitelessness' by insisting on the ‘active’ historicity that it effaces, yet by doing so, risking simply feeding its concomitant aestheticization of the ‘historical’ itself…Sinclair is almost unique in incorporating an ironic recognition of such a double-bind into his expanding oeuvre.” (169) The insight of Cunningham's analysis is slightly compromised by its incompleteness; what, one would like to know, is the political relevance or function of Sinclair's ironic recognition? At a time when the necessarily subversive and anti-hegemonic function of irony has become the object of a necessary and long overdue critical suspicion, it is difficult to know what to do with textual irony rather than to simply mark its presence.

Thomas Carlyle's On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) provides a compelling and unexpected pre-text for Peter Ackroyd's post-modern exegesis of London's architecture. In “The Hero as a Man of Letters,” he writes, “It is the Thought of man; the true thaumaturgic virtue; by which man words all things whatsoever. All that he does and brings to pass, is the vesture of a Thought. This London city, with all its houses, palaces, steam-engines, cathedrals, and huge immeasurable traffic and tumult, what it is but a Thought, but millions of Thoughts made into One—a huge immeasurable Spirit of a Thought, embodied in brick, in iron, smoke, dust, and rest of it! Not a brick that was made but some man had to think of the making of that brick” (154).

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Christine Ferguson

Christine Ferguson is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glasgow, where she specializes in Victorian studies. Her publications include the monograph Language, Science, and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siecle: The Brutal Tongue and articles on topics such as foot fetishism in the late Victorian romance, decadence and science, the Elephant Man Case, and sign language in the sensation novel. Her new book project explores the relationship between spiritualism and eugenics in nineteenth-century culture.