Jack the Ripper is Lewis Carroll, page 1

You've been reading, but of course nobody else can read anything, because you posted no link and no content. Clicking on your thread was a waste of time.

Anyway, since your title states fact, but the body of your thread says nothing at all, I figure I may as well help you out.

No, the false science behind this false belief is based on a practice called "hidden writing" also called "hidden confessions". This is essentially more "Bible Code" silliness where you take letters and rearrange them. Here is a website that discusses your idea:

www.casebook.org...

Looked at in this way, Richard Wallace's claim that Dodgson was Jack the Ripper is only an extreme expression of the existing trend. There is no evidence at all - anywhere - to support Wallace's claim. But then there is no evidence at all - anywhere - to support the story of Dodgson's marriage proposal to child-Alice - and that has never stopped anyone believing in it.

Wallace published his theory in 1996, in his book 'Jack the Ripper, Light-Hearted Friend'. It was, in brief that Dodgson and his Oxford colleague Thomas Vere Bayne, were both responsible for the Whitechapel murders. He based his belief on anagrams he constructed out of Dodgson's work, which he claimed were hidden confessions of the author's life of crime in Whitechapel in the autumn of 1888.

The anagrams he presents in his book are not very good, in that they tend to make limited grammatical sense, and Wallace tends to cheat rather by simply leaving out or changing any letters he can't fit in.

For example he takes this passage from Dodgson's 'Nursery Alice':

'So she wondered away, through the wood, carrying the ugly little thing with her. And a great job it was to keep hold of it, it wriggled about so. But at last she found out that the proper way was to keep tight hold of itself foot and its right ear'.

and turns it into:

'She wriggled about so! But at last Dodgson and Bayne found a way to keep hold of the fat little whore. I got a tight hold of her and slit her throat, left ear to right. It was tough, wet, disgusting, too. So weary of it, they threw up - jack the Ripper.'

For anyone who knows Dodgson's work, and his mastery of all word-games, the idea that he could perpetrate a word-trick as messy as this is almost more unbelievable than the image of him hanging round Whitechapel with a big knife. The structure is barely literate, and Wallace has to substitute three letters (including a very important 'o' to 'i' in order to construct the word 'ripper') in order to make his 'anagram' work at all.

But beyond all such consideration, Wallace's theory is flawed by the fact that one could rearrange the words in any piece of writing anywhere and make half-connected sentences suggestive of just about anything. The very first sentence on the opening page of 'Winnie the Pooh', for example:

'Here is Edward Bear coming downstairs now'

can be turned into

'Stab red red women! CR is downing whores - AA'

(Obviously the 'CR' is Christopher Robin, who is thus revealed as an infant psychopath).

In fact all Wallace really succeeds in demonstrating is that Dodgson used the same alphabet as everyone else in the western world, and that, therefore his words can be rearranged to make other words - including rather rude ones about ripping ladies open.

So it's fake. One pauses to wonder why some failed writer would spend his time constructing gross passages like the one above. Amazing how he has better insight into Carroll's mind than Carroll himself eh?

If someone wants to take this thread and turn it into a thread about the legitimacy of hidden writing, It'll be akin to alchemic transformation of gold from lead.

[edit on 26-2-2006 by smallpeeps]