Crippen and the Ripper – in the annals of English crime perhaps only Jack the Ripper and Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen have truly crossed the boundary from historical personage to dramatis persona, haunting the popular imagination well beyond the Victorian and Edwardian periods in which they respectively gained their notoriety. More than a century since sensational press reports first broadcast their deeds of ‘murder and mutilation’ to an aghast reading public, the Victorian Whitechapel Murderer and the Edwardian ‘North London Cellar Murderer’ have been remembered and revisited in a broad range of literary and cultural forms. For over a century, posterity has memorialised both malefactors in crime history, fiction, film, and even two ill-judged attempts at musical theatre. The anonymous Ripper and the ‘mild mannered’ domestic murderer Crippen even figured on the London tourist’s itinerary for close on a hundred years: effigies and realia associated with both criminals were included in that once reliable barometer of crime sensations, Madame Tussaud's Chamber of Horrors, where the Ripper's East End was reconstructed and Crippen's effigy stared out from the prisoner's dock until the Chamber's closure to the public in 2016.

The endurance of the figure of Jack the Ripper is more readily explained. Never brought to justice for the murder and mutilation of at least five women in autumn 1888, the Whitechapel Murderer's escape into the East End backstreets and the shadows of history allowed his swift transformation into enduring myth. Over the ensuing 130 years, the Ripper story has become, in the words of Judith Walkowitz, ‘an enigmatic thriller that continually reverberates and reconstructs itself over time’. An unbroken thread of speculation as to the Ripper's identity extends from the contemporaneous press reports, through the later reminiscences and memoirs of the investigating detectives and officials, beyond the appearance of the first full-length book on the subject in 1929, to the thriving publishing industry on the subject that continues to the present day. This tradition has seen a seemingly never-ending parade of Ripper suspects proposed – some drawn from the historical record as persons known to be of interest to the police at the time; others (the majority) plucked seemingly at random from the available contemporaneous cast of great or inglorious Victorians.