In an essay published in the mid-1980s, Christopher Frayling wrote that ‘“Jack the Ripper” remains the elusive figure he always was: a space in the files, an absence which has been given a name by “an enterprising journalist”, and a character by successive writers, reporters and members of the reading public.’ Books on the series of murders of prostitutes in the autumn and winter of 1888 in the Whitechapel district of East London by an unknown figure who has been turned by popular legend into ‘Jack the Ripper’ have proliferated in recent decades. There have been continual attempts to solve the crimes and name the killer – as in the crime writer Patricia Cornwell’s exhaustive endeavours to prove that Jack the Ripper was the painter Walter Sickert – as well as a series of critical and cultural studies.

In reconsidering Jack the Ripper in this chapter, I look at some of the representations, early and recent, that have grown out of the Ripper murders of 1888, and examine the fascination with this particular moment of Victorian crime. I explore one text in detail: Marie Belloc Lowndes’s novel of 1913, The Lodger, which merits renewed attention for several reasons. It is to this fictionalized version of the Ripper murders that a number of film directors turned, as I discuss at the close of the chapter, including Alfred Hitchcock, John Brahm and Maurice Elvey. The novel not only produces its own version of the Ripper narrative but is a form of metanarrative, embedding already existing accounts within itself. It is, moreover, one of the very few representations of the murders to have been written by a woman, and it gives a central place to a woman’s response – that of the landlady, Mrs Bunting – in whose house the Ripper figure lodges, and about whom she remains silent, despite her suspicions.