Alan Moore’s "From Hell" graphic novel shows Prince Edward VIIas a weak, dithering bisexual. I realize it’s a historial “what if” but is this specific characterization something he made up out of thin air? Prince Edward’s wiki doesn’t have a whisper of any gay sex adventures.
I haven’t read the graphic novel, but from watching the movie I have to ask, are you sure you’re not thinking of Prince Albert Victor? IIRC he was caught in some real-life scandals along those lines.
Are you sure it wasn’t Prince Albert Victor, his son? Rumors about him include his involvement with the Cleveland Street male brothel and, of course, in the Ripper murders.
Beaten!
I assume you know that all the material for Moore’s novel is stolen from Stephen Knight’s** Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution**. Reading the real book will provide much more information about Prince Albert Victor.
Regarding Albert Victor and Cleveland Street, there’s the argument developed by Andrew Cook that his name was only introduced into the case as a tactical move by Arthur Newton, the solicitor representing several of the accused. By hinting to the police and Home Office that the matter was even more shocking and scandalous than it was already, he was hoping that they’d bury the affair rather than prosecute his clients. Dropping the hint that a young, unmarried senior royal was involved was the ideal threat to use.
On this view, there’s no evidence that he was anything other than heterosexual.
“Stolen” seems completely the wrong word here. Openly using Knight’s theory as the basis for his fictional version is a better description.
Furthermore, it’s clear from the end-matter that Moore thinks Joseph Sickert was a fantasist. Moore’s view of the theory is very, very different from Knight’s.
If by “information” you mean “ramblings of a wild conspiracy theorist no reputable expert takes seriously”. That book has more outright invented fiction than the graphic novel based upon it.
Let’s not forget the earlier cinematic take of the same theory- MURDER BY DECREE with Christopher Plummer & James Mason as Holmes & Watson.
I messed up the generations. Sorry.
Well, he’s an upper class Brit, so the odds are in favour.
Does Knight’s book have anything to do with the theory that Patricia Cornwell put out in her book on Jack the Ripper? The book was so awful as to be unreadable, but I remember someone named Sickert being involved.
Strictly, yes and no.
Taking developments chronologically:
[ul]Walter Sickert, the notable British painter of the period, certainly did have some level of interest in the Ripper case. He did paint a picture called “Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom”, now in Manchester. He may also have inspired Marie Belloc Lowndes to write her (rather good) Ripper novel The Lodger, though probably only by retelling as true an urban legend of the time.[/ul]
[ul]In 1970 Thomas Stowall proposed Albert Victor as the Ripper.[/ul]
[ul]Someone called Joseph Gorman then started spinning tales that he was the illegitimate son of Sickert and that his father had been friends with Albert Victor and involved in a conspiracy to cover up the latter’s illicit marriage and illegimate child by having Gull stage the murders.[/ul]
[ul]Knight uncritically swallows this “Joseph Sickert” and his stories, thereby launching the “Royal Conspiracy” theory in all its glory. To great success. While proposing a strictly heterosexual scandal, the old allegation about Albert Victor and the Cleveland Street affair gets dragged in to imply that he was the sort to hang out with prostitutes.[/ul]
[ul]In writing From Hell, Moore incorporates this as the most recent celebrated accretion to the case.[/ul]
[ul]Various people then propose that Walter Sickert was the Ripper.[/ul]
[ul]Finally, Cornwell suggests the same.[/ul]
In fairness, Cornwell has explicitly rejected “Joseph Sickert” as irrelevant to her case that Walter Sickert was the Ripper (when the issue was put to her on the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme when her book came out). Yet she does seem to have been strangely blithely oblivious to all this previous history in researching her book.
The suspicion has to be that she only latched onto Sickert in the first place because Gorman and Knight had so successfully dragged him into the public conciousness in relation to the case. Ignoring this dodgy tradition behind her solution is one reason she produced such a shite book.
Thanks, bonzer. That’s helpful.