10 Theories About The Identity Of Jack The Ripper

Lewis Carroll, the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, is best known as the imagination behind Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the beloved children's tale, and Through the Looking Glass. Works that have captured the imagination for over a century.

He has also been put forward as a possible suspect in the Jack the Ripper murders.

This rather bizarre theory originates with the book Jack the Ripper, Light-Hearted Friend, which was authored by Richard Wallace and published in 1996. It claims that Carroll, along with colleague Thomas Vere Bayne, were behind the ripper murders, based on anagrams taken primarily from two of Carroll's works: The Nursery Alice, and Sylvie and Bruno, the latter being the final novel Carroll published in his lifetime.

Both works were initially published in 1889, the year after the murders; Wallace contends that passages in the book contain hidden yet extremely detailed depictions of the killings. Given The Nursery Alice was an adaptation of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland for younger readers, this claim was, not surprisingly, somewhat shocking.

According to Wallace, The Jabberwocky also contains anagrams pointing to Carroll as the killer.

"‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: / All mimsy were the borogoves, / And the mome raths outgrabe," for example, becomes, per Wallace, something more sinister and twisted:

"Bet I beat my glands til, / With hand-sword I slay the evil gender. / A slimey theme; borrow gloves, / And masturbate the hog more!"