The Camden Town Group in Context

From one of a series of six lectures delivered at the Thanet School of Art between 26 October and 29 November 1934, edited by Paul Pelowski, in Sickert and Thanet: Paintings and Drawings by W.R. Sickert 1860–1942, exhibition catalogue, Ramsgate Library Gallery 1986. (The quotation is from the lecture of 16 November; the transcript is in the collection of Kent County Library, publisher of the exhibition catalogue.)

The murder and its aftermath appeared in newspaper headlines as ‘The Camden Town Murder’, ‘The Camden Town Murder Mystery’ and ‘The Camden Town Affair’. Four paintings (three, with one smaller variant) seem to have been exhibited with specific references to the murder in their titles. There are a number of associated drawings, one of them – a nude study for L’Affaire de Camden Town – inscribed, later, as ‘Study for Murder of Emily Dimmock in St. Paul’s Road, Camden Town’. These and related Camden Town interiors (such as Dawn: Camden Town c.1908–9) are discussed by Wendy Baron in Baron and Richard Shone (eds.), Sickert: Paintings, exhibition catalogue, Royal Academy, London 1992. Baron is the doyenne of Sickert scholars and I am indebted both to her monograph (Sickert, Phaidon, London 1973) and to the Royal Academy catalogue, which includes illuminating essays by Richard Shone (‘Walter Sickert, the Dispassionate Observer’) and Anna Gruetzner Robins (‘Sickert “Painter-in-Ordinary” to the Music Hall’). Unlike Baron and Shone (but like Robins) I believe that it makes sense to single out for discussion those paintings and studies that are linked directly to the murder as an event, and to connect them to Sickert’s interest in Jack the Ripper.

It was not always a ‘third floor back’: sometimes it was a ‘first floor front’ (like the ‘parlour rooms’ where Emily Dimmock died). Marjorie Lilly accompanied Sickert on some of his searches for the right location: ‘As time went on he seemed to need a fresh garret for almost every picture, as if each one afforded him a separate sharp experience that must be concentrated on a single canvas ... we rapped on endless doors, dived under greasy curtains in narrow halls, climbed rickety stairs to third floor backs ... At last, however, he came upon his treasure trove. A crooked room at the top of a crooked house in Warren Street ... I fear that I failed to appreciate the significance of this grisly chamber. All I saw was a forlorn hole, cold, cheerless ... All he saw was the contre-jour lighting that he loved, stealing in through a small single window, clothing the poor place with light and shadow, losing and finding itself again on the crazy bed and floor. Dirt and gloom did not exist for him; these four walls spoke only of the silent shades of the past, watching us in the quiet dusk’ (Marjorie Lilly, Sickert: The Painter and his Circle, Elek, London 1971, pp.42–3).

Rutter is cited by Quentin Bell, Bad Art, Chatto & Windus, London 1989, p.91; Bell’s own reference to Sickert’s ‘bamboozlement’ is from his review of ‘Sickert at the Tate Gallery’, Listener, 2 June 1960, p.40.

Roger Fry, ‘Mr Walter Sickert’s Pictures at the Stafford Gallery’, Nation, 8 July 1911, p.536; Fry, Prefatory Note to the Contemporary Art Society exhibition at Manchester Corporation Art Gallery, from a clipping in Sickert’s scrapbook in the Sickert Collection, Islington Public Library, p.40.

Baron and Shone (eds.) 1992, p.210, fig.152.

Walter Sickert, ‘The Language of Art’, New Age, 28 July 1910, quoted from Osbert Sitwell (ed.), A Free House! or The Artist as Craftsman: Being the Writings of Walter Richard Sickert, Macmillan, London 1947, p.89.

Anna Gruetzner Robins, Walter Sickert: Drawings, Scholar Press, Aldershot 1996, Appendix: ‘Sickert’s 1911 and 1912 Carfax Exhibitions: A Partial Reconstruction’. I am grateful to Anna Robins for discussing Sickert with me and for the loan of her typescript. We had arrived independently at the conviction that Sickert’s interest in Jack and Ripper constituted one of the subtexts for the Camden Town Murder paintings, but we treat the issue rather differently.

Sickert often gave paintings titles only after they were completed. This would have been even more likely with drawings which had an independent existence only when exhibited or sold. But I shall argue that The Camden Town Murder titles were not an afterthought, a publicity peg or a piece of mischief but a considered reference to the murder itself, which was the motor for these images, temporarily focusing a wider interest in two-figure interiors.

Stella Tillyard has argued this in a stimulating essay, ‘The End of Victorian Art: W.R. Sickert and the Defence of Illustrative Painting’, in Brian Allen (ed.), Towards a Modern Art World, Yale University Press, New Haven and London 1995. I am indebted to her in several respects, despite differing from her conclusions. She sees the murder paintings and their studies as a narrative sequence ‘plotted at three interconnected levels’, so that the narrative runs from transaction (the drawing of the couple seated in bed, no.268 in Baron 1973), to engagement (La Belle Gâtée), to the deed just done (The Camden Town Murder), to the murderer’s final glance before he leaves (L’Affaire de Camden Town). (In fact I think the slimmer, clean-shaven man in the first drawing is not the same model as in the others and looks remarkably like Sickert.) Tillyard sees the story of the murder itself as inseparable from the wider narrative of social and moral degeneration (of which crime was a symptom), which was itself part of the millenarian mood of the fin-de-siècle. This is undoubtedly how – in more conservative quarters – the pictures were read. But I think that Sickert is more equivocal than this and that that is what keeps his paintings alive. As images of death these are resolutely modern (banal, inconsequential) with the detachment of the newspaper.

On titles see John Fisher, ‘Entitling’, Critical Inquiry, vol.11, no.2, December 1984, pp.286–98; Gérard Genette, ‘Structure and Functions of the Title in Literature’, Critical Inquiry, vol.14, no.4, Summer 1988, pp.692–720; and now – surely the definitive word – John Welchman, Invisible Colors: A Visual History of Titles, Yale University Press, New Haven and London 1997. Genette sees the function of titles as designation (of the work), indication (of the content) and seduction (of the consumer): ‘A good title should say enough to excite curiosity, and little enough not to saturate it’ (p.718). Although a painting is not a mass-produced commodity like a book, a provocation of Sickert’s murder titles was useful publicity for the Camden Town Group in 1911. But it would be a mistake to see Sickert’s ‘capricious’ way with titles as nothing other than his own version of Whistler’s symbolist exit from subject matter into an insistence on the primarily formal properties of the work. Sickert, almost uniquely, wanted to retain some sense of narrative at the centre of a painting of modern life. Fisher insists: ‘Not all artworks are titled. Not all artworks need to be titled. But when an artwork is titled, for better or for worse, a process of interpretation has inextricably begun’ (p.298). Welchman points out that before the 1860s most titles were denotative, broadly unequivocal and unmischievous. ‘Modern’ titling practices he sees as divided between the (traditionally) decorative, the connotative (stretching to the allusive and even, with dada and surrealism, the absurd) and the ‘conclusively modernist practice of advertising the absence of a title through the description “Untitled”’ (or through numbering or other non-referential designations) (pp.2, 7–8). He points to the necessary intertextuality effected between the press photograph and text (whether title, caption or article), but this was already anticipated in the nineteenth-century illustrated journalism from which, along with newspaper headlines and music hall songs, Sickert took his cue.

Walter Sickert, ‘The Whistler Exhibition’, Burlington Magazine, July 1915, in Sitwell (ed.) 1947, p.35.

Hilton Kramer, ‘Justice to Walker Sickert’, Modern Painters, vol.5, no.4, Winter 1922, p.13. Kramer points out that you ‘can’t tell’ that the woman in the painting is dead, which is true, given the approximations of Sickert’s handling and the fact that ‘Camden Town Murder’ is no longer a topical catchphrase. It is beside the point, however, insofar as Sickert invited his first audience to respond to these paintings in terms of its familiarity with this and related crimes of sexual violence: the Morning Post and his other reviewers knew well enough that this was a corpse.

Simon Watney, in English Post-Impressionism, Studio Vista, London 1980, also insists, pace Dr Baron, that Sickert’s titles are ‘indispensable guides to our understanding of his art’ signifying ‘a desired angle of viewing which ranges from the ironic ... to the frankly quotidian’ (p.138). Kaja Silverman has discussed in the case of Courbet’s Origin of the World – a painting with something of the same sexual focus as L’Affaire de Camden Town – how the title pulls the image into a different semantic space: it ‘isolates that representation from the all-too-familiar beaver shots with which it might seem otherwise indistinguishable and obliges it to circulate as a transgressively maternal image – an image that shows the mother as only a prostitute “should” be seen and which in the process forces a redefinition of both categories’ (Kaja Silverman, ‘Liberty, Maternity, Commodification’, in Mieke Bal and Inge Boer (eds.), The Point of Theory: Practices of Cultural Analysis, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 1994, p.26).

Lou Klepac (introductory essay, The Drawings of Walter Richard Sickert, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth 1979, p.11) says this begins with the Venice paintings of 1903, when he first sees the possibilities of literary painting and Charles Keene, always admired, begins to have an influence on the composition of figures in interiors imbued with a certain social and psychological intensity.

Walter Sickert, ‘A Critical Calendar’, English Review, March 1912, quoted in Baron and Shone (eds.) 1992, p.213: ‘A painter may tell his story like Balzac, or like Mr. Hichens. He may tell it with relentless impartially, he may pack it tight, until it is dense with suggestion and refreshment, or his dilute stream may trickle to its appointed crises of adultery, sown thick with deprecating and extenuating generalisations about “sweet women” ... our insular decadence in painting can be traced back ... to puritan standards of propriety. If you may not treat pictorially the ways of men and women, and their resultant babies, as one enchained comedy or tragedy, human and de moeurs, the artist must needs draw inanimate objects – picturesque if possible. We must affect to be thrilled by scaffolding, or seduced by oranges.’

Walter Sickert, ‘The Post-Impressionists’, Fortnightly Review, January 1911, in Sitwell (ed.) 1947, p.197. Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1881), Penguin, Harmondsworth 1963, p.76: ‘[Isabel Archer] found the Misses Molyneux sitting in a vast drawing-room ... in a wilderness of faded chintz.’ Perhaps Sickert thought of the Misses Molyneux, sisters to Lord Warburton, as characters in his ‘Goosocracy’.

Cited in Penelope Curtis, ‘Introduction’, in W.R. Sickert: Drawings and Paintings 1890–1942, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, Liverpool 1989, p.6.

Walter Sickert, ‘The Language of Art’, New Age, 28 July 1910, in Sitwell (ed.) 1947, p.89. See also ‘The Royal Academy’, English Review, August 1912, ibid., p.74, on the tiny figure of a thatcher, applied, ‘like a postage stamp’, on a roof of a far off cottage in a painting by Millet: ‘Millet was giving here just that something that only the pencil or the brush can give, an emotion whose bouquet will not survive decanting from the skin of painting into that of letters.’

There were anonymous double page spreads in the Illustrated Police Budget and the Illustrated Police News on the same day: 21 September 1907, pp.8–9.

Roger Fry, ‘Mr Walter Sickert’s Pictures at the Stafford Gallery’, Nation, 8 July 1911, p.536.

Daily Telegraph, 22 June 1911, p.8. The review acknowledges that Sickert’s paintings are ‘bold and masterly of their kind’ but wonders ‘how this valiant young advanced guard can keep up their spirits in the depressing atmosphere created by such a designation as “The Camden Town Group”’.

Commentator, 12 July 1911, p.119.

Or Conrad: see for example the Illustrated London News, 24 February 1912 [in Sickert’s cuttings book, p.85]: ‘If Mr Conrad went to the back bed-sitting-rooms of Camden Town for his drama, his reporting would match Mr Sickert’s; it has the same genius for the instantaneous selection of the inevitable detail’; see also the Observer, 9 March 1913, on Sickert’s etchings at the Carfax Gallery: ‘Of course, the puritanical mind may object to that series of sordid and gross bedroom scenes suggested by the revolting details of the Camden Town murder. It would object to them, as it objected to Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary”.’

John Rothenstein, Modern English Painters, vol.1, revised edn, Macdonald and Jane’s, London 1976, p.53: ‘How poorly, even at the height of his powers, he could on occasion draw is apparent not only in acknowledged failures, but in such a widely admired picture as The Camden Town Murder ... The torso of the recumbent woman, a confusion of clumsy planes which fail to describe the form, would do no credit to a student; the hands of both woman and man are shapeless. This picture shows in its extreme degree the innate weakness as a draughtsman and summariness as a designer against which he fought a lifelong, but in the main a glorious battle’; the next page refers to ‘the wretched Camden Town Murder’.

L’Affaire de Camden Town is in a private collection; I am most grateful to its owner, who kindly granted access to it.

Lilly 1971, p.16.

Tate Gallery; reproduced in Baron and Shone (eds.) 1992, p.168.

Bram Dijkstra, ‘Dead Ladies and the Fetish of Sleep’, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York 1986, pp.50–63.

Wendy Baron (1973, p.84) points out that there are echoes of Bonnard in Sickert’s nudes painted in France in 1904–5, and that Sickert had many opportunities to see his work – they shared private collectors (including André Gide) and a dealer (Bernheime-Jeune). On the expressive deployment of figural and spatial arrangements in paintings of the bourgeois interior, see Susan Sidlauskas, ‘Psyche and Sympathy: Staging Interiority in the Early Modern Home’, in Christopher Reed (ed.), Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture, Thames and Hudson, London 1996, pp.65–80.

Lilian Browse, Sickert, Rupert Hart-Davis, London 1960, p.30.

Basil Hogarth (ed.), Trial of Robert Wood (The Camden Town Case), William Hodge, London and Edinburgh 1936, p.1. It had apparently faded from view by the time that George Orwell came to write his satirical essay on the ‘Decline of the English Murder’, since although he dated our ‘great period in murder, our Elizabethan period, so to speak’ to the years between 1850 and 1925 the Camden Town Murder is not one of the nine cases of ‘murderers whose reputation has stood the test of time’; reprinted in Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays, Secker and Warburg, London 1950. (On the other hand, although he dated it, perhaps by mistake, to 1919, he noted that there was ‘another very celebrated case which fits into the general pattern but which I had better not mention by name, because the accused man was acquitted’, p.197). The Times, with far less interest in the trial than the popular dailies, still carried reports on 13, 14, 17 and 21 September; 1, 7, 8, 15, 16, 22, 23 and 29 October; 7, 13, 14, 15, 21, 23, and 29 November; and on 5, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18 and 19 December. The Daily Mirror front page featured the trial on several issues running during December 1907.

The account that follows is drawn from the contemporary press and from Hogarth (ed.) 1936. This includes transcripts from the trial together with an introduction and two appendices – Sir Hall Caine’s ‘The Law and the Man: A Psychological Study of the Great Trial’ and Robert Wood’s letter to his brother at the end of the first day – as well as a useful chronology of events. See also Edward Marjoribanks, The Life of Sir Edward Marshall Hall, Victor Gollancz, London 1930; and David Napley, The Camden Town Murder in the series Great Murder Trials of the Twentieth Century, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London 1987.

According to evidence from the police surgeon Dr John Thompson, the carotoid artery, windpipe, jugular vein and larynx had been severed cleanly down to the dorsal vertebrae; the weapon was never found. His statement was reported in the Police Budget, 16 November 1903, p.3, and is included in Hogarth (ed.) 1936, p.6.

St Pancras Chronicle, 13 September 1907, p.4; 20 September 1907, p.5.

Penny Illustrated Paper, 28 December 1907, p.430.

Hogarth (ed.) 1936, p.41. Wood had opportunity, a false alibi (dramatically exposed) and a poor demeanour in the witness box; on the other hand the evidence against him was contradictory and circumstantial, and the judge, in his summing-up, suggested ‘reasonable doubt’. The jury returned a verdict of ‘not guilty’ in fifteen minutes. Hogarth’s analysis of the case acknowledges that the prosecution was woven on ‘a web of circumstance’ gossamer thin, but concludes that Wood escaped lightly the damning inferences of the Crown witnesses and his own duplicity.

Napley 1987, p.viii.

See for example Beth Kalikoff, Murder and Moral Decay in Victorian Popular Literature, UMI Research Press, Ann Arbor 1986. She cites one of Henry Mayhew’s informants in London Labour and the London Poor, who observed that notorious murders were ‘great goes’ in street literature.

Daily Mail, 13 December 1907, p.8.

Walter Sickert to Nan Hudson, from 6 Mornington Crescent [1907], Ethel Sands Papers, Tate Archive, TGA 9125: ‘This is to tell you I have got entangled in a bunch of a dozen or so interiors on the first floor here. A typical lodgings first-floor. If you are in London any day and could come I should so like to show you a set of “studies of illumination half-done [sic, no closing”]. I am very much interested and shall stay till they are done. A little Jewish girl of 13 or so with red-hair and a nude alternate days.’

Wendy Baron is confident that Sickert would have followed reports of the Camden Town murder and trial in the press. Lilian Browse quotes a description of Sickert’s sitting room in Brighton from a visitor who found ‘newspapers covering the floor over which I was requested to step carefully; they were not to protect the carpet from paint as I at first supposed, but spread there in case he wanted to refer to certain articles in them he had found of special interest, and during lunch he suddenly jumped up and searched for one he wanted to read to me’ (Browse 1960, p.29, from a letter written to her by Miss Elfrida Lucas).

Baron, in Baron and Shone (eds.) 1992, p.210: ‘There is an oral tradition (told to the compiler by Rex Nan Kivell of the Redfern Gallery, London) that Sickert employed Robert Wood ... as his model ... Perhaps the tradition was partially distorted in the telling: for example, if not Wood, Sickert’s model could have been another of the male protagonists in Emily Dimmock’s history, for example, Bertram Shaw the railwayman’. This is an intriguing idea, but it is not borne out by a contemporary description of Bertram Shaw as ‘a thin-featured, pale faced, slightly-built young man’ (Lloyd’s Weekly News, 22 September 1907, p.7).

As conveyed in the press: see for example the News of the World, 22 September 1907, p.9. Napley (1987, p.29) gives a contemporary description of Wood’s ‘long delicate hands and tapering fingers; deep-set cavernous eyes and glistening eyeballs’, high cheekbones and broad, twitching mouth.

Sickert’s ‘Mesopotamia-Cézanne’ (a review of Clive Bell’s Art, in New Age, 5 March 1914, pp.312–13) dismisses Lombroso’s tables of ‘genius’ on which his conclusions are based: ‘When we find Lombroso deducing immense and far-reaching laws on genius from tables in which Henner, and others still less consequent, stand for examples of genius in panting, we are inclined to suspect that Lombroso is perhaps only a high-class and extremely entertaining Mr. Gribble.’ (Anna Gruetzner Robins has identified this reference: Theodore Graham Gribble was the author of The 50 Centimetre Slide-Rule as applied to Tracheometry and Curve-ranging, 1912.) Lombroso was nevertheless an influential writer on deviance and degeneration, one of the founders of post-Darwinian criminal anthropology. He further systematised, and made scientifically respectable, the correlation between physical appearance and disposition of character which (though it goes back to Aristotle) was at the heart of Victorian phrenology and physiognomy. In L’Uomo delinquente (1876), translated as Criminal Man (1891), Lombroso claimed to have identified an atavistic criminal type with a tendency to ‘outstanding ears, abundant hair, a sparse beard, enormous frontal sinuses and jaws, a square and projecting chin, broad cheekbones’. See William Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture and the Novel, 1880–1940, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1994, p.92. The profile of the male protagonist in L’Affaire de Camden Town would slip easily into Lombroso’s imagery of ‘criminal types’, and approximates to that of the prisoner in the dock in the Punch cartoon (22 February 1896), reproduced in Greenslade, p.95. See also Mary Cowling, The Artist as Anthropologist: The Representation of Type and Character in Victorian Art, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1989.

Letter from Ethel Sands to Nan Hudson, Sands Papers, Tate Archive, TGA 9125, quoted in Wendy Baron, Miss Ethel Sands and her Circle, Peter Owen, London 1977, p.98, where it is assumed to date from about 1912. Sickert was trying to dissuade them from taking themselves and their own surroundings as pictorial subject matter. ‘Of course he hated mine, and though he tried to be nice and helpful, said I must stop painting interiors and still life for a bit. There I think he’s right. Suggested I should go and do a prize fighter he’s having at Granby St. next week with a naked lady sitting on his knee! Rather a tempting offer!’

Illustrated Police Budget, 30 November 1907, p.2 (in the same issue as a continuing account of ‘The Camden Town Murder Mystery’).

Dimmock’s body was wrongly described in the caption to the Illustrated Police Budget image as ‘otherwise mutilated’.

Baron’s entry on The Camden Town Murder, in Baron and Shone (eds.) 1992, p.208, makes this point, crediting Shone (Walter Sickert, Phaidon, Oxford 1988, p.51) with drawing attention to a famous music hall song of Tom Costello’s, ‘At Trinity church I met my doom’, which includes the lines ‘Now we live in a top back room / Up to my eyes in dept for renty’.

Police Illustrated News, 12 October 1888, reproduced in Judith Walkowitz, ‘Jack the Ripper and the Myth of Male Violence’, Feminist Studies, vol.8, no.3, Fall 1982, p.553.

Hogarth (ed.) 1936, p.174.

Sitwell (ed.) 1947, pp.xxxviii–xxxix. The Tichborne case, which turned on the true identity of a claimant to Tichborne baronetcy, had made newspaper headlines when Sickert was eleven. There is a small collection of Tichborne ephemera, assembled by Sickert and in his possession at his death, in the library at Lincoln’s Inn (ms 827). (Sickert was rumoured to be planning a book on him and it includes pamphlets, books, photographs and a signed framed photograph.) Perhaps there was once a parallel file on Jack the Ripper, the other ‘immutable monument’. Sitwell believed that apart from its ‘intrinsic and abiding horror’, the story of the Ripper interested Sickert because he thought he knew the identity of the murderer (the mysterious veterinary student who had preceded him as a tenant in one of his lodgings). Sickert was likely to have been mistaken, but was apparently convinced that he had written the name in the margin of a French edition of Casanova’s memoirs lent to William Rothenstein. He tried to get it back, but it had been lent to Albert Rutherston (Rothenstein’s brother), who lost it in the blitz (pp.xxxix–xl).

Lilly 1971, all quotations from p.15. In Poe’s The Purloined Letter, Auguste Dupin explains that part of his method is to ‘fashion the expression of my face, as accurately as possible, in accordance with the expression of [the perpetrator’s], and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with the expression’ (quoted in Wendy Lesser, Pictures at an Execution, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1993, pp.56–7). If this was what Sickert was doing, it was not in order to give character and motive to his painted physiognomies in a traditional way. We get some sense of them, but not much. We are blocked by the opacity and understatement of the facture. Charles Keene used to keep hanging on pegs in his studio the costumes he wore to pose for the characters in his drawings (Sitwell ed. 1947, p.xxiv). According to Clive Bell, Sickert was ‘naughty by nature and he never ceased to be an actor’: Old Friends: Personal Recollections, Chatto and Windus, London 1956, p.15. He was famous as a dandy and a mimic (his ‘Roger Fry’ was particularly good). Retrospectively and perhaps ironically he titled a 1907 self-portrait The Juvenile Lead: see Baron and Shone (eds.) 1992, p.194.

Lilly 1971, pp.15–16: ‘When the handkerchief had served its immediate purpose it was tied to any doorknob or peg that came handy to stimulate his imagination further, to keep the pot boiling.’ Even the landlady respected the handkerchief, and left it alone when she came in to clean. There is a suggestion of the red neckerchief in The Camden Town Murder painting at Yale.

Denys Sutton, Walter Sickert: A Biography, Michael Joseph, London 1976, p.149. No doubt Sickert’s well-documented obsession, together with his exploitation of the Camden Town Murder for a series of paintings, encouraged those hypotheses that have in the last twenty years identified Sickert as Jack the Ripper or his accomplice. See for example Stephen Knight, Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, Collins, London 1977, which compares Sickert’s painting La Hollandaise with police photographs of the murdered and mutilated Mary Kelly; and Jean Overton Fuller, Sickert and the Ripper Crimes: An Investigation into the Relationship between the Whitechapel Murders of 1888 and the English Tonal Painter Walter Richard Sickert, Mandrake, Oxford 1990. Knight’s and Fuller’s theories rely on information provided by Sickert’s supposed illegitimate son, Joseph Sickert (Fuller claims that Mary Kelly had been engaged as a nanny and blackmailed Sickert after she left). Baron deals briskly with the false claims and premises on which these arguments are based (Baron and Shone eds. 1992, p.213).

Jane Caputi, The Age of Sex Crime, The Women’s Press, London 1988, calls him ‘Father to an Age’ (p.4). See also Deborah Cameron and Elizabeth Frazer, The Lust to Kill: A Feminist Investigation of Sexual Murder, Polity Press, Cambridge 1987, p.181. Already by the turn of the century the Ripper was a mythic, semi-fictional character who could be reinvented in a variety of cultural forms. In 1904 Frank Wedekind made him the means by which Lulu meets her end in Pandora’s Box. His two ‘Lulu’ plays (Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box) provided the basis for Pabst’s film Pandora’s Box (1929) and Alban Berg’s opera Lulu (first preformed 1937). Marie Belloc Lowndes’s Ripper novel, The Lodger (1913), reached thirty-one editions, was translated into eighteen languages and made into five films, beginning with Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger (1926). One Hitchcock specialist claims that he was obsessed with Jack the Ripper for fifty years from The Lodger to Frenzy (1972): see Theodore Price, Hitchcock and Homosexuality: His 50-Year Obsession with Jack the Ripper and the Superbitch Prostitute – A Psychoanalytic View, Scarecrow Press, Metuchen, NJ and London 1992. See also William Rothman, Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1992. Jack the Ripper continues to exert a morbid fascination, as though the compulsion to fill out his pseudonym with a consciousness, a history and a set of motives were irresistible. A plausible hypothesis is set out in Stewart Evans and Bruce Gainey, The Lodger: The Arrest and Escape of Jack the Ripper, Century, London 1995: Francis Tumblety, an Irish-American quack doctor and Fenian, was named in the American press as a suspect after he fled back there (pursued by Scotland Yard) after the murders in 1888. He is alleged to have had a private collection of women’s uteruses. Hall Caine, the English journalist and writer, had moved in his circle, and was later a regular attender at the trial of Robert Wood for the Camden Town Murder. There are currently several tour operators offering guided walks in Ripper territory. ‘Ripping Yarns’ leaves its leaflets in the major London hotels: ‘Jack the Ripper: For a completely different night out why not walk the very streets that were terrorised by a man who became known as Jack the Ripper. We take you where he committed the murders, we tell you how he mutilated his victims and because a picture tells a thousand words as we walk around we show you actual photographs – the only tour that does this ... There is no need to book, just turn up and enjoy yourself.’

This phrase comes from a letter sent to the Central News Agency signed ‘Jack the Ripper’, 28 September 1888. It is quoted in all accounts of the Ripper. See for example Walkowitz 1982, p.551. There are 350 letters in the Scotland Yard files and this, like others, may have been a hoax.

Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis (1885), translated from the 12th German edition and with an introduction by Franklin S. Klaf, Stein and Day, New York 1965, p.59. Krafft-Ebing noted that the murderer did not seem to have had sexual intercourse with his victims ‘but very likely the murderous act and subsequent mutilation of the corpse were equivalents for the sexual act’. Cameron and Frazer argue that sexual murder as a distinctive and fully realised category in sociological and popular thought emerges around the turn of the century in concert with the development of discourses on sexual pathology and ‘scientific’ criminology (1987, p.36); Caputi believes it to be linked not only to the rise of feminism as a political movement but to the development of the poplar press and photographic reproduction, the mass distribution of pornography and the medical elaboration of gynaecology and psychoanalysis (1988, p.12). Sex-murder is a ‘modern’ phenomenon for each of these authors; its appearance before the late nineteenth century is apparently sporadic, but criminal sexology and psychology have produced a category for it by the turn of the century. Walkowitz emphasises the role of the popular press ‘itself a creature of the 1880s, in establishing Jack the Ripper as a media hero ... and in elaborating and interpreting the meaning of the Ripper murders to a “mass” audience’ (1982, p.546). See also Christopher Frayling, ‘The House that Jack Built: Some Stereotypes of the Rapist in the History of Popular Culture’, in Sylvana Tomaselli and Roy Porter (eds.), Rape, Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1986.

Caputi 1988, p.5.

Southern Guardian, quoted ibid., p.12, from Tom A. Cullen, When London Walked in Terror, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston 1965, pp.3–4.

See n.20 above.

Inspector Bucket has caustic views on this kind of illustrated crime journalism in Bleak House: ‘Then, there comes the artist of a picture newspaper, with a foreground and figures ready drawn for anything, from a wreck on the Cornish coast to a review in Hyde Park, or a meeting in Manchester, – and in Mrs Perkins’s own room, memorable evermore, he then and there throws in upon the block, Mr Krook’s house as large as life; in fact, considerably larger ... being permitted to look in at the door of the fatal chamber, he depicts that apartment as three-quarters of a mile long, by fifty yards high; at which the [coroner’s] court is particularly charmed.’ Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1852–3), Chapman and Hall, London 1907, p.446.

The pose is close to the nude in Henri Gervex’s Rolla, based on the poem by Alfred de Musset, and even closer to that in Edouard-Théophile Blanchard’s The Buffoon (both paintings were sent to the Salon of 1878 but Rolla was removed, controversially, before the opening). Both paintings are reproduced in Hollis Clayson, Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era, Yale University Press, New Haven and London 1991, figs.43, 45.

Walter Sickert, ‘A Critical Calendar’, English Review, March 1912, in Sitwell (ed.) 1947, p.176.

Walter Sickert, ‘The Old Ladies of Etching-Needle Street’, English Review, January 1912, in Sitwell (ed.) 1947, p.237.

Sickert’s father had been a regular draughtsman for the Fliegende Blätter, a famous German humorous journal; Sickert himself contributed drawings to the Whirlwind, the Cambridge Observer, the Yellow Book and the New Age.

There are numerous references to Keene in Sickert’s writings. This comes from ‘The Importance of Being Canvas’, Daily Telegraph, 4 March 1925, quoted in Robins 1996, p.15.

I am indebted here to Pamela Fletcher’s paper, ‘Masculinity, Money, and Modern Art: The Sentence of Death by John Collier’, and very grateful to her for sending me a copy after she had delivered it at the conference Rethinking Englishness: English Art 1880–1940, University of York, July 1997. A revised version will appear in David Peters Corbett and Lara Perry (eds.), Modernities and Identities in English Art 1860–1914, Manchester University Press, Manchester 2000. I have not done justice to her argument despite leaning on it heavily, and in particular to the way in which she sees these aesthetic issues as ‘laden with metaphors of commerce and femininity’: the ‘poetic ambiguity which should accrue to art’ she sees as turning into its commercial opposite ‘which threatened to make artistic meaning itself just another commodity’. All further quotations are from her typescript. Collier’s obituary (Times, 12 April 1934, p.17) noted his dislike for the term ‘problem pictures’: ‘They are nothing of the kind ... [they] merely depict the little tragedies of modern life, and I have always endeavoured to make their meaning perfectly plain. If I ever again paint a picture of modern life ... I shall give it a title a yard long, setting forth the life history of the characters, and, if necessary, their names and addresses.’ Sickert responded approvingly that ‘Collier was right in maintaining that all good pictures have told a story, just as Whistler was wrong when he insinuated the reverse’ (Times, 17 April 1934, p.15).

Fletcher ibid., notes that one review, ‘The Royal Academy’, in Reynolds’s Newspaper, 3 May 1908, p.1, discusses the painting in terms of a diagnosis of syphilis and degeneration.

Behind the riddle of Dimmock’s double life was that of Robert Wood. His friends and family believed him incapable of violence and had no idea that he consorted with prostitutes. His employers provided the defending solicitor with £1000 with which to brief counsel. See Hogarth (ed.) 1936, pp.19, 28.

David Peters Corbett, ‘“Gross Material Facts”: Sexuality, Identity and the City in Walter Sickert, 1905–1910’, Art History, vol.21, no.1, March 1998, p.55. Baron considers that the ‘technique and handling of L’Affaire de Camden Town is partly responsible for its brutal effect’ and that the ‘attractive surface of Sickert’s 1907–8 pictures’ disappears as the subject matter calls forth a different treatment (1973, p.111).

In an obituary for Spencer Gore, ‘A Perfect Modern’, New Age, 9 April 1914, Sickert remarked that: ‘The artist is he who can take a piece of flint and wring out of it drops of attar of roses’ (in Sitwell ed. 1947, p.277). The phrase has since been reapplied to Sickert, but he probably borrowed it in the first place from discussions of his own painting by French critics: see for example Adolph Tavernier’s preface to Peintures, Dessins et Pastels de Walter Sickert, Hôtel Drouot sale, 21 June 1909, from which Signac bought L’Affaire de Camden Town (no.15). Tavernier refers to Sickert’s ‘richness of palette, sombre and sober’, and cites Arsène Alexandre’s description of one of his paintings as ‘pétri avec des roses fanées’ (petrified with faded roses) and his comparison of another to a jewel of jet. The copy of this catalogue in the Tate Gallery Library is inscribed ‘Paul Signac 160 [francs?]’ against L’Affaire de Camden Town. No.14, Dans Camden Town, has the same dimensions (14 x 51 cm) as Summer Afternoon or What shall we do for the Rent? (Kirkcaldy Museum and Art Gallery, Fife).

Walter Sickert, ‘The New Life of Whistler’, Fortnightly Review, December 1908, quoted in Rothenstein 1976, vol.1, p.43. Sickert chided Nan Hudson for fiddling over the frames of her pictures, claiming that women were ‘aesthetes’: ‘Pour moi c’est le plus gros mot que je connaisse’ (quoted in Baron 1973, p.114, n.4).

Pace Hilton Kramer, who wrote: ‘True, Sickert carried on a lot about being a “literary” painter, but I take this to have been an element of his cynicism. He knew what was necessary to interest the British public in his work. It is not something he would have boasted about in Paris’ (‘Justice to Walter Sickert’, Modern Painters, vol.5, no.4, Winter 1992, p.13).

Virginia Woolf to Quentin Bell, 26 November [1933], in Nigel Nicolson (ed.), The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol.5, Hogarth Press, London 1979, pp.253–4. Woolf’s pamphlet Walter Sickert: A Conversation (Hogarth Press, London 1934), was republished in 1992 (Bloomsbury Workshop, London), with a useful introduction by Richard Shone. Woolf wrote that there were any number of three volume novels in Sickert’s exhibition and compared him with Dickens, Balzac, Gissing and the early Arnold Bennett. Sickert appeared unexpectedly one tea-time to thank her: ‘up he stumped in a green peaked cap; and said I had written the only criticism worth having in all his life ... He is bitter though against all the Rogers and Clives I imagine; says they dont know a picture from a triangle; here he kissed my hand and said “Whereas you – youre an angel”’ (Woolf to Quentin Bell, 8 March 1934, Letters, vol.5, p.282).

T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers, Thames and Hudson, London 1985, p.100.

Lilian Browse (ed.), Sickert, ‘with an essay on his art by R.H. Wilenski’, Faber and Faber, London 1943, pp.25–6: ‘it was grand to have a highbrow English artist thus illustrating a local cockney tragedy in which a low-brow artist accused of murder was acquitted. But no tittle of these accretions can be discovered in the work itself; for that was just a technical experiment by Sickert who thought it would be fun to take Manet’s Olympia and paint it the other way round.’

Walter Sickert, ‘The naked and the Nude’, New Age, 21 July 1910, extracts reprinted in Sitwell (ed.) 1947, pp.323–7.

Walter Sickert, ‘On the Conduct of a Talent’, New Age, 11 June 1914, in Sitwell (ed.) 1947, pp.330–1.

Walter Sickert, quoted in Lilly 1971, p.28. (Sickert was at a party with George Moore and Max Beerbohm when they fell to discussing Moore’s favourite type of woman – ‘They asked me what I like best and I said, my own particular brand of frump’.) But this does not mean they had no (unlikely) precedents in art. In ‘The naked and the Nude’ Sickert wrote: ‘We remember how Mantegna, in his Dead Christ at the Brera, found inspiration in the unusual aspects of foreshortening, how Degas has incessantly chosen to draw figures from unaccustomed points of view. We must try so to pose, so to light and so to “cut” the nude, that the student can forget the lifeless formulas of generations of ushers, and see what creative artists have ever seen in the nude’ (Sitwell ed. 1947, p.326).

Walter Sickert, ‘The New English and After’, New Age, 2 June 1910, in Sitwell (ed.) 1947, p.59: ‘It is certain that the Impressionists put themselves out more than we do in England. We all live like gentlemen, and keep gentlemen’s hours. A glance round the walls of any New English Art Club exhibition does certainly not give us the sensation of a page torn from the book of life.’

Lloyd’s Weekly News carried regular reports on the Camden Town Murder Trial. George Sims (who attended the trial) wrote a regular column under the heading ‘My Criminal Museum’, discussing Jack the Ripper in the issue of 22 September 1907 a few pages away from an account of the ‘Camden Town Mystery’. On 15 December 1907 Sims reported from the Old Bailey on this ‘Zolaesque story of London by night’, referring to the killing as ‘a black page torn from the book of London Life’ (cover: p.1).

Walter Sickert, ‘The Study of Drawing’, New Age, 16 July 1910, in Sitwell (ed.) 1947, pp.315–16. Sickert’s vigorous facture, however, redeems Tilly Pullen from an alternative fate: that of becoming the drab little caricature of a realist riposte to the idealised nude, ‘stripped of her lendings’ but richly endowed with social particulars. Sickert owned Paul Jamot’s book Degas (Editions de la Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Paris 1924) and marked in the margin Jamot’s observation that the female nude, in the antique manner, no longer existed; the nude would be nothing if it were not modern, if it failed to show ‘la femme de nos jours dans le circonstances et les actions qui l’obligent à se dévêtir’ (p.106). (With other art books that belonged to Sickert, this volume is now in the library of the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London.)

Walter Sickert, ‘The naked and the Nude’, New Age, 21 July 1910, in Sitwell (ed.) 1947, p.327.

Sickert’s work anticipates something of the flavour of film noir, and also of melodrama, to the extent that it shares two of their central concerns: in film noir, the conflation of the mystery of a crime (often in the detective genre) with the mystery of woman or of female sexual desire; and in melodrama, the conflation of the physical with the psychic space of the home, in which the domestic space of women stands also for psychic interiority. This depends on an opposition between the public, ‘masculine’ world of work and the private, ‘feminine’ space of feeling which the prostitute, taking her work back home, crosses and confounds.

There is an extensive literature. See Clark 1985 and Clayson 1991, p.8: ‘[the figure of the prostitute] marked the point of intersection of two widely dissestimated ideologies of modernity: the modern was lived and seen at its most acute and true in what was temporary, unstable, and fleeting; and the modern social relation was understood to be more and more frozen in the form of the commodity ... Hence, the two seemingly antithetical qualities of modernity central to the avant-garde could be resolved in the figure of the prostitute.’ The point was made by Baudelaire, Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin and a number of less illustrious commentators. See also Laurie Teal, ‘The Hollow Women: Modernism, the Prostitute, and Commodity Aesthetics’, Differences, vol.7, no.3, 1995, pp.80–108.

Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, in Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison (eds.), Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology, Harper and Row in association with the Open University, London 1982, p.26.

See Lynda Nead, ‘The Mythology of the Life and Death of the Prostitute’, in Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain, Blackwell, Oxford 1988, pp.140–2.

Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1980.

Wendy Baron, in Baron and Shone (eds.) 1992, p.208.

Bertall, La Queue du chat, ou La Charbonnière des Batignolles, wood engraving in L’Illustration, 3 June 1865, reproduced in Clark 1985, p.145. Stella Tillyard comments on the chamber pot in ‘The End of Victorian Art’, in Allen (ed.) 1995, p.196: ‘The chamberpot – always symbolic of licentiousness, waste, and prostitution in the eighteenth-century caricatures Sickert so admired – adds a note of squalor to the scene.’ I have benefited from her account, while drawing rather different conclusions (it does not seem to me that the paintings are best seen as constituting a narrative sequence, or that the murder pictures – and Ennui – can be linked to ‘degeneration’ in quite this way).

Cocotte de Soho (reproduced in Baron and Shone eds. 1992, p.162), a bare-breasted half-length pastel of 1905, is directly comparable to Manet’s The Blonde with Bare Breasts (1878?), reproduced in Manet 1832–1883, exhibition catalogue, Galerie Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris 1983, p.431.

Marcel Proust, A La Recherche du temps perdu (1913–27), quoted by Françoise Cachin in Galerie Nationales du Grand Palais 1983, p.174. Olympia was transferred from the Luxemburg to the Louvre on 6 January 1907 and hung beside Ingres’s Grande Odalisque in the Salle des Etats (p.176).

Clark (1985, p.109) argues that in the 1860s the ‘category courtisane was what could be represented of prostitution’, that it was ‘a comfortable, general, archaic field of reference’ (p.86), and that Olympia’s notoriety derived from Manet’s refusal of it, or at least, from the refusal of the two identities – courtesan and prostitute – to cohere in her (p.131). He also (p.139) quotes Georges Bataille’s assertion that Olympia is scarcely distinguishable from a crime or a spectacle of death (Manet: Etude biographique et critique, 1955, p.74) – a reprise of some of the cadaver fantasies of the critics of 1865 who saw her naked on a bed as though on a counter at the morgue (for example Victor Fournel, quoted p.97).

Sickert’s sister, Helena Swanick, was an active suffragist and the author of Women in Industry from Seven Points of View, Duckworth, London 1908; The Future of the Women’s Movement, Bell & Sons, London 1913; and an autobiography, I Have Been Young, Gollancz, London 1935). Lilly (1971, p.93) described her as ‘altogether too strong-minded for Sickert, with whom she had little in common; in fact, she rather alarmed him’. In a letter to his friends the painters Ethel Sands and Nan Hudson in 1913, Sickert wrote: ‘I am writing to my sister to put me on her bloody association whatever it is called. If I am a beast I am a just beast, and I have never, except in conversation, come to a definite opinion before on the boring subject. Again you might both of you have condescended to inform me a little on a subject on which I was entirely ignorant’ (Ethel Sands Papers, Tate Archive, TGA 9125; letter dated in pencil 21 October 1913).

See A.D. Nuttall, Why Does Tragedy Give Pleasure?, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1996. Linda Nochlin discusses death and the realist corpse in ‘Death in the Mid Nineteenth Century’, in her Realism, Penguin, Harmondsworth 1971, pp.73–6.

Tillyard, in Allen (ed.) 1995, p.201. Lilly (1971, p.17) recalled Sickert’s preoccupation with criminology and his dramatic exposition of famous murder trials: ‘only unsolved crimes detained him, for the solution of which he had endless plausible theories’.

This is Tzvetan Todorov’s point in The Poetics of Prose, Cornell University Press, Ithaca 1977, quoted in Elisabeth Bronfen, Over her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic, Manchester University Press, Manchester 1992, pp.293–4: ‘As such it depicts two murders, the first committed by the actual murderer, the second by the pure and unpunishable murderer, the detective.’ See also Ernst Bloch, ‘A Philosophical View of the Detective Novel’, in his The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1988, pp.245–64: ‘The problem of the omitted beginning affects the entire detective genre, gives it its form: the form of a picture puzzle, the hidden part of which predates the picture and only gradually enters in to it’ (p.264).

The clues are there, for those who can make sense of them. The story was translated by Baudelaire, and T.J. Clark (1985, p.80) points out that in a letter referring to the Salon of 1865 (and to Olympia), Manet wrote to Baudelaire that he had just finished it – starting from the end, out of curiosity – and had found it ‘remarkable and amusing’. The narrator also relies on the newspapers for evidence in Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841), often considered the first detective story.

For example the Illustrated Police Budget, 5 October 1907, p.3: ‘The Camden Town Mystery. Can you help the police by identifying the writer of these postcards?’ (The News of the World offered a reward.) The modern city demands that the individual exercise the skills of a detective in negotiating the urban environment, and the novel itself came to train and feed ‘this psychology of detection with its intellectual keenness, its suspicion, its playfulness and speculation in the face of what it sees, but created simultaneously an emotional passivity that amounts to a reserve in the face of what can’t be anticipated or understood until the moment when it is unexpectedly revealed’. See Philip Fisher, ‘City Matters: City Minds’, in Jerome Buckley (ed.), The Worlds of Victorian Fiction, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1975, quoted in Peter Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1996, pp.36–7.

Stephen Knight, Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction, Macmillan, London 1988, pp.77, 79. In his The Country and the City (Chatto and Windus, London 1973, pp.17–18) Raymond Williams points out that there is in the Holmes stories ‘a recurrent image of the penetration by an isolated rational intelligence of a dark area of crime’ in the urban labyrinth (quoted in Laurie Langbauer, ‘The City, the Everyday and Boredom: The Case of Sherlock Holmes’, Differences, vol.5, no.3, Fall 1993, p.115). See also Knight’s references, pp.6–7; Ken Worple, Dockers and Detectives: Popular Reading: Popular Writing, Verso, London 1973; Glenn W. Most and William W. Stowe (eds.), The Poetics of Murder: Detective Fiction and Literary Theory, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York 1983; and D.A. Miller, The Novel and the Police, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London 1988.The detective was a new literary and journalistic hero (or a new variant, insofar as police detectives were an invention of the nineteenth century, but the figure who brings resolution after violence and disorder is much more ancient). He takes visual form on the cover of the Police Budget, 12 October 1907, as Detective Inspector Neil arresting Robert Wood. Like the flâneur, that other hero of urban modernity, he is a skilled taxonomer of social types moving anonymously and with ease in the urban crowd. But unlike the flâneur – the amateur in leisurely pursuit of the chance encounter – the detective is critically reflective, direct and purposeful: ‘My name’s Inspector Bucket of the Detective, and I have a duty to perform’ (Dickens 1907, p.333). Perhaps the difference between the flâneur and the detective, at least in literature, lies in the specific relation of the detective to narrative closure: to conclusion and judgement. Holmes is often cited on the proper construal of circumstantial detail but here is a passage from Lady Audley’s Secret, a ‘sensation’ novel by Mary Braddon, published in 1862 (this is precisely the kind of evidence that the prosecution tried, and failed, to weave into a convincing case in the trial of Robert Wood): ‘Circumstantial evidence ... that invisible rope which is woven out of straws collected at every point of the compass, and which is yet strong enough to hang a man. Upon what infinitesimal trifles may sometimes hang the whole secret of some wicked mystery ... A scrap of paper; a shred of some torn garment; the button off a coat; a word dropped incautiously from the overcautious lips of guilt; the fragment of a letter; the shutting or opening of a door; a shadow on a window-blind; the accuracy of a moment; a thousand circumstances so slight as to be forgotten by the criminal, but links of steel in the wonderful chain forged by the science of the detective officer; and lo! the gallows is built up; the solemn bell tolls through the dismal grey of the early morning; the drop creaks under the guilty feet; and the penalty of crime is paid’ (Lady Audley’s Secret [1862], Virago, London 1985, p.104; Robert Audley, who has turned amateur detective, is speaking to Lady Audley, the as yet undiscovered murderer, who drops unconscious at his feet).

Most and Stowe (1983, p.xiv) comment on Freud as a fan of detective fiction, and point out that ‘his therapeutic practice casts the analyst in the role of detective, interpreting clues, uncovering “crimes”, the revealing of the truth’. They discuss Geraldine Pederson-Krag’s classic article ‘Detective Stories and the Primal Scene’ (1949) which ‘attributes the fascination detective novels exert upon their readers to the analogy between the crime to be uncovered and the primal scene’ (pp.13–20). See also Marie Bonaparte, The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Psycho-Analytic Interpretation (1933), trans. John Rodker, Hogarth Press, London 1971, p.456: ‘In all, as Freud first pointed out to me, the unconscious roots of their interest [i.e. detective novels], for us, lies in the fact that the trail the detective follows repeats, though transferred to other activities, the infant’s original sexual investigations.’

Times, 11 July 1911, p.11. (This is a review of the Stafford Gallery exhibition of forty paintings by Sickert, not of his contribution to the Camden Town Group at the Carfax Gallery in June (which included The Camden Town Murders Series No.1 and No.2).

Kalikoff 1986, p.170. Something like the Daily Chronicle commentary on the Camden Town Murder throws into relief how Sickert’s interest in narrative was nevertheless not harnessed to the moral and illustrative certainties of Victorian narrative painting. ‘How awful is the life-picture of the murdered woman – “the lowest of the low”, as they called her, passing at the end of the week as the wife of one man and for the rest of it consorting promiscuously ... and ending it with her throat cut by some stray companion. We need not follow up the theme into the other by-ways of human folly, vice, depravity, and squalor which the evidence opened up to the public gaze. Englishmen are proud of their civilising mission among the “inferior” races in the “dark” countries of the world ... is there not some civilising to be done nearer home? There are savages, as we call them, who would be ashamed to live the life that is led sometimes in Camden Town, and Camden Town is but the particular locality upon which this case has chanced to throw the flashlight revealing the seamy side of low life in London’ (quoted in Hogarth ed. 1936, p.1).

Sexual murder, or Lustmord (in Krafft-Ebing’s German) is defined by the sadistic sexual impulses of the killer and often involves the mutilation of sexual and reproductive parts of the body. Bonaparte claimed that ‘Crimes of blood may be divided into three great categories; crimes of passion, robbery and lust murders’ (1971, p.685). In her Freudian framework, aggression and eroticism are intertwined in the lust murderer and have fixated at, or regressed to, a primitive preoedipal stage in the development of the libido; when a lust murderer appears on the scene ‘a wave of excitement sweeps through the masses. Nor is this simply due to horror but to a strange interest in the crime, which is our deep-rooted sadism’s response to theirs’ (p.688). On Lustmord see also Cameron and Frazer 1987; Beth Irwin Lewis, ‘Lustmord: Inside the Windows of the Metropolis’, in Charles W. Haxthausen and Heidrun Suhr (eds.), Berlin: Culture and Metropolis, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1990, pp.111–40; and Maria Tatar, Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ 1995. Tatar argues that the obsession with sex-murder in the paintings and films of Weimar Germany, particularly by Otto Dix and George Grosz, has been unaccountably overlooked (she counts it a ‘steadfast critical disavowal’). There are many images by Grosz, Dix and others with the title ‘Lustmord’. She reproduces Grosz’s staged photograph of himself as Jack the Ripper (1918) pointing a knife at the genitals of his victim (Eva Peter, later his wife), and a series of paintings of sexual murder by Dix and Grosz dating from 1912 into the 1920s, including Grosz’s The Double Murder in the Rue Morgue 1913. Several of these images predate 1914, but after the war depictions of Lustmord become bound up with mastery and procreation, as well as violence and sexuality; Tatar suggests that this represents ‘a strange effort to balance the gender scales of carnal violence’. These German expressionist images have more in common with the Illustrated Police Budget than with Sickert’s considered ambiguity. Indeed, Dix’s Sexual Murder of 1922 was based on police photographs of a prostitute murdered in Hamburg in 1900, published, with others, in Erich Wulffen’s The Sexual Criminal, a book Dix knew well (see Lothar Fischer, Otto Dix: Ein Malerleben in Deutschland, Nicolaische Verlagsbuchhandlung, Berlin 1981, pp.81–2). Sickert may have thought or felt himself into the part for the sake of the painting but the Germans go further: Tatar notes Grosz’s trademark reed cane on the room divider in Murder on Acker Street 1916 and reproduces Dix’s painting Sex Murderer: Self Portrait 1920.

On the ‘word city’ – ‘the accumulation of small bits and rich streams of text’, see Fritzsche 1996, p.1 and passim (I am indebted to this book).

Figures from Derek Hudson, ‘Reading’, in Simon Nowell-Smith (ed.), Edwardian England 1901–1914, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1964, p.320. In 1910 the number of papers published in Britain totalled 2,785, 734 of them in London (most were weeklies, and many were specialist titles). The Times cost 3d., and addressed itself with an air of gravitas to a cultivated reader; the popular dailies, following the lead of Harmsworth’s Daily Mail, cut their prices to a halfpenny and were noted for a more relaxed, often sensational, interest in everyday events (often appealing to women readers).

I am indebted here to Benedict Anderson’s discussion of newspapers in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Verso, London 1983, pp.38–40. Anderson points out that beyond its own existence as a commodity, subsidised by the advertising of other commodities, in measuring ‘the steady onward clocking of homogenous, empty time’ the newspaper alludes to the parcelling up and commodification of labour-power itself (p.37). He quotes Hegel (p.39), but without a source. Also of interest here is Christine Poggi, ‘Mallarmé, Picasso, and the Newspaper as Commodity’, Yale Journal of Criticism, Fall 1987, pp.133–51. Referring to Mallarmé’s sense of the uncut book as intact and virginal, she points out that to read a newspaper, by contrast, ‘is to encounter the flat, open pages of the commodity which, like the prostitute, disports itself with all comers’ (p.136).

Fritzsche 1996, p.23.

Proust’s A La Recherche includes a wonderful passage in which Charles Swann ponders the emphemerality of newspapers. ‘The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance. Suppose that, every morning, when we tore the wrapper off our paper with fevered hands, a transmutation were to take place, and we were to find inside it – oh! I don’t know; shall we say Pascal’s Pensées? ... And then, in the gilt and tooled volumes which we open once every ten years ... we should read that the Queen of the Hellenes had arrived at Cannes, or that the Princess de Léon had given a fancy dress ball. In that way we should arrive at a happy medium’ (In Search of Lost Time, vol.1: Swann’s Way, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, rev. D.J. Enright, Vintage, London 1996, pp.28–9).

Roland Barthes, ‘The Structure of the Fait-Divers’ (1964), in Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Ill. 1972, quoted in Fritzsche 1996, p.177.

Walter Sickert, in the catalogue for Walter Bayes, March 1918, Leicester Galleries, London (unpaginated).

Walter Sickert, ‘The Study of Drawing’, New Age, 16 June 1910, p.156. Cf. Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World (1968), trans. Sacha Rabinovitch, Harper and Row, New York 1971, p.85, who cites ‘the Kierkegaardian character who, before his horrified wife and terrified children, tore his newspaper to shreds screaming: “Everything, everything has now become possible!”’.

It was also a way of affecting the detachment Sickert believed necessary to the artist. He warned his friends Ethel Sands and Nan Hudson against painting each other and their own milieu: ‘it gives a want of variety to your oeuvre and something amateurish ... Banish your own person, your life and that means you and your affections and yourself from your theatre ... that is good artistic hygiene’; quoted in Baron 1977, p.97.

‘Round the Galleries’, Sunday Times, 29 December 1912, quoted from Sickert’s book of his press cuttings in Islington Public Library.

Walter Sickert, ‘Drawing from the Cast’, New Age, 23 April 1914, quoted in Sitwell (ed.) 1947, p.321.

These paintings are discussed in Baron 1971 and by Baron in Baron and Shone (eds.) 1992. The Poet and his Muse is reproduced only in the former (fig.173). By the latter publication (almost twenty years later), various factors had led Baron to identify The Studio with Le Grand Miroir, a painting exhibited by Sickert in Paris in January 1907, and to date it to c.1906–7 (p.182, reproduced p.183). Sickert also painted two self-portraits in 1907, now known as The Juvenile Lead and The Painter in his Studio.

This is not the same thing as claiming that Sickert sometimes had sex with his models or that he used prostitutes as models, both of which he seems to have done.

Various scholars discuss the prostitute’s central position within modernism and, particularly in relation to Baudelaire, the identification of the artist’s role in the modernising cultural field as itself a kind of prostitution. See for example Charles Bernheimer, Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1989; Susan Buck-Morss, ‘The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering’, New German Critique, vol.39, 1986, pp.90–140; Robert Scholes, ‘In the Brothel of Modernism: Picasso and Joyce’, In Search of James Joyce, University of Illinois Press, Urbana 1992; Angelika Rauch, ‘The Trauerspeil of the Prostituted Body, or Woman as Allegory of Modernity’, Cultural Critique, vol.10, 1988, pp.77–88; Clayson 1991; and Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque Reason: The Austhetics of Modernity, Sage, London 1994, pp.97–105. On Bourdieu and the cultural field see Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel, Polity Press, Cambridge 1996, and Randal Johnson (ed.), The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, Polity Press, Cambridge 1993, which has sections on Flaubert and Manet.

Marriage as a Trade is the title of a controversial book by the suffragist and writer Cicely Hamilton, first published in 1909 (The Women’s Press, London 1981). Sickert is quoted from ‘Goosocracy’ (i.e. rule by the fashionable ‘super-goose’, painted by such as Sargent), New Age, 12 May 1910, in Sitwell (ed.) 1947, p 69. Laurie Teal (‘The Hollow Women: Modernism, the Prostitute, and Commodity Aesthetics’, Differences, vol.7, no.3, 1995, pp.80–108) discusses how the prostitute as sexualised flesh is opposed to the ‘artificially adorned femininity represented by commodity culture’ and ‘thus rather confusingly becomes an ally in modernism’s campaign against bourgeois femininity’ (p.83).

Émile Zola, Une Nouvelle manière en peinture, a tract written on the occasion of his viewing a collection of Manet’s paintings in advance of their being shown at the Exposition Universelle (1867), quoted by Carol Armstrong, ‘Manet/Manette: Encoloring the I/Eye’, Encoding the Eye, Stanford Humanities Review, vol.2, nos.2–3, Spring 1992, p.1. I am indebted to her article, which is devoted to exploring the implications of Zola’s ‘characteristic treatment of a painting by Manet as a painting of Manet, a kind of self-portrait in disguise’ (p.22).

Rothenstein remarked that Sickert ‘spoke constantly of painting as “a rough and racy wench”’ (1976, vol.1, p.20). See also Sitwell (ed.) 1947, p.92: ‘The refined are perhaps further from art, who is a robust and racy wench, than any class.’ On Symphony in White, No.3, see ‘The New Life of Whistler’, Fortnightly Review, December 1908, ibid., p.17.

Corbett (1998, p.59) assumes that the ‘observing male figures in all these works stand in for the painter and Anne Wagner prompted me to develop the link between the nude and the ‘body of painting’.

As for example in Courbet, The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory Summing Up Seven Years of My Artistic Life (1855), discussed by Linda Nochlin, ‘Courbet’s Real Allegory: Rereading “The Painter’s Studio”’, in Sarah Faunce and Linda Nochlin (eds.), Courbet Reconsidered, The Brooklyn Museum, New York 1988, pp.17–41 (especially pp.31–2).

See Wendy Baron, ‘The Perversity of Walter Sickert’, Arts Magazine, vol.55, 1980, pp.125–9. She notes in particular the oddity of Sickert’s ‘sudden outbreak of prudery’ over the ‘phallic aesthetics’ he ascribed to Lewis and Epstein in 1914, given the controversy surrounding his own explicit and ‘unsavoury’ nudes.

Bronfen 1992, p.x.

Paul Konody, Observer, 12 May 1912, p.6.

Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’, Illuminations, quoted in Wendy Lesser, Pictures at an Execution, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. and London 1993, p.17.

Ethel Sands Papers, Tate Archive, TGA 9125 (undated). The letter continues: ‘I want to create a Salon d’automn milieu in London and you could both help me very much.’ The aim was to: ‘Accustom people weekly to see work in a different notation from the current English one. Make it clear that we all have work for sale at prices that people of moderate means could afford. (That a picture costs less than a supper at the Savoy)’; quoted in Baron 1977, p.65.

Sir William Blake Richmond to Robert Ross, 16 January 1911, quoted in Margery Ross (ed.), Robert Ross: Friend of Friends, Jonathan Cape, London 1952, p.197 (I owe this reference to Shone 1988, p.4). Sickert wrote to Ethel Sands (Sands Papers, Tate Archive, TGA 9125, undated), that Fred Brown had written to terminate their friendship because of ‘the sordid nature of my pictures since the Camden Town Murder series ... I am rather unaccustomed to be disliked. It is no doubt a salutary experience.’ A later letter, also undated, records that ‘Dear Brown has revised his opinion and is willing to continue our old relations’, but also that Gilman has been ‘naif’ and that ‘Brown is the 3rd or 4th person who after explanations from me have modified their views’. Baron suggests that Brown’s letter had been partly prompted by something else – Sickert’s resumption of his teaching post at the Westminster Technical Institute in the autumn of 1915, at the expense of Gilman, who had taught there in his stead since 1912.

C. Lewis Hind, Daily Chronicle, 24 March 1913, p.4: ‘Lingering there [at Fitzory Street] the other afternoon, listening and talking, actually I began to understand Mr Sickert’s artistic intention in choosing the petty and notorious Camden Town murder and other sordid interior happenings as subjects for pictures and sketches ... When I first saw them I loathed them, but when familiarity (that is the advantage of these Saturday afternoons; you get familiar with the artist’s aims) had lessened my repellence I began to appreciate the workmanship and the vision of these pictures, and found myself listening with enjoyment to Mr Sickert’s suave and gracious explanation to an elderly lady ... that his art is not meant for the walls of the drawing-room. I said to myself: “True! There is an art for the wall, and an art for the portfolio.” Walter Sickert’s art [with exceptions] ... is for the portfolio. I can imagine a delightful evening – a few chosen friends who care about art even when it is “ugly” and “an insult to the intelligence”, a portfolio of Sickert’s and other Ishmaelitsh, anarchical things, and real talk about them – good, groping, excited talk’. Hind’s enthusiasm, and the fact that he gives the location and time of Fitzroy gatherings, suggests a tacit advertisement of them. This in turn implies the possibility of a motivated, but more casual audience than that composed of invitees.

Charles Harrison, ‘Cézanne: Fantasy and Imagination’, Modernism/Modernity, vol.4, no.3, September 1997, p.6: ‘One way to distinguish not only a modern figure painting, but a modern still life or even a modern landscape, is first to ask, “Who is looking at this picture?” and then to ask whether or not the question is relevant ... to the quality of the painting’s effects.’

Walter Sickert, ‘Degas’, Burlington Magazine, November 1917, in Sitwell (ed.) 1947, p.147. Sickert claimed that the ‘expression, when promptly and dutiously retailed by me in London, was received with raised hands by the English Press. The somewhat excusable prurience of our Puritans could not convince of anything being seen through a key-hole but indecencies, and on the strength of this subjective and mathematically erroneous opinion, Degas was promptly classified as a pornographer.’

There is a certain cheery sprightliness to the wallpaper and a liveliness of handling at odds with the sinister subject and looming figure (whose profile is a good deal more threatening and neanderthal than it seems in reproduction). The diversity of colour and brushwork – for example in the wonderful pinks, blues and dove-greys crisscrossing the sheet at the bed-end – is also subdued in reproduction.

Louis Vauxcelles, ‘La Vie Artistique: Exposition Walter Sickert à Félix Fénéon’, Gil Blas, 12 January 1907, p.2. This review describes ‘a series of nudes, painted at dusk amid the poverty and disorder of their furnished rooms’. They stand at their toilette before a cloudy ‘psyche’ [a full-length mirror], or recline ‘in those poses immortalised by the Naked Maja and Olympia’. There is in their treatment nothing declamatory, no caricatured outrage, nothing evoking ‘the grin of a Degas, a Lautrec, or the misogyny of a Rouault’ [my translation]. Vauxcelles could not have said this in 1909. Some imprecisely specified drama of working class sex and violence can be deduced without the titles from the poses and gestures, the chamber pot, the woman’s immodestly sprawled body (as classed in its nakedness as the man’s shirtsleeves and neckerchief), from the framing, lighting and agitated handling, from the claustrophobic compacting of vertical planes in The Camden Town Murder and the brutally voyeuristic foreshortening of the body in L’Affaire de Camden Town.

As Browse (1960, p.30) remarked, his titles sound Hogarthian but have no apparent moral to point.

Clark 1985, p.133 (on Olympia).

Corbett 1998, p.60. Corbett links the undermining of the male spectator’s sense of self to a parallel undermining of the (male) observer’s position as dispassionate analyst of urban life. He considers this an attribute of Sickert’s modernity and, drawing on Judith Walkowitz’s City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1992, links it to the arrival of new social constituencies on the urban scene (protesting workers, platform women, girls in business) which ‘wrenched possession of the city away from the male flâneur and redistributed it amongst a contending variety of potential claimants’. See also, from a different angle, Bradford Collins on Manet’s Bar at the Folies Bergères, where he argues (via Hegel and Lacan) that the beautiful female nude is not so much an object of desire as a Lacanian Other, ‘the mirror in whom we males wish to see reflected our “imaginary” self: whole, healed, complete, perfect – in a word desired’: Sickert’s ‘corpses’, like Manet’s barmaid, refuse this too. Bradford Collins (ed.), 12 Views of Manet’s Bar, Princeton University Press, Princeton 1996, p.132.

Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez, Columbia University Press, New York 1982, pp.3–4. The corpse is uncannily present and absent, a complete resemblance, and nothing like what it represents. Bounded by the same skin, it is not identical because ‘identity’ is over.

The drawings for The Camden Town Murder and L’Affaire de Camden Town indicate that they were painted in a studio, with wallpaper and the same patterned curtain hanging down onto bare boards behind. They were not produced in the ‘authentic’, furnished, first- or third-floor backs that he sought out for paintings like the Mornington Crescent nudes. (He probably used one for Summer Afternoon, which has a washstand in it – an innocent bedroom accessory but one singled out in police reports of Dimmock’s murder as it was full of bloody water in which her killer had used a flannel petticoat to wash his hands.) Lilly wrote that Sickert’s studio was full of reproductions, but that Goya’s Disasters of War was ‘the only book that Sickert carried about with him, from which he was seldom parted; he would walk up and down, studying it and often we found him in his long chair, turning the pages in rapt silence’ (1971, pp.54–5). She sees Goya’s spirit brooding everywhere, including in the Camden Town Murder series. Perhaps Goya was a good guide for the expression of sexual atrocities that had always been part of the disasters of war, but seemed increasingly a disturbing concomitant of modern civilian life.

Walter Sickert, ‘Vanessa Bell’, Burlington Magazine, July 1922, p.34. Sickert considered Frith’s Derby Day ‘one of the great victories over death’, in Sitwell (ed.) 1947, p.204. See also Shone 1988, p.2: ‘Most painting worth prolonged attention, no matter how seductive or sumptuous, mundane or inconsequential in subject and appearance, carries within it a suggestion of transience and mortality ... When Sickert’s work is at his best, his fundamentally tragic vision of life gradually takes hold of the viewer ... A friend of his later years once said that Sickert “lived at such a pitch of awareness as if he remembered death all the time”’ (the friend was Sitwell: see Sitwell ed. 1947, p.178).On the links between art and death in (Kleinian) psychoanalysis, see Hanna Segal, ‘A Psycho-Analytical Approach to Aesthetics’, in M. Klein et al., New Directions in Psycho-Analysis, Maresfield, London 1977; and D.W. Winnicott, ‘The Manic Defence’ (1935), in Collected Papers: Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis, Tavistock, London 1958, pp.129–44, to which Anne Wagner has drawn my attention: ‘For instance, one is at a music hall and on the stage come the dancers trained to liveliness. One can say that here is the primal scene, here is exhibitionism, here is anal control, here is masochistic submission to discipline, here is a defiance of the superego. Sooner or later one adds: here is life. Might it not be that the main point of the performance is a denial of deadness, a defence against depressive “death inside” ideas, the sexualisation being secondary’ (p.131).