From Hell: Being a Melodrama in Sixteen Parts

AUTHOR: Moore, Alan

ARTIST: Eddie Campbell (illustrator); Pete Mullins (contributing artist)

PUBLISHER: Top Shelf Comics

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION: 1989-1996

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 1999

Publication History

From Hell began with Alan Moore musing about “writing something lengthy on a murder.” Although Moore originally dismissed the Jack the Ripper murders as too obvious and played out, he became intrigued by the story because of the publicity surrounding their centennial. That led him to Stephen Knight’s Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution (1976), which gave him the idea for the story. Having decided to create the comic as a serial for Steve R. Bissette’s horror comic anthology Taboo, he contacted artist Eddie Campbell, who agreed to illustrate the story.

From Hell was published serially from 1989 to 1992. Only the first six chapters appeared in Taboo, as the anthology ran for only seven issues. Following its demise, Moore and Campbell took the series to Kitchen Sink Press, which published the work in ten volumes between 1991 and 1996. The final appendix, Dance of the Gull Catchers, was published in 1998, and Eddie Campbell Comics published the entire series as a trade paperback in 1999. As of 2011, trade paperbacks are published by Top Shelf Comics in the United States and Knockabout Comics in the United Kingdom. In 2001, From Hell was the first of Moore’s comics work to be adapted to film, though Moore himself had no involvement with the production.

Plot

From Hell is an expansive, extensively researched fictional exploration of the 1888 Jack the Ripper murders. The premise is taken mostly from Knight’s book, which posits that the murders were the result of a conspiracy to conceal the birth of an illegitimate royal child in White-chapel. Dr. William Withey Gull, the royal surgeon and a prominent member of the secret society of Freemasons, is asked to silence a group of prostitutes who are threatening to reveal the child’s identity if they are not paid a sum of ten pounds.

Gull, who, as a result of a stroke, is either delusional or divinely inspired by an ancient Masonic god, takes the assignment as an opportunity to brutally murder the women. The murders are an occult ritual of his own devising, ostensibly to reinforce the patriarchy within the cultural consciousness and bring about the twentieth century. He finds the prostitutes with the help of coachman John Netley and kills Polly Nicholls first, grotesquely mutilating her body and removing her organs.

Inspector Frederick Abberline is assigned to the first murder case because of his familiarity with the White- chapel area. It becomes clear to him that the case will not be solved easily. Intense sensationalism around the murders has gripped London, stoked by a false letter to the police signed Jack the Ripper. Soon, Scotland Yard is inundated with hundreds of letters, all purporting to be from the murderer. In addition, Abberline must deal with corruption among both his supervisors and his subordinates. Meanwhile, Gull continues his murder spree, and as he kills more prostitutes, he begins to see visions of the future.

Mary Kelly soon realizes that she has been targeted. She becomes distraught, drinking heavily and alienating her live-in partner. She is the fifth and last victim to be murdered. Gull eviscerates her beyond recognition and burns her heart to ashes. During this time, he has an extended vision of the future, in which he sees a modern office full of disaffected people. Afterward, he feels that his life has peaked; having seen the world beneath him, he has nowhere to go but down.

Abberline, for his part, continues his fruitless search for the murderer until Robert Lees, the royal psychic, comes to him claiming to be able to find the address of the White-chapel murderer. Lees is an imposter with a grudge against Gull, and leads Abberline to him simply to embarrass the man. However, much to the shock of Abberline, Lees, and Mrs. Gull, Gull confesses to the murders.

Abberline and Lees are pressured to keep quiet so as not to provoke scandal. The Freemasons hold a secret tribunal in which they declare Gull insane. Gull refuses the judgment of the court, stating that no man among them is fit to judge, as he has surpassed them all. His death is faked and he is taken to a mental facility.

For years, Abberline continues his work for Scotland Yard until, by chance, he discovers the true motivation behind the murders: blackmail and the royal baby. He resigns from the force in disgust, but he remains silent for fear of retribution. He is given a substantial pension and retires to the seaside.

The last chapter of the book is a sequence that occurs moments before Gull’s death. In it, he flies as a spirit outside time, influencing other serial killers and causing many events in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that are peripherally related to his own crimes, before becoming one with God and the infinite and finally dying.

From Hell contains an exhaustive appendix that details which elements of the story were fictionalized and provides a list of references. It also includes a comics essay about the history of “Ripperology” and Moore’s own musings about the nature of Jack the Ripper within the cultural consciousness.

Characters

•Sir William Withey Gull, the antagonist, is the royal family’s physician and a prominent Freemason. He has thick white sideburns and usually wears formal clothing and a top hat. Despite being in his eighties, he is strong, intimidating, and wickedly intelligent. He is fascinated with the complexity of nature and displays many characteristics known to be present in serial killers. When Queen Victoria asks him to remove a threat to the crown, he embarks upon a murderous rampage that he believes to be an occult ritual to bring about the twentieth century.

•Frederick Abberline, a protagonist, is a middle-aged inspector with the London Metropolitan Police. He is stout, has a dark mustache, and often wears a bowler hat. While quiet, he has a strong sense of duty and honor and does not hesitate to take initiative when required to. He is assigned to investigate the White-chapel murders and becomes increasingly frustrated with the lack of conclusive evidence and the irresponsible, selfish behavior of his superiors and subordinates. When he unexpectedly discovers the identity of the murderer, he is pressured to keep silent.

•Mary Jane Kelly, a.k.a. Marie Jeanette Kelly, also a protagonist, is a prostitute living in Whitechapel. Dark-haired and alluring, she is strong willed and intelligent but restricted by the social barriers of her class. When she and her friends are required to pay an “insurance” fee to the local mob, she blackmails Walter Sickert, threatening to reveal the identity of Prince Albert Victor’s illegitimate child. As her companions are butchered, she becomes increasingly fearful for her own safety and descends into alcoholism. She is the fifth and final victim of the White-chapel murderer, though it is implied that she may have escaped.

•Robert Lees is a tall blond man employed by Queen Victoria as the royal psychic. A charming man prone to self-righteous indignation, he claims to have visions and to communicate with the dead. He occasionally suffers violent seizures. In the prologue, he reveals that all of his predictions were made up, but that they came true nonetheless. He pretends to know the identity of the White-chapel murderer and leads Abberline to Gull’s home because of a personal grudge, at which point Gull confesses to the crimes.

•Prince Albert Victor, a.k.a. Prince Eddy, the grandson of Queen Victoria, has soft features, an imperial moustache, and deep, mournful eyes. He is foolish, impulsive, and, by his own admission, weak. Early in the story, he impregnates a shopgirl and marries her, a scandal that leads to the White-chapel murders.

•Walter Sickert is an artist active in the White-chapel area and in the bohemian community of Victorian society. While charged with the social education of Prince Eddy, he unintentionally allows the prince to marry a shopgirl and father a daughter. When Kelly blackmails him, he goes to the prince’s mother, who reports the incident to Queen Victoria.

•Sir Charles Warren is commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police and the grand sojourner of the London Freemasons. He is tall, dresses well, and wears a horseshoe mustache. His militaristic tendencies have made him unpopular in his post. He was the one who originally recommended Gull to Queen Victoria. When Gull begins his rampage, Warren is aware of his crimes; unable to stop him, he becomes complicit in the cover-up.

•Queen Victoria, an aged, imposing monarch, is the head of the royal family. While powerful and intelligent, she is also merciless and superstitious. She is in perpetual mourning for her deceased husband, Albert, but trusts Gull, whom she considers strong and dependable. When news of her grandson’s scandal reaches her, she dispatches Gull, first to “silence” Prince Eddy’s wife and then to eliminate the prostitutes who have blackmailed Sickert.

•John Netley, a stagecoach driver with a “shallow brow and closely spaced eyes,” is enlisted by Gull to provide transportation and to seek out the various prostitutes he is charged with eliminating. Although he is unsettled by Gull’s more demonic inclinations and overcome with fear and guilt over his involvement in the crimes, he maintains his silence.

•Polly Nicholls is a prostitute in the White-chapel district and an acquaintance of Kelly, said to look remarkably young for her age. She has an estranged son and former husband who left her, allegedly for her drinking habits and possibly for another woman. She is the first victim of the White-chapel murderer.

•Annie Chapman is a prostitute in the White-chapel district and an acquaintance of Kelly. Aging and overweight, she remains fierce and individualistic. She falls ill and feverish before becoming the second victim of the White-chapel murderer.

•Elizabeth Stride, a.k.a. Long Liz, is a prostitute in the White-chapel district and a friend of Kelly. She is a Swedish immigrant and the third victim of the White-chapel murderer.

•Catherine Eddowes is an impoverished woman living in the White-chapel district. She has a lover named John Kelly, with whom she is picking hops in Kent when she decides to return to London because she believes she knows the identity of the White-chapel murderer. Instead, she becomes his fourth victim, accidentally identified as Mary Kelly because of her lover’s name.

Artistic Style

Campbell renders the pages of From Hell in stark black strokes and furious scribbles, varying his style greatly from page to page. At times, the drawings are astonishingly meticulous, while at others, the pen lines seem almost haphazard. Some pages appear to have been drawn on canvas and shaded with crayon, and a number of scenes are rendered entirely in grayscale watercolor. The different techniques create wildly different moods, with furious slashes of the pen matching the violence and chaos they depict.

The level of detail also varies with each page, as does the level of realism. Backgrounds and architecture are almost invariably photorealistic, and certain architectural structures are depicted in staggering detail. While characters are generally drawn with realistic body structures, facial depictions range from finely detailed to mere sketches. Minor characters often have cartoonishly exaggerated features. Such variation is used to great effect within the story, as expressions are often emphasized at moments of heightened emotion. During events of significance, certain characters are rendered nearly stroke by stroke from their historical depictions. Throughout the story, certain characters’ facial features, such as Kelly’s, remain ambiguous.

Realism is particularly effective within From Hell given its semihistorical subject matter, lending authority to some parts and serving to remind readers of the speculative nature of others. Certain historical documents, such as pictures, maps, and news articles, are not drawn by Campbell but rather included directly in the comic, serving to add historical authenticity to the work and underline thematic elements.

Campbell is particularly unforgiving when it comes to depicting violence. The various mutilations carried out on the women in White-chapel are shown with explicit anatomic clarity and historical accuracy, making some sequences difficult to view. These illustrations neither glorify nor exploit the atrocities, but simply and bluntly depict them as the human actions that they are.

Themes

From Hell is not so much a murder mystery as a subversion of traditional “whodunits” into something of a “whydunit.” In Moore’s own words, it is “a postmortem of Victorian society with fiction as a scalpel.” The events of the book, from the murder and investigation to the exploration of various peripheral characters’ lives, are a means of exploring the time period. Seemingly every piece of Ripper trivia has been incorporated into the plot, however obliquely, with cameos from historical figures such as the Elephant Man, Oscar Wilde, and William Blake. Even a fourteen-year-old Aleister Crowley makes an appearance. Visual and literary quotations provide context and color to characterize the society in which such an event could take place. The portrayal of Victorian London is bleak, showing a bloated, corrupt upper-class society eviscerating the poverty-stricken underbelly of White-chapel.

With his extensive notes and metafictional approach, Moore winkingly acknowledges the limitations of the fiction. The narrative is an amalgam of numerous different theories of the Ripper murders, a Koch’s snowflake of speculation. In the appendix, Moore writes that the mythology of Jack the Ripper is open to the limitless possibilities of fiction but confined to the limitations of what little historical truth is actually known. Within those confines, the Ripper becomes a faceless receptacle for what society fears: a Jew, a doctor, a Freemason, or a wayward royal mad with power.

The events of From Hell also present a theory on the nature of myth and the human mind. The murders have a real effect on the society of London, one that resonates throughout history, and the visions that Gull experiences before his death fantastically demonstrate the ways in which a single action can alter history’s architecture. While it is never made clear whether or not the events that Gull experiences are in any way “real,” the themes and concepts he explores have power, and his statement to the modern age that he “births” is haunting.

Impact

The roots of From Hell lie in horror comics, though the work transcends the genre to become something far more epic. The ghastliness of the violence is matched by an equally disturbing existential dread that permeates the work. Moore also expands on the manipulation of time he explored in his earlier texts, namely Watchmen (1986-1987). As a work of comics literature, From Hell is longer and more exhaustive than anything Moore had produced before. Throughout its publishing run, it received accolades from fans and critics alike, who praised its complexity and its scope.

From Hell is one of the most significant works in Moore’s development as a writer and an intellectual. In writing that “the human mind is one place where all of the gods and monsters in human mythology are arguably real,” he unintentionally sparked his own interest in magic. Many of his subsequent works, such as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999- ), Promethea (1999-2005), Supreme (2003, book), and Lost Girls (2006, book), are clearly influenced by this concept. All of these works explore the edifices of the human mind through fictional narratives, while maintaining an awareness of their constructs. In the years after From Hell, Moore became a self-professed magician, further secluding himself and solidifying his role as the mysterious, crazed guru of comics literature.

Films

From Hell. Directed by Albert Hughes. Twentieth Century Fox, 2001. This film adaptation stars Johnny Depp as Inspector Frederick Abberline, Heather Graham as Mary Kelly, and Ian Holm as Sir William Gull. Abberline is a brilliant yet troubled detective whose career is aided by the psychic visions he experiences while taking opium. As he investigates the Ripper murders, he discovers a conspiracy among the London elite, but the case gets personal when he becomes romantically involved with Kelly. Moore refused any involvement in the film, to its detriment, and it bears little resemblance to the source material.

Further Reading

Campbell, Eddie. Bacchus (1987-1995).

Eisner, Will. The Plot: The Secret Stories of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (2005).

Moore, Alan, and Kevin O’Neill. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999- ).

Bibliography

Di Liddo, Annalisa. Alan Moore: Comics as Performance, Fiction as Scalpel. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009.

Gravett, Paul. Graphic Novels: Everything You Need to Know. New York: Collins Design, 2005.

Moore, Alan. “Alan Moore Interview.” Interview by Brad Stone. Comic Book Resources, October 22, 2001. http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=511.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. From Hell: The Compleat Scripts. Falston, Md.: Bordlerlands Press, 2000.