Sherlock Holmes Versus Jack the Ripper

Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper entered the Victorian era almost simultaneously albeit via different means: a literary text published in an 1887 Christmas edition of a popular journal and a letter following a series of murders in the East End in the autumn of 1888, respectively. They are doubles representing opposites—a detective and a criminal, authority and anarchy, reason and madness, logic and instinct, composure and passion, order and chaos, morality and immorality, social justice and social taboos—and yet both have become not only icons of the late-Victorian London, but narrative-generating transfictional characters. Even though Holmes was not the first famous literary sleuth, it is him that is perceived as the archetypal detective; similarly, the Ripper, an avatar of the Whitechapel murderer who was neither the first serial killer nor the one that claimed the largest number of victims, is perceived as the archetypal serial killer and Victorian villain. It was probably inevitable for the unquenchable fascination with these characters to be expressed in the narratives that pit the illustrious detective against the infamous criminal, which are the subject of this book.