Never let it be said that we don’t deal with the bizarre on the Ink Desk. I had an interesting conversation with a friend earlier today in which he mentioned, in passing, that the Catholic poet Francis Thompson is considered one of the chief suspects in the hunt for the identity of Jack the Ripper. This surprised me, to say the least. Here’s the alleged evidence:  

 
And here’s my response to the evidence as given in the e-mail to my friend:
 
Thanks for the intriguing alleged connections between Jack the Ripper and Francis Thompson. I’m not convinced and found some of the evidence tenuous, e.g. the contrived connections to the saints’ days. I also think that the moral dimension of Francis Thompson’s works is too convincingly genuine to be the work of a psychopath, and I doubt very much if someone as slight in physique as Thompson could have had the strength to kill the women. Incidentally, the short story I mentioned in our conversation, “Finis Coronat Opus”, is presented as evidence that Thompson might be Jack the Ripper. The presentation of this story is misconstrued in order to buttress the case for Thompson’s guilt, whereas, in fact, it is a straightforward and bona fide cautionary tale, from a frank and orthodox Christian perspective, about the dangers of decadent aestheticism.