Lisa > Recent Status Updates

I am not liking the author’s habit of referring to Bundy ‘making love’ to his unconscious or dead victims.

I loved every last second of this book, telling the tale of the gods, the girl Medusa and the wrongs done to her, and the true monster - the dense Perseus - who used her for his own glory.

I don’t know if it’s the book or the brainweasels but I’m following this really hard to follow.

The best bits so far are all from Burton’s diaries. He’s a really wonderful writer.

The actual fight was excellent. The bits on race…yikes, Mailer.

These tales speak to the discrepancy between men’s longing for a woman unfettered by social mores and their attempt to control her by domesticating her.

Poor women’s labour was cheap because poor women were expendable and because society did not designate them as a family’s breadwinner. Unfortunately, many of them had to be. If a husband, father or partner left or died, a working class woman with dependants found it almost impossible to survive. Society was designed to ensure that a woman without a man was superfluous.

They began their lives in deficit. Not only were most of them born into working-class families, but they were born female. Before they had even spoken their first words they were regarded as less important than their brothers and more of a burden in the world than their wealthier female counterparts. Their worth was compromised before they had even attempted to prove it.

As news if her murder spread across the UK and around the globe, not one friend or relation from the past appears to have recognised Mary Jane Kelly’s name or any part of her story enough to have come forward. In subsequent decades attempts to research her history have proven equally fruitless...

By the time Kate had found John Kelly, she had lost the goodwill of most of her family, she had suffered domestic violence and bereavement, and had experienced the degradation of the workhouse, near-starvation and illness. Under such circumstances, what mattered most was the here and the now: acquiring the drink that dulled the pain and the food that stopped the hunger.

Such an attitude was not out of step with Victorian working-class sentiments about domestic violence, which frequently placed the onus for a beating in the woman herself. A certain degree of violence within the home was thought to serve a disciplinary function. Husbands felt no remorse for administering a chastising slap, while wives were often made to feel that they had ‘asked for it’.

[...] phases of ‘want and plenty’ marked the life cycle of the working classes. Household income ebbed and flowed according to the number of mature earners under a roof. While a young man lived with his parents and had employment, he might enjoy ‘comparative prosperity’, a situation that would ‘continue after marriage until he has two or three children, when poverty will again overtake him’.

[Elizabeth] had been a daughter, a wife, a sister, a mistress, a fraudstress, a cleaner, a coffee-house owner, a servant, a foreigner, and a woman who had at various times sold sex. However, the police and newspapers saw only another victim: an ‘unfortunate’ who resided in a Whitechapel lodging house, a drunk, degenerate, broken-down woman far beyond the blush of youth.

While the methods of enforcing regulation varied between countries, the concept which they all shared was that women in the sex trade should shoulder the blame for the transmission of syphilis. It was believed that if the state could control the morally corrupt fallen woman, the instrument of the disease’s spread, then the problem could be isolated. The male carrier was exempt from regulation.

Although her transgressions may not have been of a sexual nature, Victorian society conflated the broken woman with the fallen woman.

In previous attempts to recount the events of Annie Chapman’s life, one of the greatest oversights has always been a failure to examine how someone who had lived in a country estate in Berkshire or who had resided in Kingsbridge ended up in Whitechapel.

The pension to which George has been entitled would have expired with his death: in the mid-nineteenth century the law did not permit widows to claim on behalf of their deceased husbands. Overnight, the family would be bereft of an income, other than the money that Annie sent home or that her sister Emily may have earned.

Like Ellen Holland, whose name the journalists could not even bother to confirm or record correctly, Polly was just another impoverished, ageing, worthless female resident of a Whitechapel lodging house. There was nothing else the police, the coroner, the newspaper scribblers or their readers needed to learn about her.

(...) everyone was certain, without so much as a single shred of actual evidence to reinforce their convictions, that Polly Nichols was a prostitute.....At times the coroner’s inquest becomes a moral investigation of Polly Nichols herself, as if the hearing was in part to determine whether her behaviour warranted her fate.

In 1834 the Poor Law Amendment Act sought to bring an end to what the government saw as the abuse of a system of charitable relief offered by local parishes. The poor were judged to be lazy and immoral paupers who refused to do honest work, bred bastards and enormous families while ‘living off handouts’.

If the Whitechapel murders served to expose anything, it was the unspeakably horrendous conditions in which the poor of that district lives. The encampments and riots at Trafalgar Square were merely a conspicuous manifestation of what had chronically been ailing in the east end and impoverished parts of London. It was a cough hacked in the face of the establishment.

Dictum of Citizen Robespierre, useful in criminal cases: whoever shows fear is guilty.

In London they halt all large gathering, including Sunday games. Horses are requisitioned, the garrison at the Tower reinforced.

We are no more than shadows flickering briefly on the moors. But the flickering is beautiful.

This character is so infuriating. Things happen TO her as she has so little backbone or personality she couldn’t possibly get the gumption to act herself.

JFC: The court primarily blamed the sinking and ensuing deaths of the crew in two things: McVay’s failure to zigzag in conditions that it considered ‘good with intermittent moonlight’; and his failure to send out a distress message.

After being fed fruit and water, the survivors were treated for exhaustion, dehydration, shark bites, saltwater ulcers, shocks, burns, and malnutrition. (A healthy 19 year old boy usually carries about 20% body fat; many of the survivors had lost an estimated 14% of theirs. Over the course of the 4 days, one sailor had lost more than 35 pounds.)

The sharks attacked around dawn on Tuesday.

As Twible was issuing an order to remove shoes so as to swim more easily, Miner looked down and saw something flash beneath his feet. One moment the image was there, and then it was gone. He gave it no more thought.

In the panic, around 12 of the 35 life rafts made it off ship. And as for the distress messages...