North Wales & Cheshire News
Headlines
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COULD LEWIS CARROLL HAVE BEEN JACK THE RIPPER?

- Cheshire born Alice in Wonderland author, 
Lewis Carroll, may have been Jack the Ripper! 
The astonishing claim is made in a new book 
on the unsolved Victorian murders of five 
prostitutes in London's East End. Carroll, 
who in real life was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, 
a maths don at Christ Church, Oxford, emerges 
as the prime suspect in the book, Jack the 
Ripper: Lighthearted Friend, by Richard Wallace. 

Dr Wallace claims Carroll had a psychotic 
breakdown after being assaulted by a homosexual 
when he was 12 and became an angry man. 
'He retreated into a world consumed by one goal -  
revenge on society.' Dr Wallace claims Carroll 
wrote a diary every day in purple ink, but on 
the days of the Whitechapel killings, he switched
to black. 'Quite simply, Carroll was a psychopathic 
killer.' 

Dr Wallace argues that Carroll gave a clue to 
his crimes in the poem Jabberwocky written in 1872 
- 16 years before the murders. One verse reads: 
'The vorpal blade went snicker-snack! He left it 
dead, and with its head; He went galumphing back.' 
Dr Wallace says this could refer to Anne Chapman,
the Ripper's third victim, whose head was almost 
severed. In another poem, The Hunting of the Snark, 
Carroll wrote: 'They sought it with thimbles, they 
sought it with care; They pursued it with forks and 
with hope; They threatened its life with a railway 
share; They charmed it with smiles and soap.' Dr 
Wallace says all the dead girls had thimbles, forks 
and soap in their pockets when they died and there 
were no alibis for Carroll on the nights the Ripper 
struck. 

Other Ripper suspects have included Royal physician 
Sir William Gull, Liverpool cotton merchant James 
Maybrick, escaped Broadmoor prisoner James Kelly, 
East End wife killer William Bury, and quack doctor 
Francis Tumblety.