Thoughts and views about writing, researching and creating. All the doubts and wonders I come across, all the surprises and discovery of new roads I am lucky to experience when working with my non-fiction texts. A big and warm welcome to you, I’m very happy to see you here. - Majken xx
I bought the book “Big Ideas from History - A History of the World for You” a while ago. Officially it’s a children’s book, but you could also see it as an easy read for anyone interested in the world's history.
Anyway, a few pages in, the authors ask, “what is history for?” - and they give some answers too. One circle around ‘Perspective’ and it says "Finding out about history is finding out about how big and small things really are so you don’t get so frightened by the things that are near and in the present.” An example of this is the pandemic. “You think [..] it’s the worst thing that ever happened”, it reads, “but in history, it looks very different. Of course it’s bad, but the world has been through much worse and gone on to be fine.”
Now that is an excellent point, I’d say. There is, however, also another interesting angle to ‘perspective’ when it comes to history, and that is: the way we look upon history is often strongly connected to how we look upon the world here and now.
If you look around, you’ll see that we deal with certain questions and perspectives while others are left behind. It could be because we find some subjects more interesting than others; however, there are also questions and views we simply don’t see. They are off the radar, outside our field of vision, and thus it doesn’t spring to our mind to start investigating them. Neither in present-time studies nor studies that have to do with historical subjects. During a research trip to London a few years ago, I stumbled upon quite an interesting example in that department.
The book was written by the American writer and PhD, Rebecca Frost and her mission was, it said, to figure out how the five (main) victims of Jack the Ripper have been presented in books published from 1929 up until 2017. [ ] The million-dollar question was: has anything changed during the - nearly - ninety years Frost focused on?
So, at the time, I was diving into the story of the infamous serial killer Jack the Ripper. While searching the shelves of a big bookstore, a publication caught my eye. “The Ripper’s Victims in Print - The Rhetoric of Portrayals Since 1929” it was called. The book was written by the American writer and PhD, Rebecca Frost and her mission was, it said, to figure out how the five (main) victims of Jack the Ripper have been presented in books published from 1929 up until 2017. Like: what details have been written about the women through time, and in what kind of language? The million-dollar question was: has anything changed during the - nearly - ninety years Frost focused on?
You might sit with a broad smile on your face right now. “Has anything changed during ninety years?” Well, of course, it has! How can it not? Oh my, what a no-brainer of a study this is! However, the surprising and - you might add - upsetting fact is that overall it had not.
When going through the many books on the Ripper story, Frost hoped to see “a constant, steady movement toward the humanization of the murdered women.” In other words, she hoped to see a change from a more impersonal and objective portrayal of the women in the early years to a more personal approach in the later years where the readers would get a walk through the life and background story of the five ladies.
But this was not what she found.
All through the c. ninety years, the Ripper victims were - overall - seen as “whores [who were] likely better off dead” and whose personal lives were of no use to anyone since “their biographies can tell us nothing about their killer”.
[ ] can we expect to continue seeing Ripper books being written from this same standpoint? Or will someone add other perspectives to the lives of the victims in the future?
Through c. ninety years, there had, strictly speaking, been a narrow focus on the killer: what he did, when he did it and, not least, who he was. At the same time, the perspective of the five victims had been reduced to objects and clues in a murder case.
Now, the writers of these Ripper stories obviously came from a society and culture that observed murder victims solely from a police-investigative angle. All other views were either deliberately left out - the writers didn’t find them interesting - or: they belonged to the writers’ blind spots - the writers didn’t see them. And it has been so - at least - up until 2017, as Frost's study shows us. A good question then is, can we expect to continue seeing Ripper books being written from this same standpoint? Or will someone add other perspectives to the lives of the victims in the future?
If you ask Rebecca Frost, she is not very optimistic. “After nearly ninety years of books, it might be too late”, she concludes. But she wishes she was wrong about this because, as she points out, “representation matters”. And indeed, it does. We need to hear all the voices we possibly can to get a complete picture of the past - and thus become wiser on the life of our forefathers and -mothers. Which also can inspire us to become wiser in our lives today.
Okay, something interesting happened one year after Frost published her book which she did in 2018. In 2019 another book was added to the Jack the Ripper shelves, and that was [*tadaaaa*] a book that tells the story about the lives of the five Ripper victims: “The Five - The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper” written by the British social historian and author Hallie Rubenhold.
Finally, the time was ripe for adding a name, a face, and a background story to each of the five Ripper victims, and thereby making the story more complete. And more interesting too.
The writing of history is not set in stone; it is as fluid and many-sided as everything else. It changes just like we do.
Now, the case of the Ripper victims is just one example of how connected our present lives are to how we look upon history, and these years it’s like the pond is being stirred. A steady stream of new perspectives on historical subjects turn up here, there and everywhere, like women’s history, the history of slavery, colonisation, and many more. Which, in my view, is most fascinating.
The writing of history is not set in stone; it is as fluid and many-sided as everything else. It changes just like we do. So; the subject of ‘history’ does not only tell us about the lives of our ancestors, it also tells us about ourselves. Who we are - and from what perspective we see the world.
Majken xx
THIS IS a blog post from me to you. I send it out once every fortnight - if you want to join my email list please go HERE. In turn, you will receive ‘a handful of history’, which is me sharing real-life stories from around the world, narratives I’ve picked that are rooted in history one way or another. Every other time, my latest act, ‘from my corner of the world’, will land in your email. These are texts in which I share with you thoughts and views about writing, researching and creating. All the doubts and wonders I come across, all the surprises and discovery of new roads I am lucky to experience when working with my non-fiction texts.
Thanks for reading. I’m happy to see you here! - Majken xx
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