The Autobiography of Jack the Ripper Read Online Free PDF Page A

Styles prefaced the day’s instruction by leading us through one or more hymns, which he followed by an hour’s discourse of a religious character. Taking from the day’s issue of the newspaper an item of news, and treating this as text, he would justify or condemn the occurrence recorded in the light of his dogmatic religious convictions. His vocabulary was, like that of the Cromwellian puritans, derived from the Old Testament, and his ideas were as rigid as theirs. Frequent references to biblical texts under his instructions necessitated the presence of a Bible on the desk of each boy, and it was our practice to relieve, to some extent, the boredom of these discourses by furtive search in the holy book for the more unsavoury and objectionable passages. These we would memorize and ultimately retail to each other with much boyish glee during the period of the mid-morning recess.
    What a hateful, narrow-minded, ignorant bore the man was, and what hypocritical young humbugs he made of us! He employed, one at a time, a series of assistant masters, poor sycophantic wretches no one of whom ever remained in his employment for a longer period than a term. These youths were expected to profess the doctor’s own stern religious sentiments, and I have a vivid recollection of the utterance of one of these disciples on the occasion of a meeting of our boys’ “Mutual Improvement Society.” The evening had been devoted to the reading of a “paper” dealing with the destruction of Pompeii in which the wholesale wiping-out of the city and its inhabitants was described; the destruction, we were given to understand, was salutary and engineered by a Deity displeased by persistent “idolatry.” “But afterward,” explained our young preceptor, “God, in his goodness, sent a strong wind which blew away the clouds of ashes.” Even my young mind was unable to appreciate the evidence of God’s goodness offered in this grotesque statement. That a Deity should blow the ashes from the remains of the several thousand people he had destroyed struck me as entirely unacceptable as evidence of benevolence. This seemingly trivial utterance remained in my memory chiefly, I think, because it marked the first occasion on which I seriously attempted to grapple with the logic of the religious stream constantly flowing over me.
    This Mutual Improvement Society to which I have alluded, and of which membership was more or less enforced, met at the school on one evening in each week for the purpose of listening to the reading of a “paper” by a member. Choice of subject was left to the individual reader—though subject to censor by the presiding power. Following the reading the audience were permitted, and, in fact, expected, to offer criticism of the essay, and as the members’ standard of criticism was universally regarded by them as the degree of ingenuity with which offensive and derogatory statements regarding the lecturer and his subject matter could be made within the limits imposed by the president, many enmities were conceived at the meetings. Almost invariably a meeting of the Mutual Improvement Society was followed on the succeeding day by a fight furtively conducted in a cul-de-sac conveniently situated near the school. This, in its turn, usually led to wholesale and impartial canings of both the participants and the lookers-on by our seemingly omniscient principal.
    Mutual Improvement Society! By Jove, yes.
    Occasionally Dr. Styles was able to induce returned missionaries to lecture to us; these events were regarded as welcome breaks in the school curriculum though the lecturers seldom dwelt sufficiently upon the more romantic attributes of the natives amongst whom they had been working. We were less interested in the conduct of the natives after conversion than in the technique of torture and cannibalism.
    My life at that school passes through my mind in flashes, fading or