Jack the Ripper's Bedroom - Sickert

This is the crime as seen by the eye
of the perpetrator, his shutting
out of day, the furniture dyed
with blood loss from the heavy cuts.

He did this, burning in the grate,
because paraffin would have spilt,
and candles gone out, to frustrate
his purpose. Sickert stood by guilt’s

doorway, but was he tactile,
as one who used semi-darkness
to bring about the redaction
of the flesh ? Had he in harness

Blake’s Flea, for what else did Blake see,
than a murderer, blood-thirsty ?

Woodford Halse - 8 July 2025

I refer to William Sickert’s Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom ( 1906-7), which was his own bedroom where he was boarding, at 6 Mornington Crescent, Camden Town, rumoured to have been that of the Whitechapel murderer who carried out five killings in Autumn of 1888.

I refer in particular to the killing of Mary Kelly which was discovered on 8 November 1888 at 13 Miller’s Court, Dorset St, Spitalfields, because that had taken place in a bedroom, like Sickert’s paintings, and not in a yard or alley.

I consider Sickert was no more a murderer than William Blake was, who saw a gigantic flea ascending a staircase which became the subject of his Ghost of a Flea miniature of 1819-20. Sickert was putting himself into the mind of the killer and the atmosphere about him.

I would make a good Londoner, because I have an imagination for the city, but that is not possible these days.