Jeffrey Bloomfield
02-28-2004, 11:21 PM
I recently posted the section from Sir Osbert Sitwell's book of memoirs, NOBLE ESSENCES: A BOOK OF CHARACTERS (New York:
Grosset & Dunlap, Grosset's Universal Library, 1950) on the Casebook website - that section dealing with the "Lodger" Story and the painter Walter Sickert. There has been (on that web site) several threads discussing the "Lodger" suspect, or Patricia Cornwall's book on Sickert, or Sickert. I have been informed that the NOBLE ESSENCES passage was already posted, but (quite
honestly) I was unaward of that. In any case, Howard has asked me to post it here.
One thing to keep in mind was that I am a big believer in looking at the context of any writing connected with this case. Clues are not like stawberries, growing on vines to be gathered and digested. They are firmly attached to their roots, and like the fabled mandrake roots if you try to pull them out of the ground they grow in, there unearthly screams (or confounded meanings) will drive you mad. So be prepared for a little literary discussion here.
In 2004, if you talk of literary lions of Great Britain for this century, you will not really mention the once famous Sitwell family.
Sir Osbert, his sister Dame Edith, and their brother Sir Sacheverell,
had a very famous salon. Dame Edith was a well-touted poet of the period from 1920 to 1950. All three knew all the better known
literary, artistic, and historical figures of the age from England and
the continent (to a lesser extent the U.S.). Osbert wrote four or five volumes of interesting memoirs (of which NOBLE ESSENCES is one volume). However, in retrospect the Sitwell's were too well established. There is no sense of struggle in their lives as literary people, as in say those of Eric Blair ("George Orwell"), D.H. Lawrence, T.S.Eliot, Ezra Pound, Collette (to mention a non-British based writer). They were born with a silver spoon in their mouths, and it somewhat weakened their final products. Now being born well-to-do or rich will not necessarily wreck a talent (think of Virginia Woolf, from the same family as Mr. Justice Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, or his son James Kenneth Stephen), or even a popular lyracist and composer like Cole Porter - grandson of a rich timber merchant. But Woolf had to battle some hereditary mental problems (which eventually killed her), and Porter had a serious physical accident that left him a cripple. I could add T.S.Eliot's real attempts to overcome feelings of provincialism from his American midwestern background (although
a comfortable one), or Blair facing that unwritten downplaying of
"Anglo-Indian" backgrounds in British intelectual circles (in an earlier era Kipling had faced the same problem). The Sitwells never had this. The worst was some friction between the boys
(at least) and their father Sir George, but that was about it.
Such lack of suffering can dull talent.
Given this, NOBLE ESSENCES is a curious book, because it does deal with people who are still remembered, but most of them have been really forgotten. There are twelve chapters, and in ten of them a once prominent "noble essence" holds center stage.
They are: Sir Edmund Gosse, Ronald Firbank, Wilfred Owen, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Ada Leverson, Walter Richard Sickert, W.H.Davies, Violet Gordon Woodhouse, Rex Whistler, and Arnold
Bennett. My guess is that most of you would be able to know one name at this time - Sickert, of course. Not because he was England's leading impressionist of the first forty years of our century, but because of the Whitechapel Mystery, the Royalty Conspiracy theory, Joseph Sickert, or Patricia Cornwall's book. Of the others, maybe Wilfred Owen (the very fine poet killed in World War I) or Arnold Bennett, the novelist (THE OLD WIVES TALE, BURIED ALIVE, CLAYHANGER) might be remembered. If you are into foreign history, D'Annunzio is best recalled (or worst recalled) as a proto-Fascist leader, who seized Fiume in 1919, in defiance of the Western powers (France, Britain, and the U.S.) who planned to hand it over to Yugoslavia. His rule in the town
(until he was forced out) was a model for Mussolini's rule - he was an active supporter of Il Duce. Unfortunately, his political role has long since blotted out most of his artistic work as a poet,
novelist, and dramatist. Up to 1920 he was a leading writer.
Sir Edmund Gosse was a leading critic in England in his day, but is best remembered now for his book of memoirs of his relationship with his father, FATHER AND SON. But who reads Firbank's novels or Davies' books, or recalls Woodhouse's singing and her music, or can remember the theatrical art (posters, scenery, playbills, etc.) of Rex Whistler (who like Owen was killed at the tale end of a long, dreadful war). Leverson was also a novelist, who drifted out into oblivion. This may seem unfair, but most artists are forgotten.
That Sitwell tried to recall them and their spirit or presence was a noble act. In a sense he attempted to use them as living metaphors for the geist of the 1890s-1940s (late Victorian - Edwardian - Georgian) period. Those grand men and women who graced and flavored the civilized world of the old Europe, though it was first blasted apart in the war that killed Owen, and then was atomized (literally) in the war that killed Rex Whistler.
So when reading it, remember that it is a panagyric to a once great age of culture.
I should add that Sitwell does use his central figures to hang out the better, more lasting literary and artistic people of that half century. Oscar and Bosie are there, as is the inimitable Max,
Diaghilev, Duse, Shaw, Thomas Hardy, Aldous Huxley, Galsworthy,
Frank Harris, Gabriel Faure...they all make their appearances. But central stage is to the ten I mentioned.
The section on Sickert does not really suggest anything nasty about the artist - far from it, he is painted as a hospitable man.
His love of the poorer part of society for his art work is gone into somewhat - as is the French influence. But his contact and training with James MacNeill Whistler is also mentioned. From what I have gathered (I have not read the Cornwall book, but I have seen some comments) she mentions that Sickert did not like his teacher. Perhaps, but there is this interesting anecdote about their connection in the section (p. 200 - 201). Unlike the Australian artist Charles Conder, Sickert was able to work with Whistler:
"But Sickert had been accepted, had passed these tremendous tests, and had even been privileged to spend an afternoon with Whistler in tearing up canvases. And Mrs. Sickert
told me how once, when she had bought a pruning knife, with a curved tip, for use in the garden, her husband remarked suddenly:
"That's just the knife that Whistler used for ripping up the pictures he did not want to keep. In Paris one day he sent me out to fetch two of them."
The slashing contest, therefore, must have occurred either just before Whistler was moving to a new studio or, more probably, after Mrs. Whistler had fallen ill, and she and her husband had returned to London....The idea of that afternnon raises so many questions: what was the number of pictures thus slashed, and what they looked like, these ephemeral visions of a
divine and dusky nebulosity strewn with stars, these dreams, monochromatic or flecked with color, of persons delicate and ambiguous, who had wilted, perhaps even when the Master had
believed that he had with habitual deftness and certainty of touch netted them securely, and had tried to pin them out upon the canvas....On wonders how often Sickert too applied the same process to his own similar accumulations; pictures, unwanted by the painter, that in time silt up the long shelf that runs round the top of a studio. To this high repository, safely out of reach, the eyes of studio rover and amateru trun very frequently, longingly surmising what treasures may not lie hidden among those works despised by their authors, notoriously the worst judges of them. Often, indeed, these pictures are those equivocal things that remain only partially created and resist full integration, but tat yet many painters cannot bring themselves to destroy. Sickert was more ruthless, thogh, and once, when Mrs. Sickert inquired of him what had become of his celbrated life size canvases of music hall artistes painted in his early days, he told her he had destroyed them beause they took up so much room. He added that he had offered one of them, a portrait of herself, to Katie Lawrence, and she had refused it with a classic phrase of contempt:
"What! That thing!...Not even to keep the draft out from under the scullery door!""
I gave that example from the chapter so you could sample the
actual effect of the chapter on the reader, capturing the image of artists like Whistler and Sickert destroying their own work because they need the room. Also, it shows Sickert was handy with a knife - albeit for a non-bloody reason.
Shortly after this, on pages 211 - 213, is the famous or infamous passage about Sickert and the Lodger. It begins with a description of dropping in on Sickert's flat in Swan Walk for breakfast.
"Other guests would begin now to arrive, and tearing himself away from the Haselden drawing out of the DAILY MIRROR,
or from whatever might constitute the particular favorite of the moment, he would go to greet them. Often I would meet at those breakfast parties Nina Hamnett, Alvaro Guevara, W.H.Davies, and Aldous Husley....Our host would make us sit down at the table, and would hurry round with breakfast, a plate
with an egg on it for each of us. Owing to the amount of cooking, serving, and pouring out that he was forced to do, he had not always at this hour so much leisure for conversation as his guests would have liked. His talk resembled most good talk in that it contained in its web certain invariable strands, certain immutable monuments that could be invoked for purposes of reference, allusion, comparison and simile, and that also supplied him with an established standard. The Tichborne Case and the mystery of Jack the Ripper constituted two such monuments.
The first, which had come into the headlines when Sickert had been a boy of eleven, had always maintained its interest for him; a special interest, due to the fact that he believed the rejected claimant, who had come back out of the sea, to have been the rightful heir....As for the second, apart from the intrinsic and abiding horror of that extraordinary series of crimes, it interested him because he thought he knew the identity of the murderer. He told me - and, no doubt, many others - how this was.... Some years after the murders, hehad taken a room in a London suburb. An old couple looked aftre the house, and when he had been there some months, the woman, with whom he used often to talk, asked him one day as she was usting the room if he knew who had occupied it before him. When he said
"No" she had waited a moment, and then replied, "Jack the Ripper!"...Her story was that his predecessor had been a veterinary student. After he had been a month or two in London, this delicate-looking young man - he was consumptive - took to staying out occasionally all night.. His landlord and landlady would hear him come in at about six in the morning, and then walk about in his room for an hour or two until the first edition of the morning paper was on sale, when he would creep lightly downstairs and run to the corner to buy one. Quietly he would return and go to bed; but an hour later, when the old man called him, he would notice, by the traces in the fireplace, that his lodger had burned the suit he had been wearing the previous evening. For the rest of the day, the millions of people in London would be discussing the terrible new murder, plainly belonging to the same series, that had been committed in the small hours. Only the student seemed never to mention it: but then, he knew no one and talked to no one, though he did not seem lonely....The
old couple did not know what to make of the mattr: week by week his health grew worse, and it seemed improbable that this gentle, ailing silent youth should be responsible for such crimes.
They could hardly credit their own senses - and then, before tehy could make up their minds whether to warn the police or not, the lodger's health had suddenly failed alarmingly, and his mother - a widow who was devoted to him - had come to fetch him back to Bournemouth where he lived....From that moment the murders had stopped...He died three months later.
Before leaving the subject, I may add that, while I was engaged in writing this account of Sickert, my brother reminded me that the painter had told us that when his landlady had confided in him that morning, in the course of her dusting, the name of Jack the Ripper, he had scribbed it down in pencil on the margin of a French edition of Casanova's MEMOIRS which he happened to be reading at the time, and that subsequently he had given the book away - we thought he had said to Sir william Rothenstein. Sickert had added, "And there it will be now, if you want to know the name." Accordingly, I wrote to Lady Rothenstein: but neither she nor Sir William remembered the book. On my consulting Mrs. Sickert, she maintained that her husband had told her that he had given the volume to Sir William's brother, Mr. Albert Rutherston. And this proved to have been the case. My friend Mr. Rutherston informed me that he lost the book only during the bombing of London, and that there had been several pencil notes entered in the margin, in Sickert's handwriting, always so difficult to decipher."
That is all that I have to type out regarding the passages from NOBLE ESSENCES. But there is a bit more in Tom Cullen's AUTUMN OF TERROR [my American paperback edition is WHEN LONDON WALKED IN TERROR, (New York: Avon Books, 1965, 1968)]. Cullen mentions the story on pages 149-150:
"Sickert scribbled the name of the lodger in pencil in the margin of a copy of Casanova's MEMOIRS belonging to Sitwell, but when Sir Osbert came to look for it he found that the book had been destroyed in the Blitz (3). The painter evidently told the same story to Max Beerbohm, for in one of Beerbohm's notebooks, auctioned at Sotheby's in December, 1960, he had written after Sickert's name: "Estreme of refinement..." There followed a long arrow leading to a marginal note: "Love of squalor. Lodged in Jack the Ripper's house."
"(3) When I wrote querying him concerning Sickert's address at the time in question, Sir Osbert Sitwell replied that he could not recall it. His brother, Sacheverell, writes, however: "Mr. Sickert was living in Mornington Crescent, London, N.W. I do not know the number of the house."
It is obvious that Sickert certainly through out this story of the mysterious lodger many times, and mentioned it to both Sitwells
and Beerbohm, Rothenstein, and Rutherston. Did he also tell it to
Dame Edith (if he mentioned it to her brothers, possibly he did)?
Aldous Huxley was a breakfast guest too - did he hear the name too?
The point is, the story is known, but has been brushed aside due to the Stephen Knight/Joseph Sickert Masonic-Royal Conspiracy story, and now due to Ms Cornwall's book. I have not read the latter, but I was told Ms Cornwall included it in her bibliography, but did not discuss it. I think that was a mistake. It actually might not lead to Jack, but it might settle who the veterinary student was (or, for that matter) who was the landlady.
I also end this by pointing out that the anecdote does show Sickert's interest in the Ripper, but he was interested in other
popular crimes too - in this case the Tichborne Claimant case of 1868 - 1874). For some reason he was convinced that Thomas
Castro (a.k.a. Sir Roger Tichborne, and later Arthur Orton) was not a fake but the real heir. Apparently this has not been discussed by anyone. It would also fit into his later interest in the murder of Phyllisj Dimmock in Camden Town in 1907. I wonder what other crimes interested him.
Best wishes,
Jeff
Grosset & Dunlap, Grosset's Universal Library, 1950) on the Casebook website - that section dealing with the "Lodger" Story and the painter Walter Sickert. There has been (on that web site) several threads discussing the "Lodger" suspect, or Patricia Cornwall's book on Sickert, or Sickert. I have been informed that the NOBLE ESSENCES passage was already posted, but (quite
honestly) I was unaward of that. In any case, Howard has asked me to post it here.
One thing to keep in mind was that I am a big believer in looking at the context of any writing connected with this case. Clues are not like stawberries, growing on vines to be gathered and digested. They are firmly attached to their roots, and like the fabled mandrake roots if you try to pull them out of the ground they grow in, there unearthly screams (or confounded meanings) will drive you mad. So be prepared for a little literary discussion here.
In 2004, if you talk of literary lions of Great Britain for this century, you will not really mention the once famous Sitwell family.
Sir Osbert, his sister Dame Edith, and their brother Sir Sacheverell,
had a very famous salon. Dame Edith was a well-touted poet of the period from 1920 to 1950. All three knew all the better known
literary, artistic, and historical figures of the age from England and
the continent (to a lesser extent the U.S.). Osbert wrote four or five volumes of interesting memoirs (of which NOBLE ESSENCES is one volume). However, in retrospect the Sitwell's were too well established. There is no sense of struggle in their lives as literary people, as in say those of Eric Blair ("George Orwell"), D.H. Lawrence, T.S.Eliot, Ezra Pound, Collette (to mention a non-British based writer). They were born with a silver spoon in their mouths, and it somewhat weakened their final products. Now being born well-to-do or rich will not necessarily wreck a talent (think of Virginia Woolf, from the same family as Mr. Justice Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, or his son James Kenneth Stephen), or even a popular lyracist and composer like Cole Porter - grandson of a rich timber merchant. But Woolf had to battle some hereditary mental problems (which eventually killed her), and Porter had a serious physical accident that left him a cripple. I could add T.S.Eliot's real attempts to overcome feelings of provincialism from his American midwestern background (although
a comfortable one), or Blair facing that unwritten downplaying of
"Anglo-Indian" backgrounds in British intelectual circles (in an earlier era Kipling had faced the same problem). The Sitwells never had this. The worst was some friction between the boys
(at least) and their father Sir George, but that was about it.
Such lack of suffering can dull talent.
Given this, NOBLE ESSENCES is a curious book, because it does deal with people who are still remembered, but most of them have been really forgotten. There are twelve chapters, and in ten of them a once prominent "noble essence" holds center stage.
They are: Sir Edmund Gosse, Ronald Firbank, Wilfred Owen, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Ada Leverson, Walter Richard Sickert, W.H.Davies, Violet Gordon Woodhouse, Rex Whistler, and Arnold
Bennett. My guess is that most of you would be able to know one name at this time - Sickert, of course. Not because he was England's leading impressionist of the first forty years of our century, but because of the Whitechapel Mystery, the Royalty Conspiracy theory, Joseph Sickert, or Patricia Cornwall's book. Of the others, maybe Wilfred Owen (the very fine poet killed in World War I) or Arnold Bennett, the novelist (THE OLD WIVES TALE, BURIED ALIVE, CLAYHANGER) might be remembered. If you are into foreign history, D'Annunzio is best recalled (or worst recalled) as a proto-Fascist leader, who seized Fiume in 1919, in defiance of the Western powers (France, Britain, and the U.S.) who planned to hand it over to Yugoslavia. His rule in the town
(until he was forced out) was a model for Mussolini's rule - he was an active supporter of Il Duce. Unfortunately, his political role has long since blotted out most of his artistic work as a poet,
novelist, and dramatist. Up to 1920 he was a leading writer.
Sir Edmund Gosse was a leading critic in England in his day, but is best remembered now for his book of memoirs of his relationship with his father, FATHER AND SON. But who reads Firbank's novels or Davies' books, or recalls Woodhouse's singing and her music, or can remember the theatrical art (posters, scenery, playbills, etc.) of Rex Whistler (who like Owen was killed at the tale end of a long, dreadful war). Leverson was also a novelist, who drifted out into oblivion. This may seem unfair, but most artists are forgotten.
That Sitwell tried to recall them and their spirit or presence was a noble act. In a sense he attempted to use them as living metaphors for the geist of the 1890s-1940s (late Victorian - Edwardian - Georgian) period. Those grand men and women who graced and flavored the civilized world of the old Europe, though it was first blasted apart in the war that killed Owen, and then was atomized (literally) in the war that killed Rex Whistler.
So when reading it, remember that it is a panagyric to a once great age of culture.
I should add that Sitwell does use his central figures to hang out the better, more lasting literary and artistic people of that half century. Oscar and Bosie are there, as is the inimitable Max,
Diaghilev, Duse, Shaw, Thomas Hardy, Aldous Huxley, Galsworthy,
Frank Harris, Gabriel Faure...they all make their appearances. But central stage is to the ten I mentioned.
The section on Sickert does not really suggest anything nasty about the artist - far from it, he is painted as a hospitable man.
His love of the poorer part of society for his art work is gone into somewhat - as is the French influence. But his contact and training with James MacNeill Whistler is also mentioned. From what I have gathered (I have not read the Cornwall book, but I have seen some comments) she mentions that Sickert did not like his teacher. Perhaps, but there is this interesting anecdote about their connection in the section (p. 200 - 201). Unlike the Australian artist Charles Conder, Sickert was able to work with Whistler:
"But Sickert had been accepted, had passed these tremendous tests, and had even been privileged to spend an afternoon with Whistler in tearing up canvases. And Mrs. Sickert
told me how once, when she had bought a pruning knife, with a curved tip, for use in the garden, her husband remarked suddenly:
"That's just the knife that Whistler used for ripping up the pictures he did not want to keep. In Paris one day he sent me out to fetch two of them."
The slashing contest, therefore, must have occurred either just before Whistler was moving to a new studio or, more probably, after Mrs. Whistler had fallen ill, and she and her husband had returned to London....The idea of that afternnon raises so many questions: what was the number of pictures thus slashed, and what they looked like, these ephemeral visions of a
divine and dusky nebulosity strewn with stars, these dreams, monochromatic or flecked with color, of persons delicate and ambiguous, who had wilted, perhaps even when the Master had
believed that he had with habitual deftness and certainty of touch netted them securely, and had tried to pin them out upon the canvas....On wonders how often Sickert too applied the same process to his own similar accumulations; pictures, unwanted by the painter, that in time silt up the long shelf that runs round the top of a studio. To this high repository, safely out of reach, the eyes of studio rover and amateru trun very frequently, longingly surmising what treasures may not lie hidden among those works despised by their authors, notoriously the worst judges of them. Often, indeed, these pictures are those equivocal things that remain only partially created and resist full integration, but tat yet many painters cannot bring themselves to destroy. Sickert was more ruthless, thogh, and once, when Mrs. Sickert inquired of him what had become of his celbrated life size canvases of music hall artistes painted in his early days, he told her he had destroyed them beause they took up so much room. He added that he had offered one of them, a portrait of herself, to Katie Lawrence, and she had refused it with a classic phrase of contempt:
"What! That thing!...Not even to keep the draft out from under the scullery door!""
I gave that example from the chapter so you could sample the
actual effect of the chapter on the reader, capturing the image of artists like Whistler and Sickert destroying their own work because they need the room. Also, it shows Sickert was handy with a knife - albeit for a non-bloody reason.
Shortly after this, on pages 211 - 213, is the famous or infamous passage about Sickert and the Lodger. It begins with a description of dropping in on Sickert's flat in Swan Walk for breakfast.
"Other guests would begin now to arrive, and tearing himself away from the Haselden drawing out of the DAILY MIRROR,
or from whatever might constitute the particular favorite of the moment, he would go to greet them. Often I would meet at those breakfast parties Nina Hamnett, Alvaro Guevara, W.H.Davies, and Aldous Husley....Our host would make us sit down at the table, and would hurry round with breakfast, a plate
with an egg on it for each of us. Owing to the amount of cooking, serving, and pouring out that he was forced to do, he had not always at this hour so much leisure for conversation as his guests would have liked. His talk resembled most good talk in that it contained in its web certain invariable strands, certain immutable monuments that could be invoked for purposes of reference, allusion, comparison and simile, and that also supplied him with an established standard. The Tichborne Case and the mystery of Jack the Ripper constituted two such monuments.
The first, which had come into the headlines when Sickert had been a boy of eleven, had always maintained its interest for him; a special interest, due to the fact that he believed the rejected claimant, who had come back out of the sea, to have been the rightful heir....As for the second, apart from the intrinsic and abiding horror of that extraordinary series of crimes, it interested him because he thought he knew the identity of the murderer. He told me - and, no doubt, many others - how this was.... Some years after the murders, hehad taken a room in a London suburb. An old couple looked aftre the house, and when he had been there some months, the woman, with whom he used often to talk, asked him one day as she was usting the room if he knew who had occupied it before him. When he said
"No" she had waited a moment, and then replied, "Jack the Ripper!"...Her story was that his predecessor had been a veterinary student. After he had been a month or two in London, this delicate-looking young man - he was consumptive - took to staying out occasionally all night.. His landlord and landlady would hear him come in at about six in the morning, and then walk about in his room for an hour or two until the first edition of the morning paper was on sale, when he would creep lightly downstairs and run to the corner to buy one. Quietly he would return and go to bed; but an hour later, when the old man called him, he would notice, by the traces in the fireplace, that his lodger had burned the suit he had been wearing the previous evening. For the rest of the day, the millions of people in London would be discussing the terrible new murder, plainly belonging to the same series, that had been committed in the small hours. Only the student seemed never to mention it: but then, he knew no one and talked to no one, though he did not seem lonely....The
old couple did not know what to make of the mattr: week by week his health grew worse, and it seemed improbable that this gentle, ailing silent youth should be responsible for such crimes.
They could hardly credit their own senses - and then, before tehy could make up their minds whether to warn the police or not, the lodger's health had suddenly failed alarmingly, and his mother - a widow who was devoted to him - had come to fetch him back to Bournemouth where he lived....From that moment the murders had stopped...He died three months later.
Before leaving the subject, I may add that, while I was engaged in writing this account of Sickert, my brother reminded me that the painter had told us that when his landlady had confided in him that morning, in the course of her dusting, the name of Jack the Ripper, he had scribbed it down in pencil on the margin of a French edition of Casanova's MEMOIRS which he happened to be reading at the time, and that subsequently he had given the book away - we thought he had said to Sir william Rothenstein. Sickert had added, "And there it will be now, if you want to know the name." Accordingly, I wrote to Lady Rothenstein: but neither she nor Sir William remembered the book. On my consulting Mrs. Sickert, she maintained that her husband had told her that he had given the volume to Sir William's brother, Mr. Albert Rutherston. And this proved to have been the case. My friend Mr. Rutherston informed me that he lost the book only during the bombing of London, and that there had been several pencil notes entered in the margin, in Sickert's handwriting, always so difficult to decipher."
That is all that I have to type out regarding the passages from NOBLE ESSENCES. But there is a bit more in Tom Cullen's AUTUMN OF TERROR [my American paperback edition is WHEN LONDON WALKED IN TERROR, (New York: Avon Books, 1965, 1968)]. Cullen mentions the story on pages 149-150:
"Sickert scribbled the name of the lodger in pencil in the margin of a copy of Casanova's MEMOIRS belonging to Sitwell, but when Sir Osbert came to look for it he found that the book had been destroyed in the Blitz (3). The painter evidently told the same story to Max Beerbohm, for in one of Beerbohm's notebooks, auctioned at Sotheby's in December, 1960, he had written after Sickert's name: "Estreme of refinement..." There followed a long arrow leading to a marginal note: "Love of squalor. Lodged in Jack the Ripper's house."
"(3) When I wrote querying him concerning Sickert's address at the time in question, Sir Osbert Sitwell replied that he could not recall it. His brother, Sacheverell, writes, however: "Mr. Sickert was living in Mornington Crescent, London, N.W. I do not know the number of the house."
It is obvious that Sickert certainly through out this story of the mysterious lodger many times, and mentioned it to both Sitwells
and Beerbohm, Rothenstein, and Rutherston. Did he also tell it to
Dame Edith (if he mentioned it to her brothers, possibly he did)?
Aldous Huxley was a breakfast guest too - did he hear the name too?
The point is, the story is known, but has been brushed aside due to the Stephen Knight/Joseph Sickert Masonic-Royal Conspiracy story, and now due to Ms Cornwall's book. I have not read the latter, but I was told Ms Cornwall included it in her bibliography, but did not discuss it. I think that was a mistake. It actually might not lead to Jack, but it might settle who the veterinary student was (or, for that matter) who was the landlady.
I also end this by pointing out that the anecdote does show Sickert's interest in the Ripper, but he was interested in other
popular crimes too - in this case the Tichborne Claimant case of 1868 - 1874). For some reason he was convinced that Thomas
Castro (a.k.a. Sir Roger Tichborne, and later Arthur Orton) was not a fake but the real heir. Apparently this has not been discussed by anyone. It would also fit into his later interest in the murder of Phyllisj Dimmock in Camden Town in 1907. I wonder what other crimes interested him.
Best wishes,
Jeff