From Hell

Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s *From Hell* is a historical graphic novel about the Whitechapel murders attributed to Jack the Ripper in 1888. Rather than presenting a conventional detective story, it reconstructs the killings through a dense mixture of documented history, speculation, architectural symbolism, and deliberate invention. The series originally appeared in serialized form between 1989 and 1996, then was collected as a single volume by Eddie Campbell Comics in 1999. Its central premise follows the theory advanced by Stephen Knight in *Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution*: that the murders were connected to a royal scandal involving Prince Albert Victor, the royal physician Sir William Gull, and a group of women who supposedly knew too much. Knight’s theory is widely regarded by historians as unsupported, and Moore’s work does not present it as settled fact. Instead, *From Hell* turns the theory into a framework for examining Victorian class power, misogyny, empire, medicine, and the creation of public myths. The comic focuses especially on Gull, portrayed as an intelligent, intimidating, and increasingly obsessive figure. His violence is linked to an attempt to impose symbolic meaning on London, while the murders expose the vulnerability of impoverished women in Whitechapel. The real victims—Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly—remain central to the narrative, although the book expands their private lives with fictional dialogue and invented scenes. The canonical killer’s identity was never conclusively established, so the novel’s confident dramatization is an artistic choice rather than a historical discovery. Campbell’s black-and-white artwork is crucial to the book’s atmosphere. His rough, expressive linework gives London a crowded, unstable appearance, while detailed backgrounds and recurring visual motifs make streets, churches, monuments, and interiors feel like parts of an occult diagram. Moore and Campbell also include extensive endnotes identifying historical sources, explaining liberties, and separating documented events from conjecture. These notes are an essential part of the reading experience: they reveal how the narrative manipulates evidence instead of hiding its distortions. The title comes from a quotation attributed to Gull in the book, “One day, men will look back and say I gave birth to the twentieth century.” *From Hell* was adapted into a 2001 film directed by the Hughes brothers, starring Johnny Depp as Inspector Frederick Abberline and Ian Holm as Gull. The film substantially changes the comic’s structure and characterization. The graphic novel remains notable for treating Ripper history as a meditation on power, memory, and storytelling rather than merely a puzzle awaiting solution.