From Hell - Plot Overview

Plot Overview

Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence, a.k.a. Prince Eddy, marries and fathers a child with Annie Crook, a shop girl in London's East End. Prince Eddy had visited the area under an assumed name and Annie is unaware of her husband's royal position. Queen Victoria becomes aware of the marriage and has Albert separated forcibly from his wife, whom she places in an asylum. Victoria then instructs her royal physician Sir William Gull to impair Annie's sanity, which he does by damaging or impairing her thyroid gland. The prince's daughter is taken to Annie Crook's parents by the painter Walter Sickert, a friend of Eddy's who had accompanied him on his trips to the East End. Crook's father believes the child to be his through an incestuous relationship with his daughter.

The potentially scandalous matter is resolved, until a group of prostitutes — Annie's friends — who are aware of the illegitimate child and its royal connections, attempt to blackmail Walter Sickert, Prince Eddy's friend, in order to pay off a gang of thugs who are threatening them. After Queen Victoria learns of the blackmail attempt, Gull is once again enlisted, this time to silence the group of women who are threatening the crown. The police are complicit in the crimes — they are granted prior knowledge of Gull's intentions, and are adjured not to interfere until the plot is completed.

Gull, a high-ranking Freemason, begins a campaign of violence against the five women, brutally murdering them with the aid of a barely literate carriage driver, John Netley. While he justifies the murders by claiming they are a Masonic warning to an apparent Illuminati threat to the throne, the killings are, in Gull's mind, part of an elaborate mystical ritual to ensure male societal dominance over women (see "Interpretations" below). As the killings progress, Gull becomes more and more psychologically unhinged, culminating in a full psychic vision of the future during his murder of Mary Kelly.

The story also serves as an in-depth character study of Gull; exploring his personal philosophy and motivation, and making sense of his dual role as royal assassin and serial killer. Though rooted in factual biographical details of Gull's life, Moore admitted taking substantial fictional license: for example, the real-life Gull suffered a stroke; Moore fictionalizes this event as a theophany, with Gull seeing "Jahbulon", a Freemasonic figure, fundamentally altering Gull's world view and indirectly leading to the murders.

Gull takes John Netley, his coachman, sole confidant, and reluctant aide, on a tour of London landmarks (including Cleopatra's Needle and Nicholas Hawksmoor's churches), expounding about their hidden mystical significance, which is lost to the modern world . Later, Gull forces the semi-literate Netley to write the infamous "From Hell" letter which lends the work its title. Gull has a number of transcendent experiences in the course of the murders, culminating with a vivid vision of what London will be like a century after the last murder. It is implied that, through his grisly activities, male dominance over femininity is assured, and the twentieth century is thus given its dominant form, though Gull finds it disgusting nevertheless.

Inspector Frederick Abberline investigates the Ripper crimes, without success until a fraudulent psychic, Robert James Lees, acting on a personal grudge against Gull, identifies him as the murderer. Gull confesses, and Lees and Abberline, shocked, report the matter to superiors within the Police force, who work to cover up the discovery. They inform both Abberline and Lees that Gull was operating alone, and gripped by insanity. Abberline later discovers through chance Gull's actual intentions to cover up the matter of the royal "bastard" fathered by the Duke of Clarence, and resigns from the Metropolitan Police, protesting the official coverup of the murders.

Gull is tried by a secret Freemasonic council, which determines he is insane; Gull, for his own part, refuses to submit to the council, informing them that no man amongst them may be counted as his peer, and may not therefore judge the "mighty work" he has wrought. A phony funeral is staged, and Gull is imprisoned under a pseudonym "Thomas Mason". Years later, and moments before his death, Gull has an extended mystical experience, where his spirit travels through time, observing the crimes of the London Monster, instigating or inspiring a number of other killers (Peter Sutcliffe, Ian Brady), causing Netley's death, as well as serving as the inspiration for both Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and William Blake's painting "The Ghost of a Flea". The last experience his spirit undergoes before it "becomes God" is a view of Mary Kelly - the one intended victim who escaped - who is apparently able to see his spirit and abjures him to begone "back to Hell".