Children Allowed to Train Themselves for Murder

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Down to Earth Series · 6 pages

From Lucifer of December 1888, three months after the Whitechapel murders, and reprinted in Blavatsky Collected Writings X. A correspondent signing herself Ariadna supplies the occasion: that English people are fond of maintaining the superiority of their national morals over their Continental neighbours', yet a visitor strolling through a large seaside resort might have doubted it — a shop displaying an alluring tray of boys' knives ticketed "Jack Ripper's knives", and in an adjacent street a gang of children between six and eleven playing at Ripper, jumping over one another and knocking them down in a rehearsal of the act.

Blavatsky's comment fastens on the adults rather than the children. The natural question is why the parents did not stop them and forbid the ghastly play — and the answer is that they did not: the fond parents, themselves children of the present age, must have laughed and been amused at the original idea. Nor, she adds, does it occur to these good Christian people to uproot the evil by lodging a complaint against the speculators permitted to bring out such a toy. The comparison she draws to make the point is with censorship: that translators and publishers of Zola are fined heavily for showing vice in its ugliness, while Jack Ripper's knives may be freely sold to children.

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