"Can history then be said to have an architecture, Hinton? The notion is most glorious and most horrible."
Gull, in FROM HELL #2
"Such purpose. I am fifty, my own purpose unrevealed despite meaningless laurels."
Gull, in FROM HELL #2
"Our son is a wastrel and a halfwit. We shudder to think of the throne in his hands. But he is none the less of our flesh and our obligation is most severe..."
Queen Victoria, in FROM HELL #2
"These times, they are a worry to us, and it has been too long since we had men about us who were strong and dependable. Since dear, dear Albert... Go. Go now, Dr Gull. We would be alone."
Queen Victoria, in FROM HELL #2
"There is a wrong, an intense wrong, in our society running all through our life... And it will be made righter some day. I dashed myself against it but it is no one man's strength can move it. It was too much for my brain, but it is by the failure of some that others succeed, and through my very foolishness shall come better success to others... perhaps more than any cleverness of mine could have wrought."
James Hinton, quoted in FROM HELL #2
"Fear not, though thoughts and memories most unendurable beset your mind... for I shall take them all away and quite relieve your suffering."
Gull, in FROM HELL #2
"Less then a thimble-full of iodine divides the intellectual from the imbecile. Of which phenomenon I shall forthwith attempt a demonstration."
Gull, in FROM HELL #2
"I dreamed about Stamford Street, where I lived with my Billy before 'e ran off..."
"Dreams! It's wakin' life's the trouble!"
Polly Nichols and Annie Chapman, in FROM HELL #3
"No, sir! Not "Done away with" for that is common murder, only fit for common footpads. I spoke of grand work, Netley. Grand work. A great work must have many sides from which we may consider it."
Gull, in FROM HELL #4
"Do you begin to grasp how truly great a work is London? A veritable textbook we may draw upon in formulating great works of our own!"
Gull, in FROM HELL #4
"The greater part of London's story is not writ in words. It is instead a literature of stone, of place-names and assocations."
Gull, in FROM HELL #4
"Symbols have power, Netley... Power enough to turn even a stomach such as yours, or to deliver half this planet's population into slavery."
Gull, in FROM HELL #4
"Do whatever needs to be done. You make your cuts, Sir Charles. I'll make mine."
Gull, in FROM HELL #5
"What a life you have endured, awaiting nothing but deliverance."
"Mm. I... Sir? I feel so queer. Does everything look sparkly to you?"
"Why, child, that's just the stars. This is a rare and special night, I think. For both of us."
Gull and Polly Nichols, in FROM HELL #5
"You're forging a letter from a killer? But that's ..."
"It's a whole new style of journalism, Mr Gibbs, and we're inventin' it right 'ere in Wapping."
Mr Best and Mr Gibbs, in FROM HELL #7
"Oh God. I've been tryin' not to think about it. I had such a lovely fuck with Joe last night. I thought "Is this it? Is this the last of it?"
Mary Kelly, in FROM HELL #8
"Gull, please, in the name of reason..."
"Invoke not reason. In the end it is too small a deity."
Sir Charles Warren and Gull, in FROM HELL #8
"It... ughh... it is these grapes. They have something on them, I think."
"'tis laudanum. A little, nothing more. They are the grapes of mercy, child, not lightly spat away."
Elizabeth Stride and Gull, in FROM HELL #8
"If you'll forgive me, Sir, I am Robert Lees, psychic adviser to Her Majesty. I am familiar with your work, Sir, and have long anticipated this meeting."
"Indeed? I am similarly familiar with your work , Sir, profiting from delusions born of bereavement. Consequently, I have relished this meeting not at all. Good day."
Robert Lees and Gull, in FROM HELL #9
"Say what you will, Sir. You are welcome to remain ensconced in lore and ritual. For my part I am happy to entertain a questioning spirit."
"Ha ha ha! Then mark my words, Mr Yeats, your bones shall never rest easy. Good day to you, Sir."
W.B. Yeats and Gull, in FROM HELL #9
"Oh, an' I see Anderson's back from 'is Swiss 'olidays, ayin' we should arrest every tart for 'er own protection!"
"Well, he's one of them Second-Coming Christians, ain't he? Perhaps he'll put some of them up at his house."
Abberline and Godley, in FROM HELL #9
"There, there, Netley. There, there. I shall tell you where we are. We're in the most extreme and utter region of the human mind, a dim sub-conscious underworld. A radiant abyss where men meet themselves... Hell, Netley. We're in Hell."
Gull, in FROM HELL #9
"You're mad."
"Oh, undoubtedly. But you're helpless."
Sir Charles Warren and Gull, in FROM HELL #9
"Dear God, what is this Aethyr I am come upon? What spirits are these, labouring in what heavenly light? No... No, this is dazzle, but not yet divinity."
Gull, in FROM HELL #10
"It would seem we are to suffer an apocalypse of cockatoos... Morose, barbaric children, playing joylessly with their unfathomable toys."
Gull, in FROM HELL #10
"Where comes this dullness in your eyes? How has your century numbed you so? Shall man be given marvels only when he is beyond all wonder?
Gull, in FROM HELL #10
"You are the sum of all preceding you, yet seem indifferent to yourselves. A culture grown disinterested, even in its own abysmal wounds."
Gull, in FROM HELL #10
"Ah, Mary, how time's levelled us. We are made equal, both mere curios of our vanished epoch in this lustless world. This world, where in comparison I am made ignorant, while you... you are made virtuous."
Gull, in FROM HELL #10
"Do you understand how I have loved you? You'd have all been dead in a year or two from liver failure, men, or childbirth. Dead. Forgotten. I have saved you. Do you understand that? I have made you safe from time, and we are wed in legend, inextricable within eternity."
Gull, in FROM HELL #10
"Have you done, Sir? Is it finished with?"
"It is beginning, Netley. Only just beginning. For better or worse, the twentieth century."
Netley and Gull, in FROM HELL #10
"I have been climbing, Netley, all my life, toward a single peak. Now I have reached it. I have stood and felt the wind. I have seen all the world beneath me. Now there is only descent. Only the valley. Would that I had died there, Netley, in that light above the cloud line. I'm cold. Take me home."
Gull, in FROM HELL #10
"I remember my first Fenian bombin', year afore I were first married. Makes you think there's naught to us but shit and mincemeat."
Abberline, in FROM HELL #11
"To be honest, I felt worse than sick. I came out that room and I felt somethin' bad 'ad 'appened. Not just to 'er, to everythin'. I felt as if everythin' were lost."
Abberline, in FROM HELL #11
"Come on, Godley. Cheer up, for fuck's sake. There's good things happen in life as well, y'know."
"But... I mean, after that ... that thing in Miller's Court."
"I said in life, Godley. I didn't say in the East End."
Abberline and Godley, in FROM HELL #11
"Ah, yes. Dear Frank. I'm afraid he's had to retire early with a mild touch of insanity."
Oscar Wilde, in FROM HELL #11
"Oscar Wilde? Oscar Wilde, the writer?"
"Oh, good heavens, no! Awful fellow. Wouldn't give him house- room. No, I'm Oscar Wilde the florist. While over here we have Mr Walter Sickert, the turf accountant... and Mr James McNeil Whistler, who I believe keeps a tripe stall in Mile End."
Montague Druitt and Oscar Wilde, in FROM HELL #11
"It's all just stories when all's said and done."
"But that's just the thing, it isn't just stories. Those women really died. And poor Druitt, caught up in something he could never understand."
"That's all done with though. That's all gone."
Abberline and Robert Lees, in the epilogue to FROM HELL
"Take my advice and don't get old. It's bloody rubbish."
Abberline, in the epilogue to FROM HELL
"Now there's just us, knowin' what we know, both washed up 'ere. Can't send a message; can't tell anybody. I expect there's been a lot of chaps in our position down across the years with one thing and another. Makes you wonder, sometimes, doesn't it? Make you wonder 'ow much of the world is true."
Abberline, in the epilogue to FROM HELL
"I think there's going to be another war."
Robert Lees, in the epilogue to FROM HELL
The problem we face here is that neither Knight nor the assembled ranks of Freemasonry are necessarily telling the truth, at which point a Victorian fog starts to engulf the facts of our narrative. Given that the tortuous story of the Whitechapel murders is filled with liars, tricksters, and unreliable witnesses, it is a fog we shall encounter often.
In Appendix I of FROM HELL
The character and temperament of Victoria here is entirely my own interpretation, and has indeed been the source of debate between myself and the otherwise genial and agreeable Mr Campbell of Brisbane, Australia.
In Appendix I of FROM HELL
One almost suspects that the bereaved Victoria, who spent the later decades of her reign in mourning for her departed consort, would have changed her own name to Albert and the name of the country to Alberta if she had thought for a moment she could get away with it.
In Appendix I of FROM HELL
The phrase, Hairy-Ford-Shire, a rather dim pun upon the pronunciation of "Hertfordshire", is one of an extensive array of Victorian slang expressions relating to the female genitalia. The expression, in this instance, was passed on to me by Mr Neil Gaiman, who has a dirty mouth in at least seven centuries.
In Appendix I of FROM HELL
As with so much of From Hell, when we know the details of a person's life but not how he or she felt, then we must resort to fiction unless we are to exclude feelings altogether, which I don't feel inclined to do.
In Appendix I of FROM HELL