There was an article in Literary Review recently, in which DJ Taylor bemoaned the state of publishing and the literary world in general, culminating in the conclusion that

reading a book is, by and large, a more valuable and more rewarding activity than watching a film, laughing at a stand-up comedian or hunkering down over one’s Xbox.*

I’ve never agreed with smug generalisations about reading that seek to cast it as necessarily and automatically more edifying than other activities, and this sort of snobbery is almost always indulged in by people who have very little actual experience of the cultural forms they dismiss.

What’s more, I’ve recently had some experiences whilst hunkered down over one’s Xbox that have made me think we might be on the brink of a whole new way of experiencing video games and, in particular, whole new ways of uniting games with history.

The game that prompted these thoughts was Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed II, in which the player takes on the role of Ezio Auditore da Firenze, the titular assassin/heart-throb living in Renaissance Italy. I’ve been playing games for more than 15 years, and I can’t remember playing any that fired my historical imagination like this one. That’s not to say there haven’t been games that dealt very directly with history. There was JFK:Reloaded, for example, the controversial game which challenged players to recreate the official version of events at the Kennedy assassination, and offered a large cash prize to the person that came closest to matching the fatal shots from the window of the Book Depository. There have also been games like the Civilisation series, which, while not directly historical, encouraged players to think about historical processes such as creating societies and building empires. But none of these can rival Assassins Creed II’s stab at realising its historical setting, making it more than just a backdrop, but a living, breathing, accurate world

The game includes lush, atmospheric recreations of Florence, San Gimignano, Forlì and Venice. As well as its fictional protagonist, the plot revolves around real world figures, including the Medici family. The player is also frequently provided with pretty detailed historical information, with engaging, often witty details on everything from the social role of prostitutes and doctors and biographies of key Renaissance figures to backgrounds on the different districts of Venice you can explore.

Alright, so these are the historical plus points, and the game also includes an increasingly ridiculous sub-Dan Brown Assassin/Templar plotline, and implausible cameos from Leonardo DaVinci and Machiavelli. Some of the dialogue is historically unconvincing, with onlookers occasionally commenting ‘His mental health is questionable!’ as you storm about the streets. There are also interminable, unnecessary Tomb Raider style platform sections, which are a nightmare if you like me were literally born with hams for fists. I am not by any means arguing that Assassins Creed II is historically perfect, or that it goes nearly as far as it could. But it does reveal that games and history could have a future together, and a bright and exciting one at that. Technology has reached the point where both people and locations can be presented with real life in them, and extraordinary amounts of detail. By far my favourite section of the game is early on, when Ezio is still in Florence and the plot has yet to embark on its more outlandish flights of fancy. Here, Florence feels lived in, real. It feels like a place you’ve not been to before but want to learn more about. And the bitter feuds of the Medici family and their enemies seem to simmer all around.

This game got me excited about Renaissance Italy, a period I know very little about. It introduced me to astonishing figures, for example Caterina Sforza, and their stories. Gaming, traditionally, has been far more interested in the future than the past, so I can’t help but feel if games like Assassin’s Creed II introduce more people like me to previously familiar parts of history, and make them want to learn more, then that in itself is of great value.

And this could just be the beginning. 8 million people have bought this game around the world – a figure most historians will never come close to achieving. This raises the tantalising possibility that there is a market for historical games, that go a little deeper and rely on the history itself to power their storylines, trusting that history done well and responsibly can create hugely immersive, engaging worlds. Leaving all snobbery aside, can there be any more exciting prospect for anyone who loves history than to wonder around in the worlds of the past, talking to the people that inhabit them? I think the best comparison for where historical games might go is the historical novel, except of course with much more interactivity for the player, and the ability to make your own choices.

So, Mr DJ Taylor, lay off the Xbox for a while and let’s see what it can do, because I’ve got my fingers crossed that a new method not for studying but for enjoying history might be waiting to emerge.

*You may think that starting an anti-snobbery argument by throwing in a quote from Literary Review is in itself a touch snobby. If you think this, you are wrong, and I am better than you.

Jack the Ripper occupies a curious place in the popular consciousness – one that seems utterly divorced from the string of vicious murders (at least 5) he is thought to have committed. Perhaps we’ve grown too used to the idea of serial killers now, too exposed to the archetype of an unhinged misogynist, banishing their demons through clinical mutilation and remorseless murder. This psychological explanation seems to disguise the physical reality, rendering the world safer and more predictable again (unless of course you happen to be a prostitute). It’s a scenario we’ve seen played out countless times in film and television, and in reality, most recently in the 2006 Ipswich murders. So it may be that the image of Jack the Ripper has been softened by time, and fresher memories of other serial killers who have followed him, but it still strikes me as odd that Jack has somehow been absorbed into the myth of ‘Jolly Old London’; his story now, apparently suitable as entertainment, for families of tourists and coachloads of schoolkids.

Of course, another major factor in the air of unreality surrounding Jack is the fact that he was never caught, and, worse, a hundred suspects have been put forward in the intervening years (mostly by hacks looking to flog paperbacks). Whilst some are plausible and revealing (though inevitably inconclusive), a good number of these theories are fantasies of the wildest kind, like overblown kites stitched together out of old bits of claptrap, drivel and hooey, some of which have incomprehensibly caught in the winds of crazy and flown for a while. (Sorry, I’m just having a metaphor sort of a day today).

Several are out-and-out lies, relying on demonstrably forged documents or other falsehoods. Others are nothing but stories, and these can be guiltily enjoyable for their sheer chutzpah. In 1923, a Russian named Alexander Pedachenko was identified as the Ripper in the memoirs of William Le Queux. Le Queux claims to have seen a document, written in French by none other than Rasputin, which named Padachenko, an insane doctor, as the culprit, acting on behalf of the Okhrana (the Secret Police) to discredit Scotland Yard. Sadly, certain facts, most notably the lack of any good evidence pointing to Pedachenko ever having existed, count against this one.

Lewis Carroll. Look at him. Staring evilly. Thinking about doing some more muders, no doubt.

My favourite of all is the theory fingering Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, as the Ripper, which surely takes the cake as the most preposterous of all. Carroll was first suggested as a possible Jack by Richard Wallace, author of Jack the Ripper, Light-Hearted Friend. The theory seems to be based on the received (and largely exaggerated) image of Carroll as a deeply odd man, who formed dubious, intense relationships with women and girls. The clincher in the argument is Wallace’s use of anagrams, which he believe reveal hidden codes in Carroll’s writing, in which he actually confesses to being Jack the Ripper. He takes a passage from Carroll’s Nursery Alice, which reads,

‘So she wandered away, through the wood, carrying the ugly little thing with her. And a great job it was to keep hold of it, it wriggled about so. But at last she found out that the proper way was to keep tight hold of itself foot and its right ear’.

Innocent enough, you might think. But by simply shifting the letters around (oh, and changing some, and leaving others out), Wallace is able to reveal the shocking true meaning behind the passage.

‘She wriggled about so! But at last Dodgson and Bayne found a way to keep hold of the fat little whore. I got a tight hold of her and slit her throat, left ear to right. It was tough, wet, disgusting, too. So weary of it, they threw up – jack the Ripper.’

Absolute bunkum. As Casebook: Jack the Ripper notes, ‘all Wallace really succeeds in demonstrating is that Dodgson used the same alphabet as everyone else in the western world, and that, therefore his words can be rearranged to make other words – including rather rude ones about ripping ladies open’. Several wags have thankfully laid waste to Wallace’s ‘argument’ by finding other devastating examples of hidden Ripper confessions. This sentence from the beginning of Winnie the Pooh,

‘Here is Edward Bear coming downstairs now’

would be, in the world of Richard Wallace, enough to condemn AA Milne as a psychopath, with its hidden meaning,

‘Stab red red women! CR is downing whores – AA’

And then there’s this extract from Wallace’s own book,

‘This is my story of Jack the Ripper, the man behind Britain’s worst unsolved murders. It is a story that points to the unlikeliest of suspects: a man who wrote children’s stories. That man is Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, author of such beloved books as Alice in Wonderland. ‘

which can quite easily be transmogrified into,

‘The truth is this: I, Richard Wallace, stabbed and killed a muted Nicole Brown in cold blood, severing her throat with my trusty shiv’s strokes. I set up Orenthal James Simpson, who is utterly innocent of this murder. P.S. I also wrote Shakespeare’s sonnets, and a lot of Francis Bacon’s works too. ‘.

Case closed, I think you’ll agree.

But despite the lunacy of many Ripper theories, it is still interesting to examine why such accusations might attach themselves to certain people. And, in the case of Prince Albert Victor (or ‘Eddy’), Queen Victoria’s grandson, why should three such theories weave around him?

For that story, read Part 2.

I’ve just started reading the eclectic and lively Georgian London blog, and came across this piece about the menagerie at the Tower of London, which existed in various forms from 1252 until its closure in 1835, at which point its collection of animal inhabitants formed the basis for London Zoo.

The story of the menagerie (once you’ve managed to disable those parts of your brain sensitive to modern notions of health and safety, animal cruelty and basic common sense) is a dizzying carnival of unlikely experiences, which range from the sublimely ridiculous to the ridculously sublime. Picture, for example, the first resident of the menagerie; a polar bear, given as a gift from the King of Norway to the King of England. Although presumably fluffy, small and adorable to begin with (perhaps wrapped in a little bow), the gift soon grew into an almighty, boulder-pawed beast (as polar bears are so wont to do). Too large now for his strolls around the Tower, he was sent with his keeper to swim and catch fish in the river Thames.

This curious incident of the bear and his swim time seems to have set the tone for the menagerie, and as the delightful stories keep coming, the greater a tragedy it seems that there was no historical equivalent of Ben Fogle and Kate Humble to record them all in a sort of proto-Animal Park. Other residents of the Tower menagerie included Old Martin, the bear who put the grizzly back into grizzly bear, a lonely mongoose, monkeys bedecked in fine costumes, a plague of kangaroos (which apparently spread to other parts of England, until it was not at all uncommon to see kangaroos roaming around in parks) an elephant with a penchant for wine and a belligerent, beer-swilling zebra, who by all accounts was a much friendlier drunk.

There were also many Lions in the menagerie, whose chorus of roars at dawn came incongruously to mark the start of the day at the Tower of London. This put me in mind of another lion from another menagerie, whose wretched story is painfully revealing of the tensions and ironies that practically hummed in the air of revolutionary Paris.

This story is told in The Journal of a Spy in Paris During the Reign of Terror, a fascinating document which purports to have been recorded by one Raoul Hesdin (no doubt an assumed name), an English spy working for the French Government during the first half of 1794. No record can be found of anyone of this name in the employ of the government at the time, but the work rings with truth, and it seems safe to say that whoever he was, he was in Paris at the time, and in some position that gave him close access to the Committee of Public Safety, and all the important goings-on in this tumultuous period.

But despite this elevated position, it is the personal perspective offered by the journal that makes it such a fascinating and valuable source. The study of the revolution can so easily get bogged down in valiant attempts to chart and explain the ever-changing, immensely complicated shifts in the political tides, at the expense of an understanding of what it actually felt like to be an individual living through the vast impersonal processes of the Terror, of people’s perceptions of what was happening and where it was all leading, and ultimately what the point of it all was.

It seems that Hesdin once had some enthusiasm for the revolution, and was perhaps even swept up in its very early phases. In the time since then, however, this enthusiasm has clearly softened, waned and ultimately reversed upon itself. By early February 1794, he writes,

I have little heart in such scenes for the compilation of a regular journal; if there were the least chance of my obtaining employment elsewhere or a passport to leave, I would leave this hideous shambles to-morrow. I am here to discover the secrets of a Government which has none, to unriddle mysteries when everything is but too patent, to assign causes to affects when famine, hideous famine, is the cause of everything. At times I console myself with the thought that I am taking part in a piece that will one day be read and re-read on History’s page – if, indeed, all History be not destroyed and the End of all things come.

What seems to pain Hesdin most is the transformation that has taken hold of Paris, a city which once had clearly bewitched and entranced him, in a way that Paris through the ages seems to have had a unique capacity to do.

I walked today under the chestnuts for an hour… The contrast to my youthful recollections of Paris moved me almost to tears. Nothing but the eternal white dust of the streets remains the same…

The ferment of minds in the salons, clubs, and coffee-houses, above all in the streets, was indescribable. People literally lived in the open air those two summers, and in ‘89 at every moment were seen horsemen dashing in with news from the Court or the Assembly at Versailles; orators declaiming on every chair and balustrade on the terrace. Now it is the silence of the grave

He tells us of dance halls banned by the government, but which continued anyway in secret, shifting from place to place each night to avoid detection. He watches as great books and priceless pictures sell for nothing, all vestiges of the past having ‘become objects of derision’. Most chillingly, he one day observes that guillotinings have become so much a part of the day that guards have had to be posted at the scaffolds to stop children from playing on it.

In the middle of all this comes the tale of an old grey lion, once the pride of the menagerie at Versailles, and now caged in the Jardin des Plantes. This was a beautiful botanical garden, marred only, Hesdin tells us, by the presence of strolling flower girls paid by the government to keep a spying eye and keen ear trained on visitors. In this small zoo (which, along with the park, still exists today) lived the Lion, ‘covered with sores and infested with vermin’, a pitiful sight – more mange than mane. For a small fee visitors would be allowed in to see him, and consequently, says Hesdin, he was ‘tormented by the Parisian sans-cullotes because he was king’. This sad image seems to encapsulate both the deep fears and growing frustrations of the people of Paris at this time. The King and Queen were both dead and the revolution had brought immense change, but as people screamed at the lion and tugged his hair, it is tempting to believe they were expressing a powerful sense that the revolution was not yet complete, that it had not done what it was meant to. Its leaders had sought to stoke an ever-burning fear of enemies both within and without, and even the idea of royalty was something that had still to be not only ridiculed but also actively and continuously attacked.

It’s best not to get too romantic about the case of one old Lion, but I’m always searching for moments like this in history, where in one seemingly trivial anecdote everything seems to crystalise, and petty actions have the capacity to reveal what otherwise goes unspoken; ideas and emotions so powerful and complicated that perhaps only unconscious action can express them.

In the end you can interpret the story of the lion in the park in whichever way you like, but through the eyes of Raoul Hesdin, things seem bleakly clear. Shortly before his diary comes to an abrupt and unexplained end, he sums up the world he sees stretching out before him.

Politics seem to be asleep, and all hope of resistance at an end; the yoke is to be eternal; the bloodshed perpetual, if men can be born fast enough to feed the fire.

Further Reading

• The Journal of a Spy in Paris During the Reign of Terror, January-July, 1794 … A reproduction of the 1895 edition of the journal.
• Citizens: A Chronicle of the French RevolutionSimon Schama’s epic account, which complicates rather than simplifies the revolution (in a good way). Full of rich detail.
• The Terror by David Andress A probing and urgent account of the Terror, and an unusually lucid explanation of the fluctuations of revolutionary politics.

The photograph used to illustrate this article is by Vincenzo Gianferrari Pini, and was sourced from Wikimedia Commons.