Hidden in Plain Sight

Abstract

After the Whitechapel murders, Jack the Ripper had a threatening shadow over everyday life. However, Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories did not provide an adequate answer to these atrocities because Jack the Ripper did not materialise in any of them. Even though there is no tangible proof of Jack the Ripper's presence through these stories, his influence can be certainly observed. In the Victorian Era, these anxieties emerged in literary pieces often in a displaced, symbolic form. This paper focuses on these symbolic influences and appearances through James Moriarty, social anxieties and even the character of Sherlock Holmes himself.