Little Wonder. Sasha Abramsky
up with her; perhaps Renshaw, realizing he had a real match on his hands, simply raised his game one vital notch. He perceived, a commentator acerbically reported, “that he had no ordinary lady opponent, and from that moment every stroke was keenly contested, both players doing their utmost to gain the victory.”[7] Whatever the reason, he won, but only just. The final score was 2–6, 7–5, 7–5. Newspapers noted the “brilliancy” of Dod’s play, the astounding hand-eye coordination she showed at the net. She ran her opponent around the court so hard that it almost seemed, they wrote, as if Renshaw’s opponent were a man.
Later that summer, in between regular matches at a tournament in Scarborough, the exhibitions resumed.
First, the teenager wiped the floor with Grove, beating him 1–6, 6–0, 6–3. Then she took on the six-time Wimbledon champion—a man who for years had been the fiercest player on the lawn tennis circuit, a hero who traveled throughout the British Isles from one tournament to the next, routinely humbling his opponents. By the end of that match, Dod had proven her point. In demolishing William Renshaw 6–2, 6–4, she had shown that women, those delicate, fragile flowers of the Victorian imagination, were more than capable of holding their own in the most physical of domains.[8] The newspapers gushed about her “remarkable feats” in taking down the best male players of her era.
* * *
As the dreary rains of a sodden English July and August continued, the news focus shifted. The English public became engrossed in reading about the onset of a series of grizzly East End murders that would soon come to be known as the Jack the Ripper killings. Temporarily, sports, the Irish question, the growing movement for women’s suffrage, and pretty much everything else took a backseat. Purple prose poured forth on the slashing horrors that were unfolding on the darkened, narrow streets of the old districts coming off of the river Thames in the eastern precincts of London.
Time seemed to slow to a crawl. Each day from August 31, when the first of a series of victims’ bodies was discovered, new and ghastly revelations surfaced. The women, most of them prostitutes, had had their throats slashed, their abdomens and genitals cut. Some of them had had their internal organs removed. As the police started to put the pieces of the puzzle together, they found murders dating all the way back to April that appeared to fit the pattern of a serial killer.
The papers provided the unknown murderer daily coverage, guessing as to his motives, his identity, his status in society. The Illustrated Police News carried lurid stories with headlines such as “Ready for the Whitechapel Fiend, Women Secretly Armed.”[9] And a guessing game began: who was the crazed killer stalking the women of the East End, what were his motivations, where would he strike next? In September, news organizations started receiving letters from the perpetrator, signed “Jack the Ripper.” It was a moniker that would come to be a byword, down the centuries, for depravity. In mid-October, one of his missives, titled “From Hell,” arrived along with half a kidney, thought to be from one of his victims.[10]
Once the killer had named himself, the country, and much of the rest of the world, became utterly obsessed. In Scotland, the Courier and Argus reported that one of the canine entrants in a rabbit-coursing match had been named after the killer, and that, when he lost, the crowd “cheered lustily,” with one of the spectators announcing, “He cannot rip rabbits anyhow.”[11] In Yorkshire, the York Herald reported “further murders threatened by ‘Jack the Ripper,’” and in the next column over detailed how an East End woman who lived in the vicinity of the killings had been so “excited and effected” by them that she had hung herself in her own home.[12] Throughout the East End, the police flooded neighborhoods, hoping to flush out the murderer in his lair. They rounded up scores of known criminals, looking for a break in the case. They chased one lead after another, provided to them by informants. When the Ripper’s victims were buried, huge crowds lined the streets, following the hearses to the cemeteries and uttering what a Bristol Mercury and Daily Post reporter termed “loud and frequent” threats against the unknown killer. Across the Atlantic, the Cincinnati Enquirer, reporting on the murderer’s penchant for removing body parts from his victims, came up with what may well have been the most lurid subhead of all: “Theory That the Murderer Is Gloating over a Bubbling Cauldron of Hell-Broth Made of Gory Ingredients.”[13]
Soon, newspapers were reporting copycat assaults as far afield as Paris.[14] In Bradford, a woman named Maria Coroner was fined twenty pounds for “breach of the peace” after she sent out a series of threatening letters that she signed “Jack the Ripper.”[15]
* * *
Amid the horrors and the fear, sport must have been a most welcome diversion. In addition to increasingly breathless reports of dastardly crimes and bloody killings—most of them having nothing to do with the Ripper—the newspapers managed to keep up a steady flow of sports coverage. Next to the story about Maria Coroner, for example, was a long report on a shooting competition. There were still plentiful column inches in the major newspapers devoted to football, cricket, billiards, bowling—even if the front pages were otherwise occupied with murder and mayhem.
Lottie Dod kept her focus; she continued to win. The tournament season in England and Ireland ran until mid-October. And in one event after the next, Dod now pulverized her opponents. She beat them in regular matches, and she beat them, again and again and again, in handicapped events, in which her opponents started off with a two-point advantage. She beat them in singles, in ladies’ doubles, in mixed doubles. On the rare instances when an opponent kept close to her, eventually Dod would always pull off a break. When a set went the duration, her opponents would, almost without fail, blink first. That summer, she won several sets 11–9, 10–8, and 9–7. The only opponent to win one of these extended sets against her was Blanche Hillyard, who managed to squeeze out a 10–8 first set against Dod in Bath that May before collapsing 6–3, 6–0 over the following two sets.[16] Adding insult to injury, Lottie then partnered with her sister, Ann, to win the ladies’ doubles, easily beating Hillyard and her partner in the first round of that tournament. Afterward, the two sisters and their friend Mrs. Bagnall-Wild posed for photographs on the wooden chairs courtside, the sisters sitting straight, wearing feathered hats, and holding parasols by their sides. They looked regal, unapproachable.
The past couple of years, the writer W. Methven Brownlee wrote as the season wound down, had been “simply a triumphal procession” for the teenager. She and Maud Watson had together built ladies’ tennis into a mass spectator sport. “To these two players, the ladies of the lawn tennis world owe everything,” Brownlee gushed. But in reality, by late 1888 it really was only a one-woman show. “It was not now a question of getting a set against her,” the commentator wrote of Dod. “It was the satisfaction of getting a game.”[17]
* * *
The next year, however, there was a shocking absence.
The Little Wonder didn’t play Wimbledon in 1889, nor did she play in 1890 either. The public reason given was that, in the first instance, she was yachting, and in the second, she simply didn’t feel like playing. In private, however, the story may well have been less happy: The spring of 1889, Lottie’s older sister, Ann, had fallen in love with an older man, a senior employee of the Whitbread brewing company, while on a trip through the Scottish isles, and had asked her widowed mother for her blessing to get married. Instead, Margaret, who had minutely controlled her children’s lives from the time Joseph died in 1879, refused to even contemplate such a union. Fearing she would be forever trapped at Edgeworth, gradually growing into an old maid, on September 2, 1889, Ann eloped to Chertsey, where she and Ernest Worssam married.[18]
Nearly a century later, her children and Tony’s children told Jeffrey Pearson, a Cheshire-based author working on a short book about Dod at the time, that they believed in the wake of this scandal—first the spring and summer romance, then the elopement—Margaret had simply refused to allow Lottie to travel down to London to compete.[19]
Possibly adding salt to the wound was the patronizing way in which male reporters of the day greeted the proud young lady’s every success. Repeatedly, they wrote of Lottie as a tomboy, as somebody who wasn’t quite as womanly as she should be—or, if they acknowledged that she was womanly, they said it almost as a