Hi Tony
I have already booked for the Maybrick event at the Liverpool Cricket Club in May and will be coming over from the United States, where I live especially to attend it. Yes it should be an interesting weekend. Tony, if you are going to be there, I look forward to meeting you then.
In regard to the melodramatic nature of the Diary narrative, it is a bit too melodramatic and convenient. It reads, as you said, like a story with beginning, middle, and end. Thus I think unnaturally so, as if, as I said before, it was written for an audience, not the way such a "diary" would read if it was just a man's private thoughts as it purports to be.
Yes the speaker does seem to be jealous of brother "Michael" (evidently meaning Michael Maybrick) but implies throughout that he thought Michael wrote the words for songs or poetry and that his success was as a versifier. In fact Michael Maybrick aka Stephen Adams was a musician who wrote the music for "The Holy City" and other works, while his collaborator Frank Weatherly wrote the lyrics. This to me is just one of the mistakes the forger makes.
Another thing is that the forger reveals little about the Whitechapel murders that we don't already know -- if the Diary was genuine we might expect to hear about some unknown information but we really don't.
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To me, as a Liverpudlian, the "Whitechapel, Liverpool - Whitechapel, London" phrase the writer uses early in the Diary shows how contrived the story is. The man did not have to go to London to murder prostitutes to gain revenge (supposedly) on wife Florie who was cuckolding him -- there were plenty of prostitutes to murder in Liverpool. Thus James Maybrick is only a convenient Victorian candidate on whom to pin the murders.
Chris
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