Frederick Abberline - Popular Culture

Popular Culture

Several fictional retellings of the events surrounding the Jack the Ripper murders have cast Abberline in a central role. The suggestion is often but erroneously made for the sake of drama that Abberline was unmarried and formed an attachment to one of the women connected to the events. The two most popular film depictions have also cast him as an addict, for which there is no known historical basis.

• Abberline was played by Michael Caine in a 1988 television film called Jack the Ripper. Here, the character was an aging alcoholic whose quest to solve the murder gives him the strength to give up drinking.

• A fictionalized Abberline was featured as a central figure in Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's graphic novel From Hell (1991–1999), and subsequently portrayed by Johnny Depp in the very liberal film adaptation of that work (2001). The graphic novel paints him as a sulky but sympathetic policeman, different from his peers only in his moralism and being overweight, and takes pains to include little-known details of his life such as his involvement with the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. The film's version of Abberline was portrayed as an intelligent detective who is ahead of his time in his deductive techniques. He is also portrayed as being clairvoyant, allowing the filmmakers to ascribe to Abberline the contributions of spiritualist and psychic Robert James Lees. Although Abberline is addicted to opium and absinthe, he is a decent man who ultimately goes on a crusade against very powerful governmental and upper-class figures to stop the grotesque murders of Jack the Ripper. In the film Abberline dies of an overdose in his late 30s; in reality, he died of natural causes aged 86.

• Abberline was played by Gordon Christie in the 1973 TV miniseries Jack the Ripper.

• In "The Ripper", an episode of the TV series The Collector, Abberline was played by Robert Wisden.

• Abberline appears as a character in the anime series Black Butler named "Fred Abberline". While he is still involved in the Jack the Ripper case, this portrayal deviates heavily from the truth, not only by altering his family history (not married but engaged and with a twin brother), but also by placing his death sometime in 1889. However, the manga version of the story (and also the musicals) depicts him like a young enthusiastic and naive Scotland Yard agent who will become the successor of Lord Randall, the actual leader of Scotland Yard.