Whitechapel Club collection

Chicago, IL, 1890. Unique. Very Good+. Unique. The Whitechapel Club was started in The Whitechapel Club was founded in 1889 by a group of young, bohemian, literary Chicago newspapermen, located in a Loop alley that is now West Calhoun Place, between Wells and Lasalle. Equally a secret society and a press club, the organization was named after the area of London where Jack the Ripper contemporaneously prowled for victims. Jack the Ripper himself was named (absentee) president. It ended in 1894. Chicago reporters often lived in a dark and macabre world in order to report the news, and the Whitechapel Club reflected these preoccupations and mocked them. Also called the Suicide Club, the group’s motto commanded members to “laugh in the face of death.” Although over half of the all-male members were journalists, like-minded men of other professions were allowed to join: bank presidents, police chiefs, and preachers mingling with fringe members of society, including magicians, psychics, and even convicted murderers. Other than journalists, only two men of each profession could belong at the same time. Women were strictly forbidden. The era in which the Whitechapel Club was born and flourished, the 1880s and 1890s, was a period of growing professionalism in American journalism, as in the rest of American life. As Michael Schudson has pointed out, that was a time when journalists were increasingly self-conscious about their work, "as eager to mythologize [it]...as the public was to read of their adventures." The official purpose of the Whitechapel Club, boldly written on its state-issued certificate of incorporation, was "Social Reform." But that was certainly tongue-in-cheek. The Whitechapelers were not "in any sense reformers, or actuated by the smug and forbidding spirit which too often inspires that species,"--https://www.casebook.org/dissertations/rip-whiteclub.html
The collection consists of posed 8x10" photographs of the members with pencil annotations of names: Percy L. Clark, Dr. Hugh Blake Williams, etc. sitting around a table with books, skulls, and coffee mug. One image portrays a group of men sitting around a piano, with other musicians in attendance at the Koster's Saloon, Chicago, Illinois.
A loose sheet with pasted down newspaper clippings about the secret club and the cremation pledge/ceremony for Hugh Blake Williams, a known Chicago occultist.
A red printed invitation card to the Whitechapel Club symposium with dancing skeletons, with an address: 173 Calhoun Place, Chicago and the postmarked envelope addressed to Percy L. Clark. A macabre aspect of Chicago's underground society and history. Lightly toned, else bright and unmarred. Collection of three sepia toned, b/w photographs, a loose sheet of newspaper clippings, one postcard, and accompanying cancelled envelope. Pencil annotations.