Jack the Ripper: History
1.
Dare you walk the streets of Jack the Rippers London? In the
1880s, the East End of London was a rather unpleasant place
to live. High unemployment and low wages brought poverty and homelessness,
and a general feeling of desperation pervaded the air.
As a result, people lived their squalid lives against a background
of immorality, drunkenness, crime and violence. Robbery and assault
were commonplace and the streets were ruled by gangs.
Then, between August 31st and November 9th 1888, there occurred a
series of murders so gruesome, so evil, that they outraged the entire
nation. The killer was never found, but from those days forward, he
was known as Jack the Ripper. Who was he? Where did he
come from?
Those are the questions detectives, criminologists and historians
have been asking for over a century.
2.
Whitechapel in the late nineteenth century was a particularly nasty
part of London. The odd murder and violent death was much more likely
here than in any other part of the capital and the poverty and destitution
of this squalid little quarter of the 'greatest city on earth' was
made even more stark by its proximity to the richest square mile of
land on earth. Whilst the bankers and businessmen of the West End
rolled into the City some time around 10am, the City's cleaners, factory
workers and market traders all trudged their way wearily from the
East End at any time between 3 and 7 in the morning. A review of Jack
London's The People of the Abyss (1902) describes in depressingly
graphic detail just what life in Whitechapel was like at the turn
of the century - just over a decade after the crimes were committed.
Families would live eight to a room - sometimes even more. There are
descriptions of livestock sharing rooms with families and even a post-mortem
on a recently deceased baby being carried out on the one table in
the room where the family then eat their evening meal.
Work in Whitechapel was both hard and hard to come by. Men would perform
back-breaking work for 14-15 hours a day - usually in or around the
docks or City institutions - for little more than the price of a bed
for the evening. And the women of Whitechapel would perform even more
demeaning and demanding work. Working as tailoresses for a pittance
or traipsing miles for any sort of piece-work, the lot of Whitechapel
women was even more hazardous and arduous than their men.
Estimates at the time - and subsequently - have put the number of
women prostituting themselves in the East End at 1,200. (This is out
of a total population put at 80,000.) The majority of these women
were not career prostitutes - many of them were forced into sordid
sexual encounters for as little as a penny a go merely to buy a crust
of bread or buy a place in a doss-house for the night (whether married
or not). Martin Fido states that many of the people he interviewed
for his book on the Whitechapel Murders admitted that they felt 'Gran
had often done was what required to earn a crust for the night'.
We know that all of the murdered women were married at some stage
and had either divorced or separated due to their addiction to alcohol
- a habit that their occasional prostitution funded. That they were
alcoholics, and that they funded this escapism by way of their occasional
assumed profession, is neither inconceivable nor unforgivable, given
the reality of life in late-nineteenth century Whitechapel.