(1) Poverty in 1888 And Today: We Have It. Do We Need It?

As a Jack the Ripper tour guide, I've read numerous books recounting the 1888 murders. Each one offers unique insights, enriching my understanding of this dark chapter in history. Admittedly, some have left a deeper impression than others.

It is an incredible story which includes two of fiction’s best selling genres.

There is the inevitable focus on who might have been the killer, so it is a whodunnit mystery. Agatha Christie, the top-selling author of fiction, is the Queen of the Whodunnit,’ and she has proven the popularity of that genre.

There is a focus on the killer’s modus operandi, which, of course, means descriptions must be given of what the killer did to the victims, and Steven King, among others, has proved that horror sells.

The Jack the Ripper Murders have another ace. This is not crime fiction this is true crime.

But there is another element to the Ripper saga: poverty.

So every book that delves into the world of Jack the Ripper must set the scene: gaslit alleyways, swirling fog. And abject poverty.

Donald Rumbelow gives vivid descriptions of the appalling conditions that people lived in. Here’s one example from The Complete Jack The Ripper:

“In the house at 35 Hanbury Street, typical of the parish, there were seven people in each room with adult sons and daughters sleeping on the floor. In none of the rooms was there more than one bedstead, and the only w.c. was on the ground floor. This was normally in such a filthy state that the tenants used their chamber pots, which, said the Revd R.C. Billing giving evidence to a House of Commons Select Committee, were left in the rooms for a very long time before being taken down and emptied in the yard. Staircase bannisters had often been removed for firewood, and it was a common sight to see vermin-infested wallpaper hanging in strips from the walls. What furniture there was might consist of the broken-down remains of an old bedstead or table but was more likely to be a wooden board across some bricks or an old hamper or box turned upside down; the bed might be a sack of flea-infested straw.”

And the victims. The characters of the women killed by Jack the Ripper arrive in many of the books draped in the degradation of poverty.

“Polly Nichols was a typical Whitechapel whore, a gin-sodden derelict who routinely sold her body in any convenient staircase, alley or court for the price of a night’s lodging.” That’s how Thomas Toughill describes Polly Nichols in The Ripper Code -

Read my account of the life of Polly Nichols.

Bruce Robinson describes Annie Chapman in They All Love Jack: “Mrs Chapman was a forty-seven-year-old nothing with progressive lung disease that would probably have killed her if the Ripper hadn’t. In the early hours of Saturday, 8 September 1888, in want of four pennies for a bed, she went out hawking the only thing she had.”

You can read an alternative to this here.

What is written is descriptive. Some of the books will look at some of the people who struggled to alleviate the worst of the suffering: Andrew Mearns, William Thomas Stead, and, in their own way, the Reverend Samuel Barnett and his wife.

None of the books explains how, after two or three hundred thousand years of human evolution, the most advanced and complicated life form in the universe - the only life force that knows there is a universe - managed to end up with such truly diabolical conditions in what was the richest city in the world.

I have sometimes wondered if as many books had been dedicated to addressing how we ended up with such abject poverty in Victorian London, we might not still be having to deal with it. Poverty has not gone away.

True, the poverty of 19th-century London was of a different order to that of 21st-century London. That fact is sometimes offered as a sop to ease pressure on demands to deal with present-day poverty in modern London.

However, Victorian levels of poverty still exist in our global village. Images of it are delivered in colour to our living rooms on a nightly basis.

There are those who say poverty has always existed and always will exist—‘the poor will always be with us.’

There are those who say the government needs to help the poor.

Some say poverty must exist to motivate people to do a day’s work.

Some will argue there is nothing wrong with poverty because poor people are happy people while rich people are miserable.

In books about Jack the Ripper, assumptions are made depending on the writer's worldview, and so it is with the assumptions that are made regarding poverty.

I want to see what the hard evidence is.

And while it isn’t a problem that some would immediately think of when the word poverty is mentioned, there is an aspect of today’s world for which I want an explanation.

Why is the chance of owning a secure home more remote for young people today than it was a generation ago?

So, as I’ve put in the research for my many posts that explore what is known about a series of murders committed by an unknown killer, I thought I would put in as much effort to explore as many aspects of poverty as possible.

Who knows where it might lead?