(2) Poverty in 1888 And Today: What Did Charles Darwin Think?

Photograph of Charles Darwin

Whoever killed the women in Whitechapel in 1888, they were living at the same time as Charles Darwin.

However, unlike other notables of the 19th century, such as Lewis Carrol, Lord Randolph Churchill, Prince Albert Victor and Walter Sickert, to name a few, Darwin cannot become a candidate for the suspect known as Jack the Ripper.

Darwin was born in 1809 and survived until the 1880s, which means the lives of Darwin and the Whitechapel killer overlapped.

It’s more than probable that the unknown killer or killers knew of Charles Darwin because he did achieve some notoriety toward the end of his life however, Darwin is safe from suspicion because he died in 1882 - six years before the ‘Autumn of Terror’.

Darwin did cause quite a stir. Charles Darwin was not quite the headline grabber that was ‘Jack the Ripper,’ but his claims got him a lot of publicity.

His claims that we shared a common ancestor with other primates, indeed shared a common ancestor with all living creatures, was too much for a received wisdom that claimed that a supernatural being created all life on earth around 6000 years before his chosen ones founded the British Empire.

His comment that life on the planet was a battle won by the fittest was probably received more positively.

The phrase ‘the survival of the fittest’ would have appealed to the confident and assertive men who were fully occupied with building an empire, as this quote from Cecil Rhodes shows:

“Africa is still lying ready for us it is our duty to take it. It is our duty to seize every opportunity of acquiring more territory and we should keep this one idea steadily before our eyes that more territory simply means more of the Anglo-Saxon race more of the best the most human, most honorable race the world possesses.”

In 1884, four years before the Whitechapel Murders, a conference was held in Berlin. The 12 most powerful European nations, plus the Ottoman Empire and the USA, decided how to divide up Africa. Africans were not invited.

On BBC Bitesize, you will find this summary of the results of the Berlin Conference:

“Thousands of Africans were killed by European forces as each nation claimed the territory they decided was theirs. This process became known as the ‘Scramble for Africa’.

It’s fair to say that the BBC could have said tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands rather than ‘Thousands of Africans were killed.”

When the British delegation turned up for the Berlin Conference, they would have been in a jubilant mood because the year of the Berlin Conference, 1884, was the year the Maxim gun was ready for production in Hatton Garden, London.

Invented in 1884 by Hiram Stevens Maxim, it was the first fully automatic machine gun in the world. Historian Martin Gilbert called it "the weapon most associated with imperial conquest”.

It was heavily used by colonial powers during the "Scramble for Africa”, which meant that four years later, in 1888, the diamond mines of South Africa became the property of Europeans.

With funding from N.M. Rothschild & Sons Cecil Rhodes was named the chairman of De Beers at the company's founding on 13 March 1888.

The idea that one group of humans could “exploit the cheap slave labour that is available from the natives of the colonies,” as Cecil Rhodes claimed, had substantial support in late 19th-century London society.

To many, it was obvious common sense that some humans had a God-given right to exploit the labour of others.

And if some in Africa challenged that God-given right, then as Hilaire Belloc put it:

“Whatever happens, we have got


The Maxim gun, and they have not.”

London, of course, had its own natives who were there to be exploited as cheap slave labour. As Leo Tolstoy said:

"Money is a new form of slavery, and distinguishable from the old simply by the fact that it is impersonal - that there is no human relation between master and slave."

Describing the prevailing attitude of ‘the better class’ in 19th century Britain toward the poor of London’s East End, Donald Rumbelow, writing in The Complete Jack The Ripper, says:

“Its people were as strange as the African pygmies and the Polynesian natives with whom they were often equated by journalists and sociologists.”

For some, it was and is astounding that such poverty could have been allowed to exist alongside a jaw-dropping level of affluence.

And it was not just in the East End. A minute’s walk from the Palace of Westminster or Oxford Street, and abject poverty was there for all to see, as Jack London observed;

“Nowhere in the streets of London may one escape the sight of abject poverty, while five minutes' walk from almost any point will bring one to a slum.”

The reason that it did exist and had existed for generations and still exists today is once again explained by Charles Darwin:

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, not the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”

This observation came from Darwin’s observations of the natural world. Our species has adapted to every ecological system on the planet, from deserts to rainforests to arctic wilderness.

But it is not nature’s laws that we are now adapting to in what we call civilised societies.

In a civilised society, the laws and rules that we all must adapt to are laws and rules made by man.

Humans in a rainforest or a frozen tundra have no choice. They must obviously adapt to nature if they are to survive.

Humans in a ‘civilised society' have a choice obviously because in a ‘civilised society’ humans, not nature, make the rules. It must follow that humans can change those rules.

The choice that has been made is to adapt to a society in which remarkable wealth exists alongside remarkable poverty.

I want to know why.

I think Charles Darwin may have been interested after all he did say:

“If the misery of the poor is caused not by the laws of nature but by our institutions, great is our sin.”

Somebody has a tough job on if they want to convince me that the misery of the poor is caused by the laws of nature.

Poverty is caused by our institutions, and I must conclude that ‘great is our sin’.