JACK’S WORLD - Part One by Tour Guide Richard Walker
I’m Richard Walker, welcome to part one of Jack’s World.
I’ve been guiding Jack the Ripper tours in London for almost two decades. What follows is my attempt at describing the world of Jack the Ripper. I aim to keep it brief and interesting, so I’ll dive right in.
The setting for the events was an area east of the old City of London and north of the docks on the Thames. In 1888, the poverty there was world-famous. Inevitably, violence was not uncommon, especially domestic violence.
What is surprising is that murder was not common. In 1887, not a single murder was reported in Whitechapel, nor was any murder reported in 1886.
1888 was different.
On January 17th, 1888, a new newspaper was launched into a competitive market. The Star made waves. It built its readership with its tabloid-style journalism, grabbing attention with sensational advertising boards that graphically depicted the latest news.
The Whitechapel Murders were undoubtedly vital to the newspaper's achieving the largest circulation of any newspaper in the country by the end of 1888.
No murders were reported in 1886 or 1887, but in 1888, eight homeless women died after being brutally attacked in the early hours. The first three attacks took place within less than a five-minute walk of each other in the area of Whitechapel known as Spitalfields.
Situated in the western part of Whitechapel, Spitalfields lies on either side of Commercial Street and extends as far east as Brick Lane.
It was here that around 8000 homeless people would find a bed in one of the more than 200 doss houses. That was when they had the fourpence to pay for the night’s doss. When they didn’t have their fourpence, they wandered the streets, taking shelter in doorways, gateways and stairways.
Spitalfields was the most densely populated area of a densely populated Whitechapel. At the time, there were an average of 50 people per acre across London, but with its packed doss houses, the population density in Spitalfields rose to around 800 per acre.
This packed population found solace in the more than 200 public houses in Spitalfields.
And it was in Spitalfields on Saturday, February 25 1888, that a 38-year-old homeless woman known as Annie Millwood was attacked. She was stabbed multiple times but didn’t die until March 31st.
On April 3rd, 1888, three days after Annie Millwood’s death was reported in the newspapers, a 45-year-old homeless woman by the name of Emma Elizabeth Smith was brutally attacked in Spitalfields just three minutes walk from the attack on Annie Millwood. Emma Elizabeth Smith died the next day from her injuries.
Four months later, on August the 7th, the body of a 39-year-old homeless woman, Martha Tabram, was found on the 3rd-floor landing of a building in Spitalfields again just minutes from where the two previous attacks had taken place. She’d been stabbed 39 times.
Three weeks later, the body of a 43-year-old homeless woman, Polly Nichols, was found in a lane more than half a mile east of the earlier attacks. The distance didn’t save her.
Newspapers now went into full cry. Across the country, they were reporting that the Whitechapel area was experiencing a reign of terror perpetrated by a silent and seemingly invisible killer.
The murderer struck with such savage efficiency that people imagined that it could be the work of a ghost or a vampire. And it was suggested that the killer seemed to be a real-life incarnation of the killer that appeared in Edgar Alan Poe’s story “Murders in the Rue Morgue”. And that killer was an orangutan.
One week later, in the early hours of the 8th of September 1888, the body of a 47-year-old homeless woman, Annie Chapman, was found like the first three victims in Spitalfields.
That evening, The Star newspaper warned that “a creature that was half beast and half man was gratifying his murderous instincts on the most miserable and defenceless of London’s population.” It went on to say that the“ghoul-like killer was simply drunk with blood and he will have more.”
Two years before the journalist wrote those words, the world of fiction had conjured up that “half beast, half man”. It’s a good description of Mr Hyde. And Mr Hyde’s tale was told in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. It was published in 1886. And the following year the world’s most famous detective stepped onto the streets of London.
Edgar Alan Poe may have launched the modern detective story when his novel Murders in the Rue Morgue was published in 1841, but another, more successful detective appeared in 1887.
Just one year before Jack the Ripper spread terror among the population A Study in Scarlet was published. It launched the career of a figure who, like Jack the Ripper, is as well known today as he was more than a 130 years ago.
A Study in Scarlet written by Arthur Conan Doyle. Published in 1887 was the first adventure of Sherlock Holmes.
Jekyll and Hyde, Holmes and Watson, Jack the Ripper - all still casting a spell.
Just to be clear, these murders did create terror among the population. This relatively small number of murders sent out shockwaves not just in the East End of London but across the whole of London and, indeed, across the country.
If you were a locksmith, carpenter, or ironmonger, you had cause to be grateful to Jack because he dramatically increased your business opportunities.
So what kind of world was it that gave us this monster?
London was lit only by gas lights in 1888. There was no electric light then. Everything moved on the road by horsepower or manpower. There were no motor cars. In the autumn, smoke from half a million coal fires was trapped in mist rolling in from the sea, creating a suffocating smog.
The factories along the river spewed out more poison. A century supercharged by the Industrial Revolution made all of Britain’s cities very unhealthy places to live.
Cholera, typhus and all manner of lung diseases like tuberculosis cut many lives short. And then, to increase the pressure, the economy had one of its frequent meltdowns.
The Panic of 1873 was one more international financial crash, but it was a lot worse. It triggered what became known as the Long Depression.
And it was very long. It lasted for over 20 years, right through the 1870s, all of the 1880s, and into the 1890s. Unemployment rocketed, and for the millions in Britain condemned to the most appalling poverty, life unbelievably became even worse.
At the same time, London was the money capital of the world, and money replaced all other human relationships. A tiny few enjoyed an abundance of wealth and privilege while a great many struggled.
In the area aaround Whitechapel as many as 10,000 people a night had no permanent lodging. They either slept rough, or if they had been lucky enough to beg, borrow, or steal some money, they could pay four pence for a bed in a doss house or common lodging house.
For tuppence, you could sleep by hanging your arms over a rope. At least for that night you were not one of the thousands sheltering from the wind and rain being constantly woken up and moved on by the ever present policeman on his beat.
Those in the next level up from the homeless lived in the most appalling slums. It was not surprising, if unpalatable that parents would launch their children into careers of petty theft or prostitution.
Child prostitution was widespread, as the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, William Thomas Stead, told his readers. He pointed out that given the conditions that people were forced to live in, it wasn’t surprising.
He said that in the slums of London whole families were forced to share just one room so that morality was impossible. In one district, he said, there were 43 brothels with 428 women and girls, many of them not 12 years of age, working there as prostitutes.
The conditions that the vast majority of Queen Victoria’s subjects existed in were appalling and made worse for some observers because those degrading conditions existed in the richest city in the world at the time.
We will examine those appalling conditions in more detail in the next post. Thank you for checking out this post.