Introduction to the Jack the Ripper Murders of 1888
The World of Jack the Ripper.
These are the first four women believed to have been killed by Jack the Ripper
The fifth Jack the Ripper victim was Mary Jane Kelly. She was the only victim under the age of 40 when she was murdered.
It is because the way in which these women were killed is so similar that it is believed they must have been killed by the same killer. A killer who is known to the world as Jack the Ripper. But there were two other victims of murder on the streets of Whitechapel before the five murders of ‘Jack the Ripper’.
The Whitechapel Murders
On April the 3rd 1888 a 45-year-old woman by the name of Emma Elizabeth Smith was brutally attacked in Osborn Street; a street that runs north off Whitechapel High Street.
She died the next day from her injuries. Four months later, on August the 7th, the body of a 39-year-old woman, Martha Tabram, was found on the 3rd floor landing of a building just off Whitechapel High Street. She’d been stabbed 39 times.
The Murder of Polly Nichols
Then three weeks later the first of the five women believed to have been killed by Jack the Ripper was discovered in a lane just behind Whitechapel Underground Station.
Newspapers across the country 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”. That killer was an orang-utan.
The Murder of Annie Chapman
One week later, in the early hours of the 8th of September 1888, the body of a 47-year-old woman was found less than half a mile from the murder sites of the first three victims.
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 it said, “He will have more”.
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
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. Mr Hyde’s tale is told in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. It was published in 1886.
In the story, Dr Jekyll is experimenting with good and evil, and he creates a drink that, when he drinks it, transforms him into a monster called Hyde. And Mr Hyde races through the gaslit streets of London spreading terror.
A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle
Just one year later, the world’s greatest detective raced through those same gaslit streets chasing criminals.
In 1887, one year before Jack the Ripper spread terror among the population, Arthur Conan Doyle published the first story featuring Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Scarlet.
So, Holmes and Watson, Jekyll and Hyde, and Jack the Ripper were all racing through the same gaslit streets at the same time, and they are all still as well known today as they were more than 135 years ago.
Jack the Ripper suspect Richard Mansfield.
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde wasn’t just a bestseller in Britain. It did well in the United States of America, and an actor, Richard Mansfield, bought the rights and had it turned into a play. Mansfield played the dual role of Jekyll and Hyde in Boston. He was so terrifying when he transformed from the good doctor to the monster Hyde that people passed out in terror.
The great actor of Victorian London, Sir Henry Irving, brought the entire cast over to play at his West End theatre, the Lyceum Theatre.
So, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was playing in the West End at the same time that Jack the Ripper was playing in the East End, and people who saw the play were writing to newspapers and the police to have Richard Mansfield arrested because his portrayal of Mr Hyde was so terrifying that it convinced them that he was Jack the Ripper.
Dracula by Bram Stoker
The administrator of the Lyceum Theatre was fascinated by the play and by the newspaper accounts of the murders in Whitechapel. He was a writer and constantly on the lookout for inspiration, and his inspired tale about a monster spreading terror arrived in bookshops in 1897. The book was Dracula, and the theatre administrator was Bram Stoker.
A Reign of Terror
Just to be clear, these murders did create terror among the population. You might assume that people living in the East End of London back then would be used to this sort of thing because it was a violent place – and it was a violent place – but murder was not nearly as common as you might imagine.
In the whole of London in 1887, there were only 70 murders reported in a population of 4 million. There are cities in our world today that go way beyond that. Chicago, with a slightly smaller population than Jack the Ripper’s London, will expect 7 or 8 times as many murders in any year.
This relatively small number of murders sent out shockwaves and 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.
Gaslit London
London in 1888 was lit only by gaslight. No electric light back then. Everything moved on the road by horsepower or manpower, 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.
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.
And the East End of Britain’s biggest city was especially unhealthy. Unhealthy, not just for physical health.
Reverend Samuel Barnett
The Reverend Samuel Barnett and his wife moved into St. Jude’s vicarage in 1873, and they were shocked to see cattle herded into the slaughterhouses around Aldgate. An observer at the time wrote that:
“At the slaughterhouses, which are often ordinary shops, the sheep would be dragged in backwards by their legs and the bullocks hounded in by dogs and blows, while small boys clustered excitedly round the door and passers-by stepped as best they could through the blood and urine flooding the pavement.” The Reverend Barnett believed this public slaughter of animals brutalised the population.
But it wasn’t just morality and mental health that were under constant attack; 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
1873, the same year that the Reverend Barnett moved into St. Jude’s in Whitechapel, saw the arrival of a catastrophe that began in Vienna but soon spread throughout Europe and across the Atlantic to the Americas.
‘The Panic 73’ was one more international financial crash. But the Panic of 1873 was a lot worse than most. 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.
Money Replaced All Other Human Relationships
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 Whitechapel, more than 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.
A Victorian doss house
For tuppence you could sleep standing up 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.
Child Prostitution
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. And he pointed out that it wasn't surprising given the conditions in which people were forced to live.
He said that in the slums of London, whole families were forced to share just one room, so 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”. In his campaign to end child prostitution, Stead bought a 13-year-old girl called Eliza Armstrong from her mother for £5 to show how easy it was.
The Bitter Cry of Outcast London
The congregational minister Andrew Mearns, outraged by these terrible conditions, wrote The Bitter Cry of Outcast London. He began it with a warning to the reader. He wrote: “No exaggeration has been made in the descriptions of conditions; indeed, we have had to tone down the descriptions.” Even toned down, the descriptions are appalling.
“Every room in these rotting, reeking tenements houses a family, often two. In one cellar, a sanitary inspector reports finding a father, mother, three children, and four pigs! In another room, a missionary found a man ill with smallpox, his wife just recovering from her 8th confinement and the children running about half naked and covered with dirt. Here are seven people living in one underground kitchen and a little dead child lying in the same room. Elsewhere is a poor widow, her three children and a child who had been dead for 13 days. Her husband, who was a cabman, had shortly before committed suicide. Here lives a widow and her six children, two of them who are ill with scarlet fever. In another, nine brothers and sisters from 29 years of age downwards live, eat and sleep together. Here is a mother who turns her children into the street in the early evening because she lets her room for immoral purposes until long after midnight when the poor little wretches creep back again if they have not found some miserable shelter elsewhere. Where there are beds, they are simply heaps of dirty rags, shavings, or straw, but for the most part, these miserable beings find rest only upon the filthy boards.”
11,000 At the bottom of society had no home at all.
What is amazing is that a level of society existed in the East End that was below even these wretched people because Andrew Mearns was describing the living conditions of people that he had visited in their ‘homes’. The social reformer Charles Booth estimated that about 11,000 people at the very bottom of society had no home at all; they slept on staircases, in doorways, and even in dustbins and lavatories for warmth.
The People of the Abyss by Jack London
Jack London spent seven weeks living among the poor in the East End. He went to a second-hand shop, bought old working clothes, and then went among these poor wretches. He wrote up his experiences in his book The People of the Abyss, in which he said that he had seen poverty in the USA but never seen anything like the poverty he saw in the East End of London.
Jacob Adler, Yiddish Theatre Actor
Another overseas visitor was equally appalled. Jacob Adler, a Yiddish theatre actor, arrived in London after Yiddish theatre was banned in the Russian Empire. He wrote:
“The deeper we penetrated into Whitechapel, the more our hearts sank. Was this London? Never in Russia nor later in the worst streets of New York did we see poverty like the poverty we saw in the London of the 1880s.”
How could this have happened in the richest city in the world? How could this monstrous Jekyll and Hyde world have come about?
The answer, perhaps, is, as Charles Darwin pointed out, that we are not a successful species because we are stronger than others or cleverer than others. The reason we are successful is that we are supremely adaptable. We adapted to every ecological niche on the planet, and so when we create monstrous conditions, we adapt to them rather than address the cause
“Give My People Plenty of Beer,”
And all classes in London adapted. Some would blame the poor themselves. Some would exploit them. Some would ignore them. Some would devote their lives to trying to stop people from ignoring them.
Some, like Queen Victoria, would seek to pacify them; as she said, “Give my people plenty of beer, good beer and cheap beer, and you will have no revolution among them.”
Still others, like Frederick Charrington, tried to help the people by devoting his life to campaigning against the evils of beer and other intoxicating drinks.
The Year of the Psychopath
Despite all that, conditions in the East End at the end of the 19th century remained monstrous. And those monstrous conditions were a breeding ground for monsters.
A German doctor called Julius Koch wrote about his research into the mentally ill in a book he called A Short Textbook of Psychiatry.
In it, he popularised a word still used in psychiatry. He was describing a condition that he called ‘soul suffering’, but he used the Greek for ‘soul suffering’ - psychopath.
He published his book in 1888, which was, of course, the year of the psychopath. The psychopath that we know as Jack the Ripper.
Thank you for checking out this post.