In 1888, all of Britain was captivated by a string of goulish murders of indigent women in London’s East End slums. The perpetrator was of course Jack the Ripper, Britain’s most famous serial killer. What went on in the Whitechapel District of London that year has captivated the imaginations of millions of people since.
It is easy to focus on the lurid details of Jack the Ripper’s victims. They were all women, and the “canonical five” that most scholars agree were killed by him died in similar ways — they were strangled, then their throats were cut, and finally their bodies horribly mutilated. The identity of the Ripper was never discovered. You can see in the first picture from the British magazine _Punch_ from 1888 an illustration of Jack appearing as a ghost, holding a knife and reaching out with mouth agape as he reaches towards his next casualty.
But the story of Jack the Ripper has a wider importance — the way that it was blown up in the tabloid newspapers of the day and followed in detail by all social classes tells us that the situation was a touch point for much larger trends.
For one thing, it exposed class tensions: the east end slums of London were horrifying places to live. Whitechapel had about 80,000 people, and records suggest that around 8,500 lived in common lodging-houses for the poor that cost a pittance per night. You can see a picture of some women and children outside one such building in Whitechapel. The wealthy of Britain worried about immigrants, Jews, prostitutes and other impoverished “spreading” into “their” areas. At first, the police profiled men from these groups in their suspects. Later, “Jack” was hypothesized to be from a wealthy class, because his crafty ability to elude capture and his knowledge of anatomy were thought to be possible only for someone with an educated background. The media portrayed the victims as prostitutes, and thus their deaths were predictable.
For many, the story of Jack the Ripper was a cautionary tale about guarding the sexuality of Victorian women.
Source(s): Walkowitz. “Why it’s time to stop talking about Jack the Ripper,” @bookriot, Ann Foster, April 2, 2019 (featuring a book by Hallie Rubenhold, _The Five: the Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper_)
