London's Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City

by Gray, Drew D.

  London's Shadows

  The Dark Side of the Victorian City

  Drew Gray

  Contents

  Acknowledgements vi

  List of Illustrations vii

  1 Creating the `Myth' of Jack the Ripper 1

  2 Murder and Mayhem in Victorian London: The Whitechapel Murders of 1888 in Context 21

  3 East Meets West: The Contrasting Nature of Victorian London and the Mixed Community of the East End 55

  4 Read All About It! Ripper News and Sensation in Victorian Society 95

  5 The Bitter Cry of Outcast London: Poverty, Charity and the Fear of Revolution 117

  6 City of Dreadful Delights: Vice, Prostitution and Victorian Society 145

  7 Crime and the Criminal Class in Late Victorian London 167

  8 Watching the Detectives: The Police and the Hunt for Jack the Ripper 209

  9 London's Shadows: The Darker Side of the Victorian Capital 231

  Notes 239

  Bibliography 263

  Index 273

  Acknowledgements

  This project has grown out of my work with third-year undergraduates at the University of Northampton and so I would like to express my thanks to the many students that have stimulated debates, argued about the identity of `Jack' and listened to my lectures over the past six years. I hope they enjoy this book. In particular I would like to thank Lucy, Rachael and Katie for enlivening the classes in 2009. As ever my colleagues at Northampton have all been very supportive while I have tried to complete this volume and find the time for my teaching duties - their understanding of my occasional lapses are most appreciated.

  Aside from the welcome feedback from my editor, Michael Greenwood, I want to express my thanks to my mother, Diana Falkiner, who read my drafts and corrected many of my errors. Finally, and most of all, I would like to thank Jill Spencer for reading my work and helping me shape my ideas, but most importantly for letting me into her life and for believing in me at all times. This book is for her.

  List of Illustrations

  FIGURES

  1 `The nemesis of neglect', Punch, September 1888 18

  2 `Is he the Whitechapel murderer?' The Illustrated Police News, September 1888 39

  3 `Useful Sunday literature for the masses' Punch, September 1849 98

  4 `The latest murder, Moonshine, November 1890 105

  5 `The Unemployed and the Police, Moonshine, October 1887 136

  6 `The real starver of the poor - John Bull vainly endeavors to relieve the distress, Fun, November 1887 140

  7 `Whitechapel, 1888; Punch, October 1888 173

  8 `Military drill v. police duty', Funny Folks, September 1888 213

  9 `The dynamite explosions in London, The Graphic, January 1885 219

  10 `Blind-man's buff', Punch, September 1888 222

  TABLES

  7.1 Hearings at Thames Police Court, January 1887-December 1887 (Court Register 1) 176

  7.2 The nature of assault prosecutions at the Thames Police Court by summons, January to December 1887 180

  7.3 Trials at the Old Bailey, 1850-1899 186

  7.4 Property offences at the Old Bailey, 1850-1899 186

  7.5 Property offences at the Old Bailey, 1850-1899 by percentage occurrence 189

  1

  Creating the `Myth' of Jack the Ripper

  In August of 1882 a well-meaning female member of the Victorian middle classes wrote a lengthy missive in a periodical magazine urging her sisters to help her and others in bringing reform and inspiration to the poor of East London. `If only more ladies would come forward and help, how much might be done!' she wrote.' Margaret Tillard compared the work she and other Victorian women were doing with the life of Christ noting that:

  It is the personal contact, the personal sympathy, the personal interest, as if it were the touch of the Saviour, which is needed. It is not what you give, it is what you do for the poor, which really touches their feelings and binds them to you 2

  By the 1880s the problems of London's poorest communities had been well documented and were to continue to be the subject of exposes, investigations, parliamentary committees and newspaper articles well into the next century. Margaret Tillard was just one of hundreds who felt compelled, for religious, political or moral reasons, to attempt to mitigate the worst excesses of poverty that blighted some parts of England's capital. London was the heart of empire and it was a damning indictment of the inequality of Victorian Britain that large areas of Europe's most populated city resembled the slums of Calcutta. Contemporary observers compared the denizens of the East End of London with the `savages' of the Pacific Islands or `darkest' Africa. For many middle-class Victorians this was a land that God had abandoned, an area ripe for missionary work and charity. Tillard's essay stresses the importance of contact with the people of the East End. She sees the role of her class in almost medieval terms. There is, she states, `even in these Radical days, a wonderful amount of old feudal feeling amongst us still'. Just as the rural poor looked up to their local squire or lord of the manor so the communities of the East End looked up to their middle-class saviours.

  When they get to know you and your family, there is a pride in you and for you, and a feeling that what belongs to you belongs to them in some way. An instance of this came before me only the other day. At a concert that was given in an East End district, the people of a certain court would have it that `their lady's' voice was the best in the room.'

  Margaret Tillard urges her readers not to simply resort to charitable giving: `there is a great deal of selfishness in our almsgiving; we give too often, not in the way best for the recipients, but as is the least trouble to ourselves' In this she was echoing the views of women such as Octavia Hill, the matriarch of the Charity Organization Society (COS) that had established the practice of home visiting in the second half of the nineteenth century. The COS was the forerunner of twentieth-century social work, but it was an organization steeped in Christian doctrine and paternalism. Tillard's wistful reference to feudalism reflects both the Victorian love affair with the middle ages and its rigid class system; a system that was beginning to come under strain but was not to unravel until after the First World War. Tillard and Hill did not envisage a society in which the working classes of the East End would become their equals, nor did they seem to believe that the poor were the victims of a desperately unequal economic system. They themselves were rich women who owed their own comfortable lives to the dowries provided by their parents or to the land and incomes of their husbands. Restricted by the governing principles of `separate spheres' (which decreed that women were only allowed a domestic role, not a public one) charity work was often the only `career' open to them.

  Tillard, and other `ladies' like her wanted to bring the message of religious salvation to the homes of the working-class poor. She realized that sometimes this had to be done subtly: those that attempted to preach on the doorstep would often receive short shrift or worse from those living there. Some were almost beyond help - the feckless, the drunk, the criminal - but many others could be carefully steered towards the right path. This sort of missionary work must have brought great comfort to many people and it is easy to sneer at the women of the COS and other organizations from the distance of history, but in looking back at London in the late nineteenth century we are faced with the problem that often it is their voices that predominate. Octavia Hill, Helen Bosanquet and Beatrice Webb have all left behind their opinions about the poor. Charles Booth, Jack London and Henry Mayhew have likewise penned lengthy observations about the state of the poor and the reasons for their miserable lives. Newspaper editor
s and correspondents to the papers, middle-class and elite writers all, have bequeathed us a hoard of rhetoric and explanation for crime, poverty, vice and disease in the slums of Whitechapel. What we are missing in all of this is the voice of the people of East London themselves. Thus everything we read about the poor comes to us through a filter of middle class and often evangelist ideology. This does not mean we should ignore it but rather it requires that we try and understand that this is merely a partial view of the East End. What the poor themselves felt about the COS ladies who descended upon them is an interesting but unanswerable question.

  The East End was the not worst nor the most criminal place to live in London in the 1880s, but it was representative for many Victorians of the depths to which humanity could sink when separated from a close relationship with God and Christian religion. When in 1888 an unknown individual began to brutally murder prostitutes under the noses of the police in the alleys and streets of Whitechapel, some believed that the area had finally reached its nadir of degradation. As a result of the murders, attention was refocused on the social problems facing the population of the East End and the cries that `something must be done' echoed in the press, parliament and even in the corridors of Windsor and Buckingham Palace. For some people it is the murders themselves that provide the fascination that has endured since then, but in this book I would like to consider the ways in which the killings affected attitudes towards the perceived problems of East London. In doing so I would like to keep in mind middle-class perceptions of poverty and personal responsibility along with both modern and contemporary attempts to manipulate the Ripper murders for political, cultural and social purposes.

  STRUCTURE AND SOURCES

  It is over 120 years since the investigation into the series of homicides in East London known as the Whitechapel murders was brought to a close. In that time dozens if not hundreds of suspects have been presented to the public for consideration by a growing number of `experts' who have been given the name of `ripperologists' This in itself is an interesting development in the history of crime and criminology - a subgenre of investigation has emerged from the slaying of five or more women in the late nineteenth century. If you have selected this book because you want to know who Jack the Ripper was then I must advise you that you may well be disappointed by it. I am not a ripperologist and it is not my intention to offer up my own solution to the mystery. Nor is the identity of the murderer the most interesting thing about the case - arguably his anonymity has allowed legions of investigators to delve into the archives in the hope of uncovering something fresh to say about the murders. While there are some excellent histories, notably the work of Donald Rumbelow and Paul Begg in particular, the genre is bedevilled with poorly researched and badly written studies that simply repeat the work of previous histories. Worse still some recent books have attempted to fit the facts of the case, such as they are, to suit their own favourite suspect.

  In this opening chapter we will meet some of these `suspects' and attempt to refute the allegations aimed at them. I am aware that most volumes do this the other way around but then this does not purport to be another Ripper book. Instead this is a book about the London in which the killings took place and will hopefully provide a deeper context for those interested in the murderer and his victims. The Whitechapel murders have so far attracted little real interest from academic historians although there are some notable exceptions. In 1988, Christopher Frayling wrote an important essay and scripted perhaps the most thoughtful television documentary that has been made about the murders. Frayling's article has recently been included in a collection edited by Alexandra Warwick and Martin Willis. While some of the essays have been in circulation for some time (notably one chapter of L. Perry Curtis' most excellent monograph, Jack the Ripper and the London Press) there are several new entries and Warwick and Willis are to be warmly congratulated for bringing them to a new audience. In addition, the recent Museum of London Docklands' exhibition produced a well-illustrated volume containing a number of intelligent essays on a range of subjects such as the police, immigrant communities and poverty. However, while there are these few examples the field has largely been left to the ripperologists and amateur historians.'

  This study has used much of the historiography concerned with crime, the Ripper and London that has been produced over the past 20 or more years and there is a considerable amount of it. Naturally it cannot hope to cover all the work that has been published and so I apologize in advance for any omissions that have been made. Where possible I have tried to return to the original sources for the history of the Whitechapel murders and have used the records of trials at the Old Bailey and of hearings before the Thames Police Court to study the related area of crime and criminality in the period. The chief sources for much of this book have been the contemporary London newspapers that have recently become available via the British Library's internet portal. Newspapers are not without their weaknesses: the presentation of news is often determined by editorial style and the choice of subject by fashion, newsworthiness and contemporary concerns. Despite their protestations to the contrary, newspaper editors are in the business of selling papers. Crime, sexual scandal and sensation are the staple of good copy in the modern newspaper industry and the same was true in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Thus, we should be warned not to believe everything we read in the newspapers. Despite this caveat the nineteenth-century press does offer us an important window into attitudes towards a whole raft of social issues in the period. Therefore I have used them extensively in this book alongside the reports of parliamentary committees, the works of social reformers, police officials, correspondents to the newspapers and other private individuals.

  In this introductory chapter we will look at the Ripper story as the creation of a modern myth, a theme I will return to when considering the role of the press in the late nineteenth century. There is something in the Ripper story that lends itself to the falsification of history - the interplay of popular culture, press reportage and fiction - and what we think of as history. To some extent this has to do with how we envisage the past and how we use history to unravel some of the problems of the present.

  I will then go on to look at the suspects in the Ripper case and at how, almost from the moment the first murder occurred, writers have used them to say things about the society in which they were living. In doing so I will start with Frayling's useful thesis that the killer fitted into three archetypes of late Victorian culture: the mad doctor, foreign Jew and the decadent aristocrat. To some extent these tropes have persisted and we will consider why this has been the case. Finally, in discussing those suspected of being the Whitechapel murderer this opening section will offer a critique of the work of some more recent writers who have offered us up both famous and unknown suspects to be tried by the court of public opinion and then executed - as the Ripper would certainly have been had he been caught. In particular I would like to reexamine the work of the American crime writer Patricia Cornwell who had the temerity to declare the case `closed' when she exposed the painter Walter Sickert as being responsible for the murders. However, those proposing a Royal conspiracy or the founder of the National Archives of Wales, will not escape scrutiny here. This may not be a book about who Jack the Ripper was, but it is certainly partly about who he was not.

  Chapter 2 will contextualize murder in the nineteenth century so that the Whitechapel murders can be more properly understood for what they were: extreme examples of sexual homicide almost without precedent in Victorian Britain. However, they were not the first or only examples in Europe, and the work of contemporary and more modern criminologists and psychoanalysts will be used to explore the crimes of the Ripper and those who attacked in similar ways. It will also look at the sorts of murders that made the newspapers in the late Victorian period before going on to examine the file on the Whitechapel murders in some detail. This is necessary for two reasons. First, while many readers may be familiar with the case oth
ers may be coming to the story for the first time. Second, so much of what we have learned about the `Ripper' has been presented in half truths, theories and fiction and so in this section I have returned to the police files and contemporary newspapers to try and reconstruct the pattern of events as closely and accurately as possible. However, it is not the intention of this book to reopen the case and I would refer readers who wish to take an even more in-depth look at the murders to consult the works of Begg and Rumbelow who know so much more than myself.

  In Chapter 3 the focus of attention moves away from the murders and to the nature of Whitechapel and how it was envisaged by contemporaries. The Victorians had a problematic relationship with urban environments: to some they represented the sheer magnificence of Victorian culture and economic success while to others they were cesspools of vice and poverty that shamed the Empire. This dichotomy was never more apparent than in the contrasts between East and West London. This chapter will explore these contrasts before going on to examine exactly where and what the East End was and is. Having set out to explore the East End I will then concentrate on its inhabitants, both indigenous and foreign immigrants and the problems that these divergent racial groups experienced. Once again this chapter will be partly concerned with overturning contemporary and more recent myths and stereotypes, to reach a more balanced picture of the East End.

  Chapter 4 concentrates on the social problems associated with the East End and with those Victorians who believed it was their mission to bring comfort, relief and civilization to this seemingly neglected area of the Empire. It has been argued that the Ripper murders spotlighted the problems of poor housing conditions and poverty and impelled local authorities to take action to improve the situation. However, as this chapter shows, there had been attempts at reform and improvement long before `Jack' started his reign of terror. That many of these attempts either failed or simply moved the problem elsewhere was perhaps a reflection of a lack of a unified municipal authority in London. After 1888 the creation of the London County Council went some way to addressing this issue but it was not until the Edwardian and postwar period that real tangible reform began to benefit the poorest inhabitants of East London. This chapter will look at the realities of housing in the district in which the murders took place and at legislation designed to improve it.