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

by Gray, Drew D.

  Stead had chosen to highlight the traffic in young women, a cause that had been taken up earlier without success. Throughout the century, and indeed in our own, the problem of prostitution was discussed and agonized over by politicians, reformers and social purity campaigners. In the 1860s it was the state of the nation's armed forces that worried contemporaries like William Acton. The result was the introduction of unpopular legislation that attempted to control the activities of prostitutes and by implication, all working-class women. The Contagious Diseases Acts were eventually repealed after a long campaign but they reflect the gender inequalities of late Victorian Britain. In a footnote to Josephine Butler's campaign we might reflect that many of the women that became involved in her campaign went on to take their new-found political consciousness into the movement for women's votes. This crude attack on the female body corporeal helped formulate the female body politic.

  William Stead helped to change the British newspaper industry by presenting the news in a new and exciting way for a growing and more literate population. The Pall Mall Gazette and its imitators used headlines and pictures to spice up the news - these have a much more `modern' feel to them than the staid and solid columns of The Times. In the second half of the century newspapers reported more and more crime stories to titillate and frighten their readers in equal measure and we can learn much about contemporary attitudes towards criminality from their pages. The late Victorians were keen to place the blame for most property crime on a mythic `criminal class' that consisted of a whole host of stereotypes of hardened villains with apelike faces and hunched shoulders. The casual criminal that appeared at the Thames Police Court charged with petty theft or drunkenness could be dismissed as a victim of circumstances or need but the Bill Sykes' of this world were highlighted as belonging to another race. The Pall Mall Gazette may have poked fun at the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso's study of criminality but the authorities certainly operated a policy of dealing with habitual criminals firmly. The prison system of the late Victorian period was no picnic for those who found themselves within the walls of Pentonville or Holloway.

  That many of these felons hailed from the East End was of no surprise to Charles Booth and others. Large parts of Whitechapel and Spitalfields were coloured black on his poverty maps and indentified as the habitat of the criminal and those that would not work. Walter Dew, the policeman that was the first to view Mary Kelly's mutilated body, observed that Whitechapel was an area with a'reputation for vice and villany unequalled anywhere in the British Isles'' His comments may well have reflected a frustration with the inability of the police to catch the Whitechapel murderer and a desire to shift some of the blame onto the area and its people. Indeed this seems to have been a device employed by several of the newspapers of the period. The killer epitomized all that was rotten in the slums of Whitechapel - a phantom born out of the filth and degradation of Godless communities. From the moment he started killing poor women, `Jack' became a cultural construction used to serve a multitude of diverse causes. He was a purifying angel, an enlightened reformer and a harbinger of revolution.

  The mythologizing of `Jack' has continued ever since. He has been seen as a decadent milord, an English gentleman preying on poor working-class women who have no value in his notion of society. Alternatively `Jack' is a medical man, someone who has ripped up the Hippocratic oath as assuredly as he ripped open his victim's bodies. Both myths mirror contemporary fears about a decadent aristocracy and the growth of the medical profession. Lastly, the killer had to be a foreigner because no Englishman could possibly commit such bestial and horrific crimes and have the intelligence to get away with it. After all, with the exception of the `master criminal' Charlie Peace, the criminal classes of London were poor specimens of humanity and the steady bobbies of the Met would surely have captured `Jack' had he been one of them.

  But to frame the killer as a foreigner - more specifically as an immigrant Jew who had fled persecution in the Russian Empire - fitted contemporary concerns about immigration and religious difference. The Jewish community of the East End suffered abuse in the summer of 1888 as scapegoats were sought and the papers were quick to trot out all the usual rhetoric of anti-Semitism. Men like Arnold White were quite happy to perjure themselves before parliamentary committees if it led to a stoppage of immigrants from Eastern Europe. Much of the prejudice that was aimed at the `greeners' from the pale was a result of cultural differences of language and religious practice. For others, like the socialist leader Henry Mayers Hyndman, the age old accusation that the immigrants were taking British jobs was used as cover for their own racist opinions. East End Jewry survived the Ripper panic and went on to survive Mosely's Blackshirts. They left the East End in the postwar period as their industriousness earned them better homes in the north of the capital, not because they were chased out by small mindedness and prejudice. The East End has long provided a temporary refuge for foreign immigrants drawn by persecution or a desire to improve their economic situation; now the area is largely settled by Bangladeshi Muslims who are reaping the current hysteria surrounding Islamist terrorism.

  As I have hopefully suggested throughout this book the East End itself has been the subject of manipulation to the extent that its identity is hard to define. Geographically we may know where it lies but trying to determine who is an `Eastender' and what the `East End' means is unlikely to produce a single, definitive, answer. In walking around the area where the Ripper killed five or more women in 1888 one is struck both by the relative closeness of the sites - and therefore the sense that this is a small area of the capital - and by the dynamic nature of change that continues every year. East London is undergoing rapid development even as I write, with millions of pounds of taxpayers' money being spent in rejuvenating the area ahead of the 2012 Olympics. East London is having a facelift, similar to that of the London Docks in the 1980s and arguably the area around Liverpool Street and Commercial Street in the 1880s. The geography of the East End will be altered to make way for new businesses, new roads, new facilities and new homes. Whether this will ultimately serve the needs of its people is another moot point. The slum clearance of the late Victorian period did little more than displace thousands of poor Londoners, forcing them to room with friends and family locally. Without easy and affordable transport links to their places of work there was little hope that native East Londoners could hope to move out to the leafy suburbs to live alongside the more affluent middle classes.

  This study is called London's Shadows because it is about those aspects of late Victorian society that so frightened and exercised contemporaries. Poverty, prostitution and crime were the stains on the Imperial map that were not shown in the atlases of the day. Those maps proudly painted large swathes of the world in pink to testify to the grandeur of British Imperial power. Many Victorians would probably have preferred to ignore the fact that this power and wealth was built upon the conquest of inferior peoples and the exploitation of millions of working people. After all to do so was to recognize that something was wrong and, content in their comfortable drawing rooms and gentlemen's clubs, few felt the need to look at the world too closely - especially the world that was just across the metropolis.

  Jack the Ripper changed this, if only for a brief period. At the opening of the most recent Ripper movie, From Hell, the strapline declares that `One day men will look back and say that I gave birth to the Twentieth Century? This is of course is not a quote from the Ripper himself since his identity remains a mystery. It may derive, though, from one of the many letters, Maybrick's diary or from Alan Moore's graphic novel. It is undoubtedly a creation of fiction but it once again serves to remind us that the murders were seen as representative of a changing society. The murders characterize a certain loss of innocence and jar with our images of cheery East End life peopled by chirpy cockney pearly kings and queens. This was far from the reality of the nineteenth-century East End - just as the Queen Vic and Albert Square depict a fantasy of East Lo
ndon today.3

  The Whitechapel murders continue to fascinate, and inspire countless new documentaries, films and true crime studies every year. They do so because they tap into our inner fears about murder and serial killing - which are out of all proportion to the actual risk we face as individuals. The Ripper crimes were almost unique in the period and even if we have had plenty of serial murderers since then the chances of anyone reading this book falling victim to such a twisted fiend are probably less than your chances of winning the lottery. So is there any value in continuing to search for the murderer of Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Kelly? After all what are we going to discover? Certainly not the true identity of `Jack the Ripper, at least not to the satisfaction of everyone with a vested interest in the case. Is there more to understand about the lives of the women that plied their trade on the streets around Flower and Dean Street? When the archives at The Women's Library open the files on hundreds of street prostitutes we might gain a little more detail about their lives and motivations but we have some years to wait. When we do it will probably tell us that most of those walking the streets were poor and living a hand-to-mouth existence. It will tell us that they were often depressed (several women were prosecuted at the Thames Police Court for attempting suicide in the 1880s) and frequently dependent upon alcohol. It will be no surprise to learn that they had failed marriages or abusive partners, that they had been in and out of the workhouse or infirmary and that many of them were chronically ill. This did not make them all victims of the Ripper. Whoever the Ripper was, he was only responsible for the deaths of between five and nine women who are listed in the Metropolitan Police files at The National Archives. Hundreds of poor working-class women prostituted themselves and suffered more mundane deaths than the victims of the Ripper.

  If there is a reason to continue to study the events of August to November 1888 then it is to try to understand the reality of the lives of ordinary people living in one of the most depressed corners of the British Empire. We know more about them because of the efforts of contemporary journalists and essayists as well as the more recent writings of local historians and amateur sleuths. History has often been the unseen victim of much of the verbiage written about the case. According to one important historiographical study the historian's `first duty is [to] accumulate factual knowledge about the past - facts which are verified by applying critical method to the primary sources; those facts will in turn determine how the past should be explained or interpreted" However, in many of the books written about the Ripper the facts have been treated with scant care and dismissed or ignored when they fail to fit a preferred thesis. An earlier work than John Tosh's noted that the expression `the facts speak for themselves' is incorrect.5 The esteemed historian Edward Carr declared that the facts `speak only when the historian calls on them: it is he who decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context" Many of the facts of the Ripper case are open to interpretation, still more have been lost or stolen or destroyed. This allows each new interpretation to be presented and so the role of testing has been adopted by the ever-growing band of brothers (and sisters) who maintain the Casebook website and its multitude of message boards. Many of them will undoubtedly pick some holes in my own analysis of the case and indeed the area and period of history.

  The past does have lessons to teach us about the present and the study of crime and poverty in the past necessarily chimes with problems in our own period. We are not living in late nineteenth-century Britain. We have a system of welfare that, despite its cracks and creaks, manages to cope with the worst excesses of poverty. The state supports our basic needs by redistributing wealth in a way that our Victorian ancestors would hardly have credited. Many of us take the National Health Service and the Universal State Pension for granted, while grumbling that the former is ineffectual and too costly and that the latter does not provide nearly enough for our aging society. In 1888 neither of these institutions existed, neither did income support or child and unemployment benefits. But before we sit back and congratulate ourselves on the progress we have made we might reflect on Oxfam's calculation that one in five of the British population is still living in poverty. This means that over 13 million of us fall below a set of indicators that measure poverty levels in the UK and elsewhere.' Now these can be challenged, as can Seebohm Rowntree's study in York in 1901 and Charles Booth's analysis of London in the 1880s. It remains a fact that we live in an economically unequal society. One of the results of this is that some people will turn to crime as a way of coping with their inability to earn money in any other way. Inequality breeds dissatisfaction and alienation. Some of those who steal and kill do so because they feel little empathy with a society that has seemingly rejected or at best overlooked them. Others steal because they have reached the point at which they cease to care about a society that holds nothing for them so they turn to stimulants such as alcohol and drugs, and fund their addictions through petty crime.

  The continual cry of the people of Whitechapel in the midst of the murder panic was that no one cared about the plight of the poorest members of society. If the Ripper had chosen to butcher the wife of a wealthy banker or a member of the Royal Family then rewards would have been offered and the entire effort of the police in the capital directed towards his capture. Churchill was right to highlight the dangers of ignoring the plight of the poor in a society where there was an `unnatural gap between rich and poor, but despite the efforts of the past 120 years we have still not managed to eradicate this distinction.' This is why we must study the past: to make sure that we do not forget why we need to change the future.

  Notes

  Notes to Chapter 1: Creating the `Myth' of Jack the Ripper

  1 The Monthly Packet (1/8/1882)

  2 The Monthly Packet (1/8/1882)

  3 The Monthly Packet (1/8/1882)

  4 Alexandra Warwick and Martin Willis (eds), Jack the Ripper: Media, Culture, History, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007); Alex Werner and Peter Ackroyd, jack the Ripper and the EastEnd, (London: Chatto &Windus, 2008); Lee Perry Curtis, Jack the Ripper and the London Press, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002)

  5 www.casebook.org

  6 `Jack the Ripper: Killer Revealed, Discovery Channel (October 2010)

  7 Christopher Frayling, `The House that Jack Built', in Warwick and Willis (eds), jack the Ripper, 17

  8 Frayling, `The House that Jack Built', 26

  9 Stewart Evans and Paul Gainey, The Lodger: Arrest and Escape of jack the Ripper, (London: Century, 1993)

  10 C. E. Purcell and B. A. Arrigo, The Psychology of Lust Murder: Paraphilia, Sexual Killing, and Serial Homicide, (California: Academic Press, 2006) 26

  11 Inspector Littlechild, quoted in Evans and Gainey, The Lodger

  12 Tony Williams and Humphrey Price, Uncle Jack, (London: Orion, 2005)

  13 Robin Odell, `Jack in the Box, Journal of the Whitechapel Society, 2, (June 2005)

  14 Stephen Knight, Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, (Chicago: Academy Chicago, 1986); see also Melvyn Fairclough, The Ripper and the Royals (London: Duckworth, 1991) which includes a foreword by Joseph Sickert

  15 Alan Moore, From Hell

  16 Jean Overton Fuller, Sickert and the Ripper Crimes (Oxford: Mandrake, 2001)

  17 For a detailed examination of the `Ripper' correspondence see Stewart P. Evans and Keith Skinner, Jack the Ripper: Letters from Hell, (Stroud: Sutton) 2001)

  18 Clive Bloom, `The Ripper Writing: A Cream of a Nightmare Dream, in Warwick and Willis (eds), Jack the Ripper, 92

  19 Bloom, `The Ripper Writing, 105

  20 Punch (29/9/1888)

  Notes to Chapter 2: Murder and Mayhem in Victorian London: The Whitechapel Murders of 1888 in context

  1 www.oldbaileyonline.org (t18660709-616, trial of Patrick Harrington); Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper, (1/7/1866)

  2 www.oldbaileyonline.org (t18751122-1, trial of Henry and Thomas George Wainwright)
/>
  3 www.oldbaileyonline.org (t18751122-1, trial of Henry and Thomas George Wainwright)

  4 The Bristol Mercury (1/1/1875)

  5 The Illustrated Police News (8/10/1892)

  6 The Times (2/2/1888)

  7 Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper (8/4/1888)

  8 Philip Sugden, The Complete History of Jack the Ripper (London: Da Capo Press, 2002),32

  9 The Illustrated Police News (14/4/1888)

  10 The Illustrated Police News (14/4/1888)

  11 Daily News (16/8/1888)

  12 www.oldbaileyonline.org (ti8880917-834, trial of Richard Patterson)

  13 Pall Mall Gazette (3/10/1888)

  14 Birmingham Daily Post (3/10/1888)

  15 Birmingham Daily Post (3/10/1888)

  16 Catherine E. Purcell and Bruce A. Arrigo, The Psychology of Lust Murder: Paraphilia, Sexual Killing, and Serial Homicide, (California: Academic Press, 2006), 1

  17 Dr Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathic Sexualis with Especial Reference to Contrary Sexual Instinct: A Medico-Legal Study, (London: F. A. Davis, 1893) translated by C. G. Chaddock

  18 Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, 59

  19 Purcell and Arrigo, The Psychology of Lust Murder, 1

  20 Purcell and Arrigo, The Psychology of Lust Murder, 6-7

  21 Purcell and Arrigo, The Psychology of Lust Murder, 21

  22 Robert K. Ressler, Ann W. Burgess and John E. Douglas, Sexual Homicide. Patterns and Motives, (London: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 123