Jack the Ripper Tours and Walks. Introduction.
 In the autumn of 1888 a series of gruesome murders in the East End of London, lit a flame that sent shock waves reverberating around the civilised world and caused a scandal that struck right at the heart of the British establishment.
 London in 1888 was the worlds largest capital city. Queen Victoria sat upon the throne of England, and ruled an empire that was ever expanding. She had recently celebrated fifty glorious years as monarch. Her subjects seemed confident, entrepreneurial and determined. The City of London, the financial boiler-room that powered the empire and its expansion, reflected the supreme confidence of the age. Yet right on its doorstep lay the district of Whitechapel - a sordid, crime-ridden quarter where vice, violence and drunkenness flourished and where 76,000 residents lived in abject poverty.
Whitechapel had the capital’s worst slums, worst overcrowding and highest death rates. It was also the immigrant district, and the 1880’s had seen a huge influx of Jewish refugees fleeing persecution in Russia, Poland and Romania. Parts of Whitechapel had the appearance of a foreign town whose inhabitants, mostly lower class Jews, spoke their own language and dressed differently to the other citizens of the East End. Inevitably this led to a certain amount of racial tension as these immigrants were accused of taking English jobs and English homes. But whether they were Jew or gentile, all those who lived in the area shared one thing in common, life was a daily battle for survival. 
For the poor and destitute the main accommodation was offered by the common lodging houses. There were 233 of them in Whitechapel and each night eight and a half thousand men, women and children would seek shelter within their decaying walls, paying four pence for a flea bitten bed in a shared room.
 For the women there were few career opportunities, and those that were available paid a pittance, barely enough to cover the cost of a bed in a common lodging house, and certainly not enough to pay for food as well. So many of them turned to prostitution, not out of any real choice but out of a necessity to survive. Indeed the Metropolitan Police estimate that there were over 1200 low class prostitutes working the streets of Spitalfields and Whitechapel.
On the surface Victorian London may have seemed supremely confident and eminently respectable but beneath that surface there lurked a general feeling of extreme unease. In the 1880’s there were many different social fears concerning changes to the ordered society that the middle and upper classes were so used to. It was a period where a lot of people were frightened and there was a genuine belief that there was going to be a revolution.
The East End came to be the focus for all of that social anxiety, and Jack the Ripper came along at just the right time in just the right place. In many ways he became the physical embodiment of all those anxieties and he frightened people in the same way that all these other qualms were frightening them. People began to think that if the Ripper could step across the border from the poverty stricken, immoral East End and infect the rest of London, then so could all these other nebulous fears cross the border and bring with them a great deal of social unrest. So Jack the Ripper really did penetrate the consciousness of the middle classes in a way that no ordinary murderer had ever done in the past and would never do again.
|
