Why had Whitechapel become an ideal
hunting crowd for a serial killer by
1888?
www.educationforum.co.uk
A Man For His Times?
• Jack the Ripper was, in a macabre way, a man for his times.
• The turmoil of the Industrial Revolution in Britain upset the
standard social order, generating new ambitions, conflicts, and
frustrations.
• Urbanization, crowding, and change led to anomie and the
creation of the alienated loner.
• Harsh and inhumane conditions, an indifference towards
children, and a savage lifestyle all conspired to create an
environment conducive to violence and sexual deviance.
• It is not surprising the psychological and social infrastructures
of the nineteenth century produced the first modern serial
killer.
Industrialisation
• The Industrial Revolution had been progressing for over 100 years
and by 1888 some of its worst effects were being felt.
• The Industrial Revolution created overcrowded, polluted urban
centres rife with crime and social problems. Most believe Jack the
Ripper was ‘a local’ and if he was it had been brought up in a
disordered, dangerous and dysfunctional community.
• There had been no examples of serial killing in pre industrial Britain
when social life was based on, on small, personalised, self
supporting agricultural communities.
• Psychologists have argued that serial killing is the living
embodiment of modern industrial capitalist society, where,
individualisation and personal satisfaction are everything.
• Sociologists have suggested that another important factor was the
decline of religion with industrialisation with its rituals, structure,
conformity, and belief in an after- life and a redeeming Godhead.
Society had lost its core values and had nothing to replace them
with..
Housing
• Many of the rookeries in Victorian London were demolished as a
result of the Artisans Dwellings Act of 1875. This had been an
attempt to get rid of the worst slum housing in much of Britain. But
the slums of Whitechapel and Spitalfields survived and predictably
endured an influx of criminals displaced by the city's urban renewal
elsewhere.
• The late 1800s saw almost a million people dwelling in the slums
east of Aldgate Pump; 4,000 houses in Whitechapel alone one year
were condemned as uninhabitable, though little was done about it
for years .
• Liquid sewage filled the cellars of houses and people kept their
windows – those not yet broken – shut because of the stench from
without. The majority of families, often up to nine people, lived in
one room.
• Whitechapel developed a reputation for being deeply immoral.
Incest was common in these crowded conditions, even amongst
children as young as 10. Prostitution was common and seen as a
normal way of earning money.
Living Conditions
• Many East End youth died before they were five. It would not be
unusual for a mother to send her young children into the streets until
after midnight, while she engaged in the business of prostitution to
make sufficient money to feed them.
• Often children fell off their seats at school from exhaustion or cried
from the pain of chronic starvation. Yet these unfortunates at least had
a home.
• Many others slept on the streets or in dustbins, under stairways or
bridges. Those who managed to scrape together enough money could
rent a room in a lodging house, and such buildings held 8,500 nightly in
Whitechapel.
• Within these doss houses flea-infested wallpaper hung in strips and
stairway handrails were missing, long ago burnt for firewood.
• If you could not afford a straw mattress, two pence bought you the
privilege of a place along a rope to lean against and sleep
• It is likely that such conditions were experienced by Jack the Ripper
himself
Women in Whitechapel
• Women's work included scrubbing, sweatshop tailoring, hop picking, and sack or
matchbox making, all with a complete lack of safety standards. Seventeen hours
of backbreaking labour paid 10 pence, less the cost of materials.
• Prostitution was a viable alternative, paying anywhere from a loaf of stale bread
to three pence. It was estimated that one woman in 16 engaged in this trade, for
a total of 1,200 prostitutes in Whitechapel and 80,000 in London. Jack the
Ripper’s attitude to women may in some way be explained by the roles women
were forced by circumstances to undertake in 19th century Whitechapel
• The close proximity of the London Docks also meant a steady stream of sailors
willing to partake of the prostitutes of Whitechapel
• The environment in the slums of London was such that Irish playwright George
Bernard Shaw commented, after the second of the Ripper killings, that perhaps
“the murderer was a social reformer who wanted to draw attention to social
conditions in the East End
• The conditions of the poor had been made worse by the well meaning Factory
Act of 1833 which had banned the employment of young children and restricted
the hours teenagers could work – poor families reliant on their children to
contribute to a ’collective family wage’ were thereby made even more poor
Laissez faire
• The attitude of the government towards the economy and
social issues had been throughout the 19th century been one
of ‘laissez faire’ or leave alone
• This was based on the ideas of the classical liberal Adam Smith
who suggested that market forces would look after everyone
and that it would be wrong for the government to intervene
• Consequently little was done to improve social conditions and
there was no ‘benefit system’ at all other than subjecting
yourself to the workhouse set up by the Poor Law amendment
Act of 1839
• The poor were desperate to avoid the prison like conditions of
the workhouse and would do anything to remain outside of it
Geographical Factors
• The murders were all within a mile of each other, and the total hunting area was
just over half a square mile in size. In 1998 a geographic profile was produced for
the Jack the Ripper case based on body dump sites. The peak area of the
geoprofile focused on the locale around Flower and Dean Street and Thrawl
Street.
• Flower and Dean Street and Thrawl Street no longer exist as they used to, but in
1888 they lay between Commercial Street to the west and Brick Lane to the east,
north of Whitechapel Road; during the time of the Whitechapel murders they
contained several doss houses. Dorset Street lay less than two blocks to the
north along Commercial Street. This was the vice-ridden neighbourhood that
East End social reformers referred to as the “wicked quarter-mile”
• It appears that the notorious rookery played a key role in the Jack the Ripper
mystery, and there is some supporting evidence for the geographic profile
results.
• The Ripper was undoubtedly helped by the layout of the streets, the cramped
conditions, large number of dark back alleys and general background of
immorality, prostitution, extreme poverty and lawlessness. The Police were
known to be unwilling to enter this area unaccompanied.
Immigration
• The proximity of the London docks meant that Whitechapel became the first
port of call for many of London’s immigrants
• The first immigrants in the 19th century were desperately poor Irish people
escaping the potato famine of 1845
• They were followed by considerable Jewish immigrations from Russia and Poland
in the period 1860-1900
• The steady stream of Jewish immigration of the first half of the 19th century
began to gather pace in the second half and by 1881 had become a veritable
flood.
• In Russia 1881 saw the assassination of Tsar Alexander, and this was followed by
terrible pogroms in Kiev, Odessa and other cities. Mass immigration of Jews and
other minorities persecuted in the Tsarist Empire began. This was fuelled over
the next few years by increasing penal laws against Jews in Russia and reached a
climax with the great pogrom of Kishinev in 1903.
• Many of these immigrants were ‘political refugees’ – Marxists and anarchists
• Ethnic tensions became particularly marked in the 1880’s when an economic
recessions caused even greater unemployment and poverty in Whitechapel
• Quickly ‘locals’ began to blame the immigrants for the lack of jobs and shortage
of housing…. In such an atmosphere of distrust and suspicion is was easy for Jack
the Ripper to avoid detection
Alcoholism
• Each of Jack the Ripper’s 5 victims were alcoholics
• Rates of alcoholism were high and very strong drink
‘relatively’ cheap with pubs and gin houses on every corner
• In a life denuded of any luxury or comfort a large proportion
of the population of Whitechapel simply ‘blotted out’ the
awfulness of their lives by being perpetually drunk