Why had Whitechapel become an ideal hunting crowd for a serial killer by 1888?

1
Why had Whitechapel become an ideal hunting crowd
for a serial killer by 1888?

• www.educationforum.co.uk

2
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.

3
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..

4
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.

5
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

6
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 Rippers 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

7
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

8
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.

9
Immigration

• The proximity of the London docks meant that
  Whitechapel became the first port of call for
  many of Londons 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
  1880s 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

10
Alcoholism

• Each of Jack the Rippers 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