The Victorian Era

What Was Jack the Ripper's London Like

Article · Cities & Entertainment · The Victorian Era, 1837–1901

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The London of Jack the Ripper was the East End of London in the autumn of 1888, the crowded, impoverished, and anxious district in which the most famous unsolved murder case of the Victorian period was played out. Between 31 August and 9 November 1888 — a period the newspapers of the day called the Autumn of Terror — five women were murdered in Whitechapel and Spitalfields by a killer the press named Jack the Ripper, and the case has remained in the public imagination ever since. The murders exposed the worst housing, the worst policing, and the worst press of the world’s largest city, and they made the East End a byword for urban poverty in the late Victorian period. The scene of the crimes is set out in Victorian London, and the wider social geography is described in How big was Victorian London?.

The East End of London

The East End of London in 1888 was a dense, polyglot, and deeply poor district stretching from the City wall east to the docks of the Thames and north into Bethnal Green and Hackney. Whitechapel, the parish in which most of the murders took place, was a maze of narrow streets, courts, alleys, and tenements housing Irish, Jewish, and English poor alongside small workshops, sweatshops, breweries, and cheap lodging houses. The population of the Whitechapel district alone stood at around 80,000 in 1888, packed into housing originally built for perhaps a third of that number.

Life in the East End was precarious. Average weekly earnings for a labourer stood at little more than a pound, rent for a single room could swallow a third of that, and a large part of the population lived as casual dock workers, street sellers, seamstresses, or in the irregular trades of the night. Prostitution was widespread and largely tolerated, drunk and disorderly behaviour was commonplace, and the police were thin on the ground. The casual wards of the workhouses and the common lodging houses of Flower and Dean Street, Thrawl Street, and Dorset Street provided shelter for thousands of the homeless, and it was from this world of doss-houses and street corners that the victims of the Ripper were drawn.

The Canonical Five Victims

The five victims conventionally called the canonical five of the Whitechapel murders were Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly. The dates on which they were killed are: Mary Ann Nichols on 31 August 1888 in Buck’s Row, Whitechapel; Annie Chapman on 8 September 1888 in the back yard of 29 Hanbury Street, Spitalfields; Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes on the same night, 30 September 1888, in Berner Street, Stepney, and in Mitre Square, City of London, respectively; and Mary Jane Kelly on 9 November 1888 in Miller’s Court, off Dorset Street, Spitalfields. The murder of Mary Jane Kelly, committed indoors and involving extensive mutilation, was the most violent of the series and is generally regarded as the last canonical killing.

All five women were local to the East End. Nichols, Chapman, Stride, and Eddowes were casual workers who supplemented their income with prostitution and who drifted between common lodging houses; Kelly, the youngest, was working as a prostitute at the time of her death. The killer was never identified by the police, and the files on the murders remain open.

The Investigation

The murders were investigated by the Metropolitan Police, at that time under the leadership of Sir Robert Anderson of the Criminal Investigation Department and, from 1888, of its new Commissioner, James Monro. The senior detective on the ground was Detective Inspector Frederick Abberline of the CID, who was drafted in from the Special Branch at the height of the investigation. Local divisional officers assisted, and a large number of doctors and surgeons examined the bodies, the most prominent being Thomas Bond, who gave evidence on the wounds of both Eddowes and Kelly.

The investigation was hampered from the start. There were no forensic tools comparable to modern fingerprinting or DNA analysis — fingerprinting, although developed in India in the 1870s, was not yet in operational use by the Metropolitan Police — and there were no reliable witnesses. The police received hundreds of letters, including the famous Dear Boss letter of 27 September 1888 that gave the killer the name Jack the Ripper, but most are now regarded as hoaxes. Several suspects were interviewed and released; a small number of Jewish vigilantes were arrested in the mistaken belief that the killer was targeting Jews; and a series of false leads consumed much of the autumn.

The Suspects

The identity of the killer has never been established, and a number of named suspects have been put forward over the years. The principal suspects include Montague Druitt, a schoolmaster from a respectable Canterbury family who was found dead in the Thames in December 1888, shortly after the Kelly murder; Aaron Kosminski, a Polish Jewish immigrant admitted to an asylum in 1891 and named by a senior police officer as a strong suspect; Michael Ostrog, a Russian-born doctor and career criminal; and Walter Sickert, the German-born painter who made the murders a theme of his art and who is favoured by a more recent school of Ripperologists. None of these candidates can be conclusively identified as the killer, and the case remains officially unsolved.

A separate strand of speculation, the royal conspiracy theory, holds that the murders were connected in some way to the royal household and were covered up to protect a member of the family. The theory is unsupported by evidence and is rejected by most professional historians, but it has proved enduring in popular culture.