The Legend of Jack the Ripper

Ch2: Down the hill the city goes

By the late Victorian era in 1888, London was dubbed to be the largest capital in the world. It was the centre of the ever-increasing British empire. Queen Victoria had been on the throne for well over 50 years, and the public face of Britain reflected Victoria's lifestyle. It was the epicenter of an empire, culture, finance, communication, and transportation, with a new emerging mass media called the new journalism.

While the city grew in size and wealth, it also grew in population, and so millions lived in poverty. Right on its doorstep in the East End lay the district of Whitechapel. It was a crime-ridden sordid quarter, where more than 78,000 residents lived in abject poverty. It was an area of doss houses, sweatshops, abattoirs, overcrowded slums, pubs, a few shops and warehouses, leavened with a row or two of respectably kept cottages.

Whitechapel housed London's worst slums and the poverty of its inhabitants was appalling. In fact, malnutrition and disease were so widespread that its inhabitants had about a 50 percent chance of living past the age of five years old.

The West End of London, however, was undergoing massive renovation and prosperity, opening up to new concert halls, music halls, restaurants, and hotels. As the city expanded, cheap housing was being demolished to make way for warehouses and business offices, which forced more people into smaller areas.

Overcrowding and a shortage of housing created the abyss of Whitechapel. For most of the population in the East End, they lived and died in the same neighbourhood in which they were born. People there did not have any hopes of a better future.

The East End consisted of a maze of entries, alleyways and courtyards which were all lit by single gas lamps, giving out light to about 6 feet in length that at times were so thick, that you would have to struggle to even see your hand in front of your face. The whole neighbourhood was filled with dirt and debris. Sanitation was practically non-existent, and people would throw their raw sewage into the street, making the stench of the whole district unbearable.

Although some areas of Whitechapel during this time were relatively crime-free and had law-abiding citizens, there's no denying that its overcrowded slums were some of the worst places in the city. Around 15,000 of Whitechapel's residents were homeless and unemployed, and the little money they had often gone to drown their sorrows in the area's countless different pubs.

Not just limited to poverty and crime rates, Whitechapel was so overcrowded in its poorer areas, that up to two or three entire families would often be crammed into one small room just because they couldn't afford to pay rent anywhere else.

Whitechapel was considered to be the most notorious criminal rookery in London. The area was described as "perhaps the foulest and most dangerous street in the whole metropolis."Robbery, violence, prostitution and alcohol addiction were common things. The district was characterised by extreme poverty, sub-standard housing, poor sanitation, homelessness, drunkenness, and endemic prostitution.

Charles Booth states:

There were mainly three categories of people that were living in Whitechapel. The poor included builders, labourers, shopkeepers, dock workers & tailors. The very poor included women & children who usually worked as seamstresses, weavers, or clothes washers. The Homeless, they were people living in a permanent state of deprivation.

The only thing that they all had in common was the struggle for survival. Every day was a struggle for rights and survival in Whitechapel. There was a large scarcity of available resources such as education, health, and housing.

For people like the poor, common lodging houses offered a bed for the night. By law, every one of these common lodging houses had to be licensed and was subjected to strict police supervision. Most of the lodging houses were owned by middle-class entrepreneurs and investors, the majority of whom lived well outside the area and entrusted the day-to-day running of the businesses to "wardens" or "keepers." Many of these had criminal backgrounds and operated on the periphery of the law. They would turn a blind eye, probably in return for a share of the proceeds, to illegal activity and blatantly flout the regulation stating that men and women, unless married, must be kept separate.