And there’s the man outside Aldgate East station. A strange-looking, cadaver-like, soft-spoken man with an accent that somehow didn’t quite fit this world. He exudes a charismatic menace in the gloom of Whitechapel.
Between April 1888 and February 1891, Whitechapel and Spitalfields were rocked by the horrific murders of 11 women. Five of these were suspiciously similar and brutal in the autumn and winter of 1888 (the “canonical five” of Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly); This led police to believe there was only one person involved. The killer was responsible. Many had suffered horrific mutilations after being killed. The massive police investigation and intense media attention triggered a climate of fear and admiration; This meant that “Jack the Ripper” became and remains an international sensation; 136 years later as a recently discovered, never-before-seen police file makes new headlines. Over the next two hours we are transported to the places where the canonical quintet met their violent, sudden ends.
As someone who has been running immersive historical tours in London for the better part of a decade to supplement my often-struggling income as a writer, I know one of the biggest challenges is how you keep people entertained with the same old stories. , you keep things fresh. I like to organize tours around things that I actively want to bring back, or at least act as a foil to the present in some way – an in-person celebration of London’s original coffeehouses in a world of Starbucks ennui. Example: Think of it as preaching rather than guiding, and that keeps things fresh. But every guide has his own path.
For ours that night, there was only one thing that saved him from the chaos of his well-rehearsed routine, it seemed to me: violence. Jack expressing the movements of his knife, his hands cutting the air: That’s when our guide came to life. I saw wide, excited eyes in the crowd, conspiratorial looks, and a collective intake of breath as if a curtain were rapidly opening.
We are about 35 years old, huddled together. You can join the murder trail any night of the week, sometimes in the afternoon. All you have to do is buy a ticket from one of the many operators and go to a specific metro exit at a specific time. Then your bloody journey awaits you. We don’t actually visit all the murder scenes – some are “so far away, we’d be here all night” – instead we’re transported there thanks to printed photographs blowing in the wind. The overwhelming majority of the crowd is American.
There were some clichés. Most murders could be forgiven on the march, but not all. “Things were very different back then,” we learn, “nothing like they are today.” Our guide continues to paint a portrait of the Victorian East End, the heart of darkness, a nightmare land of grinding poverty and unbridled depravity. This isn’t unrealistic, but it’s a bit parodic.
In fact, some of Jack’s catchments, particularly Spitalfields, were areas of wealth; these included beautiful 18th-century townhouses that originally belonged to Huguenot master silk weavers; In Whitechapel too, philanthropists such as George Peabody had built new social housing for the “deserving poor”; There are also huge hospitals; especially the Royal London Hospital, which still towers over Whitechapel Road like a benevolent Cyclops.
I find the environment much more interesting than the tour; it’s still the Ripper’s dirty old Whitechapel tale, but it’s also a sparkling new environment with cocktail bars and sushi joints, shiny glass boxes housing City financiers and huge chunks of state infrastructure. sky.
We enter a particularly crowded square, but people don’t move as you’d expect, and I slowly realize that everyone in my line of sight is on a Jack the Ripper tour: not just our guide, but apparently two or more people. plus three more people. That’s when the absurdity of the whole enterprise becomes apparent; Almost a century and a half after suspiciously similar murders were committed, the vast expanses of Whitechapel have become a playground of memories every evening.
At one point, a slightly open window attracts our guide’s attention. He looks up anxiously and beckons us forward. He speaks in lower tones. I later learned that there were complaints from Whitechapel residents that graphic accounts were streaming down the street while they were eating dinner on warm evenings.
Fascination with the Ripper was fueled by another wild beast that lived a little further west. Along the muddy, rambling street of Fleet Street, printing had become a mind-shaping medium of mass communication, with millions of newspapers published each week. New tabloids, such as the weekly Illustrated Police News that emerged around the time of the Whitechapel murders, were stunningly visual, capturing the imagination of everyone from shoe shiners to baronets. Sort of like the first Crimewatch, there were chilling, short and exciting titles like “The Disgusting and Mysterious Murder of a Woman in Buck’s Row, Whitechapel” and “Women with Hidden Arms, Ready for the Evil of Whitechapel”; It showed women hiding guns and knives underneath. their crinolines.
I ask whether Jack the Ripper is to some extent an invention of the media; certainly manna for journalists looking to maintain readership, and didn’t this have a formative effect on our enduring admiration for Jack?
“No” comes the answer. The crowd greeted my question with discomfort. They want more murders.
So what explains our enduring fascination with the Ripper? Why aren’t there marches to commemorate the countless serial killers of the modern era who roam the streets of London? Could it be that while Jack the Ripper comes from a distant mental realm of gas lamps and men in top hats, the more recent murders may be a little closer to the bone? It could be. But the massive popularity of true crime on Netflix and podcasts shows that this only takes us so far.
The main reason for this – of course – is that, unlike the vast majority of serial murders, those attributed to Jack the Ripper remain unsolved (and can no longer be solved). If you’re on a killing spree but no one has any idea who the killer is — or rather, people have all kinds of ideas but no one knows if any of them are true — there’s the perfect formula for maintaining the fascination. This is what turns us into amateur sleuths; This, in my view, is what the journalists and editors of the Fourth Estate commercially exploited in the autumn and winter of 1888, and which continues to be exploited by a wide range of media today.
The most ingenious journalistic trick they had, the one that obsessed people’s attention, was to publish the serial killer’s “words” directly. Written in curly, elegant handwriting in blood-red ink, the “Dear Boss” Letter is truly a masterful piece of menace, but also an example of clever characterization. “Jack the Ripper”, the source of the legend, is mentioned for the first time. The gentle calligraphy of this book, which the Central News Agency received three weeks after the second murder, belies the tone and style best described as jejune Gothic. Short, sharp sentences contain threatening but simple and childish expressions: “I didn’t give the woman time to scream”; “My knife is very nice and sharp.” There is also an unmistakably British and even London twang: “The last job was the big job”; “Give it directly.” A follow-up to the “spoiled Jacky” postcard followed on 1 October 1888.
Do they read like the work of a gifted wordsmith (say, a journalist) impersonating an East Coast serial killer? Definitely. Initially these were dismissed as most likely fraud, but there was enough suspicion for the police to take them seriously. It seems to me that both – along with many other less convincing stories received in 1888-1891 – were part of a well-organised media campaign to keep the story in the public imagination as it has remained ever since. In 1931, a journalist named Fred Best reportedly admitted that he and a fellow hacker at The Star had written murderous letters “to keep the business alive”.
Because his identity remains unknown, each successive generation has shaped him into whatever monster they wished for: the Jack of all trades. To his contemporaries he was the physical embodiment of the squalor, deprivation and poverty of the Victorian East End. By the 1960s, he seems to have become more aristocratic, a top-hat-wearing psychopath who exploits everyone and everything. In this century, it has become more fashionable to conduct criminal investigations, often adopting today’s crime-solving methods. Bruce Robinson, screenwriter and director nail and meHe spent 15 years producing his outstanding doorstop additive. They All Love Jack. Since Hallie Rubenhold’s book Five Released in 2019, it was a refreshing shift from sensationalizing the killer’s crimes to illuminating the lives of those he killed; Now, if the Americans on tour are anything to go by, he is seen as a kind of timeless representation of the lethality of London streets plagued with knife crime.
The guide takes us to a parking lot. I think we’re in the area of Miller’s Court where the last victim was found, or at least close to it, or maybe not because it’s so far away, but what happens next is extremely moving. He pulls something out of the duffel bag he’s been mysteriously carrying all this time. He points it at a wall and starts poking around. The image flickers and shakes, but then the coroner’s sickening photo of Mary Jane comes into focus and the crowd goes silent.
It is then, in the stunned silence staring at this 136-year-old photograph, that the human tragedy of the Whitechapel murders becomes palpable. Women feel real for the first time. I wish our guide had brought them back to life just as he brought them to death. He acknowledges that they are not just “career whores” but people driven into it by desperate circumstances. But beyond that there isn’t much empathy. I don’t get the impression that he read Rubenhold’s bestseller; In this book, the “five” are revealed at some points to be balladeers, coffeehouse ladies, house servants, printers, and more, compounded by the misfortune of arriving in Whitechapel with a murderer on the loose. loose, but much more than just Jack being roadkill. I wonder how a tour might be different with a female guide, for example on one of Katie Wignall’s feminist Ripper tours.
The tour is over. A sound of applause is heard; It’s a bit muted because it’s an unpleasant feeling to applaud such horrific acts of violence. The man tells us that he always lived and stayed in Whitechapel while doing his research. He pulls out a small card machine and tells us he enjoys tips before walking dejectedly out into the rain.
Dr Matthew Green leads Immersive historical tours of London Every weekend including the Coffeehouse Tour, Medieval Wine Tour and Gin Tour. He is the author of Shadowlands: Journey to Lost Britain, published by Faber. You can do Buy a copy here.