Jack the Ripper

Why did the Whitechapel murders of 1888 attract so much attention?

The 1888 murders took place in Whitechapel on the dirty streets of east end London. The east end of London was the home of slaughter houses, rag shops and the slums. The living conditions were poor; they were filthy and very crowded; there was a rough population of 900,000 and 80,000 of the population were living in Whitechapel, including unemployed people.
Most people lived day to day to find ways to pay for their next meal or a bed for a night in the lodging houses, known as the doss houses. Prostitution was very common because of this, Whitechapel alone had over 1,200 prostitutes many of them were ill fed, sick and alcoholic. A writer described the prostitutes as “women with sunken, black rimmed eyes, whose pallid faces appear and vanish by light of an occasional gas-lamp, and look so like ill-covered skull that we start at their stare”. Most of all Whitechapel was the home of violence and crime, a writer recorded that “every citizen wears a black eye” and cries of “murder!”   Was a day to day thing, but what made the Whitechapel murders so special?

Jack the ripper preyed upon women with their income depending on prostitution, most victims had their throat slit which after the bodies are mutilated. The metropolitan police began their investigation in 1888 and it came down to eleven separate murders, stretching the investigation from 3rd April 1888 to 13 February 1891. The police were actively investigating and upon the eleven murders five were universally agreed to be the work of one person so they called this the “canonical five”. Many Historians argue that at least 7 other murders and violent attacks were related to Jack the ripper.

The police believed that Jack the ripper’s first victim was Mary Ann Nichols or known as Polly. She was seen to be walking around Whitechapel road in the hours of 1:30 am; she was seen to be leaving a pub in Brick Lane, Spitalfields. An hour later she was... [continues]

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