London's Shadows By Drew Gray: Chapter Analysis

Upon the first glance, Drew Gray’s novel “London’s Shadows: the Dark Side of the Victorian City” would appear to be about the unfolding events of the Whitechapel murders in London during the year of 1888, but this is not the full purpose of the novel. Drew Gray; a senior lecturer in the history of crime at the University of Northampton (The University of Northampton), applies his knowledge to provide consideration of “the ways in which the killings affected attitudes towards the perceived problems of East London” (Gray, 3). Gray uses his novel to discuss in detail the struggles of many unfortunate people living in the poorest parts of London, and described in detail what these people went through to survive. Gray broke his novel in nine different chapters, in which he discussed different aspects of people’s lives in London. The novels first chapter discusses the myth of Jack the Ripper and the people who “Ripperologists” believe Jack to have been. The second chapter looked at murders in the nineteenth century as a whole to provide a better understanding of the Whitechapel murders. Within the second chapter, through using a more modern knowledge of the psychology of murder and comparing the Whitechapel murders to other murders, Grey informs his readers that the murders that took place in 1888 where “extreme examples of sexual homicide” (Gray, 5). To conclude chapter two, Gray
Gray is successful in using the Whitechapel murders of Jack the Ripper to explore “prostitution and pornography, poverty, revolutionary politics, immigration, the creation of a criminal underworld and the development of policing”. (Bloomsbury) Through using a wide range of scholarly knowledge, Drew Gray’s achieves in creating a novel telling the past lives of the people of East End