Jack the Ripper – it would be unusual to simply live life without hearing about this figure immortalized by the media for his heinous crimes. However, the history that surrounds this serial killer is much greater than the slaughter of his prostitute victims. The district of Whitechapel, located in the East End of London, was home to those seen as degenerates by the middle and upper classes. Despite this view, the East End overflowed with residents whose “hard-luck” stories essentially required them to change their lifestyles to survive. While the majority of essays on this topic focus on who Jack the Ripper might have been or the anti-Semitism that was evident in the case, this essay will focus on the labour of the East End. The aim of this …show more content…
In the 1880s, Economic stability ceased to exist and the media turned to an interest in social exploration. During the Industrial Revolution, levels of literacy expanded during the Industrial Revolution and, therefore, newspapers attracted more readers ‘which eagerly lapped up sensationalist accounts of urban poverty and moral squalor’. These newspaper readers enjoyed pieces on the writer’s descent into territories of which they would not otherwise have knowledge. While the focus of these media authors is to ‘awaken Britain to the plight of its poor’, they also felt the need to publish worthy journalism. Andrew Mearns and Charles Booth both published pieces on the residents of this slumland where they uncovered a much more depressing truth about the lower class. The struggle to survive in the East End was not only an economic struggle but also a moral struggle as the realities of their economic situation resulted in their immoral decisions, i.e., theft, prostitution. The East End was not as simple as poor versus wealthy; rather, it held people in their position in society by …show more content…
Thus, he asserts, ‘Whilst we have been building our churches and solacing ourselves with our religion and dreaming that the millennium was coming, the poor have been growing poorer, the wretched more miserable, and the immoral more corrupt’. In other words, involvement by society only in events and people that directly affect them suggests that they did not pay any attention to what was happening to the poorer segment of their society. Consequently, his stories describe what he has seen and what he was told by the residents of the East End. From the conditions in which they live to how they forego their morality to survive, the stories are a challenging read. Furthermore, they are difficult to comprehend for those living, say, in the West End of London who have only encountered the people of the East End from a distance or across a shop counter. Acknowledging that there is difficulty in understanding this, Mearns prefaces the section on their living conditions by saying, ‘Few who will read these pages have any conception of what these pestilential human rookeries are, where tens of thousands are crowded together amidst horrors which call to mind what we have heard of the middle passage of the slave ship’. Accordingly, he writes this opening sentence to grab the attention of the middle class and let them know that the problem is worse than they could
Judith R. Walkowitz is a Professor Emeritus at John Hopkins University, specializing in modern British history and women’s history. In her book City of Dreadful Delight, she explores nineteenth century England’s development of sexual politics and danger by examining the hype of Jack the Ripper and other tales of sensational nature. By investigating social and cultural history she reveals the complexity of sexuality, and its influence on the public sphere and vice versa. Victorian London had upheld traditional notions of class and gender, that is until they were challenged by forces of different institutions.
The book The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century by Robert Roberts gives an honest account of a village in Manchester in the first 25 years of the 20th century. The title is a reference to a description used by Friedrich Engels to describe the area in his book Conditions of the Working Class. The University of Manchester Press first published Roberts' book in the year 1971. The more recent publication by Penguin Books contains 254 pages, including the appendices. The author gives a firsthand description of the extreme poverty that gripped the area in which he grew up. His unique perspective allows him to accurately describe the self-imposed caste system, the causes and effects of widespread poverty, and the impact of World War I as someone who is truly a member of a proletarian family. His main contention is that prior to the War, the working class inhabiting the industrial slums in England "lay outside the mainstream of that society and possessed within their own ranks a system of social stratification that enclosed them in their own provincial social world and gave them little hope of going beyond it. " After the War, the working class found new economic prosperity and a better way of life, never returning to the lifestyle prevalent prior to the War.
The City of Dreadful Delight starts with some cultural analysis of the historical background that helped to produce the social landscape of Victorian London. In discussing the transformation of London, Walkowitz argues for seeing more than merely a shift from one type of city to another but rather a conflicted layering of elite male spectatorship, the “scientific” social reform, and W. T. Stead's New Journalism. Here Walkowitz investigates the “Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.” The “Maiden Tribute” consisted of a series of articles, authored by Stead and presented in the penny press, which exposed the sale of girls into prostitution. According to Walkowitz, these stories relied on the new scientific methods of social investigation, but the...
History textbooks seem to always focus on the advancements of civilization, often ignoring the humble beginnings in which these achievements derive. How the Other Half Lives by journalist-photographer Jacob A. Riis explores the streets of New York, using “muck-racking” to expose just how “the other half lives,” aside from the upbeat, rich, and flapper-girl filled nights so stereotypical to New York City in the 1800s. During this time, immigrants from all over the world flooded to the new-born city, bright-eyed and expecting new opportunities; little did they know, almost all of them will spend their lives in financial struggle, poverty, and crowded, disease-ridden tenements. Jacob A. Riis will photograph this poverty in How the Other Half Lives, hoping to bring awareness to the other half of New York.
The tenement was the biggest hindrance to achieving the American myth of rags to riches. It becomes impossible for one to rise up in the social structure when it can be considered a miracle to live passed the age of five. Children under the age of five living in tenements had a death rate of 139.83 compared to the city’s overall death rate of 26.67. Even if one did live past the age of five it was highly probable he’d become a criminal, since virtually all of them originate from the tenements. They are forced to steal and murder, they’ll do anything to survive, Riis appropriately calls it the “survival of the unfittest”. (Pg.
Writers like Henry Mayhew (London Labour and the London Poor) and Jack London (The People of the Abyss), and artists like Gustave Dore (London) and John Thomson (Street Life in London) - all chroniclers of the desperate conditions of those in the East End - helped enlighten many around world - particularly those who lived just beyond the permeable boundaries of that notorious area - as to the needs of the city's unfortunate members of society. Their works called out - whether directly or indirectly - for some sort of radical social reform, but there was little immediate response.
From 1888-1891 a portion of London England known as Whitechapel was terrorized by a rash of murders. In total eleven women were murdered, five of those are thought to be the victim of one of the most well-known serial killers whom was never identified, Jack the Ripper. Out of the murders committed in the two year period, the five had like backgrounds, they lived in boarding houses and were prostitutes, alcoholics, or both. The women were found with their bodies lying on their backs with the legs spread apart. The victims were also found to have been murdered in like fashion with their throats had been slit and their bodies mutilated. This gave Jack the Ripper a specific modus operandi narrowing down the field of likely victims from the original total. Those five murders also took place in a time span of ten months.
"I am down on whores and shant quit ripping them until I do get buckled,” (Pulditor 48). That statement was sent from Jack the Ripper himself to Scotland Yard, a detective in the case. Jack the Ripper was a horrendous serial killer that preyed on prostitutes in the late 1880s (Pulditor 45-47). Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Kate Eddowes, and Mary Kelly are five of the prostitutes’ murdered by Jack the Ripper (Anderson 10-51). Although the true identity of Jack the Ripper has never been identified, experts have investigated Prince Albert Victor, Thomas Neill Cream, and Montague John Druitt as prime suspects.
Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago (1896) is intrinsically linked to the social class system and poverty. The novel is set and published during the late Victorian age, a period in which the working class experienced a relentless struggle against the harsh realities of social and working conditions. Moreover, in his paper The Working Class in Britain 1850-1939, John Benson highlights the disparities between the poor and the economy during the era, s a result of the Industrial revolution and urbanisation(Benson, 2003,p.30). Although, Benson's argument is valid when focusing on a social novel such as A Child of the Jago; because through his childhood the protagonist Dickie Perrot commits heinous crimes and becomes incredibly defiant in the old Jago; On the other hand, Benson's argument does not explain how and why an individual would succumb to these acts. Morrison makes it clear in his preface to his readers and critics that he wrote the novel to expose the trails and tribulations of the poor and the grim realities of slum living through the characterization of Dicky Perrot ' It was my fate to encounter a place in Shoreditch, where children were born and reared in circumstances which gave them no reasonable chance of living decent lives: where children were born foredamned to a criminal or semi criminal career' (Morrison, 1897). Despite, the novel being set in the fictional genre, elements of Morrison's personal life is prevalent throughout the text. Morrison originates from a working class background and collaborated with Reverend Osborne to campaigned for a variety of social reforms and slum clearance in the Old Nichol (Matlz, 2003). Thus, the novel is based on the conception of reality rather than fiction ...
A main factor in the storyline is the way the writer portrays society's attitude to poverty in the 18th century. The poor people were treated tremendously different to higher classed people. A lot of people were even living on the streets. For example, "He picked his way through the hordes of homeless children who congregated at evening, like the starlings, to look for the most sheltered niche into which they could huddle for the night." The writer uses immense detail to help the reader visualise the scene. She also uses a simile to help the reader compare the circumstances in which the children are in. This shows that the poor children had to live on the streets and fend for themselves during the 18th century. Another example involves a brief description of the city in which the poor people lived in. This is "nor when he smelt the stench of open sewers and foraging pigs, and the manure of horses and mules" This gives a clear example of the state of the city. It is unclean and rancid and the writer includes this whilst keeping to her fictional storyline.
He is known to have killed at least five prostitutes between August 7th and September 10th, although he is suspected of many other murders. He chose prostitutes as his targets on purpose. They were easily accessible and the prostitutes first initiated contact with him, which appealed to his asocial personality. The murder of prostitutes, or other lower class citizens, was not uncommon in London’s East End at the time. The district was known for the violence and crime brought over by immigrants looking to make a new start for themselves. However, these murders were different than any other violent crime of the time, because of the sadistic and sociopathic manner of the murders. However, the killer did not just murder these women, he mutilated their bodies by removing their organs. This action really stood out at that time because it showed the killer had a mind for violence that no normal citizen could even comprehend.
“Jack the Ripper”, an alias given because someone sent and signed a letter in that name, is the infamous serial killer that harmed the streets of Whitechapel district in East End London during 1888. The Ripper murdered, from what is known, at least five prostitutes in an unusual medical manner that helped provide the police with a hint that the killer might have been educated in the human anatomy (Biography.com). The killer became and remained famous for numerous reasons, one of them being that the media romanticized him. Media transformed the Ripper from a “sad killer of women” into a “bogey man”, becoming “the most romantic figures in history” (Barbee). Jack the Ripper was never caught, letting him remain as one of the world’s most infamous
Serial killing is a type of murder that is rare and it occurs when a person kills three individuals or more. Most serial killers kill people who they don’t know and there is a duration period between each murder. Serial killers are isolated from people in their cities and towns. We will probably never know what motivates a serial killer and understand the reasons for its behavior. (Haggetary, 2009)The serial killer that I chose to write about is “Jack the ripper”. “Jack the ripper” is an unknown serial killer that is referenced in movies, television shows, books and some video games. Jack the ripper killed five female prostitutes and put serious damage to their bodies. It is believed that he only have five victims but the “White Chapel Murder
England in the nineteen-thirties was a very bleak and dark time for the working class and unemployed citizens. In The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell, describes the overlooked injustices that happened in in Northern British industrial towns. Orwell depicts his experiences and views on social class and English society. The book is an eye-opener to the challenging hardships that many of the working class gentry faced during the years of the depression; Things such as, horrible housing, social injustices, and a lack of consideration from the government. The primary focus of part one, was to inform the middle class people that the unemployed were victims or a corrupt society, government, and economy.
Jack the Ripper murdered five women between the time of 31st of August 1888 and the 9th of November 1888. They were murdered within Whitechapel and Spitalfields in the East End areas of London, England. He was never caught, and because he was not there are hundreds on his personality and motives. There has been no other killers in the British history that rivaled the gruesome, disrespectful, utterly superior Jack the Ripper, a multiple murderer whose arrogance and self-assurance defied the entire police department within London and held in a great terror in a great city for as long as he cared to roam its streets and slay at will.