London's Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City by Drew D. Gray Page A
Authors: Drew D. Gray
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both to add to the panic and obfuscate the police's attempt to catch the villain. Murders were often newsworthy but in 1888 even the discovery of a headless torso paled in comparison with `Jack's antics. The press are the subject of a later chapter of this book but without them it is possible that the Whitechapel murders might not have become the international sensation that they did. Certainly the myth making that has surrounded the killings have raised this case above all previous murders in British history and we need to be very careful about how we think about the murders.
Having now established the context for the Whitechapel murders both within Victorian murder reportage and more recent criminal profiling we will now turn to the area in which the killings occurred, Whitechapel, and more broadly, the East End of London. If the Ripper has been the subject of myth making then so has this area of the capital. Unpacking the truth about the East End is just as problematic as identifying the culprit behind the mask of `Jack the Ripper.
3
East Meets West: The Contrasting Nature of Victorian
London and the Mixed Community of the East End
Towards the end of the 1850s the great Victorian essayist and champion of British art and culture John Ruskin summed up the fears of many Victorians at what they saw as the slow suffocation of rural England at the hands of industry:
The whole of the island ... set as thick with chimneys as the masts stand in the docks of Liverpool; that there shall be no meadows in it; no trees; no gardens; only a little corn grown upon the house tops, reaped and thrashed by steam, that you do not even have room for roads, but travel either over the roofs of your Mills, on viaducts; or under the floors, in tunnels; that, the smoke have rendered the light of the sun unserviceable, you work always by the light of your own gas: that no acre of English ground shall be without its shaft and its engine ...
Two Parks (1859)
By the 1870s Ruskin's dislike of industry and, in particular, the omnipresent railways that carved great swathes through the verdant countryside, had brought him to embrace the back-to-the-land movement with his fellow travellers Edward Carpenter and William Morris. Ruskin believed that open fields and all the flora of nature were `essential to the healthy spiritual life of man' and furthermore argued that agricultural labour was somehow superior to the industrial labour that so many British workmen had been forced into performing.'
In this chapter we will look at this dichotomy at the heart of Victorian culture and at how competing views of country and town manifested themselves within the ages of the nineteenth-century press and periodicals. The long shadow created by the growing towns and cities threatened to destroy the traditional pastoral image of `merrie England. While the new industrial centres of the Midlands and north clearly defined much of this threat, it was in London that the real danger to civilization had reared its ugly head. Having explored general attitudes towards the city this chapter will therefore focus on London, and in particular on the East End of London and the fears that surrounded it. It will consider how we define and understand this complex area of the capital and the people that lived in it. The East End has been represented and misrepresented for several centuries and uncovering its real nature is not an easy task. Nonetheless this chapter will attempt to discover the real Eastender (whoever he or she may be). In doing so it will look at the various migrants that have made the east side of London their home and at the problems they encountered there. This will be the story of the Irish and the Jews, but it will not neglect the indigenous people of Bethnal Green and Tower Hamlets, the Cockneys, costermongers and pearly kings and queens and the feisty match girls who recorded one of the most memorable and formative industrial relations victories of the late
Having now established the context for the Whitechapel murders both within Victorian murder reportage and more recent criminal profiling we will now turn to the area in which the killings occurred, Whitechapel, and more broadly, the East End of London. If the Ripper has been the subject of myth making then so has this area of the capital. Unpacking the truth about the East End is just as problematic as identifying the culprit behind the mask of `Jack the Ripper.
3
East Meets West: The Contrasting Nature of Victorian
London and the Mixed Community of the East End
Towards the end of the 1850s the great Victorian essayist and champion of British art and culture John Ruskin summed up the fears of many Victorians at what they saw as the slow suffocation of rural England at the hands of industry:
The whole of the island ... set as thick with chimneys as the masts stand in the docks of Liverpool; that there shall be no meadows in it; no trees; no gardens; only a little corn grown upon the house tops, reaped and thrashed by steam, that you do not even have room for roads, but travel either over the roofs of your Mills, on viaducts; or under the floors, in tunnels; that, the smoke have rendered the light of the sun unserviceable, you work always by the light of your own gas: that no acre of English ground shall be without its shaft and its engine ...
Two Parks (1859)
By the 1870s Ruskin's dislike of industry and, in particular, the omnipresent railways that carved great swathes through the verdant countryside, had brought him to embrace the back-to-the-land movement with his fellow travellers Edward Carpenter and William Morris. Ruskin believed that open fields and all the flora of nature were `essential to the healthy spiritual life of man' and furthermore argued that agricultural labour was somehow superior to the industrial labour that so many British workmen had been forced into performing.'
In this chapter we will look at this dichotomy at the heart of Victorian culture and at how competing views of country and town manifested themselves within the ages of the nineteenth-century press and periodicals. The long shadow created by the growing towns and cities threatened to destroy the traditional pastoral image of `merrie England. While the new industrial centres of the Midlands and north clearly defined much of this threat, it was in London that the real danger to civilization had reared its ugly head. Having explored general attitudes towards the city this chapter will therefore focus on London, and in particular on the East End of London and the fears that surrounded it. It will consider how we define and understand this complex area of the capital and the people that lived in it. The East End has been represented and misrepresented for several centuries and uncovering its real nature is not an easy task. Nonetheless this chapter will attempt to discover the real Eastender (whoever he or she may be). In doing so it will look at the various migrants that have made the east side of London their home and at the problems they encountered there. This will be the story of the Irish and the Jews, but it will not neglect the indigenous people of Bethnal Green and Tower Hamlets, the Cockneys, costermongers and pearly kings and queens and the feisty match girls who recorded one of the most memorable and formative industrial relations victories of the late
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