19th Century Whitechapel
Whitechapel in the 19th century was a district in the East End of London known for its poverty, overcrowding, and high crime rates. It became infamous for the series of unsolved murders attributed to the unidentified serial killer known as Jack the Ripper. The area was also a hub for immigration, industrialization, and social reform movements during this period.
5 Key excerpts on "19th Century Whitechapel"
eBook - ePubCity of Dreadful Delight
Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London
- Judith R. Walkowitz(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- University of Chicago Press(Publisher)
...Worsening conditions, recent historians have argued, precipitated a mounting political crisis in 1888, driving the East End destitute and unemployed towards defiance, and unleashing anti-alien and anti-Semitic protests. But, as Jerry White has observed, the middle classes of London were far less concerned with the material problems of Whitechapel than with the pathological symptoms they spawned, such as street crime, prostitution, and epidemic disease—“the whole panoply of shame of this ‘boldest blotch on the face’ of the capital of the civilized world.” 5 For the respectable reading public, Whitechapel provided a stark and sensational backdrop for the Ripper murders: an immoral landscape of light and darkness, a nether region of illicit sex and crime, both exciting and dangerous. Like the deserted wasteland of Stevenson’s “city in a nightmare,” Whitechapel’s empty spaces could rapidly fill with a menacing crowd. “All sorts and conditions of men” could be met with on Whitechapel Road, the district’s main thoroughfare, with its “flaunting shops,” piles of fruit, and “streaming naphtha lamps.” A principal entertainment center for working-class London, Whitechapel Road also proved a magnet for rich young bloods from the West End who would tour the “toughest, roughest streets, taverns and music halls in search of new excitements.” This was Charles Booth’s “Tom Tiddler’s Ground”—imagined as a place of Darwinian drama and excitement—as compelling to the respectable observer as it was frightening. 6 At night, commentators warned, the glittering brilliance of Whitechapel Road contrasted sharply with the dark mean streets just off the main thoroughfare. Turning into a side street, one was “plunged” into the “Cimmerian” darkness of “lower London.” Here in the Flower and Dean Street area, with its twenty-seven courts, alleys, and lanes, stood one of the last remaining rookeries of late-Victorian London...
eBook - ePub- Charlotte Brunsdon(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- British Film Institute(Publisher)
...There are hundreds of versions of this story, which has been retold across many media and contributes strongly to an image of London as a perpetually Victorian city where murder is committed in labyrinthine alleyways. The fog of Jack the Ripper's East End makes of London a murderous place. The international currency of this London is directly, and rather archly, referenced at the beginning of Alfred Hitchcock's 1972 return to serial-killer London, Frenzy. As one gentleman observes to another in a Covent Garden pub after the reporting of another 'neck tie murder', 'good juicy sex crimes' are 'so good for the tourist trade', continuing, as cited at the opening of this chapter, 'Foreigners somehow expect the squares of London to be fog-wreathed, full of hansom cabs and littered with ripped whores'. 17 Judith Walkowitz commences her scholarly investigation of the contexts of the Whitechapel murders by reporting on the 1980 installation of a 'Ripper Street' at Madame Tussaud's in London in response to public demand for horror greater than that offered by Tussaud's 'Chamber of Horrors'. 18 'Ripper Street' is just one variant of a cross-media cultural phenomenon which, partly because the case has no closure, has proved both resilient and generative. There are postcards, maps, tea-towels, comic books, graphic novels, scholarly articles, books, television programmes and films. Kim Newman, in a survey of Ripper films, suggests that 'The case at once embodies a melodramatic vision of the Victorian era (gaslight, fog, Sherlock Holmes, gin-swilling drabs) and sets the agenda (forensic medicine, gutter journalism, criminal psychology) for the supposedly twentieth century phenomenon of the serial killer.' 19 The story of the Whitechapel murders and Jack the Ripper is told and retold across many sites, with many different kinds of participation by tellers and audiences. There were once street ballads, and now there are walking tours and websites...
eBook - ePubThe New Cockney
New Ethnicities and Adolescent Speech in the Traditional East End of London
- S. Fox(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
...1 The Social and Historical Context 1.1 Introduction This chapter provides the historical background against which the current situation in the traditional East End of London can be evaluated. In order to understand today’s profile of Tower Hamlets and to consider why changes to the traditional Cockney dialect might have taken place we must chart the changes that have occurred in the area from the time of the first redevelopments following World War I. Since that time, there has been a mass exodus of the white working-class population, whose families had lived in the East End of London for generations. Between 1901 and 1981 there was a staggering decline in the population of Tower Hamlets from 600,000 to just 140,000 and the reasons for this will be explored throughout this chapter. The decline in population began to halt during the 1970s with the development of the dockland area but this regeneration did not attract the working-class families back; instead derelict council blocks stood side-by-side with luxury riverside homes and the area saw the emergence of a new kind of resident – the ‘yuppies’ as they were known – and Wapping, where the fieldwork for this research was carried out, and now other places in the borough such as Limehouse and the Isle of Dogs, have become trendy places to live and work for a more affluent and middle-class community. It is the home of the Canary Wharf development and is an area where one of the most rapid social and economic transformations has taken place anywhere in Britain. Also in the 1970s, the relatively small pre-existing Bangladeshi community of Tower Hamlets began to grow in size. Changes in the immigration laws together with civil unrest between what was then West Pakistan (now Pakistan) and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) led to the predominantly male migrant workers who were already in London, sending for their families and subsequently settling in England...
eBook - ePubTrue Crime Chronicles, Volume Two
Serial Killers, Outlaws, and Justice ... Real Crime Stories From The 1800s
- (Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- WildBlue Press(Publisher)
...The fiendish perpetrator of the murders in the Whitechapel district of London in the early 90s is an inmate of Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminal Insane in England. The revelation of his identity sets at rest the stories ascribing the outrages of an English nobleman, now dead, who, despite his great wealth, had rendered himself an outcast by his vices and eccentricities, or to an Englishman, untitled, but of birth and breeding, who, after manifesting unmistakable signs of mental disorder, disappeared from his accustom haunts in London to die in a madhouse. Jack the Ripper, at whose hands 14 women of the unfortunate class lost their lives successively within a circumscribed district of the East End of the English metropolis, was a poll of the lower, though educated, class, and a maniac of the most virulent and homicidal type – a type that is known to science as a sadist. These facts have just been given to the world by Sir Robert Anderson, for more than 30 years Chief of the Criminal Investigation Department of the British government and head of the Detective Bureau at Scotland Yard. Sir Robert’s disclosures were made in one of the London reviews for March, and were supplemented by a letter from him printed in the London Times. He describes in his written statement the house to house search for the murderer in the district in which the atrocities were committed. He declares the police investigated every man in Whitechapel whose circumstances were such that he could go and come and get rid of bloodstains in secret...
eBook - ePubViolent Victorians
Popular entertainment in nineteenth-century London
- Rosalind Crone(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Manchester University Press(Publisher)
...Processes of change, such as urbanisation and industrialisation, already underway in the eighteenth century, greatly intensified during the first half of the nineteenth century. The effects had a substantial impact on the daily lives of many Londoners, dramatically shaping the conditions in which these people were forced to live and work. It is certainly easy to be seduced by the accomplishments of the metropolitan improvements. As one historian has recently reminded us, during the 1820s, while London’s ‘best circles were agog with excitement about the wave of metropolitan improvements’, a ‘seamier and more squalid side of urban life’ persisted. 6 Although the improvement programme was redirected towards tackling these issues from the late 1830s onwards, by mid-century large parts of London remained untouched, improvements accomplished had often intensified already unbearable conditions in surrounding neighbourhoods, and nothing had prevented the erection of new slums in old and new districts to accommodate an ever-increasing population. Thus the clash between ‘old’ and ‘new’ London continued. 7 Such tension was further reflected in the political realm, where reform was also on the agenda. Legislative changes often fell short of expectations generating great disappointment and increasing social divisions. Moreover, the direction of government policy ensured that throughout the first half of the century the battle between traditional values, rights and customs on the one hand, and capitalism, laissez-faire ideology and new middle-class values on the other, continued to rage. These tensions and feelings of disappointment and loss are explored in depth in this chapter. The experience of life in the metropolis for the large number of ordinary people is central to an understanding of why the theme of violence emerged in a new form in popular entertainment around 1820...
