————————————————————————Page 8hostile mob.”43THIS PERIOD represented a culmination of tensions between West and East. By the autumn of 1888, “the respectable classes were obsessed with fears of class conflict and social disintegration[;] coming so fast on the heels of the West End riots, the Jack the Ripper murders fed the flames of class hatred and distrust.”44 The fact that Whitechapel was situated at the western edge of the East End, next to the important financial district of London, made the killings seem even more ominous. The horrifying crimes of the Whitechapel murderer condensed the vague fears of the West End about the brutality, immorality, and destructiveness of the East into one mysterious entity. While many in the West End viewed the crimes as a logical result of conditions in East London, the reaction of the East End was marked by anti-semitism, xenophobia, and hostility towards the police, intensifying social divisions which already existed.The Metropolitan Police had vast powers available to solve the Whitechapel murders. It could investigate “every pawnshop, every laundry, every publichouse, and even every lodging-house in the huge area of London in a couple of hours.”45 Furthermore, there was a great willingness on the part of the people of the East End to aid in the capture of the killer. Thus, a contemporary noted that “arrests were made by the score, principally of people of a low class who inhabited the locality where the murders were committed.”46 The scope and lack of focus of police activity can be clearly seen in a report sent to the Home Office on 19 October 1888 by Chief Inspector Swanson. He noted that 80,000 handbills had been distributed, house-to-house searches conducted, 2,000 lodgers questioned, and inquiries made of sailors on the Thames, Asians in London’s opium dens, Greek gypsies, and cowboys from the American Exhibition. Furthermore, “three hundred people were questioned as a result of communications from the public . . . [including] seventy-six butchers and slaughterers.”47By an examination of the sorts of people who were suspected of committing the Whitechapel murders, one can get a sense of the racial prejudices and class tensions that were very much a part of Victorian life. The police and press exhibited a strong suspicion of foreigners and Jews from the beginning of the investigation. One writer commented in 1891 that Whitechapel “harboured a cosmopolitan population, chiefly Jews, many of whom were decent hardworking folk though others were the very scum of Europe.”48 There was a widely held suspicion that Jews were involved in the killings. The coroner, Mr. Wynne Baxter, described the killer as using “Judas-like approaches”49 and Will Cross, the carter who found the sexually-mutilated body of Mary Nicholls, supposedly pointed at the nearby Jewish cemetery and said that the murderer was “probably————————————————————————Page 9some sneaking Yid who wouldn’t pay for his fun.”50 On 10 September 1888 the Manchester Guardian reported that “all are united in the belief that [the murderer] is a Jew or of Jewish parentage[,] his face being of a marked Hebrew type.”51 Sir Robert Anderson, the Head of the Central Intelligence Division, was adamant in his memoirs that the killer was a Polish Jew.52Several other examples can be cited to illustrate London’s preoccupation with the Jews. The London Times published several articles from their Vienna correspondent during the first week of October 1888 on the 1884 trial of a Galician Jew charged with the mutilation of a woman near Cracow. On 2 October another report from Vienna stated that one method for a Jewish man to atone for the sin of sexual relations with a Christian woman was to kill and mutilate her. Hermann Adler, a London Rabbi, responded to these charges by stating that “in no Jewish book is such a barbarity even hinted at. Nor is there any record . . . of a Jew having been convicted of such a terrible atrocity . . . [things were bad enough] without the revival of moribund fables and the importation of prejudices.”53On the night of the murder of Catherine Eddowes, 29 September 1888, an officer found a chalk-written message on a wall in Goulston street near the spot where a fragment of the victim’s apron had been dropped by the murderer.54 The message, “The Juwes are the men who will not be blamed for nothing,” was erased on the express orders of Sir Charles Warren. Superintendent Arnold in his report to the Home Office explained that “a strong feeling existed against the Jews generally . . . I was apprehensive that if the writing were left it would be the means of causing a riot.”55Jews were not the only ones to be suspected or arrested. A number of non-Jewish foreigners also fell under suspicion. Some detectives felt that anarchists or nihilists in the East End were behind the killings. On 4 October, an American was taken into custody for threatening to “rip up” a woman. Another man, with an American accent, was arrested because his features supposedly matched the admittedly vague police description. The police requested information about an Austrian seaman, whose signature supposedly corresponded with the letters signed “Jack the Ripper” and whose description also “matched” that of the Whitechapel murderer.” 56 Charles Ludwig, a German citizen, was accused of being the killer after his arrest for pulling a penknife during a drunken brawl.57Even more exotic suspects were found in the Malays and Lascars of east London. Chief Inspector Abberline felt that the murders were neither typically British nor Jewish. He believed that “[s]exual maniacs of the type of the ‘Ripper’ were more to be found on the continent of Europe, or in Asia, than in Britain.”58 In early October, another writer remarked that the Ripper used “peculiarly————————————————————————Page 10Eastern methods” and that the killer acted when he was “primed with his opium, or bang, or gin, and inspired with his lust for slaughter.”59 On 6 October the Times printed a telegram from an English sailor, then in New York, stating that a Malaysian cook the previous August had told him that “he had been robbed by a woman of bad character, and that unless he found the woman and recovered his money he would murder and mutilate every Whitechapel woman he met.”60After taking all of the reports regarding the suspicion of foreigners into account, it is difficult to come to any conclusion other than that the police and press were especially eager to believe that an “outsider” had committed these horrible crimes. Many agreed with the Times editorialist on 4 October who stated that “the celerity with which the crimes were committed is inconsistent with the ordinary English phlegmatic nature.” 61 If the suspicion of foreigners did not lead to the arrest of the perpetrator of the horrors, the police could turn to a number of other “outcast” groups, which were, for one reason or another, beyond the pale of the respectable.The mentally ill were naturally suspected. The suspicion of lunatics followed from the common belief that no sane Englishman would commit such brutal crimes. If the murders could not be tied to a foreigner, then the guilty Englishman must be insane. The East London Advertiser described the killer as being a “murderous lunatic, who issues forth like another Hyde.”62 A number of individuals turned themselves in to the police claiming to be the Whitechapel killer. Those whose stories were due to alcohol were often fined; others with more serious psychological problems were placed under restraint in an asylum. The police rigorously attempted to clear east London of anyone who seemed unbalanced. Some suspects brought in for questioning were determined to be insane and were also placed into confinement.63Theories that the killer did not come from the poverty-stricken East End were neither common nor popular in the West during the autumn of 1888. The belief that the Ripper belonged to a higher class of society than both his victims and the usual suspects, however, found greater resonance among the less prosperous and educated in the East. The two main theories were that the killer was either a religious fanatic intent on ridding the world of prostitution or a medical doctor. The belief that the killer might be a “homicidal maniac of religious views” was first postulated by the eccentric Dr. L.S. Winslow early in the investigation.64 Winslow was adamant that the Ripper was “not of the class of which ‘Leather Apron’ belongs, but is of the upper class of society.” 65 In the London Times of 1 October, another doctor, Edgar Sheppard, agreed with Winslow’s conclusions and added that the murderer “may be an earnest religionist, believing that he is extirpating vice and sin.”66————————————————————————Page 11The theory that the Ripper was a doctor was more widely respected. In essence, the case against the medical profession revolved around the question of whether the killer needed to possess surgical skills and instruments to have performed his grisly dissections. Some believed, as Dr. Winslow did, that “considerable anatomical knowledge was displayed by the murderer, which would seem to indicate that his occupation was that of a butcher or a surgeon.”67 Some people went even further. At the close of the inquest for Anne Chapman on 26 September, Dr. Wynne Baxter concluded that “no unskilled person could have known where to find [the uterus] or have recognized it when found. For instance, no mere slaughterer of animals could have carried out these operations. It must have been someone accustomed to the post-mortem room.” 68 An editorialist, writing in the Lancet on 29 September, expressed his opinion that no one without experience in anatomical or pathological examinations could have performed such skillful mutilations in so rapid a fashion.69 Other medical experts, perhaps in an attempt to deflect criticism from their profession, disagreed and stated that the killer showed little or no medical knowledge.Debate also raged about what sort of weapon the Ripper used to kill and mutilate his victims. The discovery or accurate description of this instrument might have given a clue as to the class or profession of the murderer. As early as the second week in September, the coroner stated that a surgical knife might have been used. By mid-October, anyone carrying a small black bag, one of the symbols of the medical profession, in east London was suspected of being the killer.70 A final reason for suspicion to be tied to the medical profession was the fact that in several of the killings, organs had been removed from the victim’s bodies. It was commonly believed that there was a market for such organs. J. R. Bennett, in a letter to the Times in late September, exclaimed that such theories were just an attempt to defame the medical profession and should not be believed. To this day, however, many suspect that a doctor was, in fact, involved in the murders.”71Members of a number of other occupations were suspected of being involved in the Whitechapel horrors. Men with such diverse livelihoods as bootmakers, cork-cutters, butchers, slaughterers, sailors and servicemen on leave attracted the attention of the police. During the inquest for Catherine Eddowes in mid-October 1888, Drs. George Sequeira and William Saunders stated that the killer did not possess medical skills or knowledge of anatomy. At the same time, Drs. Frederick Brown and George Phillips argued that though the murderer showed some anatomical knowledge, “the murder could have been committed by a person who had been a hunter, a butcher, a slaughterman, as well as a student in surgery or a properly qualified surgeon.”72 A letter sent by Mr. R. Hull in early————————————————————————Page 13October made the same point; he had been a butcher for fifteen years and remarked that doctors did not understand “how terribly dexterous a good slaughterman is with his knife. There has been nothing done to these poor women that an expert butcher could not do almost in the dark.”73 Another concern related to the curious fact that the murders occurred only on weekends; suspicion attached itself to butchers or drovers working on cattle boats bringing live freight from the continent. These individuals had the necessary skill, and their absence from London would explain the intervals between the Ripper’s murders. 74Since the police had no witnesses to the murders and few leads to follow, it cast a wide dragnet in the hopes that the killer would fortuitously fall into their hands. Whitechapel was densely populated with foreigners, Jews, and drifters of one sort or another; thus, these were obvious groups to target. The attaching of suspicion to butchers, slaughterhouse workers, and boot-makers, because of their proficiency with knives,also seemed to be reasonable. The attempt to round up all the mentally unbalanced of Whitechapel may well have been a sensible precaution. The suspects taken together, however, produce not a portrait of one killer, but a catalogue of those considered by the West End to be brutal and callous enough to perform such deeds. Much as in the East End, the police and press revealed their xenophobia and anti-semitism. There is a third element which enters the West End equation–that of class. The brutality exhibited by the Whitechapel murderer was felt to be confined to the lower classes. Few in the West would have argued with the following logic: an Englishman would not be likely to commit such crimes; if the killer were English, then he was probably a member of the refuse of Victorian civilization residing in the East End.THE REACTIONS of London to the murders reveal that Jack the Ripper’s activities reinforced earlier notions about the relationships between classes, segments of the population, and parts of London. Clearly, the Whitechapel murders were considered by the West End to be part of a larger problem, that of “Outcast London.” It should not be surprising that the cures suggested by the press, social critics, and philanthropists were of the most conventional kind. For most middle and upper class Victorians, the relationships between poverty, poor sanitation, immorality, and crime were too strongly entrenched to be challenged. Examples of this phenomenon are numerous. On 6 October, an article in Lancet proclaimed that “great poverty, overcrowding, dirt, and bad sanitation . . . renders [sic] more probable the conception and the execution of such crimes as those that now absorb the public attention.” 75 There were many calls for reform. Several writers commented in the Times that if the government ever roused itself “to suppress disorderly houses, suppress disorderly houses, to cleanse and widen the streets, to pave and light the————————————————————————Page 14courts and alleys, the chief external conditions which favour murder will have been removed.”76 Some called for additional police protection in the “criminal quarters.” Others lamented the living conditions of the poor, especially with regard to common lodging houses in east London. If the dwellings were not improved, then “we shall have still to go on–affecting astonishment that in such a state of things we have outbreaks from time to time of the horrors of the present day.”77 Finally, there was an attempt to encourage missionary activities in the East End. 78The reaction of the East End reflected a different tone entirely. From the first, there seems to have been a genuine desire on the part of the vast majority of those living in the East to aid in the capture of the Ripper. Local tradesmen formed vigilance committees and helped to patrol the streets at night. On a less organized level, “any passer-by who aroused the suspicion of a street crowd was forcibly seized and hauled into the local police station.”79 With the ineptitude of the police proven by its inability to bring the killer to justice and their own activities failing to achieve results either, a more paranoid attitude took hold in Whitechapel. The Times described this feeling by stating that “it seemed as if every person in the streets were suspicious of everyone else he met . . . as if it were a race between them who should first inform against his neighbor.”80 The Home Secretary refused to offer a reward for the capture of the Whitechapel murderer at least in part because the “danger of false charge is intensified by the excited state of public feelings [in east London].”81By early November, the East End was in such a state of exasperation at the police’s failure to end the string of murders that each arrest brought crowds into the streets; on several occasions, innocent men were very nearly lynched. On 15 November, there were two such instances. In the first, a plainclothes policeman was chased through the streets with an East End crowd in pursuit. Secondly, after a man was arrested for staring at a woman in a supposedly threatening manner, the police were “followed by an enormous mob of men and women, shouting and screaming at him in a most extraordinary manner.”82 In one of the worst cases of this kind, a crowd watching an officer chase a man wanted for throwing bricks at policemen jumped to the conclusion that Jack the Ripper was about to be arrested. A large police escort brought the man in to the local station. The East End crowd, however, had their own ideas about how the suspect should be dealt with. The crowd stormed the building several times. It took a couple of hours for the crowd to be dispersed and peace to be restored.83THE JACK the Ripper murders have been studied on numerous occasions over the past one hundred years. Most writers are primarily interested in determining————————————————————————Page 15the identity of the killer. Some have examined the social conditions that made east London a blemish on the landscape long before the autumn of 1888. Very little has been done to synthesize Jack the Ripper’s story with the crisis of the 1880s. It is important to do this. In the 1880s, many eyes in the West End were re-opened to problems which had been ignored for some time; poverty, overcrowding, poor sanitation, immorality, and criminal behavior had not disappeared in the interval. The riots and demonstrations of 1886 and 1887 revealed to the West End residents that, whatever their contempt for the East End, complacency could be dangerous. It was at that moment, a time when the West was most concerned about the threat from the East, that Jack the Ripper stepped onto center stage. The Whitechapel murderer represented the callousness, brutality, destructiveness, and malicious cruelty that the West had most reason to fear. The killings, in a more efficient fashion than any parliamentary bluebook or social commentator’s pamphlet, revealed the extent of the rot in the East End. Only there, many in the West End preferred to believe, could such a creature have evolved and prospered. The types of people who were suspected by the police and the press accurately reflected many of the tensions and prejudices of Victorian London. Anti- semitism, xenophobia, and distrust of the poorer classes all made an appearance. The East End, although harboring all of these prejudices, remained suspicious of the intentions of the more prosperous West and of the ability of the police to protect the residents of east London. Taken together, the reactions of London to the Whitechapel murders present a snap-shot of social tensions only a short time before the bloodless dock workers strike of 1889 relieved the West End of many of their fears concerning east London.
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