In this video, we explore the social conditions against which the Jack the Ripper murders occurred.
For many years prior to the onset of the Whitechapel atrocities the newspapers, social commentators, and philanthropists had been portraying the East End of London as a heathen hinterland inhabited by a lawless population, where vice, violence, and drunkenness flourished.
By 1888, many of the more "respectable" citizens throughout the country, and particularly in the West End of London, had, thanks to incessant press coverage of the social conditions in the East End, become extremely nervous about what might happen if the people of the abyss were to rise up and start demanding a share of the spoils, profits, and benefits of the British Empire.
So deeply ingrained were middle-class prejudices about the "Eastenders", that, when the Jack the Ripper murders got underway, in the autumn of 1888, they came to view the miscreant responsible for the crimes as an inevitable outgrowth of the miasmic slums to the East of the City of London.
The consequence of this, the murders impacted society in a way that no series of murders had done in the past, and no series of murders would ever do again.
The video ends by posing the tantalising question, would the murders have had the same impact if they had occurred in any other district?
