Take a Journey Back to 1888
A Fascinating Look at the Streets of Whitechapel in 1888
UNCOVERING
JACK THE RIPPER'S LONDON
£12.99 plus £2.00 postage and packing
The crimes of Jack the Ripper have gone down in history as some of the most brutal and violent ever committed. These horrendous acts of serial murder
confounded the police at the time, and the mystery of the Ripper's identity remains unsolved to this day. In addition to the sense of fear and panic the murders brought to the London streets of the late 1880s, they also shed a harsh light on the impoverished and dangerous conditions of the East End and brought numerous tensions to boiling point.
This is not a typical Jack the Ripper publication that attempts to sensationalize or embellish the facts of the 1888 murder mystery by attempting to build a case against a particular suspect. Rather, it
is a gripping day by day account of ten weeks in 1888, when an unknown murderer, lurking in some of the capital's worst slums, sent a wave of terror and panic surging through the whole of Victorian society.
Drawing on contemporary newspaper accounts, official reports and witness statements Richard Jones spirits his readers back to the autumn of 1888 and exposes them to the panic, terror and hostility that the Jack the Ripper murders evoked in the area.
He examines the wider context of
the murders, taking into account the social conditions against which they were committed, the animosity between police and press, the instances of anti-Semitism and the physical geography of the area now and then.
This lavishly illustrated book includes several never before published photographs of the streets and places where the murders
occurred. In addition it has many full colour and atmospheric photographs of the murder sites as they are today. These photographs were specially commissioned for the book and were taken by Sean East, a former Metropolitan Police Officer who spent long nights in early 2006 traipsing the streets to catch them at their sinister best!
What Richard has not tried to do is name the Ripper. As he says in the preface to the
book "There is no doubt that several of the police officers who worked on the case favoured particular suspects, and some even went on record to name him. The problem is that those that did so tended to name different suspects. Therein lies the difficulty of hunting the Ripper down and naming him. With over a hundred possibilities to choose from the exercise can simply create more confusion in an already confusing and confused field of study."
The book is aimed at those people who are interested in learning the story of the murders without the claims, counter claims
, fabrications and downright falsehoods that have distorted the true facts for over a hundred years. It provides an excellent introduction to the case that those who are new to the case can then use to launch their own studies in to the most debated over and pored over murder mystery in history. Yet the photographs, particularly those of the murder sites and other relevant locations as they are today, will provide seasoned ripperologists - especially those based overseas - with evocative images of an area of London whose worldwide reach extends far beyond its geographic boundaries.
