Author: Richard Jones

One of the saddest and most thought-provoking aspects of the Jack the Ripper case, is the plight that the victims had faced in the years, months and days leading up to their murders. All but one of them […]

On Sunday, May 26th, 1901, Mary Annie Austin was stabbed at a common lodging house in Dorset Street, Spitalfields. She was taken to the London Hospital, where the doctors were unable to save her life, and she died […]

Come, let us go on a journey back in time and walk through the night hours on the streets of London in August, 1894. Our guide for our journey into the past will be a Victorian journalist, whose […]

White’s Row, in Spitalfields, was one of several densely populated thoroughfares that, like Dorset Street a little further along, ran off the busy Commercial Street. Like Dorset Street, White’s Row contained a range of common lodging houses and, in […]

Belva Ann Bennett Lockwood (1830 – 1917), was a tireless campaigner for the rights of women, and was one the first female lawyers in America. She was a teacher, an author, a journalist, a temperance campaigner and a politician, […]

Homelessness was a huge problem in Victorian London. Vast numbers of poverty-stricken drifters wandered the streets during the day, and sought rest at night wherever they could find shelter. Doorways, the communal halls or stairwells of houses, benches […]

There is no doubt that the living conditions in some parts of the East End of London, in the latter half of the 19th century, were appalling. Whole families were forced to cram into rooms in overcrowded houses, […]

For many of the Victorian residents of the East End of London, life was a daily battle for survival. In the case of many of the women, as is illustrated by the stories of several of the victims […]

Toynbee Hall, on Commercial Street, was an integral part of everyday life in the East End of London at the time of the Jack the Ripper murders. It had been founded in 1884, by the Reverend Samuel Barnett […]

Whitechapel, throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, could be a dangerous neighbourhood for the unwary stranger, who might submit to the numerous temptations that were to be found in the pubs and on the streets of the […]