Author: Richard Jones

Today, there is a general consensus – though, as with so many things relating to the Whitechapel murders, not a 100% certainty – that the Jack the Ripper atrocities ended with the murder of Mary Kelly, on the […]

Drunkenness was a huge problem – not just in London but throughout the whole of the country – in the latter decades of the 19th century. However, thanks largely to the press coverage that tended to focus on […]

By the 10th of October, 1888, the Jack the Ripper crimes were being reported upon and pondered upon by newspapers across the country. From Land’s End to John O’Groats, journalists were pondering what sort of person could be […]

Throughout the 1880’s, the belief was widespread that, when it came to tracing the perpetrators of murders in London, the detectives at Scotland Yard were, to put it mildly, lacking in success. SOLVING MURDER CASES In an article […]

Throughout the 1880’s, the Victorian authorities had been grappling with the problem of how to deal with the huge numbers of poverty-stricken town and country dwellers that were to be found all over the country. Newly implemented methods […]

In the wake of the murders of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes – on the 30th September, 1888 – there was an upsurge of interest in the streets of Whitechapel and Spitalfields, and in the type of people one was […]

On Saturday, December 20th, 1924, the following article appeared in The Sphere in which the author, Thomas Burke, took readers on a nighttime wander around the streets of Spitalfields. In the introduction, the editor explained that, for the subject […]

On Friday, 20th January, 1889, Police Constable Graham, of the Gateshead police force, in the north of England, was murdered, and Edward Wilkinson was charged with the crime. That very night, the Mayor of Newcastle received a letter in […]

One of the issues that was being discussed by the Victorian press in the years leading up to the Jack the Ripper murders, was the reliability of witness statements in court, especially with regards to the evidence given […]

Either late in the evening of Thursday, 12th January, 1899, or early on the Friday morning of 13th January, 1899, a lady named Emily Wood was, supposedly, attacked as she made her way along Commercial Road in Whitechapel. She […]