Author: Richard Jones

Some of the most stinging criticism of the Victorian Metropolitan Police was to be found in the pages of The Pall Mall Gazette.  Indeed, throughout the late 1880’s and the 1890’s, this newspaper subjected the London police force […]

Clementina Black (1853 – 1922) was a Victorian writer, feminist and devoted trade unionist, who worked tirelessly for women’s rights at work and for women’s suffrage. One of the causes she championed throughout the mid-1890’s was the plight […]

One East End thoroughfare that cropped up time and time again in the newspaper reporting on the Jack the Ripper murders was Whitechapel Road. This major artery, that led, and still leads, away from the City of London […]

We are so used to reading about London policemen when it comes to studying the history of the Jack the Ripper case. We read about constables discovering the bodies of the victims; we read about officers patrolling the […]

Putting the atrocities of Jack the Ripper aside, it is a fact of history that the streets of Spitalfields were filled with numerous dangers for residents and chance visitors alike. The common lodging houses, that had proliferated in […]

Where was Jack the Ripper in April, 1889? Well, if the newspapers from the first week of April, 1889, are to be believed, he was here, there and everywhere. Indeed, the murderous spree of the unknown miscreant who […]

Although not directly involved in the police investigation into the Jack the Ripper crimes, Chief Inspector John Littlechild (1848 – 1943), was, nonetheless, privy to much of information being brought in by the on the ground detectives who were […]

One of the more disturbing aspects of the Jack the Ripper case was the fact that many commentators came to see the perpetrator of the crimes as an inevitable outgrowth of the horrific social conditions that had been allowed […]

It could happen to anybody. There you are, walking through the streets of London, full of the joys of spring, when, all of a sudden, up comes a plainclothes policeman, puts an accusatory hand upon your broad shoulder, […]

We’re on a mission to find out which of the many suspects’ people favour for having been Jack the Ripper. To that end, we have set up an online poll in order to give people the opportunity to vote on […]