A Brief History of London in 1888

Jack the Ripper Tours are fascinating and can provide a real insight into London life in the 19th century. Ours are the only Jack the Ripper tours that provide you with a history of the area and the murders that you can peruse before you join one of our walks.

On 21st June 1887 Queen Victoria celebrated fifty “glorious” years as monarch, and her subjects marked the occasion with feasting and public ceremonies. The middle classes had particular cause to celebrate since the past half century had seen them rise to become masters of industry, finance and international trade. Fortunes were there for the making and the taking, and the middle classes embraced the philosophy of unencumbered self enrichment with a vengeance. The British Empire was ever expanding, and core British values such as justice, truth and harmony were being exported throughout Africa, the Middle East and Asia. The City of London, the financial boiler-room that powered the empire and its expansion reflected the supreme confidence of the age, and the majority of its workers enjoyed reasonable affluence whilst increasing numbers of them led life styles of wealth and privilege. Yet beneath this facade there lay a feeling of extreme and general unease. For, by the 1880’s, the ordered society which the middle and upper classes had come to see as their very birthright was under threat like never before. Many of them were casting nervous glances towards the East End where a huge underclass of dispossessed and displaced citizenry was beginning to bare its teeth and demand a fair share of the profits, benefits and spoils of the Empire.

The term “East End,” used to describe the area that lay beyond the City of London’s eastern fringe, had in fact been a recent invention of the early 1880’s. But it soon caught on and was enthusiastically embraced by the popular press who used it to create a universal image of the area as a hot bed of villainy and degradation. As one commentator has put it:

In 1883 the Reverend Andrew Mearns had shocked the delicate sensibilities of the English middle classes with The Bitter Cry Of Outcast London: An Inquiry into the Condition of the Abject Poor. This comparatively small publication, confronted the bourgeoisie with the grim reality of everyday life in London’s slum lands, and warned them that they ignored this festering underclass at their peril.

Although the Victorian metropolis had many slum areas, it was on those in the East End that public attention began to focus. Whitechapel had the capital’s worst slums, worst overcrowding and highest death rates. One of its least salubrious neighbourhoods lay to the west and the east of Commercial Street. Here the dregs of Victorian society were crammed into the Common Lodging Houses, many of which were little more than breeding grounds for crime and vice. Inspector Walter Dew, a local detective who began his career at Commercial Street police station in 1887, would later write in his memoirs that “even before the advent of Jack the Ripper [the district] had a reputation for vice and villainy unequalled anywhere else in the British Isles.” In addition the area was the place of last resort to huge numbers of homeless drifters, who if they couldn’t find shelter behind the decaying walls of a common lodging house, would either tramp the streets all night long, or else attempt to sleep in dark corners of dark passageways, on the landings and stairwells of tenement buildings, or in some cases, on the stairs or in the hallways of those houses where the anti social hours worked by the lodgers necessitated the front doors being left open throughout the night. The East End had long been equated with lawlessness and immorality in the minds of the more “respectable” middle and upper class west end citizens. According to Professor Julian Huxley, who was no doubt expressing widely held bourgeois sentiments and prejudices:

Some social commentators were well aware of the consequences that could easily ensue should this trampled underclass be pushed beyond endurance and decide to fight back. In her book In Darkest London Margaret Harkness, writing under the pseudonym John Law, warned:

Yet the conditions in the East End had largely been brought about by powers that were turning a blind eye to the misery, poverty and dreadful overcrowding that was endemic there. Even when the authorities tried to appease their critics by appearing to do something their measures proved woefully inadequate and often demonstrated an incompetence that bordered on the comical.

In 1875 The Artisans and Labourers Dwelling Act was passed by Parliament to “allow and to encourage…the purchase and demolition…of large areas of “unfit” property.” The proximity of Whitechapel and Spitalfields to the wealthier parts of London, coupled with the alarming fact that 80% of the poor were living in so-called “unfit” properties, ensured that the district was one of the first to be earmarked for demolition and regeneration. Thus the slum clearances began and almost immediately ran into the problem of philanthropy versus blatant profiteering.

Parliament may have been keen to eradicate the problem of overcrowding, but it was also emphatic that redevelopment was not to be financed from the public purse. It therefore fell to the private sector to provide the funding, with the necessary incentive for investors being a return on investment that, quite evidently, was not going to be generated by building houses for the poor. Thus the rents for the new model dwellings that began to appear about the streets of Spitalfields and Whitechapel were well beyond the means of the very people that the government had intended them to accommodate. These indigenous poor were forced into an ever decreasing number of slum houses where the laws of supply and demand, coupled with the compensation for lost rents that those who owned the properties could look forward to when these too were eventually demolished, ensured that as many people as possible – men, women and children – were crammed together under horrendous conditions as their landlords eagerly sought to wring as much profit as possible from these decaying dens of iniquity. As Joseph Loane, Medical Officer of Health for the Whitechapel District reported:

The plight of the area’s poor had been further highlighted in May 1887 when Charles Booth, a wealthy shipping magnate turned philanthropist and social reporter, presented a paper to the Royal Statistical Society outlining the grim reality for many who lived in the East End. Out of a population of some 456,877 people he estimated that 22% of them were living on the poverty line; whilst 13% of them were struggling against conditions in which “decent life was not imaginable.” Put simply 60,000 East End men, women and children lived their daily lives on the brink of starvation and found themselves crammed into overcrowded accommodation where disease, hunger or neglect would claim the lives of one in four children before they reached the age of five.

The harshness of their living conditions served to dehumanise those whose lot it was to wallow in the filth and degradation of everyday life in the East End. Most of the children, or at least those who survived their early years, had lost all innocence by the time they reached their teens. As The Bitter Cry of Outcast London grimly lectured its readers: