London's Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City
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I see in this murder evidence of similar design to the former Whitechapel murders viz: sudden onslaught on the prostrate woman, the throat skilfully and resolutely cut with subsequent mutilation indicating sexual thoughts and a desire to mutilate the abdomen and sexual organs. I am of the opinion that the murder was perpetrated by the same person who committed the former series of Whitechapel murders.9o
The coroner shifted the emphasis onto the prostitutes of the area suggesting that if they stayed off the streets the killer would have no one to murder, an obvious but unhelpful observation.91 According to the witnesses that identified her body at the mortuary, Alice had lived with a man called John McCormack and had been in the neighbourhood for at least 14 years, living at 52 Gun Street, a common lodging house. Alice, like the previous victims, was prone to drinking heavily and on the night she died she had not paid the deputy for her bed. Alice had picked up a client on the evening of 16 July at the Cambridge Music Hall where she had been with George Dixon, a blind boy who she took back to Gun Street before going off with the stranger. However, this was at just after 7 p.m. and the police clearly did not think that Alice's punter had anything to do with her death. Initially the police questioned a man called Isaac Lewis who was off `to get something for my supper' but he was not really suspected. Then on 19 July a man named William Brodie presented himself at Leman Street and confessed to the murder. Brodie had been convicted of burglary in 1877 and had served 13 years. He told the police that he was responsible for nine murders in Whitechapel but that `none of them had troubled him except the last one, that was why he had given himself up'92
There is no record of a William Brodie appearing at Old Bailey in the 1870s but a William Broder (aged 20) was sentenced to 14 years (the amount Brodie claimed) for stealing an overcoat and other goods. In the previous case Broder had met a man, Frederick Hebden, at the Alhambra Palace and accompanied him back to his chambers near Leicester Square. Hebden expressed surprise to find Broder in bed with him in the morning - was this a homosexual liason, was Broder a male prostitute? Broder asked Hebden for money, and became aggressive when Hebden refused, threatening `he would smash me and my place up,.93 Eventually Hebden was forced to hand over a variety of items and write a note authorizing Broder to pawn a carriage clock - he was clearly very frightened that Broder was out of control and extremely violent as he had been that morning. The manager at the printing workshop where William Brodie's brothers were employed described Brodie as a 'reckless character addicted to drink' and it is not impossible that Broder and Brodie were one and the same person.94 According to his landlady and her daughter, Brodie was generally quiet and well behaved but `when in drink he is very curious in his manners and says some quaint things'.95 Brodie claimed to have been to South Africa to work in the diamond mines and when this claim was examined it proved he had sailed on 6 September 1888 and so could not have been responsible for the murders in that year. He was also found to have confessed to a murder in Kimberly and so it would seem that he was a rather disturbed individual who was simply wasting police time. Once he had been discharged for murder they arrested him for fraud.96
The trail had gone cold again but the police increased the numbers of detectives and plainclothes officers in the area in case Alice McKenzie's murder really did mean the killer was operating again. Was McKenzie the Ripper's sixth (or seventh) victim? We cannot rule out the possibility that, as with Liz Stride, the killer was interrupted in his work and that is why her mutilations were less severe. However, it could also be the work of a copycat killer or even someone who knew McKenzie and wanted her dead and saw a way in which to make it look like the work of the Ripper. Like so much of this case the more one uncovers the less clear the overall picture becomes.
On Friday, 13 February 1891, PC Ernest Thompson found Frances Coles lying in a roadway under a railway arch. Her throat had been cut and before a doctor could arrive she expired. A man named Sadler was eventually prosecuted for her murder and some believed they had `Jack' at last, but the case against Sadler collapsed when he was able to establish an alibi. Frances' killer, like the other women before her, was never caught. This is where the case files into the Whitechapel murders are closed.
CONCLUSION
So what have we learnt about Whitechapel murders based upon the evidence (such as it is) surviving from the police archives and the pages of the press? The killer remains masked and will probably never be revealed to everyone's satisfaction. Modern criminology would support a theory that the murderer was, if operating alone, either a non-social or disorganized asocial killer: both have elements that fit the persona of `Jack'. We also need to consider David Canter's geographical profiling as all of the victims shared a very similar locale. This may be purely coincidental of course, and it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that a `slummer' or other person was travelling into the district because he knew he would find a suitable target for his rage and lust. But it would be more plausible to believe that someone who evaded the law and left so few clues and was seen by so few people knew the area he operated in and had somewhere close by to escape to. This would make `Jack' a local man and also someone who could blend into his surroundings with some ease; a nondescript individual of little or no importance. That he assumed centre stage with his devastating purge of Whitechapel's `unfortunates' must have caused him a frisson of excitement: perhaps that is one of the reasons he killed.
The murders were beyond anything Victorian society had experienced before, both in their intensity and in the way that they unfolded in the press, week by week. The press and the public became involved in this case in an unprecedented manner, which merely served both to add to the panic and obfuscate the police's attempt to catch the villain. Murders were often newsworthy but in 1888 even the discovery of a headless torso paled in comparison with `Jack's antics. The press are the subject of a later chapter of this book but without them it is possible that the Whitechapel murders might not have become the international sensation that they did. Certainly the myth making that has surrounded the killings have raised this case above all previous murders in British history and we need to be very careful about how we think about the murders.
Having now established the context for the Whitechapel murders both within Victorian murder reportage and more recent criminal profiling we will now turn to the area in which the killings occurred, Whitechapel, and more broadly, the East End of London. If the Ripper has been the subject of myth making then so has this area of the capital. Unpacking the truth about the East End is just as problematic as identifying the culprit behind the mask of `Jack the Ripper.
3
East Meets West: The Contrasting Nature of Victorian
London and the Mixed Community of the East End
Towards the end of the 1850s the great Victorian essayist and champion of British art and culture John Ruskin summed up the fears of many Victorians at what they saw as the slow suffocation of rural England at the hands of industry:
The whole of the island ... set as thick with chimneys as the masts stand in the docks of Liverpool; that there shall be no meadows in it; no trees; no gardens; only a little corn grown upon the house tops, reaped and thrashed by steam, that you do not even have room for roads, but travel either over the roofs of your Mills, on viaducts; or under the floors, in tunnels; that, the smoke have rendered the light of the sun unserviceable, you work always by the light of your own gas: that no acre of English ground shall be without its shaft and its engine ...
Two Parks (1859)
By the 1870s Ruskin's dislike of industry and, in particular, the omnipresent railways that carved great swathes through the verdant countryside, had brought him to embrace the back-to-the-land movement with his fellow travellers Edward Carpenter and William Morris. Ruskin believed that open fields and all the flora of nature were `essential to the healthy spiritual life of man' and furthermore argued that agricultural labour was somehow superior to the industrial labour that so many British workmen had been
forced into performing.'
In this chapter we will look at this dichotomy at the heart of Victorian culture and at how competing views of country and town manifested themselves within the ages of the nineteenth-century press and periodicals. The long shadow created by the growing towns and cities threatened to destroy the traditional pastoral image of `merrie England. While the new industrial centres of the Midlands and north clearly defined much of this threat, it was in London that the real danger to civilization had reared its ugly head. Having explored general attitudes towards the city this chapter will therefore focus on London, and in particular on the East End of London and the fears that surrounded it. It will consider how we define and understand this complex area of the capital and the people that lived in it. The East End has been represented and misrepresented for several centuries and uncovering its real nature is not an easy task. Nonetheless this chapter will attempt to discover the real Eastender (whoever he or she may be). In doing so it will look at the various migrants that have made the east side of London their home and at the problems they encountered there. This will be the story of the Irish and the Jews, but it will not neglect the indigenous people of Bethnal Green and Tower Hamlets, the Cockneys, costermongers and pearly kings and queens and the feisty match girls who recorded one of the most memorable and formative industrial relations victories of the late Victorian era.
COPING WITH CHANGE: VICTORIAN VIEWS OF THE COUNTRYSIDE AND TOWN
The Victorians, perhaps more than any previous generation, were having to come to terms with the changing environment around them. The 1830s and 1840s had seen acceleration in the industrializing process that had begun in the previous century. While we should be cautious of depicting mid-nineteenth-century Britain as predominantly industrial (for it was far from that), the rate of change was arguably dramatic. A falling death rate ensured steady population growth despite a falling birth rate. In addition internal migrants flocked to the growing towns and cities from all over the United Kingdom, and they came to London in particular! Britain's population doubled between 1801 and 1851, from some 9 million souls to more than 18 million. While for most of the eighteenth century the rate of population growth had been 0.46 per cent, in the period to 1911 it averaged some 10 per cent.' According to a royal commission report of 1841 an `entirely new population [had] been produced' Where once `there was not a single hut of a shepherd, the lofty steam engine chimneys of a colliery now send their columns of smoke into the sky'4 In the period 1801 to 1911 the proportion of the British populace that lived in urban areas rose from 20 per cent to 80 per cent.'
The popular literature of the day reflected this change in the rural landscape; Merry & Wise published a short story called `Pits and Furnaces, or life in the Black Country' where three children comment upon the strange activities of a group of men in a field near their home. `Papa!' exclaimed Fanny, `what do you think they are going to do? I hope they will not spoil that green field: there are so few others near our house' Her father explains that they are looking for coal and this excites the imagination of Fanny's brothers who realize they can `watch them very easily, and shall see it all from the beginning, thus neatly juxtaposing the Victorians' competing attitudes towards progress and conservation.' The story unfolds as the boys explore the developing site, taking home samples for analysis and demonstrating the Victorians' love of science. Fanny, representing a female stereotype associated with continuity by way of contrast to the more dynamic aspect exhibited by her brothers, questions her mother about the origin of coal. She learns, as does the intended reader, that coal comes from the great forests that once covered the land before men (specifically English men) cultivated the soil. Yet all the efforts of ancient and `modern' men are placed within the context of religion in shaping human society. As Mrs Hope tells her daughter Fanny, `most wonderful of all that God should so arrange it that the decay and destruction of the plants of past ages should prove such a source of comfort and wealth to the present race of beings - thus linking us with times long gone by, and encouraging us to trust Him for the future'' Religion and science, those two contrasting and competing bastions of Victorian society, are thus neatly entwined in this story of progressive industrialization.
The contrasts between town and country appear in other popular publications of the day. In Jane Boswell Moore's `The Black Pony, Charlie and Phil go to live with their grandfather where, `instead of the dull streets they had become accustomed to' were `pleasant green fields, with high grass and corn' 8 Much later in the century the Rev R. F. Horton complained that there `are vast tracts of this green and pleasant land where the grass and flowers have ceased to grow, and the trees which survive are stunted and warped" That the Victorians were well aware of their somewhat ambiguous relationship with rural and urban living is demonstrated by this interactive poem published in 1874:
It has often been urged, and with some reason, that pastoral poetry must fail to be properly appreciated by dwellers in towns; while on the other hand ... urban verse must be unintelligible to the rustic. In the following poem we have striven to meet the requirements of both classes of readers.
Doggerel it may be but the emphasis is firmly placed on the differences between urban and rural life with a sense that the former is less pure, but perhaps more interesting. The manufactured nature of the urban environment and the naturalness of the rural reflect Cowper's idiom that `God made the country, man made the town' However, we should not read Cowper too simplistically: `If man made the town, then the town demonstrates both his state of original sin and his capacity for the greatest of human achievements'" Thus Cowper reflected the ambivalent position the countryside had in contemporary discourses, `sometimes seen as the abode of joy and tranquillity, more often regarded as dull'" Beatrix Potter had also highlighted the differences between urban and rural life in her Tale of Johnny Town-Mouse (1918). As P. J. Waller has noted, in Potter's tales the `town is mannered and alarming to Timmy [the country mouse], the country dull and dirty to Johnny' .13 Potter herself lived in London before later moving to the Lake District. The cities of England held a fascination for those that lived outside them, a fascination made all the more real by the rapid advance of the railways, which meant that almost anyone anywhere in Britain could experience urbanity for the cost of a few shillings.
The Victorian economy was built upon progressive and successful industrial growth in which knowledge and skills were crucial. Towns and cities were, by the mid-nineteenth century, well ahead of the countryside in this respect. The availability of labour (and importantly cheap labour), along with the clustering of workshops and suppliers with access to transport networks and the large numbers of available customers drove business growth in the urban environment. So it is perhaps odd that Victorians were so concerned with the growth of towns and the implications this had for their society. After all, it was extremely successful in terms of the wealth it created. Certainly many contemporaries were very positive about the city and Victorian urbanites were proud of their towns and built impressive architectural monuments to demonstrate this. We need only cast our gaze at the town halls, squares, statues and other buildings that survive from the Victorian era or at the wealth of guide books, engravings, paintings and maps that `celebrated and explored the towns' of Britain in the nineteenth century.14 We can tell what the Victorians felt about their urban environments when they festooned these buildings with words such as `progress', `growth' and `improvement' These were powerful expressions of urban pride.
In the early years of the nineteenth century new arrivals in the growing towns and cities felt little sense of neighbourhood, having exchanged the close-knit community of village life for the anonymity of urban living. However, as transport networks expanded and towns grew in size new identities were created and competition developed: village rivalries expanded into town and even regional competitiveness. This rivalry was fuelled by economics and trade, the growth of organized sports such as football and rugby and, after 1880, by the emphasis pla
ced on civic pride by compulsory education." Thus, while England was becoming a predominantly urban culture as the last decades of the nineteenth century approached it retained its strong links to the countryside and to nature. Ruskin's gloomy vision of the future was coupled with his own obsession with all things medieval and both reflect the Victorian discomfort with industrialization and urbanization. 16
All of which brings us back to the concerns so often expressed at the time that the towns and cities of Britain were somehow detrimental to the health of the nation. Even today it might be fair to say that Britain has an anti-urban sentiment in its culture with our eulogizing of the countryside and our attempts to restrict urban sprawl even in the face of a massive housing shortage. We see ourselves as living in a 'green and pleasant land' despite the fact that most of us live and work in cities and towns and enjoy the benefits that they bring. Two modern institutions devoted to the preservation of our rural heritage had their origins in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. The Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) was established in 1926 and today calls for a closer engagement with a protected and sustainable countryside. The CPRE was preceded by the National Trust, which was founded in 1895 by three Victorian philanthropists: Octavia Hill, Sir Robert Hunter and Canon Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley, all of whom were concerned about industrialization and unchecked development and set up the trust to conserve Britain's countryside, coastline and buildings. The preservation or conservation of England has therefore been closely linked to notions of national identity for over a century. Today the city carries most of our fears about modern society and thus echoes with our Victorian past. For the middle classes of late Victorian London their particular concerns about the dangers of the city were focused on the East End, but this has historically been a difficult area to define and is as much subject to myth making as the Ripper himself.