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Chapter 1: Who was Jack the Ripper and why is he significant?
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Dear boss, I keep on hearing the police have caught me, but they won't fix me just yet. I've laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. That joke about leather apron gave me real fits. I'm down on whores and I shan't quit ripping them till I do get buckled. Grand work the last job was. I gave the lady no time to squeal. How can they catch me now?
I love my work and I want to start again. You will soon hear of me with my funny little games. I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle over the last job to write with. But it went thick like glue and I can't use it. Red ink is fit enough I hope. Ha ha ha. The next job I do, I shall clip the lady's ears off and send to the police officers just for jolly, wouldn't you?
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Chapter 2: What were the circumstances surrounding the first murder attributed to Jack the Ripper?
Ah, ah. So that's the most notorious, the most infamous letter in the history of crime. And of course, it's so chilling. because of the mocking, sadistic tone, the tone almost of banter. And it was sent on the 27th of September, 1888, to the Central News Agency of London. And they sat on it for two days, unsure whether it was authentic, and then forwarded it to Scotland Yard.
And this is the letter, Tom, that gives the name to somebody who at that point believed had killed probably two, possibly three, possibly more women on the streets of Whitechapel, an area of the east end of London that was notorious for poverty and crime and prostitution. And both of these women had had their throats cut and both had been hideously mutilated.
And then after the letter reached Scotland Yard, in the early hours of the 30th of September, the killer struck again, not once, but twice, the so-called double event. one of the most dramatic nights in the history of London. And then we come to the most horrific murder of all, which was on the 9th of November, wasn't it?
Yes, and that was, again, a woman eviscerated, but this time not on the streets as the other victims of the Whitechapel murderer had been, but in a cramped and mean room in a place called Miller's Court. in the dark heart of Whitechapel. And to those who saw that victim, it seemed, even compared to the previous victims, a vision of hell.
So one of the witnesses was a woman who had lived above the victim, so directly above the murder scene. And she said, I could bear to look at it only for a second, but I can never forget the sight of it if I live to be 100. And another, the man who had forced the locked door of the victim's room, he said, the sight we saw, I cannot drive away from my mind.
It looked more like the work of a devil than of a man. But as it turns out, almost certainly, although maybe not, but almost certainly, the horror of that murder occurred. The horror of Miller's Court seems to have been the climax of Jack the Ripper's reign of terror.
And the thing that people found eerie about that reign of terror wasn't just the brutality, but the ability of the murderer always to be one step ahead of the police, to avoid apprehension, to avoid almost being seen. And now with this terrible murder in Miller's court, he kind of vanishes as though into thin air.
And he leaves behind him what I think is undoubtedly the most enduring mystery in the annals of crime. Would you agree?
Definitely. He's the one serial killer whose name is known across the world, who appears in films and video games, as we shall talk about, and novels and all sorts of things. And I guess even at the time, there was something... otherworldly about him, wasn't there, to people in London. So people would describe him right from an early stage. This isn't sort of back projection.
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Chapter 3: How did the media and public react to the Ripper murders?
And for people at the time, that was both horrifying, but also kind of darkly fascinating, wasn't it?
I mean, in that, the thirst for human blood, I mean, there's something vampiric. But there's also a kind of a hint of almost cannibalism because organs are being excised and there are rumors that they're being eaten by the killer. So it does seem something very primordial. But at the same time... there is a feeling that this is something perhaps expressive of modernity.
There's another newspaper that says of Jack the Ripper, perhaps he is some mysterious and awful product of modern civilization. People are wondering, what is it about our industrial society that is producing such a monster? And we've said that Jack the Ripper is the most famous serial killer.
I think almost the most intriguing thing about him from the historical point of view is he's actually the first serial killer we know about. I mean, presumably there were serial killers before him, but he is the first person who is identified as a serial killer in the sense that we understand it today in 2025.
Yeah, there were people previously who'd killed an awful lot of people, so in the Middle Ages or whatever, but there was not the sense of a serial killer phenomenon. And he invents the phenomenon, doesn't he? Or rather, the newspaper editors who write about him invent the phenomenon.
Or the psychiatrists who kind of home in on what he represents as a particular kind of monster, and they classify what he might be in scientific terms. And I think that's also a part of the story. So for all these reasons, he's notorious, but I think there are two obvious reasons why he remains such a notorious figure still almost 150 years on. The first most obvious is that he was never caught.
So his identity remains a mystery to this day. And we will be exploring the range of possible suspects in our final episode of this five-part series.
Surely solving the mystery and unveiling the killer. Yes.
We will. But also, I think that name, Jack the Ripper, I mean, it's so horribly, brilliantly memorable. We will be returning to that letter and other letters that were thought by the police at the time, perhaps to have been sent by the murderer, asking whether they really were, were they authentic or were they fakes. There are lots to come.
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Chapter 4: What can we learn about Victorian society from the Ripper case?
And there's this entire field, ripperology. It's a kind of sub-genre of the true crime genre. And I guess that we, by doing this podcast, we're standing in that tradition, aren't we?
So not only did I read lots of books about this, but there's a website called Casebook Jack the Ripper, and it's the world's largest repository of ripperiana. And when you fall into that hole, there is always a danger that you will never, ever climb out again. There were moments researching this where I just thought, I'm absolutely drowning in kind of theories and stuff here.
Yeah, it's not another kidney.
Yeah.
Right. Not quite, but yeah. But the thing about Jack the Ripper, so for those people who are thinking, hold on, this isn't the rest is true crime. The Jack the Ripper story is a brilliant window onto 1880s London, isn't it? I mean, that's the appeal of it.
It's a fascinating melodrama in its own right, but it also allows us to do all kinds of social and cultural and political history of a period that looms quite large in our collective imagination because of, as we'll see, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. and Sherlock Holmes and the sort of the image of the Dracula, the image of the gas lamps and the fog and the streets of London and so on.
London at its imperial height. And that's another element to this story. So that's the appeal of this for us, isn't it, as historians?
Well, I think it reminds me of the series we did on Titanic. which was like this, a drama replete with horror and with tragedy and has essentially become a myth. Again, something that everybody knows about, but it does simultaneously provide a brilliant window onto the social history of the age. So if you look at that letter, the famous Jack the Ripper letter with which we opened this episode,
You've got hints of all kinds of aspects of late Victorian life that we will be talking about in this series. So there's the police. You know, Jack the Ripper is mocking them for being useless. You've got the press. That letter gets sent to a press agency first. To what extent are they creating the image of the Ripper?
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Chapter 5: Who were the victims of Jack the Ripper, starting with Polly Nichols?
Privilege and deprivation. The theme of class conflict and class tension runs right through this story. So we'll be spending as much time with the metropolitan police and the establishment as we will on the streets of Whitechapel.
Yeah. So, I mean, it is absolutely a topic of obsessive interest in the corridors of power. And it does seem to people to express something that is rotten in the state of policing and the home office and so on. So the chief commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, the London Police Force, a guy called Sir Charles Warren, who was originally a military man, served in South Africa.
He ends up resigning. And although that is not directly because of the failure of the police to catch the Ripper, the Ripper case is definitely a contributory factor to that resignation. You've got a Tory government, Home Secretary Henry Matthews, he comes close to following Sir Charles Warren.
And even the prime minister, Lord Salisbury, by the end of the case, he's getting kind of irate telegrams from Queen Victoria. So the day after the climactically hideous murder at Miller's court, she telegraphs him. This new ghastly murder shows the absolute necessity for some very decided action. All these courts must be lit and our detectives improved. They are not what they should be.
So Queen Victoria there, sounding eerily like Mrs. Thatcher.
And yet, on the other hand, the place where we'll be spending most of our time, it's probably the single grimmest place in London. Arguably, one of the grimmest places, certainly in England, if not in Britain. And this is Whitechapel, the East End. It's centred on spittle fields. It's really important for listeners to get this into their heads. It is not like it is now.
It is an absolute kind of reeking, stinking, crowded labyrinth of little, a sort of warren of little alleys and courts, lines with these kind of crumbling, decrepit tenement houses and doss houses and lodging houses.
And the very names of the streets, to people at the time reading this in the newspapers, so Flower and Dean Street, Dorset Street, Thrall Street, Blood Alley, Frying Pan Alley, Shovel Alley, these places, these were redolents of extreme poverty. You know, the sort of poverty that you would not associate with the richest and most powerful country on earth.
They're the last, what were called rookeries in the Keynesian period and the 18th century. They're kind of tangles of streets that are seen as being literally poisonous, full of sewage and rubbish and vermin, and also incredibly violent. And so whether it's true or not is debated, but the conventional take is that the police only enter this area in pairs
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Chapter 6: What were the social conditions in Whitechapel during the Ripper's reign?
So this brings us to Jack the Ripper's victims, who'll be playing a very big part in this story. And right from the start… There was a sense that the Victorian reading public, the people who were the first consumers of the Jack the Ripper melodrama, are much more interested in Jack the Ripper than they are in his victims.
And actually, I guess a telling sign of this, you know, we're complicit in this as well so far because we haven't actually named any of the victims. We talked a lot about Jack and of the context. but we haven't named Polly Nichols or Catherine Eddowes or Annie Chapman or whatever.
And that's something that we will be trying to remedy in this series because we'll also have a special bonus episode for our club members. I'm looking in more depth at three of the victims and their lives and what they tell us about the world of late Victorian England. And actually, Hallie Rubenhold, who's been on the show in the early days,
She wrote a book called The Five, didn't she, in 2019, a prize-winning book, which was a sort of group biography of the murdered women. And as she pointed out, people wouldn't write books about their stories were it not for the way in which it ended. It's this kind of horror of their deaths that has made them –
If you reel off the names of the victims, a lot of people will recognize them, but they won't know much about the victims. And probably what they do know may well be wrong, because people tended to see them purely as prostitutes rather than as human beings with kind of backgrounds and inner lives of their own.
Yeah, I mean, that's why Halle's book was so revelatory and why it was deservedly prize-winning. But I mean, as she acknowledges... they are only remembered because they all shared the same terrible fate. So she wrote, the courses their lives took mirrored that of so many other women of the Victorian age, and yet were so singular in the way they ended.
And again, I think that is another comparison with Titanic, that it's the horror of their deaths that enable them to serve us as exemplars of a class of society that normally doesn't enter the history books. And the class of person who is being killed by Jack the Ripper, they are even more lost to poverty than those who are traveling in the steerage of Titanic. They are indigent.
They are absolutely the bottom and they are women. And it does give us an opportunity to kind of focus on the lives of people who, as I say, don't normally feature in our podcasts.
But when Victorians are reading about these women's lives, I mean, they're not terribly interested, I think, in the personal stories of the women, but they are interested in the background, aren't they, in the East End more generally. I'd say they're obsessed by it, actually.
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Chapter 7: How did the police investigation unfold after the first murder?
Four million people or so, I think possibly. I think that's actually an underestimate. I think, you know, if you go bigger, greater London, you're looking at more like six million people. I mean, to people at the time, it is a jaw-dropping spectacle. The sprawl and the crowds and the excitement and the modernity of London, because it's the heart of the British Empire.
The city of London is there, the kind of financial nerve center of global capitalism, of shipping. It's still a port. It's a manufacturing city at the time, so there are lots of factories.
It's full of smoke, and the smoke blends with the famous fog, the notorious fog. And I think because of this, you have a sense that what happens in London matters for the entire world. And this is kind of partly propagated by the fact that London, as well as being the center of everything else, is also the center of the world publishing industry.
So the newspapers that are printed in London have a reach that perhaps the American media today would have globally. But it is also because people come to London from across the world to see what their own future is going to look like. It's a vision of the cities of the future.
And so again, there is a sense that what happens in its darkest corners, you know, has a relevance for, for everyone pretty much.
If you're on the left, if you're a radical or a socialist or whatever, the spectacle of the poverty in London is a reminder of the iniquities of capitalism. But it's also the chance of a new dawn, isn't it? Because you're hoping that from this darkness, some new light will come, that it will be the breeding ground for revolution and rebellion, right? That's what Karl Marx and co. think.
And Karl Marx, of course, is a refugee in London, and he is very familiar with the East End. He describes it as a pool of stagnant misery and desolation. But he sees in that pool of stagnant misery and desolation the prospect, as you say, of a brighter future, of a revolutionary utopia. And this, of course, for the vast majority of the Victorian middle classes, is precisely what they most dread.
the misery and the violence that they see as being incubated in places like Thrall Street or Dorset Street or whatever, that this will kind of spread and infect the entire city. The sense of it as a breeding ground for a kind of moral pestilence is a recurrent theme in the press of the time. So to quote the Times, We have long ago learned that organic refuse breeds pestilence.
Can we doubt that neglected human refuse as inevitably breeds crime? That crime reproduces itself like germs in an infected atmosphere and becomes at each successive cultivation more deadly, more bestial, and more absolutely unrestrained.
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Chapter 8: What impact did Jack the Ripper have on crime and policing in London?
So 1887... is the year of Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee. So tremendous pomp and circumstance. But in that same year, there had been a massive focus for middle-class panic in the place in London that is synonymous with British greatness, namely Trafalgar Square, where Nelson's Column stands. because it had become a vast squatters camp.
So the homeless had moved in and had set up kind of shacks and tents there. And this becomes a focus for middle-class indignation. And there is pressure on the police to do something about it. And so on the 8th of November, Sir Charles Warren, the head of the Metropolitan Police, bans all public assemblies from gathering in Trafalgar Square.
And on the 13th of November, there are kind of a series of rallies. So they are organized by socialists, by Irish nationalists. Karl Marx's daughter, Eleanor Marx, is a speaker there. And they try to occupy Trafalgar Square and to hold it against the police. But the police are there in mass force. They've been supplemented by the Grenadier Guards, and they succeed in clearing Trafalgar Square.
This is commemorated as Bloody Sunday. In due course, revolutionaries in Russia will see it as one of the examples of how an advanced industrial economy might conceivably be overthrown by a proletarian revolution. It isn't In this case, however, Trafalgar Square is held for the establishment and the homeless are cleared out from their camps.
And many of them end up heading to the only place really where they can hope to find shelter, which is the warren of streets off Whitechapel High Street.
And Whitechapel has been changed actually by three things. So one of them, which we'll come on to in the next couple of episodes, is immigration specifically. from the western part of the Tsarist Empire, the Russian Empire, so Poland and Russia itself. And that's particularly Jewish immigration. So that's one thing that's changed Whitechapel.
There's also been a lot of slum clearance, hasn't there? So people who have been basically decanted from the slums have ended up being pushed into the back alleys and DOS houses of Spitalfields, so in the heart of Whitechapel. The other thing has been an attempt to crack down on brothels. So in 1885, an act to make further provision for the protection of women and girls.
And that basically means that people have been kicked out of their establishments and they too are now sort of being packed into the East End. So it's a sort of, it's a powder keg, Tom. It is a powder keg, yes.
Well, I mean, kind of this mood of seething desperation, I guess, in the streets, even worse than normal. And so when you have people crammed into terrible housing, I suppose it's unsurprising that recorded incidents of crime have been going up throughout 1887 and then into 1888. To the degree that you might think that, you know, another murder wouldn't create any great stir.
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