Why does Jack the Ripper continue to fascinate? Because it feeds into Victorian myths
Yet another Jack the Ripper suspect has been lined up, this time German Carl Feigenbaum, who was sent to the electric chair in Sing Sing in 1894, and whose lawyer believed him to be the Whitechapel killer. The case is discussed on Radio 4 later today, this being the anniversary of the first murder.
New suspects in the Ripper case pop up every couple of years; in recent years two of the most popular have been James Maybrick, a Liverpool merchant who was murdered by his wife in 1889, and Francis Tumblety, an Irish-American quack doctor. Both theories have serious flaws (Maybrick’s “diary” is believed by many to be a hoax, while Tumblety was most likely gay, which would make him an unlikely serial killer of females). In the 1980s a teacher called Montague Druitt was prime suspect, based purely on the speculation of Metropolitan Police assistant commissioner Sir Melville Macnaghten in his 1894 report; the sole reason seems to be that Druitt killed himself soon after the murders ended. There was also the popular, and absurd, theory put forward by Stephen Knight in Jack The Ripper: The Final Solution that the killings were a Masonic plot to cover up the Duke of Clarence’s marriage to a Catholic, which inspired the entertaining From Hell graphic novel.
So why does Jack of Ripper still fascinate us? It’s only partly explained by the whodunit element; rather it is the setting of late Victorian society itself that obsesses us, and the Ripper case helps to feed into our modern myths about Victorian poverty, inequality and hypocrisy.
Certainly the people of Spitalfields and Whitechapel lived in truly awful conditions. Dorset Street, where victim number five Mary Kelly was murdered, was known as the "worst street in London", and was mainly inhabited by dossers and prostitutes. By today's standards levels of physical poverty were dreadful, and the average Eastender’s health was very poor.
Yet despite the caricature of pre-statist Victorian society that we are all taught, English society had made tremendous progress since the 1830s in reducing squalor. The East End was poor, but absolute poverty was easing, and this had much to do with both physical and spiritual improvements in people’s lives. And this often had little to do with the state. As Mark Steyn notes in his new book about statism, After America, a letter sent by Jack the Ripper’s first victim Mary Ann Nichols shows a level of literacy that would shame many of today’s university students – and she was born in Holborn, arguably London's worst slum, 25 years before the Education Act.
Crime was relatively low by 1888, which is why such murders were shocking. The English homicide rate by the end of the 19th century had reached under 1/100,000 after decades of improvement, and would continue a decline until the mid-1950s, after which it would rise to its current level of 1.2-1.3/100,000. How was this achieved? Education and material improvement helped, but it’s telling that when Nichols’s body was found, at 4am in the worst district in London, three policemen were found within ten minutes, each walking the beat.
But the grinding poverty of the victims’ lives nevertheless allows the Ripper case to feed into our idea of Victorian society being some sort of pre-welfare hellhole; even the caricature of the Ripper himself as a top hat-wearing toff lends the story a class oppression aspect, even though in reality the vast majority of serial killers come from lower socio-economic groups and almost always murder close to their home, rather than taking a hansom cab across town.
The real social issue at the heart of the Ripper case was the oldest and most intractable social evil in London’s history, one the Victorians were well aware of – alcohol. All five victims were alcoholics, in a couple of cases hopelessly so, having sunk into addiction after losing a child to disease. Their alcoholism led them to slip through the informal but effective safety nets of the time, but almost certainly they would have fallen through today’s more comprehensive, but less effective, state safety net, just as addicts always will. But in the meantime this enduringly fascinating Victorian mystery is likely to remain just that.
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