Abstract
This chapter focuses on one of the first assignments I have asked my students to undertake on arriving in London: deciding on and investigating some aspect of how the Whitechapel murders were reported by contemporary newspapers by selecting a topic from a set of broad categories: evidence, victims, perpetrators, locations, and visual and textual rhetoric of reportage. It discusses the assignment in relation to three pedagogical goals: to think about the ways in which newspapers—often the first kind of source to which students of English literature might turn for contextualization or historians to gather facts about particular events—are highly problematic sources of evidence, to become more adept users of a library’s historical print and electronic resources and carry out original research and writing on topics related to the themes and issues we were studying, and to reflect on the historical roots of fake news and the spread of misinformation.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
For example, the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette opined: “Something like a panic will be occasioned in London to-day by the announcement that another horrible murder has taken place in densely populated Whitechapel…. This renewed reminder of the potentialities of revolting barbarity which lie latent in man will administer a salutary shock to the complacent optimism which assumes that the progress of civilisation has rendered unnecessary the bolts and bars, social, moral, and legal, which keep the Mr. Hyde of humanity from assuming visible shape among us. There certainly seems to be a tolerably realistic impersonification of Mr. Hyde at large in Whitechapel” (“Another Murder” 1888: p. 1).
- 2.
Penny dreadfuls were inexpensive popular serial literature that focused on crime and the supernatural.
- 3.
In her fascinating account of the Victorian interest in gruesome murders, Judith Flanders (2011) notes that the publication date of the Mysteries of the East End is unclear and can only be approximated by the cover illustration, which lists four murders. (The fourth is Annie Chapman.) Because Flanders relies on the informative online Jack the Ripper casebook for articles about the case, she misses the advertisements in the Illustrated Police News , which enable us to narrow the publication window considerably. Despite the proliferation of online resources, I repeatedly insist that my students consult newspapers in their original hardcopy form, less user-friendly microfilm, or various historical newspaper databases because much information can be gleaned from the surrounding copy of a given article.
- 4.
Harkness changed the title after William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, published his In Darkest England, and the Way Out (1890), which argues that despite industrialization, much of England remains as undeveloped as “Darkest Africa.”
- 5.
For helpful synopses of these popular fictional works, see the entries on each text in Morrison (2018).
- 6.
One case of attempted murder, Annie Farmer (21 November 1888), was also examined.
- 7.
Before her death, Emma Smith named a group of men as having attacked her.
- 8.
Between Oliver Twist and Jack the Ripper, there had been competing representations of the East End. On the one hand, the area was the subject of investigative reporting and penny pamphlets decrying the abject living conditions of the poor and their purported immorality (Andrew Mearns 1883; Sims 1883). On the other hand, some writers, including novelists and journalists, sought to present the East End in less sensational terms, not as a place of wickedness and moral depravity, but as monotonous and uncultured (2012/1882).
- 9.
This division, however, was to some extent imaginative. As Charles Booth’s poverty maps of 1889 reveal, the East End had far greater socio-economic diversity. To introduce students to Booth’s work, I take them to the Museum of London, where a small room is covered from floor to ceiling with Booth’s color-coded maps of the city. Drawn from his multivolume Inquiry into Life and Labour in London (1886–1903), the walk-in poverty maps are a visual form of the social cartography he carried out in which each street was color-coded according to the income and social class of its residents. A touch screen allows museum visitors to zoom in on particular streets or pan out onto entire areas to learn about the characteristics of the metropolis. On the one hand, Booth’s maps enable students to grasp almost instantaneously the extent of poverty in areas like Whitechapel and Spitalfields. On the other hand, the map also shows that many middle-class and well-to-do families lived in these areas as well. In other words, while we focus on the poor of East London, especially those whose precarious and intermittent forms of employment could only, at best, secure them nightly accommodation in a common lodging house, students walk away with an understanding of the Victorian East End as a far more dynamic place.
- 10.
Dubbed the “Whitehall Mystery,” the dismembered remains of a woman were found at different locations in central London, including the construction site of New Scotland Yard near the Thames Embankment.
- 11.
In Chap. 6, I will discuss perhaps the most famous example of an illustration in which these issues come to the fore: John Tenniel’s “The Nemesis of Neglect,” which appeared in the 29 September 1888 edition of Punch . Some publications hedged their bets.
- 12.
Indeed, the very phrase Whitechapel murders was “a potent spatial signifier … [that] evokes a distinct, coded visual image of late-Victorian urban squalor” (Newland 2008: p. 251).
- 13.
For an analysis of various letters thought at one time or another to be written by the hand of the killer, see Evans and Skinner (2001).
- 14.
Following in the footsteps of the social investigator Henry Mayhew, Sims spent significant time among the poor in the East End before and after the Ripper murders. He published a number of studies on working-class dwellings, including How the Poor Live (1883) and Horrible London (1889), and his interest in the case undoubtedly explains why he began writing detective stories toward the end of the century. Those featuring the female protagonist, Dorcas Deane, were particularly successful.
- 15.
A recent linguistic analysis of the letter and postcard identify distinguishing lexicogrammatical structures indicating that the same author penned both communications (Nini 2018).
- 16.
During the period in which the Star reported on the Whitechapel murders, its circulation rates grew exponentially. It often provided this information to readers. Thus, for example, the 10 November 1888 issue includes at the top of one column: “The circulation of the Star yesterday reached the Enormous Total of 298,800 copies. This number exceeds the total ever circulated in one day by the journal or by any other paper.” At the top of the immediately adjacent column appears the headline: “Whitechapel. Details of the Seventh Crime of the Murder Maniac” (“Whitechapel” 1888: p. 2).
- 17.
One of the many anonymous letters purporting to be from the killer was signed “Spring Heel Jack the Whitechapel Murderer” (“Jack” 1888). Some scholars and Ripperologists have suggested that the letter writers who used the name Jack would have been raised on the stories of Spring-heeled Jack in their childhood (Evans and Skinner 2001). But in fact one would not have had to look far back into the past. The penny illustrated (and widely circulated) Boy’s Standard carried full-page advertisements for Spring Heeled Jack: The Terror of London in 1886.
References
Another East End Murder. 1888. Evening News, September 8, p. 3.
Another London Tragedy. 1888. Weekly Herald, September 14, n.p.
Another Murder—And More to Follow? 1888. Pall Mall Gazette, September 8, p. 1.
Another Whitechapel Murder. 1888. The Times, September 1, p. 6.
Begg, P. 2004. Jack the Ripper: The Definitive History. Harlow: Pearson.
Begg, P., and J. Bennett. 2013. Jack the Ripper: The Forgotten Victims. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Bennett, J. 2017. Mob Town: A History of Crime and Disorder in the East End. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Coville, G., and P. Lucanio. 2008/1999. Jack the Ripper. His Life and Crimes in Popular Entertainment. Jefferson and London: McFarland.
Crying False News. 1889. Globe, February 18, p. 7.
Curtis, L. Perry, Jr. 2001. Jack the Ripper and the London Press. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Dickens, C. 1843. Oliver Twist. Leipzig: Tauchnitz.
Eddleston, J.J. 2002. Jack the Ripper: An Encyclopedia. London: Metro.
Evans, S. P., and K. Skinner. 2001. Jack the Ripper: Letters from Hell. Stroud, UK: Sutton Publishing.
A False Alarm—Dismissal. 1888. Islington Gazette, November 16, p. 3.
Fishman, W. 2007. Crime and Punishment. In Jack the Ripper: Media, Culture, History, ed. A. Warwick and M. Willis, 229–243. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Flanders, J. 2011. The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime. London: Harper.
Gilman, S. 2007. ‘Who Kills Whores?’ ‘I do,’ Says Jack: Race and Gender in Victorian London. In Jack the Ripper: Media, Culture, History, ed. A. Warwick and M. Willis, 215–228. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Gray, D. 2010. London’s Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City. London: Continuum.
Higgs, E. 2004. The Linguistic Construction of Social and Medical Categories in the Work of the English General Register Office, 1837–1950. In Categories and Contexts: Anthropological and Historical Studies in Critical Demography, ed. S. Szreter, H. Sholkamy, and A. Dharmalingam, 86–106. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
The Horrors of the East End. 1888. Pall Mall Gazette, September 8, p. 8.
Hughes, L.K. 2006. Victorian Literature and Periodicals: Mid-Victorian Culture Wars and Cultural Negotiations, A Graduate Seminar. Victorian Periodicals Review 39 (4): 317–329.
“Jack” Letter. 1888. Spring Heel Jack the Whitechapel Murderer. National Archives, Kew. MEPO 3/142. October 4.
‘Jack the Ripper’s’ Joke. 1888. The Star, October 1, p. 3.
Kahn, P., and K. O’Rourke. 2005. Understanding Enquiry-Based Learning. In Handbook of Enquiry & Problem Based Learning, ed. T. Barrett, I. Mac Labhrainn, and H. Fallon, 1–12. CETL: Galway.
Kershen, A.J. 2008. The Immigrant Community of Whitechapel at the Time of the Ripper Murders. In Jack the Ripper and the East End, ed. A. Werner, 65–97. London: Chatto and Windus.
Leather Apron. 1888. The Star, September 5, p. 3.
The London Murders. 1888. Bath and Cheltenham Gazette, October 10, p. 5.
The London Tragedies. 1888. Daily Telegraph, October 4, p. 5.
London Tragedies. 1888. Daily Telegraph, October 5, p. 3.
Marriott, J. 2008. The Imaginative Geography of the Whitechapel Murders. In Jack the Ripper and the East End, ed. A. Werner, 31–63. London: Chatto and Windus.
Mearns, A. 1883/forthcoming. In Morrison, K., ed. Victorian Poverty and Philanthropy: Reading London’s East End. San Diego: Cognella.
Michie, H., and R. Warhol. 2015. Love Among the Archives: Writing the Lives of Sir George Scharf, Victorian Bachelor. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Morrison, K., ed. 2018. Companion to Victorian Popular Fiction. Jefferson: McFarland.
The Murders at the East-End. 1888. The Times, October 2, p. 6.
The Murders in the East-End. 1888. The Daily Telegraph, October 1, p. 3.
Mysterious Murder in Whitechapel. 1888. Daily Telegraph, September 1, p. 3.
Newland, P. 2008. The Cultural Construction of London’s East End: Urban Iconography, Modernity, and the Spatialisation of Englishness. New York: Rodopi.
Nini, A. 2018. An Authorship Analysis of the Jack the Ripper Letters. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 33 (3): 621–636.
A Reign of Terror in Whitechapel. 1888. East London Observer, September 15, p. 6.
A Revolting Murder. 1888. The Star, August 31, p. 3.
Rumbelow, D. 2013. The Complete Jack the Ripper. London: Virgin.
Sims, G. 1883/forthcoming. In Morrison, K., ed. Victorian Poverty and Philanthropy: Reading London’s East End. San Diego: Cognella.
[Sims, G.]. 1888. Mustard and Cress. The Referee, September 16.
Smith, C. 2016. Jack the Ripper in Film and Culture: Top Hat, Gladstone Bag, and Fog. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Sugden, P. 2002. The Complete History of Jack the Ripper. London: Robinson.
A Thirst for Blood. 1888. East London Advertiser, October 6, p. 5.
Two More Murders in East London. 1888. The Standard, October 1, pp. 6–7.
Walkowitz, J. 1992. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London. London: Virago.
Whitechapel. 1888. The Star, November 10, p. 2.
The Whitechapel Horrors. 1888a. East London Observer, November 17, p. 5.
———. 1888b. Evening News, October 1, p. 2.
The Whitechapel Murders. 1888. East London Advertiser, September 8, p. 5.
Wilson, E. 1983. What is to Be Done About Violence Against Women? London: Penguin.
Winter, S. 2015. ‘Two and the Same’: Jack the Ripper and the Melodramatic Stage Adaptation of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Nineteenth Century Theater and Film 42 (2): 174–194.
Yesterday’s Whitechapel Tragedy. 1888. Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, September 9, p. 1.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Morrison, K.A. (2019). Fake News from Fleet Street: Studying Jack the Ripper and the Victorian Periodical Press. In: Study Abroad Pedagogy, Dark Tourism, and Historical Reenactment. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23006-7_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23006-7_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-23005-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-23006-7
eBook Packages: EducationEducation (R0)