Abstract
This chapter considers whether teaching about the Whitechapel murders onsite in London is itself a form of dark tourism. It first recounts some of the ethical considerations that arise in visiting the Jack the Ripper Museum and the London Dungeon and in undertaking one of the many Jack the Ripper tours, which focus on the murderer. It then narrates an attempt to construct an alternative itinerary that includes visiting the graves of some of the canonical five victims.
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Notes
- 1.
The term chamber of horrors originated with Madame Tussaud, who began using it in promotional material from 1843 (Berridge 2006: p. 292). Other proprietors of waxwork museums quickly followed suit.
- 2.
I have been unable to identify an earlier tour but they likely took place. Victorian interest in visiting macabre sites pre-dates Jack. When a schoolmaster clubbed his wife to death in 1871 Stockwell, crowds gathered in front of the house and attended the inquest. Bainbridge (1984) fictionalizes these events to great effect.
- 3.
I am focusing here only on dark (domestic) tourism as it relates to the Ripper murders. Many other kinds of dark touristic practices took place in the nineteenth century. For a particularly intriguing account of British (and other) visitors to the Paris morgue, see Edmondson (2018). On other nineteenth-century practices, such as attending public floggings or visiting sites associated with the Battle of Waterloo, see Stone (2006: p. 147).
- 4.
One visitor, Montagu Williams, provided an account in 1892: “In the body of the room was a waxwork exhibition and some of its features were revolting in the extreme. The first of the Whitechapel murders were fresh in the memory of the public, and the proprietor of the exhibition was turning the circumstance to some commercial account. There lay a horrible presentment in wax of Matilda Turner [Martha Tabram], the first victim, as well as one of Mary Ann Nichols, whose body was found in Buck’s Row. The heads were represented as being nearly severed from the bodies, and in each case there were shown, in red paint, three terrible gashes reaching from the abdomen to the ribs” (Williams 1892: p. 8).
- 5.
The Chamber of Horrors also featured waxen body parts depicting the Thames torso murders, which unfolded simultaneously with the Ripper killings (Tussaud 1920: p. 220). Three men who were suspected of being Jack the Ripper were added when they were arrested for other murders: Frederick Deeming, Thomas Neill Cream, and Severiano Klosowski, who went by the name George Chapman (Sala n.d.).
- 6.
Cable Street also runs parallel to Pinchin Street, the site of a gruesome discovery on 10 September 1889: the torso of a murdered woman. Many at the time believed the deceased to be another victim of Jack the Ripper.
- 7.
The exact wording used in the museum exhibition is “The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.” The exact wording has been the subject of considerable debate, with variations of the phrase appearing in any number of studies, such as “the Juwes are not The men that Will be Blamed for nothing.” When Police Superintended Thomas Arnold, who was in charge of the Whitechapel division, arrived on the scene, he feared that the message might stoke anti-Semitic feeling. Chief Commissioner Charles Warren agreed and ordered it erased before it could be photographed. Their subsequent recollections differed (Rumbelow 2013: pp. 127–28).
- 8.
These were turned over to the London Hospital and examined by its curator of the Pathology Museum, Thomas Horrocks Openshaw. The hospital maintains a small museum, to which I have regularly taken students, that outlines its role in the case.
- 9.
As Elena Stylianou and Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert write, a “museum’s context and surrounding content can influence photographic meaning by favouring one interpretation over others” (2017: p. 3). Thus, it seems to me, it is not simply repeated exposure to such imagery that can harden the viewer, which J. J. Lennon (2018) worries about in the context of photographs of atrocities. The question is how the post-mortem photographs should be displayed. On the approach to the photographs taken by the curatorial staff in a major exhibition titled “Jack the Ripper and the East End” at the Museum of London Docklands in 2008, see Spence (2011: pp. 161–62).
- 10.
- 11.
Her official address was 13 Miller’s Court. But because of the flat’s location in the building, it was effectively 26 Dorset Street. As Fiona Rule explains, “What had originally been the back door to the house was now the only means of access to the room [rented by Mary Kelly] because [John] McCarthy [the landlord] had nailed up the interior door, thus blocking any means of escape for tenants who couldn’t afford to pay their rent. Because the door to the room was down the alleyway, McCarthy decided to rename it 13 Miller’s Court” (Rule 2008: pp. 106–07). In any event, the building no longer stands.
- 12.
The walking tours are reviled by some East End residents. As one guide, Alex Hetherington, informed me, “I [have] heard of guides and groups being resented, even pelted with stuff, by local residents. I guess that may be because of the sheer number of groups blocking pavements or it may be because of the nature of the tour or perhaps even a response to crass comments about the area made by an individual guide.”
- 13.
“Here we have a place which boasts of an attempt at murder on average once a month, of a murder in every house, and one house at least a murder in every room. Policemen go down it as a rule in pairs. Hunger walks prowling in its alleyways, and the criminals of tomorrow are being bred there to-day” (“Worst Street” 1901: p. 4).
- 14.
The collaboration has had lasting effects on us both. For Alex, it has impacted how he guides: “If I’m asked about Ripper history in Whitechapel, I don’t sidestep anymore but I respond exclusively with victim stories. I’ve done much more research on women as perpetrators and victims of crime in Spitalfields using the Old Bailey’s online records. I work with a company that does Spitalfields tours with a late 19th Century Poverty, Policing and Crime theme to fit a schools’ GCSE examination course.”
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Morrison, K.A. (2019). Teaching at Dark Sites. In: Study Abroad Pedagogy, Dark Tourism, and Historical Reenactment. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23006-7_5
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