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THE WHITECHAPEL MURDERS
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Jack the Ripper and the East End
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by presenting this voucher at the Museum in Docklands admission desk. Terms & Conditions: 1. This voucher entitles the bearer to 2 tickets for the price of 1 for Jack the Ripper and the East End on presentation at the Museum admission desk. A maximum of 2 people go free per voucher. 2. Valid 15 May to 2 November 2008. 3. Cannot be used in conjuction with any other discount or against family or group tickets. 4. One voucher per transaction. 5. Nontransferable and non-exchangeable. No cash alternative. 6. Subject to availability.
From the Illustrated Police News
Ripping Good Yarn or Cautionary Tale?
t
he symbolic importance of the 11 murders of prostitutes that took place in London’s East End between the years of 1888 and 1891 is a fact that cannot be ignored; but also one that highlights a worrying national fascination with violence and gratuity. Seemingly unending streams of pages and ink (this article included) have been expended on the subject of the Whitechapel Murders – as well as their iconic primary suspect – and the Museum in Dockland’s Jack the Ripper and the East End exhibition is
the latest to join the fray, exhuming the case once again for the spellbound public’s intense scrutiny. However, along with the often recited gory descriptions of the murders, the museum has collected together artefacts and photos of the East End in the late 19th century: before, during and after the time of the atrocities. Some are symbols of cultural and social information that could have influenced a serial killer, while others are more mundane reminders of the crippling poverty that afflicted the area.
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A Poor-house, circa 1869, Gustave Doré
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From The Illustrated Police News, Sept 22, 1888
hese humdrum, everyday objects are the strands that hold this vision of late Victorian society together: in short, it is one – much like our own – roused out of slumber by violent crime, and consequently paralysed by fear. George Bernard Shaw was correct when he claimed the Ripper figure did more for the East End than any reformer: as the exhibition highlights, the wilfully ignorant eyes of the city’s wealthiest were forced to confront and attempt to alter the depressing slum-like surroundings of Whitechapel, Bethnal Green and Mile End. That said, to celebrate this and other gruesome historical murders so hysterically is to ignore how they have impacted on our current attitudes towards violence; in the case of the Ripper, to sexual violence. One of the most commonplace exhibits – a seemingly anonymous brown satchel – reveals a wider truth about how panic can be exploited in the midst of a national crisis. The accompanying placard explains that it was carried by a suspicious local eccentric who, when asked what was in the case, was known to reply “something that the ladies don’t like”. It is a striking fragment of a tale – all the more chilling in its incompleteness – and it
emphasises a malevolent, chauvinistic depravity: one of many of the darker facets of the human condition that a nation gripped by terror is forced to confront. This pervasive expression of a nation’s terror has the unique benefit, claims co-curator of the exhibition Julia Hoffbrand, of distilling a clear moment of social history. “There had been horrific crimes before but knowledge about them [the Whitechapel murders] was so widespread...They were by an anonymous murderer, perhaps a cipher or a symbol of the anonymity of the city. They were taking place when many elements of modern life: newspapers, technology, policing were changing. Trade unions, fears of riots: all of these urban issues were being fomented at the time.” Hoffbrand sensibly describes the Jack the Ripper element of the events as “a sensitive subject”, and is at pains to stress that even the impartial stance of a social historian is not enough to discuss these events “without being obscene or appearing to be sensationalist”. By recruiting the aid of the current East London prostitution project Safe Exit, she hopes to have avoided these pitfalls: “We spoke to them about the appropriateness of showing some of the material, these are people who know: they deal with violence against women all the time. If anybody is in a position to represent vulnerable women then they are. The whole point [of the exhibition] was to redress the balance so that Jack the Ripper is not the hero, he’s not this cunning man who has managed to elude the police for 120 years, he is a sadistic and cruel killer. We’re trying to put those women’s lives and the thousands like them back in the foreground.”
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In short, this vicious cycle of horrific murder, lurid media reportage and mass hysteria amount to a recognisable and somewhat hopeless picture that belies our safe, fairytale, What the Victorians Did for Us attitude to the 19th century. Reducing the issue to
a trivial hunt for a long-dead murderer (see novelist Patricia Cornwall’s obsessive destruction of one of Victorian painter Walter Sickert’s works in an attempt to implicate him as Jack) can only help to fuel false images of a roguish idol and make the events less real. The positives to be drawn from study of this vital moment in London and England’s history are that we can choose to emphasise the reality of these victims and disregard the phantasmal Ripper figure. As Hoffbrand
From The Illustrated Police News
What the exhibition’s myriad of newspaper clippings and quotations from headlines make clear is that historical London was a city afraid in more ways than one; afraid of this new threat of sexual predatory, afraid of the ineptness of the police These services and afraid of a rising women tide of immigrants: their shady otherness – especially were real the Jewish community – a people who dead ringer for the elusive had lives; their Ripper. If the Ripper has come to define the identity lives were of historical Britain (and cut short, particularly of the East but they lived End), then our unbridled fascination with the case and breathed reveals how little we have and loved progressed since then. The suspicion, the blame culture and the xenophobia are still present, entrenched in our national psyche. The exploits of this deranged individual or group (the absolute horror of the actual physical mutilation inflicted on the victims cannot be overstated) are now immortalised in walking tours and postcards; as much a part of our cartoonish concept of Victorian England as Ebeneezer Scrooge and cheeky street urchins.
concludes, “exploring these women’s lives further will go some way towards bringing home that they were real people who had lives; their lives were cut short, but they lived and breathed and loved...like we did.” Jack The Ripper and The East End runs at the Museum in Docklands, London E14, until 2 November 2008. www.museumindocklands.org.uk/jacktheripper To read about the good work of Safe Exit, go to www.toynbeehall.org.uk All images copyright MUSEUM IN DOCKLANDS
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