You wouldn’t want to have lived in Jack the Ripper’s London. Whitechapel in East London had garnered a reputation for being poor, overcrowded, and crime-ridden even before the infamous murders of 1888. What dangers could be worse than a knife-wielding serial killer? Read on to see!

Poverty map from Life and Labour of the People in London 1889 by Charles Booth. Black indicates “Lowest class. Visciuous, semi-criminal”, and blue indicates “Very poor, casual. Chronic want.”

Poverty

Have you heard of a “common lodging-house”? Dorset Street in East London was considered “the worst street in London” and was full of common lodging-houses housing the poorest of the poor. These low cost “accommodations” were often limited to a pile of rags on a cot or a fourpence coffin bed. Two of the Whitechapel murder victims lived in these common lodging-houses. Many of the people in the area were immigrants. Some had come to London during the Great Hunger in Ireland. Others were Jewish émigrés escaping pogroms in Eastern Europe. The available housing couldn’t keep up with the increase in demand, so many people lived in crowded, substandard situations.

East London was home to many of the more noxious or polluting industries like tanneries as described by Henry Mayhew in 1851: “[R]oads were unmade, often mere alleys, houses small and without foundations, subdivided and often around unpaved courts. An almost total lack of drainage and sewerage was made worse by the ponds formed by the excavation of brickearth. Pigs and cows in back yards, noxious trades like boiling tripe, melting tallow, or preparing cat's meat, and slaughter houses, dustheaps, and 'lakes of putrefying night soil' added to the filth”.

Rows of coffin beds in London's Burne Street hostel, c.1900.

“The Nemesis of Neglect” by John Tenniel for Punch, 1888.

Disease and Mortality

If these accommodations sound tolerable to you, perhaps you will be discouraged by the rampant disease and death! While cholera had largely been managed after 1860, London in the 1880s was full of contagion including scarlet fever, typhoid, smallpox, and especially tuberculosis. Child mortality in the East End was especially high at 20% while many laborers didn’t reach their 21st birthday. Women didn’t fare much better with many exposed to disease and violence while being forced into survival sex work.

London Fog

Did you know that even the air in 1880s London could kill you? Today, many of us know London Fog only as a clothing brand, but historically, London fog was a killer all of its own. Sulphur dioxide and soot burning from the cheap, soft coal created a toxic combination that mixed with the natural vapor above the Thames River to form a “pea soup fog”. Atmospheric conditions would sometimes create worse-than-normal conditions causing a spike in respiratory-related deaths like those of late January and early February 1880.

“Harmony in London Smut", illustration for Punch by George Du Maurier illustrating a coal-cart and chimney-sweep in grimy fog, 1889. © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

Ironically, it was through the Whitechapel murders and the notoriety of “Jack the Ripper” that international attention was drawn to the squalid conditions of East London. Facing increased public pressure to reform, Parliament passed the Housing of the Working Classes Act 1890 and the Public Health Amendment Act 1890 which set minimum standards for accommodation in an effort to transform slums like those of Whitechapel.