As 1888 drew inexorably to a close, London was enveloped by a dense fog rolling up the Thames. Darkness descended well before the sun slumped beneath the horizon and by 6 p.m. the temperature had plummeted below zero. The muddy roads began to freeze into icy death traps, and the major thoroughfares of the metropolis seized up as cabs, buses and carts slowed to a crawl. Pedestrians, unable to see more than a few feet in front of them, struggled to keep their heads as they threaded their way through the traffic. To the shouts and cries of drivers and the shrieks of horses were added the bleats and moans of sheep and cattle being driven home from the markets. Everywhere was chaos and confusion as London shivered and bolted its doors until morning.170
It was perhaps a fitting end for the Year of the Ripper. At times during those twelve months it had seemed as if the normal order of things had broken down and the city was on the verge of sliding into the depths of Hell. That once proud capital of civilisation had been tarnished by ‘a series of unique atrocities revolting to humanity’ which outdid any work of fiction. The legend of Jack the Ripper played upon a host of Victorian fears about the future, and exploited a variety of stereotypes – the mad doctor, the depraved aristocrat, the Jewish immigrant and the fallen woman. The fact that the killer, or killers, evaded capture despite leaving a series of tantalising clues and loose ends only heightened the terror and deepened the mystery. It is no wonder the case still fascinates the public more than a century later.171
Yet when the hysteria subsided, and people had time to reflect, it seemed that 1888 was not such a momentous year in the scheme of things. The world had been pretty quiet. ‘Those colossal calamities of which no year is altogether deficient have been far below the average in number and magnitude,’ remarked the Liverpool Mercury, ‘… there has been no great war and only a few small ones.’172 Parliament had busied itself with domestic issues like housing, immigration and the conditions of ‘sweated labour’, but little was actually done. The task of sorting out London’s problems would fall instead to the London County Council, set up under the Local Government Act of 1888. It was the passing of the Act that the Graphic Illustrated Newspaper concluded was the most memorable event of the year.
Jack the Ripper did, however, play an important part in focusing national and international attention on the problems that a capitalist society faced. The modern era was fast approaching, and in many ways 1888 marks a symbolic dividing line between the old and the new.173 This changing of the guard was depicted in a Punch cartoon at the end of the year called ‘New London’. It showed the forces of light, backed by science, art, literature, and the standard of municipal reform driving away the forces of darkness represented by slums, money lenders, sweaters and crime.
At the same time, the ‘Great Powers’ of Europe were also sliding towards war. The 1880s saw the beginning of the ‘Scramble for Africa’ and the arms race as they competed for dominance over land and sea. The year 1888 marked the deaths of two German emperors in the space of three months, and the arrival to the throne of the confrontational Kaiser Wilhelm II, who bears as much blame as anybody for the First World War twenty-six years later. In Britain, the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury promised Queen Victoria that the navy would adopt the ‘two power standard’ by maintaining a fleet big enough to face both France and Russia.174
This was also an age of important developments in science and technology. Electricity was emerging as an alternative to gas and coal, and the inventors Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla were squaring up to each other for the ‘War of Currents’ between AC and DC.175 In 1888, George Eastman invented the first Kodak hand-held camera and marketed it with the slogan: ‘You press the button, we do the rest.’ Edison, having pioneered the lightbulb and the phonograph, began researching a prototype moving film camera known as a kinetoscope. Meanwhile, Karl Benz continued to work on the internal combustion engine and began selling the first commercially available automobile. It would only be another fifteen years until the Wright brothers successfully made their first flight. Authors like H.G.Wells were inspired by the rapid speed of progress, and began writing science fiction novels featuring time machines, alien invasions and invisible men. One of the bestsellers of 1888 was Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward 2000–1887, about an American who fell asleep and woke up in a socialist utopia in the year 2000.
Socialism was now starting to attract the support of workers as well as intellectuals like George Bernard Shaw, thanks to the ‘Great Depression’ and the focus on social problems in the East End. The 1880s saw the formation of the Social Democratic Federation in 1881, and the Fabian Society in 1884, the extension of the vote to higher-paid workers, the Bloody Sunday demonstration of 1887, the Bryant & May ‘matchgirls’ strike and the 1889 dockers’ strike. The last two events revitalised the Trade Union movement and spurred on its growth throughout the industrialised areas of England, Wales and Scotland. This ‘New Unionism’ would lead to the formation of the Labour Party at the beginning of the twentieth century.
The decade saw increasing agitation for women’s rights by feminists such as Emmeline Pankhurst, and the emergence of the so-called ‘New Woman’. In 1888, the Woman’s World, edited by Oscar Wilde, featured an article on ‘the fallacy of the superiority of man’ by Laura McLaren. ‘No age was ever so favourable for the development of female talent as the present and every day the conditions of male and female become more equal,’ she wrote.
It has taken many centuries to develop the intellect of man. If, by the year 1987, the position of women in the artistic, musical, scientific and literary worlds is not equal to that of the other sex in their day, men will then be able to write a plausible essay on the inherent inferiority of women.
Likewise the ‘New Journalism’ was revolutionising the newspaper industry with its ever more inventive attempts to attract readers. Matthew Arnold, who coined the phrase in 1887, praised its ‘ability, novelty, variety, sensation, sympathy, generous instincts’ but mourned its feather-brained tendency to ‘throw out assertions at a venture because it wishes them true; does not correct either them or itself, if they are false; and to get at things as they really are it seems to feel no concern whatever’. The Star newspaper, born on 17 January 1888, was one of the new breed that made their names and circulations on the back of the Ripper murders. Its first editorial promised to look at every issue ‘from the standpoint of the workers of the nation, and of the poorest and most helpless among them’. Fifty years later the newspaper looked back on the changes wrought on society:
In 1888 we had not heard of the submerged tenth … but we had the real thing, plain to all our senses. The poor in 1888 were poorer by far than they are today, they had fewer alleviations of their poverty. Perhaps too they had less reticence concerning it. The streets were full of beggars. In the poorer districts barefooted children were a common sight. And at night the noble river embankment was a mile and a half of sheer misery, with homeless people sleeping out in all weathers. The Salvation Army was doing its best. Private but badly organised charity did something. But the city’s conscience had not yet been aroused to a realisation that this misery was a public concern. In this respect it is safe to claim that there has been a marked advance since 1888. There is still plenty of poverty … but by legislation, or by municipal energy, or by private benevolence, or by all combines, the submerged tenth has been reduced to a smaller fraction, and that fraction brought nearer to a surface where life is endurable.176
Even Whitechapel was able to cast off some of its hellish reputation. In 1938, the police officer George W. Cornish wrote that it was:
… as law abiding as any district in London, and perhaps more so than some. It is still cosmopolitan, and in parts rather picturesque. The two great roads to the eastern suburbs and the docks run through it, but they are very different from the cobbled, badly lit streets of thirty-five years ago. There are still mean streets and dark alleys but the coming of buses and the Underground, restaurants, big shops and cinemas altered it completely.177
Revisiting London in 1888 has revealed some eerie similarities to the present day. Again capitalism is in crisis. The city is labouring through an economic depression and has been visited by riots, strikes and occupations of public spaces. Our head of state is an elderly Queen who has just celebrated a jubilee. The government is again led by an Old Etonian Conservative. The police force is under pressure, morale is low and a commissioner has been forced to resign.
Since the Year of the Ripper we have seen a massive increase in state intervention and the establishment of public services like the NHS to protect the most vulnerable in society. It now seems that the state can no longer afford such generosity and we may have to rely once again on charity and philanthropy.
Just as in 1888, when some feared the spectre of revolution, it is difficult to predict what might happen next. Hopefully we will not have to face our own Jack the Ripper.