Jack the Ripper Revisited

"The first thing I noticed was that she was ripped up like a pig in the market," her entrails
"flung in a heap about her neck." Thus the account in London's Star newspaper of the
policeman who found the body of Catherine Eddowes, a prostitute murdered in the
autumn of 1888 by the serial killer the media dubbed "Jack the Ripper." But if the Ripper's
notoriety was fueled by a fiercely competitive media market with newspapers trying to
outdo one another in relaying gory details of the crimes, unearthing clues, floating
theories and taunting the police, his killing spree remains an object of fascination more
than a century later not least because it was the exploits of "The Ripper" that first
acquainted comfortable middle-class London with life on the city's dark underside.
"The crimes and the killer are intertwined with London's identity and history," says Julia
Hoffbrand, co-curator a new major exhibition, "Jack the Ripper and the East End," at
London's Museum in Docklands. Of the many hardscrabble neighborhoods of Dickensian
London, none was more blighted than Whitechapel, a grim, crowded East End hellhole,
rife with poverty, disease, crime and homelessness. Prostitution was widespread; alcohol
was plentiful. Whitechapel as an ominous, foggy maze of gaslit, cobbled streets, alleys
and dead ends "is still very much the public image of the East End now," says Hoffbrand.

Most middle-class and wealthy Londoners were blissfully ignorant of conditions in

Whitechapel until the autumn of 1888, when Scotland Yard realized that a serial killer was
loose in the area, and Fleet Street helped create the legend and even the name of
the knife-wielding "Ripper." Until the brutal slayings ended some two and a half years
later, sensationalistic coverage of the Ripper was relentless, his exploits recounted by
reporters and artists in a manner that exposed the squalor of Whitechapel to a fascinated
audience and shaped London's perception of the East End. Playwright George
Bernard Shaw once remarked that Jack the Ripper did more than any social reformer to
draw attention to the intolerable conditions of Whitechapel's slums.
The new Ripper exhibit recounts the unsolved murders through the prism of life in
Victorian Whitechapel, using photographs, police files and press reports to bring the era
to life. It also shows how the Ripper's 11 victims all alcoholics who turned to
prostitution were brought down by slum life before falling prey to a murderer. A police
list of Catherine Eddowes' clothing and possessions is both mundane and poignant: A
gray petticoat, "a very old ragged blue skirt," and a pair of men's lace-up boots.
The exhibition includes the more well-known suspects, but makes no attempt to solve the
case. "It's not a whodunit," Hoffbrand says. Actually, 120 years after the fact, it doubtful
anyone really wants to see the world's most famous murder mystery solved. That might
spoil the rich legacy of Jack the Ripper. And rich it certainly is a multimillion-dollar
industry, featuring periodicals, chatrooms, websites, conventions and the countless books
that continue to be written on the subject. The murders have also inspired numerous
films, plays and TV dramas, even several stage musicals.