Rumors That Changed the World by Chirovici Eugen O.;

Author:Chirovici, Eugen O.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

And so, when a series of grizzly murders began in the East End, the subject of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was on everybody’s lips, thanks to Stevenson’s novel, as well as the incredible performance of Richard Mansfield in Sullivan’s dramatization.

In addition, far from the clean, elegant streets of Mayfair, socialist ideas were beginning to spread among the workers in the slums, as well as being embraced by a significant number of intellectuals, and were a constant source of worry for the authorities. Although England had been one of the few European countries unaffected by the revolutions of 1848, left-wing movements could be found there and were drawing increasing numbers of followers. Those that shared such ideas frequently accused the authorities of being indifferent to the fate of poor workers living in slum housing.

A number of peaceful demonstrations against unemployment and the social indifference of the authorities were held between 1886 and 1888, culminating, however, in what would go down in history as Bloody Sunday. Organized by the Social Democrat Federation and the Irish National League, the demonstration held on November 13, 1887, drew more than thirty thousand people, who clashed with two thousand policemen brought in to ensure order. There were hundreds of arrests and a large number of demonstrators and two policemen were seriously injured.

Demonstrations of this kind were held in protest at the degrading living conditions in the East End. As a result of the increase in the numbers of Irish and Jewish immigrants (the Jews having fled pogroms in tsarist Russia), the East End was overpopulated and conditions were dire. The police estimated that there were more than sixty brothels in the district and around one thousand two hundred street prostitutes.

This was the context in which the Jack the Ripper bomb was to explode in late August 1888.

In fact, whoever takes the time to study the archives of the Metropolitan Police will discover that it is not at all clear exactly when the historic murders began or when they came to an end. It is not until much later that police experts were positively to ascribe the five “canonical murders” to the same killer. But in the contemporary files the Whitechapel Murders file contained eleven cases of murdered prostitutes from the area. And the series began not in August 1888, but four months earlier, in April. At the time, however, the first murders later to be ascribed to Jack the Ripper caused no particular alarm among the ranks of the police, hardened to such horrors, or among the public, accustomed to ignore the goings-on of the slums (Jones, Richard, Jack the Ripper: The Casebook, Andre Deutsche, 2009).

Emma Elizabeth Smith (1843–1888), a prostitute from Whitechapel, was discovered on the morning of April 3 in Osbourne Street; she had been beaten, raped, and robbed. She died from her injuries in the hospital the next day, but was able to declare that she had been assaulted by two or three men, including an adolescent.

In August, the body of Martha

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