Murder and Mayhem in Victorian London: Creating Jack the Ripper

Please feel free to change the title, it just seems to sum up the general life of the poor in Victorian London.

The quote I was talking about to get us started on the division of society is:

Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets. The rich and the poor.
Benjamin Disraeli
1845 in Sybil.

This ties into the time of Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels etc who were writing on the division of class into the bourgeoisie and proletariat. The consensus of writers such as this was that the proletariat were exploited by the bourgeoisie for profit etc.

Anyway, this leads onto the creation of a working class which is different from previous definitions. It is the Mass. A mass of humanity, all crammed into a small space and in poor conditions in the hope of finding work of some sort, but chiefly finding grinding poverty, insanitary conditions and poorly paid work. Of course this wasn't just happening in London but in many of the towns in the industrialised areas, Manchester, Liverpool etc.

There is a lot of fiction out there that deals with this, including Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy and W.m Thakeray. All of these give us an indication of what life was like in Victorian times. They may seem a arduous to read nowadays, but they remain classics, I think, because they act as a social statement, or document about the time they were written. Many writers used their skill to depict the social injustices they saw around them. Often showing the plight of women and the poor.

What is interesting about all this is: there wasn't just two nations or two societies, but layers within them. There seems to have been a great deal of 'underneath' to the Victorians.

To explore them fully would take a long time but a quick starting point is Channel 4's travellers guide to the Victorians.

There is also a timeline for the ripper killings on the jack the ripper casebook.

There is also a brief history of Victorian life.

We need to look at how the conditions were created for Jack to operate. How the poor were created if you like and the differences in the 'two nations'. We could focus on the differences faced by women if that is simpler. It would be possible to take some information about prominant Victorian gentlewomen, a couple of subversive women (George Elliot for example) and what we know about Jacks Victims as contrasting material.

Also some mortality figures might be handy. I'll have alook and see what I can find on those.

By the way we have a PDF copy of Jack London's book People of the Abyss if anyone else want to read it.

If anyone else has ideas and want to add stuff this is only a brief outline.

See you soon

Polly