One Man with A Knife: The Price of Reform in London’s Whitechapel Ward

Millette, Holly-Gale (2013) One Man with A Knife: The Price of Reform in London’s Whitechapel Ward. ‘In the Jungle of Cities’:: Mobs, murders, crowds, riots and crises in the Modern City Conference, Chawton Library, Manchester, United Kingdom. 30 May 2013. (Submitted)

Abstract

At approximately 3.20am on Friday, the 31st of August 1888, MaryAnn Nichols, an alcoholic mother of two, was killed by a cut to the throat in Buck’s Row, Whitechapel Ward, London. She was forty-two years old. She was not the pretty young thing full of gaiety and song of modern myth’s depiction. She was destitute, displaced, hungry and unlucky. She would have remained as forgotten in death as she was in life but for the fact that she, in her dying, ignited a powder keg that had long sat within the parish boundaries of Whitechapel Ward. Two months later five women would be dead and the history of Whitechapel as a place – imagined and configured – would change forever.

The Daily Telegraph would write: “She has affected more by her death than many long speeches in Parliament and countless columns of letters to the newspapers could have brought about.” George Bernard Shaw followed this with the indictment that:

“Whilst we conventional Social Democrats were wasting our time on education, agitation and organisation, some independent genius has taken the matter in hand, and by simply murdering and disembowelling four women, converted the proprietary press to an inept sort of communism”

Late in 1888, Whitechapel was martyred and societal and political ignorance of the slum was violently exposed. This paper will consider this powder keg and the cruel paradox it spawned, of Murderer as Social Reformer. In it, I will argue that two concurrent waves of slum clearance legislation sanctioned an excising of the Ward from all sides, leaving it vulnerable and I will explore the pressures of identity and migration that then unsteadied this small geographic space when, in 1881, the area was overwhelmed by migrants from “troubled Russia”.

This paper will also consider the gendered nature of the violent city, specifically how the perpetrator further substantiates reforming social democrats as male, while the blood of his female victims genders the Ward itself as martyred and female. Furthermore, I am curious that – less than two years after the London Riots, with immigration figures on par with those of the 1880s, and in the grip of a recession – 2013’s viewers of Ripper Street are mirroring an engagement with release by revisiting these geographies of a city from the 1880s.

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Contributors

Author: Holly-Gale Millette

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