Episode 150! Who Was Jack the Ripper? Part 1

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London in 1888:

Victorian London was not a happy place to be, and the facts speak for themselves. Prostitution was rife, poverty and crime were prevalent, and 19th-century housing was barely habitable. Finding work in 1888 was extremely difficult for the residents of Whitechapel, feeding into the cycle of poverty and depravity.

Soot and smoke generally filled the air, and there were still grazing sheep in Regent's Park in the mid-Victorian period — it was said that you could tell how long the sheep had been in the capital by how dirty their coats were. They went increasingly from white to black over days.

The nights were riddled with gas lamp-lit streets and dark, foggy alleyways.

The city was steeped in poverty and all manner of crime and disease.

Many children were seen as a strain on their parents' resources, and it is believed that two in every ten died before reaching five years old.

breeding ground for crime and poor behavioral habits, including murder, prostitution, and violence – and vicious circles like these were rarely broken in such poor districts

Streets were dirty, and fresh food was scarce. Pollution and sewage smells filled the air.

Urine soaked the streets. There was an experiment in Piccadilly with wood paving in the midcentury. It was abandoned after a few weeks because the sheer smell of ammonia coming from the pavement was horrible. Also, the shopkeepers nearby said that this ammonia was discoloring their shop fronts.

London in the 19th century was basically filled with cesspools.

There'd be brick chambers, maybe 6 feet deep, about 4 feet wide, and every house would have them.

It was more common to have a cesspool in the basement in central London and in more crowded areas.

Above the cesspool would be where your household privy, or toilet, would be.

These made the general smell in crowded London pretty awful.

There would have been horses everywhere. By the 1890s, there were approximately 300,000 horses and 1,000 tons of horse droppings a day in London. The Victorians employed boys ages 12 to 14 to dodge between the traffic and try to scoop up the excrement as soon as it hit the streets.

Shit everywhere.

The streets were lined with "mud,"... except it wasn't mud.

Life was much harder for women than men generally.

The lack of proper work and money led many women and girls into prostitution, a high-demand service by those wishing to escape their grim realities.

These women were commonly known as "unfortunates,"

They owned only what they wore and carried in their pockets - their dirty deeds would pay for their bed for the night.

There was an extraordinary lack of contraception for women.

Doctors performed unorthodox abortions in dirty facilities, including the back streets.

Many women would die of infection from these ill-performed surgeries or ingesting chemicals or poison.

The insides of the houses throughout the borough were no less uninviting and more reminiscent of slums.

Many of these dilapidated homes were makeshift brothels.

Prostitution was a dangerous trade, as diseases were passed from person to person very quickly, and doctors did not come cheap.

Most work came through casual or 'sweated' labor, like tailoring, boot making, and making matchboxes.

There was very little job security, and the work premises would more than likely be small, cramped, dusty rooms with little to no natural light.

Workhouses were another alternative, set up to offer food and shelter to the poorest of the community in return for hard, grueling labor in even worse conditions.

large portions of the population turned to drinking or drugs to cope with everyday life

Pubs and music halls were abundant in the East End, and booze was cheap, too, making it a viable means of escapism for many.

Crime rates spiraled and were unmanageable by London's police force in 1888. Petty crime like street theft was normality.

High levels of alcohol-related violence, gang crime, and even protection rackets were everywhere.

The high level of prostitution meant that vulnerable women were often forced to earn a living on the streets, leaving them easy targets for assault, rape, and even murder.

Police stations and the detectives at the helm lacked structure and organization, with many crimes being mislabelled, evidence going missing, or being tampered with was common.

The maze of dingy alleyways and dark courtyards, each with multiple entrances and exit points, made the district even more difficult to police. There were even some parts of Whitechapel that police officers were af...