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Whitechapel - Coggle Diagram
Whitechapel
Problems in Whitechapel
Poverty and unemployment
Low paid, unskilled work - casual labour at docks, markets, factories
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Casual labour meant people moved around, so no one knew their neighbours well
Overcrowding
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Common lodging houses - cheap shelters; men, women, children all slept in one big room; dirty, unsafe, no privacy
Crime and disorder
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Prostitution - women had few other ways to survive; 1,200 estimated in Whitechapel
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Disease and poor health
Cholera, typhus, tuberculosis - spread fast in dirty, crowded conditions
Open sewers, contaminated water
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Fear and predjudice
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Stereotypes: “criminal class”, “immoral”
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Policing
The Met Police
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Mostly dealt with minor offences - drunkenness, theft, fights
Why it was so difficult
Too few police for such a huge, dense population
Narrow streets, alleys, courtyards - easy for criminals to escape; police couldn’t see everywhere
Community didn’t trust them - many people saw police as the enemy; wouldn’t give information or testify
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No CID forensic team yet - detectives existed but no fingerprinting, no DNA, no CCTV
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What they were bad at
Solved very few serious crimes; limited resources, limited community help
Jack the Ripper
Who were the victims
Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, Mary Jane Kelly
All women, living in poverty; most worked as prostitutes to survive
Most were middle aged, some had families
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Housing
What it was like
Old, neglected buildings - originally built for the wealthy but divided into tiny rooms for the poor
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Courtyard housing - rows of houses around a shared open space; one tap, one toilet for everyone
Rookeries - slum areas; crumbling, overcrowded, unsanistary
Key problems
No running water - fetched from a shared standpipe, sometimes only available a few hours a day
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