Jack the Ripper and the East End: Press release
Jack the Ripper and the East End
15 May - 2 November 2008
Between April 1888 and February 1891, eleven women were brutally murdered in London’s East End. The blood-red signature on a letter to the press gave the killer a name that has become an indelible part of London’s identity: Jack the Ripper.
Museum in Docklands is returning to the scene of London’s most infamous crimes, with its major new exhibition, Jack the Ripper and the East End. Bypassing salacious speculation and whodunit sleuthing, the exhibition opens a new path by looking at the human stories behind the sensational accounts. Bringing together surviving original documents for the first time, including police files, photographs, and letters from the public, Jack the Ripper and the East End maps the world which witnessed the murders and was transformed by them. It explores the complex legacy of myths and legends which have become central to London’s imagining of itself.
Museum in Docklands’ retelling of the Ripper story sees the East End take centre stage. Visitors will be able to follow the crimes and the investigation as they unfolded and understand more about the lives of the victims, witnesses, suspects and police, and about the labyrinthine world they inhabited. For the first time the public can see the original reports of the policemen who discovered the victims’ bodies, the witness statements, coroner’s plans and letters from the public, including hoax confessions, that were sent in and followed up by investigating officers.
Artefacts, including Charles Booth’s meticulously drawn maps of poverty, and oral history recordings from those who grew up in the East End around the time of the murders, throw sharp light on the slums of Whitechapel and on the grim lives of their inhabitants. A wretched maze of alleyways, courts and dead-ends, filthy doss houses and dwellings, formed a landscape of poverty which shaped restless, shifting communities.
Previously unseen photographs from the Museum’s archive vividly illustrate the destitution of the turn-of-the-century East End. The exhibition explores how the murders were a huge catalyst for change, creating public revulsion at the desperate state of life in the shadows of the world’s richest city.
The hard and precarious lives of the murdered women, who sold their bodies to pay for a bed and drink is traced in detail. Case histories from Stepney Union Workhouse records the sad and all too familiar paths which brought women to the workhouse, while objects attest to the limited options available for making a meagre living, from sweatshop tailoring to the phosphorus fumes of the match factory.
As Eastender Arthur Harding recalls in a recording in the exhibition:
“…poor old Mary Kelly, she’d take them up to her room. She had a room in Dorset Street, she probably paid about two bob a week. I think she did pay, a shilling a night she paid. But see she hadn’t paid her rent, so poor cow she was, you know what I mean, she was right down to her bottom, nothing.”
Both the media and the police were forced into innovation by the murders. Jack the Ripper and the East End traces how agendas were set and forced: the fierce competition between newspapers to produce the most sensational descriptions of the murders, and lay claim to the latest theories and suspects. The lurid etchings in The Illustrated Police News show the crossing of voyeurism and terror. As The Star reported on 14 September 1888:
“Every new turn of this bewildering labyrinth reveals some fresh depth of social blackness, some strange and repulsive curiosity of human nature. What are we to do? Where are we to turn?”
Officers attempts to introduce new policing methods were often prompted by letters to the press, as beleaguered investigations unravelled. A Victorian bloodhound, on display, marks just one such intervention.
From printing press to post-mortem, the exhibition illustrates the strategies of detection and explores how the processes of running and reporting a major police enquiry have changed. Forensic science was not yet available to help identify the murderer, and a range of pseudo-sciences, philosophies and superstitions, including spiritualism, shaped the investigation. The scapegoating of groups (socialists, immigrants, lunatics, criminals, medical students, doctors, butchers were all suspects at the time), and the pressure to produce names, may not be entirely alien to modern audiences.
The story of Jack the Ripper is an integral part of London’s identity. It has shaped the way London and in particular the East End is imagined. The exhibition will ask why the story of the Whitechapel murders continues to resonate over 120 years after the events. A wall of suspects follows the changing faces of supposed Jacks, whilst display objects, including the purported confessional diary of James Maybrick and a knife said to be the murder weapon, represent a veritable library of claimed solutions which have consistently failed to close the case.
Although no one knows who he was, Jack the Ripper is probably London’s most famous son. His story has passed into folk legend, and has gained a fictional currency, re-examined and re-invented by each generation. He inhabits the same world as Jekyll and Hyde and Sherlock Holmes, his fictional contemporaries. Jack the Ripper and the East End, which opens with a dramatic montage of Expressionist films from the 1920s, explores how this story of a serial killer is sustained and changed in its telling and retelling.
Unpicking the complex overlapping of reality and imagination, the exhibition questions assumptions about the Whitechapel murders, as well as the enduring human interest in violent death. Rather than trivialising or glamorising the horrific murders from 1888, Museum in Docklands grounds the crimes and our obsession with them in the reality of East End lives.
Julia Hoffbrand, curator of the exhibition says, “Jack the Ripper and the East End takes visitors deep into the labyrinth of late-Victorian Whitechapel. It reveals the lives of those who inhabited the streets and courts where the murders took place – lives which are obscured in so many accounts of the Ripper murders. With the original surviving case reports, photographs and artefacts from late 1880s Whitechapel on public display for the first time, visitors to Museum in Docklands will be able to examine the contemporary evidence first hand, enter the world in which the crimes took place and reach their own conclusions about a London story which continues to fascinate and shock.”
For more information contact Tim Morley or Clea Relly
Museum press office
tel: 020 7814 5607 / 5503
email: press@museumindocklands.org.uk
Notes
- Booking tickets
Jack the Ripper and the East End runs from 15 May – 2 November 2008
Adults £7
Concessions and under 16s £5
Museum in Docklands ticket holders £5
Family (1 adult, 2 children) £15
Family (2 adults, 2 children) £20
Groups of 10 or more people receive a 20% discount
Includes same day free admission to Museum in Docklands (usually £5 for adults, £3 for concessions, free for under 16s).
Tickets can be booked now at www.museumindocklands.org.uk/jacktheripper or on
0844 980 2151. Timed tickets and booking fee apply.
- Please note that due to its sensitive nature we do not recommend this exhibition for children under 12 years old.
- The original material supplied by The National Archives is extremely rare and fragile. As such, we are only able to display certain documents for a 3 month period. These artefacts will be on a rolling display to ensure that all visitors will be able to see original documents. All facsimile documents are identified by caption.
- Oral history recordings (made between 1971-79) can be made available for press use. Please contact the press office for details.
- Audio Visuals in the gallery feature interviews with Bonnie Greer, Eve Pollard (former editor of the Daily Express), Professor David Canter (forensic psychologist), Superintendent Simon Ovens, and Ellen Armstrong (co-ordinator of Safe Exit, an initiative of Toynbee Hall’s Adult Advice and Education team, London Borough of Tower Hamlets, Metropolitan Police and Providence Row Charity, dedicated to working with people involved in prostitution.
- A book, Jack the Ripper and the East End: Introduction by Peter Ackroyd (published in Chatto & Windus hardback on 24 April 2008 priced £25) is being published to coincide with the exhibition. The book aims to uncover the reality of East End life. Sections look at slum housing, immigration, attitudes to women, poverty, violence and crime. The book examines how the brutal killings were reported and how the police tried to identify the murderer. A final section shows how Jack the Ripper has shaped our vision of London, and influenced our popular culture. Contact Louise Rhind-Tutt at LRhind-Tutt@randomhouse.co.uk for details.
- Write a notorious note at www.jacksnotoriousnotes.com and spread the word about the exhibition. It’s a site based on hoax letters sent into the police.
- Museum in Docklands explores London's connections with the world through the 2000 year history of the river, port and people. Across four floors of interactive displays the Museum’s unique collection takes you on a journey through stories of the Thames and surrounding areas from Roman settlement to the urban regeneration of Canary Wharf. A changing programme of activities caters for visitors of all ages and includes gallery tours, storytelling, drama, talks by historians, films and guided walks through Docklands. The Museum opened in 2003 and is a short walk along West India Quay from the Docklands Light Railway or ten minutes from Canary Wharf underground station on the Jubilee Line.