by Michelle Wilkinson

Created on: November 04, 2008

Everybody loves a good mystery, and what more intriguing mystery is there than the brutal slaying of at least five women attributed to some unknown, almost supernatural being, who stalked the dark streets of Victorian London in order to satiate his bloodlust? Jack the Ripper is cemented in our collective consciousness because he seems to symbolise the fear of moral decay in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Social commentators, writers and politicians were fearful about what the future had in store for the human race, and Jack the Ripper seemed to symbolise everything that was wrong with Britain at the time.

Consequently, a vast amount of coverage was given to the spate of murders that happened in 1888, as newspaper editors realised that murders sold newspapers. Hoax letters were sent to the police and sometimes were attributed to journalists, desperate to drag the story out for as long as possible. It was one such letter which led to the sobriquet Jack the Ripper'. Wherever you went it was hard to avoid the Jack the Ripper phenomenon'.

Five murders have been attributed to Jack the Ripper, although there has been speculation that he may have committed more, or that there may have been more than one killer at work. However, police procedure was rudimentary and at the time publications such as Punch' were quick to point out the ineptitude of the police. The police did face an uphill battle, though, as the murders occurred in Whitechapel, East London, a notoriously poverty-stricken, crime-ridden area. The women who were murdered were all prostitutes, and perhaps if the murders had not been so brutal, there would have been less focus on these specific murders.

Yet there were so many gruesome details to be garnered from the investigation that journalists could not stop themselves, playing on people's fears that they, too, could fall victim to this anonymous killer who could not be caught. Speculation flew around. The precision of the cuts led some to conclude that it was the work of a surgeon, and the fact that he had not been caught fuelled the idea that it was a person of Royal blood. Others speculated that he was a butcher. A message written on a wall stating: The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing' near the scene of a murder led some to speculate on the possibility of Jews being involved. There had been a wave of Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe
in the late 1880s, and so such a message may have been attributable to anti-Semitism,

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