Dickens’ London
while not a few are... immoral and
profligate... [for London and its environs:]
at least 50,000 children are reared, and
rearing up, every year, in the grossest
ignorance and profligacy... the morals of
the inferior classes of society, particularly
in the metropolis, are rapidly declining.”
Blood in the streets
The serial killings in Whitechapel in
1888 by ‘Jack the Ripper’ were the most
dramatic example of a more general
concern about London as a troubled
world of misery and disorder – the
flip side of its imperial greatness. This
concern was frequently voiced in the
press and overlapped with explicitly
fictional accounts of the city, from
Dickens to Doyle, most of which
contributed to the same impression of
London as a city of great deprivation as
well as one of excess and luxury.
The impact of press reporting is
seen in Martin Chuzzlewit when Tom
Pinch arrives in London from Salisbury:
“He was particularly anxious, among
other notorious localities, to have
those streets pointed out to him which
were appropriated to the slaughter of
countrymen; and was quite disappointed
to find, after half-an-hour’s walking, that
he hadn’t had his pocket picked. But on
John Westlock’s inventing a pickpocket
for his gratification, and pointing out
a highly respectable stranger as one of
that fraternity, he was much delighted.”
In Great Expectations, Mr Wopsle,
“imbrued in blood to the eyebrows,”
reads the newspaper aloud at the
pub, delighting in the gory details of
a recent murder.
In effect, London became the subject
of social exploration, such as by Henry
Mayhew in his series of articles about the
slums published in the Morning Chronicle
in 1849 and then in his collection London
Labour and the London Poor. There were
also visual accounts, notably by Gustave
Doré, whose illustrations brilliantly
captured the cramped and cluttered
streets of London. The ‘Jack the Ripper’
killings were an apparent culmination
of a menace already seen in other
episodes, such as the garrotting scare of
- The resulting sense of menace was
mocked in the satirical magazine Punch’s
cartoon Going Out To Tea In The Suburbs.
A Pretty State of Things for 1862, which
showed three wealthy young ladies
escorted by six armed men.
Criminal class
There are obvious problems with the
sources, not least the extent to which
BELOW The very
poorest in society
often ended up in
a workhouse, where
they were given
employment and
a place to liveRIGHT William
Gladstone opens
the Metropolitan
Railway in London in
1863, the beginning
of the London
UndergroundRIGHT The
development
of the London
Underground
transformed how
people moved
around the city©^ Getty^ Images