Jack the Ripper and the East End
28 January 2008
'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?' The Star 14 September 1888
From 15 May - 2 November 2008, 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 the salacious speculation and whodunit sleuthing that has long crowded this terrain, the exhibition will open a new path by looking at the human stories behind the penny-dreadful accounts. Bringing together the surviving original documents for the first time, including police files, photographs, and letters from the public, Jack the Ripper and the East End will map the world which witnessed the murders and was transformed by them. It will explore the complex legacy of myths and legends which have become central to London’s imagining of itself.
This is the first exhibition to explore the Jack the Ripper murders and their legacy and it is the first time the public will have the opportunity to examine the original police documents relating to the murders and their investigation. Museum in Docklands’ retelling of the Ripper story will see 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.
Artefacts, including Charles Booth’s meticulously drawn poverty maps, and oral history recordings from those who grew up in the East End at the time of the murders, will throw sharp light on the slums of Whitechapel and on the grim lives of their inhabitants. The wretched maze of alleyways, courts and dead-ends, filthy doss houses and dwellings, formed a landscape of poverty which shaped restless, shifting communities. The exhibition will explore 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.
Both the media and the police were forced into innovation by the murders. Jack the Ripper and the East End will trace 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; attempts to introduce new policing methods, like the use of bloodhounds, as beleaguered investigations unravelled.
From printing press to post mortem, the exhibition will illustrate the strategies of detection and explore 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, as well as accepted ideas of human nature and morality, shaped the investigation.
The scapegoating of groups (socialists, immigrants, lunatics, Fenians, 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. 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.
Jack the Ripper and the East End will explore why this one unknown figure has become so iconic, and so much a part of London’s cultural landscape. The exhibition will be full of objects attesting to an undimmed public appetite for the telling and retelling of this story, from letters sent to the police by the public and self-claimed Jacks, to the veritable library of claimed solutions which have consistently failed to close the case ever since.
Julia Hoffbrand, curator of the exhibition says, “Jack the Ripper and the East End will take visitors deep into the labyrinth of late-Victorian Whitechapel. It will reveal 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 and photographs, and artefacts from late 1880s Whitechapel on public display for the first time, visitors to Museum in Docklands will have the chance 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, Clea Relly or Stacey Witter in the museum press office, on 0207 814 5607 / 5503 / 5511 (email tmorley@museumindocklands.org.uk or crelly@museumindocklands.org.uk) or switter@museumoflondon.org.uk)
Notes to editors
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.
Booking tickets
- 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, free for under 16s).
From March 2008 people will be able to book tickets at www.museumindocklands.org.uk/jacktheripper or on 0844 980 2151 (call centre open Mon-Fri 9.15am to 6pm, Sat-Sun 10am to 6pm, UK calls only)
Timed tickets and booking fee apply.
Museum in Docklands
West India Quay
London E14 4AL
Kids go free
Open daily 10am -6pm
tel: 0870 444 3856
www.museumindocklands.org.uk