The Moral Of The Jack The Ripper Crimes - A Lesson From The Past.

In the first two weeks of September 1888, as the Whitechapel murders increased in their frequency, newspapers began reporting more extensively on the district where the crimes were occurring. As information about the lifestyles of the victims thus far - Emma Smith, Martha Tabram, Mary Nichols, and Annie Chapman - reporters began flooding into Whitechapel and Spitalfields to see the conditions in the area for themselves. As they began to publish descriptions of the horrific social conditions that they found, society at large began to take notice of the grinding poverty and the awful degradation under which those who lived in what would later become known as "the abyss" dwelt. Several newspapers began to pontificate that the killer had shone a light into the dark alleyways of the East End of London, and they began looking for a possible moral of the Whitechapel murders. This video uses several of those articles to paint a vivid picture of the East End of London at the time of the Jack the Ripper murders. It uses evocative photographs from the era that show the district as it was, and makes the point that, if nothing else, the Whitechapel atrocitites should be a lesson from history that we should not ignore.