S3 – 2: Rome & Babylon

pear trailed behind. You can picture them leaning in together, whispering as they passed into the beautifully manicured landscape that had made London the envy of the modern world when it was first designed a generation before. One writer had expressed his awe at its grandeur. Rome had its ruins and Jerusalem It's temple, but London had its own shining glories. As they ambled through Regent's Park, maybe Lizzie rested her

head on Joseph's shoulder. Back in eighteen twenty four, London had repeat old the city's ancient law against walking the streets at night. That was thanks in part to the new wonder of the age, light that could throw back the darkness on command. Maybe, as the clipped lawns glowed under the gas lights that came to life, Lizzie had the time to recall the lofty terms in which their city had been praised the room of modern history. But if it was a beautiful, quiet moment, it would be

their last. The sound of running feet neared on the path behind them. Someone shouted, are you Macy. Joseph turned to answer with I don't know what you mean, as another voice called out, that's the one. Lizzie looked just in time to see half a dozen young men closing in anger on their faces, and they were staring at Joseph. In an instant, they were upon him. One of them grabbed him by the collar. Other hands and arms came swinging in more violently. Joseph did his best to fight back,

throwing up his arms. He was a printer's machinist and strong man, but there were too many of them, so he took off, running his hat flew into the darkness. They were faster, and they came on him too. Suddenly. It only took a few moments before Lizzie caught up just in time to see a knife flash in the shadows between their bodies. As she came within reach, the group was already on the run, whooping as they made their escape. They had left Joseph draped over a park

gate with blood running from his mouth. He was gasping. At first, she thought he had been punched in the face, but he wheezed out the words I am stabbed. Someone nearby came over to help and hail a cab, but Lizzie could still see the attackers running off and no one was giving chase. A righteous fury took hold of her, and she set off running. Lizzie could tell they were getting away. She yelled stop thief, and a man in front of them tried to answer the call. Stepping into

the group's path. They knocked him aside, but it slowed them down just enough for Lizzie to catch up. That's when one of them turned and knocked her down. A vicious kick smashed her ribs. Before she could get up, they disappeared. As she climbed to her feet, she saw a group of bystanders taking it all in. Why didn't any of you help, she demanded, but the nearest man turned away, and then she remembered Joseph still bleeding in the park. She got back to him just as he

was helped into a cab. Lizzie climbed in with him and they began rattling toward the hospital. But they wouldn't make it. Blood was flowing from Joseph's chest and neck, and he died in Lizzie's arms while they were still on the way. It was a terrifying, senseless murder. To say that it shocked London would be an understatement. Papers across Britain, from Leeds to Ipswich to Bristol, reported the murder at a frenzied pitch. The story made the same

splash in Scotland and Ireland. Like the Brighton railway murder. It drew the attention of a reading public to the turmoil in the streets of London. As suspects were questioned, the picture became clear. The attackers were members of the Deck, and they'd mistaken Joseph for a member of a rival gang, a gang that had attacked them in Regent's Park the night before. The knife that had sliced Joseph long was

a sailor's dagger. The sanitary workers dredged the sewers at the request of Scotland Yard and found the six inch blade embedded in the mud. Its owner had loaned it to the killer, who had carried it to the park with revenge on his mind. Youth gang's sailor's knives and evidence stashed in sewers, only to be dredged up by London's finest It all gave London an air of incredible danger. And of course this heinous crime had occurred along Regent

Street inside Regent's Park. That place was a wonder of modern design, meant to replace pestilent alleyways, squalid hovels and myrie rhodes at the heart of London with healthy streets, elegant buildings and park like scenery, or so they had said in eight when the park was first opened. But like the Brighton Railway murder, the Regent's Park murder of eight would force Britain's wide eyed readership to revisit the

question asked by the rampaging crowds two years earlier. Had the modern world really washed away the worst impulses of London's past, or had it simply invited the sins of Mother England to play out once more, only this time on a much grander scale. This is unobscured. I'm Aaron manky m M. London didn't just get this way by itself.

There's always a backstory. It was certainly true that in the eighteen hundreds London was a city on the grow, and no one could take more credit for that than the Prince Regent himself, George the Fourth, well except maybe his architect John Nash. You see, in the centuries before the industrial era, much of the land around London was owned by the Crown. It was then leased to farmers

and builders, who used it for their own ends. But those leases ended in eighteen eleven, just as the Prince Regent was puzzling over England's place in the modern world, and if the reports are true, he was especially troubled when he looked across the channel and saw the grandeur of France. By all accounts, he set out to make the city at the center of his empire a metropolis that could quite eclipse Napoleon, and he spared no expense.

Not only did George the Fourth and John Nash create Regent Street and Regent's Park, but they remade Buckingham House into a pal us worthy of any continental monarch. Acts of Parliaments launched three new bridges across the Thames, which cleared the way for new roads to cross the river. Gas Lights began to pop up in eighteen oh seven and spread along London streets for years until their glow could be seen throughout the city in the eighteen forties.

But this was more than a facelift, and the scalpel did more than scratch the surface. Along those streets and gas lines traveled new sewers that would sluice the city's filth to the river that would carry it out to sea. At least that was the story for London's West End.

When the Prince Regent and John Nash were done and collecting their praise from observers, others took up the vision for creating London anew Throughout the century, huge projects continued to be launched, even up to eighteen sixty seven, when the Holburn Viaduct, the biggest and most expensive project of the century, was built to serve London's financial district. All of that remodeling came at a cost, though, and not just to a purse, No, it was much more severe

than that. For the new city to arise, the old one had to be cut to pieces. Among the wealth and well to do, John Nash was known for his beautiful architecture, but among poor and working people he was known for the men who cleared the way for those buildings,

Nash's housebreakers. Here's historian Adam Wood. Fifty years earlier. The rookeries, where the poor in the criminal classes congregated, were to be found in the West End and Saint Charles Area and spill Fields and White chap in the early teen hundreds, were by comparison and quite prosperous. When the West End was developed, a large number of people were forced from

the rookeries. And when Oxford Street and Shaws Revenue, which are well known West End streets now were developed, that St Charles Area was demolished and all the five five thousand poor residents were relocated to the East End. That's right, thousands of poor Londoners were dispossessed and displaced as the West End developed. The homes where they had lived in some cases for generations were destroyed and those people were simply turned out into the streets. Where did they go?

Not far? Actually, pushed out from the neighborhoods where they used to live. Many now found themselves only a few neighborhoods away in the East End, but there was hardly a reprieve in the docklands. When a project to build the St. Catherine's Docks was arranged, the first thing to do was clear the way. House breakers arrived at three neighborhoods in the East End called Cat's Whole, Pillory Lane

and Dark Entry and they left them in ruins. Construction on this single project left over eleven thousand people without their homes. Here's historian Louise raw If you were better off and the property owner, then you get compensation. If you didn't tough on, you go. And we presume because nobody bothered to record where people went, that they just went deeper into London. They just increased the overcrowding everywhere else they would had no choice, perhaps stay with friends,

go wherever you could. A lot of them would just have been homeless. And there was a large increase in homelessness. So London's posh West End and it's dark East End didn't just drop out of the sky or sprout up from the soil. Among the Thames River. They were choices that had been made by Crown and country that lay behind the fashionable facade of the West End and the desperation of the East. In fact, many Londoners of the Victorian era agreed where we might differ from them, though

is in whose choice that was. Because for the middle class Victorians who looked to the East from their comfortable homes, it was clear the east Enders had brought this upon themselves. The link they saw was between the squalid conditions of the East End neighborhoods and the morality of the people who lived there. It was an endless cycle, they thought,

between bad homes and bad morals. It was as if the grandness of Nash's designs had white all memory of his house breakers from their minds, assuming, of course, they had ever given them a thought in the first place. The Regent's Park murder locked a lot of London doors. The house breaking and home wrecking that middle class Victorians worried about had little to do with fears that their home might be destroyed to clear the way for a

grand promenade. Instead, they worried that someone might break into their homes and make off with their belongings, or that someone with loose morals might disturb the tranquility of their family arrangements with temptations. And that's what had them turning to a new organization that grew up alongside the modern city,

the modern police Department. They turned to men like Charles Warren to coordinate and lead the efforts against both violence and vice, and they counted on men like Detective Inspector Donald Swanson to untie the difficult knot at the center of inexplicable crimes. After all, when Swans and arrested the Brighton Railway murderer in eight eight one, it wasn't the first time that his quick thought and decisive action brought

relief to London's wealthy. In fact, by then he had already solved a string of cases that made him highly respected among the public who knew him, but in the police department too. In eighteen seventy, when Swanson was still just a constable, a small gang of thieves made off with gold chains lifted from a pawnbroker's shop on Fleet Street. They had used the cover of night to creep to the shop's closed shutters with a small metal file and

a plan while two of them stood look out. The other two board holes through the shutters and pulled out the valuables they found inside. They had spotted diamond necklaces in the shop, and no mere wooden board could stop someone with a penchant for drilling his way to wealth. But they knew they couldn't attract too much attention. They had to work quickly, and they ran out of time. The holes they made were too small for the diamonds.

Only a few thin gold chains would slip through. The hall was far us valuable than it could have been, but when the thieves vanished with the gold chains, it was enough to set the police on the scene. The gang would have gotten away completely if it weren't for Constable Donald Swanson. He traced their path through the city, into the East End and into Whitechapel. Ultimately, Swanson arrested three of the four thieves. Alongside the stolen gold chains, he found a bent wire in the belongings of a

woman named Curly Paul. Swanson convinced the judge that the wire had been used to lift the stolen gold through the punctured shutters of the shop. Curly Paul was convicted of acting as a lookout for the group, but that was only one case when Swanson slapped the hand reaching from the East End, because as well as helping the residents and retailers of West London hold onto their valuables, he was also tasked with making sure that their moral

fiber remained intact. The year after catching the pawn shop burglars, Swanson worked with another officer, Frederick Aberlein, to investigate a different kind of business, one that threatened to corrupt respectable

und dinners. Here is Adam Wood. Once again, Swanson was a PC and Atherline a serjump and complaints have been made to the police that the infamous fear to impresario George Sanger was putting on plays without a license, and to get around this he placed advertisement stating that entry was free, but when nearly four hundred people turned up on the night, they were told they had to buy

a program before they had gained admittance. Other Line went along in playing clothes and watched the performance and observed what the newspapers described. Got it written here as several drunks, men of a doubtful character and women of an immoral character, causing nuisance to the ability to the public so you

just imagine what an evening that that was like. Sanger eventually appeared before the magistrates and was fined just five pound and I know a little bit about saying that he did go on to continue with his illegal playhouse career, should he say? And he was quite quiet notorious that Swanson was transferred to Bow in the East End three months later on a line to whitechape Or two years later. Those transfers for Donald Swanson and Frederick Aberleine would be

a fateful one for both men. As they worked in the East End, they came to know its streets and its people, and those experiences meant that in eighteen eighty eight, when Scotland Yard needed detectives to investigate a series of gruesome murders, first Frederick Aberleine and then Donald Swanson would get the call. Not at first though, because in eighteen eighty seven, after nine years as the head of investigation in Whitechapel, Aberleine had been transferred to the central office

at Scotland Yard. Donald Swanson joined him in the same November. In eighteen eighty eight, both men were senior officers climbing toward the top of the criminal investigation Department or c i D, whose responsibilities were more and more administrative, to follow the patterns of crime around London. But when murder came to Whitechapel in eighteen eighty eight, they found themselves facing a pattern they had never seen before, and it would prove to be their greatest challenge. Pearly Paul sat

uneasily looking at the corner. If it was an ordinary week, that man would have been Win Baxter, who led the inquest into the Brighton railway murder. But Baxter was vacationing in Scandinavia. His work got handed down to the next in line, so Pearly Paul was faced with Baxter's deputy. The newspapers that reported her testimony would mock her. They would call her masculine looking and say that her face

was soddened by drink. But the past few weeks had been terrible ones for Paul, and now she was sitting at a coroner's inquest, and she was about to relive all those weeks again. After all, her friend had been murdered when she was first called into the inquest two weeks before. Paul was pulled into view the body of a dead woman. She told the police that yes, she

knew her name. Her name was Emma, but the inquest came to a halt when the next two women to view the body gave different names for the dead woman. Frustrated by the confusion, the deputy corner delayed the second day of the inquest by two weeks in hopes that Scotland Yard could sort out the confusion. At least one historian has noted that while wind Baxter was known for guiding inquests with cool detachment in the face of gruesome injuries and mysterious deaths, this backup Deputy Corner was not

so collected. His shock and horror are evident in his records. We can only imagine how glad he was to put the terrible crime out of his mind and turn things over to the detectives as they slowly began to put together the pieces of Martha Tabram's life. Here's historian Drew Gray. She was an alcoholic and she had a reputation for being seen out with men that she wasn't going out with,

which might have tainted her reputation. She was found dead on the landing of George Yard Buildings on the seventh of August. She can stabbed thirty nine times. Most of the wounds are targeted to abdomen. I think at the time it was considered to be a very brutal murder, and there's a suggestion it might have been carried up by soldiers. That suggestion caught on because a constable patrolling that neighborhood had talked with the Grenadier guardsman loitering in

the street around two am. Hurley Paul's testimony made that theory even stronger. You see, she and Martha had been out drinking with a couple of soldiers on the night of the murder. Just before midnight. They left the White Swan Pub to go their separate ways with their separate men. Hurly Paul had seen Martha walk away on the soldier's arm. It was the last time anyone would see Martha alive. Her body was found at four fifty a m. The next morning in the stairwell of the George Yard buildings,

just off the White Chapel Road. A dock worker spotted her body as he was coming down the street to go to work. He rushed to find a constable and brought the man who had talked with the soldier. A few hours earlier. That brought more police and a Sir Rgin to examine Martha's body. What he found was terrifying. Small knife wounds covered her thighs, her abdomen, and her chest. The surgeon guests they were inflicted with what he called an ordinary pen knife. The blade had pierced both lungs

and Martha's heart as well. One wound that had punctured her stern um, though likely required something bigger, a dagger or maybe a soldier's bayonet. The doctor did report that there was no evidence of recent intimacy to use the terms of Victorian propriety that were published in the paper. But there's no wonder it was considered a brutal murder

because that's exactly what it was. So with the White Chapel Constable into the detectives rounded up Grenadier guards at the Tower of London, especially the ones who had been on leave the night of the murder. The constable couldn't spot his man among them, or rather, first he picked out one man, then changed his mind and picked another.

After talking with them, the inspector decided the constable had made mistake, so a few days later they called Pearly Paul She was brought into view an identity parade, and the detectives asked her, can you see here either of the men you saw with the woman now dead? She scrutinized them for a long time, but in the end she shook her head. When the inspectors asked her again, she looked him in the eye and said he ain't here. All she remembered was that the soldiers had white bands

around their caps. That led the search to the Wellington Barracks and the cold Stream Guards. They brought Paul back to review more potential killers, and when they came through in a lineup, she picked out two men. The trouble was both of them had alibis, so the inspector scribbled an ominous phrase in his notes. Identification failed. Scotland Yard questioned neighbors around the building where Martha's body had been found, and people who had passed by along the street that night.

None had information to add, though in fact, no one in the neighborhood where she died even claimed to know her. Strangely, the police didn't press the supervisor of the building where Martha's body was found. He was questioned, but he told the inspectors he hadn't heard anything. Maybe he was just trying to keep his head down. His wife told them that she had heard someone shout a single word murder, but that wasn't so unusual, she said, after all, this

was the East End. When the inquest reconvened on August, only Martha's identity had been established. Her estranged husband, Henry Tabram, had come in to identify her from Greenwich, on the other side of the Thames and a bit farther downriver. Henry said they had been separated for thirteen years and I quote owing to her drinking habits. Another Henry, Henry Turner,

had been her partner since then. She had been his wife for nine years, he said, but he had separated from her two or three weeks before she was killed. Their landlady testified as well, but all she said was that Martha owed her two weeks rent. So Pearley Paul came last. She gave her account of the night when Martha died. She gave her account of reviewing the suspected soldiers. She even admitted to saying she might drown herself, though at the inquest she tried to take that back. In

the days since the murder. Paul had taken refuge with her cousin on Drury Lane. We can only imagine how much she needed that support to not be alone. The inspector responsible for Whitechapel told the Deputy coroner that none of the soldiers were found with any blood on their clothes or weapons. He ended his statement with the plea that was published in the London Times on August if anyone had information about Martha's death, please let them know.

They had reached a dead end without The inspector responsible for investigating crime in Whitechapel moved on literally. He followed Win Baxter's example and left London on vacation. The next day. The East London Adviser responded with an article of their own. They saw the way that the East Ends reputation was looking,

and they hoped to head it off. A murder in Whitechapel or any in the East End was regarded differently from attacks elsewhere in London, say Regent's Park, for example, A murder there would get sympathy from a wide British readership. But let a poor man sin in the East End, they wrote, and it draws the finger of scorn alongside the gasp of horror. After all, fearful readers and the journalists who fed them stories truly believed east Enders were

all Ruffians. It seemed the papers used every story to reinforce that prejudice too. If the editors of the East End Adviser thought Martha Tabram's murder was used to spoil their neighborhood's reputation, though they were completely unprepared for what was coming, and they had no idea just how bad things could get. Regent's Park was built for the Lizzies and Josephs of London and their betters. But as we're starting to see, that's only one small part of london story.

When the old city was chewed and swallowed by the reads plans and the industrial era crept into the light, Londoners saw three faces of their home. To the west sat Court and Parliament. It was the city's government seat,

second at the city center. Tides of money were pulled in from all around the globe to create the banks and towers, all of which spilled into the creeping suburbs for the middle classes who served in them, and finally on the eastern side of the city and flowing ever eastward, towards the open sea were London's ducks and the factories and warehouses that hunched against them. Here's historian Drew Gray. The West End, or in popular parlance, the Best End,

was home to the wealthy. It was a playground for those who had money, and of course it was a magnet for people who wanted to work. So plenty of East London has worked in the West End, worked in the shops and the clubs, and the clubs and the and came over, you know, the women came over sometimes to collactic prostitutes and escorts in that part of town. And this is where the shops and the clubs in

the theaters of Victoria and London were. Um. You know, this is where you'd find the elegant streets and the squares around Bloomsbury. And this is this is what looked like the capital of the greatest empire of the world had ever seen, all of it, beautifully lit and well served by transport networks. If you contrast that with the East End of London, um, this is poor, dark, overcrowded

and largely degraded. So, as I've said before, the while the West End was affluent, the East End was affluent, kind of strich, stinking in the noses of those that

visited it. And that's the image we have of the contrast between the East and West ends of London in nineteenth century, and it's probably the image that most Londoners would have had, certainly most West Londoners and people from outside the capital as Londoners white, these factions growing in their home, popular songs and political cartoons arrived to tell the story of St. Giles and St. James. It was an easy way to paint a picture of a divided city. St.

James represented posh and aristocratic West London. St. Giles was the London of hard labor and heavy industry. The swelling middle classes and the ranks of money men and industrialists were squeezed in between the two worlds. Of course, all of this was far too black and white to give a clear picture of the real city. Here's Drew Gray once again. Well, the East End was poor, it was overcrowded, and it was home to those dirty trades that were necessary,

such as slaughtering and tanning. Those industries has always been placed in the east of the capital. Um that that goes right back in history. But Charles Bose Great Survey of Poverty, um He's macking of London reveals that, yeah, were certainly more areas of wealth and prosperity in the West End than in the East End. To the east End wasn't entirely riddled with poverty, and you will find pockets of deprivation across the capitol in West London as well.

So the contrast is a useful starting point. But London was a very mixed city in the eighteen hundreds, and poverty and wealth often lived cheap by jiles side by side. After visiting the city at the beginning of the nineteenth century, one American observer wrote that the constant press of carriage traffic, even in London's West End, created and I quote a universal hubbub, a sort of uniform grinding and shaking, like that experienced in a great mill with fifty pair of stones.

I should say that it came upon the ear like the fall of Niagara, and the city only continued to grow. In the East End. It wasn't just factories, it was also the homes of the people who worked in those factories and on the docks, and yeah, us who worked back in the West End too, but we're just too poor to live there. But grand as the houses were in the West End of London, the houses in the

East End where the holdovers from another era. Here's Adam Wood once again, when you combine that large movement of or poverty stricken residents into an area, as I say, which had been prosperous, but the buildings were getting older and dilapidated. Certainly the the the sewage facilities around the East End were getting dated. It just become too overcrowded

and more. From historian Drew Gray, I always trying to imagine that I'm going back in time and I'm stepping out onto the rather dirty streets of London in the nineteenth century. But I would describe the East End is a multicultural melting pot, a kind of vibrant community of people struggling to survive in a society, of course, which generally failed to support those that fell on on hard times.

So I see a series of communities, not one community, but several communities, and not always seeing eye to eye, where kind of new immigrants mingled with established ones and native east Enders for want of a better word, robbed shoulders with new arrivals and with slumming tourists, you know, wealthier people coming into the area to kind of got at what they could see. I see White Chapel is somewhere where poverty was endemic, but at the same time

there's an entrepreneurial spirit kind of everywhere. So words I'd use to describe White Chaplain in the would be bold, with brassy, sometimes shocking, often funny, amusing, always lively and exciting and ever changing. There was a city teaming with life, full of sorrows and struggles and excitement, and plenty of suffering, but also a place of work in a real home

too many. That's the world that the East London Adviser set out to defend in the days after Martha Tabram's murder, not to deny the seriousness of the crime, but to argue that there was so much more to Whitechapel than

the shadow of an uncaught killer. But to the journalists of the other papers out looking to scare up a story, and to the readers who followed them there, the neighborhood was most useful as the home to those men of doubtful character and immoral women who filled up illegal playhouses and worse, if some writers were praising London as the rome of modern history. Others weren't so celebratory. When he visited London in eighteen seventy six, American writer Henry James

had harsher words for the city. He dubbed it and I quote, the murky modern Babylon. James called London plenty of other things too, like a strangely mingled monster that stirred together all the classes and activities of English society. That one's probably my favorite image. But it also expressed a prejudice that we see over and over again in writers of the period, that London's worst inhabitants and impulses were all mixed up with its best, and it turned

the whole thing monstrous. But it was that phrase modern Babylon that carried the right weight of history, the mix of awe and horror and fear of foreigners from the East, to really catch on, even more so when the British journalist W. T. Stead used it in the title of a series of newspaper articles that shocked the reading public. In them, he described the depths of the city's depravity, and in doing so he launched a wave of fear and fury about life in the East End long before

the name Jack the Ripper was ever whispered. In July, the pall Mall Gazette gave it to readers a warning. All those who are squeamish and all those who are prudish the article read, and all those who pre for to live in a fool's paradise of imaginary innocence and purity were told that they would do well not to read the paper for the next four days, because it was about the publish a story of an actual pilgrimage

into a real hell. Of course, all of this meant that the next few issues of the paper sold like never before, and the story that it told was indeed hellish and diabolical. But if Bryant and May were bad enough for exploiting women and girls to make matches in their East End factory, well London was home to matchmaking of an even more depraved and creditory sort. In his series of articles called The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon, W. T. Stead described a hell that was far too close for

most of his listeners, child sex trafficking. He argued that young girls were being bought and sold rights in the heart of the British Empire sold off like sacrifices to a vicious god. Instead, it was the deepest damnation of Victorian society. And to add to that, he wrote, the

girls there were being shipped off to foreign sures. Gladstone and his Liberal government were focused on military campaigns overseas, so Stead realized that in order to make them pay attention, he needed the public's help, so he whipped them into a fury. In part because Stead crossed the line in order to demonstrate the trafficking, he did some himself. He convinced the London mother that he had a place for

her daughter as a domestic servant. Once he had the girl in his power, he drugged her and shipped her to Paris, where she was held by the Salvation Army. As Stead chronicled the process in the Paul mal Gazette, and not just his own paper either, London newspapers and the stories they published were reaching around the world. Stead would proudly announce that his articles on London sex trafficking were printed in every capital across Europe and in America too.

The sensation was international. In London, unauthorized reprints alone sold more than one and a half million copies. Now, obviously W. T. Stead had a noble vision behind his lured writing. To begin with, recent government reports had shown that at least thirty three British girls and women had been taken to brothels on the European continent in the short time between eighteen seventy nine and eighteen eighty, and at the time English law set the age of consent at just thirteen.

Instead correctly saw that the law itself was deeply criminal, a moral stain. His spate of articles was meant to scrub that away, and there's no doubt that on one level, the horrified response to his expose on child trafficking was a good thing. As a result, the law did change. But there were people Stead had not taken into account, which included the girl's parents. Their names were splashed all over the papers saying that they had sold their daughters

into sexual slavery. To their mind, they had trusted the word of a respected journalist when he offered to help their daughter find a good job. So in response they turned around and sued him for defrauding them and for committing the very same crime that he was blasting in his paper, which to be honest, seems fair. There were other consequences too, like the fact that Stead's made a tribute of modern Babylon served to deepen middle class distrust

of London's poor. Here's historian Louise Raw once again. In fact, there was this idea that the poor didn't love their children, which is a really strange one. How separate of a species have you got to be considered if people question whether you love your children. And there are even some commentators who say, well, you know, I've talked some of this poor pl and Jina, they actually do. And once those attitudes were exposed, it only got uglier, and some

of that ugliness was right there insteads articles. Here's a bit more from historian Drew Gray. One thing we have to remember, of course, is that most people were certainly most middle class people, even middle class people in London, and these are the people that read most of them new papers. Rarely ventured into the East End or any of London's other poorer areas, you know, it's like Saint Giles or the Borough in Southolk, and they just didn't

go there. Instead, they learned about those areas through the newspapers they read, and papers gave them a partial and a biased view of those areas, not unlike the way in which Darkest Africa was described by the missionaries who went there to loosely use the term civilize it in the nineteenth century, so colorful descriptions of the East End,

you know, featuring the strange people that lived there. There they're weird customs there, smelly food and the clothes that people we're all printed in ways that was similar to the descriptions offered of far away in exotic lands in India and China and Africa, all the parts of the all the parts touched by the British Empire, and people like William Stead, who pioneered what we could probably call you know, who pioneered what's been termed new journalism, recognized

the power that the media had to affect change as well as turning a profit by saying newspapers. It was the combined fear of the East End, whipped up by reporting like the Maiden Tribute stories and the growing fear of gang violence stemming from the Regent's Park murder that lifted Martha Tabram's death to the headlines. Fear and horror about sex among London's poor was already at a boiling point.

The doctor who examined Martha's body suggested that she hadn't been raped, but that barely broke through the real lens by which middle class readers saw the East End with someone like Pearly Paul as the main witness to an East End murder investigation, murder and prostitution were stitched together for the public, and it's no coincidence that the London docks in the East End were the places where people

and plunder from around the world entered Britain's bloodstream. When the Sailor's knife was found after the Regent's Park murder and identified as the murder weapon, it could only have reinforced the East Ends reputation for the mysterious and dangerous and the fear and suspicion that many readers had of

lands beyond England Shore. It was exactly the kind of thinking that Britain's leaders had used to justify the invasion and plundering of lands around the world, so of course it brought campaigners to the East End too, As we'll see in the future, most of the attention on the East End was like this. The women and girls who worked in the match factory were looked at as almost subhuman species. The poor were considered at best, lost souls in need of saving, or reprobates in need of reform.

The common attitude was that the monstrous darkness of the East End needed to be conquered and brought to heal. And all of that was before murders began to spot Whitechapel with blood, and when sensationalist stories sold papers in the name of righteous campaigning. While that could only have journalists drooly over a good East End story, one that would trigger all of the worst prejudices of their London readership. A summer of anxiety was about to become the autumn

of terror. A sailor's knife and a soldier's bayonet, tools of empire and weapons of war. These were the objects conjured up by the ink stained hands of London journalists to evoke a shutter of horror, not because they were new, but because they were being used in London itself. And

then Charles Cross found the body of Polly Nichols. Like the man who discovered Martha Tabram's body, Charles was a laborer headed off to work in the early hours of the morning when he saw something lying on the cobbles, slumped against a gate. Another man going by join him, and they approached. The shape was a woman with a bonnet tossed to the side. At first the two men couldn't tell if she was asleep. Her face was still warm,

but her hands were deathly cold. Charles said to the other, I think she's dead, and they ran off to find a policeman. The constables they found, fetched a hand carts and a nearby doctor. He pronounced her dead and ordered them to move her body to the mortuary for examination. But it was when the constables lifted her that they saw the blood. It ran from her body to the

gutter and covered her back. It covered everything Polly's body, the stones of the street, and the officer's hands too, so they examined the surrounding roads to see if there were any marks or traces elsewhere. Nearby, they checked the neighborhood's railway lines and embankments, but beyond the location where her body had been found, there were no other signs of Polly's blood. Soon enough, though, it would stain everything.

When the doctor arrived to make his examination in the mortuary at ten a m. He began by cataloging the wounds that would become the next press sensation. Her throats had been cut and several deep, jagged wounds crossed her abdomen. Experience and evidence led him to surmise that the cuts

had been made with a very sharp knife. The number of wounds made him think that the attack had taken as long as five minutes from start to finish, a brutally long demonstration of violence, and it had happened just one mile east of where Martha Tabram had been killed. It had begun. Events were now set in motion that would possess an entire nation a deadly series of killings that would become forever known as the White Chapel Murders.

That's it for this week's episode of Unobscured. Stick around after this short sponsor break for a preview of what's in store for next week. Emma had suffered a brutal attack in the street. Afterwards, she was able to make her way back to the lodging house where she was staying. There, she told other lodgers what had been to her. They helped her to the hospital. Along the way, she told the women helping her that she was attacked by three men,

and one of them was only nineteen years old. Emma even pointed out the place where she was attacked as they passed by, and she talked with the doctors who treated her wounds. All of this had reached the papers within a week of her death, after the inquest held by coroner Win Baxter, was reported in major newspapers like The Times of London and the front page of Lloyd's

Weekly News. Of course, almost five months later, it was more profitable for The Star to leave out those details and replaced them with the suggestion of a mysterious killer who had already taken three lives. It conjured up the image of a figure haunting White Chapel who would never really leave. It didn't hurt the paper if it brought in some cash in the process of spinning up a

false narrative of events. The thing is, though Emma's murder was horrible enough, there's no question that her death, along with Martha Tabraham's and now the murder of Polly Nichols, were a terrible sign of life in East London. No price can be put on any human life, but an evening issue of The Star, well, that was just one halfpenny. Unobscured was created by me Aaron Manky and produced by Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Josh Thane in partnership with

I Heart Radio. Research and writing for this season is all the work of my right hand man Carl Nellis and the brilliant Chad Lawson composed the brand new soundtrack. Learn more about our contributing historians, source material and links to our other shows over at history unobscured dot com, and until next time, thanks for listening. Un Obscured is

a production of iHeart Radio and Erin Mankey. For more podcasts for My heart Radio, visit I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.