I, Ripper

It struck me that in my several times here in Whitechapel, I’d never really looked at the place in full clarity. Now, at last, I had space and time and opportunity to behold the hell den where the killer lurked, the ladies walked, the gentlemen searched, and sex and death were in the air.

What you saw, on Commercial Street, at least, was a great bazaar of humanity, a sort of gathering of tribes for sustenance of all sorts (all sorts were available) amid clamor, dust, the smell of horse ordure and human excrement, various foodstuffs, including meat and fruit and candy offered from the abundant stalls clotting the sidewalks, the eau de toilette the ladies presumably splashed about between commercial transactions, and the ever present London tang of coal-oil smoke from all the burners at the hearth, which I am told sometimes combined with the evil sea dew to create the city’s cottony billows of fog. But mostly, you felt the hubbub, the bustle, the clamor, the circus-midway urgency of people unconsciously living out their lives without much thought or hope or worry.

It was a festival of hattery, as none in those days went uncapped. The men beneath, most in heavy frock coats or tweedy Norfolks, all with dark ties cinched about their necks, and most obscured by beard, were unknowable and mysterious as they drifted this way and that. Not all were hunting for Judys, but I think it fair to say that all were hunting for something, be it a beer in a public house, an oyster in a stall, a piece of meat on a stick, a glowing globe of fruit, a new trinket or toy, a bonnet for a lover, an office for a lawyer, a freak with no nose, conjoined twins, magic shows, minstrels true Negro or just paint, or what have you, and I do not know what you have. Some were just slumming, as coming in from the sober City to see the show was quite the habit.

Meanwhile, those of lower origin and destiny fought for space amid the costers’ stalls, coal heavers and dock laborers, dolly mops and magsmen, cabinetmakers and seamstresses, bug hunters and mudlarks, and “entertainers” of various type, ballad singers and oratorical beggars and running patterers and the street-fire king, who devoured and disgorged great scuts of flame for a penny a pyre.

Dust rose from the streets as the cabs and wagons and tram buses coursed slowly up or down, the horses pausing now and again to beshit themselves and the cobblestones, all of it creating a mad din that, heard once, would ring forever in your ears (I hear it now, in a quiet study, twenty-four years later). God was not entirely absent: At street corners the anointed addressed small flocks of believers or want-to-believes and threw scripture hard and loud at them. Commerce of a thousand kinds transpired. But Babylon demanded its obeisance as well: Down side streets were the penny gaffs, wherein, or so it was claimed, scantily clad young maidens cavorted to bad music. Gambling went on everyplace, and if you looked sex-wanting but frightened of a real Judy, a scurvy-looking fellow might approach and offer you French postcards from underneath his coat, these being glimpses of carnal entanglements that took some deciphering. Rat killing seemed an enjoyable sport for certain Johnnies, while others turned to dog fighting, all forms of barbarism offered to the top hats without a blush of shame.

So much frenzy, so much throbbing, so much shove and slip and shuffle, everywhere, everywhere. Chanters, second-edition sellers, boardwalkers, strawers, mountebanks, clowns, jugglers, conjurors, grease removers, nostrum vendors, fortune-tellers, French polishers, turnpike sailors, various classes of lurkers and peepers, stenographic-card sellers, racetrack-card sellers. It was all illuminated by naphtha lamps atop high poles but also by swaths of glare from the public houses, of which there appeared to be one every thirty or forty feet. Besides the Alma, I passed the Ten Bells, the Queen’s Head, the Britannia, the Horn of Plenty, the King’s Share, and the Princess Alice. Each was full packed, in full swing, in full glug, for I should add that liquor was the fuel that kept the human fires of Whitechapel ablaze, which meant that it slowed speech, slurred and slowed and misguided decisions, stuttered steps, and slewed behavior this way and that. A man fully drunk is not fully human: He pisses and shits without remorse, he speaks without thought (the truth, usually, God help us), and he’s quick to fist or blade or bullet. So that, too, that distance from normal discourse, hung over everything like a cloud, a pall, garish in the grotesque play of the light on the puddles in the street or the windows across the way or the shine of the beaver in the hats. No wonder the slummers came to watch.