# Read the first page of The complete Jack the Ripper by Donald Rumbelow Read the opening of The complete Jack the Ripper by Donald Rumbelow free, no signup. A documented history of the Whitechapel murders, suspects, evidence, and myths. - Page: https://uncovered.ink/read/the-complete-jack-the-ripper-donald-rumbelow - Genre: Crime history - Year: 1975 - ISBN: 9780141914367 - Read it blind (cover and title hidden): https://uncovered.ink/?b=9780141914367&s=read-page - Buy: https://bookshop.org/a/125786/9780141914367 - Borrow: https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=9780141914367 ## The opening @@CHAP@@ 1. Outcast London ‘This street is in the East End’: so begins Arthur Morrison’s Tales of Mean Streets, which is about life at the end of the nineteenth century. There is no need to say in the East End of what. The East End is a vast city, as famous in its way as any the hand of man has made. But who knows the East End? It is down through Cornhill and out beyond Leaden-hall Street and Aldgate Pump, one will say; a shocking place, where he once went with a curate; an evil plexus of slums that hide human creeping things; where filthy men and women live on penn’orths of gin, where collars and clean shirts are decencies unknown, where every citizen wears a black eye, and none ever combs his hair. The East End is a place, says another, which is given over to the Unemployed. And the Unemployed is a race whose token is a clay pipe, and whose enemy is soap; now and again it migrates bodily to Hyde Park with banners, and furnishes adjacent police courts with disorderly drunks. Still another knows the East End only as the place whence begging letters come; there are coal and blanket funds there, all perennially insolvent, and everybody else wants a day in the country. Many and misty are people’s notions of the East End; and each is commonly but the distorted shadow of a minor feature. To the average Victorian the East End was outcast London. There was a feeling that it was separated from the rest of the metropolis geographically as well as spiritually and economically. Its people were as strange as the African pygmies and the Polynesian natives with whom they were often equated by journalists and sociologists who wished to draw attention to its problems. So little was known about them, until slumming became fashionable in the 1870s and 1880s, that an educated woman who was visiting St George’s-in-the-East in the 1870s remarked with some astonishment on the fact that the people didn’t sleep squatting against a wall, and that they lived in houses and not in railway carriages, as she had expected. For the greater part of Victoria’s reign, the East End was ignored by the Church. Occasional lip service was paid to the needs of the ‘lapsed masses’ but very little practical help was given them. An impact was beginning to be made on some of the area’s major social problems by philanthropists and private charities when the Revd Samuel Barnett and his wife moved to St Jude’s vicarage in 1873. The previous incumbent was still in residence and too ill to be moved, so they were forced to take temporary lodgings nearby. The landlady had some careless habits: she apologized one day for not serving Mr Barnett his usual rice pudding as a mouse had drowned in it. Many years later, there was still a rasp in Mrs Barnett’s voice when she retold the story for her memoirs. Their church, St Jude’s, was an isolated and empty one. At the first Sunday service there was a congregation of six or seven old women who all expected some dole for attending. The newly hired organist played tunes on a damp-stained piano and Mrs Barnett, who could not sing a note in tune, led the hymn singing. Most of their parishioners had been lured away by the Sunday street market in Middlesex Street (Petticoat Lane), where card sharps, thimble riggers and swindlers of all sorts, as well as men seeking casual work, went in their thousands hoping to get enough money to see them through the week. Equally disgraceful to Mrs Barnett were the herds of cattle goaded through the streets of Whitechapel each week to the slaughterhouses in and around Aldgate. Sometimes the horns would catch in the spokes of moving wheels and the animals, maddened with pain and fear, would scramble onto the pavement scattering the crowds. At the slaughterhouses, which were often ordinary shops, the sheep would be dragged in backwards by their legs and the bullocks hounded in by dogs and blows, while small boys clustered excitedly round the door and passers-by stepped as best they could through the blood and urine flooding the pavement. ## Books with a similar feel - [Killing for Company by Brian Masters](https://uncovered.ink/read/killing-for-company-brian-masters.md) - [Hide And Seek by Ian Rankin](https://uncovered.ink/read/hide-and-seek-ian-rankin.md) - [The Survivors Club by Lisa Gardner](https://uncovered.ink/read/the-survivors-club-lisa-gardner.md) - [Blue Heaven by C.J. Box](https://uncovered.ink/read/blue-heaven-c-j-box.md) - [Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens](https://uncovered.ink/read/where-the-crawdads-sing-delia-owens.md) - [Razorblade Tears by S. A. Cosby](https://uncovered.ink/read/razorblade-tears-s-a-cosby.md) --- Source: Uncovered (https://uncovered.ink). 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