Whitechapel, London
In 1881 the census registered 1 million people living in a district in the East end of London known as Whitechapel. The overcrowded district had 189 people per acre; the Booth district of Whitechapel had 256 people per acre compared to London where there were only 45 people per acre.
Whitechapel was a slum known for poverty, crime, and prostitutes with an annual death rate of 50 per1,000 people dying from diseases such as tuberculosis, rickets and scarlet fever. Children were seen as a strain on their parents’ resources rather than a blessing with 2 out of 10 children dying under the age of five.
Over population and a lack of housing was a primary issue and to accommodate more people, houses were divided into apartments. Families who could afford to pay rent lived cramped together in a small damp, insect-infested room. Those who couldn’t afford a room could rent a bed for 8 hours at common lodging houses. The homeless and less fortunate had a few options available depending on how much money they had. They could spend the night in one of three ways; paying a penny to sit-up, two pence to be tied to rope and ‘hang-over’, or 4 or 5 pennies to lie down.
Sanitation was almost non-existent. People collected water from shared standpipes on the street and used poorly maintained shared outside latrines.
Unemployment rates were at an all-time high but those lucky enough to find a job, worked long hours for little wages. Employment opportunities were limited to shoe-makes, tailors, railway construction, slaughterhouse, street-sweepers, or dock workers.
Those who couldn’t find employment could go to a workhouse, but this was usually the last resort as it was a place of poor sanitation, hunger, and violence where people who were sick, old, young, or unable to afford a bed were forced to work to earn their keep.
The people who stayed at the workhouse were referred to as inmates that were forced to work to earn their keep. The inmates had strict rules about what they could eat, when they could sleep, and how much they had to work. Work consisted of chopping wood, breaking stones, and cleaning.
Families were separated, with children and adults only allowed to see each other once a day.
The medical officers were often young with little to no medical knowledge and the inmates were responsible for the cost of their own medical supplies.
Fresh food was almost non-existent and hard to come by. The streets of Whitechapel were littered with filth, pollution and the smell of sewage hung in the air. The area was known for many of the social issues that came with overcrowding and poverty such as alcoholism, gangs, crime, violence and sex work.
Life was much harder for women; they owned only what they wore and carried in their pockets and were commonly referred to as ‘unfortunates’. Work for women was almost non-existent, and to make money many turned to prostitution out of desperation. However, the lack of contraception forced women to terminate unwanted pregnancies at dirty back street clinics which resulted in many women dying from infections afterwards.
Petty crimes, alcohol-related violence, gang crime and even protection rackets were commonplace and almost unmanageable by London's police force. Women were easy targets for assault, rape and murder and many turned to alcohol as a means to cope.
Whitechapel streets were a maze of dimly lit alleyways and dark courtyards that had multiple entrances and exit points making the streets difficult to police. There were criminal hotspots where even the police were afraid to enter let alone pratol the streets. The police department as a whole lacked structure which resulted in crimes being mislabeled, evidence going missing or being tampered with and violent criminals being released back onto the streets.
