When I began working on the Whitechapel project, my first area step towards familiarizing myself with the late 19th century district face was through maps. By the end of the project, I had seen professional illustrations, messy sketches, hand-drawn alleyways, dramatized accounts of a labyrinthine carnival of terrors, and police reviews. All of these ingredients of Whitechapel’s imagery carried with me as I grew to grasp both the realities and fantasies of the East End, and their place within historic reconstruction. My earliest (and fondest) encounter with Whitechapel’s popular imagery was in its liminality, frequently expressed through characters from serial novels that smoothly walked off the pages of fiction into opinionated accounts on the recent public house fracas. I grew to become almost desensitized to the vocabulary of Victorian press qualifiers, each attempting to compete in terms of how boldly they could characterize Whitechapel’s residents and architecture. In theatrical departures, Whitechapel took on an entirely alien shape in the contemporary optic, which was both invasive and visibly different. The audiences these portrayals were meant for were constantly fluctuating, and it was not uncommon that Whitechapel’s physical face was moderated for the function and occasion. During murder inquests the Working Lads’ Institute was hectic and reprehensibly filthy, while during the visits of nobility it became the perennial spot of civility in the district. As I continued my own personal research alongside this project, I was drawn to the economy of urban and social visualizations that riddled Whitechapel’s topography.
As a researcher, one of the unique challenges was learning to parse these images into content. One of the most fascinating public discussions in the onset of the Ripper murders was on the subject of pictorals and posters, which were decried as eroding morality and creating a sensational society where dramatic images produced violence. In the Booth notebooks, a series of handwritten documentations of Whitechapel’s streets in the company of a police officer, the authors rely frequently on the condition of windows and the appearance of children to determine the quality of the neighborhood. Likewise, when Salvation Army schemes and religious settlements quarreled over the quality of care they could provide to the wretchedly poor, the metric of public alcoholism often surfaced. I found these methods for gauging the district’s image were constantly at odds to determine what produced the overwhelming negativity that overcame the district in its worst episodes. Any argument over which organization deserved to rescue Whitechapel from its ‘self-inflicted’ disaster usually boiled down to attacks on mandate, and not the condition of the actual inhabitants. For me, the substance of Whitechapel’s images were often best observed between the lines of these disputes: in the cultural engagements and internal events constantly circulating the district. Even in the worst of its apparent pandaemonium, Whitechapel’s agency was expressed through debates, union meetings, the often over-enthusiastic Vigilance Committee, and other organs of the district. When any danger or social unrest struck, Whitechapel’s livelihood was scarcely disrupted for more than a few days. As a researcher completing my segment of the project, my takeaway is that in the deluge of pessimistic accounts, it is equally crucial to remember the district’s resilience.