Amy Milne-Smith, Principal Investigator - September 23, 2017

Overcrowding and Disease
The Wellcome Archive has digitized all Medical Officer of Health Reports for London. The reports on Whitechapel are not specific enough to be plotted on the map, but the data collected does demonstrate what medical authorities were most concerned about in the area. While the official reports track causes of violent deaths, it was hardly the area of greatest concern. The year of the Jack the Ripper murders, Joseph Loane does go out of his way to emphasize that such killings are rare. Frustrated that there was a popular opinion that Whitechapel was in some way the murder capital of London, he makes clear in his report from 1888 that in the past 26 years there were only 19 murders recorded, 5 of which were from the one unusual serial killer. Even in cases of violent deaths, the MOH charts clearly demonstrate that suffocation and accidental fractures were the leading causes of such deaths.

Most reports focus on infectious disease and its connection to poor housing conditions or lack of facilities. The greatest challenges to the Ministry of Health were overcrowding and poverty. In 1886 Loane expressed frustration that their efforts to improve Bell Lane had been thwarted due to an increasing number of people coming into the area. Lodging houses were singled out as the greatest cause of the spreading of influenza in 1891. The following year Loane noted that vaccination efforts to combat smallpox were stunted because of the influence of common lodging houses. In 1895 Loane believed the greatest smallpox risk actually came from Salvation Army Shelters.

Loane pointed out that one reason lodging houses became so overcrowded was a direct result of the Mansion House Fund. The Mansion House Relief Fund was established in 1886 by the Lord Mayor of London. That winter was the coldest in thirty years and the city was facing a crisis of unemployment. The fund received a large infusion of donations after riots shocked the West End of London February 7-8. These riots were perceived as an invasion of the East End poor into the heart of London.¹ While applicants had to apply to the fund and be deemed worthy of help, the managers of the charity worried that it attracted more people to London rather than solving the problem.

They say the difficulties of discrimination are great, that the local agencies cannot suddenly meet new demands upon them, and that the fund itself draws applicants to London, thereby increasing the congestion already caused by the popular belief that there ‘is always work in London.’²

Overcrowding and unemployment were rampant in London, and the Ripper murders only underscored these problems.

The Sweating System
A major concern for authorities looking at the East End was the so-called “sweating system” of labour. Manual labourers, typically in the clothing industry, were subcontracted out for incredibly low wages, and lived in cramped and crowded conditions. This system was pointed out as a problem as early as 1850, and had become a crisis by the 1880s. A Report on the Sweating System in Leeds pointed to Whitechapel as the most problematic area of concern.

The quality of the house accommodation for working people in Leeds is, however, of a very superior character to that of the east end of London, and there is an absence of that appearance of misery and squalor which makes Whitechapel and St Georges-in-the-East so oppressive to the stranger...the Jewish toilers in Leeds are better off than their brethren in London.³

Whitechapel was the go-to comparison for misery and deprivation.

The Jewish community was of particular interest to the British government, but it was also a community that seemed to defy categorization. Many Jewish immigrants worked in the tailoring and shoe-making industries for very low wages in concentrated areas in and around Whitechapel. A map of Jewish East London in 1899 shows Flower and Dean Street, Old Montague Street, and Booth Street as over 90% Jewish Residents. The Jewish population tended to shun public relief; in some ways this helped to establish them as part of the “deserving poor.” As waves of Jewish immigrants flooded into the East End of London in the 1880s, the community was even more determined in its goal to keep its members outside of the Poor Law system.⁴

¹ Amy Milne-Smith, London Clubland: A Cultural History of Gender and Class in late-Victorian Britain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 167-200.
² The Spectator, 20 November 1886, 2.
³ Report to Board of Trade on Sweating System in Leeds, by Labour Correspondent, C.5513 LXXXVI 19th Century House of Commons Sessional Papers (1888), 561
⁴ David Feldman, D., “Jews in the East End, Jews in the Polity, ‘The Jew’ in the Text,” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 13, (2011). N.p.