The worst slum in London, by the time of Jack’s visits, Whitechapel had already become the “other London” more than three hundred years earlier. Like an island within the greater island of England itself, Whitechapel was its own world. Cut off from the wealth surrounding it, the city was more prison than home to its many citizens.

Writing of the period 1883–1884, actor Jacob Adler wrote, “The further we penetrated into this Whitechapel, the more our hearts sank. Was this London? Never in Russia, never later in the worst slums of New York, were we to see such poverty as in the London of the 1880s.”

Copyright 2007 Virginia Baker, All Rights Reserved