Jack the Ripper and the London Press
L. Perry Curtis Jr.
Abstract
Press coverage of the 1888 mutilation murders attributed to Jack the Ripper was, of necessity, filled with gaps and silences, for the killer remained unknown, and Victorian journalists had little experience reporting serial murders and sex crimes. This book examines how fifteen London newspapers—dailies and weeklies, highbrow and lowbrow—presented the Ripper news, in the process revealing much about the social, political, and sexual anxieties of late Victorian Britain and the role of journalists in reinforcing social norms. It surveys the mass newspaper culture of the era, delving into the nat ... More
Press coverage of the 1888 mutilation murders attributed to Jack the Ripper was, of necessity, filled with gaps and silences, for the killer remained unknown, and Victorian journalists had little experience reporting serial murders and sex crimes. This book examines how fifteen London newspapers—dailies and weeklies, highbrow and lowbrow—presented the Ripper news, in the process revealing much about the social, political, and sexual anxieties of late Victorian Britain and the role of journalists in reinforcing social norms. It surveys the mass newspaper culture of the era, delving into the nature of sensationalism and the conventions of domestic murder news. Analyzing the fifteen newspapers—several of which emanated from the East End, where the murders took place—the book shows how journalists played on the fears of readers about law and order by dwelling on lethal violence rather than sex, offering gruesome details about knife injuries but often withholding some of the more intimate details of the pelvic mutilations. It also considers how the Ripper news affected public perceptions of social conditions in Whitechapel.
Keywords:
press coverage,
Jack the Ripper,
Victorian journalists,
sex crimes,
serial murders,
sexual anxieties,
Victorian Britain
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2001 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780300088724 |
| Published to Yale Scholarship Online: October 2013 |
DOI:10.12987/yale/9780300088724.001.0001 |
