When we first met, back in the soft crevices of history, my boyfriend worked in a pub that happened to be on a Jack the Ripper tour. Every evening a group of tourists would come in and order a glass of water each, and the manager would roll his eyes, and off they’d shuffle to look at another autopsy photograph in an alley. He and I lived in Whitechapel for 12 years after that, and I’d watch the serial killer tours walking slowly through our little streets with respectful bemusement.
The skyline changed behind the tour groups, sky-scrapers emerging like a sort of architectural knotweed, and the murder tours were eclipsed by street art tours, which changed the area in a different way. Yet both tours imposed an authoritative order on things that might have previously escaped it. A great episode of the This American Life podcast focused on ghost tours in Savannah, Georgia, and the stories guides told about enslaved people betraying or seducing their masters. “If you look at them as little moral fables,” noted reporter Chenjerai Kumanyika, “the message of these stories is that everything would be fine if everyone just stayed in their place.”
The story of Jack the Ripper was part of my local landscape, but it’s long been part of the landscape of the whole country, too, a series of brutal murders commodified for our entertainment. A Ripper industry has been thriving since the discovery of his second victim, Annie Chapman, in 1888. – Locals paid a penny to view her body, and fruit sellers set up around the scene to cater for the crowds. Since then Jack the Ripper has become one of Britain’s most lucrative cultural exports, as recognisable and exportable a brand as the Beatles.
While the tours continue in Whitechapel, the Ripper marketing concept is strong enough that it no longer needs to trade on any connection to east London. A couple of years ago a hotel in Leeds invited guests to enjoy a two-course meal before watching “a team of clinicians dissect the Rippers victims, looking at how they were ‘mutilated’ using ‘real specimens’ and new technology”. The most recent business venture is a Jack the Ripper-themed “immersive horror” bar and restaurant in Southsea. Nearly 300 people have signed a letter to Portsmouth city council asking them to take action against the bar, one of whom is a direct descendent of Chapman. (The owner told local press how the scandal had already led to thousands of bookings.)
What remains even more interesting to me is the way the world balances its repulsion towards sexual violence with its never-ending fascination with it as entertainment. We’ve seen serial killers, such as Ted Bundy, repeatedly glamorised, their crimes readjusted in our rear-view mirrors until they appear simply as edgy stylistic quirks, like an earring or ripped jeans. And, going back long before Victorian times, we’ve seen murder victims objectified and (especially if they were sex workers, as the Ripper’s victims were assumed to be) blamed for their own deaths. On Radio 4, historian Hallie Rubenhold said a bar like this is “a real problem” because the victims, Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly, “were real women, Jack the Ripper was a real person – it’s not Jekyll and Hyde or Frankenstein.” How can we thrill at their deaths when similar violence happens every day?
A 2018 study found a large proportion of people still believe sex workers can’t get raped, or that they deserve it. On average in this country, three women are killed by men every week, while one in four women has been a victim of rape or sexual assault. One in five schoolchildren have experienced or witnessed sexual harassment at school and, according to the most comprehensive study of its kind, sexually abusive language has become “normalised” in British classrooms. A spokesperson for East London Rape Crisis (speaking from the borough where Ripper tourism thrives) said: “We are almost at the stage where sexual violence has been decriminalised.”
The problem with the Ripper industry is not just that the victims are erased but that the distance encourages us to normalise these kinds of crimes. The last time I stumbled upon a Jack the Ripper tour was shortly after Sarah Everard’s murder, and the horrifying reality of the tourists’ hen-night jollity made me feel quite breathless. Ripper tourism and the appetite for a bar like the one in Southsea reveals a grim and uncomfortable reality that no suggestion of offering profits from a cocktail to a “women’s rights charity” (as the owner has floated) can hide. They fulfil a horrible need in a society where sexual violence is quotidian – . The only clear way to escape it seems to be to laugh at it. People are desperate for a chance to be further anaesthetised to the knowledge that men frequently kill, that marginalised women remain especially vulnerable, and how quickly a person can become dehumanised, a Halloween costume, a joke.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
