It wasn´t easy being poor in Victorian London, if you had a job you would properly only earn enough to survive and if you didn’t… Starvation and malnutrition was common and hygiene was bad. Typhus, tb, smallpox and cholera flourished and many kids didn´t live to see their first birthday. The living conditions were horrible, old, worn-down houses with families crammed together in a single room, no pluming and properly high rent. But even among the poor there where different rank. The “rich” lived in the front house and the more poor you where the further in, in the dark backyards you lived.
Within the shadow of The City walls is London's oldest synagogue, the Bevis Marks, whereas Whitechapel is where the Salvation Army was founded and the original Liberty Bell was forged. However, what everyone remembers most about this area are the Victorian slum streets that were stalked by the most infamous serial killer of all, Jack the Ripper.
At No. 90 Whitechapel High Street once stood George Yard Buildings, where Jack the Ripper's first victim was discovered in August 1888. A second murder occurred some weeks later, in hanbury Street, behind a seedy lodging house at No. 29, is where Jack the Ripper left his third mutilated victim, "Dark" Annie Chapman. A double murder followed, and then, after a month's lull, came the death on this street of Marie Kelly, the Ripper's last victim and his most revolting murder of all. He had been able to work indoors this time, and Kelly, a young widow, was found strewn all over the room, charred remains of her clothing in the fire grate. Jack the Ripper's identity never has been discovered, although theories abound, including, among others, the cover-up of a prominent member of the British aristocracy, the artist Walter Sickert, and Francis Twomblety, an American quack doctor.
