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AP Wolf
Assistant Commissioner
Username: Apwolf
Post Number: 1250
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Saturday, August 14, 2004 - 4:10 pm: |       |
After reading a history of the following - much more extensive than quoted here - I was left with the abiding feeling that the suspect market is wide open, for all manner of toffs slummed it in the East End at this establishment doing their good deed. From what I understand even your Druitt had connection with the place, and lord knows who else beside Booth, Dickens and probably uncle Charles:
'Toynbee Hall was founded in 1884 in the East End of London in an area that then was a Jewish ghetto and red light district. Jack the Ripper committed some of his crimes in the alley that runs behind the building and nearby is the Isle of Dogs, the historic port district of London housing Canary Wharf and the East India Company docks and the Cockney dock workers.
Toynbee was begun partially as a religious mission but primarily as an activist initiative by graduates of Oxford and Cambridge to set up a laboratory for social reform where they would have direct contact with the poor. Young men moved into rooms at the settlement house and lived among the slum residents. They created programs, helped neighborhood people set up their own groups, befriended local workers, and over the following half century ran a variety of intellectual discussion groups that shaped construction of the welfare state in England. Toynbee was a model of Victorian social reform that Jane Addams and other reformers imported to America and enshrined in settlement houses like Hull House and the Northwestern University Settlement in Chicago and the Henry Street Settlement in New York.'
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AP Wolf
Assistant Commissioner
Username: Apwolf
Post Number: 1252
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Saturday, August 14, 2004 - 4:38 pm: | |
The girls have something to say as well:
'In the autumn of 1888, the attention of the "classes" as well as the "masses" was riveted on a series of brutal murders of prostitutes residing in lodging houses in the Whitchapel area of East London.58 Public response to the murders was widespread and diverse, but the people who mobilized over the murders were almost exclusively male. An army of west End men, fascinated by the murders and bent on hunting the Ripper, invaded the East End.59 Meanswhile, a half-dozen male vigilance committees were set up in Whitechapel-by Toynbee Hall, by the Jewish community, by the radical and socialist workingmen’s clubs.60 These male patrols were organized to protect women, but they also constituted surveillance of the unrespectable poor, and if low-life women in particular. They were explicitly modeled on existing purity organizations already active in the area that had helped to close down two hundred brothels in the East End in the year before the Ripper murders.61 As we have seen, the message of social purity to men was mixed: it demanded that men control heir own sexuality, but it gave them power to control women’s sexuality as well, since it called don them to respect their women and to repress brothels and streetwalker.
These generalizations are borne out by the Ripper episode, when men ostensibly out to hunt the Ripper often harassed women on the streets; husbands threatened wives with "ripping" them up in their homes; and little boys in working-class Poplar and suburban Tunbridge Wells itimidated and tormented girls by playing at Jack the Ripper. 62 Female vulnerability extended well beyond the "danger zone" of Whitechapel: throughout London respectable women, afraid to venture out along at night, were effectively placed under "house arrest" and made dependent on male protection. Despite the public outcry against the "male monster" who "stalks the streets of London"63 in search of fallen women, public attention inevitably reverted to the degraded conditions of the Whitechapel victims themselves. "The degraded and depraved lives of the women," observed Canon Barnett of Toynbee Hall in the Times, were more "appalling then the actual murders." 64 Men like Barnett finally manipulated public opinion and consolidated it behind closing down lodging houses where the murdered victims once lived and replacing them with artisan dwellings. Through the surveillance of vigilance committees the murders helped to intensify repressive activities committees the murders helped to intensify repressive activities already underway in the whitehapel area and to hasten the reorganization of prostitution in the East End.65
During the Ripper manhunt, feminists were unable to mobilize any counteroffensive against widespread male intimidation of women. Josephine Butler and others did express concern that the uproar over the murders would lead to the repression of brothels and to subsequent homelessness of women; but these were isolated interventions in an overwhelmingly male-dominated debate.' |
Christopher T George
Chief Inspector
Username: Chrisg
Post Number: 846
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Monday, August 16, 2004 - 12:39 pm: | |
Hi, AP
Could you please provide the reference from which you are quoting? Thanks.
All the best
Chris
Christopher T. George
North American Editor
Ripperologist
http://www.ripperologist.info
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AP Wolf
Assistant Commissioner
Username: Apwolf
Post Number: 1258
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Monday, August 16, 2004 - 1:14 pm: | |
Sorry Chris...
very slack of me. I should have quoted the relevant sources of course.
The second feminist piece is from:
'Desire
THE POLITICS OF SEXUALITY
Edited by:
Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson
Preface to the British Edition Rosalind Coward
Published by :
VIRAGO Press Limited 1984
41 William IV Street, London WC 2N 4 DB'
The first quote I'm sure is from the on-line 'Victorian Dictionary' but I will check to confirm.
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David O'Flaherty
Inspector
Username: Oberlin
Post Number: 379
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Monday, August 16, 2004 - 1:26 pm: | |
A cutting letter to the Daily News (UK) from the feminist Florence Fenwick Miller (2 Oct 1888 near the bottom of transcript) is also an interesting read. It's titled "Woman Killing No Murder".
Cheers,
Dave |
Christopher T George
Chief Inspector
Username: Chrisg
Post Number: 848
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Monday, August 16, 2004 - 1:48 pm: | |
Hi, AP
Thanks for providing the perteninent reference. Much appreciated.
All the best
Chris
Christopher T. George
North American Editor
Ripperologist
http://www.ripperologist.info
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Mephisto
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Sunday, August 15, 2004 - 11:55 am: | |
Hello Mr. Wolf,
Thank you for the interesting and informative post.
Is the "Canon Barnett" you mentioned related to the Rev. Samuel Barnett who was questioned by police during the "Autum of Terror"? Are they two names that refer to the same person?
Best regards,
};-)}
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