It had been known since the English stopped using wood for fuel in the seventeenth century that smoke from burning coal damaged life and all of its edifices, but this did not dissuade people from using it. In the 1700s, it is estimated that there were 40,000 houses with 360,000 chimneys in the metropolis. By the late 1800s, coal consumption had gone up, especially among the poor. The approaching visitor smelled London many miles before he saw it.
Skies were sodden and blotchy, streets were paved with soot, and limestone buildings and ironworks were being eaten away. The polluted thick mist lingered longer and became denser as it took on a different hue than it had in the past. Watercourses dating from Roman times became so foul that they were filled in. A public health report written in 1889 declared that at the rate London was polluting itself, engineers would soon be forced to fill in the Thames, which was fouled with the excrement of millions every time the tide seeped in. There was good reason to wear dark clothing, and on some days the sulfurous, smoky air was so hellish and the stench of raw sewage so disgusting that Londoners walked about with burning eyes and lungs, handkerchiefs held over their faces.
The Salvation Army reported in 1890 that out of a population of approximately 5.6 million in the Great Metropolis, 30,000 were prostitutes, and 32,000 men, women, and juveniles were in prison. A year earlier, in 1889,160,000 people were convicted of drunkenness, 2,297 committed suicide, and 2,157 were found dead on streets, in parks, and in hovels. In the Great Metropolis, slightly less than one-fifth of the population was homeless, in workhouses or asylums, in hospitals, or ravaged by poverty and near starvation. Most of the “raging sea” of misery, to the founder of the Salvation Army, General William Booth, was located in London’s East End, where a cunning predator like Jack the Ripper could easily butcher drunken, homeless prostitutes.
When the Ripper was terrorizing the East End, the population of his hunting ground was estimated at a million. If one includes the overcrowded nearby hamlets, the population doubles. East London, which included the London docks and run-down areas of Whitechapel, Spitalfields, and Bethnal Green, was bordered on the south by the River Thames, to the west by the City of London, to the north by Hackney and Shoreditch, with the River Lea to the east. The growth of the East End had been heavy because the road that led from Aldgate to Whitechapel to Mile End was a major artery for leaving the city, and the earth was level and easy to build upon.
The anchor of the East End was the London Hospital for the poor, which is still located on Whitechapel Road but is now called the Royal London Hospital. When Scotland Yard’s John Grieve took me on one of several retrospective visits to what is left of the Ripper crime scenes, our meeting place was the Royal London Hospital, a grim Victorian brick building that doesn’t seem to have been modernized much. The depressiveness of the place is but a faint imprint of what a pitiful pit it must have been in the late 1800s, when Joseph Carey Merrick – mistakenly called John Merrick by the showman who “owned” him last – was granted shelter in two of the hospital’s first-floor back rooms.
Merrick – doomed to be known as the “Elephant Man” – was rescued from torment and certain death by Sir Frederick Treves, a courageous, kind physician. Dr. Treves was on the London Hospital’s staff in November 1884 when Merrick was a slave to the carnival trade across the street inside a deserted greengrocer’s shop. In front was a huge canvas advertising a life-size “frightful creature that could only have been possible in a nightmare,” as Dr. Treves described it years later when he was Sergeant-Surgeon to King Edward VII.
For two pence, one could gain admittance to this barbaric spectacle. Children and adults would file inside the cold, vacant building and crowd around a red tablecloth hanging from the ceiling. The showman would yank back the curtain to “ooh!”s and “aah!”s and cries of shock as the hunched figure of Merrick cowered on his stool, dressed in nothing but an oversized pair of filthy, threadbare trousers. Dr. Treves lectured on anatomy and had seen just about every conceivable form of disfigurement and filth, but he had never encountered or smelled any creature quite so disgusting.