Jack the Ripper walking tours:
giving the Whitechapel women a voice

Towering office blocks loom over Whitechapel's narrow, cobbled alleys; the electric street lighting, which floods these passages with light, is a far cry from the humble oil and gas lamps of Victorian England. But Whitechapel has never fully left the 19th Century. Each evening, converging on designated meeting spots, a throng of tourists descend on the Tower Hamlets district. They're partaking in the many walking tours which take place daily, looking for one man: Jack the Ripper.

Expert consensus loosely agrees that the Ripper took five lives in 1888 — Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly. Each of these women was found murdered and mutilated. Now, huge groups gather around the sites where these members of the "canonical five" were killed. Most of the sites don't exist as they did in Victorian times, but that doesn't matter. They gasp and gawk as the crimes are described — often in exaggerated, morbid detail — and it's not uncommon for autopsy photographs, showing their horrific wounds, to be distributed.

Across the street, you might see another huddle listening to Ellie Kennedy of Rebel Tours, a company she founded in 2020 with Charlotte Everett. She's leading a sort of Ripper tour herself, but you'll rarely hear her utter his name. As conventional tours congregate around a murder site, Kennedy's covers the nearby doss-house (low-cost lodgings). She's not interested in where and how they died, but where and how they lived. Even in the #MeToo era, where we're assured that attitudes towards women have progressed greatly, giving these women a voice of their own is unusual.

"We know nothing about the killer, so we don't talk about whoever that is at all on the tour," explained Kennedy. "We know a hell of a lot about the women, because their lives are very well documented."

She said understanding the victims' lives, which we can gain an insight to through inquests held at the time, is an important part of humanising them. "You find these snapshots of people's lives, which are really interesting. Obviously their lives were harsh, but I like to pick out some of the positive aspects, as well. They still had fun, they still had relationships, they had friends."

A working class woman's life was not, Kennedy said, a "big blob of misery". When I went on her tour, which lasts two hours, she spoke in-depth about the women's families and partners, their occupations, and their personalities. She explained that Mary Jane Kelly, the youngest victim at around 25 and also the Ripper's last, seemed to her a feisty and independent woman, with a mysterious past and adventurous spirit, who liked singing.

Katrina Jan is a doctoral researcher with Birmingham University's English department. She said class had a role to play in the romanticising of the Ripper from the start. "Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was playing in London at the time of the Ripper murders and people started to see how an upper-middle class man could transform into this monster." Subsequently, she said, Jack the Ripper began to adopt a more mysterious, even alluring, identity. The working class women did not.

Jan explained that 21st Century romanticisation of the serial killer even extends to romantic and erotic novels. "I call it the 50 Shades of Gray Effect," Jan said, referring to the 2011 erotic novel, "where you have this dark character as a romantic hero."

She said some of these works, like Stalking Jack the Ripper (2016), offered an outlet for "sexual empowerment" through female protagonists, and were targeted at teenage girls. "Women are taking a serial killer and flipping it, so they're in charge now and can control how the narrative ends."

"But on the other hand," she cautioned, "this is a real life serial killer, not a fictional character. So, where do we draw the line between female sexual empowerment and female sexual abuse?"

She added that the glorification and fictionalisation of figures like Jack the Ripper — which sidelines his (very real) victims — seemed to contradict modern attitudes towards victims of sexual violence. Although there is no definitive evidence of a sexual motive behind the Ripper's attacks, Jan said efforts to make the serial killer marketable, alluring, and attractive had led people to wrongly believe there was.

A similar misconception might be at the very heart of story. Kennedy said her own reading of the historical documents led her to agree with historian Hallie Rubenhold that there is little evidence most of the victims were prostitutes, a claim regularly made of the women. "I don't care if they were or they weren't. That's not the point", she said. Accusations of drunkenness and prostitution meant Victorian Londoners did not have to confront the issues of systemic poverty and misogyny which had helped facilitate their murders.

"In the story, prostitution means 'unwanted' — it means an undesirable member of society. It's a form of victim blaming which calmed down the middle classes at the time, and still does today," Kennedy said.

When Nicola Bulley went missing in January 2023, the police were accused of perpetuating misogynistic stereotypes after divulging that the 45-year-old was struggling with menopause and had alcohol issues. Kennedy said she sometimes brings up Bulley as an example of how "not much has changed over 130-odd years".

Trying to reform the walking tours from within poses practical difficulties, however. "When we first started the tour, we called it 'Silent Voices of Whitechapel'," Kennedy said. "But it didn't work marketing wise." In order to appease search engine algorithms, the serial killer's name — the creation of a sensationalist Victorian press — simply had to be in the title.

Jan said media depictions of violent men means attitudes "will never completely change". "In Hollywood and films, it's never about the victims," she added, pointing out the controversy around Zac Efron's 2019 portrayal of a "romanticised" Ted Bundy.

Kennedy said she sometimes thinks "we're not really moving in the right direction, or moving fast enough" but is happy if her walking tour can help even one person learn about the real stories of the Whitechapel women. "I appreciate every single person that books on the tour — and there are more and more people that do want to see a different perspective."

Perhaps, one day, crowds of tourists won't be ogling at crime scenes or post-mortem photographs, but paying solemn tribute to five innocent women who so cruelly lost their lives.