Peripeteia

Gothic Jack the Ripper
On 3rd October 2025, we set off from Bath on an extravaganza of an English trip to London.Part of our weekend included a guided tour of some of the spots where the bodies of Jack the Ripper’s victims had been found. Taking a slightly different angle on this well-known story, our tour guide carefully avoided speculating on the identity of the murderer himself. Instead, he made the focus of the tour the lives of the victims themselves, much influenced by his reading of Hallie Rubenjold’s ‘The Five’. The connection of the murders of these women in East London to Bram Stoker’s Gothic novel, ‘Dracula’, is an interesting story.
As what is often known as the ‘second wave’ of Gothic fiction brought threat and danger into the domestic sphere, London was the perfect host for contemporary fears. In the late nineteenth century, a heady mix of xenophobia, antisemitism and sensationalist journalism about a series of real life murders captured the public imagination of the time. For the Gothic component of OCR A Level, considerable emphasis is placed on the context of the set texts; in order to appreciate and make connections between them, English students need to know what was going on at the time when they were conceived. In the case of the Gothic genre, however, what is also fascinating is the way in which the context has itself since been fictionalised as well. The result is that, in true Gothic style, the distinction between what is real and what is imagined has itself become uncannily blurred.
To fully understand this strange connection, a bit of background on the source of much Victorian antisemitic feeling is required. As Roger Luckhurst explains in his introduction to the Oxford Worlds Classics edition of ‘Dracula’, the idea of ‘blood libel’, a medieval antisemitic myth suggesting that Jews murdered Christian children for ritual purposes, reared its ugly head in new forms during the Ripper investigation. In 1888, the East End, particularly Whitechapel and Spitalfields, was home to a large population of impoverished Jewish immigrants fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe. Threatened by this foreign invasion, many of the local community didn’t need much fuel for their racist sentiments so, when the mutilated bodies of women such as Mary Ann Nichols and Annie Chapman were discovered, suspicion quickly and conveniently fell on the ‘foreign other’. Despite police attempts to diffuse racial tensions, speculation about a Jewish or foreign perpetrator abounded. This frenzy of rumour and misinformation, driven by prejudice and fear, pretty much did for any meaningful consideration of the victims, who were mostly (wrongly) dismissed - in a similarly discriminatory way - as prostitutes.
Here is where Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’ (1897) comes in. Written less than a decade after the Jack the Ripper murders, the novel clearly reflects these prejudices and anxieties, amongst many others. Count Dracula, the blood-sucking foreign invader from the East, can without much trouble be read as a Gothic embodiment of xenophobic fears that had surfaced during the 19th century. The vampire myth and the blood libel are both predicated on the idea of a predatory outsider contaminating the purity of the host nation. In Victorian London, a mix of extreme urban poverty, racism and sensational press coverage, of the like that spurred on other contemporary writers such as Robert Browning to explore the workings of the criminal mind, resulted in fiction merging with reality. In the same way, Victorian audiences at the stage version of ‘Jekyll and Hyde’, thought the actor who played Hyde could actually be Jack the Ripper. And these kinds of (wrong) assumptions perpetuated, and no doubt exacerbated, the very prejudices on which they were founded.
We paused on our tour at the junction of Brick Lane and Hanbury Street, three days after the Manchester synagogue murders and just two days before the second anniversary of the October 7th attacks. And it wasn’t just standing on the site of Annie Chapman’s murder or the thought of Dracula lurking in those dark Victorian streets that chilled us.