Research Guides: Jack the Ripper's London: Home

Course Description - Dr. Jill Abney

This course represents a fundamental step in your path toward becoming an historian. Think of it as an apprenticeship where you will work closely with the instructor and other students through a workshop-approach to practice the skills that historians use all the time. We will take skills that you already have—your ability to read and take notes, to conduct research, to analyze and properly cite sources, and to form original arguments—and we will polish them over the course of the semester with the goal of equipping you for the work you will do in upper-division history courses. We will talk about what it means to be an historian, why we do history, and the ethical responsibilities that come with this role. We will focus specifically on London, England in the mid- to late-Nineteenth Century. We will use the well-known murders of five women by “Jack the Ripper” as a centering point for our research into the social, economic, environmental, and political realities of the era and space. The primary and secondary resources you will read and the assignments you will complete will all connect to this theme.

The purpose of this guide is to support your research efforts by highlighting relevant resources, library tools, and collections.

Course Books

The Five by Hallie Rubenhold
Call Number: Available at Young Library Reserves, 2 Hours (HV6535.G6 L6578 2019). You can check it out at the Circulation Desk.
Publication Date: 2019
Five devastating human stories and a dark and moving portrait of Victorian London--the untold lives of the women killed by Jack the Ripper. Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary-Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. They came from Fleet Street, Knightsbridge, Wolverhampton, Sweden, and Wales. They wrote ballads, ran coffee houses, lived on country estates, they breathed ink-dust from printing presses and escaped people-traffickers. What they had in common was the year of their murders: 1888. The person responsible was never identified, but the character created by the press to fill that gap has become far more famous than any of these five women. For more than a century, newspapers have been keen to tell us that "the Ripper" preyed on prostitutes. Not only is this untrue, as historian Hallie Rubenhold has discovered, it has prevented the real stories of these fascinating women from being told. Now, in this devastating narrative of five lives, Rubenhold finally sets the record straight, revealing a world not just of Dickens and Queen Victoria, but of poverty, homelessness and rampant misogyny.
A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, Ninth Edition by Gregory G. Colomb (Revised by); Joseph M. Williams (Revised by); Joseph Bizup (Revised by); William T. FitzGerald (Revised by); The University The University of Chicago Press Editorial Staff (Revised by); Kate L. Turabian; Wayne C. Booth (Revised by)
Call Number: Available at Young Library Reserves, 2 Hours (LB2369 .T8 2018). You can check it out at the Circulation Desk.
Publication Date: 2018

Optional Reading

Victorian Babylon: People, Streets, and Images in Nineteenth-Century London by Lynda Nead
Call Number: Available at Young Library Reserves, 2 Hours (DA683 .N425). You can check it out at the Circulation Desk.
Publication Date: 2005
In this fascinating and innovative look at nineteenth-century London, Lynda Nead offers a new account of modernity and metropolitan life. She charts the relationship between London's formation into a modern organized city in the 1860s and the emergence of new types of production and consumption of visual culture. She considers the role visual images played in the creation of a vibrant and diverse urban culture and how new kinds of publics were created for these representations. Shifting the focus of the history of modernity from Paris to London, Nead here argues for a different understanding of gender and public space in a society where women joined the everyday life of city streets and entered the debates concerning morality, spectacle, and adventure. The book draws on texts and images of many kinds?including acts of Parliament, literature, newspaper reports, private letters, maps, paintings, advertisements, posters, and banned obscene publications. Taking a highly interdisciplinary approach, Nead explores such intriguing topics as the efforts of urban improvers to move water, air, traffic, goods, and people in the Victorian metropolis; the impact of gas lighting and glass on urban leisure; and the obscenity legislation that emerged in response to new forms of visual mass culture that were perceived as dangerous and pervasive.