A darker side of London

Today was clearly my day to be morbid. We went to the Tower of London in the morning, and I ended the day with a Jack the Ripper tour. Basically, nothing but murder and mayhem all day. London is a beautiful, vibrant city, but like any city it's had its dark moments. I got to learn a little bit about them at both ends of the economic spectrum today.

The Tower of London has a long and bloody history both as a place royalty has holed up during battle and a place where inconvenient nobles were executed, or simply murdered, with one of the most infamous set of murders being those of the boy princes who were in the way of Richard III's path to the throne in (probably) 1483; their skeletons were found during Tower renovations. The exploits of Richard III, and his use of the Tower as a place of murder inspired both Shakespeare's tragedy, and, um, Richard Corman's schlocky horror movie. Although not very many executions have actually taken place at the Tower itself, it is where both Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard were executed. It was amusing to see how toned down the Tower is today. While there is mention of the darker history of the Tower, most people come to see the Crown Jewels (themselves kind of dark, if you think too hard about where those enormous rocks have come from), and you can take your picture with a man-sized teddy bear in a beefeater costume. Even the Tower ravens have their wings clipped, so they don't abandon the Tower; superstition holds that if they do the Tower will fall, and England with it. (This rather seems like cheating to me.)

At the other end of things, in the bleak and extremely impoverished East End of 1888 London were theJack the Ripper killings. The tour a few of us took was not watered down. In fact, I'll spare you the worst of the worst, but life was pretty terrible for the working class of London then, especially for women, who had extremely limited opportunities, and the murders, as you probably know, are utterly gruesome. I think they still loom large in the popular imagination both because they're the earliest set of murders that we think of as the stereotypical serial killer, and because the person who did the killings was never caught. Most of the famous modern theories revolve around a number of the rich and famous, including painter Walter Sickert, and even Prince Albert. I think in some way the conviction that it was one of the upper crust is symbolic of how the rich treated the poor then. Our guide had an interesting theory that it was simply one of the local butchers. That makes sense on one level, and does explain the ability to get to organs quickly in the dark. (I know, ick.) It's just not as exciting as thinking it could have been a member of the royal family. We'll never know, given the primitive level of forensics at the time, but I suspect people will never stop theorizing about it.