The Ripper Murders of 1886-1914
The name for the moral panic and security crisis gripping London for almost 30 years, starting with the first murders of prostitutes in Whitechapel in 1886 attributed to Jack the Ripper and then spiraling into a surge of murders in the '90s that at the time were also blamed on the famous serial killers but later on have been deemed to be the product of deranged imitators and multiple people inspired by the stories on Jack. During this period that reached its peak in the first decade of the 20th century over 250 people were killed in ways that resembled the Ripper methodology, originally targeting prostitutes but after 1891 it went on hitting people of all genders and social status, with a particularly scandalous case in 1899 when a member of the House of Commons became the latest victim of "the Ripper".
The ongoing, relentless media case was a cause of constant embarrassment for Scotland Yard as it was seemingly unable to stop the surge of crime, and even when individuals started to be accused and condemned for the crimes the murders would continue. At its peak imitators of the style of the Ripper would start appearing in other British and even European or American cities, and a popular conspiracy theory was born when it was theorized that Queen Victoria's death in 1901 was actually yet another murder committed by the Ripper and that the authorities were trying to hide the truth (although the elderly queen simply died of natural causes at an advanced age).
The scandal would eventually cause political consequences, as it initially raised concerns on the squalor of the poorest districts of London and encouraged social reforms and urban changes to improve the situation, but as the crisis went on in the '90s and '00s it sparked increasing social and political unrest. The 1905 bill to further expand suffrage in the United Kingdom is widely considered a necessary measure that the parliament had to pass to answer the political unrest in the capital, this would lead to the quick expansion of the young Labour Party in the 1906 elections (causing a complicated political situation in the parliament), and to its unexpected victory in the 1911 elections.
To this day Jack the Ripper remains a cultural icon in global fiction as a horror figure and a seemingly immortal assassin, that would return to life and change his identity even after being killed by the authorities or a heroic solitary investigator. A popular series of stories (and also a political conspiracy theories) that emerged in the '20s had Jack the Ripper be a German agent or a series of German agents on behalf of Kaiser Wilhelm II, or even Wilhelm II himself in the most wild tales.
The origin of this apparently strange sub-genre of Jack the Ripper stories can be found in the Great European War of 1914-1916, when a diplomatic crisis started by the assassination of the Austrian archduke Franz-Ferdinand eventually led to war between the German Empire and Austria-Hungary against Serbia, the Russian Empire and France. During the war Germany violated Belgium's neutrality that was protected by Britain, but under the pressure of the pacifist wing of the party and in what was an extremely controversial move at the time the Labour government decided to not declare war on Germany to defend Belgium and instead to take a stance of "diplomatic neutrality" to ensure that Belgium's borders and independence would have been guaranteed by Germany after the war in exchange for the United Kingdom neutrality in the military conflict, which the Germans accepted. This resulted in an intensely bloody war that ended with Germany's victory over a Russian Empire crippled by internal dissent and an isolated France that was barely able to defend Paris in the 1914 offensive and then faced a renewed offense in the south when Italy joined the war on Germany's side.
For this reason some imaginative writers and conspiracy theorists connected Britain's diplomatic faux pass in 1914 and Germany's long-lasting dominance over continental Europe that resulted from the war with Jack the Ripper, a German agent sent to spread chaos in the British Empire and force it to ignore European matters. These stories sometimes imagine speculative history scenarios where the German plot is discovered and Britain joins France and Russia to oppose and defeat German imperialism in a massive world war waged all over the globe, although they usually downplay the fact that such a war would have been even more horrific and costly in human lives than the already brutal Great European War.
The murders associated to the Ripper slowed down greatly in the first years of the 1910s, and the last murder was registered in November 1914, when news of the war in Europe had already taken over the popular imagination.
The Great Cleansing
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