Defining this area of London is not an easy task; contemporary social commentators and modern historians, like Paul Begg and Alan Palmer 1 , disagree over its exact geographical boundaries. Gray overcomes this difficulty by arguing that we should focus less on these details and more on the ever-changing and evolving social construction of the East End. For the middle classes, it was here in the East End β amid the hotchpotch of cultures and races, the smog and the slaughterhouse β that crime, poverty and sexual deviance, including incest and prostitution, festered and flourished.
Andrew Mearns and East London by Charles Booth , but warns against taking these sources at face value. Instead, Gray argues that these reports should be seen as evidence of a cultural, social and economic chasm that existed between the middle and working classes, characterised by ignorance and notions of superiority. Just as the More Sprees pamphlet drives the plot in Crimson Petal , the media also played a role in fuelling middle-class anxieties about poverty and vice in the real East End.
The last quarter of the 19th century witnessed the emergence of sensationalism β a new style of journalism Gray, p. Under intense competition to attract readers, editors needed to find new ways of presenting stories that would keep the public hooked. Crime reporting, in particular, was one way that newspapers could achieve this aim.
From a few cases of wildly-exaggerated street robbery came soaring arrest rates and changes in penal policy the Security Against Violence Act of p. Gray thinks not and urges us to remember that the Ripper was so brutal, media exaggeration was unnecessary. Furthermore, despite the public outrage and significant police investigation, the murders never resulted in additions or changes to criminal legislation.
But there were many journalists in Victorian London that were not just interested in boosting sales figures through sensationalist reporting.
