Between August and November 1888, at least five women were murdered in the Whitechapel district of London's East End, in crimes attributed to an unidentified killer known as Jack the Ripper. Scotland Yard's Metropolitan Police and City of London Police pursued extensive but ultimately unsuccessful investigations, gathering physical evidence, witness testimony, and correspondence purportedly from the killer. The murders exposed critical limitations in Victorian criminal investigation — no systematic fingerprinting, no forensic laboratory — and galvanised calls for investigative reform.

The Ripper murders generated an extraordinary volume of literary, journalistic, and dramatic response that continues to the present. The case became a defining text of Victorian anxiety about urban poverty, gender violence, and the failures of institutional authority. Poets and novelists of the Fin de Siècle used Whitechapel as a symbol of modernity's dark underside — a literature of the abyss that included Arthur Morrison's East End fiction and influenced the Gothic urban poetry of the period.