Opinion | The Fight for the Future of Jack the Ripper

LONDON — I’d been living here for a little more than a year when I finally went on a Jack the Ripper walking tour.

My partner’s mother was in town, and a stroll past the old haunts of the still-unidentified murderer of at least five women in the East End of London in 1888 seemed like the kind of activity that would please a visiting parent with a taste for the macabre. I didn’t really start to feel uneasy until we paused outside a pub called the Ten Bells, a place two of Jack the Ripper’s victims supposedly frequented. Decades ago, our guide informed us, the pub had sought to capitalize on its history by transforming into a Ripper-themed bar, complete with murder-spree-themed memorabilia and special drinks. He said this with a high-minded contempt that I found confusing. Did he really think we were doing something more morally defensible?

By the time we’d reached the last stop, it was clear that we weren’t. The juxtaposition of gratuitous gore and tour-guide patter finally became too much when, outside of a narrow alley, our guide passed around a photograph of the Ripper’s final victim, a woman named Mary Jane Kelly, taken by the police after her death. Her murder is unique, even among the Ripper killings, for its brutality; one by one, we studied her mutilated corpse, and I tried to forget that a few minutes before, the guide had made fun of her because after a brief stint in France, she’d supposedly begun giving her name as Marie Jeanette. I remember him batting his eyelashes as he said it, delivering the name in a coquettish falsetto.

There have long been efforts to try to change the way we talk about Jack the Ripper and how we treat his victims. Over the years, there have been various efforts at staging “alternative” Ripper tours, focused on the lives of the women he killed and not on the moments of their deaths. In 2015, there was an eruption of outrage after a museum that had pledged to dedicate itself to the history of women in the East End, formerly one of the poorest parts of the city, opened its doors as a Jack the Ripper museum instead.

Now it seems as though for the first time, these efforts could be gaining momentum.

A new book, “The Five,” by the historian Hallie Rubenhold, does a wildly overdue job of fleshing out the lives of Jack the Ripper’s victims, giving us context about their families, how they grew up and where they spent time before winding up in the East End. We learn that the second victim, Annie Chapman, grew up in a wealthy West London neighborhood called Knightsbridge and not only that she had been married but also that her husband was on his way up in the world. We learn that Catherine Eddowes, the fourth to be killed, was selected to attend a school intended to better the lives of working-class children. (One of Ms. Rubenhold’s main contentions is that there is little evidence for the widespread belief that the Ripper’s victims were all prostitutes and that time and misogyny have hardened the sexist assumptions of Victorian police officers into fact.)

“The Five” has received deservedly rave reviews — it’s gripping — and made best-seller lists; it has been optioned as a TV drama, to be produced by the pair of women who commissioned the megahit “Downton Abbey.”

The book was quickly followed by the opening of a new production last month from the English National Opera called “Jack the Ripper: The Women of Whitechapel,” billed as an opera about “a disadvantaged group of working-class women” who’ve been “drawn together in their determination to survive.” The Ripper himself determinedly never appears on stage. The show’s creators have made clear that they object to having the name even appear in the title but were overruled by marketing considerations.

The fight over how we talk about Jack the Ripper is, in part, a proxy for other fights. In the aftermath of #MeToo, there is a prevailing sense of moral imperative to pay less attention to the perspectives of larger-than-life men (What drove the most infamous serial killer of all time? And how did he get away with it?) and more attention to women who’ve been rendered faceless, anonymous and expendable.

The story of the 1888 murders, and the worldwide media frenzy they spawned, was seminal: It has shaped the way we look at serial killers and the women they kill to this day. It looms over the current true-crime boom and the way recent works have examined everyone from Ted Bundy, one of America’s most notorious serial killers, to Adnan Syed, the maybe-guilty-maybe-innocent subject of the hit podcast “Serial,” while so rarely turning to those killed. Perhaps if we could truly change the way this one story is told, it could have an outsize impact.

But can those pushing a new perspective on Jack the Ripper’s murders possibly win? Even as new books and operas and TV shows get the sort of billing and promotion they could hardly have hoped for a few years ago, the lure of the Jack the Ripper tale as we know it — a grisly whodunit with a patina of social history — remains strong. Just this month, the BBC released a “CSI”-style documentary purporting to “reopen” the case using modern cold-case techniques to finally reveal the killer’s real name. In March, a study in the Journal of Forensic Science also claimed to reveal the identity of the killer, following a “forensic investigation of a shawl” linked to Catherine Eddowes.

And for all its good intentions, “Jack the Ripper: The Women of Whitechapel” has faced brutal reviews: “laudable and sincere but dramatically inert,” The Guardian called it. The show “has a tang of duty” about it, The Spectator wrote. I watched the opera recently and was disappointed. If the strength of Ms. Rubenhold’s book is that she fleshes out Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman and the other victims as real people, with all their flaws, “The Women of Whitechapel” flattens them — they are poor wretches with hearts of gold. The focus may be on them, but they are undifferentiated still, and as a result, hardly less anonymous than they were before.

That these women were not the main selling point was also clear enough from the signs on the front of the opera house: “Jack the Ripper” was displayed in large letters; “The Women of Whitechapel” was barely readable underneath. And in the East End, the endless stream of Jack the Ripper tours continue to stumble over one another each night, jockeying for position closest to the murder sites.

Alicia P.Q. Wittmeyer (@apqw) is a staff editor in the Opinion section, where she oversees gender coverage.

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