Victorian Riots Copyrighted imageCredit: Production team

We remember Jack the Ripper - the top-hatted, knife-wielding psychopath - but what has our fascination with the man made us forget about the time in which he plied his diabolical craft?

We forget Bloody Sunday in November 1887, we forget the riots, the moral panic and the talk of revolution from the East End that accompanied the stories of the Ripper murders.

The real fear in London in the later years of the 1880s wasn’t a man with a knife, it was a socialist revolution and a moral contagion that threatened the Empire – and in the Queen’s Jubilee season, too!

But slum clearance, popular journalism and a brigade of the Grenadier Guards succeeded in removing one fear, whilst popular prurience ensured immortality for another.

You can read a transcript of this programme.

First broadcast: Monday 16 May 2005 on BBC Radio 4

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