The East End of London was 'outcast London,' a place as strange to the average Londoner of Queen Victoria's time as 'darkest Africa' to which it was often compared. It was the ghetto quarter of London, a haven for the many refugees fleeing the pograms of Tzarist Russia as well as an abyss for the very poor who could sink no further. Gross overcrowding was common and more than half the children born there were dead before the age of five. One tenth of the remainder were mentally defective. Sleeping seven to a room was common while windows were often broken or stuffed with sacking and beds might be straw palliasses or a blanket stretched on bare boards, Stair banisters would have long since disappeared for firewood and vermin of all kinds infested the rooms.

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Work was hard to find. Women could box matches, stitch dresses and work 24-hour days for slave wages. Inevitably many of them took to the street for their living. These were not the satin and champagne figure of popular fiction. Most were women in their 40s: grey-haired alcoholics with sagging breasts and stomachs, front teeth missing from street brawls or wife-beating husbands, with steel-tipped men's boots on their feet and wearing the rest of their worldly goods on their backs. One Ripper victim was wearing under her dress of Michaelmas daisies and golden lilies a drab linsey skirt, pettitcoat and chemise; in her pockets she was carrying matches, table knife, cotton, two clay pipes, five pieces of soap, and a small box containing tea and sugar.

It has been estimated that in the autumn of 1888 the particular area of the East End known as Whitechapel had about 1,200 prostitutes and 60 brothels that the police knew of. In fact there were many more prostitutes: women who would sell themselves for 3d, 2d, or a loaf of stale bread.

Fourpence would buy them a single bed for one night in one of the common lodging houses of which Whitechapel had over 200 sleeping nearly 9,000 'casuals' each night. If these casuals hadn't got 4d they could sleep–standing up–for 2d by leaning on a rope ladder stretched across the dormitory! The alternative was a bed in some dark alley, and empty doorway, or deserted staircase.

In the early hours of Friday, 31st August, 1888, a market porter walking through Buck's Row, a street with terrace houses on one side and a warehouse wall on the other, saw a woman lying in a gateway. There was only a gas lamp at the far end of the street to see by. Her skirts were pushed up about her waist. His first thought was that she had been raped and his next was that it was more likely that she was drunk. He was joined by a second market porter who was of much the same opinion. Leaving the woman there they went off to find the beat policeman, but before they found him he had already discovered the body for himself. Shining his torch into the gateway he could see what the porters hadn't been able to; that the woman's throat had been cut almost from ear to ear and nearly back to the spinal cord. A doctor made a cursory inspection on the spot before the body was taken away to the local workhouse where there was a mortuary and a bucket of water was thrown over the bloodstains on the pavement.

It was only when the body was being stripped by two of the workhouse inmates that it was discovered that the body had been 'ripped.' There was a deep jagged incision in the lower abdomen as well as many other mutilations.

The only identifying marks on the woman were some stencillings on her clothes which showed that she had been a workhouse inmate. It was soon discovered that a woman answering her description was missing from one of the local common lodging houses who was soon identified as Polly Nichols. She was 42 years old with five front teeth missing and had been separated from her husband, because of her drinking, for three years. He had custody of their five children. She had last been seen alive about an hour before her body was found when she had been turned away from a lodging house because she did not have 4d for a bed. Yet she was wearing a new hat and was obviously drunk.

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