Researcher gives the Ripper victims a voice

PhD researcher Charlotte Mallinson focuses on the victims of the 1888 Whitechapel murders at major conference

BASED at the University of Huddersfield, 200 miles north of Jack the Ripper’s haunts, researcher Charlotte Mallinson is becoming nationally established for her expert knowledge and provocative interpretation of the Whitechapel murders of 1888.  Now she has been invited to deliver the keynote lecture at a major conference in the East End of London.

While conventional “Ripperologists” pore over clues in an attempt to unmask the identity of the killer, Charlotte spurns the “whodunnit” approach.  Her focus is on the five known victims of Jack the Ripper and she seeks to reclaim them from the margins of history, where she believes they were consigned because of their gender and low social status.

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This will be the theme of her lecture, taking place on Saturday 5 August during the 2017 East End Conference, which coincides with a meeting of the Whitechapel Society, whose members focus on the Ripper killings.

Charlotte’s keynote - to be delivered at the Curzon Cinema in Aldgate – is titled In the Name of Jack: Rethinking Victimhood in the Representations of the Whitechapel Murders.

Conference organisers state that: “Offering a challenge to the elevation of ‘Jack’ to mythic hero, it will explore its tragic impact on women in the years after the original crimes.  Ultimately, she hopes to show that how ‘Jack’ and his crimes are remembered affect women - not just in the past but in the here and now.”

Charlotte has completed two degrees at the University of Huddersfield, and for her Master’s she wrote a dissertation on the darker dimensions of the heritage industry, in particular the Whitechapel Murders and the extent to which she felt that that Jack the Ripper’s victims were dehumanised by the guided tours that have proliferated in the East End.

She developed the theme for her PhD, supervised by Senior Lecturer in history Dr Rob Ellis, and her researches have frequently taken her to Whitechapel, where Ripper tourism is as ubiquitous as ever. 

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The murder victims are still marginalised, she finds, and the full brutality of the murders is often glossed over for the sake of telling a good story.  She would not, however, seek to stop the tours of Ripper territory, but she would reframe them, giving the victims a voice.

“The sexual intent of the murders and possible cannibalistic tendencies are often removed.  We have this strange sanitisation.  Whether these women were attractive or not, or whether or not they were drunk are not relevant.  As sex workers they were doing what they chose to do in order to survive and they were killed.”

Charlotte is now in the final stages of her doctoral project and has given several public presentations of her work.  One was a public lecture that drew a large audience at the University of Northampton, where history lecturer Dr Drew Gray has also researched the Whitechapel murders.  Now, her prestigious presentation at the East End Conference takes her deep into Ripper territory and an audience steeped in the saga.