In the Shadow of Jack the Ripper: The Lambeth Poisoner

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The Place and the People

Victorian London was a place of contrasts. Between 1800 and 1900 the population increased from one million to 6 million. The Industrial Age had arrived at the same time as Britain’s Empirical expansion. This brought great wealth and led to impressive building projects, which in turn raised land value. The moneyed classes moved to areas such as Hampstead and the West End. The poorer classes were forced into the alleyways in the back streets of the East End of London in such areas as Whitechapel and Lambeth.

These overcrowded alleyways were places where poverty, sickness and crime were rife. They were overrun by cockroaches and vermin. 

 Journalist Henry Mayhew described London at the time “there is more virtue and iniquity, more wealth and more want, brought together into one dense focus than in any other part of the earth.” 

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It is somewhat understandable then, that some women would turn to the streets to try and improve their lot, though often the money would be spent on alcohol as an escape from their surroundings. 
The “gentlemen” of London were only too happy to indulge these women. Lodging houses openly advertised rooms for hire by the day.

In contrast, outside these dismal alleys, could be found a more “normal” street life. Here were the Music Halls and Theatres, or even the main thoroughfare of Waterloo Bridge where the girls would pick up their trade.
Although this type of life could be very brutal, at least since 1888 they had not had the shadow of Jack the Ripper hanging over them.

That was until October1891.

And So it Started

In the middle of the night, an intern named Johnson, from Lambeth Medical Institute was called out to make an urgent call to a lodging house off Commercial Street.
Here he found 19 year old prostitute, Ellen Donworth convulsing and clutching at her chest and abdomen. Her companions told Johnson that she had said that “a gentleman” had given her some drink from a bottle with “white stuff in it”. He immediately recognised the symptoms of system poisoning and sent for the police. She was whisked off to St Thomas’s hospital but died in the carriage on the way there.