"A Phantom on the Slum's Foul Air": Jack the Ripper and Miasma Theory

When Jack the Ripper gruesomely disemboweled and murdered prostitutes in 1888, Victorian newspaper journalists and their readers discussed his crimes in terms of epidemiology that might seem more appropriate for a medical journal.¹ Just days after the murder of Annie Chapman, the alleged third victim of the Ripper, the Times observed, "We have long ago learnt that neglected organic refuse breeds pestilence. Can we doubt that neglected human refuse as inevitably breeds crime, and that crime reproduces itself like germs in an infected atmosphere, and becomes at each successive cultivation more deadly, more bestial, and more absolutely unrestrained?"² By visualizing crime as "germs in an infected atmosphere," the Times participated in an extended metaphor that began with the newspaper coverage of Jack the Ripper's first victim, Polly Nichols, on August 31 and persisted well after the last of his five victims, Mary Kelly, died on November 9.³ Articles and editorials relied upon a discourse of infection and disease to conceptualize the origins and methodology of the murderer; some even went so far as to envision the "Whitechapel Fiend" himself as a deadly miasma.

Depictions of the Ripper as miasma appeared in a diverse range of daily and weekly periodicals, including the conservative Morning Post, the radical Reynolds's Newspaper, the left-leaning Pall Mall Gazette, and even the medical journal the Lancet.⁴ Such ubiquity of miasmic imagery across class, genre, and politics reveals a surprising preoccupation with a theory of disease that many have considered defunct by the 1880s.⁵ Yet, as I will show, miasma lingered in the late-Victorian imagination, both medically and metaphorically. Even as the miasmatic theory of disease seemed to be assimilated into a more predictable and certain germ theory, the press adopted the miasmatic model to describe Britain's most famous serial killer. Indeed, while representations of serial killers that are loosely based on Jack the Ripper have remained popular in film, literature, television, and stage since the 1888 murders, these narratives are only the most obvious legacy.⁶ The use of miasmatic imagery to depict the Ripper as a mindless and motiveless murderer has informed subsequent representations of other serial killers.⁷ Thanks to the late-Victorian press, miasma, in a disguised form, lingers with us even today.

The appropriation of scientific and medical vocabularies by other forms of discourse was not uncommon in the nineteenth century. Not only words but analogous modes of thought proliferated in fields that had no ostensible relation.⁸ As Gillian Beer notes, "Not only ideas but metaphors, myths, and narrative patterns could move rapidly and freely to and fro between scientists and non-scientists: though not without frequent creative misprision."⁹ Reporters co-opted the narrative patterns that doctors used to describe miasma theory in order to sensationalize the new and unfamiliar type of public, serialized mutilation perpetrated by Jack the Ripper. While authors such as Paul Begg and L. Perry Curtis have discussed the sensationalism associated with the Ripper murders and the way coverage emphasized the need for medical, economic, and social reform, little has been said about the formal patterns, images, and analogies employed by such coverage.¹⁰ Miasma theory is notable for its uncertainty about the origins of disease; the theory posits that disease resides in the ephemeral atmosphere but also, paradoxically, in the constitution of the individual.¹¹ Miasma poses the greatest threat to the lowest class and yet has a way of unpredictably rupturing class and domestic boundaries in a way that threatens the entire nation. By using miasmatic narrative forms and characteristics to describe the Ripper murders, reporters were able to pathologize the killer and render him (like miasma) an object of knowledge despite his apparent ephemerality and unknowability.

Understanding how newspaper reporters appropriated the changing narrative logic about miasma to depict Jack the Ripper shows how miasma (which, like the murderer, is notoriously difficult to pin down) simply transitioned to a new mode of discourse: that of the world's first sensationalized serial killer. I will begin with a brief explanation of how doctors...