Jack the Ripper and Sherlock Holmes

Abstract

Rapid urban development and industrialization resulted in a sharp increase in the population of both Vienna and Prague at the end of the nineteenth century. This dynamic population growth in turn led to the need to diversify the press, leading to cheap newspapers that were aimed at the lower classes, who had moved to the cities from the countryside. These new types of newspapers placed an emphasis on sensationalist reporting, including in the case of murder, showing the dark side of urban modernity. The modern city, in opposition to the countryside, became the symbolic center of a dark and violent form of deviance, around which a cultural narrative also formed. The most emblematic example was the case of Jack the Ripper in east London. Soon all states in Europe were in search of their own Ripper, with the tabloid press in hot pursuit to boost sales and quench the thirst of its readership for sensationalist murder cases and to strengthen the stereotype of the dark urban metropolis. The glorification of crime and its perpetrators however led to a counter-narrative that put at its center the detective fighting these crimes. Similarly to the case of Jack the Ripper, another British (in this case fictional) protagonist, Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective Sherlock Holmes, became an inspiration for writers in the Habsburg Monarchy. The sensationalist press and the heroes of dime novels transformed the perception of physical violence into one of the defining features of urban modernity.