1888

1888....

For a long time I have been fascinated with the year 1888. Such a lot was happening during that time - the year of the Jack the Ripper murders. There were two very different Londons in 1888. If you were high up the social ladder you would be most interested in the new patented inventions of the year - the revolving door was patented in America, the electric chair in Germany, Heinrich Hertz was discovering radio waves and Berliner had demonstrated the first flat gramophone disc in Philadelphia. You may have purchased a first ever edition of the new Financial Times newspaper in London and spent the evening at the Lyceum Theatre watching the opening night of "Jekyll & Hyde"; you may have read with some curiosity about the value of two new companies formed that year and wondered if they would in later years, affect your lifestyle, namely the Raleigh bicycle company, and the Eastman-Kodak camera company. Maybe you purchased a volume of Charles Dickens' 1888 �Dictionary of Old London� which gave a wondrous insight into all the social and political machinations of the emerging capital city.

Or maybe you were behind Annie Besant and William Booth's march through Whitechapel to Westminster to expose the terrible working conditions and pay of the "match-girls" who were forced to use deadly chemicals in their workplace. You could have possibly walked past the Old London hospital unaware that its famous resident Joseph Merrick, known as �The Elephant Man�, was receiving illustrious visitors in his basement room in Bedstead Square. Perhaps you were instead watching as James Cadderley was getting 12 strokes of the birch for stealing a single loaf of bread for his hungry family, and maybe you were



		Annie Besant


	there when John Lucas was given one month's hard labour just for singing on the street and begging a few halfpennies to buy food to stay alive.



		Joseph Carey Merrick


	These were hard times for the working classes, and you would not have cared two pennies that West Bromwich Albion had beaten Preston North End in the F.A. cup final at Kennington Oval, because the two shillings admittance was more money than you had ever seen. Or indeed cared at all whether the Metropolitan police would ever catch the man known as �Jack the Ripper� who was responsible for the Whitechapel murders. Maybe in the year that Edward Lear died and Kaiser Wilhelm II succeeded his father, which class you were born into was the determining factor in whether you saw 1889 at all.

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