"Jack the Ripper" is the best known
pseudonym given to an unidentified
serial killer active in the largely impoverished areas in and around the
Whitechapel district of
London in 1888. The name originated in
a letter by someone claiming to be the murderer that was disseminated in the media. Attacks ascribed to the Ripper typically involved women prostitutes from the slums whose throats were cut prior to abdominal mutilations. Rumours that the murders were connected intensified in September and October 1888, and extremely disturbing letters from a writer or writers purporting to be the murderer were received by media outlets and
Scotland Yard. Mainly because of the extraordinarily brutal character of the murders, and because of media treatment of the events, the public came increasingly to believe in a single serial killer, Jack the Ripper. Extensive newspaper coverage bestowed widespread and enduring international notoriety on the Ripper. An investigation into a series of brutal
killings in Whitechapel up to 1891 was unable to connect all the killings conclusively to the murders of 1888, but the legend of Jack the Ripper solidified. As the murders were never solved, the legends surrounding them became a combination of genuine historical research, folklore, and
pseudohistory. The term "ripperology" was coined to describe the study and analysis of the Ripper cases. There are over one hundred
theories about the Ripper's identity, and the murders have inspired
multiple works of fiction.
Noël Coward (1899–1973) was an English playwright, composer, director, actor and singer, known for his wit, flamboyance, and what Time magazine called "a sense of personal style, a combination of cheek and chic, pose and poise". Coward achieved enduring success as a playwright, publishing more than 50 plays from his teens onwards. Many of his works, such as Hay Fever, Private Lives, Design for Living, Present Laughter and Blithe Spirit, have remained in the regular theatre repertoire. He composed hundreds of songs, in addition to well over a dozen
musical theatre works (including the operetta Bitter Sweet and comic
revues), poetry, several volumes of short stories, the novel Pomp and Circumstance, and a three-volume autobiography. Coward's stage and film acting and directing career spanned six decades, during which he starred in many of his own works. Coward won an
Academy Honorary Award in 1943 for his naval film drama, In Which We Serve, and was knighted in 1969. In the 1950s he achieved fresh success as a cabaret performer, performing his own songs, such as "
Mad Dogs and Englishmen", "
London Pride" and "
Don't Let's Be Beastly to the Germans". His plays and songs achieved new popularity in the 1960s and 1970s, and his work and style continue to influence popular culture.
John Dee. Sixteenth century portrait, artist unknown.
John Dee was a
mathematician,
astronomer,
astrologer,
geographer and consultant to
Elizabeth I, born in the
Tower ward of the
City of London in 1527. He also devoted much of his life to
alchemy,
divination, and
Hermetic philosophy. Dee straddled the worlds of
science and
magic. One of the most learned men of his time, he was lecturing to crowded halls at the
University of Paris in his early twenties. He was an ardent promoter of mathematics, a respected astronomer and a leading expert in
navigation, training many of those who would conduct
England's voyages of discovery. At the same time, he immersed himself deeply in
Christianangel-magic and Hermetic philosophy, and devoted the last third of his life almost exclusively to these pursuits. For Dee, as for many of his contemporaries, these activities were not contradictory, but aspects of a consistent world-view.
Mary Wollstonecraft was a writer,
philosopher, and early
feminist, born in
Spitalfields, East London, in 1759. During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the
French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book. Wollstonecraft is best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in which she argued that women are not naturally inferior to men, but only appeared to be because they lacked education. She suggested that both men and women should be treated as rational beings and imagined a social order founded on
reason. Among both the general public and feminists, Wollstonecraft's life has often received as much, if not more, interest than her writing because of her unconventional, and often tumultuous, relationships. After two unsuccessful affairs with
Henry Fuseli and
Gilbert Imlay, Wollstonecraft married the philosopher
William Godwin, one of the forefathers of the
anarchist movement. She was also the mother of
Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. Wollstonecraft died at the age of thirty-eight due to complications from childbirth, leaving behind several unfinished manuscripts; she was buried in
Old St Pancras Churchyard. Today, Wollstonecraft is considered a foundational thinker in
feminist philosophy. Her early advocacy of women's equality and her attacks on conventional femininity and the degradation of women presaged the later emergence of the
feminist political movement.
Chalk and pencil sketch of Jack Sheppard in Newgate Prison
Jack Sheppard was a notorious robber, burglar and thief of early 18th-century London. Born into a poor family, he was
apprenticed as a carpenter but took to theft and burglary in 1723, with little more than a year of his training to complete. He was arrested and imprisoned five times in 1724 but escaped four times, making him a notorious public figure, and wildly popular with the poorer classes. Ultimately, he was caught, convicted, and
hanged at
Tyburn, ending his brief criminal career after less than two years. The inability of the noted "Thief-Taker General" (and thief)
Jonathan Wild to control Sheppard, and injuries suffered by Wild at the hands of Sheppard's colleague,
Joseph "Blueskin" Blake, led to Wild's downfall. Sheppard was as renowned for his attempts to escape justice as for his crimes. He returned to the public consciousness in around 1840, when
William Harrison Ainsworth wrote a novel entitled Jack Sheppard, with illustrations by
George Cruikshank. The popularity of his tale, and the fear that others would be drawn to emulate his behaviour, led the authorities to refuse to
license any plays in London with "Jack Sheppard" in the title for forty years.
Samuel Johnson was an English author. Beginning as a
Grub Street journalist, he made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, novelist, literary critic, biographer, editor and
lexicographer. Johnson was a devout
Anglican and political conservative, and has been described as "arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history". His early works include the biography The Life of Richard Savage, the poems London and The Vanity of Human Wishes, and the play Irene. After nine years of work, Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1755; it had a far-reaching impact on
Modern English and has been described as "one of the greatest single achievements of scholarship". His later works included essays, an influential annotated edition of
William Shakespeare's plays, and the widely read novel Rasselas. In 1763, he befriended
James Boswell, with whom he later travelled to Scotland; Johnson described their travels in A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. Towards the end of his life, he produced the massive and influential Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, a collection of biographies and evaluations of 17th- and 18th-century poets.
Sir Henry Wood was a conductor best known for his association with London's annual series of
promenade concerts, known as the
Proms. Born in modest circumstances on
Oxford Street, central London, to parents who encouraged his musical talent, Wood started his career as an organist. During his studies at the
Royal Academy of Music, he came under the influence of the voice teacher
Manuel Garcia and became his accompanist. After similar work for
Richard D'Oyly Carte's opera companies on the works of
Arthur Sullivan and others, Wood became the conductor of a small operatic touring company. He was soon engaged by the larger
Carl Rosa Opera Company. One notable event in his operatic career was conducting the British premiere of
Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin in 1892. From the mid-1890s until his death, Wood focused on concert conducting and made recordings. He was engaged by the impresario
Robert Newman to conduct a series of promenade concerts at the
Queen's Hall, offering a mixture of classical and popular music at low prices. The series was successful, and Wood conducted annual promenade series until his death in 1944. He had an enormous influence on the musical life of Britain over his long career: he and Newman greatly improved access to classical music, and Wood raised the standard of orchestral playing and nurtured the taste of the public, presenting a vast repertoire of music spanning four centuries.
William Shakespeare was an
Englishpoet and
playwright, now widely regarded as the greatest writer of the
English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "
Bard of Avon". His surviving works consist of 38
plays, 154
sonnets, two long
narrative poems, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1590 and 1613. His early plays were mainly
comedies and
histories, genres he raised to the peak of sophistication and artistry by the end of the sixteenth century. Next he wrote mainly
tragedies until 1608, producing plays, such as Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote
tragicomedies and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime; and in 1623, two of his former theatrical colleagues published the
First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. Shakespeare was a respected poet and playwright in his own day; but his reputation would not rise to its present heights until the nineteenth century.
Emmeline Pankhurst (1858–1928) was a political activist and leader of the British
suffragette movement. Although she was widely criticised for her militant tactics, her work is recognised as a crucial element in achieving
women's suffrage in Britain. She became involved with the
Women's Franchise League, which advocated suffrage for women. When that organisation broke apart, she joined the left-leaning
Independent Labour Party through her friendship with socialist
Keir Hardie. After her husband died in 1898, Pankhurst founded the
Women's Social and Political Union, an all-women suffrage advocacy organisation dedicated to "deeds, not words". The group quickly became infamous when its members smashed windows and assaulted police officers. Pankhurst, her daughters, and other WSPU activists were sentenced to repeated prison sentences, where they staged hunger strikes to secure better conditions. Eventually
arson became a common tactic among WSPU members, and more moderate organisations spoke out against the Pankhurst family. With the advent of
World War I, Pankhurst called an immediate halt to militant suffrage activism, in order to support the British government against the "German Peril". They urged women to aid industrial production, and encouraged young men to fight.
Edgar Speyer (1862–1932) was an American-born financier and philanthropist. He became a British citizen in 1892 and was chairman of Speyer Brothers, the British branch of his family’s international finance house, and a partner in the German and American branches. He was chairman of the
Underground Electric Railways Company of London Limited from 1906 to 1915, a period during which the company opened three underground railway lines, electrified a fourth and took over two more. Speyer was a supporter of the musical arts and a friend of several leading composers, including
Edward Elgar,
Richard Strauss and
Claude Debussy. He was chairman of the Classical Music Society for ten years, and he largely funded the
Promenade Concerts between 1902 and 1914. His non-musical charitable activities included being honorary treasurer of the fund for
Captain Scott's
Antarctic expedition. For his philanthropy he was made a
baronet in 1906 and a
Privy Counsellor in 1909. After the start of the
First World War, he became the subject of anti-German attacks in the Press. In 1921, the British government investigated accusations that Speyer had traded with the enemy during the war, and had participated in other wartime conduct incompatible with his British citizenship. Speyer denied the charges, but his naturalisation was revoked and he was struck off the list of members of the Privy Council.
Kate Bush is a
British singer, songwriter, musician and
record producer. Her eclectic musical style and
idiosyncratic lyrics have made her one of the
United Kingdom's most successful and original solo female performers of the past 30 years. Bush was signed up by
EMI at the age of 16 after being recommended by
Pink Floyd's
David Gilmour. In 1978 at age 19, she debuted with the surprise hit "
Wuthering Heights", topping the UK charts for four weeks and becoming the first woman to have a UK number one with a self-written song. She has since gone on to release eight albums, three of which topped the UK album charts, and have UK top ten hit singles with "
Running Up that Hill", "
King of the Mountain", "
Babooshka", "
The Man with the Child in His Eyes", and "
Don't Give Up". During her tour of 1979, the only tour of her career, she became the first ever singer to use a wireless headset radio microphone on stage. With her 1980 album Never for Ever, she became the first solo female British singer to top the UK album charts. Her songwriting ability was recognised in 2002 with an
Ivor Novello Award for "Outstanding Contribution to British Music". In 2005, she released Aerial, her first album in 12 years. The album was a UK success and earned her BRIT Award nominations for "Best Album" and "Best Solo Female Artist".
Mellitus was the first
Bishop of London, the third
Archbishop of Canterbury, and a member of the
Gregorian mission sent to England to convert the
Anglo-Saxons. He arrived in 601 AD with a group of clergymen sent to augment the mission, and was consecrated as Bishop of London in 604. Mellitus was the recipient of a famous letter from Pope
Gregory I known as the Epistola ad Mellitum, preserved in a later work by the medieval chronicler
Bede, which suggested the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons be undertaken gradually and integrate pagan rituals and customs. In 610, Mellitus returned to Italy to attend a council of bishops, and returned to England bearing papal letters to some of the missionaries. Mellitus was exiled from London by the pagan successors to his patron, King
Sæberht of Essex, following the latter's death around 616. King
Æthelberht of Kent, Mellitus' other patron, died at about the same time, forcing him to take refuge in
Gaul. Mellitus returned to England the following year, after Æthelberht's successor had been converted to Christianity, but he was unable to return to London, whose inhabitants remained pagan. Mellitus was consecrated as Archbishop of Canterbury in 619. During his tenure, he was alleged to have miraculously saved the cathedral, and much of the town of Canterbury, from a fire. After his death in 624, Mellitus was revered as a saint.
David Bowie (8 January 1947 – 10 January 2016), born David Robert Jones, was an English musician, actor, record producer and
arranger. A major figure for over four decades in the world of popular music, Bowie was widely regarded as an innovator, particularly for his work in the 1970s. He was known for his distinctive voice and the intellectual depth and eclecticism of his work.
Bowie first caught the eye and ear of the public in July 1969, when his song "
Space Oddity" reached the top five of the
UK Singles Chart. After a three-year period of experimentation he re-emerged in 1972 during the
glam rock era with the flamboyant,
androgynousalter ego Ziggy Stardust, spearheaded by the hit single "
Starman" and the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. In 1975, Bowie achieved his first major American crossover success with the number-one single "
Fame" and the hit album Young Americans. The sound constituted a radical shift in style that initially alienated many of his UK devotees. He then confounded the expectations of both his record label and his American audiences by recording the
minimalist album Low (1977)—the first of three collaborations with
Brian Eno over the next two years. The so-called "
Berlin Trilogy" albums all reached the UK top five and garnered lasting critical praise.
After uneven commercial success in the late 1970s, Bowie had UK number ones with the 1980 single "
Ashes to Ashes", its parent album Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), and "
Under Pressure", a 1981 collaboration with
Queen. He then reached a new commercial peak in 1983 with Let's Dance, which yielded several hit singles. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Bowie continued to experiment with musical styles, including
blue-eyed soul,
industrial,
adult contemporary, and
jungle. His last recorded album, Blackstar, was released on his 69th birthday two days before his death. In the BBC's 2002 poll of the
100 Greatest Britons, Bowie was placed at number 29. In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked him 39th on their list of the "100 Greatest Artists of All Time", and 23rd on their list of the best singers of all-time.
Alice Ayres (1859–1885) was an English
nursemaid honoured for her bravery in rescuing the children in her care from a house fire. Ayres was a
household assistant and nursemaid to the family of her brother-in-law and sister, Henry and Mary Ann Chandler. The Chandlers owned an oil and paint shop in
Union Street,
Southwark, then just south of London, and Ayres lived with the family above the shop. In 1885 fire broke out in the shop, and Ayres rescued three of her nieces from the burning building, before falling from a window and suffering fatal injury.
Britain, in the wake of the
Industrial Revolution, experienced a period of great social change in which the rapidly growing news media paid increasing attention to the activities of the poorer classes. The manner of Ayres' death caused great public interest, with large numbers of people attending her funeral and contributing to the funding of a memorial. Shortly after her death, she underwent what has been described as a "secular
canonisation", being widely depicted in popular culture and, although very little was known about her life, widely cited as a role model. Various social and political movements promoted Ayres as an example of the values held by their particular movement. The circumstances of her death were distorted to give the impression that she was an employee willing to die for the sake of her employer's family, rather than for children to whom she was closely related. In 1902 her name was added to the
Memorial to Heroic Self Sacrifice and in 1936 a street near the scene of the fire was renamed Ayres Street in her honour.
The case of Alice Ayres came to renewed public notice with the release of
Patrick Marber's 1997 play Closer, and the
2004 film based on it. An important element of the plot revolves around a central character who fabricates her identity based on the description of Ayres on the Memorial to Heroic Self Sacrifice, with some of the film's key scenes shot around the memorial.
Harold Pinter (1930–2008) was a
Nobel Prize-winning English playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. One of the most influential modern British dramatists, his writing career spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party (1957), The Homecoming (1964), and Betrayal (1978), each of which he adapted to film. His screenplay adaptations of others' works include The Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1970), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), The Trial (1993), and Sleuth (2007). He also directed or acted in radio, stage, television, and film productions of his own and others' works.
Pinter's career as a playwright began with a production of The Room in 1957. His second play, The Birthday Party, closed after eight performances, but was enthusiastically reviewed by critic
Harold Hobson. His early works were described by critics as "
comedy of menace". Later plays such as No Man's Land (1975) and Betrayal (1978) became known as "memory plays". He appeared as an actor in productions of his own work on radio and film. He also undertook a number of roles in works by other writers. He directed nearly 50 productions for stage, theatre and screen. Pinter received over 50 awards, prizes, and other honours, including the
Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005 and the French
Légion d'honneur in 2007.
Despite frail health after being diagnosed with
oesophageal cancer in December 2001, Pinter continued to act on stage and screen, last performing the title role of
Samuel Beckett's one-act monologue Krapp's Last Tape, for the 50th anniversary season of the
Royal Court Theatre, in October 2006. He died from
liver cancer on 24 December 2008.
Edmund Evans (1826–1905) was a prominent English
wood engraver and colour
printer during the
Victorian era. Evans specialized in full-colour printing, which became popular in the mid-19th century. He employed and collaborated with illustrators such as
Walter Crane,
Randolph Caldecott,
Kate Greenaway and
Richard Doyle to produce what are now considered to be classic
children's books. Although little is known about his life, he wrote a short autobiography before his death in 1905 in which he described his life as a printer in
Victorian London.
After finishing an apprenticeship, Evans went into business for himself. By the early 1850s, he had established a reputation as a printer of covers for a type of cheap novels known as
yellow-backs. In the early 1860s, he began to print children's
toy books and
picture books in association with the printing house
Routledge and Warne. His intention was to produce books for children that were beautiful and inexpensive. For three decades he produced multiple volumes each year, first illustrated by Crane, and later by Caldecott and Greenaway.
Evans used a
woodblock printing technique known as
chromoxylography, which was used primarily for inexpensive serialised books and children's books requiring few colours, so as to maximize profits. However, chromoxylography allowed a variety of hues and tones to be produced by
mixing colours. The process was complicated and required intricate engraving to achieve the best results. Evans possessed a meticulous eye for detail and used a
hand-press and as many as a dozen colour blocks for a single image. He went on to become the preeminent wood engraver and colour printer in Britain during the second half of the 19th century.
Elizabeth Canning (married name Treat; 1734–1773) was an English maidservant who claimed to have been kidnapped and held against her will in a hayloft for almost a month. She ultimately became central to one of the most famous English criminal mysteries of the 18th century.
She disappeared on 1 January 1753, before almost a month later returning to her mother's home in
Aldermanbury in the
City of London, emaciated and in a "deplorable condition". After being questioned by concerned friends and neighbours she was interviewed by the local
alderman, who then issued an arrest warrant for Susannah Wells, the woman who occupied the house in which Canning was supposed to have been held. There Canning identified Mary Squires as another of her captors, prompting the arrest and detention of both Wells and Squires. Local magistrate
Henry Fielding became involved in the case, taking Canning's side. Further arrests were made and several witness statements were taken, and Wells and Squires were ultimately tried and found guilty—Squires of the more serious and potentially deadly charge of theft.
However, the trial judge and
Lord Mayor of London Crisp Gascoyne was unhappy with the verdict and began his own investigation. He spoke with witnesses whose testimony implied that Squires and her family could not have abducted Canning, and he interviewed several of the prosecution's witnesses, some of whom recanted their earlier testimony. He ordered Canning's arrest, following which she was tried and found guilty of
perjury. Squires was pardoned, and Canning sentenced to one month's imprisonment and seven years of
transportation.
Elizabeth Canning's case pitted two groups of believers against one another: the pro-Canning Canningites, and the pro-Squires Egyptians. Crisp Gascoyne was openly abused and attacked in the street, while interested authors waged a fierce war of words over the fate of the young, often implacable maid. She died in
British America in 1773, but the mystery surrounding her disappearance remains unsolved.
His forms are usually abstractions of the human figure, typically depicting mother-and-child or reclining figures. Moore's works are usually suggestive of the female body, apart from a phase in the 1950s when he sculpted family groups. His forms are generally pierced or contain hollow spaces. Many interpreters liken the undulating form of his reclining figures to the landscape and hills of his birthplace,
Yorkshire.
Moore was born in
Castleford, the son of a
coal miner. He became well-known through his carved marble and larger-scale abstract cast bronze sculptures, and was instrumental in introducing a particular form of
modernism to the United Kingdom. His ability in later life to fulfill large-scale commissions made him exceptionally wealthy. Yet he lived frugally and most of the money he earned went towards endowing the
Henry Moore Foundation, which continues to support education and promotion of the arts.