'The Savage of Civilisation': Jack the Ripper and the Spectre of Colonialism in Late-Victorian Culture.

This article analyzes late-Victorian press coverage of the 1888 "Jack the Ripper" murders, focusing on how colonial and imperial narratives shaped public and media perceptions. Early reportage framed the crimes as the work of a foreign, racialized "other," reflecting dominant imperial attitudes that idealized Englishness as civilized and morally superior while casting non-English peoples as primitive and threatening. However, as speculation evolved to consider the murderer as a respectable English "gentleman" leading a double life, these narratives exposed deep anxieties about the instability and contradictions within English identity and society. The coverage reveals how the Ripper case challenged prevailing assumptions of British progress and imperial superiority by highlighting fears of degeneration, social fragmentation, and the presence of a threatening "other" within England itself, particularly in London's racially diverse and impoverished East End.