GCSE History: Whitechapel c1870–c1900 – Crime and Policing

This material covers the historic environment study that goes with the crime and punishment thematic study in GCSE History – for example Pearson Edexcel's 'Whitechapel, c1870–c1900: crime, policing and the inner city'. It asks you to understand a real place at a particular time and to think about the sources historians use to investigate it.

You revise the conditions that made Whitechapel one of the poorest districts of Victorian London: overcrowded common lodging houses and rookeries, the workhouse, the sweated trades, and attempts at improvement such as the Peabody model dwellings on Commercial Street and slum clearance. You look at the arrival of Irish and, after 1881, Eastern European Jewish immigrants, and at the tensions caused by competition for work and housing and by prejudice. You also cover the problems that alarmed outsiders – drunkenness, prostitution, gangs and fears of anarchism and socialism.

On policing, you study the Metropolitan Police's H Division, the life of the beat constable (low pay, limited training, drunkenness as a common reason for dismissal), the Criminal Investigation Department created in 1878 and the Commissioner Sir Charles Warren. The Whitechapel murders of 1888 are used as a case study: the 'canonical five' victims and dates, the problem of two police forces after the murder of Catherine Eddowes in the City of London, the work of Inspector Frederick Abberline, house-to-house searches, the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, the sensational press and hoax letters, and the limits of forensic science before fingerprinting and blood grouping.

The historic environment is also about sources. The quiz includes questions on which source would best answer a particular enquiry – census returns, Charles Booth's poverty maps of 1889, police records, newspapers – and the written work includes short practice sources written for this material, so that you can practise judging usefulness from content, nature, origin and purpose and planning how to follow up a source.

The flashcards drill key terms and names, and in the oral exam an examiner asks one question at a time about the area, the police and the sources, then gives short feedback at the end.

The material is revision practice written by Zestly and is not produced or reviewed by any exam board; the practice sources in the written work are invented for training and are labelled as such.

• Describe living and working conditions in Whitechapel c1870–c1900 and attempts to improve housing
• Explain the impact of Irish and Eastern European Jewish immigration and the tensions it caused
• Describe the organisation and problems of H Division, the beat constable and the CID
• Explain why the police failed to catch the Whitechapel murderer in 1888
• Choose suitable sources for an enquiry, such as census returns and Booth's poverty maps
• Judge the usefulness of a source from its content, nature, origin and purpose

Practice material written by Zestly, based on the DfE GCSE history subject content (historic environment) and the study of Whitechapel c1870–c1900 linked to the thematic option 'Crime and punishment in Britain' (for example Pearson Edexcel GCSE History 1HI0). Sources in the written work are invented for practice.