‘The Lust of the Savage’: Evolution, the Press, and the Whitechapel Murders

This chapter shows how media coverage of the Whitechapel murders absorbed contemporary ideas about evolution and disseminated them to a large audience. It argues that this process indicates the widespread acceptance of evolution in the late Victorian period, and its association with the idea of progress. At the same time, however, press speculations about Jack the Ripper explored some of the darker implications of the new biology: these included the threat of degeneration and the supposedly bestial qualities that lurked in humankind.