Hello everyone. It's us, your hosts Maddie Pelling and Anthony Delaney.

But before we begin the show, we want to ask for a few seconds of your time.

If you're enjoying After Dark, and we love you, if you are, we would love you just a little bit more.

If you could vote for us in the listeners choice category at the British Podcast Awards.

So go to the show notes now, click the link and just then search for After Dark.

Fill in your name and your email and don't forget to confirm. They will send you an email.

You need to confirm. The whole process probably takes about 30 seconds.

If you've already voted, we are so, so grateful. If you haven't, stop what you are doing right now.

Vote for us before you enjoy this show.

Hello and welcome to After Dark. I'm Maddie. And I'm Anthony. And in true AfterDart

form, we are journeying into one of the most sinister corners of the past today. Today we're

talking about the story that epitomises so much of the shady past of the 19th century, the media's

creation of the figure of Jack the Ripper.

To help set out our store, we're starting with a quote.

Helen Cork was a mid-20th century writer who had nothing directly to do with Jack the Ripper.

In the 1970s, when she was into her 90s, she wrote an autobiography. In that autobiography, she tells us what it was like

being a young girl of about six years old in the year 1888, the year of the Whitechapel murders.

The daily paper is carefully kept out of my way and no hint of the Jack the Ripper murders

reaches me at home. But the boys next door are well advised of them and have their story ready.

There's a man in a leather apron coming soon to kill all the little girls in

Tumbridge Wells. It's in the paper. He stands before me, vividly enough that man with the leather

apron and the uplifted blood-stained knife. I scarcely ask myself if the boys are lying. I delight the boys by running indoors, screaming,

...