Roughly twelve months lay between the Queen’s Golden Jubilee summer and Polly Nichols’s murder on August 31, 1888. She would be the first of Jack the Ripper’s five “canonical” victims—those whose deaths the police determined were committed by the same hand in the district of Whitechapel, in London’s East End. A few days later, on September 8, the body of Annie Chapman was discovered in a yard off Hanbury Street. In the early morning hours of the thirtieth of that month, the Ripper managed to strike twice. In what became known as “the double event,” he claimed the lives of Elisabeth Stride, who
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