End worked only occasionally for exhausting and not well paid jobs. They were criminal or unemployed persons of long time. They lived from day to day.
Half the children died before the age of five and if they survive they were mentally or physically sick. There were numerous Orphans in the streets and some ended in brothels.
The arrival of Jews, after a wave of immigration from the Eastern Europe towards London in 1880, had very beneficial effects on the district of Whitechapel, by improving sanitary conditions and the security.
However, in spite of numerous efforts of urban renewal and the improvement of the living conditions entailed by the Jewish immigration, Whitechapel was always a poor and criminal area.
Prostitution was one of the only means of survival for a single woman because they were often exploited, badly paid and obliged to do extra hours. Prostitutes worked directly in the street, sank very often into alcoholism and were lucky if they avoided venereal diseases (syphilis, in particular). The procurers were many and treated the prostitutes contemptuously and with violence. They also risked to be aggressed by "gangs" of thieves which struck them to steal them their money if a woman had not won enough money to buy herself a bed for night, she had to find a man who would let her sleep with him in exchange for her sexual favors. Or else, she slept in the street.
In the poverty of the overpopulated houses, in the dark and narrow alleys, the murderer of Whitechapel had found the perfect place to kill.
It is in those conditions that Jack the Ripper; doubtless the most famous of all the serial killers: killed five prostitutes in four months in the miserable district of Whitechapel, in 1888. He knifed them and mutilated them with a rare violence, and really burst out on his last victim. In spite of the long work of the police, he was never arrested. The craziest theories still run on his identity, and fascinate hundreds of "Ripperologues".
Uncountable books and movies were produced on his subject, offering each "the" solution of the enigma which will be never known.
Curiously, the murders of the Ripper had positive consequences for the East End. As Stéphane Bourgoin explains it (The red book of Jack the Ripper)” fixed prices served as catalysts to unify the action of the reformers of any edges, thanks to the pressure of the public opinion, horrified by the descriptions contained in the press on the life of Whitechapel ".
Streets, usually so dark as we saw there almost nothing, were much better lit(enlightened) by new lampposts. The dirty shanties were demolished from 1889 and new housing was reconstructed. The orphan children were not any more left with the street and we voted for laws so that they are protected.
However, East End remained another poor and dangerous area during decades.