Rupert Matthews Audiobooks

Jack the Ripper's Streets of Terror: Victorian London as the people living it knew it

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Who is Rupert Matthews?

More than a hundred and seventy books carry Rupert Matthews’s name, which tells you most of what you need to know about his working habits. Born in Dorking in 1961, he made his career as a popular historian, writing on Roman gladiators, military command, English folklore and the Victorian city, and appearing regularly on television and radio as presenter and consultant.

His range is unusually wide even by the standards of the trade. Alongside the straight history sit books on ghosts, cryptozoology and unexplained phenomena, approached with curiosity rather than credulity, and he has produced picture led surveys of the twentieth century as well as a biography of the American artist Frederic Remington.

He has also spent time in public life, serving as a Member of the European Parliament for the East Midlands and later as a police and crime commissioner. The writing, though, has been the constant: brisk, detail rich, and pitched squarely at readers who want history that moves.

Rupert Matthews in audiobooks

Jack the Ripper’s Streets of Terror takes a subject buried under a century of speculation and does something refreshingly different with it. Rather than nominating yet another suspect, Matthews reconstructs the autumn of 1888 as the people of Whitechapel actually experienced it: the rumours racing through the courts and alleys, the vigilance committees, the riots, the wrongful accusations and the ordinary fear of walking home.

Eyewitness accounts, contemporary documents and press reports do the heavy lifting, and at just under seven hours it never sags. Phil Fox narrates with the steady, unsensational delivery the material needs, letting the horror sit where it belongs, in the detail.

It has drawn a large and appreciative response from listeners. Look out for it among the audiobooks below when you are ready for Victorian London at street level.