Whitechapel is an inner city district in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, located 3.4 miles east of Charing Cross and roughly bounded by the Bishopsgate thoroughfare on the west, Fashion Street on the north, Brady Street and Cavell Street on the east, and Commercial Road on the south.
By the 1840s Whitechapel, along with the enclaves of Wapping, Aldgate, Bethnal Green, Mile End, Limehouse, Bow, Bromley-by-Bow, Poplar, Shadwell and Stepney (known as "the East End"), had evolved, or devolved, into classic "dickensian" London, with problems of poverty and overcrowding.