Significance
Londoners were familiar with violent attacks in the street at night, and Ratcliffe Highway had a particularly bad reputation for robbery. Yet this murder shocked London and much of England, because the Marrs had been a hardworking family with no apparent ties to criminal elements. They seemed to be entirely random victims, and their brutal deaths violated the social ideal that law-abiding people who lived decent lives and worked hard had nothing to fear.
London was panicked by the idea that a stranger or a gang could enter homes and leave everyone dead. This was the ultimate fear: that one's own home was not safe.
Read more about this topic: Ratcliff Highway Murders
Famous quotes containing the word significance:
“Of what significance the light of day, if it is not the reflection of an inward dawn?—to what purpose is the veil of night withdrawn, if the morning reveals nothing to the soul? It is merely garish and glaring.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The hypothesis I wish to advance is that ... the language of morality is in ... grave disorder.... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.”
—Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (b. 1929)
“I am not afraid that I shall exaggerate the value and significance of life, but that I shall not be up to the occasion which it is.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)