Later, witnesses at the trial believed that he “and his party had come in for a row.”
“You have a brother out on strike, you shabby devil!” Eddowes was reported to have shouted. He then “up with his fist and struck Fenton, and kicked him.” Within moments, a group of at least nine tinworkers, including William Eddowes’s wife, Elizabeth, set upon Fenton, kicking and beating him and crying, “We’ll murder him, murder the bastard!” as Fenton attempted to flee upstairs.4
According to the magistrate who presided at the trial, Fenton had been fortunate to escape with his life. William, perhaps shaken by the severity of his own actions and the prospect of imprisonment, went into hiding, leaving his wife, Elizabeth, to appear at the trial.
Unfortunately, this incident was but the first of the Eddowes family’s misfortunes. On February 15, Edward Perry ordered a notice to be printed in theWolverhampton Chronicle.Perry stated that he and two other factory owners were aware that “daily secret meetings” were being held for the purpose of “inducing our men to leave our employment,” and he offered thirty pounds “to any person who shall give such information as may enable us successfully to prosecute any parties conspiring, by payments of money or otherwise, to prevent us carrying on our respective trades, to withdrawing our men or to compel us to alter our methods of carrying on our businesses, or to submit to their terms.” By March 24, the newspaper ad had come up trumps. Whoever the informant was, he had pointed his finger at George Eddowes.
At the trial that followed, Perry took the stand and directed his fire at his former employee. “The defendant,” he said, “had been a ringleader” and “was a complete firebrand.” Perry wanted Eddowes gone and went on to claim that “he had coerced the others and had it not been for him, no strike would have taken place.”5 The judge had sympathy for the beleaguered factory owner and immediately sentenced George to two months’ hard labor. According to the Wolverhampton Chronicle, Eddowes demonstrated no remorse for his purported crimes, nor indeed any concern that he was leaving behind his wife and six young children. Instead, “he retired . . . with something like an air of bravado and a readiness to undergo . . . punishment.”6
While Kate Eddowes’s father may have hid his anxiety at the prospect of spending the next two months plodding the prison treadmills, he would not display it openly. As a committed union man, George Eddowes would have known the risks he faced when he became an agitator and would have expected the union to reward him and his family for their sacrifice. Equally, he would have recognized that his days of working alongside his friends and family in Wolverhampton were now at an end.
The Eddowes family made their entrance into London along the gray, effluent-tainted waters of the Thames, passing through an archway of dangling cranes that framed the docks of Bermondsey. The small house in which they settled, at 4 Baden Place, was set a safe distance from the polluted waterfront. George Eddowes would have paid extra to situate his family nearer to the open green spaces and market gardens that flourished between the factories and warehouses. Although the area’s housing was not of the highest caliber—it was plagued by poor drainage and ventilation and a lack of running water—the family was not subjected at close range to the eye-watering fumes of chemicals spewn from the local tanneries, dyers, and breweries. A lungful of relatively fresh air was one of the few privileges the expanding family could enjoy.
Had George been a single man or even one with a modest collection of children, his move from Wolverhampton might have been the making of the family. The union was likely to have been responsible for getting him his new job at Perkins and Sharpus, a large tin- and copperware manufacturer on the northern side of London Bridge. As a “skilled mechanic,” George was entitled to a better rate of pay than was a general laborer—one of the many porters, carmen (deliverymen), or dockworkers who populated the neighborhoods of Bermondsey. According to The English Book of Trades, in the 1820s, a tinplate man, “if sober and industrious,” could “with ease earn from 35 shillings to 2 guineas in a week.” However, it is likely that by midcentury, George would have expected to receive a weekly wage of approximately three pounds and nine pence from his new employer.* Such an income would offer a family with two or three children a degree of certainty that the rent would be paid, the hearth fires would be lit, and that a choicer cut of meat might appear on the table. As the writer C. S. Peel describes, in London, a man could “rent a neat little house of six rooms,” one of which he would probably let out to a lodger, who would pay twenty pounds per year. The children would “probably go to an Endowed school or a British Day [school]. There will be occasional jaunts to [the seaside at] Gravesend or Margate: sound boots, Sunday best.” With a reliable workingman’s income to support them, George’s two or three children could rise in society. If they had a good education, his boys might become clerks or shopkeepers, his daughters, schoolmistresses or the wives of clerks and shopkeepers. However, a burden of six children blocked that route to improvement. Indeed, it is unlikely that such a hopeful scenario so much as crossed the minds of George and Catherine Eddowes, who were both born into large families whose needs far exceeded the stretch of their fathers’ wages.*
According to the social reformer Seebohm Rowntree, phases of “want and plenty” marked the life cycle of the working classes. Household income ebbed and flowed according to the number of mature earners residing under a single roof. While a young man lived with his parents and had employment, he might enjoy “comparative prosperity,” a situation that would “continue after marriage until he has two or three children, when poverty will again overtake him.” Most workingmen then entered “a period of poverty that will last perhaps for ten years, ie; until the first child is fourteen and can earn wages.” But Rowntree also noted that “if there are more than three children, it may last longer.” For a working-class woman, this pattern was the same, though she typically contributed less before her earning potential was further crippled by the onset of childbearing and domestic obligation.
The experience of Kate Eddowes’s mother, Catherine Evans, mirrored this pattern. As the second of seven children born to an impoverished Wolverhampton latch-maker, little care was taken over her schooling before she was sent to work. By the time she entered her teens, she had acquired experience as a kitchen maid and eventually worked her way up to become a cook at the Peacock Inn, one of the premier hostelries in Wolverhampton. However, in 1832, at roughly age eighteen, her short career there was curtailed. Matrimony in the nineteenth century spelled the beginning of a woman’s true calling: motherhood, and in this regard Catherine proved exceptionally dutiful. In the first five years of her marriage, she produced four children; the eldest, Alfred, was mentally disabled and suffered from epileptic seizures. While many women of the laboring class continued to work after becoming mothers, whether by taking in washing or mending or by going out to factories or laundries, it is possible that Alfred’s condition and the rapid succession of births that followed his arrival prevented Catherine from contributing to the family’s income. Whatever the case, if either she or George had possessed access to reliable information about contraception, their lives, and those of their children, might have been entirely different.
It is often erroneously thought that the Victorians, those who are charged with inventing the covered table leg, were too strait-laced to contemplate, let alone write about, the reproductive lives of married couples. Nothing could be further from the truth. In the first part of the century, Francis Place, Robert Dale Owen, and George Drysdale each published works on methods by which men and women could “restrict family size.” Suggestions varied from coitus interruptus to (reusable) “French letters” constructed from sheep’s gut, to spermicidal douches and “contraceptive wads” placed inside the vagina. However, while this information was discreetly communicated to the literate middle classes, who could afford books, it was not successfully circulated among the working classes. Neither George nor Catherine Eddowes could read, nor is it like
ly they even knew that such books existed, or where to get them. The acquisition of “French letters” would have proven equally baffling, if not totally beyond the means of a family scarcely able to make ends meet. At any rate, conception and its prevention were widely believed to be a woman’s responsibility. Like her mother and grandmother and most of the women in her community, Catherine would have been conditioned to accept perpetual childbearing as the lot of a wife. Contraception, when it was used, all too frequently came in the form of her husband’s exhaustion or illness. In times of desperation, herbal tisanes and douches with spermicidal or abortifacient properties could be concocted, if a woman possessed the time, the money, or the moral courage to acquire the ingredients. In many cases, she had none of these resources.
All these factors—poverty, lack of information, and a sense of obligation to perform the role of a dutiful wife—resulted in what the nineteenth-century maternal rights campaigner Margaret Llewelyn Davies called “a life of excessive childbearing.” Its toll on the physical, emotional, and material well-being of women like Catherine was enormous. In large families, like the Eddoweses, where the addition of another mouth to feed became almost an annual occurrence, resources grew increasingly stretched. In real terms this meant less food on the table; a thinner soup, a forkful of offal, a slice of bread in watered-down milk. In such circumstances, it was the mother who was expected to go without. Regardless of whether she was pregnant or breastfeeding, “at a time when she ought to be well-fed . . . ,” she would “stint herself, in order to save; for in a working-class home, if there is saving to be done, it is not the husband and children, but the mother who makes her meal off the scraps which remain over, or plays with the meat-less bones.”7 Contemporary experts frequently remarked on how malnourished mothers were and the high incidence of miscarriage, stillbirth, and births of enfeebled infants who failed to thrive in the first year of life.
Nevertheless, women like Catherine, forced to contend with the demands of an infant and young children while simultaneously maintaining the home for her husband on ever-diminishing pay, could not permit themselves the luxury of reducing their duties during pregnancy, or delivery. Even with occasional help from female relations and neighbors, a woman was expected to be on her feet, engaged in “the incessant drudgery of domestic labour,” right up to the moment of birth. If she couldn’t pay for assistance during her period of recovery, she had no choice but to be “back at the stove, at scrubbing and cleaning, at the washtub, in lifting and carrying heavy weights” within days of giving birth. Such strain could have serious repercussions, including hemorrhages, severe varicose veins, and crippling back problems.
None of these factors impeded the expansion of the Eddowes family, which continued at a steady pace in the wake of their move to London. The following year saw the birth of a seventh child, Thomas, who was soon joined by George in 1846 and John in 1849. Two further girls, Sarah Ann and Mary, were born in 1850 and 1852. By the arrival of William in 1854, Catherine had given birth twelve times, though only ten of her children survived beyond their teenage years.* It must have seemed that whenever an older child flew the nest to earn a wage, a new, crying, demanding tiny sibling replaced her. In order to accommodate this growth in number and the accompanying adjustments to the household budget, the Eddoweses relocated at least four times between 1843 and 1857; for the most part they moved no more than a street or two away from their original address, on Baden Place.* This in itself is an indicator of the family’s standing in the community. It seems that despite their often difficult financial circumstances, the Eddoweses made good on their rent and paid down whatever debts they owed to the local shopkeepers. Unlike less fortunate families, such as those of unskilled laborers with irregular work, George, Catherine, and their children never had to “do a flit” in the night, disappearing to some other neighborhood, leaving their unpaid bills behind them. This would have been a matter of great pride to the family, a mark of respectability. Catherine, like other wives of her status, would have attempted when possible to put aside money for lace curtains, a sideboard for crockery, or a carpet to lay down on Sundays. Ideally, all of the children of a hardworking skilled laborer would own a pair of shoes, and it is unlikely that the “seven sisters” of the Eddowes clan (as they came to be known) were permitted to mix with those boys and girls who ran barefoot through the streets.
As much as it was possible given the practical hardships of managing an army of children, it seemed that at least George, if not Catherine, wished their offspring to benefit by some sort of education. Although they were under no legal obligation to send their children to school, Elizabeth, age twelve, Kate, age ten, Thomas, age eight, and George, age six, are cited on the 1851 census as scholars.* Yet this does not guarantee that they actually attended school. Working-class parents would sometimes claim that their progeny were receiving an education in order to keep up appearances. How much instruction Kate’s four elder sisters received is questionable since none but Emma could write, let alone read, as evidenced by the cross they marked in place of a signature on their marriage certificates.
Illiteracy and a poor level of education were hardly unusual among the daughters of the working class at this time when 48.9 percent of English women could not even sign their name.8 Regular school attendance was not deemed essential when a girl was of more use assisting her mother at home or earning a wage. As the educational reformer James Bryce commented in the 1860s, “They can help in the house-work and mind the baby . . . Hence it often happens that girls are not sent to school till long after the age when systematic instruction ought to have begun, and . . . they are frequently kept away upon slight grounds.” Those “slight grounds” might be the birth of a sibling, the illness of a family member, or a wide range of other circumstances. Such an event might remove a girl from school for several months at a time, if not permanently. In larger families, in which the eldest children were expected to assist in the rearing of their younger brothers and sisters, birth order often determined how much schooling a girl often received. While Catherine’s attention was likely occupied by her infants, it would have been Harriet, Emma, and Eliza who took turns minding Alfred, as well as the smaller children; the older girls would also help with cooking meals, shopping, and doing the laundry and the cleaning. These obligations would shift each time a daughter entered employment; then, the next eldest would be called upon to lend assistance at home. While the constant juggling of wage earners with mother’s helpers would have placed many obstacles in the four elder sisters’ paths to an education, it had the effect of leaving Kate’s open.
It is unknown who alerted George Eddowes to the availability of places at the Bridge, Candlewick and Dowgate School, little more than a few minutes’ walk from the gates of Perkins and Sharpus. This charity, established to provide education for the poor children in the area, had recently extended its admissions policy to accept the sons and daughters of those who worked nearby. Upon learning this, George sought to enroll Kate at the Dowgate School.
In the 1840s, the Dowgate School accommodated “not less than 70 boys and 50 girls”; at times, a waiting list existed. Although the education offered there adhered to the religious-based National System, the teaching was much more focused and rigorous. Boys and girls were taught separately, though both were instructed in reading, writing, and arithmetic, as well as the Bible and music. Girls were given additional lessons in needlework. To be granted a place at this school would be an honor for any child of a working-class family. Although Dowgate was not a boarding school, its pupils undertook a full day of structured learning, seven days a week, from 8 a.m. to 12 p.m. and 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. in the spring and summer months, and from 9 a.m. during the autumn and winter months. On Sundays they were required to attend no fewer than two church services, usually at St. Paul’s Cathedral, in whose shadow the school stood. Cleanliness and respectability were enforced absolutely. Each child was to wear a uniform, laundered and provided by the schoo
l and made by the female pupils. Both boys and girls were responsible for mending their clothing, and no child could enter the schoolroom in the morning without a clean face and hands. A special sink was installed to ensure that this standard was upheld, and a sum was budgeted each year for the purchase of soap. Teachers were also expected “to attend and see the children’s hair is cut every six weeks.”9
The intention of the Dowgate School, and others like it, was to create a better sort of working-class person—one who valued themselves and the principles of Christianity and who would go forth into the labor force dignified, clean, thoughtful, and obedient. When students reached the age of fourteen and completed their schooling, Dowgate strove to place them in a respectable industry. Boys were offered positions with architects and engineers, or given work as clerks in banks or businesses, while girls were prepared for roles in domestic service. Successful pupils who persevered at their new trade and were commended by their masters or mistresses became eligible to receive prizes from the school, amounting to as much as five pounds, and Dowgate’s minute books are filled with such stories.
Ultimately, one of Dowgate’s objectives seems to have been to separate the child as much as possible from the demeaning circumstances of his or her daily life, where they were viewed as another pair of hands, rather than a scholar. The demanding schedule, seven days a week, kept children away from their families but for dinner and bed; it also limited a child’s exposure to any vices that the home might harbor. A parent who put a child forward for such an opportunity knew that the Dowgate School offered a stepladder out of the cycle of poverty.
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