The Five

by Hallie Rubenhold

  Well I remember my dear old mother’s smile,

  As she used to greet me when I returned from toil,

  Always knitting in the old arm chair,

  Father used to sit and read for all us children there,

  But now all is silent around the good old home;

  They all have left me in sorrow here to roam,

  But while life does remain, in memoriam I’ll retain

  This small violet I pluck’d from mother’s grave.

  Cox seemed fairly certain that she heard Mary Jane singing at least until around 1 a.m., but as with so many of the witness testimonies in all five of the cases, there are omissions, questions, and inconsistencies.23 What precisely had happened to Mary Jane’s male customer over the course of this concert, lasting an hour and fifteen minutes, is anyone’s guess.

  Elizabeth Prater, who lived upstairs from Mary Jane, claimed she could hear most sounds clearly through the thin partition wall and floor. At 1:30 a.m. nothing was stirring in Mary Jane’s room.

  At some point in the very early hours of November 9, Mary Jane decided to bring an end to the day and retire to sleep. She removed her clothes piece by piece, a few shabby items of a once resplendent wardrobe diminished by wear; the hems had been dragged along the uneven sidewalks of Dorset Street, and the fabric splashed with beer and gin. In spite of each article’s poor condition, she folded it neatly and placed it on her chair. The flame of her only candle, which she had balanced on a broken wineglass, guttered and bobbed until snuffed out. Enveloped in darkness, she slid under her bed sheet and pulled it snugly around her, protecting herself from the night.

  Joseph Barnett was the nearest thing Mary Jane Kelly had to a family member, and even he never knew the true identity of the woman who was placed in the casket. Because she called herself Mary Jane Kelly and claimed she had been born in Ireland, she was interred at a Catholic cemetery: St. Patrick’s in Leytonstone. But if she was as Welsh as everyone else attested, Mary Jane might well have been buried by Methodists.

  Mary Jane was whatever she wished to be, and in the wake of her death, she became whatever Joseph Barnett wished to commemorate. It was he who insisted that the name on her brass coffin plate read “Marie Jeanette Kelly,” a moniker brimming with all the flounce and flamboyance of a Saturday night in the West End.

  Following her death, Mary Jane, an otherwise anonymous resident of Spitalfields, also became what Whitechapel imagined her to be: a local heroine who had suffered at the hands of a monster still on the loose. Her open hearse, her two mourning carriages, and her polished oak-and-elm coffin, decorated with two floral wreaths and a cross of heartseed, became a show of defiance. It also became an excuse to gawk and drink and exclaim at the carnival of mourning that passed through the streets, trailed by publicans and their best customers, as well as the sort of females that the newspapers called “unfortunates.” Women with infants on their hips watched from the doorsteps, men removed their hats as she passed by.

  “God forgive her!” they were said to have cried out, through their sobs. “We will not forget her!”

  Conclusion: “Just Prostitutes”

  The loss of these five . . . lives is clearly a tragedy . . . You may view with some distaste the lifestyles of those involved . . . whatever drugs they took, whatever the work they did, no-one is entitled to do these women any harm, let alone kill them.

  —Mr. Justice Gross, R v. Steven Gerald James Wright (the “Suffolk Strangler”), 2008

  Shortly after the death of Annie Chapman, Mr. Edward Fairfield, a senior civil servant at the Colonial Office and a resident of the upmarket South Eaton Place, in London’s Belgravia, was moved to pick up his pen and write a letter to theTimes. He was particularly concerned about the series of Whitechapel murders. The actual deaths of “the vicious inhabitants of Dorset Street and Flower and Dean Street” were not what was bothering him. Edward Fairfield was far more anxious that in the wake of this disturbance, women like Annie Chapman would be displaced from their hellish hovels in Spitalfields and make their way into his neighborhood, carrying their “taint to the streets hitherto untainted.” “The horror and excitement caused by the murder of the four Whitechapel outcasts imply a universal belief that they had a right to life,” continued this representative of the government.

  . . . If they had, then they had the further right to hire shelter from the bitterness of the English night. If they had no such right, then it was, on the whole, a good thing that they fell in with the unknown surgical genius. He, at all events, has made his contribution towards solving, “the problem of clearing the East-end of its vicious inhabitants.”1

  While today we are likely to shiver at such a comment, Edward Fairfield was simply expressing what would have been, if not a widely held sentiment, then one that he did not feel was inappropriate to discuss openly in 1888. Fairfield was a bachelor, a man who spent a good deal of time at his club, where he was noted for his “slightly flippant, slightly dissipated personality.”2 When he was not there, he was cared for by a cook and a parlor maid and regularly hosted intimate dinners for his male friends. Fairfield, like most of the literate public, had learned all he needed to know about the “vicious inhabitants” of the East End from the newspapers. He had been educated about their disgusting, impoverished, drunken lives from the snippets of information he had read. Whatever gaps remained in his understanding of slum-dwelling women would have been filled in by that which was “common-knowledge”: they were all desperate, filthy, foul-mouthed prostitutes. Sadly, what he and the rest of the readership of theTimesfailed to realize was that there was much more to the story of “the typical Annie Chapman,” as he called women of her ilk, than what appeared in the press. Little did Edward Fairfield know that Annie Chapman had already “carried her taint” into his part of town, because Annie Chapman had spent a good part of her life there. Annie Chapman’s family lived a fifteen-minute walk from Fairfield’s front door, and in her final years, ragged, sick, dejected, “vicious” Annie came there to visit her sisters. Edward Fairfield may have even passed her on the Brompton Road, on his way to Harrods.

  The truth of these women’s lives was not simple, and the sensationalist nineteenth-century press was certainly not telling the whole story to readers like Edward Fairfield. Neither did the editors nor the journalists covering this story deem it necessary, worthy, or interesting to delve into the biographical details of the victims. Ultimately, no one really cared about who they were or how they ended up in Whitechapel.

  The cards were stacked against Polly, Annie, Elisabeth, Kate, and Mary Jane from birth. They began their lives in deficit. Not only were most of them born into working-class families; they were also born female. Before they had even spoken their first words or taken their first steps, they were regarded as less important than their brothers and more of a burden on the world than their wealthier female counterparts. Their worth was compromised before they had even attempted to prove it. They would never earn the income of a man; therefore, their education was of less importance. What work they could secure was designed to help support their families; it was not intended to bring them fulfillment, a sense of purpose, or personal contentment. The golden ticket for working-class girls was a life in domestic service, where it might become possible, after a number of years of back-breaking work, to rise in station and become a cook, a housekeeper, or a lady’s maid. There were no desk jobs for poor girls like Kate Eddowes or Polly Nichols, though both were literate, but many that involved twelve-hour days stitching trousers in a sweatshop, working in a factory, or gluing together matchboxes for a wage that barely paid for bed and board. Poor women’s labor was cheap because poor women were considered expendable and because society did not designate them as a family’s breadwinner. Unfortunately, many of them had to be. If a husband, father, or partner left or died, a working-class woman with dependents would find it almost impossible to survive. The structure of society ensured that a woman without a man was sup
erfluous.

  A woman’s entire function was to support men, and if the roles of their male family members were to support the roles and needs of men wealthier than them, then the women at the bottom were driven like piles deeper and harder into the ground in order to bear the weight of everyone else’s demands. A woman’s role was to produce children and to raise them, but because rudimentary contraception and published information about birth control was made virtually unavailable to the poor, they, like the women of the Eddowes family, like Annie Chapman’s mother, and like Polly Nichols, had no real means of managing the size of their families or preventing an inevitable backslide into financial hardship. The inability to break this cycle—to better their own prospects and those of their children—would have been soul crushing, but borne with resignation.

  Atop this heap of burdens placed on a woman’s shoulders was balanced the most cumbersome one of all: the ideal of moral and sexual immaculacy. As a woman was the keystone at the center of family life, her character must be unimpeachable; if it were not, it was she who was responsible for the ruin of others. Her circumspection and self-sacrifice calibrated the moral compass of her children; her dedication to her husband’s needs kept him from sin—away from the public houses and other women. The double standard ensured that although it might not be entirely acceptable for a man to seek sexual relations with a number of women, it was completely understandable, and even normal. A woman, on the other hand, could have sex with a man only if she was legally married to him. The all-pervasiveness of these ideals meant that even in the more permissive working-class communities, where couples frequently had sex outside of wedlock, didn’t marry, split up, and recoupled at regular intervals, women still bore the brunt of moral judgment, especially when it came from mainstream, middle-class Victorian society. In the narrow-eyed, censorious gaze of the moral arbiters, Polly and Annie were fallen women the moment they parted with their husbands and threw in their lot with other men. Kate was deemed as dissolute as Mary Jane for living out of wedlock with two partners, and Elisabeth was ruined twice: once in Gothenburg, when her name went on the register of public women, and a second time after her marriage failed, when she supported herself through soliciting. The double standard rendered life in black and white. Missionaries offered pity and promises of redemption to those who had taken the wrong path, but usually applied this balm after years of shame and condemnation had rubbed a woman’s self-esteem raw. Is it any wonder that Polly fled the comforts of the Cowdrys’ home, that Annie could not bear to tell her sisters where she lived, that Elisabeth never let anyone truly know her, that Kate fell out with her children, and that by age twenty-five Mary Jane had become an angry drunk?

  At the time of the murders, the belief that “Jack the Ripper was a killer of prostitutes” helped reinforce this moral code. However, while it served an agenda in 1888, this often repeated line fails to serve any immediately obvious purpose today. Nevertheless, it is still the one “fact” about the murders upon which everyone can agree, and yet it does not bear scrutiny.

  From the introduction of the Contagious Diseases Acts in the 1860s through the period of the Whitechapel murders, very few authorities, including the Metropolitan Police, could agree as to what exactly constituted a “prostitute” and how she might be identified.3 Was a prostitute simply a woman like Mary Jane Kelly who earned her income solely through the sex trade and who self-identified as part of this profession, or could the term prostitute be more broadly defined? Was a prostitute a woman who accepted a drink from a man who then accompanied her to a lodging house, paid for a bed, had sex with her, and stayed the night? A woman who occasionally masturbated men behind the pub for money but didn’t have intercourse with them? A woman who let a man put his hand up her skirt for three pence? A woman who had sex for money twice over the course of a week, before finding work in a laundry and meeting a man whom she decided to live with out of wedlock? A woman who used to work in a brothel but then left to become the kept mistress of one of her clients? A woman who tramped and agreed to have sex with a man because otherwise she felt threatened and alone? A young factory worker who had sex with the boys who courted her and bought her gifts? A woman with a “free and easy” reputation who stayed out late at night, carousing in pubs? A woman with three children by three different fathers who lived with a man simply because he kept a roof over their heads?

  Some of these women might be classed as professional or “common prostitutes,” while others might be called “casual prostitutes” or just women who, in accordance with the social norms of their community, had sex outside of wedlock. But as the Metropolitan Police came to recognize, the lines separating these groups were often so blurred that it was impossible to distinguish between them.

  The question of who could or couldn’t legitimately be called a prostitute came to a head in July 1887, after Elizabeth Cass, a dressmaker who had gone out on her own one evening to buy a pair of gloves and view the Golden Jubilee illuminations on Regent Street, was erroneously arrested as a streetwalker. The resulting trial and acquittal of Cass forced the police to reexamine their assumptions about the morals of women who appeared alone in public and to think twice before slapping the label of “prostitute” onto all of them. Sir Charles Warren’s order of July 19, 1887, was issued in an attempt to make an official clarification of how the police were to formally define a prostitute. It was stated that “a Police Constable should not assume that any particular woman is a common prostitute” and that the police were not “justified in calling any woman a common prostitute unless she so describes herself, or has been convicted as such . . .” Furthermore, in order to charge a woman with being a prostitute, proof was required in the form of a formal statement by a person who had been “annoyed or solicited.”4 A year later, Warren was equally cautious about identifying “prostitutes” among the Whitechapel lodging-house population and acknowledged that there were “no means of ascertaining what women are prostitutes and who are not.”5 After having their fingers burned in 1887, police officials were forced to recognize that the intersection between working-class women who were not part of the sex trade and those who were, was so seamlessly interwoven as to make them impossible to isolate into distinct groups. However, this did not always prevent police constables from ignoring these orders and doing whatever their prejudices dictated.

  In the absence of any evidence that Polly, Annie, and Kate had ever engaged in common prostitution, many have taken to claiming that these women participated in “casual prostitution,” a blanket term cast over the ambiguities of the women’s lives that is steeped in moral judgment. It ascribes guilt by association: because a woman was poor and an alcoholic, because she left her children, because she had committed adultery, because she had children out of wedlock, because she lived in a lodging house, because she was out late at night, because she was no longer attractive, because she didn’t have a settled home, because she begged, because she slept rough, because she broke all the rules of what it meant to be feminine. This line of reasoning also explains why Polly, Annie, and Kate’s homelessness was entirely overlooked as a factor in their murders; a “houseless creature” and a “prostitute” by their moral failings were one and the same. There were many reasons why an impoverished working-class woman may have been outdoors during the hours of darkness, and not all of them were as obvious as street soliciting. Those without homes or families, those who drank heavily, and those who were dispossessed did not lead lives that adhered to conventional rules. No one knew or cared about what they did or where they went, and for this reason, rather than for a sexual motive, they would have appealed to a killer.

  If the official criteria established by the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police for defining the term “prostitute” is applied to Polly, Annie, and Kate, it immediately becomes obvious that they cannot be identified as such. Even when relying on inquest testimony, there exists no proof to support these assertions. Similarly, there is no absolute proof that Elisabeth St
ride returned to prostitution in the period prior to her murder. Quite simply, there is no evidence that any of these women self-identified as prostitutes and no evidence that anyone among their community regarded them as part of the sex trade. Furthermore, on the nights they were killed, no one came forward to state that they had been solicited by Polly, Annie, Kate, or Elisabeth. After the coroners had heard the evidence provided by all of the witnesses, they made their absolute conclusions as to the victims’ identities. These were recorded as “occupation or profession” on the women’s death certificates. Mary Ann Nichols was described as the “Wife of William Nichols, Printing Machinist.” Annie Chapman was identified as the “widow of John Chapman, a coachman.” Elisabeth Stride was recorded as the “widow of John Thomas Stride, carpenter,” and Catherine Eddowes as a “Supposed single woman.” Only Mary Jane Kelly, who admitted openly to working in the sex trade, was described as a “Prostitute.”6 These official pronouncements must be taken as the final word on whether or not we are justified in claiming that “Jack the Ripper was a killer of prostitutes.” To insist otherwise is to fall back on arbitrary supposition informed by Victorian prejudice.

  Today there is only one reason why we would continue to embrace the belief that Jack the Ripper was a killer of prostitutes: because it supports an industry that has grown, in part, out of this mythology. There’s no doubt that the story of Jack the Ripper is a good yarn. It’s a gothic tale of a monster on the loose, stalking the dark streets of foggy London. It contains suspense and horror, and an element of sexual titillation. Unfortunately, this is also a one-sided story, and the hunt for the killer has taken center stage. Over the centuries, the villain has metamorphosed into the protagonist; an evil, psychotic, mysterious player who is so clever that he has managed to evade detection even today. In order to gawp at and examine this miracle of malevolence we have figuratively stepped over the bodies of those he murdered, and in some cases, stopped to kick them as we walked past. The larger his profile grows, the more those of his victims seem to fade. With the advance of time, both the murderer and those he murdered have become detached from reality; their experiences and names have become entwined with folklore and conspiracy theories. To some merchandisers, the victims are no longer human beings, but rather cartoon figures, whose bloody images can be printed on T-shirts, whose deaths can be laughed about on postcards, and whose entrails decorate stickers. Is it any wonder that there has been no public appetite to examine the lives of the canonical five, when they have never seemed real or of any consequence to us before?