The Ripper’s Victims in Print
The Rhetoric of Portrayals Since 1929
REBECCA FROST
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE
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e-ISBN: 978-1-4766-3143-1
© 2018 Rebecca Frost. All rights reserved
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Front cover image © 2018 samposnick/iStock
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com
To the memory of Brittany Nicholas,
who looked for—
and brought out—
the best in everyone
Acknowledgments
First and foremost I would like to thank Dr. Kette Thomas, who agreed to guide me through an independent study on Jack the Ripper’s victims at our very first meeting. Her support and encouragement meant that I could then pursue the dissertation I had imagined. Dr. Diane Shoos, Dr. Marilyn Cooper, and Dr. Adam Feltz also agreed to be on my dissertation committee, and each provided specific, faceted insights into my research. Thank you for your perspectives.
Thanks also go to the circle of colleagues and friends who have impacted my research and my work, listed in alphabetical order because I would never be able to form a hierarchy: Dr. Kirsti Arko; Angela Badke; Natasha Fetzer; Colleen Hix; Rae Hix; Dr. Karla Kitalong; Katie Trotter; and members of the UP-Write group. Your support has been perhaps a bit unorthodox at times, but always present and very much appreciated.
And last but not least, I must express gratitude toward my family: my parents, who have read nearly every word I have ever written (poor Xander); and my husband Eric, who has heard more about Jack the Ripper than he ever wanted to in his life.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
ONE ∙ Enter the Victims: The Ripper Crimes of 1888
TWO ∙ Fifty Years Later: The Earliest Ripper Books
THREE ∙ “Ladies of the pavement”: Ripper Narratives of the 1950s and 1960s
FOUR ∙ Royals, Freemasons and Schemes: Presenting Victims in the Conspiracy Theories of the 1970s
FIVE ∙ One Hundred Years Later: Writing for the Anniversary of the Crimes
SIX ∙ More Than a Century Later: Discussing Murder in the 1990s
SEVEN ∙ More of the Same? An Introduction to the 21st Century Books
EIGHT ∙ Enter DNA: Victim Descriptions in Light of 21st Century Uses of Technology in Ripper Theories
NINE ∙ Crimes for a New Age: Variations and Changes in Victim Representation of the 21st Century
Conclusion: What Possible Use?
Chapter Notes
Bibliography
List of Names and Terms
Introduction
In the summer of 2007 I entered a bookshop in London and asked, quite naively, if it had any titles about Jack the Ripper. I was directed toward the proper section and confronted with a shelf and a half of choices and no idea where to start. In the end I arbitrarily chose between the two thickest books and ended up with Philip Sugden’s Complete History of Jack the Ripper. Whenever anyone asks where my interest in true crime began, I name Sugden.
Three years later I had read what I thought was a vast number of books on the Ripper and I went to my first meeting with Dr. Kette Thomas ready to propose an independent study course—but not on the Ripper. I sat down with Kette and outlined my realization: every time an author writes about a serial killer, there are more victims than killers in the narrative. This held true whether the killer in question was the Ripper, John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, Gary Ridgway…. Any serial killer had more than one victim, no matter which definition of “serial killer” happened to be current. The true crime books I had read, however, overwhelmingly devoted space on the page to the killer.
It was, as I explained to Kette, quite a revelation for me when I realized that, as I was delving into an historical mystery full of clues and evidence, I was participating in the representation of the victims as objects. (I did not word it so cleverly then, but this same sense of injustice drove my dissertation years later, in which I was able to express these ideas more eloquently.) What I wanted to do with my independent study was breathe life back into the victims of Jack the Ripper to recreate the women they might have been.
I was able to take my independent study paper and turn it into my very first conference presentation based solely on my belief that this cultural trend of bringing the serial killer to the spotlight and leaving the victims in the shadows—unless, of course, their bodies held some crucial clue—was in need of discussion and consideration, and certainly not on any prior experience with conferences. Until then I had focused mainly on American crime narratives for my dissertation, with a foray into Stephen King’s serial killers as both a conference presentation and a book chapter, but my collection of works about Jack the Ripper grew steadily. Unlike my first encounters, I stopped reading them to learn the answer to the mystery of the killer’s identity and started reading them for what they had to say about the victims.
I consulted the Casebook: Jack the Ripper website1 for its list of nonfiction titles about the Ripper, not minding when it advised that certain ones were outdated or had since been proven wrong because I was not looking for facts. I was hoping to track down books across a wide range of years to trace the rhetoric surrounding the Ripper’s victims. This book is the result of that search.
I examine representations of the five canonical victims from Leonard Matters’ 1929 The Mystery of Jack the Ripper, considered the first nonfiction book on the subject, up through titles published as recently as 2017. In many I am only interested in a few pages since my focus is not on these women as victims or corpses, and certainly not as clues that point to the Ripper’s identity, but in these women as women. I am further not concerned with whether the descriptions of and information about them is accurate, but rather in what information is presented, and in what language. My focus is the rhetoric of victimhood as presented throughout the decades in the specific case of the victims of Jack the Ripper.
I chose to focus on the canonical five victims—Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth “Liz” Stride, Catherine “Kate” Eddowes, and Mary Jane or Marie Jeanette Kelly—not because Jack the Ripper killed these five women and only these five women, but because they are the most likely to appear in any given text about him. It is a matter of having access to evidence and not a statement of personal belief on the number or identity of Ripper victims. Each will be discussed in connection with individual texts the way their names are written in that text.
The sheer number of English-language narratives concerning Jack the Ripper that were produced around the century mark of the killings, during the following decade of the 1990s, and even since the beginning of the twenty-first century means that, in some chapters, the books discussed are representative samples. My working bibliography is by no means exhaustive—although I hope to continue to make progress toward that goal—but does include works by the more well-known Ripperologists as well as the more popular ones of recent decades.
The organization of this book is chronological based on the original publication date of the material being examined. Many of the original documents have been reproduced in later publications so as to be more accessible—and,
indeed, more legible—for the average amateur Ripperologist, and that information is treated as contemporary to the crimes.
Chapter One, “Enter the Victims: The Ripper Crimes of 1888,” surveys what was known at the start of it all, covering newspaper and inquest information. Although many more recent works refer to any number of primary documents, the most common are coroners’ reports, which give few—if any—details about the victim herself and instead concentrate on what her injuries have to say about the killer.
Chapter Two, “Fifty Years Later: The Earliest Ripper Books,” addresses the early works of the 1920s and 1930s, beginning with Leonard Matters’ The Mystery of Jack the Ripper from 1929. These titles have been published when sources and readers might remember the crimes, and thus their connection to the events is the most immediate for book-length narratives.
Chapter Three, “‘Ladies of the pavement’: Ripper Narratives of the 1950s and 1960s,” explores the next Ripper narratives for information about the canonical victims. There were no books published in the 1940s, and thus authors and audiences find themselves situated in the post-war world, which may have effects on the narratives produced then.
Chapter Four, “Royals, Freemasons and Schemes: Presenting Victims in the Conspiracy Theories of the 1970s,” focuses on the decade in which Queen Victoria, her personal physician, and her grandson all came under suspicion as having played a role in the Ripper crimes. To explain the motives behind the killings, many theories relate the victims to each other in new ways and explore their identities and personalities to make these accusations of guilt seem plausible.
Chapter Five, “One Hundred Years Later: Writing for the Anniversary of the Crimes,” concentrates on the 1980s, an interesting decade in Ripperology for multiple reasons: it holds the hundred-year anniversary of the murders; saw the American true crime boom; marked the FBI beginning to state itself as an authority on serial killers and serial killing, terms that had only recently been coined; and saw, in 1989, the execution of Ted Bundy, who had become a modern foil for the Ripper. This change in attention to and authority concerning serial killing allows for new language to be used in the chronicling of the Ripper crimes and in the description of his victims.
Chapter Six, “More Than a Century Later: Discussing Murder in the 1990s,” draws upon a selection of books from the 1990s, a decade in which the first female author is heard and books seek to offer new and exciting information on a case more than one hundred years old. Past inconsistencies are highlighted and past rumors dismissed, but the discussion of the victims remains open for new approaches and close readings in order to determine whether, after all these decades of varying narratives, these women are receiving a different kind of attention.
Chapter Seven, “More of the Same? An Introduction to the 21st Century Books,” tackles a selection of representations from the twenty-first century that seem to follow along in the historically-established vein. These books are indeed “more of the same” in both their theories and victim descriptions, creating an argument for how much—or how little—cultural approaches to victimhood have changed.
Chapter Eight, “Enter DNA: Victim Descriptions in Light of 21st Century Uses of Technology in Ripper Theories,” focuses on texts that have advertised themselves as using modern technology to form their approaches to the crimes and those involved. This chapter includes the popular 2003 book by Patricia Cornwell, Portrait of a Killer, as well as the more recent—and controversial—2014 Naming the Ripper by Russell Edwards, both of which rely heavily on DNA evidence gathered through the personal work of the authors and the great personal expense of hiring experts. Although the technology and terminology surrounding the case have advanced, has the approach to the victims changed?
Chapter Nine, “Crimes for a New Age: Variations and Changes in Victim Representation of the 21st Century,” makes a short survey of the more recent Ripper texts that have gone beyond the usual and oft-repeated narrative. Some do not concern themselves with the victims at all, and the way in which they do so may be just as enlightening as the way the victims have been represented, or ignored, in prior decades.
Finally, the Conclusion considers more than a century of information on Jack the Ripper to ask the larger questions: what has changed? What influenced those changes? And what is still in need of change?
Frequent readers of true crime or Ripper texts may notice a common element is missing here. I have chosen not to include photographs of the victims, since the majority of uncontested photographs come from the morgue. Much has been written and theorized about the victims as corpses, but the focus of this book is the representation of the victims as living women.
• ONE •
Enter the Victims
The Ripper Crimes of 1888
This is not a book about Jack the Ripper. That would be an understandable misconception—his name is, after all, in the title, and multiple books claiming to be about the victims or other surrounding topics do indeed end up focusing on the Ripper himself. The Ripper’s identity is one of the great historical mysteries and the focus of more than one hundred books. This is not one of them.
Although many pages have been devoted to concluding exactly how many women were killed by Jack the Ripper, the most commonly agreed-upon victims make up the so-called canonical five: Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth “Liz” Stride, Catherine “Kate” Eddowes, and Mary Jane (or Marie Jeanette) Kelly. These women were found murdered in the latter half of 1888 in the poor East End area of London and have been resurrected in nearly every Jack the Ripper narrative published since. Although none of these women lived to be fifty, their names are still spoken more than one hundred twenty-five years after their deaths.
Because of the repetition of the Jack the Ripper narrative and the fact that these five women are commonly agreed to have been his victims, we are thus able to trace their narratives and the rhetoric surrounding their victimhood across the decades. This investigation is not interested in descriptions of the wounds inflicted to their bodies, or in their corpses—instead, this study focuses on the descriptions of the women themselves, in life. How were they presented? What terms and phrases are used to describe these women? Are they lumped together as five variations on a singular theme of victim, or are they allowed individual traits? And do these descriptions serve to flesh out these specific lives of women in London’s East End, or do they function solely to point to the identity of their killer?
Whitechapel, 1888
For those living through the terror of 1888, little explanation of the time and place was needed. Although those in the West End may have learned a bit about the lives being lived by the poorer citizens of the East End, they still occupied the same time period and shared many of the same world views. This cannot be said for readers situated in the twenty-first century, who may require more of a background so that they may clearly picture the time and place in which these women lived. These descriptions, some pulled from contemporary documents, are more common in recent books about Jack the Ripper, reflecting both the distance from the events and the acknowledgment that situation plays into these murders—or at least into identifying the murderer.
The East End, including Whitechapel, was largely home to newly arrived immigrants. In the late nineteenth century, many of these immigrants were Jewish, seeking refuge from pogroms and general persecution in Eastern Europe. Due to religious practices and daily customs, many of these immigrants tended to keep to themselves and settle among fellow Jews instead of mixing with others in the area. To further the divide between poor Londoners and these immigrants, Victorian England did not provide social services for the poor, while the Jewish community did. Since the Jewish community looked out for their own, instead of leaving the unfortunate to fend for themselves, this led to increasing anti-Semitism among the English—or at least among contemporary seekers of Jack the Ripper, who were all too eager to accuse him of being foreign, Jewish, or otherwise “other.”
Life in
the East End was difficult enough without seeing others—and foreigners to boot—having a slightly easier time of it. Those who ended up in the East End had not done so by choice, only occupying the filthy streets and dilapidated buildings because the poor and unwanted had been pushed further and further east as the city proper expanded. In the East End alone there were nearly one hundred thousand paupers, and the vast majority of them did not have a fixed address. Many East Enders spent their days gathering pennies to spend the night in a doss house or lodging house, paying for their beds one night at a time. If they had no money and could bring themselves to accept the harsh conditions, they might have lined up for a place at a work house. Homelessness was rampant in the East End and led to people being on the street at all hours, not being allowed to linger in the kitchens of lodging houses or in the public houses without being able to pay.
While Victorian London may be portrayed as uptight and prudish, the East End seemed to be a different world entirely. Some young men of the higher class of Londoners may have engaged in the practice of slumming as a means of passing the time, experiencing the life of the lower classes for a limited period of time, but otherwise the upper classes avoided such rough areas. In more than one report surrounding the Ripper case, cries of “Murder!” were ignored because of their frequency. It was not the sort of area many people would have entered into willingly.
One escape from the rough life of the East End would be the numerous public houses, frequented by the victims themselves. These pubs opened around five in the morning and closed around midnight, if indeed they ever closed at all. At the time, alcoholism was not considered a disease but was thought to be a sign of a weak mind or lesser constitution. This was not helped along by the fact that many women of the East End were not only given to excessive drinking but were also prostitutes, combining sins. Clearly, drinking was for the lower classes, and the higher classes had little to no business being in the East End in the first place. They would likely have been able to ignore the poverty of the East End altogether if not for the Jack the Ripper murders.
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