The Ripper's Victims in Print

by Rebecca Frost

  The first full-length book on Jack the Ripper was published forty years after the event itself and could not have been said to have opened the floodgates. Only two more were published in the following decade, and then twenty years passed before the next book. In those twenty years, the world experienced a number of changes.

  Sixty years after the Ripper murders, audiences were even further removed from the culture in which they took place. Newspapers were no longer the sole source for timely information. Telephones, radios, and televisions had become common. While the East End may have remained a less prosperous region than the West End, all of London had felt the effects of the bombings during World War II. Men, women, and children alike had been threatened by the axis powers, and the level of fear may well have been comparable to the days when newspaper boys shouted details of the latest gruesome murder. Women had entered the workforce and then refused to be displaced when the soldiers returned home. The focus of attention was shifting.

  The Ripper reappears in books more than a decade after the end of the war, assuming three new alias over a half-dozen years. None of these identities is enough to rival Hitler—a Russian surgeon, a failed barrister, and a Jewish slaughterman all fall short—but they represent a specific, localized threat that is now far in the past and likely no longer remembered firsthand. Readers and authors are far enough removed from these murders, as well as far enough removed from the most recent event of violent bloodshed, that the Ripper may once more be examined.

  There is a notable change between the Jack the Ripper books of the 1920s and 1930s and those of the 1950s and 1960s. Although these pairs of decades boast a mere three books each, those of the earlier decades include very little information about the five women found dead. The amount of space devoted to them—to their biographies and years of life instead of to their corpses and coroners’ reports—greatly expands in the fifties and sixties. It is possible that the experience of an entire country having been on edge and in fear of the next attacks, while at the same time coping and living through the danger in part by bringing women out of the home, allowed for the perspective of the Ripper’s victims to be more fully considered as both important and valid.

  Naming the Ripper with Another Alias

  In his 1959 book The Identity of Jack the Ripper, Donald McCormick offers up a confusing solution in the form of a man alternately named Alexander Pedachenko and Vassily Konovalov. Multiple contemporary theories speculated that the Ripper had to be a foreigner, since no one could conceive of a proper Englishman committing such a crime. Further, there was great debate over whether or not the Ripper showed any medical skill during his mutilations of his victims, with the prevailing theory leaning toward the affirmative. A third question was whether or not the Ripper happened to be sane, since presumably an insane butcher of women would be more notable and should have been more easily caught. McCormick satisfies all of these concerns with his proposal of a mad Russian doctor, although Pedachenko may not have ever actually existed.

  It is only in his final chapter that McCormick names his Ripper, and even then only after dismissing multiple other theories. He opens with the murders themselves, with Chapter 2 entitled “‘Polly’ of Thrawl Street” and Chapter 3 “‘Dark Annie.’” Their deaths are important enough not only for an entire chapter to be devoted to them, but to be named for them, as well. Liz and Kate must share a chapter given the broad title of “An Autumn of Terror,” and even though Mary Kelly exists in her own chapter, it is named “Grand Guignol in Miller’s Court” and named after the location of her death instead of using her own name. This is an interesting division—Polly, being the first victim, may be accorded the “honor” of a chapter title simply by dint of being first, but Mary, usually held separate from the others because of the brutality of her mutilation and the fact that she is usually considered to be the final murder, has a chapter that proclaims her address instead of her identity.

  Within her chapter that at least holds her name and might be excused for giving her address as a form of identifying her against the other Pollys of the East End, Polly is a contradiction. McCormick declares that she “was generally liked, even by her own sex and by those who competed against her”1 as fellow prostitutes, but when he expounds upon her biography, he finds little to like. McCormick breezes through her childhood and past her marriage to the point where she finally parted from her husband and her five children. The language is neutral enough that it is unclear whether Polly left her husband or he left her, but nothing is said about him apart from his occupation whereas Polly is shown to be too fond of drinking and careless in many aspects of her life. This carelessness is not subject to much scrutiny, but since drinking put Polly on the outs with her father, as well, perhaps nothing more needs to be said. Readers are able to connect her fondness for the bottle with her inability to remain in a household with a male figure well enough.

  It is a pattern that repeats, since Polly is next seen running through a string of men who manage to put up with her for perhaps a month before they, too, react in the same way as her estranged husband. As likable as McCormick claims Polly to be, perhaps it is only to those who must endure her in small doses and not those who attempt to cohabitation for an extended period of time. Polly runs through various men and plenty of alcohol until she ends up even lower than many of the women around her.

  And yet, whether or not she has been medicating herself with alcohol, Polly is still likable. McCormick argues that, when drunk, she was perhaps a bit loud, but always cheerful, hardly the worst reaction to an overindulgence. It is difficult to imagine incessant cheerfulness as a reason for so many men to abandon her in turn, but McCormick does not go into further details and indeed only names Polly’s husband and father. The other men are perhaps in and out of her life too quickly to have left such a mark, or—it must be considered—have been constructed through hearsay and rumor in which the reality of the situation was blown all out of proportion. If Polly experienced any money troubles with these men, they were subsumed under the repetition of her alcoholism.

  Even on her final night McCormick’s Polly is not turned into the street for a lack of money but because she happened to show up drunk. This makes her declaration that it will not be long before she has money for her bed a rather confusing non sequitur, since McCormick made no indication that she lacked coins in the first place. Then again, a drunken Polly may well have given such a response, either as her way of denying her condition or because she had not fully understood in the first place. Either way, a drunk Polly ends up wandering the streets, admitting to a friend that she was thrown out because she did not have any money and not because she was turned away at the door for drunkenness—after all, what doss house would have clients if men and women were turned away for drink? Just as it is difficult to reconcile a likable Polly with the biography McCormick presents, it is confusing to attempt to determine which explanation honestly led to her presence on the street that night.

  Polly is likable but unable to hold a man’s favor for long. She drinks, but this does not turn her mean or maudlin. She did not have money for a bed, but she was turned away at the door of the lodging house because of her drinking. It is possible that she had drunk enough to hope that she might have her bed on credit and it is not unbelievable that she would have told different tales to different people in her life. Two of these people—the men who had parted from her but had not been able to escape being known in her biography: her husband and father—even chose to insist that she had not been a prostitute in life, and McCormick does not offer any evidence to refute this. It would have been entirely possible for them to lay such blame at Polly’s feet, since she could have easily been presented as abandoning her husband, children, and father in turn, but it seems she turned to serial monogamy instead of prostitution and was thus saved from such a label. In the end much of Polly’s life remains a mystery, and despite this confusion, McCormick does not interpret the given information as in as poor a light as he could
have.

  Annie, who receives a chapter title that is solely her nickname, stands out for McCormick against all of the others. First and foremost he admits to her occupation as prostitute, although this places her far below the middle-class of her birth and marriage. This endears her to neither her fellow women of the streets nor to McCormick and garners no sympathy, although he does mention that the end of her marriage may have been the fault of her husband. Annie, like Polly, parted from both husband and children and had a drinking habit. Although McCormick makes no hesitation in dispelling any romantic notions of Annie as a “one man” woman, she did not turn to prostitution until after her husband’s death, when her weekly allowance ceased. For McCormick, Annie’s attempts to make money through crocheting and selling flowers were the supplement to her main income and not her first choice of vocation. He presents an Annie who, despite looking older due to her drinking and poor health, “frequently took men back to the common lodging house”2 where she stayed.

  Annie’s movements during the final days of her life, important because they might reveal where and when she had crossed paths with the killer, are confusing. McCormick mentions she had been in the infirmary off and on all month due to illness, and then relates her fight with another woman during which she was badly injured. McCormick reports that she spent the night before her death with her sister, but he does not show Annie being kicked out of a lodging house or even attempting to enter one on the last night of her life. There is no firm explanation for what she might have been doing out so late—or so early—although the previous evening she had acknowledged to a friend that she needed money for lodging. Between this statement around five the previous afternoon and the murder around five in the morning, McCormick gives no indication of her actions.

  In spite of the fact that she had been ill and the beating she had taken for pointing out another woman’s attempted scam of a mutual friend, McCormick offers no sympathy to Annie. He specifically states that anyone offering such sympathy has been misled. He denies Annie both Polly’s supposed serial monogamy and her universal likability, and there is no mention of how Annie acted when she was drunk. It is as though McCormick is personally offended by prior sympathetic representations of Annie Chapman and has set out, in this chapter titled with her nickname, to dispel them all and offer her up to a harsher light.

  The facts presented of Annie’s life, like those of Polly’s, could have been interpreted more or less favorably as McCormick chose. The language he uses to discuss Polly, even in her negative aspects, is buffered and buoyed by this continual insistence on and his belief in her likability. Annie suffers from his determination to invert previous representations that he finds to be fraudulent. It is perhaps possible to find sympathy for a victim of Jack the Ripper, but McCormick has none for Annie.

  In their shared chapter, McCormick bounces back and forth between information on Elizabeth and Catherine. Elizabeth, like Annie, is most definitely a prostitute, although other details are not as certain. It is uncontested that she was a Swede, but, Stride not being her maiden name, there is some confusion as to whether she is, or ever was, married. Despite being registered in the Swedish church as unmarried and known there as childless, McCormick reports Elizabeth’s rescue from the sinking of the Princess Alice and the death of her husband and two children.

  Even after admitting that there is no evidence to back up this claim, McCormick relates the fact that Elizabeth marked this moment as “the beginning of her downfall.”3 The story of the Princess Alice not only explains why Elizabeth was alone on the streets, as neither wife nor mother, but also provides a reason for her drinking. In this telling, the grief made Elizabeth crave hard liquor, and thus she worked as a prostitute in order to satisfy her craving and dull the pain. Unlike Polly or Annie, Elizabeth did not leave her husband or be driven out by him. If their parting was a result of his death then her situation would have indeed been desperate, especially if she needed to pay for drink as well as shelter and food.

  She may have found help in this, since McCormick brings up the figure of Michael Kidney. Theirs does not seem to have been an entirely stable relationship, since they intermittently parted during the three years they lived together. McCormick does not mention whether Elizabeth and Kidney were in the on again or off again part of their relationship on the night of her death. In fact, Kidney is apparently of such little importance to Elizabeth that his name only appears the once.

  Catherine’s long-term relationship, John Kelly, fares little better, with his name appearing twice despite the fact that they had been together for seven years. Readers are once again faced with a strange contradiction when McCormick informs them that Kelly knew her the wife of a man named Thomas Conway before adding that, as far as evidence could be found, she had never actually married Conway. Barnett seems to have been under the impression that she was indeed Conway’s wife, although presumably she had followed this up with the information that she was widowed or that they had separated. Certainly she was not receiving an allowance, the way Annie had until her husband’s death. All the same, if Catherine had met Barnett after her relationship with Conway had ended, it brings up the question of why she would have introduced herself to him as Conway’s wife without additional clarification of the current arrangement.

  Questions of whether one half of the couple might have been using the other for money, Kelly depending on Catherine’s prostitution when he was unable to find work as a laborer, or Catherine being supported by Kelly so she would not have to walk the streets, are not raised. Nor is the question of why the couple may have stayed together at all if they so often ended up penniless as they did in Catherine’s final days. As with Elizabeth and Kidney, there is no investigation of this relationship or what it might have meant for either party. Kelly allows Catherine to pawn his boots less than twenty-four hours before her death so that they might eat, standing barefoot on the dirty cobbles in September. If the female victims are largely ignored within Ripper narratives, the character of their companions receives even less scrutiny.

  Catherine’s prostitution was not her only means of obtaining money, although McCormick stresses it as her most common. This Catherine, as McCormick relates through Catherine’s daughter Ann Phillips, was an irritation because she would beg her daughter for any spare coins. Despite Kelly’s identification of Catherine as Conway’s wife, Ann Philips seems uncertain as to her paternity. What she does know is that “Conway left her mother because Catherine Eddowes drank so heavily.”4 Conway was in fact still living, although he had been living under an assumed name so that Catherine could not find him and hound him for money as she hounded her daughter.

  Once again readers are faced with a woman who has separated from the man who, if not her husband, was the father of her child, and was therefore also separated from her children. She drinks to excess—if there were any hope that Catherine may have found sobriety in the wake of her relationship with Conway, this is quashed with the recollection that she spent her final evening in jail for public drunkenness. She, like Elizabeth, is in a long-term relationship with a man, although this does not prevent her from being on the street alone after dark.

  The only woman who did not meet her end on the street after dark had recently lost the man who had worked to keep her off of them. McCormick clarifies that the Ripper’s final victim went by various forms of her name, sometimes Mary Ann, sometimes Mary Jane, “and, occasionally, more pretentiously as Marie Jeanette Kelly.”5 Perhaps it is Mary Jane’s youth and vivacity, so unlike many women in the East End, that has allowed her to feel so pretentious. Those who lived nearby knew who she was without having ever been introduced. At her death inquest, one woman noted that “you couldn’t miss her. She was different from these other girls”6—and Miller’s Court, where Mary Jane lived, was home to many young women. Mary Jane’s difference must have been visibly clear.

  Mary Jane may have been an object of jealousy for more than her age and her looks, since she lived there wit
h the man she had introduced as her husband. She had met Joseph Barnett only the day before they had decided to live together, and, according to testimony at her inquest, the relationship seemed to be a good one. True, there were fights, and one in particular led to a broken window, but it was agreed that these only happened when Mary Jane drank. Overall Mary Jane was a lucky girl to have her looks, her youth, and her Joe Barnett.

  Her Joe Barnett who, for whatever reason, was rapidly cooling toward her. McCormick guesses that Barnett “discovered his mistress had been secretly whoring again,”7 a supposition that carries many levels of meaning. First, although Mary Jane can refer to Barnett as her common-law husband, she is instead his mistress instead of a common-law wife. Granted, a mistress is simply a woman involved in a long-term relationship who is not married, but the most frequent use of the word implies that the man in question is married and his mistress is the other woman.

  Barnett is perhaps lucky that Mary Jane is his mistress and not his wife, although separation without divorce clearly happened in the Victorian era. Thus, when he discovers that Mary Jane has been prostituting herself without his knowledge, he is able to simply leave her. But why would Mary Jane walk the streets in the first place? If she had a room, a bed, and a man to provide for her, then she would hardly need to put herself in such a position. After all, the Ripper had already murdered four women before her, and the newspapers were hardly silent on the matter. McCormick does not mention it, but the Ripper murders could not have escaped her attention.

  Did she need money for drink that she felt Barnett could not give her? Was he therefore insulted that life with him was not so grand that she felt no need to drink? Or was it instead an insult to his manhood because he could not provide for the two of them on his own? McCormick maintains that Barnett was under no illusions about Mary Jane’s life before they had met, which included a rapid fall from a bordello in the West End and a series of men who left her because of how she acted when she was drunk. Her modus operandi was so repetitive that McCormick decides her sole purpose in prowling the streets was not for single encounters with men, but to find the next one to provide for her room and board. Was Barnett simply seduced by a pro and could not cope when he learned he was unable to change her?