Despite her drunken staggering, Spiering allows Polly a moment of hesitation and indecision when she spies a shadowy figure who turns out to be Eddy. This moment is overshadowed by her desire for money and a warm bed, however, and in the end she gestures to the man who ends up being her murderer. Having squandered her money on drink, Polly ends her final night alone and on the street, ostensibly through no one’s fault but her own.
Annie is not given this same order of introduction, biography, and then death. She is encountered, nameless, upon the street, where Spiering gives the reader a brief description of her appearance through Eddy’s eyes. Although she, too, has clearly been drinking—gin, by the smell—there is something about Annie that makes Spiering describe her as attractive. Her hair, at least, is still brown and not Polly’s almost entirely gray.
Her past is solely investigated through the death inquisition, and then only reaches back less than a week. Whether Annie was married, to whom, and if there were any children is never discussed. It is enough for Spiering to inform readers of a fight she had gotten into with another prostitute—thus indicating Annie’s profession once again without saying it outright—as an explanation for why Annie had not been feeling well during her last night alive. Because she had been so drastically injured in a fight that was said to have been over a piece of soap, she could not work and had not been able to earn any money for food or her bed. Like Polly, Annie was turned away from her usual lodging house and forced into the street in the wee hours of the morning.
Thus the woman who is so often portrayed as the most sympathetic, having done her best to engage in and sell handicrafts instead of resorting to prostitution, is given a somewhat confusing and abbreviated background. This Annie is a woman who will engage another fiercely in a physical fight to the point where she must nurse her injuries for days—a rather shortsighted battle, considering how it left her unable to pay for her own basic needs. Is this Annie hotheaded? Was she drunk then, as she apparently was on her last night, despite her inability to pay for a bed? And the fact that this brawl was apparently over soap—what are readers meant to make of this? Is this part of what Eddy found attractive about her? As the sole report of a living Annie, this incident conjures up more questions than answers.
Liz is introduced prior to her death in a manner similar to Polly, and Spiering perhaps sums it up best when he says “Liz Stride played many roles.”11 He relates the story of the Princess Alice sinking—in this version a single child drowns with the father—and describes how Liz would protest any charges of drunkenness against her by feigning a fit in court to prove that it was this condition and not drink that had led to her arrest. Spiering does, however, allow that all of this fantasy may have helped Liz save face in front of her friends and companions, since she had to explain why she was no longer with her husband. Perhaps Liz, apparently childless in reality, also felt she had to turn herself into a mother of deceased or absent children—she claimed nine—instead of a widowed woman with none. The position of a mother whose children predeceased her would have earned her marked sympathy.
In an encounter that is too perfect to be anything but apocryphal, Spiering relates the tale of a doctor who had visited the East End and overheard a number of prostitutes discussing Annie’s murder. One of these women happened to have a Swedish accent and she, if no one else gathered there, had been drinking. This woman makes the dire prediction that any one of them around that fire could be next, and indeed, she was. Perhaps Spiering’s dismissal of Liz’s penchant for storytelling is undercut by the fact that he felt the need to relate this one.
Again like Polly, the reader is introduced to Catherine Eddowes prior to her encounter with Eddy. Her past, unlike Annie’s, is discussed, from her long-term relationship with Thomas Conway that resulted in three children but not marriage, to her current relationship with John Kelly. Catherine may have practiced monogamy, but it was serial monogamy outside of a marriage contract. Spiering does nothing to hint that she engaged in prostitution, but he makes it clear that the couple did indeed drink, wasting their last coins on gin in a familiar story. Catherine in fact wakes up for the last time in a jail cell, coming out of a drunken stupor.
She is evicted from this cell instead of from her lodgings, but Catherine still ends up alone on the streets in the wee hours of the morning, and is apparently still drunk when Eddy meets her. In her last moments, Catherine is described as “small, thin, and alone”12—clearly she has not been eating well, preferring to spend the money on drink instead of food, and although she has a steady man in her life, he is not with her then. Catherine’s death is not a result of prostitution but clearly the result of a woman being alone on the streets at night. Other authors choose to blame the policemen, who should have followed the woman they say was a known prostitute, but Spiering’s Catherine is not such a woman. Catherine was not looking for a man or for her doss money, and yet she died all the same.
Marie Jeanette Kelly appears in a chapter entitled “The Birthday Gift,” since her death corresponds with the birthday of the Prince of Wales, Eddy’s father. It is perhaps worth noting that objects, not people, are generally given as gifts, although whether this objectification is of Marie Jeanette’s corpse of her as a human being is unclear. As is fitting for the youngest and most attractive victim, more time is spent on her physical appearance, although Spiering insists this was not the most striking thing about her. Marie Jeanette, like Liz, tells stories about her life.
Spiering’s Marie Jeanette speaks of French parents, although he immediately cuts this down and proclaims the plain Mary Jane from Ireland. This Marie Jeanette was forced into the streets immediately after the death of her husband, without any struggle or apparent search for other work. She did not do so poorly for herself, however, since she occupied a small room of her own, which she shared with her long-term companion Joseph Barnett. Lest anyone wish to equate this relationship to that of Catherine Eddowes and John Kelly, Marie Jeanette discovers in August that she is pregnant and knows that Barnett is not the father. As expected, this revelation causes quarrels and puts a strain on the relationship, resulting in Marie Jeanette being alone in her room on her final night.
On par with the tale of Liz Stride predicting her own death is Spiering’s declaration that “there was no woman in Whitechapel more frightened of Jack the Ripper than Marie Jeanette.”13 He makes no connection between this fear and the prostitute Marie Jeanette allowed to stay in the small room, leading to the final straw for Barnett, which would indicate an empathy and concern for life beyond her own. Despite this fear, the stresses in her life drive Marie Jeanette to drink, very much like the other women before her. A woman so terrified of the Ripper is now walking the streets drunk instead of remaining in her own room after dark, and she has driven out the man who would mean both protection and an income. Does this mean that risking the Ripper was preferable to spending another day with Barnett? They were in arrears for a surprising amount and Marie Jeanette was said to be out on her final night looking for customers so she could pay some of her rent. What would have driven her to kick Barnett out if staying alone meant she was solely responsible?
Although Spiering does go further than Knight in exploring the lives of these women, the details he presents remain disconnected and confusing. At times he seems at least partially sympathetic to their plights, but it is always a combination of drinking and a lack of money that leads them into the waiting knife of his syphilitic Prince Eddy. These are women who have left their men—husbands, if they even bothered to get married—and have abandoned any children they bore. Two are known to have turned their pasts into obvious falsehoods grander than anything they had ever experienced. All made the mistake of being a woman who had sex outside of marriage, whether or not they were paid for it, and even those that were squandered that pay when four pence would have bought them a bed for the night and kept them from becoming famous in their deaths.
Not Joined by Royal Blood
There is, h
owever, one book from the 1970s that is willing to commit to the identity of Jack the Ripper without pointing in the general direction of the Duke of Clarence. Dan Farson’s 1972 book Jack the Ripper reintroduces the idea of a young lawyer named Montage John Druitt as his suspect, based on notes composed by Sir Melville Macnaghten. Granted, Macnaghten joined the force the year after the murders; his notes, while not fully accurately representing Druitt, also lists two other possible suspects; and Druitt committed suicide sometime after the murder of Mary Kelly without actually confessing. Little enough is known about Druitt, and certainly not enough for Farson to find any glaring evidence that he could not have been the Ripper. But does an accusation of common blood in the Ripper have an effect on his presentation of the women who were killed?
Farson, like Spiering, does not think that the Ripper chose his victims for any specific reason, although he takes this a step further. This Ripper does not have a grudge against prostitutes in general, either, and simply finds them to be “the easiest prey.”14 The East End itself was dangerous enough that cries of “Murder!” were common and the women walking the streets were generally left to themselves, not overseen by brothel matrons or even presumably by their common-law husbands. Farson is, however, one of the few to realize this aspect instead of turning the victim choice into a personal crusade involving some form of revenge.
His attention to the women in question, on the other hand, is minimal. Although Farson does indeed set the scene for each murder, he does so with a bare sketch of the woman as she was that night, hardly touching on any biographical information. Again, this brief information comes across as contradictory, since readers are presented with a Mary Ann Nicholls who “was a pathetic creature…. But she had spirit.”15 This spirit might be embodied by the bonnet she wears, the one she indicates before being thrown out of her lodging house for the night. Farson suspects that Mary Ann did not mean to sell the bonnet in order to make her doss money, although he does not indicate whether she might have been able to pawn it at that hour. It would seem that any other woman out and about would be in the same situation and not have any money to pay for it, but Farson concludes that she did not mean to sell it since it was still in her possession when she was murdered.
Aside from being irresponsible enough with her money to be forced out into the streets in the middle of the night, Mary Ann was clearly too drunk to have been expected to fight for her life. Aside from her bonnet, if she had indeed purchased it herself instead of having been given it, she had enough money for drink. In case any reader would wonder if this was a singular incident, testimony from her father later on cements the fact that Mary Ann was indeed prone to drinking. Whatever negative emotions her death stirred in her father, her husband, who is mentioned only at the end of Farson’s discussion of Mary Ann, offers a blanket forgiveness for what his wife had done to him. What that is, exactly, is never mentioned, but leaves the reader to wonder how many sins can be forgiven in light of a brutal murder.
No father or husband comes into Annie’s story, although, since Farson indicates she had known better days, at least one must have factored into her past. This Annie is simply “another pathetic old prostitute”16 who ends up turned out in the middle of the night. She is allowed the explanation that her lack of money stemmed from having been in the infirmary—instead of having squandered her money on drink and a new bonnet, Annie has been too ill to earn it. This is her valedictory, since Annie’s next appearance is after her death.
Farson reverses Liz and Kate, presenting them in the order of identification instead of the order of their murders. Kate “fitted the pattern of the other woman,”17 referring to her preference for alcohol and the fact that she looked years older than her age. Unlike Mary Ann or Annie, Kate has the benefit of a long-term male companion in John Kelly, although the pair seems little better suited to keeping track of their money than the women before them. Once again a woman who has no money for a bed is found drunk, and Kate was locked up for a few hours, presumably to sober up.
Acknowledging the fact that she must have heard about the two murders that occurred prior to that night, Farson notes the fact that Kate may have gone willingly with her killer into Mitre Square. He admits that she may have been suspicious of the man accompanying her, but she needed money. Farson’s tone in this matter is a bit flippant, since he declares that “she went readily to her death”18 that night without acknowledging the struggle she and Kelly faced over the previous span of days that led to their return to London, ostensibly in search of the reward money for identifying the Ripper. Their desperate situation is covered quickly in such a way that yes, Farson might express incredulity at the risk she presumably took with a customer.
Liz’s life is confined to a single paragraph. In it Farson mentions her Swedish origins, her marriage to an Englishman, her arrests for drunkenness, and the every-popular account of the Princess Alice. Liz is reduced to being a pathetic foreigner, living in an area well known for housing prostitutes even if he will not commit to calling her a prostitute outright, and one who played up the sympathy of those around her with her fictitious tale of the sinking. As a drunken attention-seeker, Liz is perhaps considered no great loss, even if she had managed to avoid of a life of prostitution. She, like those before her, found herself alone on the streets at night, and though Farson does not indicate that she went in search of money, readers are still left to wonder why she might have been so desperate to risk it. Liz was, after all, not specifically denied a bed, and it was still comparatively early.
The need for money makes a reappearance with the figure of Mary Kelly, whom Farson first places apart from the others through her age, attitude, and looks before shrugging those off and declaring, “Otherwise she was a drunken prostitute like the others.”19 Despite the fact that she alone was said to have begun her career in the West End and had gone to Paris with a client, there is nothing in her life to raise her above meeting the same gruesome end. Unlike the others Mary had her own room, but she was behind on the rent. There is no mention of Joseph Barnett or his recent departure—Farson’s Mary has been keeping this room on her own, although clearly not very well. During her last day, many reported seeing her in all kinds of comings and goings as she sought money, and these various ventures eventually led to the Ripper joining her in her room.
In a final dismissal not only of these women but all of those in Whitechapel, Farson mentions that they “were so indifferent to their fate”20 that they joked about the Ripper and their chances of being next. It is his interpretation of their reaction as one of “indifference” that is jarring. Although his narrative does not go to lengths to explore these women’s backgrounds or even the position of a woman without a husband during this time period, apparently their attempt to make sense of the situation through black humor instead of finding themselves respectable jobs so that they might afford their beds each night makes them indifferent. Perhaps a better assessment would be “trapped, and doing their best to confront the realities of the situation.” At any rate, Farson does not make a suggestion for what these women should have done to protect themselves.
Still Unnamed
The remaining books from the 1970s do not champion a particular suspect but rather hint at what is to come by reviewing previous theories—and rejecting them all. Although these narratives are not informed by a leading theory of the Ripper’s identity, they still offer some unique perspectives worth noting.
Richard Whittington-Eagan’s 1975 A Casebook on Jack the Ripper largely ignores the victims after presenting them in a list on page 2. The information is limited to date, name, and location of the murder—so limited, in fact, that nicknames of the victims must be clarified in footnotes on later pages. Otherwise they do not appear as individuals in the text. Whittington-Eagan’s introduction and epilogue, however, are noteworthy in their generalizations.
He declares that the story of the murders, even almost ninety years removed, is still enough to procure feelings of empathy and p
ity—although there is little indication where these emotions can be found in writing. These women are deserving of such a reaction because their “small shortcomings in life were surely redeemed by the enormity of their deaths.”21 It is almost a throwaway comment, a token acknowledgment that the women in question were indeed drunks and prostitutes and an emphasis on how terrible their murders were, but it deserves some attention.
The mere fact that Whittington-Eagan believes these women to have been in need of redemption comments on their lifestyle as though it was indeed a choice and a willing descent into sin. This lack of background of the individual women and lack of situating them within an East End world that was by 1975 truly foreign allows this judgment to be passed simply and universally. There is no discussion of what these women may have done in order to be in need of redemption, and likewise no acknowledgment that prostitution was the last resort of the desperate and not an easy answer. The Ripper, meanwhile, becomes the one dispensing redemption, assuming the role of a priest or other man of god while he wields his knife. True, Whittington-Eagan admits that none of these women deserved to be carved up, but the statement still remains: their terrible deaths redeemed them when it seems nothing in their lives could.
He comes full circle in his epilogue when he returns to this idea of these deaths as somehow a positive event, claiming that the women “share an uneasy immortality that has been envied to the worthier majority.”22 Their deaths not merely redeemed them but made them immortal. It is true that the names of Mary Ann, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine, and Mary Jane would likely never have been recorded if not for their deaths, and how many people are still discussed nearly a century after their lives ended? It is this idea of envy that should be more complicated than Whittington-Eagan makes it seem.
The Ripper's Victims in Print Page 10
