The Ripper's Victims in Print

by Rebecca Frost

  Catherine Eddowes, whose current situation could be seen as worse than Liz’s, maintains a vastly different outlook nevertheless. This Catherine is a “perky little streetwalker … [with a] cheeky outlook which belied”7 her situation in life. She was short and thin, with no fixed address and no steady income with which to feed herself. Once again her initial long-term relationship ended when her common-law husband left her because of her drinking habits, since he was himself a teetotaler. Perhaps it is her alcoholism that allowed her to always be in such good spirits, since her attitude is mentioned multiple times. Her relationship with John Kelly was impacting by her drinking, but apparently only rarely, and although it led to quarrels the couple had remained together for years. Catherine is perhaps a sprightly, less fanciful version of the women who went before her.

  Marie Jeanette Kelly, on the other hand, gives Liz’s tales some strong competition. Fido’s main contention is of how many previous authors seem to have accepted Marie’s autobiographical narrative, filtered through her boyfriend Joe Barnett, as truth. He remains skeptical of much of her tale, especially her time in France, and suggests that the more elaborate version of her name was given out of “pretension.”8 Granted, this pretension might have come from an actual trip to France and a true past in a brothel of the West End, but it seems to be more likely just another aspect to make Marie stand out from the others, such as her age or her looks. Her name was simply something she had control over, the same way she had verbal control over her past. In Marie’s case, however, there was not enough evidence, either at the time of her inquest or discovered since, to concretely prove her tale to be false.

  Fido thus draws a line between himself and previous Ripper authors, at times agreeing with what they have said—marking all of these women as having drinking problems—and at others declaring the popular image to be false, such as when he makes the point that “[t]hey were not, as is usually stated, prematurely aged harridans.”9 He walks that line and feels that tension between what others have said before him and some new declarations, many of them made to correct past false beliefs based either on new information or on Fido’s own new approach. It is a struggle between what so many authors have claimed to know and what it is possible to prove, or to see in a new light, that many latter Ripper authors have faced and attempted to confront themselves.

  Enter the Black Magician

  In 1987, Melvin Harris published his Jack the Ripper: The Bloody Truth and put forth a new name for the Ripper: Doctor Roslyn D’Onston, whose hobby of dabbling in black magic might explain the ritualistic nature of the murders. D’Onston himself only appears in the final chapter of the book, occupying less than twenty pages. Harris uses the majority of his text to examine and reject a number of other theories. After a brief introduction, all five women appear in a single chapter totaling fifteen pages. As little attention as Harris gives to his star suspect, he makes the five victims share even less space.

  Chapter 2 is given the title of “The Bundle at Buck’s Row” and headed with the date Friday 31st August 1888.10 There are no other headings throughout the chapter listing the other dates on which the victims’ bodies were found, and nothing to separate one from the other, even though Mary Ann Nichols was the only one found in Buck’s Row. Due to this compression of all five murders into a single unbroken narrative, it is therefore unsurprising when little information is given about the women themselves.

  As befitting this lack of information, Mary Ann—subject of both the title and heading—is “unremembered and unmemorable.”11 She is lucky not only because focus is lent to her through these titles, but because two entire paragraphs are devoted to information that would not have been in the coroner’s report. Her husband left her due to her drinking habits, presumably taking their five children with him, and in the three years since he had had contact with her, those drinking habits had apparently not improved. A friend who encountered Mary Ann after she had been ejected from her lodging house for lack of funds reported that she had been too drunk to walk properly. And that is the sum of information about the woman nicknamed in the chapter title. Intriguingly, Harris refers to her as Mary Ann when referencing her past life, but on the streets of the East End, she is Polly.

  Annie occupies a single paragraph on the facing page. She is a widow. There is no further discussion of her marriage—her husband’s name and occupation are not reported, and there is no information about the possibility of children. As a widow she turned to prostitution, but there is no suggestion of wither her occupancy of the East End predated her husband’s death or represented part of a downward slide. Like Mary Ann, she was out on the street because she lacked the coins for a bed, and, also like Mary Ann, Annie was “sozzled.”12 She had somehow managed to attain this state even though she was unable to pay for a place to more safely spend the night.

  Catherine likewise has her biography in a single paragraph, although she is introduced as “the most tragic”13 of the women. She did indeed spend her last evening locked up for being drunk, and the police who regularly patrolled those streets were used to finding her that same way. Drink would also have helped contribute to the fact that she is presented as looking twenty years older than her actual age, although it might also have been simply life on the street that aged her prematurely—or that drove her to drink in the first place. In this version Catherine must be a loner, and the only part of her life given any attention is that last night, from her arrest to her death. The only mention of John Kelly comes after Mary Kelly’s death when it is pointed out that Catherine gave his last name instead of hers at the time of her arrest, and much is made of the coincidence of two of the victims having used the last name of “Kelly.”

  As little as that is, Elizabeth fares worse. She receives no biography. There is some discussion of whether or not she was indeed “Long Lizzie,” since a woman came forward and claimed that the victim was her sister, but in the end “the original identification of Swedish prostitute Lizzie Stride was then shown to be correct.”14 That is the sum total of information provided about her: that her name is Elizabeth, her nickname “Long Lizzie,” and her address Thrawl Street. Perhaps she, unlike the others, had not been drinking on the night of her death, and thus it was not worth mentioning. If that is the case, then there was a lot of information not worth mentioning.

  Strangely enough, despite her usual position of attention as being the final victim, as well as the youngest and the best-looking, Mary Kelly does not fair much better. She is “young, spirited, attractive”15 and behind on her rent. Aside from the descriptions of her mutilations, there is little to distinguish her from anyone else. Granted, she had a rented room and was not a frequenter of the doss houses like the other women, but age and residence do not paint a very full picture of a person.

  Despite his introduction of D’Onston as the true identity of Jack the Ripper, the real purpose behind Harris’ book seems to be to summarize the century since the crimes and not to focus on the crimes themselves. His arguments against previously proposed Ripper suspects focus more on the information discovered about those suspects and not on relating them to the specific victims. In fact, Harris does not relate any of the possible killers to the specific victims. D’Onston is performing ritual murders in which the locations apparently matter—Harris provides a map that depicts the locations of the murders as a cross—but the women themselves were inconsequential. Their deaths were needed for his ritual, and in fact Harris proposes that the murders stopped because D’Onston did not see the magical results he searched for. The women thus not only died randomly, but also in vain.

  More Poetry, Less Sympathy

  Nineteen eighty-seven was a banner year for Ripper books, and the next was Martin Howells and Keith Skinner’s The Ripper Legacy: The Life and Death of Jack the Ripper. Although the narration of the murders does take place over three chapters instead of Harris’ one, those three cover a total of 36 pages. Indeed, there are few points to make as notable among their short des
criptions of these women. The main interest lies in the more enveloping statements.

  Howells and Skinner use the term “nefarious transaction”16 when discussing what brought Mary Ann Nichols to Buck’s row on the night of her death. Although there is little argument that a prostitute seeking to exchange sex for money could call that a transaction, “nefarious” is a term more often suited to the villain—in this case, the Ripper himself. It is not his nefarious scheme to get a woman alone so that he might murder her and mutilate the corpse, but her nefarious actions meant to earn her the coins for the night. She has, after all, been kicked out onto the street and can have no shelter unless she can pay for it. True, the act of sex outside of marriage and specifically for money has long been considered sinful, but in the comparison between prostitution and murder, it seems a bit harsh to use such language for the former.

  In their discussion of the items each woman had on her at her death, Catherine Eddowes’ lengthy list of belongings proves to the authors that she “was rich by comparison”17 when her belongings are placed alongside those of the other women. Granted, Mary Jane had her own room and thus didn’t need to carry around every single thing she owned—however little it was—but Howells and Skinner’s list of Catherine’s possessions hardly makes her well off. Some items, like a pipe, matches, and handkerchief, seem to be quite common to be taken along. Perhaps they think she is rich because she could afford a packet of tea and sugar that hadn’t been drunk right away. Or perhaps it merely is “by comparison,” a simple counting of the items and nothing more. There is certainly no consideration that Catherine’s lifestyle may have been more itinerant—or rather, no consideration at all. Just a list of items and this declaration, as though it is possible to declare any woman of the East End to be rich.

  The authors do, however, seem to at least be aware of the fact that such comments about these women can be flippant. In the introduction they observe that “[o]ur interest in the death of five Victorian prostitutes has become a curiously antiseptic and painless experience”18 and, in the course of the book, go on to prove just that. There are few details given about the victims, but also no acknowledgment that they realize they are participating in distanced reaction, or even whether this happens to be a good or bad thing. It is simply an observation, and then perhaps not even entirely true. If it has become antiseptic and painless, then there is the assumption that, at one time, it was the opposite. At one time, the deaths of these women must have inspired sympathy and been more personal instead of distant.

  Granted, this was likely true at the time of the murders, for the population that was at the center of the crimes, but it is difficult to stay whether anyone who was not living in the East End in the 1880s was ever given the opportunity for such a reaction. Contemporary newspapers certainly wrote extensively about the murders, although their purpose was to sell more copies. Attempts to present these women in a way that was not antiseptic and painless have been few, if they exist at all, and Howells and Skinner do not attempt to make their book one of the minority. They might use more poetic language to describe what was happening, such as when they say that, using losing her husband, Liz “became vulnerable to the evils that formed the very fabric of life in Whitechapel,”19 but that fabric is neither nuanced nor described in detail. This statement becomes a way of glossing over what happened to Liz, either because of a lack of information or a lack of interest, and moving from her brief history to the one part of her life that mattered: her death. The metaphorical language conjures up a certain image of both Liz and life in the East End while at the same time offering little of substance.

  Howells and Skinner employ a similar technique after the double murders when reporting the words of a prostitute in the East End who had spoken to the Pall Mall Gazette. Although they do not give the context of the original piece or the questions that prompted it, this unknown woman says, “I only have to die once, and I’d not mind being murdered by Jack the Ripper if it led to the brute being caught.”20 She goes on to add that she is well aware of how kindly people—all people, from all walks of life, many of whom had their words recorded in print—talk about the victims. It is her opinion that a quick death would be better than starving, although she does show an awareness of the brutality of the crimes, since she acknowledges that having her corpse desecrated would be worth the beautiful eulogies.

  Howells and Skinner place this quote near the end of a chapter and use it to direct their narrative toward the intrigue and mystery surrounding the Ripper. They therefore ignore the implications surrounding it. Clearly this woman believes that nobody speaks well of her now, and that they would not after her death unless she were to meet not only a violent end, but an end that involves the Ripper. It has already been shown that the Ripper’s crimes earned a place in the newspapers above and beyond the usual murders of the East End, and thus simply being murdered, while a realistic death for an East End prostitute, would not have been enough for those sympathetic words.

  She dreams not only of having her death turn her into a figure worth sympathy, but also of being the final victim because it would mean the Ripper was caught. Since she was speaking to a newspaper, it is difficult to see how this mystery woman could have missed that the Ripper murders were widespread news. Certainly she must have heard about the crimes, if not read about them herself, because she knew how others were talking about the victims. Is it possible that, in her quest to escape her current situation and have nice things said about her, she was also aiming to find herself a place in history as the names and carefully scrutinized final victim of the man formerly known as Jack the Ripper?

  Finally she compares the death that would await her at the sharp end of his knife with starvation. Presumably from her current position, starvation seems to be likely, if not imminent. Being murdered in a strange alley, however, has more perks than starving, not only because it would be quicker. The one common wound between all five women was the fact that their throats were cut, presumably before further injury took place, and thus this mystery prostitute could assume that she would not be conscious—or even still alive—when the mutilations that made the Ripper crimes stand out were then enacted.

  Howells and Skinner have found an East End prostitute who, rather than staying off the streets had night, has expressed the desire to be the next of her kind to encounter the Ripper, but they do not use this sentiment to direct the conversation toward conditions in the East End and the lives Mary Ann, Annie, Elizabeth, and Catherine must have been living up until that point. What might this mystery woman have known about them that would lead her to assume the large gulf between what she read or heard about them after their deaths and the lives they had lived previously? Was it simply the fact that they, too, had been prostitutes that made her come to what, to her, was an obvious confusion? And if it was so obvious, then what does this preference for being murdered really say about the East End and the lives of the women who lived there?

  They do return to the idea of the worth of a life of an East End prostitute later on, although there is no connection made between the previous mystery woman and their discussion of the law. According to Howells and Skinner, women “who took to the streets deserved everything they got—though even the most ardent retributionist would have drawn a line somewhat earlier than Jack the Ripper.”21 A woman’s worth was strongly connected to men, first through her father and then through her husband. She was expected to pass from the first protective non-sexual relationship directly into her first—and only—sexual relationship, where she had little to no say over her own body. Engaging in sex before marriage interrupted this order and made a woman unfit to assume the role of respected wife and mother, whether or not that sexual activity involved the exchange of money.

  Only one of these five women connected by Jack the Ripper has ever been accused of having been a prostitute before marriage. Mary Ann may not have been a fit wife because of her penchant for drinking, and some versions indicate that she might not have been
loyal to her husband before they parted, but she did not turn to prostitution until she was turned out. Annie faired even better and managed to avoid the label until her husband’s death ended her weekly allowance. Although Liz had gone on record as having been a prostitute in Sweden prior to coming to England, Howells and Skinner make no note of this. Catherine is likely to never have married Thomas Conway, despite their years together, and Mary Jane married at a young age and also turned to prostitution after widowhood.

  A further complication is that women who turned to prostitution for their livelihood did not necessarily do so of their own free will. It is not as though these women threw themselves into having casual sex with random strangers wholeheartedly. There are many situations in which a woman might willingly engage in intercourse before marriage without being coerced or being on the receiving end of violence, but being an East End prostitute is not the same as being a kept woman or even living in a brothel in the West End. These women who “deserved everything they got” were homeless, at the mercy not only of their customers but of the roving gangs, and forced out onto the street at night if they did not have the money for a bed.