The Ripper's Victims in Print

by Rebecca Frost

  The final point is how the expectation of what these prostitutes deserved is “somewhat earlier” than the fates that actually befell the Ripper’s victims. Apparently the cost of prostitution lies somewhere between a day to day, hand to mouth existence that waffles between doss houses and work houses, a life accentuated by drink when there was money to be had, with the threat not only of robbery but of disease, and a brutal death. A woman without a man in Whitechapel seemed to have a very narrow range of experience to look forward to.

  Just as Howells and Skinner turn the previous quote from a mystery prostitute to a discussion on the mysteries of the Ripper, these observations about women and women’s bodies turns in the next sentence to speculation of what Victorians might have done with another sexual deviant: the homosexual. Their candidate for the Ripper’s identity, Montage John Druitt, is speculated to have been homosexual, which would have indeed placed him in a difficult position in life. Whether it was more or less difficult than the average East End prostitute is up for debate.

  The authors suggest that part of the reason Druitt would have murdered East End prostitutes is the fact that he would have had to pass through the East End on his way to visit his mother, who was in an asylum from the summer of 1888. They add together the puzzle pieces of sexual frustration, a mother who has secretly been locked away, this constant sight of women “who were reaping the harvest of their poverty and vice,”22 and throw in layers of secrecy and conspiracy in order to explain why Druitt did not simply keep continuing to kill victim after victim in a growing frenzy. Their choice of Ripper becomes difficult when comparing theories to known facts and records, but they still decide that the choice of prostitutes was not necessarily because of the ease of encounter, but because there was something about this particular sort of woman that set him off.

  Despite the lyrical language and metaphors Howells and Skinner use to discuss some aspects of the Ripper’s victims, and indeed life in the East End in general, the end result is not in fact one that inspires empathy in the reader. Empathy would involve a personal recognition between reader and subject, a way in which the reader could see herself in the shoes of one of these women. Part of this difficulty comes with being one hundred years removed from Victorian Whitechapel, although clearly contemporary readers were confronted with similar distances in class and circumstance.

  Like many authors before them, Howells and Skinner continually and routinely turn the focus of their book back to the Ripper himself. It is, after all, a quick summation of the salient facts of the crime meant to lead into various theories developed in the years since, ending traditionally with the suggestion of the “real” identity of the Ripper. Further investigation into the lifestyle of East End women or questions into what, exactly, some of these provocative quotes and statements reveal would just distract from the main focus of this and every Ripper text: the killer himself.

  “Not so pretty”

  Terence Sharkey’s book, Jack the Ripper: 100 Years of Investigation—also from 1987—takes a rather mathematical approach of rating the likelihood of various proposed Jack the Rippers by percentage. The various theories themselves are presented in a chapter he entitles “Identity Parade” and then rated in the next, “Pick Your Ripper.” The most likely, according to the rankings, is Montague Thomas Druitt—presumably the same man others name as Montague John—who is assessed at 75 percent. The pseudonym of Dr. Stanley and known criminal Fredrick Bailey Deeming are each rated at 0 percent and thus entirely dismissed, but, as far as Sharkey is concerned, the rest have at least a small chance of one day being fully proven.

  Because of this approach, he does not set out to prove a single theory. There is therefore no need to link the murders or victims, and he presumably does not need to discard details that would disprove his favorite Ripper or to emphasize small points that would otherwise not deserve such attention. He even allows each woman her own chapter, with four of them titled with her accepted nickname: Dark Annie, Long Liz, Kate, and Mary. Chapter 2, however, is entitled “Not So Pretty Polly.”

  Polly is, of course, already the nickname of Mary Nichols, and she is not said to have been known as anything with a further description, pretty or not. And pretty she had indeed once been—it is the reason Sharkey gives for her marriage to William Nichols and their five children. It is perhaps then no surprise that William eventually left her due to “her drinking and general slovenliness.”23 If nothing but Polly’s looks had attracted William to her in the first place, then excess drinking could have indeed led to a decrease in her attractiveness, as well as simple aging and motherhood. There is no indication as to why Polly would have started turning to the bottle or caring less about her appearance, and no suggestion that her husband might have done anything to lead to her alcoholism or apathy.

  Sharkey overemphasizes the fact that being without a husband in the East End made Polly turn to prostitution, stringing together a number of euphemisms that leaves no doubt as to her profession. Her last night finds her ejected from the lodging house, boasting about her bonnet, which he derides. Clearly he interpreted her comment as indicating that this bonnet would help men find her attractive, a prospect Sharkey clearly doubts. Even then he follows this dismissal with commentary by Polly’s friend, Emily Holland, who notices something wrong with Polly aside from her drunkenness. Apparently Polly was usually quite cheerful and pleasant to be around, even when drunk, and thus this lack of spark caught Emily’s attention. Polly was, however, too drunk to listen to her friend’s concern, and is next seen after her death.

  This assessment of her personality is really the only positive thing to have been said about Polly. The rest of her life seems to be failure: as a wife, as a mother, as a respectable working woman, and even as an attractive prostitute. Her one redeeming feature was her cheerful personality, and even that was missing on the night of her death. In case readers are influenced too strongly by the opinion of Emily Holland, William Nichols is given his valedictory when he views the body of his wife in the mortuary. It is not her personality that causes him to forgive her, but the gruesome state of her corpse. Nothing Polly has personally done could have redeemed her to him, it seems, but Jack the Ripper’s knife managed what she could not.

  Annie Chapman, given the nickname Dark Annie, suffered a similar descent in her life, although her position as a married woman may have placed her higher than Polly. She had lived with her husband in Windsor and, according to Sharkey, Annie had been the one to instigate their separation. He suggests that it was her drinking that caused her to leave, although it does not seem she abandoned any children. These had already been sent away, and her husband died not long after she had left him.

  Aside from her drinking and the usual life associated with women living on their own in the East End, Annie is known to have been involved in “frequent brawls—she presented no attractive sight.”24 In spite of both her apparently incendiary personality and her less than beautiful appearance, Annie clearly found work as a prostitute. Witness after witness at her death inquest confirmed this, and even those who did not know her personally but had merely seen her on the night of her death described a procession of men.

  In the face of such testimony, Sharkey does not even mention any other means by which Annie may have been making a living. She is given no steady man and no steady income, since she was on the street that night because she had no money for a bed. Apparently, again in spite of her looks, she may indeed have found a client before meeting her fate with the Ripper, since Sharkey reports that coins were found near her body. If they had belonged to Annie and had not been left there by her murder, then she must have earned them recently, both because she had not had them to pay for her lodging, and because she had not spent them on the gin of which she was so fond.

  Liz was different in that she was neither drunk on the night of her death, nor had she been kicked out of her lodging house for being penniless. She also had the support of the clergy—at her death inquest, the pastor
of the Swedish church suggested that she made her living by means other than prostitution. His testimony to this matter ends up being disregarded, since a number of men turned up at the inquest to say that they had once lived with her, but Liz is the only one of these women to have been associated with a church at all.

  She is, of course, Swedish, although she had been living in the East End for nearly two decades at the time of her death. Her last name is the result of a marriage, although Sharkey does not know what happened to John Thomas Stride. What he does know is that the Princess Alice story, once again related here, was shown to be false during the inquest. Any sympathy Liz might have gained by either being widowed during the sinking or because she earned her living through sewing is ultimately denied her. There is no series of people to prove that she was not a widow because of the sinking, but this story is dismissed all the same.

  Thus most of the information given about Liz is shown to be a lie, or perhaps a fairy tale meant to present her in a better light. Sharkey does not even indicate whether the pastor may have lied because he was honestly unaware, or if he meant to give Liz a better public reaction in death than she had been given in life. When she crossed paths with the Ripper—it is not clear if she happened to be looking for a customer at the time—she “moved silently and swiftly from the obscurity of the ill-lit East End streets to national and lasting fame,”25 although whether or not fame might have been worth the price of her life is debatable. Unlike the claims that Liz was not a prostitute and was widowed by the Princess Alice, this one goes uncontested.

  Kate fairs a bit better since John Kelly is present and accounted for to tell more of her story. He is described as her “‘latest’ husband in common-law,”26 indicating that there must have been more before him, even if they are not named or even numbered. Sharkey informs readers that Kate had indeed been married, and the relationship was important enough to her that she had her husband’s initials tattooed on her arms. None of the other women were said to have tattoos, and there is no discussion of how common this might have been, or what the contemporary reaction would be to a woman with tattoos, no matter what their content. Unfortunately Thomas Conway abandoned his wife and she was left with this reminder long after he had gone. There is no indication that Conway was upset or at all impacted by Kate’s death.

  In contrast, when Kelly takes the stand at her death inquest, he is emotional. Clearly he cared about the woman he had lived with for seven years, and their relationship is not questioned even though Sharkey states that Kate was a prostitute. The police knew her to work in a certain area, and if she had refrained from prostitution the entire time she was with Kelly, it is unlikely that they would have remembered this seven years on. And, even though she was a prostitute, somehow she and Kelly spent their last days virtually penniless, spending what they earned on drink first, with food and lodging only as afterthoughts. Even their annual hop-picking did not earn them enough money to pay for everything.

  The picking was cut short not only because Kate was feeling unwell, but because she told Kelly that she wanted to return to London to claim the reward money for naming the Ripper. This tale, unlike Liz’s concerning the Princess Alice, is not declared an outright lie. It is simply surprising and left at that. No one seems to have pestered Kelly to learn whether Kate had told him the name, or even to ask him why she had not claimed the reward sooner. The legend of Kate knowing the Ripper has reached the level of supreme acceptance, unquestioned at the time and unexplored in the years since. If nothing else, with this depiction, Kate would have done her best to secure the reward so that she could keep herself in gin, weakening the support for this story.

  When confronted by the rumors and tales surrounding Mary’s past, on the other hand, Sharkey sidesteps them by listing the locations in which she was supposed to have lived before coming to the East End but not discussing them further. It is almost easy to overlook the fact that she was ever anything but an attractive East End prostitute in a sea of drabs. She is given a place of honor, not only in the relative length of her chapter but also because Sharkey opened his book with a discussion of her. His Mary “shone like a beacon”27 and thus attracted, and was deserving of, attention. Whatever bad things may have been said about her—things that Sharkey has said about the other women, for example—he argues that there must have been something good about her, something appealing, if only because she had managed to charm her landlord into letting her owe weeks’ worth of back rent.

  This charm also extended to her relationship with Joe Barnett, since she was walking the streets behind his back. Although they had been together for almost two years and he was meant to support them through day labor, Sharkey tells a different story. His Mary spends her day in prostitution and then meets up with Barnett when he finishes work, he being none the wiser, and the pair would then drink together until bedtime. Mary, of course, had been drinking all day, and perhaps this is where her money went, since it clearly had not gone to paying rent. Sharkey also has to mention that there were rumors that Mary might have been a lesbian, in case Barnett needed another reason to garner sympathy at having been duped by a pretty face.

  Unless, of course, he was simply too dull-witted to have realized what Mary was pulling one over on him. After Barnett left Mary, Sharkey pictures her simply waiting for him to come back, certain he will return. As conniving and deceptive as she might be, though, Barnett earns sympathy in the end when he gives evidence at the inquest despite a stutter and his tears. Through both the fact that he was not aware of Mary’s daytime prostitution, intending to support the pair of them on his own, and this emotional reaction, Barnett is shown as a devoted man who happened to pick an East End woman singular for both her looks and her connivance.

  The doubt and negative comments that Sharkey expresses have been embedded in Ripper narratives for a century at the time of his writing and thus should not be surprising. Dismissals are common and do not need explanation beyond the fact that the speaker was making an attempt to present the subject in a positive light. Aside from Mary Kelly, who has issues of her own to counter this, it is rare to find anything redeeming about these women, and Sharkey does his part to continue this representation.

  Ghosts, Psychics and Suspects

  In Peter Underwood’s 1987 book Jack the Ripper: One Hundred Years of Mystery, he claims the description of being “possibly the first to consider paranormal aspects”28 of the murders. He does not consider black magic and does not name Doctor Roslyn D’Onston as one of his suspects, even as one of the theories to be dismissed, but Underwood does involve Robert James Lees in his accusation of Sir William Gull and devotes a chapter to the discussion of ghosts encountered at the murder locations. It was only Gull’s connections to the royal family, Underwood points out, that saved him from a more public accusation, and thus it is high time for the Ripper’s name to be known.

  Underwood groups the murders into a single chapter, but does allow each woman her own heading. He opens the section on “Mary Ann ‘Polly’ Nichols” with a narrative of the woman in question, describing an almost whimsical account of her final hours. His Polly has indeed been evicted from her doss house for not having the money, but she has since been lucky with two clients. “[A]lthough the second one had been a sadistic slob of a beast, he had plied her well with gin beforehand and she had survived”29 and was presumably on her way back to her lodging house with coins from two such encounters in her pocket.

  This version of the tale clarifies how Polly could have been drunk when she encountered the Ripper after having been evicted for being penniless. The gin came from one of her clients—the second she had met that night. If lodging houses required four pence for a bed, and Polly allowed herself to be plied with gin by the second man, the question occurs: how little was she charging per encounter? If the first man had given her enough for a bed, why did she need a second client? While it is true that East End prostitutes could not charge a fortune for their services, does this mean that Polly h
ad been desperate enough to accept an offer for less than four pence in the hopes that she could then make up the difference? And was it desperation that led her to accept the offer of the sadistic second customer, or love of gin?

  The irony, of course, is that Polly survived an encounter with this second customer only to encounter someone who better fit the definition of “sadistic.” In Underwood’s version, she does not willingly go with the Ripper as a client, but is instead surprised by the Ripper. He is aided by her drunkenness, and perhaps by this point Polly was also relieved to have earned her money and was not as inclined to pay attention to any man she saw. Then again, Polly is not found with any money, which is what has led most authors to conclude she either could not find a customer or had bought her own drink that night.

  This opening scene makes way for very little information about what Polly’s life had been like up until that last night. Her estranged husband is mentioned, but no children, although Underwood allows for the conflicting reasons of who ended the marriage and for what reason. He recounts how she failed at both living with her father and working as a maid, and the repetition of her drinking habits, even though not explicitly linked, provides readers with an explanation for these shortcomings. The tale then circles back around to its opening scene, with Polly on the street and looking for money for her bed. After all, for all of these women, their importance always returns to their final moments.

  Annie does not receive such a romanticized opening of her last night, although she is given more background information, as well as a middle name. Underwood introduces her as “Annie May Chapman,” using a middle name that seems to belong to him alone. As a young woman, around the time she met her husband, Annie is described as a “slim, dark … impressionable and attractive girl”30 who finds herself utterly taken with soldier-about-to-turn-veterinary-surgeon Fred Chapman. It is unknown how long her slenderness lasted, since she was not described as such at the time of her death, and Underwood does not explain the effects Chapman had on his impressionable young wife. Was she impressionable because she was swayed into marrying him? Underwood connects the idea of Chapman being an honorable man and his marriage to Annie, allowing for much speculation about the reason behind their marriage, but he also comments that the marriage itself was happy.