By suggesting that the Ripper killed multiple women because of his obsession with Mary Kelly, both Paul Harrison and Bob Hinton attempt to shift the blame from a man to a woman. If Barnett and Hutchinson had never encountered Mary Kelly, then they presumably would never have gone on to murder a number of women, ending with the subject of their obsession. If Mary Kelly had been a better woman—either rejecting prostitution in favor of living on Barnett’s earnings or responding in kind to Hutchinson’s attentions even when he had no money to offer her—then her own death could have been averted. Barnett is meant to have killed the other women in an attempt to scare Mary Kelly off the street, so perhaps she should have given in to that fear or, at least, been more suspicious of Barnett and his own intentions. Hutchinson’s stalking was spurred on by moments of attention, most—if not all—of which revolved around money, and thus if Mary Kelly had been less obsessed with pennies and had looked past her pocketbook to the man in front of her, then perhaps Hutchinson would not have had to murder, after all. Thus the deaths of these women lie not on the man who slit their throats, but the woman who drove him to it.
A Pair of Jacks
Mary Kelly has not simply been accused of driving the men in her life to murder, but also factors into being the cause of further narratives of two men acting as a team to commit the murders. Although neither of the two men, each presumably a homosexual, is personally affected by Mary’s secret, they end up working together in order enact the murders. In John Wilding’s 1993 book Jack the Ripper: Revealed, the murders are instigated when Mary Kelly visits lawyer Montague John Druitt in order to confess that she has become pregnant by the Prince of Wales and wishes to receive compensation for this. Druitt turns to J. K. Stephen for help, since he and Stephen are both set to hold positions of power once the Prince of Wales’s son, Eddy, takes the throne, and the two men embark on a series of murders so that, when it comes time to murder a substitute woman in Mary’s bedroom, her own death will go unnoticed.
Initially, however, they were not acting to preserve Mary’s life—and the secret of the paternity of her child—but to eliminate it. Mary Nichols’ death appears to have been something of an accident. Wilding presents her as an alcoholic who would give or do anything in order to have a drink—indeed, “the power of mother-love was easily defeated by the might of alcohol,”28 driving Mary away from both her marriage and her children. Even an attempt to make a respectable living as a maid was ruined by her thirst for alcohol. Wilding expresses great surprise—or perhaps scorn—at this, since he suspects that any woman who had been living on the street or in workhouses would have made a better attempt to keep that position. This is a Mary Nichols who would accept any offering that could be converted into drink.
On the night of Mary Nichols’ murder, Wilding suggests that Mary Kelly was at home in her rented room and became aware of someone lurking outside. Throwing on a hat and a shawl, Mary Kelly retreated to a public house where she came across Mary Nichols, presumably hatless. Showing off her “cool, calculating nature”29 and assuming that whoever had been following her had been tracking her bonnet instead of her face, Mary Kelly passed the bonnet off to Mary Nichols, who clearly accepted solely so she could pawn it for drink money as soon as the shops opened. The men who had intended to follow and murder Mary Kelly recognized the bonnet and found their chance to murder the wearer before dawn. Thus Mary Kelly is responsible for Mary Nichols’ death, and Wilding suggests she must have been shaken by the news—assuming she read the stories and recognized the woman, or perhaps the bonnet. Although perhaps accidental murder might be forgivable, since Mary Kelly might have merely wished for the stranger to follow Mary Nichols and allow her to slip away. After all, Mary Nichols was nothing but an old drunk.
Annie Chapman, on the other hand, is not presented as an alcoholic, nor a professional prostitute. Whereas Mary Nichols might have been willing to do anything for money for a drink, Annie resorted to prostitution only when her other attempts at earning money failed. She was a sick woman who still tried her best to earn a living despite the lack of a man to support her, although Wilding does also disparage her looks. Annie was “not an alluring woman”30 and thus would not have likely been mistaken for Mary Kelly, even if she had put on Mary’s bonnet. Mary’s hand in Annie’s death, however, is still present.
After the murder of Mary Nichols, Wilding posits, Mary Kelly returned to Druitt in order to express her fears and concerns, unaware that he himself had been one of the men after her that night. In the course of their conversation she told Druitt that she had given proof of her secret to a friend, and must have named Annie Chapman in the process. This, Wilding explains, was the reason Annie’s belongings were spread out around her body: the killer was looking for that evidence. In this instance, Mary Kelly foolishly named her friend and thus condemned her to death.
Unlike the first two murders, Mary appears to have had no hand in the death of Liz Stride. Wilding even makes sure that Liz is painted as being different from her predecessors: she was in better health, contributing to the fact that she was better-looking, and also better educated. He attributes her emigration from Sweden to London, as well as her on and off relationship with Michael Kidney, to wanderlust, and deems her a free spirit, albeit a heavy drinker. Liz’s death came about because she recognized one of the killers, explaining why her murder was rushed and in a more public place. The killers themselves couldn’t linger, however, since they had a standing appointment to meet Catharine Eddowes.
This Catharine is never a Kate, and she never married. Her relationship with Thomas Conway was perhaps ill-advised purely because of their age difference, and Wilding dismisses any claim that Conway might have beat her, since “Catharine, a much younger person with a fiery temper, would surely have been able to defend herself!”31 It is difficult to say whether Wilding means to dismiss the possibility of domestic abuse due to her age and personality, or whether she should have been physically and mentally strong enough to stand up for herself had it happened. His repetition of the age difference makes it seem like he wants readers to find it laughable that a man would have been able to beat a much younger woman. It is not clear whether Catharine should have pulled herself together and left him if these beatings actually occurred, but she certainly should have been able to weather or even prevent them.
Catharine is still interested in getting money any way she can, although Wilding insists that Conway had initially enrolled in the army under an assumed name and thus retrieved his pension under that name. While other authors have had Conway make the change specifically in order to prevent Catharine from attempting to get that money, Wilding has him using the assumed name before the pair ever met. Instead of having Catharine look for her daughter on her final day in order to scrounge more money, however, Wilding puts Catharine with Mary Kelly. This Catharine is not the persistent scrounger her entire family works so hard to avoid.
Mary Kelly, pregnant and claiming the father as the Prince of Wales, had by now become the subject not of assassination, but protection. It would seem that Queen Victoria herself learned of her pregnancy and had decided that any descendant of her beloved Albert should be protected. This plan involved Mary Kelly “being destroyed then reborn as a new woman,”32 a prospect that Wilding has Mary Kelly embracing completely. Her life in 1888 was at a low point, since she had fallen from a middle-class background and had been unable to reclaim that position through her own means. Being intelligent, educated, and mannered—at least in comparison to the other East End prostitutes—allowed her a wider range of clients, including the future king. The fact that she was carrying his child, or at least a child who could be claimed to have been his, would have looked like the key to her future and given her a special feeling of place. After the initial shock of causing the murders of Polly and Annie, the protection from Queen Victoria herself would have further elevated Mary Kelly’s sense of importance. Catharine’s death shows just how much stock she put in her promised future.
During her final afternoon, in which Catharine Eddowes managed to get quite drunk despite having been penniless earlier in the day, she was with Mary Kelly. In order to complete the plan that put Mary Kelly’s death as just another in a string of murders, there needed to be another murder, and Mary Kelly had selected the victim. Even though she had chosen one of her friends to be the next to die, Wilding suggests that Catharine’s steady drinking was perhaps a sort of apology and that Mary Kelly hoped her friend would be drunk enough to be willing to meet Druitt and Stephen, but not so sober that she would be aware of what happened. Unfortunately the men did not manage to find Catharine while she was so impaired and thus Mary Kelly waited around for her friend to be released from her cell, no longer drunk and incapable but mostly sober and willing to go along to service a good-looking pair of men. If Mary Kelly vouched for them, then Catharine would have trusted her, even at the height of the murders.
Catharine Eddowes was not the only friend Mary Kelly offered up as a sacrifice in order to be born into her new life, although the other woman’s name is not known. Once she had helped Druitt and Stephen secure one victim, there was no backing out. Even if the protection and life offered to her had not been enough, the fact of Mary Kelly’s guilt would have made her continue. Wilding’s Mary is, of course, cool and calculating, and thus she does not hesitate. In order to assume her new life as the mother of a royal child, even if the child’s paternity was not publicly acknowledged, East End prostitute Mary Kelly had to die. Once again, Mary Kelly chose the woman to be murdered.
In order to ensure that the body found in Miller’s Court would not be identified as being someone other than Mary Kelly, the horrific mutilations were necessary, especially of the woman’s face. Being so different from the other women of the East End would have worked against Mary Kelly, since she would have had to find someone who was also young and of the same build. Once her friend was asleep in her bed as simply the latest woman to share the small room with her, Mary Kelly left to wait out the murder.
As cold and calculating as Wilding shows Mary Kelly to be, he suggests that she is not entirely immune to thoughts of what was happening behind her closed door. Although Druitt and Stephen take no issue with seeing these women as objects, Mary Kelly suffers a fit of conscience on the night of her supposed murder and, instead of waiting for the men, spends her time getting drunk. The various reported sightings of Mary Kelly after the coroner’s declared time of death are thus the real Mary Kelly, miserable after a night of drinking, before Druitt and Stephen were able to track her down again and spirit her away to her new life. Even if there was a rumor that Mary Kelly was living in luxury with a child, it would be easily put to rest by recalling the gruesome scene discovered November 9. This sequence of murders meant that Mary Kelly no longer existed and could give birth to a royal child in private.
While the duo of Montague John Druitt and J. K. Stephen were given a solid, if slightly convoluted, narrative reason for the murders, the pair of J. K. Stephen and Prince Eddy does not have such a clear cut explanation in David Abrahamsen’s 1992 book Murder & Madness: The Secret Life of Jack the Ripper. While Wilding’s pair of Druitt and Stephen happened to be accused of homosexuality individually, Abrahamsen’s couple is indeed a romantically linked pair with a relationship established before the start of the murders. Druitt and Stephen were not boyfriends, but Stephen and Eddy were indeed involved on many levels. Druitt and Stephen acted in order to preserve the reputation of their crown prince, and thus their own futures with the crown prince’s son, while Stephen and Eddy came to commit the murders together out of a deep-seated misogyny. In Abrahamsen’s narrative, Marie Kelly is just another victim, a pawn “strategically moved about on [the killer’s] deadly chessboard—before, during, and after the attacks.”33 For once there is nothing special about her.
Abrahamsen writes from the position of a forensic psychiatrist who offered his opinion on the sanity of David Berkowitz, the self-styled Son of Sam, and thus his insights reflect this background. For instance, he declares that “[t]he eternal wish of every woman from childhood onward is to be taken care of by someone who loves her,”34 a desire that went unfulfilled in the case of many of the women under discussion. Even when they attempted marriage—and even when Abrahamsen refers to them solely by last name, which is in many cases their married names—their husbands could not provide them with the support they sought.
Mary Ann Nichols, for example, was denied this ultimate satisfaction because of her drinking. Her marriage had ended because of it, and her possible opportunity of employment—being taken care of by a man, at least, in the form of a wage, if not given the desired love—also ended because of her alcoholism. The defining characteristic of Nichols, then, is her love of drink. It explains why she was on the street, not just on the night of her murder but the life that had led her there in the first place, ruining every chance she was given to better herself and her position. Nichols not only lacks funds for a bed but a dependable man to provide that money and security that all women everywhere, not just in the East End in Victorian England, desire.
Annie Chapman fares little better, although Chapman at least received an allowance from her husband after they separated because of their drinking. Chapman is lumped in the same boat as Nichols, since presumably their histories aligned quite closely, and Abrahamsen’s killer duo would not have cared why they ended up on the street, anyway, so long as the women made themselves available for murder. What Abrahamsen does ponder, however, is Chapman’s age: “she was the oldest of the victims, yet her body held attraction for this murderer.”35 Despite her age and presumably her looks, Abrahamsen’s Ripper—a homosexual couple, no less—was in some way attracted to her body. It is perhaps fitting that only Chapman’s body is of interest, both for the killers and for the author, since it is her body that has caught the attention of researches for more than a century. The living Chapman, with an alcoholic life that paralleled Nichols,’ is of no consequence.
Even with this dismissal, however, Chapman fares better than Elizabeth Stride. Stride is given an age, a nationality, and her nickname before she is merely an interesting corpse.
Catherine Eddowes at least has a bit of an interesting past, involving both her “friend”36 John Kelly and a husband who only admitted his relationship to her two weeks after her death. Although Chapman’s husband was already dead at the time of her own death, neither Nichols’ nor Stride’s husband earns himself such a mention. Presumably the fortnight between the identification of Eddowes’ body and her husband’s appearance is a unique and interesting timeline of events, especially since the man had gone so far as to change his name in order to avoid her. It is perhaps a darker mark against her than the stain of alcoholism.
Abrahamsen has Eddowes hop-picking with Kelly, although the story of new boots is a bit muddled. In this version Kelly buys Eddowes some boots out of his own earnings, and it is these boots—not his—that are pawned. Despite the fact that she was presumably picking hops alongside of Kelly, it is his money explicitly that is used to buy her some boots. Whatever money she earned goes missing before they return to London, since those boots have to be pawned—although a list of the clothes Eddowes was wearing when her body was discovered includes a pair of men’s boots. The provenance of these boots has nothing to do with the killer, however, so it is not discussed. It is left to the reader to assume that Eddowes’ money has gone to drink instead of clothing or shelter.
Marie Jeanette Kelly, on the other hand, of course had her own room, and Abrahamsen is reluctant to tar her with the brush of alcoholism. He goes so far to declare that, “[i]f a caste structure existed among prostitutes, she may have been slotted in a higher status than her more degraded associates.”37 Abrahamsen awards Kelly a sense of self-respect and self-care above and beyond the previous women. Perhaps it is because she is younger and thus less ravaged by East End life, or perhaps her beauty was owed in part to her perception of herself. Although her past is the same mys
tery filtered through Joseph Barnett—who is not relegated to the same “friend” status as John Kelly—the present Kelly was young, beautiful, and self-possessed until she met the Ripper and his knife.
Because he is indeed proposing that the Ripper was in fact a pair of men, Abrahamsen can relieve Kelly of the idiocy of taking a strange man back to her room in the middle of terror over the Ripper. He suggests that seeing two men, especially since the men in question would have been well-dressed, would have alleviated her fear, since the newspapers accused a lone man of wielding a knife. Indeed, even a lone well-dressed young man would have been more than enough to appeal to the previous victims. Since these women are older, Abrahamsen has them gratefully accepting the attentions of his Ripper, since there are women younger and prettier to be had. He even has the Ripper’s offer of payment being more than the going rate, and the women happily anticipate what they might do with the money while unknowingly entering the final moments of their lives. They are either too greedy or too desperate to question why such a man might be in the East End, and why he might be willing to pay more than the usually accepted amount. Abrahamsen does not credit them with much of a sense of self-preservation, especially after the murders began.
In fact, he takes things to the opposite end of the scale: “Some of them harbored an unconscious attraction to the murderer who had been bold enough to kill some of their sisters and then disappear.”38 Although Abrahamsen acknowledges that many prostitutes had to continue to walk the streets at night in spite of the danger in order to provide for themselves, he still identifies a group of women as feeling an attraction to the killer. He does not make it clear whether any of the named women belonged to this group, although presumably his background in psychiatry led him to determine that such women existed. Were this prostitutes attracted to the Ripper in the same way so many authors have been, drawn to the mystery of his identity and fascinated by the fact that he was not caught? Or were they attracted to the idea of their own deaths, quicker—and likely messier—than what could usually be expected? Abrahamsen does not explain this psychiatric mystery, merely presenting it as a fact before moving on.
The Ripper's Victims in Print Page 18
