Perhaps the accusations are similar in more than just their wording. When a victim is mentioned as having failed in some way, it means that she has become a victim in the first place. The least she could do in this situation would be to offer evidence as to the identity of her killer, and, in the case of Jack the Ripper, the women fail do have done that. Now Cornwell is moving beyond blaming the murdered women to blaming the eyewitnesses who have spread their tales—and, perhaps, to the many authors who have also believed them.
It is now no longer a question of decreased ability, either through alcohol or multiple factors concerning eyesight, allowing the crime to happen in the first place, but these issues interfering with the identification and arrest of the person responsible. Those who are too drunk or otherwise incapacitated are no longer women who have thus bought and paid for their fate, allowing the Ripper an easier time at his task, but the innocent bystanders of both genders who were unable to help bring the murderer to justice. Responsibility for the deaths and the escape of the Ripper is thus shared out not only among the dead, but among the living, and given to men as well as women—although still kept from the figure of the Ripper himself. The comment in and of itself might be easy to overlook, perhaps as readers assume that such familiar critiques must once again be heaped against the victims and no others, but this shift in blame is interesting. Cornwell may not go so far as to present Sickert as possessing full responsibility for his crimes, but that blame is at least shared by people who were not his victims.
Just the Facts?
Trevor Marriott’s 2007 book, Jack the Ripper: The 21st Century Investigation, does not make use of the same sort of DNA evidence as Cornwell’s, but Marriott’s background is similarly based in the real-life field that proves support for his investigation. As he explains in his introduction, Marriott was hired to the Bedfordshire Police and quickly put in the Criminal Investigation Division,20 giving him real world experience with murder investigations. Although he does not have the same forensic evidence as Cornwell—he presumably also lacks a spare million or two with which to have conducted such an investigation, since Marriott is not the author of a best-selling crime fiction series—Marriott, like John Plimmer, seeks to bring modern approaches to bear on the Jack the Ripper case.
Despite the fact that his book comes to more than 300 pages, Marriott himself has very little to say about the Ripper’s victims. Instead of providing his own descriptions and insights, Marriott introduces each woman with her name and age before reproducing pages of the coroners’ inquests. Although he argues that “[n]one of this testimony furnished wholly accurate description of anyone who appears more than one throughout the enquiry into the series of murders,”21 Marriott himself does not attempt to clarify any individual’s identity or sort through these discrepancies. He simply offers up the information collected at the time with only a single instance of analysis.
This comes in his discussion of Catherine Eddowes or, rather, during his discussion of the Goulston Street graffiti. On the night when Catherine’s body was discovered, a piece of her apron, shown to fit the one she was wearing, was found in a doorway on Goulston Street beneath some chalked graffiti. Never photographed and thus much contested, this message—generally reproduced as “the Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing”—was only one such slogan chalked on the walls, but the piece of apron meant it was closely scrutinized. Did the Ripper take a piece of Catherine’s apron, use it to wipe his hands, and discard it—either beneath an existing message or without noticing the message—or did he take the time to chalk it himself?
Marriott, in an argument expanded in his 2013 eBook Jack the Ripper: The Secret Police Files, suggests that Catherine had made use of the cloth as toilet paper. As the graffiti was found near a stairwell and public toilets charged their customers, it is his contention that Catherine made use of this semi-private space before her death and then disposed of her soiled apron. Since graffiti itself was common, this action then unintentionally led to the mystery of the message chalked nearest to the apron. Discussions of feminine hygiene related to the Ripper narrative are rare indeed and somehow gritty in a way that coroners’ reports are not, and thus this deviation from contemporary reports stands out in Marriott’s discussion.
This approach to the representation of the victim in which Marriott relies heavily on contemporary reports and withholds his own interpretations could have been done for a number of reasons. First, it might be that Marriott wished to play it safe, presenting readers with contemporary accounts rather than attempting to form his own opinions of women who had lived and died over a century earlier. It might be an acknowledgment that a man born and raised in a world vastly different from the one these women inhabited could not properly assess their situations. Or it could be the decision of a policeman who wants to present readers with the facts and just the facts, remaining distant in order to allow them—and himself—to form an unbiased opinion. Marriott, following the inquest reports, jumps between the women as alive and the women as dead, once again glossing over the transition as has long been expected. Although murdered, these women have not suffered.
Back to the DNA
Over a decade after Patricia Cornwell faced criticism for issues of mitochondrial DNA and imperfect sample sources, Russell Edwards found himself facing those same critiques. His 2014 book Naming Jack the Ripper recounts his attempts to match the DNA sample on a shawl with both Catherine Eddowes and his chosen suspect, Aaron Kosminski. Like Cornwell, Edwards finds himself only able to test for mitochondrial DNA and thus make sweeping conclusions that the results do not rule out Catherine or Kosminski, instead of pinpointing them. Further, in the same way that research has not proven that the Ripper wrote, stamped, or sealed his own letters, Edwards admits that the provenience of the shawl is itself in question. He has “no proof it had belonged to the victim Catherine Eddowes, just a long family history,”22 making his claim that it relates to the Ripper murders even more difficult to substantiate.
Unlike Trevor Marriott, Edwards presents his readers with the women’s biographies in his own words, reflecting his own opinions. His Mary Ann Nichols abandons her family for reasons he does not fully discern, leaving all of her children in the care of multiple others and therefore presumably not together. It is during this time, when she has to fend for herself, that Mary Ann undertakes prostitution as her means of income, and it is this prostitution that leads to her dubious fame as being the first Ripper victim. Edwards makes a valiant attempt to remind his readers that these victims were first and foremost women, with their own histories and personalities, before they were lumped together and numbered according to the time of their deaths, but even he seems unable to fully pursue those histories and personalities. Very little information is offered about Mary Ann the person, since it is as a victim she has achieved what Edwards terms “a strange immortality.”23 No matter what their lives or personalities as individuals, these five women are forever lumped together through their deaths, which were not of their own choosing. Their individuality is subsumed under the Ripper’s activities and his identity.
Annie fairs little better. Edwards presents his readers with an alcoholic prostitute who, despite having family nearby—and presumably being on better terms with them than Mary Ann was with hers—struggled to make a living. He declares that Annie, like most of the women in the East End, attempted to piece together enough money through selling goods instead of herself. Here Edwards suggests that, despite the large number of prostitutes in the East End, it was not the first choice in vocation for the majority of them. While many Victorians and still more recent authors seem to think that many of these women made a beeline for prostitution at the least provocation, Edwards acknowledges the difficulties women faced in this period when they lacked support, either from a husband or extended family. It is a broader acknowledgment that most of these women, and not just Annie herself, did what they could in the hopes that they might be able to keep themselves off the str
eets.
Edwards also brings his readers closer to Annie’s experience than many other authors. While discussions of the weather and temperature are usually put forward in order to facilitate estimates of time of death of these women, he brings up the conditions during Annie’s last night alive and presents her in them as alive instead of as a cooling corpse. “It was cold for that time of year,” Edwards informs his readers, as many authors have, adding that the chill and rain made it “an unpleasant night to be out, especially for someone who was so clearly unwell.”24 Annie’s inability to produce money for a bed that night is now framed not merely as a moment that would facilitate her death, but as an occurrence that would not have turned out well for Annie even if she had not met the Ripper. She would likely have lived—for another few months, at least—but the experience of merely being out on the street in those conditions would have been miserable even for a healthy woman. Annie’s recent stay in the infirmary and her various post-mortem diagnoses mean she was hardly in the best of shape to have been kicked out of her lodging house in the first place, and suggest that her last night was miserable indeed.
Although Annie’s alcoholism is not in question, and although Edwards gives it as the reason she ended up alone in the East End, he does not blame her final night’s misery on alcohol. In the end his Annie is a woman fighting to maintain herself through means other than prostitution, unknowingly suffering from a number of illnesses and with the bad luck to have crossed paths with the Ripper on her last night. Even though she spends her money at the pub first, thinking of food and shelter second, her recent stay in the infirmary means that she likely had no money for a bed simply because she was unable to earn it. This Annie is not drunk when she meets her fate and is able to be seen as more of a sympathetic figure.
Liz, though, is a different story. Even if her marriage, like Annie’s, ended because of her drinking habit, Edwards makes it clear that Liz’s drinking led to many arrests. Whatever Liz’s personality, she became violent and out of control when she drank, an assessment that was not made of Annie. Although Liz does indeed try to find work outside of prostitution, “there simply wasn’t enough work to keep her going, especially with her drink habit.”25 Oddly enough, even though Liz was not on the street because she had been thrown out due to a lack of doss money—she was seen preparing for a night out and leaving freely—her alcoholism can still be positioned as the cause of her murder. If she did not want more money, presumably for drinking, then she would not have needed to seek a secluded location with a strange man.
In a fit of generosity Edwards at least declares his forgiveness of the lies she told about herself, since empathy moves him to comprehend why a woman in her position might make up romanticized versions of her past. He even suggests that Liz might have come to believe her own stories, considering the frequency with which she told them, likely showing an understanding of how difficult and depressing life in the East End must have been. The fact that he admits seeing he might have done the same had he been in her position makes it unlikely that he would be condemning a pathological liar unable to separate truth from her own fiction.
Catherine Eddowes is, like the others, an alcoholic, and once again a past relationship has dissolved because of this. Edwards allows that, at the time, “she was using the surname Conway, a common enough thing to do when a couple were living as a man and wife,”26 although his wording makes it very clear that the couple had not in fact married. Clearly the relationship ended by Catherine’s alcoholism, although long-lasting, was merely common-law and had not seen the benefit of a wedding. Unlike other authors Edwards does not begrudge her the use of the name, nor mock her adoption of it. It almost comes off as a mild rebuke against anyone who would choose to focus on the fact that the relationship was not legalized, indicating that this was “common enough” in the time and place. Whatever morals twenty-first century readers may have involving marriage—and, of course, prostitution—Catherine’s lack of a proper signed paper is dismissed without fanfare.
While Catherine’s alcoholism would seem to have been enough of a reason for the relationship to end, considering how the previous women’s stories were told, Edwards gives her a reason for not wanting to stay with Conway. Perhaps in relation to her alcoholism, Conway himself had occasional bouts of violence that were directed toward Catherine. Her later long-term relationship with John Kelly was presumably free from such violence, even if she continued to drink to excess. Although an alcoholic, Catherine seems to have preferred serial monogamy to a string of men in her life, and her assumed role as prostitute is questioned. If most of the women in the East End did what they could to avoid prostitution, and if Catherine had her long-term steady man in John Kelly, then perhaps prostitution was not her main means of earning money.
Catherine is at the center of Edwards’ argument since the source of DNA is a shawl that he claims was on her body when she died. Since there is no written history of the shawl he must spend some time making a case for its importance and indeed its existence. Edwards ends up concluding the expensive silk shawl had never actually belonged to Catherine for two main reasons: first, since the dye ran when the shawl got wet, it “could never have been used as an outer garment.”27 Catherine, having no fixed address, would not have always had a place to go when it rained or a layer to put over the shawl, so the dye would likely have already run had she owned and worn the shawl. Perhaps more compelling is the argument that, during their last days together, Catherine and Kelly pawned items in order to make money for food, including his boots. Surely if they were so desperate to make money that they would pawn the very boots off his feet, they would have pawned her silk shawl instead—and surely said boots would not have been pawned if the couple had been accustomed to making money through Catherine’s prostitution. Through these arguments Edwards once again shows an understanding of the position these women found themselves in and thus attempts to connect the shawl to his Ripper suspect as a more believable provenience of such a fine garment.
These moments of connection and apparent deeper understanding are still interspersed among the more common, distancing language. In reference to Mary Kelly, for example, Edwards writes, “Again, thank God, the victim was dead swiftly.”28 Comparing this to Patricia Cornwell’s description of Mary Kelly’s death shows that Edwards has fallen into the trope of quick deaths, although at least he does not attempt to make hers painless, as well. Although the coroners’ reports indicate that Mary Kelly did not have any defensive wounds, those reports from 1888 cannot always be taken as though they were the full, comprehensive, and strictly regimented documents of the twenty-first century. It is simply easier for Edwards to dismiss Mary quickly, especially when her background is only obtained third-hand and he suspects that even her name might not have been the truth. Unlike many authors, Edwards does not ascribe some deeper meaning so special attributes to Mary, since his main focus is on a garment he does not believe she ever touched.
Jack the Ripper and the CSI Treatment
Instead of using modern technology to illustrate proper procedure for a murder investigation or to identify the Ripper himself at this late date, Paul Begg and John Bennett’s 2012 book Jack the Ripper CSI: Whitechapel seeks not to investigate, but rather to illustrate the Whitechapel crime scenes. Although other books have relied on photographs of the scenes themselves, not from 1888 but from before any time any of the locations was destroyed or remodeled, Begg and Bennett present readers with an illustration-heavy volume of computer generated images of the crime scenes. They are meant to help readers imagine the place and not the crime itself, since the spaces themselves are empty. They are not occupied by people, living or dead, or any other possible clues.
Because the identity of the Ripper himself is not under discussion, each of the women’s biographies for once outshines discussion of the killer. Begg and Bennett do not even bother listing possible suspects or refuting the less likely. Indeed, their entire focus is on recreating the spaces of 1888 t
o help readers place themselves in that distant time and place.
Mary Ann Nichols is at times called Mary Ann and at other times addressed simply as Nichols. The authors hit the high points of her biography, including the dissolution of her marriage and the existence of her five children, adding once again that “the couple’s eldest son would have nothing to do with his father at his mother’s funeral.”29 Both father and son attended that funeral, despite the fact that Mary Ann had apparently abandoned them, and the fact that this son still avoided his father indicates that, whatever may have been said, not all of the blame fell on Mary Ann herself. It is a pointed observation, given without extra comment but presented to readers so that they might reflect on the fact that, even if she had been given to drink, Mary Ann might not have been the more offensive of the married couple.
Begg and Bennett also point out that the blacksmith Mary Ann had a long relationship with after leaving Nichols was not a complete stranger. Thomas Stuart Drew had apparently courted Mary Ann before her marriage and was a widower at the time when Mary Ann left her husband. Although that relationship also faltered, this information puts it in a different light. Instead of the possibility of Mary Ann grasping for any man who would support her, it could be in fact Mary Ann returning to a man who cared for her and might have made a better husband in the first place. Or, considering the reasons for the breakdown of her marriage, Drew might have been the cause for Nichols to accuse his wife of cheating on him. Whichever way Mary Ann’s relationships went, Drew separates from her just as Nichols did, leaving Mary Ann to make her own way in the world and thus putting her on the street to die at the scene Begg and Bennett illustrate.
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