Begg and Bennett do acknowledge that the amount of attention these women receive does not necessarily equate to good attention when they ask if the effect their story has on readers is “a genuine sympathy, or is a by-product from a sense of guilt.”44 Is the attention given to the canonical five victims an honest attempt to present them as women in their own right, or has it been an outgrowth of the desire to finally identify Jack the Ripper? Does tracing the biography of a murder victim allow an author to breathe the life back into her, or does it mean the author can support the argument for a new suspect? It is a fine line for an author to walk, one that might be predetermined by decades of previously written narratives and the expectations inherent within the genre of crime narrative, where the slightest increase in attention to detail in one text might make it stand out as vastly more attentive than the others.
Have these women been discussed most thoroughly and satisfactorily? Was the information available about them “enough” at the time or their murders, or did that completeness emerge in the intervening years? Can we trace any sort of improvement of the written treatment of the Ripper’s victims through the years? After this survey of books published about the case, we can begin to piece together the answers to these questions.
Conclusion
What Possible Use?
From the very beginning, starting with Leonard Matters’ book in 1929, authors have been arguing that the women murdered by Jack the Ripper were all but indistinguishable from each other. This insistence has carried across the decades, from Tom Cullen in 1965 to Jean Overton Fuller in 1990, Robert House in 2011, and Paul Begg and John Bennett in 2013. Each of these authors stresses that the women were anything but unique, marking them as simply select individuals that represented the teeming masses of the East End poor.
Even in the midst of this protestation that these women are the same, distinctions emerge. At times those differences are negative, such as when Elizabeth Stride is dismissed completely, either because she was not a Ripper victim or because there was nothing new to learn from her death. More often authors who declare that the murdered women are similar contradict themselves by adding more information about one or two of them in order to make them stand apart. Annie Chapman is a likely candidate for more information, especially more sympathetic information, and Mary Jane Kelly is by far most frequently separated from the others and held up for scrutiny.
What purpose could be served in lumping the murdered women together as a cohesive cohort? The more similar their stories, the more likely it would be that they shared a reason for being murdered. Likewise, the more similar they are, the less likely it would be that readers would be able to identify with the women. By grouping the victims as uninteresting prostitutes, any reader who finds herself—or her female family members or friends—to be interesting, and not a prostitute, would not need to worry that a similar fate could befall them. It is easy to point to the women’s occupation as the reason they crossed paths with the Ripper in the first place, and thus women who are more cautious about meeting or going with strangers need not have the same fears.
Daughter, Wife, Mother, Woman
Even as they are lumped together, the women are still individualized through their various relationships—with men, of course. The main relationship they all share is that of being a victim of Jack the Ripper. Calling them “victims” defines them in relationship to a criminal, even if he is not named. The term in this case functions the same as “husband,” presupposing that there is someone to occupy the other position and create a relationship in which the women in question can orient herself. However, these women are not only victims but also wives and mothers.
Although few details are known about their lives, the women are generally accepted to have had some say in the men they married. This is in stark contrast to their relationship to the mysterious figure of Jack the Ripper—no murder victim can be said to have wanted that fate. The choice of that husband, as well as the subsequent failure of that relationship, is used to position the given woman in many cases as a failure. It is generally her addiction to the bottle that is given as the reason for her husband abandoning her, and she rarely receives a sympathetic reason to have turned to the bottle in the first place. Due to the circumstances of her children, Annie Chapman is most likely to be presented empathetically when it comes to both her drinking habit and her separation from her husband. With one child born a cripple and a second dying young, Annie-as-mother seems to have every reason to turn to alcohol for comfort, and she and her husband are generally presented as separating through a mutual decision. This is in stark contrast to Elizabeth Stride since, even in the narratives in which she turned to the bottle after the drowning deaths of her husband and children, authors still resist treating her as kindly as they do Annie. Perhaps this is because so many others have completely rejected this tragic story from Liz’s past.
This background of relationships made and broken serves to explain why each of these women was on the street, for the most part fending for herself. It is all a consequence of having been born as a woman in Victorian England—the need for a man to support a woman is paramount. Although women of the lower classes may have been able to find work to support themselves, such as Polly’s failed attempt as a maid or the various items the women were meant to have hawked in the street, they were still meant to find themselves a good husband, and thereafter be a good wife and mother. A man was expected to bring in a steady income and provide her with security. The women in long-term relationships at the time of their deaths were not married to those men, although this was not the only aspect of those partnerships that has been derided. Michael Kidney, John Kelly, and Joe Barnett have all come under suspicion of having prostituted their women and lived off their earnings, while Kidney and Barnett have each been accused of murder—and Barnett of being the Ripper himself.
Although the women’s first husbands, both legal and common-law, play only small roles in this narrative, since they were out of the women’s lives before the murders took place, they, too, are grouped together to explain the women’s current lifestyles. In 1987 Martin Fido described the situation in a single catch-all statement that labeled the men respectable and their wives alcoholic, and thus intolerable. Whether the women were simply drinking or drinking for a reason, it was enough of a cause for their men to leave them. It is commonly asserted that the husbands were indeed the ones to draw the line, since what Victorian woman would cut herself loose from a provider if she were not forced to do so?
This idea of the men tolerating and rejecting the behavior of the murdered women is also a throughline in the Ripper narratives, stated outright by Jean Overton Fuller in 1990 when she asserts that any man who was in a relationship with the women near the ends of their lives could only do so because he had “forgiven” her for prostitution. None of the men in these narratives, least of all Jack the Ripper, is in need of such defense or forgiveness, but the women face the question continually. Their husbands could not forgive them, although this is hardly a flaw on their parts, since they were themselves respectable and thus had expectations of their wives. The men who did forgive them were likewise only East Enders themselves. Perhaps their forgiveness is more freely given, although it might not mean as much as it would coming from a man of good standing.
Some authors refer to these women with the title of Mrs., or solely by their last names. Polly, Annie, and Liz took the last names of Nichols, Chapman, and Stride through marriage, and authors have routinely granted them the use of this name. Kate Eddowes, on the other hand, is routinely mentioned with her maiden name, since there is no record of her marriage to Thomas Conway as having been anything but common-law, and her seven-year relationship with John Kelly likewise did not see their signatures on a marriage certificate. The fact that she seemed to have called herself Kate Kelly is generally deemed inconsequential, especially in the face of the numerous other aliases she may have used. Mary Jane Kelly, on the other hand, is routinely referre
d to by her maiden name of Kelly—even if her given names vary—despite the fact that she reported she had once been married to a man with the last name of Davies or Davis.
It could be as simple as the fact that authors have chosen to use the names the women were buried under, except for the fact that many shorten their names or use the nicknames reported in the daily papers. Mary Ann Nichols is thus most often Polly, and other nicknames seem based on the appearance of the women: Dark Annie, for example, or perhaps “Long Liz.” At times authors such as David Abrahamsen only use the women’s last names, while others, like Richard Whittington-Eagan or A. P. Wolf, need to clarify which woman they are writing about since it seems unlikely that readers would have been given enough context for that information for remain in their short-term memories. Still others, of course, do not mention the murdered women at all, either because they choose not to discuss the crimes, or because they opt to focus on the clues and evidence left on the corpses who are, after their encounter with the Ripper, no longer people at all.
Since four of the murdered women were in their forties, it may make sense to identify them based on their choice of husband, since his personality and profession may reveal something about their pasts. However, certain authors, such as Paul Harrison in 1993, find it important to list their father’s professions, as well. Since even the youngest woman—Mary Jane, in her twenties—had been living on her own and outside of her parents’ home, this information seems at best introductory and at worst a token attempt at identity. If their fathers’ occupations are part of a longer biography of the women, then this information serves to paint a fuller picture of their childhoods and thus perhaps their expectations. When Harrison mentions it, however, he also fails to discuss the women’s husbands at all. Thus the presentation of this information, of victim-as-daughter, is only useful when it is part of a larger context of the women’s backgrounds. Their fathers’ occupations, like many tidbits that have emerged about these women, are nearly useless in reconstructing their identities unless they are accompanied by many more facts. After all, these women did not choose their families, although their expectations for their husbands and the path their lives should take would have been founded in their childhoods.
Is It Sympathy, Empathy or Respect?
Not every author has approached the murdered women purely in the negative, although that has largely been the trend. As seen above, it is easier to accept the horrific deaths of women if they somehow deserved it. If they were alcoholics who managed to make their respectable husbands drive them out of house and home, to the point where even their children wanted nothing to do with them, then they become less sympathetic female figures. Women especially are expected to fulfill distinct roles within society, and those who cannot are then somehow deserving of their fates, whether this meant life in the East End or death in the same place.
This extension of sympathy does not come often, and is not necessarily extended to all of the women each time it is present. Sometimes it seems more of a gesture of propriety, such as Edwin T. Woodhall’s reluctance to actually use the term “prostitute” to refer to any of the women. At times even the empathy is dehumanizing, such as when Melvin Harris uses the phrase “tragic, lost creature.”1 The first two words are promising and meant to elicit an emotional response from readers, but he is discussing a creature instead of a woman or a human being. It seems that, for many of these authors, the path that the women took to the East End removed their humanity and, in a sense, their worth.
At times sympathy is extended to Liz or Mary Jane in outright defiance of the usual dismissal they receive for their fanciful tales of their own histories. Liz’s supposed loss of husband and children on the Princess Alice and Mary Jane’s unlikely tale of having been taken to France and then returned to London because she did not like it there are often reported and then scoffed at, dismissed as utter fairy tales used by women to prey on sympathetic others. These stories are in fact almost conniving, since the women telling them do so only to elicit a known reaction—hopefully in the form of coins—from their audiences. The less popular view is to acknowledge the desperation inherent in these women’s situations. Women of a certain age living alone in the East End needed a tale to tell about how they ended up there, and if they wished to create their own biographies in order to give themselves distance from their own pasts, this seems to be only rarely understandable.
Prostitution is another issue that is generally derided by authors who seem to believe that there were many open positions simply waiting to be filled by women of this class. The empathy here, as seen for the first time in William Stewart, extends towards the “one-man women”2 who have managed to hold on to an apparently steady relationship. These women—Stewart names Annie and Mary Kelly specifically, although other authors have also championed Liz and Kate—presumably have no need to walk the street at night, since they have managed to find a man who will care for them. They might do some work during the day to help supplement his income, but these women are not prostitutes. They might not be married, but they have managed to situate themselves in a long-term relationship of mutual benefit. It might still involve sex outside of marriage, but at least it is sex for money in a more roundabout, apparently acceptable way than outright prostitution. Prostitution is, after all, an act that must be forgiven, even by the men who apparently love and care for these women.
Authors who set out to provide a more rounded representation of these women must declare it specifically, as William Beadle, Philip Sugden, and John Tully do in the 1990s. They stand out for declaring that they are discussing people, not just victims, and that these women had already fallen victim to society before Jack the Ripper ever met them. These approaches attempt to situate the women and their murderer in a society far removed from what readers know, providing background information that helps clarify the situation more than other authors have done. Instead of condemning the women’s apparent choice of prostitution, for example, these authors explore the conditions of women in Victorian England, especially women whose husbands have left them. This approach does not mean that the women are presented as having been perfect, but it does allow for a more critical look at their lives and the era and place in which they lived. It also complicates the question of why these women were selected to die, and perhaps threatens the reader’s own feelings of safety since the answer is no longer cut and dry. These authors are not dealing with women who threw off the shackles of marriage and willingly walked the streets of Whitechapel looking for customers, but women whose lives were not always in their own control and thus women who may not have done anything specifically in order to deserve death.
Dehumanization and Separation
In many of these accounts, the murdered women are stripped of their humanity even before their deaths. Once they have encountered the Ripper—or rather, once their bodies have been discovered—their main importance is as clues or evidence that could point to the Ripper’s identity. This is, after all, the reason why so many authors do not need to delve into the women’s lives, since it is only the final encounter with their killer that is of interest. Even those that do present the women as living beings and not lifeless corpses do not always allow them their personhood.
Some of the earliest metaphors for describing the murdered women bear a seafaring theme when the women of the East End are often referred to as derelicts or flotsam, either drifting or washed ashore. Such items have no control over their paths or their usefulness and must depend on outside intervention in order to be directed or rescued. Although the items may have at one time been both functional and valuable, something happened to them so that, perhaps through neglect or disrepair, they have lost their worth.
Reducing human beings to derelicts or flotsam removes any possibility of agency. Perhaps the women had no hand in their own descent, but they also are now not given any opportunity for bettering their situations. They have been given up as a lost cause and, as such, their murders represent no great loss.
If Jack the Ripper merely destroyed a derelict or some flotsam, well then, they were of no use to anyone anyway, and perhaps it is better to have them removed rather than eternally drifting.
The same change is affected when authors refer to the women as creatures. Annie is most often the target for such language, being a poor, sick creature on the last night of her life. While the adjectives are generally skewed toward the sympathetic and an unfortunate creature might indeed be the subject of pity, it is still a creature and not a person. The emotional response generated is more along the lines of an injured animal, since the use of the word “creature” indicates an other and does not encourage identification with the self. A creature is a thing and not a human being, and most often creatures take on the form of monsters or other figures that encourage emotionally distanced fascination.
That distance continues with phrases that mark these women as the “easiest prey” or “Jack’s targets.” Outside of a short story by Richard Connell, human beings are not thought of as the hunted and most dangerous game. It is animals who are hunted, and the prowess of the human hunter is tested by the skill and ferocity of his intended prey. Skilled hunters do not focus on the easier prey but rather seek to challenge themselves. Identifying these women as “easy prey” is not only an insult to them, but also to the Ripper, who somehow managed to avoid capture but limited his homicidal actions to a set of women who would not be missed very much.
As his targets, the women once again become objects. A target has even less agency than the easiest prey, which can at least be expected to move of its own free will. A target might be stationary, or it might be launched into someone’s path, but it does not choose to be there. While the easiest prey might not offer much resistance, a target will not fight back. Its entire purpose is to allow the hunter to practice with a deadly weapon, and it acts as a stand-in for more challenging objects.
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