First of all, the motive was clearly not robbery, since Nichols had nothing to steal. Second, the violence of her death was chilling. Her throat was severed almost to the vertebrae. Her face was bruised, and both her upper and lower jaws were injured. A deep slash ran across her abdomen. The cuts had ragged edges and some inner organs had been cut out. The murder seemed to have no purpose except as an expression of violence. The police surgeon duly noted the details in his formal report to the London Metropolitan Police.
As an isolated event, the death of Nichols soon subsided in the public consciousness. After all, the Whitechapel of those days was one of the grimmest of all London slums; life there, as Jack London points out, was cheap indeed. One inhabitant of the East End wrote to The Times (London) at midcentury:
We are Sur, as it may be, livin in a Wilderness, so far as the rest of London knows anything of us, or as the rich and great people care about. We live in muck and filthe. We aint got no privies, no dust bins, no drains, no water splies…We al of us suffer, and numbers are ill, and if the colera comes Lord help us…*1
The writer accurately perceived that the place where he lived was so cut off from the rest of the prospering city that it was almost another country. The East End was the popular name for the area east of the actual City of London, which had grown up around the docks that lined the Thames, the heart of the trade on which the British Empire flourished. Inside this maze of narrow streets and jerry-built houses with totally inadequate sanitary facilities, some ninety thousand people lived in desperate poverty, victims of unemployment, homelessness, overcrowding and disease. The cholera did indeed come, and much worse. High infant mortality was as common as child labor, and prostitution, alcoholism, crime and murder were endemic. Hanging like an evil cloud over the slums was the thick black tarry smoke from factory smokestacks and thousands of coal fires that Charles Dickens describes at the beginning of Bleak House: “Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.”*2
In The People of the Abyss—written a little over a decade after the infamous year of 1888—Jack London points out that the personal despair of many East Enders drove them to suicide.
Into this wilderness of poverty, illness and blight some Londoners traveled regularly to buy what could not be bought on more civilized streets—the sexual services of women. In the borough of Whitechapel alone there were ninety thousand people, of whom seventy thousand were women and children, mostly the unemployed poor who lived from hand to mouth. By 1880, there were estimated to be ten thousand prostitutes and three thousand brothels in London. Almost every room, nook, or corridor in Whitechapel, Shadwell, Spitalfields, and adjoining areas was at one time or another used for sexual purposes. Owning a brothel, in fact, was a favored way of investing in a neighborhood. Prostitution was illegal, of course, and many prostitutes were picked up and sent to jail. Men, however, were not harassed, unless they were suspected of performing “unnatural sexual acts” with other men. But the typical English method of dealing with the problem was, in general, to ignore its existence.
The most humane contemporary view of prostitution is found in the writings of the physician William Acton, one of the authors of the Contagious Diseases Act of 1866, which provided that prostitutes in certain areas be subject to periodic medical examination. In his pioneering book on the subject, first published in 1862, Acton writes that “cruel, biting poverty” forces women to become prostitutes:
Unable to obtain by their labor the means of procuring the bare necessaries of life, they gain, by surrendering their bodies to evil uses, food to sustain and clothes to cover them. Many thousand young women in the metropolis are unable by drudgery that lasts from early morning till late into the night to earn more than from 3s. to 5s. weekly. Many have to eke out their living as best they may on a miserable pittance for less than the least of the sums above-mentioned…Urged on by want and toil, encouraged by evil advisors, and exposed to selfish tempters, a large proportion of these girls fall from the path of virtue…*3
The horror and sadness of the Jack the Ripper murders are intensified when we consider the degraded lives of the victims. Scorned by society, these women were defenseless, alienated, and dispossessed. Their lives were narrowly limited to the goal of getting fourpence from a client to buy a shot of gin or a glass of beer, or to rent a bed for the night in a common lodging house. This economic exchange could easily end in syphilis or gonorrhea, or in an unwanted pregnancy that was terminated by an abortion performed under appalling conditions. Life, as they knew it, was dangerous and callous. In the “brute vulgarities” of this world, as Jack London put it, “the bad corrupts the good, and all fester together.”*4
Yet there were some people who felt that the prostitutes’ deaths were a kind of moral retribution for the lives they led—essentially, that they got what they deserved. Syphilis was widely regarded as a punishment for sin—why not murder? Hypocrisy, one of the most deadly sins, was nowhere more evident in Victorian society than in the sexual double standard practiced by men. A woman was judged by her effect on men. This was a period when women of one’s own class were set on a pedestal and the wife was idealized as the keeper of the sacred flame of home and hearth: kind, gentle, nurturing, and, above all, pure. And, not surprisingly, this produced a view of women as either virgins or whores. Although Victorian men publicly revered women, courted them, catered to them and married them, they secretly sought out prostitutes for sexual release or for taboo sexual pleasures. But there were other, psychological reasons why the Victorian man sought out prostitutes.
First of all, when a man bought the services of a prostitute, he did not have to establish any emotional relationship with her, or any significant relationship at all. The encounter was generally brief and impersonal. He did not have—and usually did not want—to remember her name or face.
A second reason was the great gulf of class distinction: almost without exception, prostitutes came from the lower classes. Their humble origins and the conditions of squalor in which they lived both excited and revolted the middle-class and aristocratic men who were their patrons. Slumming has always had charms for those who are not condemned to live in poverty, and many Victorian men visited the East End for very different reasons from their wives, who knew it only as a place to set up missions and soup kitchens to save souls and nourish starved bodies.
On the whole there is a general behavior pattern observable among those men who choose prostitutes as their only sexual objects. Such a man is unconsciously attracted to women who are more or less sexually discredited. He identifies with the harlot’s lack of fidelity and loyalty. His choice is rooted in his unconscious fixation on his infantile feelings of tenderness for his mother, a crucial point in his sexual development. From his first belief that his mother is sexually pure, he comes to learn that she (like a prostitute) has had sex with a man (his father). The child feels betrayed by her. He fantasizes rescuing her from the father who he feels has defiled her. This leads him later in life to set up a woman as a substitute mother whom he loves, yet despises for her weakness. He ends up seeking out prostitutes, whom he endows with his mother’s image.
What drives women to prostitution? Without question, it is a way of obtaining through economic means what a woman has not been able to gain through love, the love from a mother or father, or a substitute. For some women, prostitution seems to offer a means of revenging themselves against weak and passive fathers who never defended them against their mothers’ anger and criticism. Other women feel a masochistic identification of sex as sinful or humiliating, as they believe it was for their own mothers. In nineteenth-century Whitechapel, the wretched housing, miserable earnings, and lack of emotional bonds between parents and children inevitably produced strained and callous relationships. Girls moved away from their parents into a situation where the procurer, the pimp, became the father substit
ute and the madam the mother substitute. The girl’s relationship with her abusing father and unloving mother was now played out in the new environment, complete with all the former ambivalent feelings. One must wonder why a woman abused by her mother would become a prostitute and tolerate the madam. The answer is that she hates the madam as she hated her mother, yet is masochistically tied to her.
For most of the Whitechapel prostitutes, their illicit business was a means of scraping by from day to day in a poverty-stricken world. It had desperate and cruel consequences—broken homes and emotional turmoil, sometimes leading to arrest and jail, in addition to the risk of disease, alcoholism, drug addiction, and exposure to crime. Even if a prostitute married or managed to avoid the fate of poverty and disease, her psychological fate remained cloudy at best.
The eternal wish of every woman from childhood onward is to be taken care of by someone who loves her. But few are given such happiness. And the prostitutes of Whitechapel were no exception. For five of them, a horrible death ended their quest.
Falling from the path of virtue had always been dangerous; the story of Mary Anne Nichols shows that it was becoming more so.
Nichols was no young girl, however; she was forty-two years old and an alcoholic. She had had five children and had left her husband about eight years earlier because of her drinking habits. Though separated from her, her husband continued to support her for several years until she moved in with another man. Several times, Nichols had tried to make a fresh start, but her alcoholism always prevailed. At one point she ended up in a workhouse, but was thrown out because she stole some small items—again, the result of her drinking. The Times (London) described her life as “intemperate, irregular and vicious.”*5 The meaning of “vicious” here is “savage.”
On the night of August 30, 1888, Nichols had been drinking steadily at a pub. At about 2:00 A.M., she decided to go out on the streets to raise the price of a bed for the night. She went into Buck’s Row, a secluded back alley about a hundred yards from the Jews’ Cemetery, close to the Whitechapel Road. At about 3:45 A.M., her body was discovered there by Constable John Neil working his Whitechapel beat. The Times (London) described Neil’s discovery of the body:
With the aid of his lamp he examined the body and saw blood oozing from a wound in the throat. Deceased was lying on her back with her clothes disarranged. [Neil] felt her arm, which was quite warm from the joints upward, while her eyes were wide open.*6
She was dressed in a new brown dress, a shabby red overcoat, two flannel petticoats, blue woolen stockings and a straw bonnet, which had fallen from her head and was lying by her side. Her underwear had been removed. Her only possessions were a piece of mirror, a comb, and a handkerchief.
The police surgeon Henry Llewellyn of 152 Whitechapel Road was called to the scene and examined the body at the site. He found no marks of a struggle and no bloody trail as if the body had been dragged. He had the body moved to the mortuary, where he discovered for the first time the mutilation of the abdomen. He concluded that the cuts must have been caused by a moderately sharp, long-bladed knife wielded with violence. Excerpts from his report to the Metropolitan Police the following day, August 31, 1888, are as follows:
…throat cut nearly severing head from body, abdomen cut open from centre of bottom of ribs along right side, under pelvis to left of stomach, there the wound was jagged: the coating of the stomach was cut in several places and two small stabs on private parts…*7
Inquiries were made of the neighbors, night watchmen, other prostitutes and friends of Nichols, local tavern owners, coffee-stall keepers, and lodging houses. The police also interrogated three slaughtermen doing night work for a butcher’s firm on the next street, but each accounted for himself satisfactorily. Nichols’s history “did not disclose the slightest pretext for a motive on the part of her friends or associates in the common lodging houses,” wrote Chief Inspector Donald S. Swanson in his report on the murder.*8
Early on Saturday, September 8, 1888, London was jolted once again, when the body of another murdered woman was found. Forty-seven-year-old Annie Chapman—also destitute, a prostitute and an alcoholic—was discovered in the back yard of a house on Hanbury Street, Spitalfields, about half a mile from the site of Nichols’s murder. This woman had also been hideously mutilated. It was suggested “that the murderer, for some purpose or other, whether from a morbid motive or for the sake of gain, had committed the crime for the purpose of possessing himself of the uterus.”*9
The scene was macabre. Fully dressed, she lay on the ground with her organs exposed like a scientific experiment. The abdominal wall had been cut open and the uterus removed. The vagina, bladder and intestines—still attached to the body—were arranged over her right shoulder. At her feet were her comb and some coins, carefully placed.
On Friday, September 14, 1888, The Times (London) described the postmortem of Annie Chapman and stated that, in the coroner’s opinion, “there had been no struggle between the murderer and the woman.” This was an important finding. Like Nichols, Chapman had died without making any resistance. The coroner also concluded that the murderer “had anatomical knowledge from the way the viscera was removed.” In addition, he believed the murder weapon was not an ordinary knife, but “a small amputating knife or a well-ground slaughterman’s knife,” probably between six and eight inches long.*10
Annie Chapman was the widow of a veterinarian. They had been separated for several years before his death because of what the police report called “her drunken and immoral ways.” However, her husband continued to send her ten shillings a week until he died, at Christmas, 1886. Like Nichols, Chapman was a victim of her alcoholism, which had caused her to lose touch with her family and turn to prostitution. The Times (London) on September 27, 1888, reported:
She had evidently lived an immoral life for some time, and her habits and surroundings had become worse since her means had failed. She no longer visited her relations, and her brother had not seen her for five months, when she borrowed a small sum from him. She lived principally in the common lodging houses in the neighborhood of Spitalfields, where such as she were herded like cattle. She showed signs of great deprivation, as if she had been badly fed.
The glimpse of life in those dens which the evidence in this case disclosed was sufficient to make them feel there was much in the 19th-century civilization of which they had small reason to be proud…*11
On Saturday, September 15, 1888, The Lancet, the foremost British medical journal, published an editorial suggesting the theory that the murderer might be a lunatic. But, the writer added, this “appears to us to be by no means at present well established.”*12
The third victim was Elizabeth Stride, forty-five years old, a Swedish prostitute known by the name of “Long Liz.” On Sunday, September 30, her body was found at Berner Street, Aldgate, a short distance from Hanbury Street. Although her throat had been cut in the now familiar method, she had not been disemboweled, which suggested that the murderer was interrupted in his work. Did somebody warn him?
Later that same night, the murderer struck again, at Mitre Square, which was only about half a mile from Berner Street, just across the boundary of the City of London. The victim was another prostitute, Catherine Eddowes, who was forty-three. As if in compensation for the murderer’s frustration at having had to leave Stride intact, Eddowes’s body had been brutally dissected. Her nose was cut off, her abdomen sliced open, and on her right shoulder were placed her left kidney and intestines.
The fact that this murder took place within the City boundaries meant that it was handled by the City Police Department, and these fresh investigators zealously set about gathering evidence. Eddowes’s murder, it seems, was the only occasion when a description of the possible assailant was available.
Catherine Eddowes had been trying to make some extra money by picking hops in Kent with her friend John Kelly, who had spent 2s. 6d. of his earnings to buy her a pair of boots. When they returned to London to
gether on Thursday, September 27, however, they had to pawn the boots to get enough money to pay for a night’s lodging. The following night they had to part and she spent the night in the Mile End casual ward (a dormitory), while Kelly stayed in a cheap lodging house. By Saturday they had no money left and were unable to find any odd jobs. So at 2:00 P.M., Eddowes left Kelly and went off to Bermondsey to try to borrow money from her daughter. At 8:00 P.M. that evening, she was back in the City, in a drunk and disorderly condition, was arrested by two City policemen and taken to the Bishopsgate Police Station, where she remained until shortly after midnight. During her incarceration, she continued, in the words of Dr. Francis Camps, one of the major authorities on the Ripper story, “singing to herself and asking to be released.” His report continued:
At about 1 A.M. her wish was complied with and she was shooed off into the night. It was a singularly bad piece of luck for her that the instructions of Major Smith, the City Police Commissioner, were not carried out, for he had ordered that every man and woman seen together after midnight must be accounted for and she might have been followed to Mitre Square.*13
As City Police Commissioner, Major Smith was responsible for all police activity within the City of London, while the Metropolitan Police were under the separate command of General Sir Charles Warren, who had no jurisdiction within the City. Both commanders were out in the field that night, and Smith, a more enthusiastic participant than Warren, was intensely frustrated to discover later on that he had been on the heels of the murderer the whole time.
It was a City constable, P.C. Watkins, who found Catherine Eddowes’s body. He had passed through the square at 1:30 A.M. and noticed nothing unusual, but when he returned, about fifteen minutes later, his police lantern at once illuminated the body of a woman lying on her back in the corner of the square with her left leg extended and her right leg bent at the knee. Further investigation showed the shocking nature of her wounds, which were subsequently noted by the police surgeon in some pencil drawings made at the scene.
The Big Book of Jack the Ripper Page 2