The Ripper's Victims in Print

by Rebecca Frost

  Mary Jane may have been a mystery to many of those around her, but even her friend George Hutchinson is shown to have had a shrewd idea of the kind of woman she was. McCormick confides that Hutchinson “had always liked the girl”8—girl, not woman—and had often thought of coming to an agreement that would benefit both of them. Although Mary Jane would have apparently been up to the task, Hutchinson admits that he would not have been able to keep up with her, and that he had little to contribute, presumably in the face of all that made her such a phenomenon in the East End. Hutchinson, like so many others—and in contradiction to McCormick—clearly thought there was something about Mary Jane that elevated her above the other women in Whitechapel.

  Elevated or not, Mary Jane found herself in a familiar situation. She was not turned away from or out of a lodging house, but she owed a large sum of rent going back many weeks. Barnett had left her and stuck her with paying it all on her own, but the fact that it had not been paid for weeks suggests that he had not been paying it, and, if Mary Jane had gone around “whoring” behind his back, it had not earned her enough to make up the difference, either. All the same, the need for money drove Mary Jane onto the street during the last night of her life, at which time she asked Hutchinson for sixpence. McCormick has the penniless Hutchinson thinking of the fact that, for six pennies, he might have been able to spend the night in Mary Jane’s room, in her bed, and likely with her. As much as Hutchinson admired Mary Jane, this shows all too clearly that he knew her morals and her price.

  Behind in rent or not, those who saw Mary Jane that night agreed that she had been drinking, again mirroring so many of the women before her. McCormick neither speculates how Mary Jane might have obtained drink, or why she might have wanted it—after all, a woman who preferred to find long-term partners instead of engaging in casual prostitution may indeed have wanted a pint or two fortify herself for the task at hand.

  But McCormick’s Mary Jane, like many of his other victims, is a hardened drinker not thrust into prostitution, but accepting the position willingly. After Barnett leaves, Mary Jane has nothing left but to turn to the streets. At an earlier time in her life she had attempted to open a shop in London, but she was now penniless as well has having “no business sense and no education”9—no matter what some of her contemporaries believed about her—and there was nothing left but the streets. Mary Jane may have died in her room instead of on the pavement, but she still let the Ripper in.

  It may be argued that the contradictions in McCormick’s narratives of these women’s lives comes from a simple lack of information compounded by hearsay, the rumor mill, and a desire not to speak ill of the dead. Perhaps he felt it would have detracted from his narrative to explore the discrepancies in his own biographies of these women to a depth that would have fleshed out the messiness of human life unable to be turned into a simple single-line narrative. At the very least he might have acknowledged these small disagreements, such as a Polly who was apparently universally well-liked but could not maintain a lasting and stable relationship with a man. It is this deeper investigation that would attempt to raise the victims from flat stand-ins who matter only as corpses to women existing in a complex world of gender and class expectations that is not familiar to readers of the day.

  “Dregs of wretched humanity”

  Like other authors before him, Tom Cullen seems to have a penchant for seafaring metaphors in his 1965 Autumn of Terror (also published as When London Walked in Terror and The Crimes and Times of Jack the Ripper). Perhaps there is something about calling the East End “the abyss” that encourages ideas of descent to be watery instead of full of the dirt and smog that would have been more closely aligned with the truth. For Cullen, prostitutes of the East End find themselves on “the last rungs of the ladder descending into the abyss.”10 Presumably they might still have a step or two to go, since that ladder must be resting on some sort of surface, and thus there must be something lower, but Cullen does not name what that might be. It is this position on the ladder that made these women cross paths with Jack the Ripper—in this case, a young lawyer named Montague John Druitt.

  Being in so low a position does not necessarily lend itself to humility, as the fragment of mirror found on Polly Nichols’ body is a “concession to vanity,”11 since even one such as she likes to check her reflection from time to time. There is no other suggestion of use given other than that of peering at herself, even though Polly has been both on the streets and in the bottle long enough that Cullen dismisses any allure she may once have had. Polly is not a woman who gives regular care to her looks, and any looks that she has left are long past caring for. Presumably there were no mirrors in the lodging houses where Polly stayed, since she had to carry her own, since there were so many concerns for the poor other than appearance. Yet here her mirror is, helping prove her identity by marking her as a dosser and giving an indication of where to look for her friends.

  Neither Polly’s marriage nor her apparently sole attempt at a respectable job can redeem her. Although she was a mother, Cullen reports that she generally abandoned her family in favor of saloons with their dual appeal of strange men and drink. She is little suited to being either wife or mother, and her attempt at being a maid is likewise doomed. There is almost a hint of sympathy as Cullen describes her standing at attention as the master of the house—a dry house—reads from the daily lesson, and at least here she fights with the temptation instead of immediately giving in to drink and all the consequences. Polly is, however, unable to abstain forever, and thus she ends up on the East End streets for Jack the Ripper to find.

  Polly’s husband identifies her and is reported as making his oft-reprinted statement of forgiveness at the time, despite how long it had been since the pair had lived together. He has apparently not forgotten all that had gone between them, however, because his attitude was far less forgiving when he took the witness stand. Whatever kindness or empathy was expressed—or perhaps fabricated—earlier is washed away, and there is no strong compulsion for him to present his deceased wife in a more favorable light. Death is no kinder to Polly than life was.

  Annie Chapman is not anchored down by a husband who is still living, although having once been married to an army pensioner who also happened to be a veterinary surgeon in Windsor was not much to help to her in the end. Cullen explains that no reason is given for “why she had left her good provider,”12 whom she apparently often raised to the level of doctor in her recollections. These reminiscences, however often they came, were spoken solely to the annoyance of her fellow prostitutes. Apparently it would have served her better to have only gone down one rung of the ladder instead of having descended from on high and ending up their equals. It is puzzling, though, why the marriage failed, since she is not painted as being either a drunk or shrew, and little enough is known of her husband. Cullen speculates he was much older than she was, and leaves it at that, though a mere mismatch in age seems to be of little consequence in comparison to life alone in the East End.

  She seems to get on well enough alone in Whitechapel for as long as he paid her a weekly allowance, but her husband’s death ended this weekly payment. Annie’s health began to fail around this same time. Dizziness and fainting spells are not conducive to any manner of work, whether this meant the small sorts of trades Annie is said to have cobbled together for herself or, when that failed, prostitution. Her problems went beyond what the infirmary could do for her, even if she could have afforded better care, since Annie had tuberculosis. On top of this, she was slowly starving to death, especially without the help her estranged husband had once provided.

  Cullen recognizes Annie’s dual character, both at the time of her death and in the Ripper texts that have discussed her since. He puts his foot down, stating flatly that “to insist she was not a whore is to take the romantic view”13 and lamenting that previous authors had been fooled by Annie’s tales of her past. Even if she had once been respectable, by the time she landed in the East End,
she was far from it. Whatever small things Annie did in an attempt to make a living, from selling matches to cheap sachet, it would not have been enough, and she clearly supplemented this pitiful income with prostitution. There is a similarity, however, between this literary treatment of Annie and the responses at her death, since her contemporaries also waffled between condemnation and public tears.

  However much Annie—or authors prior to Cullen—was moved to turn her past into a golden recollection of a better age, she is bested by Long Liz Stride, a “born actress”14 who narrated her life in such a way that she became the center of a tale both tragic and romantic. In Cullen’s version, Liz’s Princess Alice story was inspired by the fact that her carpenter husband had helped to build at least one ship. One variation says that she herself was involved with its creation, or at least the cushions and salon fittings, but the timeline says she would have been only fifteen at the time and still in Sweden. This Liz, like many others, does not let the facts get in the way of a good story.

  In this variation she does indeed have nine children, two of whom died with their father during the disaster. A new detail is added in that Liz, in the process of saving herself—instead of being rescued—was kicked in the mouth, resulting in the loss of two of her front teeth. Cullen is quick to point out, however, that Liz’s post mortem does not support the claim of such an injury, even though Liz was indeed missing all of her lower teeth. It seems that this Liz has not only come up with an explanation for her position as a single, childless woman, but also for the state of her mouth, all of it combined into a narrative that was clearly a tragedy with Liz in the coveted position of sympathy at its center.

  Cullen treats the Princess Alice recollection with the same sympathy as he does the question of whether or not Liz was actually indeed drunk each time she was brought before the court on such a charge. Liz, the actress and heroine of her own life, would protest that she did not drink, but had fits. When she demonstrated—or rather, was overtaken by such a fit in front of the judge—more often than not she was dismissed. The frequency of her success perhaps led Liz to continue on drinking, often and to excess, since she was so often able to get away with it. Where she got the money to do so, considering the fact that, Princess Alice or not, her husband was not around, was through prostitution. At the very least she was living with Michael Kidney off and on for three years before her death, so John Stride was presumably out of the picture by then. What Kidney did for a living, if he even had a semi-regular position, is not mentioned, and their relationship is also not examined. With this bare description, it is however possible for readers to assume that he did not have a calming influence on Liz, who apparently needed one.

  John Kelly fares better than Michael Kidney in this narrative, since he is given both a job title—market porter—and his relationship with Kate, whether her last name was Conway or Kelly that day, is established straight off: his description of her clothing includes that of “a hole in her boot which he himself had mended with a piece of leather.”15 He had been living together with Kate for the past seven years, and though they were not married, she often adopted his last name, the way she had adopted the last name of her first common-law husband. Kelly is not only able to narrate Kate’s biography, but the fact that he had mended her boot for her shows a degree of care, no matter how small.

  This is, perhaps, undermined by Cullen’s next paragraph. He shows Kelly moving from his long viewing of Kate’s body to the table with her clothes, no longer concerned with her boot but with her hat. He checks the inside of the hat band because she kept her money there, although he found none. This is offered as a simple action with no explanation or clarification. Was Kelly himself penniless at the time? Did he send Kate out to earn some money through prostitution? Was he hoping that she might have done so behind his back, if only to leave him the money for a bed that night?

  It seems strange that the couple should be penniless, since they had taken the typical East Ender holiday of going hop-picking. Kate was quite ill, with Bright’s disease found during her autopsy, but they had gone to the country all the same. They made an early return to London, not waiting out the season, because Kate wanted to earn the reward money for identifying the Ripper. Apparently she told Kelly that she thought she knew him, but did not pass on her suspect’s name. They bought a train ticket to return to the city and spent the rest of their money, however much it was, on gin.

  During the final days of Kate’s life, the couple routinely met up and parted again in London, looking for money, earning it, pooling it, and spending it more on drink than food or a bed. The night before her death Kate told Kelly to pay for his bed while she took one in the workhouse. This is apparently an entirely practical decision, considering the sort of work the workhouse demanded of men as opposed to women, and not a show of devotion on Kate’s part. Jobs the following day did not come easy, and the last time Kate and Kelly were together, they were “too miserable to look each other in the eye.”16 This couple of seven years, all of those spent in the East End, has reached such a low in their final moments together that they are too ashamed to even look at each other.

  If Kate had come to claim the reward for identifying the Ripper and they were so constantly penniless, why had she not tried to get it? Her straw bonnet had no money to hide and could have been pawned, but it does not seem to have occurred to them. This pair decides to part, Kelly with no clear plans and Kate to attempt to find money from her daughter, with no mention of pawn shops whatsoever. And, despite the lack of money for food, Cullen suggests that their failure to find work is due to their visibly being the worse for drink. Not as far gone as Kate is discovered to be later, when she is arrested for being a public nuisance and locked up until she is sober enough to be released.

  Unlike Liz, Kate does not romanticize her life story, and she does not need to. Unlike Polly, whose husband had no compunction about speaking ill of the dead, Kate underwent a transformation. Cullen reports that so many witnesses at her inquest could only speak well of her, and suggests that, were Kate still alive, they would not have been saying such lovely things. There was even resistance to the idea that Kate had been a prostitute and not a morally pure woman struggling along as best she could, even though the police officers who knew her declared her occupation without qualification.

  Despite the myths that Liz propagated during her lifetime and that sprung up after Kate’s death, it is still relatively simple to separate fact from fiction. The same cannot be said for Mary Jane Kelly, who told legends and fairy tales of her own life that have no corresponding reference in recorded history and thus cannot be proven or disproven. The extent to which she presents herself in different ways, and indeed the way various others relate her story with differences, means that Cullen can only conclude two things about her: “she was a striking-looking woman … and she loved her gin.”17

  Cullen reports as fact her birth in Limerick and her marriage at age sixteen that only lasted a year or two before her husband’s death in a mine explosion. By the time Mary was paid compensation, she had already been driven into the streets. Not only was the money delayed, but it was a pitifully small amount, and a young, striking girl needed an income. He does not believe that she spent any time in the West End of London, much less that she ever set foot in France. This Mary was on a quick downward trajectory that ended with her death.

  On the last night of her life, Mary was desperate for money, out and about and in search of any potential customers. Here the maritime language resurfaces: “It was among such flotsam that Mary Jelly drifted … borne along by the tide, yet remaining aloof, as befits an Amazon Queen.”18 Flotsam by definition floats aimlessly, being the wreckage of a ship or its cargo, and thus the others in the East End are the aftermath of some calamity that has left them unable to choose their own course. Mary drifts as well, but the Amazons in Greek mythology were warriors. Cullen’s Mary is a bit of a terror when she defends her own turf and is thus perhaps a warrior, but it is dif
ficult to imagine an Amazon, let alone an Amazon Queen, in the East End. A woman would not have to be as elevated as a queen to stand out among London’s poor, and to be queen of the East End would mean very little. Cullen’s queen is borne along by the tide just as the flotsam around her, and perhaps even fares worse than the others, since, despite her looks and stature, she cannot find a customer.

  This Amazon Queen is not above stealing from her customers, and Cullen even reports that Mary has been known to rush into a pub and swap shawls or other outer garments with another prostitute so that she might escape identification. Now, if Mary is a queen and all others are flotsam, it hardly seems that the changing of a shawl would hide her hair, her figure, or attitude that it seems a queen must have. For a queen, though, she is well liked, although this may have little to do with her attitude and more to do with the fact that she was “as open-handed with money as she was with her other favors”19—again, not the behavior usually associated with a queen.

  Despite the similarities in her biography Cullen claims as truth for Mary compared with the other women, he remains determined to separate her from the others. They are bound together in the location in which they lived out the ends of their lives, as well as in the violence of their deaths, but no other woman is such a queen. Cullen includes one final summation in which he refers to Mary Ann, Annie, Liz, and Kate as “bundles of rags,”20 removing Mary Kelly because of her youth and the fact that she had retained her looks, but this hardly seems worthy of an Amazon Queen. In the end, Mary Kelly is a prostitute who was all too fond of gin and, like the others before her, crossed paths with the Ripper while looking for customers on the street.