Another possible reason for her silence on her past is suggested when Begg questions whether the body found so terribly mutilated at 13 Miller’s Court was, in fact, hers. Joe Barnett’s testimony, especially concerning why he may have fought so terribly with Mary Jane Kelly before they parted, mentioned multiple prostitutes staying in the room. Begg allows that two have been named, but wonders if there might have been others, and if it is one of them whose body was buried under Mary Jane Kelly’s name. Begg wonders if this lack of information about her past hides someone who might have wanted to harm her, and the reason for this silence. If Mary Jane Kelly returned to her room to discover that her guest had been murdered there, she then quickly slipped away and managed to hide her true identity for the rest of her life as the story played itself out with her as the victim. Then again, after this supposition that seems less likely than many previous ones, Begg does admit that “[i]t is easy to build complex theories on very slender evidence.”49 He is, of course, not the only one to have done so, though most authors confine their wilder tales to the identity of the Ripper.
He does manage to rather undermine his own theory with his points that Mary Jane Kelly was weeks behind in her rent, meaning she would have had to strike out penniless with only the clothes on her back, and that she was so striking. A woman with her looks, her education, and her apparent pretensions would likely have a difficult time hiding in the East End, especially when her name and description had been in the newspapers. Granted, she may have also had a number of things working in her favor. If she had only been hiding in the East End because of a threat, then that threat was neutralized and she might have been able to move on and elsewhere. Secondly, since the inquest into her death only lasted a day, the story disappeared from the newspapers rather quickly. In the end, though, this theory seems too much like a fairy tale, especially since variations have been used in fictional accounts of the murders.
Like Wilson and Odell, Begg begins to ask questions at certain points in the narrative, seeking answers or explanations that have been ignored or overlooked throughout the previous century. Certain assumptions are allowed to continue unquestioned, and Begg may not have picked the most obvious places to start with his questions, but at least they are present. He shows that he is capable of critically considering the gaps in the narratives and acknowledging that more than one explanation could lie behind them. It is the continuation of these questions, adding more to those Begg, Wilson, and Odell have already presented, that would increase the understanding of Jack the Ripper’s victims as women.
Beyond the Anniversary
The 1980s saw many advances in the knowledge about serial killers such as Jack the Ripper, and this, along with the centennial anniversary of the murders, led to narratives that tended toward summarizations of the event itself and of the investigation over the previous hundred years. It was not necessarily the goal of these authors to prove the identity of the Ripper, although some new names were put forward, but rather to take the long look at the crimes. The question of how far we have come in the investigation into such serial murders was tempered by the fact that no one name has been accepted to replace the sobriquet of “Jack the Ripper.” Any attempt at putting this new knowledge about serial killers and psychopathy to use are tempered by the fact that any such diagnosis must be made long-distance and based only on the documents that have survived for contemporary perusal.
The 1980s continued the swell in publications seen in the 1970s, now not focused on whether or not the murders could be tied to the royal family but more concerned with the passing of time. Although it can never be firmly declared that the reading public has access to every single document or file recorded at the time of the murders, any new information would be discovered by luck. These authors could not manufacture that luck, but they could make use of new information surrounding killers like the Ripper, if not new information about the Ripper himself. Because 1988 marked the hundred year anniversary of the killings, the focus of this decade was more on using this new knowledge to take a more general look at the case itself. The term “serial killer” and the language presented by the FBI was still new, although it became more common and widely known due to the general true crime boom of that decade. The anniversary seemed to be a time for reflection; any new accusations, relying on this advancing field of specialty, would come later.
• SIX •
More Than a Century Later
Discussing Murder in the 1990s
Initially the police files concerning Jack the Ripper were meant to have remained unseen until 1992, one hundred years after they had initially been closed. Access was instead allowed to researchers as soon as the 1970s, and even then many of the files had been greatly weeded or even lost, due to accident or perhaps souvenir seekers. Thus the anticipated information boom that was originally meant to have occurred in this decade did not in fact come to pass. Researchers had to continue to make do with the odd now-and-again discoveries that seem to have peppered the history of Ripperology. Some of these discoveries are more hotly contested than others, as shall be seen below.
With the centennial mark of the murders behind them, authors seemed freed to build upon various cases for the Ripper’s identity, and the books produced in this single decade nearly outnumber those all of the years leading up to it. This explosion of texts brought with it expanding ideas, topics, and even authors. The first female writers penned books about the Ripper in the 1990s, still very much in the minority. Authors found new ways to place blame on Mary Jane Kelly. Others declared that the Ripper was actually a killer duo consisting of homosexual young men. Some authors set out to increase the attention given to the murdered women, declaring it bluntly and then declaring their intention to give as much attention to the Ripper’s victims as to the Ripper himself. Still others continued much in the same vein as the previous decades, largely ignoring the victims and making fuller use of the information about serial killers that emerged in the previous decade. The 1990s thus presented readers with a vast array of titles and ideas, seemingly enough to satisfy any prejudice or theory.
New Authors, New Voices
Along with the other changes, the decade of the 1990s brought the first female authors to the Jack the Ripper narratives. Jean Overton Fuller’s 1990 book Sickert and the Ripper Crimes takes up the story that began in Stephen Knight’s Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, although Fuller rejects the idea of the murders being Masonic in origin. Instead, she places Sickert at the center of the crimes as the lone murderer, forced to kill because of the actions of Mary Kelly.
Because the story centers around Mary Kelly through the reminiscences of a friend of Fuller’s mother, the other four women receive little mention. Fuller does inform readers that these women “were elderly and weak,”1 in stark contrast to Mary Kelly. When discussed they are named as Mrs. Nichols, Mrs. Chapman, and Mrs. Stride, tying their identifies to those of the husbands they had left, although they were at least legally married. Catherine Eddowes is indeed always Catherine Eddowes and never Mrs. Conway, presumably because her relationship with the father of her children was common-law. Catherine Eddowes is allowed the individuality of her first name rather than being presented as the female half of a married couple. Previous authors—all male—have tended to use the women’s last names in order to refer to them, allowing them variations depending on the presence or absence of a common-law husband.
Oddly enough Fuller makes the observation that these women “are usually just referred to as prostitutes…. To the public they are hardly individualized.”2 Granted, this comes at the end of her narrative, after she has presented her readers with a very individuated Mary Kelly, but she does not spare this time or attention for the other women herself. In fact, the morgue photographs of Elizabeth Stride and Annie Chapman are mislabeled, switching the women’s names.3 The first four women remain grouped together under blanket statements about East End prostitutes, or as the friends Mary Kelly confided in. Their deaths are a
lso no fault of their own, but caused by the distinct, highly colorful figure of Mary Kelly.
Fuller’s Mary Kelly was a strong-willed, good-looking woman who found herself keeping a shop with one Annie Crook. Annie caught the eye of a young man brought around by the artist Walter Sickert, giving birth to this young man’s child and eventually marrying him in a secret ceremony. That young man was of course Eddy, Queen Victoria’s grandson, and once Eddy was removed from Cleveland Street and Annie properly disposed of, Mary Kelly found herself in possession of knowledge that could threaten the crown. She shared the knowledge of this marriage and child with her friends, and this was what caused all of them to be murdered.
This Mary Kelly is disillusioned with life in London, having come from a previous position washing floors at an infirmary in Cardiff in search of something better and perhaps more glamorous. Fuller reports that Mary was “not a happy girl,”4 which seems like a bit of an understatement. Although presumably prettier than Annie, and better educated—Fuller mentions that Mary Kelly could sign her name, which was apparently beyond Annie—it was Annie who caught Eddy’s eye. Despite the fact that both women lived in the same neighborhood, the one had managed to ensnare a prince and the other, highly dissatisfied, left her shopkeeper’s position in search of something more to her tastes. It is this departure, possibly made in jealousy over Annie’s fortune and not due to circumstances beyond her control, that led Mary Kelly to prostitution.
Fuller seems determined to ensure that Mary Kelly, as individual and separate as she may be, is not a sympathetic figure. Her descent into Whitechapel is the result of multiple failed attempts to reach for a better life, one presumably beyond her abilities and status. Although she is Mary Kelly throughout the narrative, accorded both a first and last name, Fuller makes it clear that “[i]t was just plain English Mary, and one Christian name only”5—even Mary Jane Kelly is a fantasy, much less Marie Jeanette. Although Fuller does allow Mary Kelly trips to Dieppe with Walter Sickert, and questions whether this meant Sickert had taken her as a lover, she is firm in her assertion that any name beyond the simple Mary Kelly is an invention of the woman herself to put on airs.
Even in the East End Mary Kelly continued her search for what had supposedly been her lifelong goal: a man to support her, even if it could not be a man of royal blood. Joe Barnett is this man, and apparently quite a decent one for the East End, treating Mary Kelly better than any man before in her life—including Sickert and the prince. Barnett, however, does not feel the same about Mary Kelly’s prostitution as the woman herself, since Fuller has him moving out because he does not wish to live off her earnings. From her shopkeeper’s assistant position alongside Annie, Mary Kelly moved directly into prostitution, apparently of her own free will. Mary Kelly is clearly willing to sell her body to make a living, and apparently preferred it to her other options.
Fuller does take some time to discuss what it meant to be a prostitute in Victorian England, arguing that the vast majority of women in that position were forced into it, with the alternative being starvation. She seems sympathetic, at least to the other four Ripper victims, since they fall into her category of women who, for one reason or another, find themselves without a man or other means of support. Fuller even points out that many East End prostitutes had steady men who “forgave”6 them for their prostitution, presumably as long as it was the result of desperation and not personal choice. Mary Kelly had a steady position that had kept her off the streets, even if she had felt the work was beneath her and she had to jealously witness the love affair of her coworker. The sympathetic prostitutes of the East End were forced to sell themselves in order to stay alive, and Fuller even sympathizes with those who used that money to buy alcohol instead of food or shelter, since their situations were so dire. It would seem that Mary Kelly’s situation had no need to be so dire. Presumably Fuller is able to “forgive” the other prostitutes, as well, as long as their profession was forced upon them and not a true choice.
The most unforgivable about Mary Kelly, though, is the fact that she shared her secret with her friends. If she had not done this, then Sickert would have had no reason to murder any women outside of Mary Kelly herself—and indeed, he would have had no cause to murder Mary Kelly had she not written to him demanding money in the first place. Granted, Fuller admits that Mary Kelly had to “have been in dire straits”7 to make the demand at all, but in this narrative it is Mary Kelly alone, presumably out of jealousy, that sets Jack the Ripper in motion. Mary Kelly is responsible for the murders carried out by Walter Sickert. While a man may have ripped, it was only because of a woman.
In her narrative Fuller makes one reference to her gender identity as being essential to her interpretation of facts. When discussing the report that Mary Kelly’s clothes were found neatly folded on the day her murder was discovered, Fuller observes, “Perhaps because I am a woman, it is these I think about, and the circumstances in which she took them off and folded them.”8 While other authors have pondered the folded clothes, using them to conclude that Mary Kelly must have taken them off herself, unhurried, since they were not bloodstained and it was unlikely the killer had folded them neatly at any point in the proceedings, Fuller uses this moment to bring her own gender identity into play. It may come across as an admission: she only focuses on the minutiae of folded clothes because she is indeed a woman, and has thus presumably folded many clothes. They may have no more significance than has already been discussed, but they stick in her mind for reasons she associates with womanhood.
Fuller’s identity as an artist has much more influence on the text, especially since both Sickert and her mother’s friend, the source of her information, are artists. This leads to various comparisons between artwork and the given situation, at times branching out from pieces painted solely by those involved with the murders. In discussion of a Dali painting, Fuller observes that “the woman is corrupted from within, which is a worse thing than to be murdered by the Ripper, which is only violence from without.”9 Fuller, like many male authors before and after her, appears to take comfort in the fact that being brutally murdered by a strange man has meant that these women’s names have been passed down through history. Murder and mutilation in this case are “only” minor in comparison to internal torment. This is an odd diminishing of the consequences of Mary Kelly’s actions, especially when Fuller works to present the beautiful, free-spirited Mary Kelly in a negative light. If the consequences to her actions, for herself and four others, was “only” being attacked by Sickert, then it becomes more difficult to condemn her sternly for lighter consequences.
Shirley Harrison’s 1993 book, The Diary of Jack the Ripper, does not include nearly as much information about Mary Jane Kelly, but Harrison still introduces a new approach to discussions of the murdered women. The focus of her narrative is, of course, a dairy meant to have been written by James Maybrick, confessing to be Jack the Ripper, and thus much of her text is devoted to the origin of the book and various tests and inspections meant to prove its worth. She covers the murders themselves quickly, as points of comparison for descriptions in the diary, and because the diary is only concerned with their deaths and not their lives, Harrison does not need to focus on their biographies.
What she does include, however, is a new way of introducing these women. In her first mention of them, Mary Ann (“Polly”) Nichole’s is presented with her age at death and the information that she “was a locksmith’s daughter.”10 Annie Chapman is “the daughter of a Lifeguardsman”11 and Catharine Eddowes the “daughter of a Wolverhampton tin worker.”12 Nether Elizabeth Stride nor Mary Jane Kelly is identified by her father’s occupation, although Elizabeth is at least presented as being Swedish. Mary Ann, Annie, and Elizabeth’s husbands are not mentioned by either name or occupation, and Catharine is meant to have pawned her own boots—John Kelly does not appear in the narrative at all. Only Joe Barnett appears as a player in Mary Jane Kelly’s story.
Like Jean Overton Fuller’s pre
ference of referring to these women as wives, Harrison’s method of identifying these women as daughters situates them according to the men in their lives. Even though the women are grown, with four of them being in their forties, she still turns them into daughters instead of women in their own right. Their choices of husband or personal profession, as well as the general course of their lives up until the nights of the deaths, are ignored, but for some reason their fathers’ occupations are relevant to their identities. Indeed, this information is included in their introductions, with no indication of how long it had been since the woman in question lived with her father, or how his position influenced her life.
Even with their new additions of ways to describe the murdered women, Fuller and Harrison still each turn Mary Kelly into a unique figure. For Fuller she is the cause of all the murders, since her decision to attempt to blackmail Sickert drove him to decide that murder was the only way to keep the royal secret. Although Harrison’s narrative does not show Maybrick having known Mary Kelly before her death, she does make connections between Mary Kelly and Maybrick’s unfaithful wife, suggesting that Mary Kelly’s murder was so horrific because she thus functioned as a stand-in for the woman who had angered him. Positioning the last canonical victim at the center of the murders was not new, and it was even repeated with new twists throughout the 1990s.
They All Love Mary Kelly
The Ripper's Victims in Print Page 16