The Ripper's Victims in Print

by Rebecca Frost

  Tully’s Annie, on the other hand, confines her drinking to Saturdays even if she might manage to live her life out of direct purview of her family members. Considering the fact that Annie’s parents were not married when she was born, it might be expected that they would be more understanding of her situation, but that seems not to factor into things. Annie married late, possibly because of the unattractive features Tully describes, and the marriage dissolves for reasons Tully doubts. He says it was claimed that Annie lost her husband his job through her dishonesty, but there seems to be no proof or even a specific accusation. Alone and on the street, it seems perfectly understandable that she might start drinking, and when her various attempts at earning money failed her and she was in need of another drink, she would turn to prostitution. It is all a downward spiral that illustrates the limits imposed on women’s lives. Perhaps the best that can be said for the less than pretty, alcoholic Annie is that she seems to have made the most of a bad situation, even if she might have caused herself to end up there in the first place.

  Elizabeth Stride, who spelled her name as Elisabeth before coming to London and changing it to be more British, apparently suffered from the same pressures of family as Annie did. After a number of setbacks, a young Elizabeth chose to come to London because she felt her family would not help her, putting her even further out of their reach than Annie from her family. Part of that situation involved having already become a prostitute, and although Tully makes sure to mention that she was attractive—and certainly more attractive than Annie—it seems that the profession was not lucrative enough for her. Considering the age difference between Elizabeth and John Stride, Tully suspects that their marriage was a “business arrangement”56 or maybe based on issues of citizenship. Perhaps the fact that this union lasted less than a decade helps support Tully’s argument that it was something other than a love match. Due to issues surrounding the identification of her body, Tully even suggests that enterprising Liz lived a double life beginning around 1882. If her marriage was in fact a business arrangement, then this double life may have been, as well, another example of how shrewd Liz might have been when it came to providing for herself. If she managed to pretend to be another woman, that allowed her the benefit of preying on the sympathies of her “sister” as well as relying on her boyfriend or prostitution for monetary support. Granted, Tully later returns to the question of Liz’s murder and declares that she must have been killed by “her lover, and probably pimp, Michael Kidney,”57 whose domineering attitude toward Liz makes it sound as though she were not much in control of her life at the end.

  While any indication that Liz was intelligent or independent is roundabout, Kate Conway is outwardly declared as intelligent, as demonstrated by the fact that she and her common-law husband wrote and sold chapbooks for a living. Her childhood was marred by the early deaths of her parents and she had ended up running away with Conway when she was quite young, thus losing the support of her family, much like Liz Stride. Despite the many years and children with Conway, the couple eventually parted, and Kate soon took up with John Kelly. Although not as intelligent as Conway, Kelly proved to be kind to her and the couple seemed to have a good relationship. Perhaps this had something to do with the question of intelligence—although scrounging and drinking are usually used to explain Kate’s separation from Conway, there is the question of whether perceptions of intelligence may have come into play and whether she might have been too “uppity” for his liking. Lest anyone perceive an overly positive representation of Kate, however, Tully points out that, in her final days with Kelly, Kelly pawned the boots off his feet in order to get the money because she “was loath to pawn her new jacket,”58 even though the jacket would likely have earned them more than the boots. Kelly’s gesture has often been seen as incredibly selfless and of his own free will, although a Kate who would leave him barefoot on the pavement while she went to pawn his boots, wearing her new jacket, seems cold. It is, however, an argument in favor of Kate not being a prostitute, since Kelly would likely have sent her off to work rather than lose his boots.

  Once again an author runs into the problem of having little confirmable information about Mary Jane Kelly, including any reliable description of her looks. Tully does consider that, since one of her nicknames was Black Mary, it was “more likely to have been in reference to her temperament”59 than to her looks, considering how many variants indicated her hair was light or red. It is rare to have this sort of negative perspective of Mary, who again might be better-looking than the other women, but this might only be due to her youth and the fact that she had not been living in the East End as long. She was also meant to have had an easier life before she turned up in the East End, though the speed at which this change was affected is again puzzling, as is much about Mary. Perhaps her redeeming feature comes in the fact that, whatever lies and fancies she told about her past, she never pretended that she was currently anything but a prostitute. Tully points out that hers is the only death certificate to list it as her occupation and takes it as a statement that Mary Jane made of herself, and not an outwardly imposed concession to the facts.

  At this point in time, more than a century after the murders, it seems unlikely that any new concrete information will surface about the murdered women. Sugden and Tully, however, make full use of the information available, from declarations confirmed by outside sources to first person testimony in newspapers and inquest reports. It has indeed become fashionable for authors, like Beadle, to flat-out reject past conceptions about these women, with or without the sources to support this new claim, but Sugden and Tully have chosen to walk a more middle line, acknowledging both positive and negative arguments of the women’s lives. This is, perhaps, a difficult position to maintain, and such focus on the victims’ lives is wildly unpopular, as can be seen by the following books that have little to say about the women.

  Of Little Interest

  In stark contrast with authors such as Beadle, Sugden, and Tully, other authors who tackled the Ripper narrative in the 1990s do not set out to direct as much attention to these women as their murderer. Many of these books follow the already established pattern of having little to say about the living women beyond perhaps their names, ages, and dates of death. If any aspect of their identities or possessions might point to the killer, such as the question of Annie’s rings, then those might be mentioned. Otherwise there is little sense in reviewing how each of these authors presented all five women and our time will be better spent seeking out any moments that raise above the expected.

  In 1994 Melvin Harris wrote The True Face of Jack the Ripper, accusing Roslyn D’Onston of being the murderer. He displays perhaps the minimum amount of information about the victims necessary to telling the Ripper narrative, grouping them together in terms such as “tragic, lost creatures”60 deserving of pity to common terms such as prostitutes and drabs. Whatever pity these women earn it is in their role as corpses, bodies, and murder victims or—on one page, when Harris refers back to the murders—as ordinal numbers. Instead of Polly, Annie, and Elizabeth, they become the first, second, and third victims. Catherine is referred to as “the Mitre Square murder,”61 giving the location of her death instead of the order, and only Mary Kelly is referred to by name. While the location and number of victims are of importance to a murderer invested in black magic, the biographies of the women killed there are not.

  Paul H. Feldman’s 1998 book Jack the Ripper: The Final Chapter shows support for the theory that James Maybrick was the Ripper and likewise gives little information about the murdered women. Mary Kelly stands out from the rest as being “a little different, a little special,”62 and worthy of more information than the other four women. Mary Ann Nichols has a name; Annie Chapman’s rings are mentioned; Long Liz’s nickname is declared; the spelling of Catharine Eddowes’ first name is discussed, and John Kelly deserves recognition; but Mary Kelly’s story of her own past is worthy of a more lengthy discussion. Feldman is unable to track
down any record of her marriage and suggests that Mary first became a prostitute and then invented her narrative of widowhood in order to justify her position. Further, the fact that Mary was willing—or perhaps stupid—enough to entertain the Ripper in her room is presented not as an indication of the sort of person Mary must have been, but to support the fact that the Ripper may indeed have been well-dressed and respectable-looking.

  In his 1993 book Jack the Myth: A New Look at the Ripper, A. P. Wolf takes an interesting approach in his argument for Thomas Cutbush as the Ripper. Four of the victims receive very little attention indeed, to the point where Cutbush has to clarify who Catherine Eddowes is when he mentions her more than one hundred pages in. The fact that he does not expect his readers to recognize the name of a canonical victim shows how little attention he has paid to them in a text that, oddly, begins each chapter with an epigraph from Winnie the Pooh. Wolf in fact devotes a good deal of the text to exploring the life of Elizabeth Stride, whom he claims was in fact not a victim of the Ripper after all. He declares that Long Liz was only an occasional prostitute, using details from her last day cleaning and charring to support the fact that she “was determined to do anything else to earn a living rather than reducing herself to prostitution.”63 This Liz prettied herself up for a night out with someone who was not Michael Kidney, the jilted boyfriend who thus murdered her out of jealousy. When explaining that Kidney often padlocked their lodging house room door and kept the only key, Wolf once again feels the need to explain the identity of someone he names, this time ensuring that his readers recognize “Stride” as being the same person as “Long Liz.” Liz is thus the victim of domestic violence and Kidney escaped the consequences of his actions simply because her murder came in the midst of the others, largely ignored by Wolf.

  M. J. Trow has no solution to the mystery of the Ripper’s identity in his 1997 book The Many Faces of Jack the Ripper and offers few insights into the lives of the women he dubs “Jack’s targets.”64 He groups the women together not only through their murderer but through their dependence on alcohol, with few details to individuate them. Polly Nichols, for example, surprised the coroner with “the cleanliness of her thighs,”65 an oddly intimate detail that has readers once more pondering her body piecemeal. Polly seems to be the focus of the majority of these comments that differentiate Trow’s narrative from any other, including the fact that she was “plucked from the obscurity of her life by death,”66 a statement that indeed applies to each of these women. Otherwise there is little to distinguish one alcoholic from another, outside of the locations of their murders and the amount of damage the Ripper inflicted with his knife.

  In The Ripper & The Royals (1991), Melvyn Fairclough once again returns to a variation of Stephen Knight’s final solution, placing Walter Sickert as the ringleader responsible for the murders in order to prevent Mary Kelly’s blackmailing of the crown. Fairclough more than other authors jumps around in the narrative instead of taking a chronological approach, dropping tidbits of information about the murdered women instead of taking the time to focus a paragraph or two on each. Thus what can be learned about them is scattered, and readers unfamiliar with the Ripper narrative might benefit from some clarification of identity, in the vein of A. P. Wolf. Since the blame for the murders is once again placed on a Mary Kelly intent on blackmail, she receives more attention than the women whose deaths she is meant to have caused. Fairclough does introduce the idea that Kelly was only an occasional prostitute and in fact supported herself through the secondhand rag trade, supporting this argument through a diary supposedly written by Inspector Abberline. The 1990s, it seems, was the decade of the revealed diary.

  The final book of note is Richard Wallace’s 1996 Jack the Ripper: “Light-hearted Friend” in which he relies heavily on anagrams and word games in order to accuse Charles Dodgson, otherwise known as his pen name of Lewis Carroll. He has little to distinguish his “‘gay’ women (meaning women of the streets)”67 or “lower creatures”68 from one another, except perhaps his assessment of how wealthy they were. While Wallace attributes the coins found near Annie Chapman to have been given to her by the Ripper, since she would not have possessed money on her own, he also labels Catherine Eddowes as “relatively well off”69 based on the amount of possessions she had with her at the time of her death, not considering the fact that this meant she had no fixed abode at which to leave many of them while she was out. Further, Wallace shares at least part of his approach with David Abrahamsen, declaring his Ripper to be just as much a victim as the murdered women, albeit largely more sympathetic. This sits in strong contrast to his later musings that “[o]ne could wonder where is the empathy for the poor, nameless women so callously murdered and mutated,”70 since Wallace himself seems to have expressed sympathy for the murderer and not the murdered. Further, he did indeed name the murdered women—at least, the most commonly named as the Rippers victims—so it seems strange to think of them as nameless, unless he means to indicate further unknown murdered women. Whether they are named or not, the victims of Wallace’s Ripper do not receive the same sympathetic attention as Lewis Carroll himself, making Wallace’s narrative fail to meet its own call for empathy.

  Paving the Way

  The focus of the 1990s thus broadened beyond the singular question of previous decades. Authors now no longer had to focus on the killer himself, or even the timeline and minutiae of the murders specifically. They were able to begin exploring other aspects of the Ripper narrative beyond what had been thoroughly—and repeatedly—summed up in the 1980s. Although the question of the Ripper’s identity still remained largely at the fore, the answer to that question held new possibilities and new explanations for why that name had been put forward. Some authors continued much in the same vein that had proven interesting and worthy of publication in the past, but others started to expand and explore their options.

  This exploration continued with the dawn of the twenty-first century. Again, some authors stuck to the by now expected questions concerning the Ripper narrative, while others took the mystery in new directions. Authors began to make use of more advanced technology alongside the psychology already presented, and others firmly turned their backs on the question of the Ripper’s identity in order to pursue topics that they felt had been ignored, either willfully or unintentionally. As much as the 1990s expanded the library of Ripper texts, the twenty-first century saw the number of printed offerings continue to skyrocket.

  • SEVEN •

  More of the Same?

  An Introduction to the 21st Century Books

  Change does not come easily. Although each new text about the Ripper murders must at least claim to offer something that has not been seen before, at times this can still mean that many aspects of the familiar narrative are simply repeated and not expanded upon. The attempt to find something new may focus authors and their research on specific areas so strenuously that they do not have time—or do not feel the need—to apply that same effort toward others. The desire to clearly show that the chosen man was indeed Jack the Ripper still most often demands that authors make use of the murdered women’s dead bodies and not their biographies.

  This does not mean that every author represents the murdered women in the same way. Some authors tend toward raising them up, in their deaths if not in their lives, as though murder and mutilation were a small price to pay for the fact that their names are indeed known and repeated. Other authors take the topics of prostitution and murder and use them to question the idea of redemption. Another group of authors perhaps downplay the individuality of the women themselves, lumping them together in a homogenous group in order to remove the sting and stigma of murder. One even owns up to his lack of interest in their lives, though he also does not restrain himself from commenting on how others have presented them. These are the books from the twenty-first century who continue their search for the Ripper’s identity and follow more closely along the path that has already been set for them.


  Walking into History

  In his 2001 book Alias Jack the Ripper: Beyond the Usual Whitechapel Suspects R. Michael Gordon sets out to argue that the Ripper was in fact Severin Klosowski, a.k.a. George Chapman. If true, this means that the Ripper switched from murdering strangers with a knife to killing multiple “wives” through arsenic. Gordon also suggests that one of those women, Annie Chapman—from whom Klosowski adopted his pseudonym—was in fact Annie Georgina Chapman, daughter of one of his Whitechapel victims. The younger Annie Chapman was lucky in that she parted from Klosowski while still alive, and thus he took nothing but her name.

  Gordon dedicates his book “For the ladies of Victorian London’s East End, who so long ago walked into history”1 and adds that they can now rest, since the killer has been identified. This is perhaps a sanitized way of saying that, through their bloody deaths and horrific mutilations, these women’s names are remembered. Had they lived and died without having crossed paths with the Ripper, they would not have walked into history—or rather, walked into the path of the Ripper who forcefully propelled them into the history books. Gordon further argues that, considering the horrific conditions of the East End, death would be looked upon “an escape”2 instead of being viewed negatively. Death would indeed have meant that the women need no longer scrounge for money in order to support themselves, but these women did not resort to suicide. They had the choice of life over death taken from them, with mutilations and missing organs thrown in on the side. Gordon, like many authors before him, does his best to minimize the suffering and loss of the murdered women so that he might be able to focus on proving the identity of their killer.