Polly is not only an alcoholic and a prostitute, but one who sold herself in order to pay for a drink instead of the bed that would have kept her off the street and out of the path of history. Gordon acknowledges that her marriage was bad for both parties and that their final separation was not necessarily purely Polly’s fault, especially since there had been previous partings over their seventeen years of marriage. The couple’s oldest son avoided his father at his mother’s funeral, once again allowing readers to question whether Polly’s alcoholism was the only issue involved. Further, Gordon speculates that Polly’s relationship with a blacksmith named Dew was in fact better than her marriage to Nichols, considering how well she was dressed at her brother’s funeral. Gordon does not come out directly and state that Nichols could have been a terrible husband, but the hints are there. Unfortunately for Polly, her relationship with Dew came to an end in 1887 and her position as a prostitute enslaved to the bottle was secured.
Annie is also fond of the bottle and, due to nebulous comments made by her siblings, Gordon suspects that it was a “long term drinking problem.”3 Because his source is her siblings, Annie’s alcoholism need not have sprung directly from a bad marriage, especially since she married rather late in life. Her alcoholism seems to have been a problem before she ever met Chapman, much less before marrying the heavy drinker. Gordon allows that the couple separated by mutual consent, not casting blame to either party, and Annie is able to support herself—and presumably her drinking habit—on the allowance Chapman gave her. The amount was apparently enough to satisfy her sieve-maker, as well, since he abandoned her after Chapman’s death and the cessation of the allowance. Annie may have been an alcoholic, but Gordon suggests that Sivvy only found her tolerable when accompanied by the allowance, when he was able to make use of some of it for himself. An alcoholic Annie without an income, however, was unacceptable, and Annie ended up in the same position as Polly: prostituting herself for alcohol and, if any money was left, a bed. Once again it is alcoholism that led Annie into the history books since she, like Polly, spent her final coins on drink and was turned out onto the street.
Unlike the previous two women, Long Liz is not accused of being an alcoholic, and she was not forced out of her lodging house on her final night. Instead she seems to have gone out of her own accord in search of clients. Even though Gordon faithfully reports that Liz made her living “charring,” he adds that “[t]here can be no doubt about her occupation.”4 However much cleaning Liz may have undertaken, it was not enough to support her and she also had to go out soliciting. Her history is cloudier than Polly’s or Annie’s, and the reasons her marriage dissolved are unknown and perhaps unknowable since Liz herself was known to spin many different tales. Liz might have been a fanciful liar, but at least she was not an alcoholic who died because of her addiction to the bottle.
Catherine Eddowes, on the other hand, has no official evidence of prostitution or continual alcoholism. True, she met the Ripper when she was released after being arrested for being drunk and incapable, but Gordon does not report a history of alcoholism. There may be some hints when he acknowledges her that she had a temper or explains that Catherine had been ejected from the casual ward for “unspecified trouble”5 but neither is explicitly linked to alcohol, and Catherine might simply have been a difficult person to get along with. All the same Gordon does not blame the breakup of her marriage to Tom Conway on Catherine alone, since there are arguments on both sides, but the fact that Catherine’s daughter had moved to avoid her and had had no contact with her mother for two years adds to the suspicion that Catherine’s personality was perhaps a bit prickly. Catherine finds herself on the street in the middle of the night after being released from a cell instead of ejected from a lodging house, although she may have been on her way to pay for a bed when she was accosted by the Ripper instead of having gone with a strange in order to earn coins—Gordon does not mention whether Mitre Square was on her way. Simply being a woman alone at night, perhaps not entirely sobered up from her earlier binge, was cause enough for her murder.
Mary Jane Kelly is, on the other hand, clearly a prostitute, having first taken up the occupation after the sudden death of her husband. Gordon explains that Mary made attempts at working in more respectable positions, including scrubbing floors and working as a maid, but her life endured a quick descent that found her in the East End. For a while her boyfriend, Joseph Barnett, was able to support the two of them, but when he found himself out of work, “Kelly decided to return to prostitution.”6 Presumably she had not been scrubbing floors while Barnett worked, or perhaps any money she earned through other means was simply not enough to support them. Gordon does at least ascribe the agency to Kelly herself, since she is the one who decided on this means of earning money, possibly to spare Barnett from accusations of pimping out his girlfriend. She willingly returned to her work as a prostitute and thus willingly took the Ripper into her room on her final night.
These are the women Gordon says may now rest, since the identification of their killer has ended the mystery. Just as he allowed Kelly the agency of choosing her return to prostitution, Gordon ascribes it to all five women: they walked into history, apparently under their own power, instead of being dragged into it. Because they were prostitutes, or alcoholics, or both, they willingly encountered a strange who turned out to be their murderer and thus seem to have invited their own deaths—and their own fame, albeit one that is continually connected to his through their deaths.
Facts and Definitive History
Adding to his oeuvre on Jack the Ripper, Paul Begg published two books in two years in the early 2000s. The first, Jack the Ripper: The Facts (2004) is an updated and fully revised version of his earlier Jack the Ripper: The Uncensored Facts from the 1980s. Many of the facts he includes about the lives of the murdered women resurface again in 2005’s Jack the Ripper: The Definitive History, tracing the women’s biographies with the use of references and, where possible, multiple points of confirmation. There are, however, variations in word choice between the books that can lead to shifts in focus and perception.
In 2004, there is little known about Mary Ann Nichols’ early life, and Begg reports that her husband did not deny having an affair, but denied that his wife had left because of it. Despite her drinking and her difficult life after the breakup of her marriage, Mary Ann still managed to look youthful. Begg’s 2005 text adds that this is in spite of “the abuse she had suffered, self-inflicted through the bottle as well as possible others we can only imagine.”7 Some of that abuse may have come directly from her husband, while others were a result of her having left him and struck out on her own. True, by leaving her husband Mary Ann put herself out of his reach, although also into danger since she ended up in the East End—between the choice of two evils, the one she selected ended in her murder. Since her alcoholism was self-inflicted it, too, followed her and is given as the reason she did not have money for a bed on her the last night of her life. Perhaps she should have been able to choose to walk away from the bottle, as well, but proved unable to make that choice. May Ann, it seems, was not able to treat herself any better than anyone else in her life had.
Annie Chapman appears to have faired little better. In 2004 Begg reveals that, while in her early twenties, Annie remained in London and likely worked as a domestic while her family moved back to Clewer. It was during this time that she was to have met her husband. A further discovery of a letter possibly penned by her brother reveals that there were already issues of alcoholism in her family and thus, instead of abandonment, perhaps being apart from her family at that time might have been a relief for Annie. All the same she, like Mary Ann, became an alcoholic, although Begg points out that she seems to have gotten her drinking under control by the time of her death.
Begg’s second book does not mention Annie having been left alone in London, although here he mentions that she was likely sent to good schools during her childhood. At the time of her marriage, Begg sugges
ts that her character was already in question, likely due to drinking, but he comes to a more forceful defense of Annie in the last years of her life. While living in the East End, Annie “was said to get drunk regularly on Saturday nights (as many people did and still do)”8 as opposed to constantly wrestling with alcoholism or going about continually drunk. In both books Begg argues that there is no evidence to show that Annie prostituted herself, either for room and board or for drink, until her husband’s death stopped her weekly allowance. Begg clearly resists both the idea that Annie was more than an occasional prostitute and that her alcoholism had gotten the better of her. It may have proven a problem during the years of her marriage, but in the East End Annie seems to have fought against the bottle.
The gaps in Elizabeth Stride’s early years are smaller, since Begg is able to trace her movements while she was still living in Sweden. Despite her childhood education, which included biblical knowledge, Elizabeth found herself on the police registry as a prostitute after her parents’ deaths. After multiple stays in the hospital having to do with venereal diseases, Begg observes that Elizabeth was removed from that registry, which was only achievable when the woman in question found a husband or a proper paid position. Since Elizabeth did not marry until she came to London, it seems that her removal came from employment. There is indeed a small gap in her history concerning the three years she lived in London before marrying, although the incidents commonly attributed to her life between her marriage and her death—including the familiar Princess Alice tale—are in question. Begg observes that, during the inquisition into Elizabeth’s death, Coroner Baxter “tried to confirm the tale”9 of the sinking and Elizabeth’s loss. This is a much more positive phrasing than is often given, since Begg does not come out and directly say that much of Elizabeth’s personal narrative was a lie.
Jack the Ripper: The Definitive History offers more information about the Swedish system of registering prostitutes. Once Elizabeth’s name was recorded, Begg observes, she would have been caught in a system that often labeled women permanently and involved a grueling process to reverse. He further suggests that the employment that allowed Elizabeth’s name to be removed was in fact a position in a brothel, which meant no real improvement in Elizabeth’s circumstances. Indeed, her only escape came when she finally inherited after her mother’s death and was able to emigrate to England—although, after a twelve-year marriage that seems to have marked an upswing in her life, Elizabeth once again found herself on the street. Her poor relationship with Michael Kidney would have likewise worked against her chances at stability and happiness, and she seems to have been parted from him, perhaps permanently this time, on the night of her murder.
Catherine Eddowes is compared to Elizabeth in that Begg finds evidence that they both worked “for the Jews”10 whenever possible, only turning to prostitution to supplement their income. Catherine, however, unlike Elizabeth, seems to have had a poor relationship with her first common-law husband and a much better relationship with her second. Although Begg argues that Conway need not have been much older than Catherine, despite the fact that he was a pensioner, he marks Catherine’s first relationship with alcohol and black eyes—both in reference to Catherine. She was likely feisty, a character trait not tempered by drink, but Conway was not entirely uninvolved in the breakup of their long term relationship.
Lest he seem too reluctant to mention any negative aspects of these women’s personalities, Begg does acknowledge that the glowing character traits given to Catherine immediately after her death are tempered by other reports. Although John Kelly may have had only good things to say about the women who had shared his life for seven years, Begg points out that Catherine’s own children avoided her. Whether or not she worked as a prostitute, she was still a known drinker and a scrounger, and thus any attempt after her death to only speak well of her had to be taken for what it was: the cultural impetus to not speak ill of the dead. The Catherine who spent so many good years with Kelly was still the same woman who drank and fought with Conway, and even if her relationship was improved, she was still the same fallible woman.
Mary Jane Kelly presents more of a problem for a researcher intent on grounding his representation of the victims on outside corroboration, but even here Begg manages to take the personal history Kelly told her boyfriend and align it with known practices. The fact that she was not originally from England and claims to have come to London to work in a West End brothel—which somehow involved a trip to France—makes Begg question whether “she had fallen into the hands of a procurer.”11 He expands on this idea in Jack the Ripper: The Definitive History to explain that said procurer would have been out a great deal of money if Kelly had decided to leave France and return to England. If she had made an agreement with such a person and then not followed through, then the fact that Kelly might have seemed to have been hiding in the East End would be explicable. She would not have been able to return to the West End without being identified, and any comments she made about being fearful of someone might have been connected to this scenario.
Begg likewise suspects Joe Barnett of doing what Catherine’s friends did after her death and presenting her story in a more positive light. It is possible that Barnett may have altered Kelly’s personal history in his retelling, consciously or not, since even her other friends could not be called upon to corroborate that information. She seems to have kept herself mostly to herself and thus is known more for her youth and her looks than her background, although Begg does point out that her history and lack of contact with her family suggests that her relationship with her parents was not a positive one. No family or friends from outside of London attended her funeral.
In neither book does Begg make an argument for the Ripper’s identity, ending Jack the Ripper: The Facts with the declaration that “the identity of Jack the Ripper isn’t really important. It’s the story of these crimes, of the women who died, and of the society and times in which they lived that matters and holds the enduring fascination.”12 Granted, the identity of the Ripper is not at the center of any of Begg’s published texts, but the vast majority of Ripper narratives are indeed focused on giving the killer a name. Even Begg’s treatment of the murdered women might be considered out of the ordinary, since an even-handed approach is so striking as to seem almost too kind. In his concluding thoughts in Jack the Ripper: The Definitive History his argument shifts slightly, not attempting to dismiss the identity of the Ripper entirely but condemning the authors of both fact and fiction who have romanticized the series murders and placed them in the midst of a romantic Victorian fog. This is perhaps a more reasonable call for other authors, considering the usual research questions that have been brought to bear on the subject.
In Jack the Ripper: The Definitive History Begg also makes another move toward a more relatable representation of the murdered women when he brings up for the subject of pathos. For Begg, three of these women exhibit moments of pathos on the last night of their lives: Mary Ann Nichols takes pride in her new bonnet, the act of a poor woman reveling in the simplest of things; Elizabeth Stride borrowed a clothes brush before going out for the evening, as though her outfit were fine enough to look all the better for using one; and Catherine Eddowes laments the response she will receive for arriving home hours later than she had promised. This is the only rhetorical term Begg uses, calling these instances “moments of pathos”13 without clarifying either the term or what it is about each scenario that makes it pathetic. They are simply snapshots in which these women tug the heartstrings, everyday tasks that can be seen as relatable or pitiful even more than a century later.
Even when conscientiously aligning his representation of these women with information gleaned from contemporary sources, Begg manages to avoid either extreme and give a more balanced presentation. They are not horrific, irredeemable wrecks of women who threw themselves into prostitution without a care, and neither are they saints. Begg tempers reports that skew to either end with more information, e
ither placing these women and their actions in the historical context or reminding readers of previously stated evidence to combat the tendency to clean up a person’s reputation after death. These biographies do not necessarily eclipse the mystery of the killer’s identity or his methods, but they offer more than scant repeated facts.
Questions of Redemption
Paul Roland’s 2006 book The Crimes of Jack the Ripper once again directs focus back to the Ripper himself, concluding that the accusations against a mad Jewish butcher were in fact correct, and that his name was Jacob Levy. Roland also returns to the typical method of presenting each of the women’s biographies in a paragraph or two, painting their lives in broad strokes. He may be choosing to reflect the opinion of the day, the same way in which he observes that the only way lower-class women could “redeem themselves”14 would be to find themselves a respectable paid position, either as a maid or in one of the factories. If a women were ever forced to resort to prostitution, then she was indeed in need of redemption, and Roland declares that any woman who could not—or would not—apply herself to an occupation other than prostitution deserved whatever end she might meet, even if that end came on the Ripper’s knife. This is an opinion that was not left in the Victorian era.
Polly Nichols indeed seems to have bought and paid for her violent end—or rather, to have chosen to spend her money on alcohol instead of on the bed that would have kept her off the street. “Had she saved just a few coppers,” Roland laments, “she would not have been soliciting”15 and therefore on the street and in the path of the Ripper. The focus is not on the fact that there was a killer on the loose, attacking women with his knife, but that Polly was so much of an alcoholic that she was unable to keep herself out of his way.
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