London's Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City
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The mere recital of the abominations prompted and carried through by the principal defendant almost suggests a doubt whether anything short of monomania can have led to the idea that such a sacrifice of all that was right and true and virtuous in the lives of so many people was really demanded as the price to be paid for a victory over vice.36
This was a view not shared by the Daily Chronicle. While it accepted that Stead was a fanatic, and that he had certainly broken the law through his actions, it at least credited Stead with acting from the best of intentions in noting that he `sought to accomplish a great good in the interest of society' 17
So what are we to make of the scandal of the `Maiden Tribute' and the expose of child prostitution in Victorian Britain and elsewhere? Arguably the most significant effect of Stead's newspaper campaign was in the passing of the Criminal Law Amendment Act in 1885. This piece of legislation raised the age of consent for girls to 16 but also set in place measures to protect young women and girls from exploitation in the sex industry. Persons procuring women under the age of 21 for prostitution within Britain or the Empire were liable for a prison sentence of up to two years and if the girl was under 13 the sentence could be extended to `penal servitude for life'.3R It also highlighted the issue of the exploitation of working-class girls by members of the aristocracy and elite. This echoed the treatment of working women by the CDA and resurfaced in the attacks on gentlemen in the wake of the Ripper murders. Middle-class moralizers such as Stead were quick to point to the poor example that many pleasure seeking `toffs' were setting to the working classes they ruled. The `Maiden Tribute' therefore offers us another glimpse into the ongoing class war between the middle and upper echelons of late Victorian society.
It also illustrates once more the gulf in understanding of working-class lives and culture by the more comfortable middling sorts. Stead's campaign built upon Dyer's less sensational one but both operate from the principle that young women were the `sexually innocent, passive victims of individual evil men' rather than a consequence of a deeply unequal capitalist society.39 This followed from the traditional view that saw prostitution as individual failings of character rather than an effect of society itself. Therefore philanthropy directed at prostitutes in the nineteenth century grew out of the prison reform movement, which spent time inside gaols talking to inmates about their path to crime. Prisons were seen as corrupting institutions and `fallen' women were viewed as redeemable but this was made more difficult if they were exposed to other criminals. Thus reformers argued that separate institutions should be created to help such women escape from prostitution. In Magdalene asylums prostitutes were subjected to a disciplined regime of moral education and industrious training to instil middle-class standards of femininity. Josephine Butler rescued working girls from the streets of Liverpool and attempted to re-educate them as `respectable' members of society. Similarly Ellice Hopkins helped establish a number of Ladies' Associations for the Care and Protection of Young Girls across the country. These had the aim of preventing young women from falling into prostitution.
Stead's campaign, building as it had on Dyer's original expose of the traffic in British girls, should not obscure the fact that earlier in the century the trade had also operated in the opposite direction. Bracebridge Hemyng's survey of London prostitutes had revealed that along with the export of poor unfortunate English girls, unscrupulous Europeans (one assumes that the English were not involved ...) regularly brought young women from the Continent to work as prostitutes in London. Again it would appear that women from Belgium (this was the subject of a complaint to the magistracy at Marylebone Police Court but other nations may well, in Hemyng's opinion, have been involved) were `imported' into Britain under false pretences and then effectively imprisoned in brothels. In Hemyng's rather colourful language these Continental mesdames were `made to fetter themselves to the trepanner, and they, in their simple-mindedness, consider their deed binding, and look upon themselves, until the delusion is dispelled [by whom one is bound to ask], as thoroughly in the power of their keepers"'
Mary Kelly, often considered to be the Ripper's final victim, had herself been trafficked to the Continent but had made her escape and return to Britain. Whether her experience was typical or, in managing to remove herself from an overseas brothel, she showed an exceptional presence of mind, we will never know. Mary did avoid sex slavery abroad but the fate that she exchanged it for she could never have imagined. Hemyng recounts the story of a London whore whom he does not name who he met in a refuge but who had shared Mary's experience. At 16, and with her parents in financial difficulty, she had advertised herself for a position in service. Her advertisement attracted the attention of a French woman who preferred English servant girls and was offering a high wage. However, when she reached France it soon became clear that her mistress had other, much less respectable intentions towards her. Luckily she was saved by one of the clients of the brothel, a young Englishman who effected her escape with the assistance of the English consul and the deployment of the young man's personal wealth. Unfortunately when she arrived back in England no one was prepared to believe her story and as a result she `found it difficult to do anything respectable, and at last had recourse to prostitution; - so difficult is it to come back to the right path when we have once strayed from it'.41 Do we believe this tale of exploitation or should we view it as another attempt by the subject of Hemyng's investigation to tell him exactly what he wanted to hear? People trafficking was a reality in the nineteenth century just as it remains a reality today. Many of its victims are deluded, seduced, greedy or simply desperate to escape the situation they find themselves in. As with much of the related history of the Whitechapel murders it is sobering to think that so little has really changed in 120 years.
REVISING THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF PROSTITUTION
There are different ways to view prostitution in the late Victorian period. Judith Walkowitz's seminal study of prostitution effectively challenges the view of prostitutes as mere passive victims of male lust. Instead she sees them as independent and assertive. They also seem, when interviewed by reformers in prisons such as Millbank (where Rebecca Jarrett was left to rue her involvement with journalism), to have had higher expectations of life than other workingclass women. `Living in a society where status was demonstrated by material possessions' Walkowitz contends, `women sold themselves in order to gain the accoutrements that would afford them "self-respect"'." In this analysis we see the prostitute as a member of the urban working class, and this is particularly appropriate to the prostitutes of the East End. Walkowitz argues that the 'stereotyped sequence of girls seduced, pregnant, and abandoned to the streets fitted only a small minority of women who ultimately moved into prostitution'. The women working the streets of Whitechapel and its environs were often local girls, former domestic servants and had `lived outside the family - indeed, they would most likely have been half or full orphan. Before going onto the streets, they had already had sexual relations of a non-commercial sort with a man of their social class' 43 Prostitutes had much more control over their own trade, at least until the late 1860s and 1870s, than many do today. Bullies certainly operated in the East End along the Ratcliffe Highway but many British prostitutes were able to work without being exploited by a pimp or gang master. There was also a form of unity among the `fallen sisterhood' that bound prostitutes together in times of hardship. They sat outside of `respectable' society but it is much less clear that they were outcast: again this seems to be a rather middle-class view of respectability. Working people realized that prostitution was often a necessity and not a choice for some women.
In 1857 William Acton asked who are these `somebodies that nobody knows'?44 Hemyng had defined them by the class of men that used them (as `kept mistresses, demimondaines, low lodging house women, sailors and soldiers' women, park women and thieves' women'). But this was an oversimplification. Prostitutes were drawn, at least according to the contemporary reform organizations, from the
vulnerable trades. About half were former servants, others were dressmakers, barmaids, flower girls - those working-class women that were exposed to poverty when times were hard. East End prostitutes like `Swindling Sal, who was interviewed by Hemyng, were perhaps exceptional in that they were very outgoing in their answers; most prostitutes were more `ambivalent and defensive about their occupation'45 Their decision to prostitute themselves was probably more circumstantial than deliberate. As Walkowitz has noted, the lifestyle of prostitution offered some advantages and `some women may have found the shorter hours and better pay of prostitution a temporary solution to their immediate difficulty'.46
The lack of male partner was often cited as the reason for women turning to the streets and this may well have been an important consideration. Observers also cited the very nature of Victorian cities as centres of vice because they offered too much freedom and anonymity. The overcrowding that typified cities such as London compounded the problem, forcing thousands to live in parlous conditions with the inevitable add-on problems of disease and pollution. This physical state of the poor figured prominently in the works of social observers and reformers.
In a middle class inspired tautology, immorality was associated with poverty, which simultaneously was associated with the working class. Prostitution, it was supposed, resulted from the generalised indecency of the working class as large families lived, ate, drank and slept together in one room, which made the cultivation of chastity impracticable."
Thus we return once again to the recurrent theme of middle-class morality and a desire to control the behaviour of their social inferiors. The Victorian period saw a shift in attitudes towards sex and sexuality but also towards children and childhood. The `Maiden Tribute' in some ways exemplifies this shift. As the notion of adolescence graduallybegan to establish itself in the Victorian consciousness the middle classes developed clear ideas about what was (and what was not) appropriate behaviour and pastimes for their own offspring. They then began to apply this viewpoint to the children of the working classes. However, the children of the working classes (as we saw in Chapter 5) inhabited an entirely different world to their rich compatriots. Working-class children aged 12 and above routinely worked and spent considerable amounts of time unsupervised. The independence that Walkowitz noted in East End prostitutes was a product of the freedom many young people enjoyed in the capital. This scared the middle classes who sought to control and restrict the work and leisure activities of working people, or at least to try and mould them into acting in ways which they themselves felt comfortable with. Throughout the nineteenth century, Victorian society saw wave upon wave of reforms designed to limit the ability of the `ordinary' man or woman to enjoy themselves: drinking, gambling, bare-knuckle boxing, dog fights, bullock hunting - all were curtailed or banned during this period.
IMAGINING THE LIVES OF EAST END PROSTITUTES: THE VICTIMS OF THE RIPPER
Finally we might spend some time looking at the sort of women that walked the streets of Whitechapel. Hundreds if not thousands of women chose this desperate option in the last decades of the nineteenth century and, as we noted earlier, few if any have left behind them any indication of why they did so. In recent years one of the more heartening developments in `ripperology' has been a movement to reveal the lives of the Ripper's five canonical victims. This has not been an easy exercise since working-class lives typically produce little in the way of documentary evidence. These women have achieved fame or have, rather, drawn the attention of the world because they were brutally murdered by an unknown assassin who has resisted investigators' best efforts to unmask him for over a century. One might ask who cares about the victims? Perhaps because we now live in an age where the victim is increasingly prominent in discussions about crime or, more cynically, because there is precious else new to write about the Whitechapel case, the histories of Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Kate Eddowes and Mary Kelly are now of increased interest. This was particularly evident at the Jack the Ripper exhibition in 2008 at the Museum of London Docklands which stated its intention of contacting the relatives of the deceased in advance of its opening. To date there has only been one volume dedicated to the victims, by Neal Stubbings Shelden, which is useful if a little uninspiring in its presentation.48 It does, however, along with what little we might glean from the police reports and press cuttings, help us imagine the lives of these five East End prostitutes and thereby project a composite image of the low lodging house `unfortunate' that Hemyng was at pains to describe.
We have already noted some of the circumstances of the Ripper's victims in Chapter 2. All but Mary Kelly were well into their thirties or forties, all had experienced broken relationships at least in part because of their personal struggles with alcoholism. Each one of them had friends and family who would have missed them but were drawn from the very bottom rung of society and as a result, had these women not been murdered in such a brutal and sadistic manner, the murders might have failed to register in the wider public consciousness. Even now their deaths have not been marked by any official memorial in the area in which they lived and worked. Some enterprising individual has stencilled their names on the streets in which they died but apart from their graves there is little or nothing to remember them by. The same fate is likely to befall the 13 victims of Peter Sutcliffe or the five women murdered by Stephen Wright in Ipswich.
So what can we add to the memory of the five canonical victims of Jack the Ripper? Well, in the case of Mary Kelly very little at all. As Sheldon notes she has left us almost nothing apart from the unreliable evidence provided by her boyfriend Joseph Barnett. Kelly hailed from Limerick in Ireland, one of a family of eight children. Her family crossed the Irish Sea to Carmarthenshire where her father worked `as a gaffer at an ironworks'. 4' Kelly married a local man and after he died in a mining accident she decamped to Cardiff (where, according to Thomas Williams, she met and became Dr John Williams' lover). It was at this point that Kelly, aged about 18 or 19, fell into prostitution. By 1884 Kelly had been up to London and had travelled to France and back, escaping the clutches of a Continental madam who would have imprisoned her in a brothel as we have seen. She avoided that fate but met a worse one. All of this is largely conjecture since the real Mary Kelly is as elusive as her killer. Again this provides the conspiracy theorists with more ammunition. Walter Dew says he remembered Kelly as a frightened woman and had often seen her `parading along Commercial Street, between Flower-and-Dean Street and Aldgate, or along Whitechapel Road 's0 But then by November 1888 surely most East End prostitutes were living with the fear that they might be the next victim of the Ripper. That this did not stop them going out to look for customers should not surprise us; they prostituted themselves because they had little other way of existing.
Mary Ann Nichols had married in 1864 to William Nichols, a printer from Oxford, and by 1876 the couple were living in the newly built Peabody Estate in Duchy Street in Stamford Hill. They must have been earning enough money and living a respectable working-class life to have been able to afford the rent and meet the strict criteria that Peabody buildings required. However, there it seems that Mary and William had a temporary separation in 1876, perhaps on account of Mary's drinking or because William was having an affair with another resident in the block. Whatever the truth the pair finally parted in at Easter 1880 and Mary moved away. She turned up in the records of the Lambeth workhouse in 1882 and 1883 before moving in with Thomas Drew, a blacksmith, for about a year. This relationship also failed and by 1887 Mary was back in the workhouse. The final twist in Mary's life was in May 1888 when she wrote to her father to tell him that because of her good attitude in the workhouse the guardians there had found her a position in service in Wandsworth with Mr and Mrs Cowdry. Mary told her father, with a touch of irony perhaps, `they are teetotalers and very religious so I ought to get on. They are very nice people and I have not much to do' In July the workhouse received a letter in which Mrs Cowdry suggested that Mary had run away
from service with property amounting to £3 l Os. Mary went north and moved into a lodging house in Spitalfields and prostituted herself to pay the rent and feed her drink habit. A good-tempered and very small woman, Mary clearly struggled with life and failed to take advantage of the last opportunity that was given her.
Annie Chapman married her husband, John, in Knightsbridge in 1869. John was a coachman and by 1873 when Annie had produced two children, he was working in the employ of a member of the nobility in Bond Street. Shelden is unsure why Chapman left this position but speculates that it might have been because of Annie's dishonesty or poor behaviour. He did, however, eventually manage to obtain work out of town in Berkshire in the household of Sir Francis Tress Barry who was to serve as MP for Windsor from 1890 to the memorable election of 1906 (which saw the beginning of the end of `Country House' government). By the end of the 1870s Annie had already succumbed to alcoholism and this may well have caused her to lose as many as five babies in her lifetime. She had returned to London in 1880 with her crippled son, John Alfred, to seek medical help at a London hospital. She may also have remained in London because her husband had little time for her when she was drinking. She returned to Berkshire in 1882 but, having supposedly weaned herself off the drink in London, soon found herself reaching for a bottle when she was with John. On 26 November her eldest child died of meningitis. Emily Chapman was only 12 years old and the grief the family felt only exacerbated Annie's alcoholism. Within two years her drinking habit had reached such a state that she was effectively expelled from her home by her husband's employers. Annie self-destructed at this point and went on the tramp, eventually ending up in Spitalfields living in a common lodging house and relying on prostitution. Annie received an allowance from John but this abruptly stopped in the summer of 1886 when he fell ill and was forced to give up his job in Berkshire. When Annie Chapman died in a backyard on Hanbury Street she was about 47 and had a terminal illness affecting her lungs and brain. She seems to have been a well-mannered woman, literate, industrious and quiet who only turned to prostitution when she had no other options.''