During the late 1800’s Whitechapel and neighbouring Spitalfields in East-End London was a terrible place to live. It seems as if all of society’s outcasts; the beggars, thieves, unemployed immigrants, prostitutes, orphans, mentally ill and crippled washed out into this gigantic slum, where crime, vice, violence and drunkenness were almost Endemic. A French visitor described it as “the population of the neighbouring lanes came pouring into the street, children in rags, paupers, street women, as if a human sewer were suddenly clearing itself.” Edward Fairfield, a public servant at the time, reflected a perspective that these people had no place to even believe they had a right to live and that the victims of Jack the Ripper deserved their horrible deaths: “If they had no such right, then it was, on the whole, a good thing that they fell in with this unknown surgical genius. He, at all events, has made his contribution towards solving ‘the problem of clearing East End of its vicious inhabitants.”
At the time, American journalist and activist, Jack London in his book ‘People of the Abyss’ (recently republished by Tangerine Press), tells of his descent into London’s East End in the 1900s. Sent to cover Edward VII’s coronation, he went in search of the real story – the stinking slums. Doffing his Yankee togs for filthy rags purchased off a barrow in Petticoat Lane, the young, vigorous, handsome, American spent seven weeks amidst foul tenements, starving children, alcoholic adults, stunted human beings and bottomless despair and recorded it for prosperity.
Whitechapel was overcrowded, with poor sanitation. Crime and violence were rife, fresh food was scarce, the air was polluted and stank of sewerage. Social problems such as poverty, hunger, alcoholism, child neglect and domestic violence were the norm of the day. There were 233 common lodging houses, known as ‘doss-houses’ in Whitechapel where the poor and destitute could rent a room for the night, or just a bed in a ‘flop-house’ or in the worst circumstances they could pay for a place on a rope, where they would hook their one arm over the rope, like washing hanging on a washing line – and sleep standing up – probably where the term ’hungover’ originates from.
This was the backdrop to the final days of Mary Ann (Polly) Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly, referred to as the canonical five victims of Jack the Ripper. They are commonly referred to as prostitutes and outcasts, but were they?
Author Hallie Rubenhold in her 2019 book, The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper (published by Doubleday) – which was awarded the winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction – draws the curtain to reveal the real lives of these five women and the author challenges long-held assumptions that they were all prostitutes. Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, and Catherine Eddowes were not full-time prostitutes; Elizabeth Stride had resorted to soliciting only occasionally, during periods of desperate poverty, and the only verifiable sex-worker among the five was Mary Jane Kelly, who was once a high-class sex sex-worker, owning beautiful clothes, jewellery and driving around in a carriage. Rubenhold’s book poses the question, is it fair to still judge them according to class-based Victorian prejudice and moral self-righteousness?
The first victim Mary Ann (Polly)Nichols, (nee Walker) worked as a domestic servant and married a machinist with whom she had five children. Polly’s troubles started when a neighbour had an open affair with her husband. Unable to bear with the humiliation Polly left. Her husband accused her of abandoning her children and prostitution, which was never proved. By 1887 a police record shows that she was arrested for being a drunken tramp. Polly Ended up in Whitechapel.
We do not know if her life was better after leaving her cheating husband, but on the night of 31 August 1888, 42-year old Polly excitedly showed her lodging house landlady her new black velvet bonnet. It started out as a happy night for Polly. A few hours later she was killed by Jack the Ripper on Buck’s Row. Polly’s father, Edward Walker identified his daughter’s mutilated body. Her father, his grandson and two of Polly’s sons attEnded her funeral, which the police tried to keep a secret. Polly Nichols was buried in an unmarked grave, but there is a plaque in the City of London Cemetery commemorating her.
Compared to the other victims, Annie Chapman, (nee Smith) initially began her life in relative affluence as the daughter of a Member of the Queen’s Regiment Life Guards. Annie married John Chapman, a coachman and they lived in a charming cottage on Leonard Hill farm. Annie began drinking heavily and lost five of her eight children due to alcohol-foetal syndrome. Eventually Annie decided to leave her home voluntarily, to save her husband’s job and found her way to Whitechapel, where John maintained her with 10 shillings a week, until his death in 1888.
On 8 September 1888, the proprietor of Crossingham Lodging House, Dorset Street, Spitalfields allowed Annie a few hours respite in the kitchen because she was ill, but then he refused her a bed until she had the money to pay. Annie’s last words to him was to keep her bed as she would be back soon with the money. She was killed by Jack the Ripper in Hanbury Street. She was 48 years old. During her autopsy, the pathologist found that she suffered from tuberculosis and would probably have died within a few weeks. Annie’s family attended her funeral. A little compassion for a sick woman could have prevented her from becoming Jack’s victim.
The Daily Telegraph wrote: “Dark Annie’s spirit still walks Whitechapel, unavenged by justice…[her] dreadful End has compelled a hundred thousand Londoners to reflect what it must be like to have no home at all except the ‘common kitchen’ of a low lodging-house; to sit there, sick and weak and bruised and wretched, for lack of fourpence with which to pay for the right of a ‘doss’; to be turned out after midnight to earn the requisite pence, anywhere and anyhow; and in the course of earning it to come across your murderer and to caress your assassin.”
Elizabeth Gustafsdotter was a Swede who had entered domestic service in Sweden. Unfortunately in 1864 she fell pregnant. Sweden had a list of ‘lecherous women’ with the names of any woman deemed lacking in moral standards. Even a woman who called out to a man on the street could be listed as lecherous and being pregnant out of wedlock certainly qualified Elizabeth, who could find decent employment no longer, so she turned to prostitution. Women on this list had to report to police stations, where they would be forced to queue naked and be checked for syphilis. Elizabeth was diagnosed with the dreaded disease, and her child was stillborn due to the disease. Elizabeth was destitute and heartbroken. With help of a troupe of troubadours she reached London in 1866.
She met and married John Stride, 22 years her senior and they opened a coffee shop in London, however their venture was not successful in East End, where people preferred alcohol to coffee. Liz often abandoned her husband and cleaned premisses at lodging houses. By 1886 the syphilis had deteriorated her senses to such an extend she had epileptic seizures. Yet she met and moved in with dockworker Michael Kidney, who beat her. She resided on and off at a common lodging house at 32 Flower and Dean Street in Spitalfields. On 30 September 1888 Liz left Michael again and wandered in Flower and Dean Street. She had cleaned herself up and even bought a hairbrush. She was found with her throat slashed, but not mutilated and the hypothesis is that Jack was disturbed, for an hour later the body of Catherine Eddowes was discovered
Catherine Eddowes was described as a very jolly woman, always singing and an “intelligent and scholarly person, but possessed of a fierce temper”. Catherine or “Kate’ was born in Wolverhampton. Her father was arrested for participating in a strike and spent time in jail, whereafter the family was shunned and they relocated to London. In 1855 her mother fell ill and died and tragically her father died soon after. Catherine was fired from the Old Hall Tin Factory where she worked for stealing. Then she met Irishman Thomas Conley, who was discharged from the army and who wrote street ballads and sold penny dreadful books. Conley regularly assaulted Catherine, who eventually left him in 1880. Catherine gravitated to the East End of London, where she moved into Cooney’s common lodging house at 55 Flower and Dean Street, and here, in 1881, she met a man named John Kelly, who earned his living as a casual labourer at the local markets.
On the morning of 29 September 1888 Kelly warned her about the Ripper and she answered: “Don’t you fear for me, I’ll take care of myself, and I shan’t fall into his hands.” There is a police record that on the night of 29 September she was arrested for drunkenness on the street and when asked her name she answered: “My name is Nothing”. She was released at 1pm on 30 September and killed by Jack the Ripper in Mitre Square.
Where the police tried to keep the funerals of the previous victims a secret. Catherine’s was attended by thousands of people, including her four sisters Harriet Jones, Emma Eddowes, Eliza Gold, and Elizabeth Fisher; her two nieces, Emma and Harriet Jones, and John Kelly, the man with whom she had lived. Like the other victims, Catherine had a family, relatives and people who loved her. She was not an outcast.
Twenty-something year old Mary Jane Kelly was young and beautiful. According to her latest boyfriend, Joseph Barnett, she was Irish born but her family moved to Wales, where she had married a collier, who died in an accident. She was introduced to prostitution by her cousin. In 1884 she moved to London and worked in high-end brothels in Soho and at Piccadilly Square at a French brothel. Mary Jane was popular, owned fancy clothes and would drive around in a carriage. When a client offered to marry her and take her to Paris, she was enchanted and packed her pretty robes and belongings into trunks. When she arrived in Paris she had to learn that this was a scam, she had lost her belongings and she was actually sex-trafficked.
Mary Kelly managed to escape and return to London, but she was paranoid about being found by her captors and hid in East-End at Radcliff highway near the docks. She began calling herself Mary Kelly from Ireland. Then she met Joseph Barnett and gave up prostitution for 18 months. When John lost his job, Mary Jane returned to prostitution. They lived at 13 Millers’ Court, Dorset Street, where she was brutally eviscerated on 8 November 1888, by Jack the Ripper. Thousands followed her hearse to the cemetery, but only mourners were allowed in. Mary Jane Kelly was 25 years old and her crime scene is regarded as one of the worst ever witnessed.
Top image: Applicants for Admission to the Casual Ward at Saint Martin in the Fields by Luke Fildes (Public Domain)
