The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper

by Hallie Rubenhold

I write for those women who do not speak, for those who do not have a voice because they were so terrified, because we are taught to respect fear more than ourselves. We’ve been taught that silence would save us, but it won’t. —AUDRE LORDE

Roughly twelve months lay between the Queen’s Golden Jubilee summer and Polly Nichols’s murder on August 31, 1888. She would be the first of Jack the Ripper’s five “canonical” victims—those whose deaths the police determined were committed by the same hand in the district of Whitechapel, in London’s East End. A few days later, on September 8, the body of Annie Chapman was discovered in a yard off Hanbury Street. In the early morning hours of the thirtieth of that month, the Ripper managed to strike twice. In what became known as “the double event,” he claimed the lives of Elisabeth Stride, who was found in Dutfield’s Yard, off Berner Street, and Catherine “Kate” Eddowes, who was killed in Mitre Square.

After a brief pause in his spree, he committed his final atrocity on November 9: a complete mutilation of the body of Mary Jane Kelly as she lay in her bed at 13 Miller’s Court. The brutality of the Whitechapel murders stunned London and newspaper readers around the world. The Ripper had cut the throat of each victim. Four of the five were eviscerated. With the exception of the final killing, these violent deaths occurred in open places, under cover of darkness. In each case, the murderer managed to abscond, leaving not a trace of his or their or her identity.

The Ripper always seemed one ghostly, ghoulish step ahead of the authorities,

Because the police failed to apprehend and charge a suspect for any of the five murders, the itch to see justice meted out in the form of a trial was never salved.

Most of the information that currently exists about Jack the Ripper’s five victims appears in witness statements given during the inquests; however, these accounts are problematic. The examinations lacked thoroughness, the juries asked few follow-up questions, and inconsistencies and vagaries in the testimonies were rarely challenged.

The fibers that have clung to and defined the shape of Polly, Annie, Elisabeth, Kate, and Mary Jane’s stories are the values of the Victorian world. They are male, authoritarian, and middle class. They were formed at a time when women had no voice, and few rights, and the poor were considered lazy and degenerate: to have been both of these things was one of the worst possible combinations.

We have rarely ventured to peer inside it or attempted to remove the thick wrapping that has kept us from knowing these women or their true histories. Jack the Ripper killed prostitutes, or so it has always been believed, but there is no hard evidence to suggest that three of his five victims were prostitutes at all. As soon as each body was discovered, in a dark yard or street, the police assumed that the woman was a prostitute killed by a maniac who had lured her to the location for sex.

There is, and never was, any proof of this either. To the contrary—over the course of the coroner’s inquests, it became known that Jack the Ripper never had sex with a single victim. Additionally, in the case of each murder there were no signs of struggle and the killings appear to have taken place in complete silence. There were no screams heard by anyone in the vicinity. The autopsies concluded that all of the women were killed while in a reclining position. In at least three of the cases, the victims were known to sleep on th...

However, the police were so committed to their theories about the killer’s choice of victims that they failed to conclude the obvious—the ...

I write this book. I do so in the hope that we may now hear their stories clearly and give back to them that which was so brutally taken away with their lives: their dignity.

the author of Oliver Twist had come to know these dingy courts and fetid alleys intimately in his youth while he worked as a shoeblack, and later scribbled away in nearby rooms. Polly, as Caroline Walker’s daughter came to be called, would spend her first years in lodgings just like those of the fictional Fagin and his pickpocket boys.

As the capital’s laboring classes knew too well, filthy, overpopulated dwellings made a comfortable home for nothing but disease. Smoke-filled rooms, as well as London’s noxious yellow “fogs,” further impacted the health of the overworked and undernourished. Polly was to learn of this even before she had reached her seventh birthday. In the spring of 1852, her mother began to sicken. At first, Caroline would display the symptoms of what appeared to be the flu, but the cough she developed would grow worse.

As the tuberculosis, which had settled in her lungs, gradually began to consume them, her dreadful hacking became blood-laced. Feverish, thin, and weary, Caroline continued to waste away until November 25. At her death, she left behind a widower and three children;

Within laboring communities, the social stigma of time spent at the workhouse was so great that many would rather beg, sleep rough, or become a prostitute than place themselves at the mercy of this institution.

All her life, Polly would have feared the workhouse,

In 1880, when Polly turned her back on her husband and walked out of her matrimonial home, she would have understood the consequences. It was an enormously bold step.

in 1880 a wife could not cite adultery alone as a grounds for ending her union. While a man could divorce his wife for a sexual liaison outside the marital bed, a woman had to prove her husband was guilty of adultery in addition to another crime, such as incest, rape, or cruelty. This Victorian double standard was enshrined in law, permitting a man to enjoy as many sexual dalliances as he wished, so long as he did not also rape the servants, have sex with his sister, and beat his wife too severely.

Polly might instead opt to take on “slopwork,” earning six shillings a day for sewing together cheap clothing: trousers, coats, skirts, and waistcoats. She would be paid by the piece and could expect to work from the earliest hours in the morning until late at night, with scarcely a break.

Whichever choice she made, Polly faced a loss of identity and complete isolation in a society that viewed a woman without a family, or a husband, with deep suspicion, or even incomprehension. The sexes had distinctly defined roles, and Polly, like every other female, would have internalized the belief that a woman required a man to guide her, govern her, and bestow meaning on her life.

On April 24, 1882, Polly had no choice but to enter Lambeth Union Workhouse, this time for an indefinite stay. With the exception of a short period spent in the infirmary in January, she remained there for exactly eleven months, and discharged herself on March 24, 1883. It appears she attempted to find her feet, only to return for another stay, from May 21 until June 2.

Slumped at the base of a bronze lion or lying with her head against a bench was Polly Nichols, cold and anonymous. When morning came, the rough sleepers were joined by a steady trickle of the unemployed and the “friends of Socialism.” Daily that autumn they gathered in their thousands at the base of Nelson’s column. They came with their red flags and banners, singing songs and shouting slogans about workingmen’s rights.

As Polly Nichols had been tramping since May of that year, it’s unlikely she had any regular work at all. It would have been with a heavy and dejected heart that Polly, on November 15, 1886, returned to Lambeth Workhouse.

Whatever the situation, it appears that in May 1887, Polly could not bear the prospect of yet another sojourn in the workhouse and instead decided to take her chances tramping. A tramp, or vagrant, had a life that combined different roles: part iterant worker, part beggar, and sometimes, depending upon circumstances, part criminal or prostitute. Unfortunately, the Vagrancy Laws did not attempt to distinguish between these “professional” identities; a beggar or a criminal or a prostitute—anyone who lived on the street—was viewed similarly and simply categorized as a nuisance. However, a tramp’s life and means of self-support varied markedly from person to person and was often determined by age, gender, the presence of an infirmity, or any number of circumstances.

A tramp took work where he or she could get it: selling various items on the street, taking laboring jobs such as loading and unloading goods at markets and at the docks, or doing odd bits of childcare or cleaning for working-class households. Life was lived hand-to-mouth, and the quest for work, food, and shelter was constant, sending men and women “tramping” from one end of town to the other, from lodging house to workhouse to public house and back again. While some tramps argued that this lifestyle provided them with freedom and that they enjoyed sleeping wherever they chose, the majority were pushed into this existence through want and a desire to avoid a lengthy and oppressive stay inside a workhouse.

tramps were what we today would recognize as London’s homeless population, and Polly was among their number.

While the experience of homelessness in Victorian London was one of wretched misery for all who were forced to endure it, women like Polly, who found themselves without shelter, might also expect to become victims of sexual violence. As women who lived without male protection or a roof over their heads were considered outcasts, and outcasts were regarded as defective women, so it followed that outcasts were also morally corrupt and sexually impure.

Polly’s experience of tramping would not have differed from that of other women. Initially, life on the street would have been shocking and distressing, and then gradually accepted with resignation. It is no wonder that by the time she was arrested in Trafalgar Square, in 1887, after nearly six months of vagrancy, the formerly respectable, well-behaved tenant of the Peabody Buildings had evolved into a disorderly, foul-mouthed menace.

Following her hearing on October 25, Polly was “released on her own recognisances,” but was instructed to go into the workhouse or face arrest.

Tramping in the cold and damp of January had taken its toll, and Polly soon fell ill, at which point she was transferred to the infirmary in Archway.18

After Polly had recovered, she was interviewed on February 13, 1888. It was then decided that she should be sent back to Lambeth, to the workhouse that had only just turned her out.19 On April 16, she was dispatched like a human parcel to Renfrew Road Workhouse.

On the morning of May 12, Polly Nichols arrived at the Cowdrys’ comfortable middle-class home with nothing more than the clothes on her back. As the only servant in a household occupied by one couple in their early sixties and an unmarried niece in her twenties, Polly’s duties would not have been especially demanding. She would be expected to clean the rooms and cook the meals, but also could enjoy her own attic room and her own bed, which must have seemed a luxury after months of tramping or suffering in the workhouse.

As Polly had no attire befitting her station as a housemaid, Mrs. Cowdry would have provided her with at least one, if not two changes of clothes, along with a decent bonnet and shoes, a nightgown, caps, pinafores, a shawl, a pair of gloves, undergarments, and a variety of other accouterments, such as a hairbrush, combs, and pins. No middle-class mistress wanted her maid to appear ragged before her visitors.

Polly Nichols’s last movements are largely known through the testimony that Ellen Holland offered at the coroner’s inquest into her friend’s death.

According to Ellen Holland, Polly remained at Wilmott’s until roughly August 24, when it seems her funds were running short. It was common practice for a deputy keeper of a lodging house to extend credit for a night or so to those who were regulars; but Polly, who was not especially well known, did not receive this kindness. She was turned out. Once more, Polly was back on the street, tramping and reduced to acquiring a few coins and lodging where she could.

Polly Nichols was obviously out soliciting that night, because she, like every other woman, regardless of her age, who moved between the lodging houses, the casual wards, and the bed she made in a dingy corner of an alley, was a prostitute.

in the testimonies of the three witnesses who knew Polly most intimately—Ellen Holland, Edward Walker, and William Nichols—runs counter to the preconception that she was engaged in prostitution. At times the coroner’s inquest became a moral investigation of Polly Nichols herself, as if the hearing was held in part to determine whether her behavior warranted her fate.

Polly had been born among printing shops and presses, against the very backdrop where some of the most famous Victorian stories were fabricated. In death she would become as legendary as the Artful Dodger, Fagin, or even Oliver Twist, the truth of her life as entangled with the imaginary as theirs. She had been brought into the world along the Street of Ink, and it is to there, riding on its column inches, its illustrated plates, its rumor and scandal, that she would return: a name in print.

Even with her injuries, with the stitched-up gash across her throat and the deep cuts along her body, William Nichols knew his wife.

He addressed Polly as if she were merely sleeping and the brutish cuts on her body had not ended her life.

The precise day on which Annie Eliza Smith was born in September 1841 is unclear.

Yet Annie also experienced life as a child of the working class. Despite the privileges of her father’s position, his salary was meager.

Annie came of age, Ruth had Emily at home to assist with the younger children, thereby freeing Annie to begin to make contributions to the family income. By 1861 Annie Smith was working as a housemaid for William Henry Lewer; whether this was her first job in domestic service is unknown.

Annie was proud of having successfully scaled a rung on the social ladder;

Their girls, whose schooling they could pay for, might have grown up to marry middle-class men, perhaps a shopkeeper, a clerk, or even a local lawyer. The courses of all of their lives may have ended quite differently had Annie Chapman not been an alcoholic.

Late-nineteenth-century science had already begun to uncover the links between maternal alcohol consumption and its danger to children. As early as 1878, one medical journal asserted that substantial evidence had been gathered to prove that “drunkenness in the parent before and after birth has more effect on infant mortality than all other causes.”

Of the many tragedies that befell Annie Chapman in the final years of her life, perhaps one of the most poignant was that she needn’t have been on the streets on that night, or on any other. Ill and feverish, she needn’t have searched the squalid corners for a spot to sleep. Instead, she might have lain in a bed in her mother’s house or in her sisters’ care, on the other side of London. She might have been treated for tuberculosis; she might have been comforted by the embraces of her children or the loving assurances of her family. Annie needn’t have suffered. At every turn there had been a hand reaching to pull her from the abyss, but the counter-tug of addiction was more forceful, and the grip of shame just as strong. It was this that pulled her under, that had extinguished her hope and then her life many years earlier. What her murderer claimed on that night was simply all that remained of what drink had left behind. Sometime around September 8 or 9, the Smith siblings—Emily, Georgina, Miriam, and Fountaine—received the dreadful news.

the realization that their sister had been the victim of a brutal murder would have devastated them completely.

As a farmer’s daughter, Elisabeth would have been initiated into the routines of agricultural life as soon as she was steady enough on her feet to carry pails and gather eggs. When older, she would have assisted with the basic chores of milking, tending the chickens and pigs, making butter, and, as was traditional in Swedish households, learning how to distill aquavit, the alcoholic liquor offered at mealtimes.

In the winter months, the mornings would begin many hours before dawn, when she, her sister, or her mother would rise in what felt like the middle of night, and light the fires and lamps. In the summer, the men and women in the fields would work long into evening, beneath an almost never-ending twilight.