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

by Hallie Rubenhold

The other was a homeless woman called Mary Ann, or “Polly,” Nichols, who was among those encamped at Trafalgar Square in 1887.

Roughly twelve months lay between the Queen’s Golden Jubilee summer and Polly Nichols’s murder on August 31, 1888.

A few days later, on September 8, the body of Annie Chapman was discovered in a yard off Hanbury Street.

Catherine “Kate” Eddowes, who was killed in Mitre Square.

The Ripper always seemed one ghostly, ghoulish step ahead of the authorities, which bestowed upon the murders something extra terrifying and almost supernatural.

“Autumn of Terror”

All the while, the press speculated wildly about the identity of the culprit: he was a Whitechapel man; he was a wealthy “swell” from the West End; he was a sailor, a Jew, a butcher, a surgeon, a foreigner, a lunatic, a gang of extortionists.

As the social reformer Charles Booth’s extensive study of London’s impoverished areas in the 1890s revealed, pockets of destitution, crime, and misery flourished throughout the metropolis, even within otherwise comfortable areas. Still, Whitechapel’s reputation trumped even Bermondsey, Lambeth, Southwark, and St. Pancras as the most sordid.

In the late nineteenth century, a large number of Irish, desperate to escape the rural poverty of the mother country, had arrived. By the 1880s an exodus of Jews, fleeing the pogroms of eastern Europe, joined them.

Lined with cheap, vice-riddled lodging houses (known as “doss houses”) and decrepit dwellings, whose crumbling interiors had been divided into individual “furnished rooms” for rent, these streets and their desperate inhabitants came to embody all that was rotten in England.

On one occasion, health inspectors found five children sharing a bed alongside a dead sibling awaiting burial.

Girls, having barely reached puberty, turned to prostitution to earn money.

Other prostitutes chose to sleep in a cheaper four-penny single but see to their customers in dark corners outside, where quick sexual encounters, which frequently did not involve full intercourse, took place.

During the Ripper’s reign of terror, newspapers, eager to scandalize the nation with graphic details of slum life, regularly asserted that Whitechapel’s lodging houses “were brothels in all but name” and that the majority of women who inhabited them, with very few exceptions, were all prostitutes.

After doing some rough calculations, Warren estimated that approximately 1,200 prostitutes inhabited Whitechapel’s 233 common lodging houses. More importantly, he qualified this statement by admitting that the police “have no means of ascertaining what women are prostitutes and who are not.”

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.

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.

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 the street and on the nights they were killed did not have money for a lodging house. In the final case, the victim was murdered in her bed. However, the police were so committed to their theories about the killer’s choice of victims that they failed to conclude the obvious—the Ripper targeted women while they slept.

Amid this cacophony, in a cramped old room, Caroline Walker brought her second child, Mary Ann, into the world.

The home into which she was born, a dilapidated two-hundred-year-old house known as Dawes Court, on Gunpowder Alley, off Shoe Lane, bore an address worthy of any of Charles Dickens’s heroines.

Edward Walker had trained as a blacksmith in Lambeth, on the opposite side of the Thames, until work along the “Street of Ink” beckoned him north across the river.

Edward and Caroline and their three children—Edward, born two years before Polly, and Frederick, four years after—made a humble but steady life together on these wages.

While Polly and her brother Edward might not have had access to such a resource, it is likely they attended either a National School or a British School.

Edward Walker apparently was a firm proponent of education. Polly, quite unusually for her gender and class, was permitted to remain in school until the age of fifteen. During this period, when it was conventional to teach reading but not writing to working-class girls, Polly mastered both skills.

The Walkers never lived far from Shoe Lane or High Holborn. From Dawes Court they moved to Dean Street, Robinhood Court, and Harp Alley.

One bed may have sufficed for an entire household, with younger children sleeping on makeshift truckle beds stowed beneath.

Parents, children, siblings, and members of the extended family dressed, washed, engaged in sex, and, if no “adjacent conveniences” were available, defecated in full view of one another.

In the spring of 1852, her mother began to sicken.

For most of her life, Polly rarely strayed far from her father, even in her choice of spouse. In 1861, nineteen-year-old William Nichols was living in a men’s lodging house at 30–31 Bouverie Street and working as a warehouseman, most likely in the printing trade. Nichols was the son of a herald painter.

small, dark-haired, brown-eyed young woman,

The banns were read, and on January 16, 1864, eighteen-year-old Polly and her beau were married at St. Bride’s, also known as “the Printer’s Church.” William proudly entered that precise profession as his on the register.

On December 17, 1864, the cries of William Edward Walker Nichols filled the rooms of 17 Kirby Street.7

William later asserted that their disagreements arose because of his wife’s sudden affinity for drink.

Later, Edward Walker, Polly’s father, offered another explanation: he claimed that William, his son-in-law, had begun an affair with Rosetta Walls.

Daily, the couple’s rows and accusations increased. William would later claim that between the birth in December 1878 and the first few months of 1880, Polly stormed out of their home “perhaps five or six times,” to land herself on her father’s doorstep. According to Edward Walker, by then Polly’s husband “had turned nasty.”

If Polly, in the final throes of her marriage, had acquired a taste for drink to dull her pain, her thirst for this medicine had grown only more acute since her separation. Since alcohol was largely prohibited in the workhouse, her stay there likely staved off dependency, at least for a time.

he did suggest that she spent a good amount of time in the local public houses.

Her sense of shame too cannot be overestimated; she had lost her home, her husband, and her dignity. More excruciating still, she had lost her children, and the sight of her nieces and nephews could not fail to serve as a constant reminder of her worthlessness as a mother. Drink offered a way out.

as the social reformer Charles Booth remarked, even this level of toleration had limits. “I do not know exactly how far upwards in the social scale this view of sexual morality extends,” he wrote, “but I believe it to constitute one of the clearest lines of demarcation between upper and lower in the working class.”

Polly, who had probably taken a few glasses that evening, did not go willingly into the cells. She swore, put up a fight, and “was very disorderly” at the police station. The following morning she was made to account for herself before Mr. Bridges, the magistrate.

“presented a woeful aspect, being dirty and very ragged.” The police judged “Nichols” to be “the worst woman in the square.”4 It was described how she and a group of other women had made a business of begging beneath the terrace that separated the National Gallery from Trafalgar Square. These women waited for “respectable people” to appear, at which point they would “take off their shawls and shake themselves as if they were cold, in order to invite sympathy.”

As Polly Nichols had been tramping since May of that year, it’s unlikely she had any regular work at all.

Into the admissions ledger beside her name was written “no home, calling: nil.” Following her brother’s death and her rift with her father, she must have felt an acute sense of isolation.

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.

In the middle of the nineteenth century it was estimated that “seventy thousand persons in London . . . rise every morning without the slightest knowledge as to where they shall lay their heads at night.”

In 1887 the estimate of those sleeping in Trafalgar Square varied between “more than two hundred” and “six hundred” each night.

Even if she did resort to it, “casual prostitution” among older women, who did not possess the physical allure of their younger counterparts, frequently did not involve penetrative intercourse, but rather manual stimulation or a grope up the skirt.

Ellen described her roommate as “melancholy” and said “she kept herself to herself,” as if “some trouble was weighing upon her mind.”

Ellen knew Polly to have no male companions, “only a female with whom she ate and drank for a few days,” as was usual practice among vagrant women.22 Holland also did not deny that Polly drank and that she had seen her the “worse for it” a couple of times.

The deputy lodging-house keeper was, however, not in the habit of handing out beds to penniless drunks and so sent Polly on her way. As she left, she attempted to hide her disappointment with a laugh and a sharp comment, saying that she would “soon get her doss money.”24