The Five Read online

  Whitechapel was one of the most notorious of these, but was by no means the only sink of poverty in the capital. 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. By the end of the nineteenth century, seventy-eight thousand souls were packed into this quarter of common lodging houses, “furnished rooms,” warehouses, factories, sweatshops, abattoirs, pubs, cheap music halls, and markets. Its overcrowded population represented diverse cultures, religions, and languages. For at least two centuries, Whitechapel had been a destination for immigrants from many parts of Europe. 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. In an era highly suspicious of those of other nationalities, races, and religions, integration, even within the slums, did not occur naturally. Nevertheless, Booth’s social investigators regarded these various residents as fairly uniform in terms of their social class. With a number of middle-class exceptions, a significant percentage of the inhabitants of White­chapel were identified as “poor,” “very poor,” or “semi-criminal.”

  The throbbing dark heart at the center of the district was Spitalfields. Here, near the fruit and vegetable market and the soaring white spire of Christ Church, some of the worst streets and accommodations in the area, and perhaps in all of London, were situated. Even the police feared Dorset Street, Thrawl Street, and Flower and Dean Street, and the smaller thoroughfares contiguous to 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.

  Those who strayed into this abyss from the safety of the middle-class Victorian world were struck dumb by what they encountered. The broken pavement, dim gaslights, slicks of sewage, stagnant pools of disease-breeding water, and rubbish-filled roadways foretold the physical horrors of what lay within the buildings. An entire family might inhabit one vermin-infested furnished room, eight by eight feet in size, with broken windows and damp walls. On one occasion, health inspectors found five children sharing a bed alongside a dead sibling awaiting burial. People slept on the floors, on heaps of rags and straw; some had pawned all their clothes and owned barely a scrap to cover their nakedness. In this circle of hell, alcoholism, malnutrition, and disease were rife, as was domestic violence—along with most other forms of violence. Girls, having barely reached puberty, turned to prostitution to earn money. Boys just as easily slipped into thieving and pickpocketing. It appeared to moral, middle-class England that in the face of this level of brutal, crippling want, every good and right­eous instinct that ought to govern human relations had been completely eroded.

  Nowhere was this state of affairs more apparent than in the common lodging houses, which offered shelter to those too poor to afford even a furnished room. The lodging houses provided temporary homes for the homeless, who divided their nights between the reeking beds on offer here, the oppression of the workhouse casual wards, and sleeping on the street. They were the haunts of beggars, criminals, prostitutes, chronic alcoholics, the unemployed, the sick and the old, the casual laborer, and the pensioned soldier. Most residents would fit into a number of these categories. In Whitechapel alone there were 233 common lodging houses, which accommodated an estimated 8,530 homeless people.3 Naturally, those on Dorset Street, Thrawl Street, and Flower and Dean Street bore the worst reputations. Four pence per night could buy someone a single hard, flea-hopping bed in a stifling, stinking dormitory. Eight pence could buy an equally squalid double bed with a wooden partition around it. There were single-sex lodging houses and mixed lodging houses, though those that admitted both sexes were acknowledged to be the more morally degenerate. All lodgers were entitled to make use of the communal kitchen, which was open all day and late into the night. Residents used this as a gathering place, cooking meager meals and quaffing tea and beer with one another and anyone else who cared to drop in. Social investigators and reformers who sat at these kitchen tables were appalled by the rude manners and the horrific language they heard, even from children. However, it was the violent behavior, degrading filth, and overflowing toilets, in addition to the open displays of nakedness, free sexual intercourse, drunkenness, and child neglect to which they truly objected. In the “doss house,” everything offensive about the slum was concentrated under one roof.

  The police and reformers were especially concerned about the link between common lodging houses and prostitution. As long as a “dosser” could pay the pence required for a bed, the lodging-house keeper asked few questions. Many women who regarded prostitution as their main source of income lived in or worked out of lodging houses, especially in the wake of the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act, which saw the enforced closure of many brothels. The result of this meant that a large number of prostitutes were forced to ply their trade in places separate from where they lived. A lodging house with eight-penny doubles was a convenient place to take a man who had been solicited on the street. 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.

  Lodging houses provided shelter for a wide variety of women facing an assortment of unfortunate circumstances. While some resorted to what has been called “casual prostitution,” it is categorically wrong to assume that all of them did so. These women were inventive when it came to scraping together their “doss money.” Most took on poorly paid casual labor, doing cleaning and laundering or hawking goods. Generally, they supplemented the little money they earned by borrowing, begging, pawning, and sometimes stealing. Pairing up with a male partner also played an essential role in defraying costs. Often these relationships, formed out of necessity, were short-lived; some, however, endured for months or years without ever being sanctified in a church. The nonchalance with which poor men and women embarked upon and dissolved these partnerships horrified middle-class observers. Whether or not these unions produced children also seemed to be of little consequence. Obviously, this way of life diverged considerably from the acceptable moral standard and threw another layer of confusion over what exactly it was that the female residents of these wicked lodging houses were doing in order to keep a roof over their heads.

  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. In the grip of such terrible events, the public were willing to believe it. Hyperbole became enshrined as fact, although some within the police had come to perceive the situation in another light. An altogether different perspective is offered in a letter written by Sir Charles Warren, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, at the height of the murder spree. 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.”4 In other words, the newspapers were in no position to make this determination when even the police found distinguishing a prostitute from among her sisters an impossibility. Warren’s figures present another intriguing prospect. If the lodging-house population was comprised of 8,530 people and a third, or 2,844, of those residents were female, and if it were to be accepted that 1,200 of these women could be identified as prostitutes, that would still indicate that the maj
ority of them, or 1,644, were not engaged in any form of prostitution at all.* Much like the inhabitants of Whitechapel’s common lodging houses, the victims of Jack the Ripper and the lives they led became entangled in a web of assumptions, rumor, and unfounded speculation. The spinning of these strands began over 130 years ago and, remarkably, they have been left virtually undisturbed and unchallenged. 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. For over 130 years we have embraced the dusty parcel we were handed. 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 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.

  Unreliable source material has always been the obstacle to discovering the truth about these murders. Although a handful of police records exist, the coroner’s inquests provide most of what is known about the actual crimes and the victims. Unfortunately, in three of the five cases, the official documentation from these inquests is missing. All that remains is a body of edited, embellished, misheard, reinterpreted newspaper reports from which a general picture of events can be teased. These documents have been approached with care on my part, and nothing contained within them has been taken as gospel. Similarly, I have also refrained from using unsubstantiated information provided by witnesses who did not know the victims personally prior to their deaths.

  My intention in writing this book is not to hunt and name the killer. I wish instead to retrace the footsteps of five women, to consider their experiences within the context of their era, and to follow their paths through both the gloom and the light. They are worth more to us than the empty human shells we have taken them for; they were children who cried for their mothers, they were young women who fell in love; they endured childbirth, the death of parents; they laughed, and they celebrated Christmas. They argued with their siblings, they wept, they dreamed, they hurt, they enjoyed small triumphs. The courses their lives took mirrored that of so many other women of the Victorian age, and yet were so singular in the way they ended. It is for them that 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.

  Part I

  Polly

  August 26, 1845

  August 31, 1888

  The Blacksmith’s Daughter

  The cylinders turned. The belts moved, and gears clicked and whirred, as type and ink pressed against paper. Floors rattled; lights burned at all hours. In some rooms, lengthy sheets of words hung from the ceilings on drying racks; in others stood towers of wooden boxes filled with tiny pieces of metal type. There were rooms where men bent and molded leather, tooled gold leaf onto covers, and stitched bindings. There were sheds in which copper plates were etched and lettering was forged. There were shops stacked high with books and newspapers and magazines, redolent with the delightful scent of fresh paper and sharp ink. Fleet Street, and all the smaller byways surrounding it, was a multichambered hive of printing. Filthy canvas smocks and smeared aprons were the only fashion; the sootier and blacker, the harder the worker. Printer’s boys ran their errands arrayed head to toe in ink dust. Hardly a man in the publishing parish of St. Bride’s could boast of unstained fingers, nor would he wish to. This was the home of the author, the printer, the newspaperman, the bookseller, and every other profession related to the written word.

  Fleet Street and its tributaries flowed constantly with human traffic. As one writer commented, it was possible to look back on the street from Ludgate Hill, near St. Paul’s Cathedral, and see “nothing but a dark, confused, quickly-moving mass of men, horses and vehicles” without “a yard of the pavement to be seen—nothing but heads along the rows of houses, and in the road, too, an ocean of heads.”1 Between this broad thoroughfare and that of High Holborn, which par­alleled it, a network of smaller alleys and passages was lined with rotting wooden structures and old brick buildings all crushed together. These had been the homes and workshops of printers, thinkers, and impoverished writers since the seventeenth century. Neighbors were close enough to hear a wail, a sneeze, or even a sigh from next door. In the summer, when the windows were thrown open, the thumping and the churning of presses—steam-powered and those run by hand—could be heard along nearly every street.

  Amid this cacophony, in a cramped old room, Caroline Walker brought her second child, Mary Ann, into the world. She arrived on August 26, 1845, a day that the surrounding newspapers described as “fine and dry.” 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. Indeed, 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.

  The Walkers had never been a wealthy family, nor, given the limitations of her father’s profession, were they ever likely to be. 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. He had turned his skills at first to making locks and then, quite probably, given his location, to the founding of type, or the creation of typeface.* Although blacksmithing was a respected skilled trade, it paid only a passable living. A journeyman blacksmith at the start of his career might be paid three to five shillings a day, a sum likely to rise to at least six shillings and sixpence when he gained a permanent position, though the expansion of a man’s family would stretch the extra pennies more thinly.*

  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. In the early decades of the Victorian era, this was not a simple task. Illness or the sudden loss of work might send a family into rent arrears and then just as quickly into the workhouse. The average weekly expenditure for a medium-sized family like the Walkers was about one pound, eight shillings, and one penny. The rent for one large room or two smaller rooms in central London ran from four shillings to four shillings and six pence a week. A further twenty shillings would be spent on food, while one shilling and nine pence was the least one might expect to pay for coal, wood, candles, and soap.2 A skilled laborer like Edward Walker would be expected to put aside at least several pennies in savings, in addition to an estimated one shilling and three pence for his children’s education.

  Although schooling would not b
ecome compulsory until 1876, more prosperous working-class parents often sent their boys and sometimes their girls to local charity schools or even to schools requiring a fee. This was especially true among the families associated with the printing trade, where literacy was not only highly valued but considered essential. Some employers, such as Spottiswoode & Co., one of the era’s largest publishers, went as far as to offer schooling on site for boys under fifteen and also ran a lending library for its staff in order to encourage literacy in the home. 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. National Schools, such as the City of London National School, based on nearby Shoe Lane, were organized by the Anglican Church and offered part-time instruction for children who had to bring home an income. British Schools, favored by working families who considered themselves a cut above the poorest in the community, offered what was thought to be a slightly more rigorous learning experience; there, older children taught younger pupils under the auspices of the school’s master or mistress. 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. As the Walkers could have afforded little in the way of luxuries, it’s likely that access to the printed word was the only advantage that Polly enjoyed from growing up near the Street of Ink.