The Ripper's Victims in Print by Rebecca Frost

Author:Rebecca Frost
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2018-01-05T05:00:00+00:00

Mary Kelly has been depicted as separate from the other canonical victims since the time of her murder. The fact that she was killed in her own room and that the Ripper mutilated her body far beyond anything previously seen was part of it, but her youth and apparent beauty and intelligence also tend to come into discussions. If she is seen as the last victim, there is the question of why the murders stopped, and—since the initial narrative of Dr. Stanley—it has been common to conclude that she was in fact the desired victim while the others were stand-ins, obstacles, or mistakes. For two authors in the 1990s, Mary Kelly was the cause of the murders in a new way: the Ripper meant to control her.

In his 1991 book, Jack the Ripper: The Mystery Solved, Paul Harrison casts judgment on all of the women involved and not just Mary Kelly herself. When Polly Nichols separates from her husband it is because she “was not up to the permanent responsibilities of a family.”13 Her husband has done nothing wrong—or at least nothing worth mentioning—and Harrison places Polly on the street even during her marriage, drunk and soliciting. It is as though she is already practicing for life on her own in the East End, and the one possibly positive assessment Harrison makes of Polly is that she was hardy enough to withstand life as a prostitute in Whitechapel. He even ends his discussion of her by making the point that, even though she was no longer alive, Polly was making trouble for others, especially her family.

Despite the brevity of Polly’s biography, Harrison manages to convey that Polly’s death, although troublesome, proved to be no great loss. He condemns her by saying that she “had been given every opportunity to better herself which she failed to accept.”14 Despite the fact that Polly seemed to bounce back every time life knocked her down, Harrison traces each of these instances of failure to her alcoholism. Even when he depicts her as lost in the East End, just one face among many, completely anonymous and overlooked until her death, the cause of her presence there and her situation overall is still her alcoholism. If Polly had been able to triumph over the bottle she might have even recovered from the dissolution of her marriage, since she was given the opportunity to work in a respectable position. Respectability and dependability were apparently beyond Polly, and, no matter how many people reached out to help her, she made a mess of every opportunity.

Eliza Ann Chapman does not fare much better. Like Polly, Harrison’s Annie is drinking and going with other men before her marriage is over. Annie even takes it a step further, since she “was prone to throwing anything within her grasp at her better half”15 during their arguments, many of which were about her drinking. In this case “better half” takes on a deeper meaning, since John Chapman was indeed better than his drinking, whoring, violent wife.

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