JACK THE RIPPER’S “UNFORTUNATE” VICTIMS: PROSTITUTION AS VAGRANCY, 1888-1900 by Katherine Crooks Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts at Dalhousie University Halifax, Nova Scotia June 2015 © Copyright by Katherine Crooks, 2015 TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................... iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .............................................................................................. v CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................... 1 1.1 THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE FALLEN WOMAN ..... 3 1.2 RIPPERATURE AND RIPPEROLOGY ........................................................... 11 1.3 NEW JOURNALISM AND THE DEMOCRATISATION OF THE PRESS.... 16 1.4 METHODLOGY ................................................................................................ 21 CHAPTER 2 “HER POVERTY DRIVING HER TO A SHIFTY MAINTENANCE”: THE VICTIMS OF JACK THE RIPPER AND SEX WORK AS CASUAL LABOUR IN LATE –VICTORIAN LONDON ............................................................. 25 2.1 NEW JOURNALISM AND THE DEATH OF THE FALLEN WOMAN ....... 27 2.2 “THE LOSS OF TRADE”: PETITIONS........................................................... 30 2.3 “SHE HAD PROBABLY HAD SOME DRINK”: EMMA SMITH AND MARTHA TABRAM .............................................................................................. 34 2.4 “THE STAMP OF THE LAMBETH WORKHOUSE”: MARY ANN NICHOLLS .............................................................................................................. 38 2.5 “GET SOME MONEY FROM SOMEWHERE”: ANNIE CHAPMAN .......... 42 2.6 “THE POVERTY OF THE DEAD WOMAN”: ELIZABETH STRIDE AND CATHERINE EDDWOES ...................................................................................... 46 2.7 “TO KEEP HERSELF FROM STARVATION”: MARY KELLY .................. 51 2.8 CONCLUSION .................................................................................................. 55 CHAPTER 3 GUILTY OF “NOMAD VICES”: VAGRANTS AS RIPPER SUSPECTS ..................................................................................................................... 56 3.1 “NOMAD VICES”: VAGRANTS, TRAMPS, LODGERS .............................. 59 3.2 “BRITONS FIRST”: FOREIGN RIPPER SUSPECTS .................................... 65 ii 3.3 “NO ENGLISHMAN DID IT”: LEATHER APRON AND JEWISH SUSPECTS .............................................................................................................. 67 3.4 LASCARS, MALAYS AND IMPERIAL SAILORS ....................................... 72 3.5 “I’M LIVING ANYWHERE”: IMPERIAL TRAVELLERS ........................... 78 3.6 “I AM SUSPECT, THOU ART SUSPECT”: COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT IN THE INVESTIGATIONS .................................................... 84 3.7 CONCLUSION .................................................................................................. 86 CHAPTER 4 “A CONNECTION NOT TO BE WONDERED AT”: PROSTITUTES AND PAUPERS AS THE VICTORIAN VAGRANT CLASS ..................................... 88 4.1 “UNRULY, IMMORAL, AND OFFENSIVE BEHAVIOUR”: VAGRANCY IN THE STREETS ................................................................................................... 89 4.2 “THIEVES’ OR PROSTITUTES’ KITCHENS”: VAGRANCY AND THE COMMON LODGING HOUSE ............................................................................. 98 4.3 “TOWZLED, DIRTY, VILLAINOUS”: VAGRANTS AND THE CASUAL WARD ................................................................................................................... 111 4.4 CONCLUSION ................................................................................................ 120 CHAPTER 5 CONCLUSION....................................................................................... 122 APPENDIX A ............................................................................................................... 134 BIBLIOGRAPHY ......................................................................................................... 135 iii ABSTRACT In the wake of the series of 1888 murders attributed to the unknown killer called “Jack the Ripper,” Victorian cultural authorities, and newspapers in particular, spent a great deal of time meditating on the social problem posed by the class of low-end, urban prostitutes, from which the Ripper’s victims were drawn. An analysis of the metropolitan press coverage of the Ripper murders shows that journalists treated prostitution as a class problem as much as a moral evil. Newspapers identified the Ripper victims as members of the same class of vagrants from which Scotland Yard drew the majority of their Ripper suspects. Victorians’ conflation of this group of prostitutes with the men who also engaged in unconventional and unreliable forms of work suggests that Victorian prostitution might be reconceptualised not only as a gendered and pathologized form of sexual deviance, but also as a partially normalized form of labour. This thesis therefore analyses the Victorian media furor surrounding the Ripper murders as a means of assessing the importance of class and labour in studies of nineteenth-century prostitution. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I would also like to extend my gratitude to the Killam Trust for supporting my work at Dalhousie. They say it takes a village to raise a child. Completing this thesis would not have been possible were it not for the assistance, support, and interest of many individuals and institutions to whom I am immensely grateful. I have space here only to name a few of those who have helped me along the way. My thanks to: Mona Holmlund, for engaging in the Socratic method of supervision, and testing the logic of my ideas and facilitating insights through questions, all under the guise of convivial conversations in the comfort of her living room. My thesis committee, Krista Kesselring, Todd McCallum and Justin Roberts, for engaging so fully with my work and, without a doubt, improving the quality of this thesis. The graduate students in the Department of History at Dalhousie University, for creating an intellectual community that enabled me to sound out my ideas to a sympathetic audience. My parents, Fred and Shelagh Crooks, for modeling for me what an active and inquiring mind looks like, and can achieve. Michael Christian, for keeping me grounded and sane, and reminding me that, alongside history, there are other things in the world worth knowing and getting excited about. v 1 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION The prostitute does not behave like any other commodity; she occupies a unique place, at the centre of an extraordinary and nefarious economic system. She is able to represent all the terms within capitalist production; she is the human labour, the object of exchange, and the seller at once. She stands as worker, commodity, and capitalist and blurs the categories of bourgeois economics in the same way that she tests the boundaries of bourgeois morality.1 As Lynda Nead observes, the nineteenth-century prostitute was not only a gendered figure, she was also a casual labourer. The realities of class and labour that Nead’s comment encapsulates are often less fully recognised among subsequent Victorian gender historians who draw upon Nead’s work. Historians like Timothy Gilfoyle argue that scholars’ interest in cultural representations of sex work over the practical realities and experiences of prostitutes in the past is tied to a perceived paucity of primary sources that give the historian access to such realities. 2 This thesis treats the “Jack the Ripper” murders as a historiographical case study in order to demonstrate that the Victorian capitalist market underpinned late-nineteenth-century prostitution and shaped the way prostitutes and their class peers perceived sex work as precisely that – a form of work. Furthermore, this thesis suggests that the historian can, using the products of Victorian print culture, unearth some of the economic realities of prostitution. In the wake of the series of 1888 murders attributed to an unknown killer called “Jack the Ripper,” Victorian cultural authorities, and newspapers in particular, spent a great deal of time meditating on the social problem posed by the class of low-end, urban prostitutes from which the Ripper’s victims were drawn. An analysis of the metropolitan 1 Lynda Nead, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (Oxford and Cambridge, Massachusetts: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 99. 2 Timothy J. Gilfoyle, “Prostitutes in History: From Parables of Pornography to Metaphors of Modernity,” American Historical Review 104:1 (February 1999): 137-138. 2 press coverage of the Ripper murders shows that journalists treated prostitution as a class problem as much as a moral evil. Newspapers identified the Ripper victims as members of the same class of vagrants from which Scotland Yard drew the majority of their Ripper suspects. Victorians’ conflation of this group of prostitutes with the men who also engaged in unconventional and irregular forms of work suggests that Victorian prostitution might be reconceptualised not only as a gendered and pathologized form of sexual deviance, but also as a partially normalized form of labour. This thesis therefore analyses the Victorian media furor surrounding the Ripper murders as a means of