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Hallie RubenholdThe Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper
Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 5-ConclusionChapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 5: “Mary Jane, c. 1863-November 9, 1888”
Part 5, Chapter 17 Summary: “Marie Jeanette”
Mary Jane Kelly first appeared in London’s West End in 1883 or 1884. According to the records, she told different versions of her life story to her acquaintances. One story was that she was born in Limerick in Ireland around 1863. Her father moved to Wales to take up a job as an ironworks foreman. Mary Jane claimed that, at the age of 16, she married a coal miner named Davis or Davies, “who died in an explosion a year or two later” (257). Afterward, she moved to the Welsh city of Cardiff, where possibly a cousin of hers coaxed her into sex work. Other times, she claimed she was born in Wales, that she had a two-year-old child, and that she was related to an actress in London. None of these details have ever been verified. Rubenhold suggests that this lack of evidence indicates that Mary Jane Kelly’s biography and name were “entirely fabricated” (257).
Mary Jane was apparently well-educated and “was a capable artist” (258), suggesting she may have come from a middle-class family. Rubenhold speculates she may actually have had a child. Like other middle-class daughters who had children out of wedlock, she would have been placed in an asylum or a reformatory. It was while at such an institution that she met her cousin who introduced her into a “bad life” (259), in her own words. By Mary Jane’s time, most sex workers did not operate in the neighborhoods they lived, and instead went to specific red-light neighborhoods like Chelsea and Brompton Road.
Professional, higher-class sex workers in the Victorian era entertained their clients as well as offered them sex. Sometimes, they would accompany the client to a music hall, a theater, or another venue. Women met their clients either through meetings arranged by a procuress or by advertising themselves in theaters and music halls, particularly the Alhambra, or even the streets, especially Regent Street, Piccadilly, and elsewhere. However, men seeking to meet sex workers had to be careful to distinguish them from domestic servants or women who worked in the shops.
Mary Jane had a French landlady/procuress who arranged for her to go to Paris with a client. However, this arrangement may have been an attempt to lure Mary Jane into a situation where she would be trafficked. Nineteenth-century technological improvements in travel and communications made such trafficking more possible. British women were sent to brothels in Germany, Belgium, and France, with 250 British women trafficked to northern France and Belgium in the year 1884 alone. Two-thirds of these women were tricked with a fake marriage proposal or a job offer (266).
One such woman was Adelene Tanner, who was tricked by professional recruiters for continental brothels (266). Another was Amelia Powell, who agreed to go to Bordeaux only for the madame of the state-run brothel, called the maison close, to give her expensive clothing and tell her she must work off her debt as a sex worker for the clothes and the cost of traveling from England (267-68).
While Mary Jane did travel to Paris, she somehow managed to return to England. Possibly she was saved by the fact that she may have known some French. However, as a witness to sex trafficking, Mary Jane may have invoked the wrath of her would-be captors.
Part 5, Chapter 18 Summary: “The Gay Life”
Due to the threat from sex traffickers, 22-year-old Mary Jane relocated to the Ratcliff Highway, a major road that went through London and was the home of various pubs, music halls, and lodging houses. She took up residence at 79 Pennington Street, an inn that rented out rooms to sex workers run by a Dutch woman who went by the name “Mrs. Boekü” and her common-law partner, Johannes Morgenstern. Mary Jane joined the ranks of the “gay women” (273-74) that catered to the sailors and had less to worry about from the authorities than sex workers in other parts of London.
Sex workers sometimes avoided alcohol so they could stay sober around potentially dangerous clients. Nevertheless, many sex workers also turned to alcohol to ease their difficult lives. This is likely why Mary Jane developed an alcohol dependency; the dependency may in turn have been the reason why she was forced to leave 79 Pennington Street and relocate to an even less reputable establishment, a boarding house at 1 Breezer’s Hill owned by Rose Mary and John McCarthy. Before then, however, Mrs. Boekü travelled with Mary Jane to Knightsbridge to reclaim a trunk of dresses. After they returned, a man claiming to be Mary Jane’s father went around the pubs of Ratcliff Highway looking for her. The man was “almost certainly not Mary Jane Kelly’s father” (276).
In 1886 or 1887, Mary Jane met and fell in love with a plasterer named Joseph Fleming. They lived together in a room on Bethnal Green Road until the relationship fell apart, possibly because Joseph was abusive. Mary Jane then moved to the Cooley’s lodging house in the East End neighborhood of Spitalfields. Eyewitness accounts describe Mary Jane as cheerful and well-liked, who missed the days she lived in the West End and once confessed she was now unhappy with her life. Another account from Dennis Barrett, who claimed to have met Mary Jane as a boy in 1888, claimed Mary Jane got into violent fights with other sex workers over territory (278).
Most details about Mary Jane, however, come from the official testimonies of a porter, Joseph Barnett, who lived with Mary Kelly in a series of lodging houses. In March of 1888, they ended up living in a lodging house called Miller’s Court. After Joseph lost his job, Mary Jane considered returning to sex work in order to be able to pay their rent and debts. She also may have been receiving funds from former lovers, including Joseph Fleming. This led to fights between Mary Kelly and Joseph Barnett, who was likely jealous. The tensions grew when Mary Jane offered shelter to unhoused women who might have been targeted by Jack the Ripper. Joseph left Mary Kelly alone on November 9, 1888, although he rented a room at a boarding house nearby so he could continue to check on her.
Mary Jane’s neighbor, Mary Ann Cox, thought she saw Mary Jane with an unknown man. Later, she heard Mary Jane singing the song, “A Violet Plucked from My Mother’s Grave When a Boy.” What happened to the male customer Mary Kelly had with her before her murder, or if he was Jack the Ripper, is unknown. After she died, at her funeral she was seen as a “local heroine” (285).
Conclusion Summary: “Just Prostitutes”
Following the murder of Annie Chapman, a civil servant named Edward Fairfield wrote a letter to The Times newspaper. His concern was not necessarily the murders, but that women from Whitechapel would flee from their home district and relocate to his own neighborhood of South Eaton Place. In fact, Edward Fairfield’s letter thanked Jack the Ripper for dealing with the East End’s “vicious inhabitants” (287). Rubenhold argues that Edward Fairfield may have represented the opinion of many educated Victorians, even if they were more reluctant to express it.
Rubenhold maintains that, even today, the false claim that all of Jack the Ripper’s victims were sex workers allows writers even today to “disparage, sexualize, and dehumanize them” (294). Furthermore, Rubenhold asserts that these attitudes allow today’s culture to continue celebrating Jack the Ripper, a figure made famous by murdering women, with the implication that his victims were in some way “deserving” of their deaths. By challenging the myths and delving into the truth, Rubenhold writes, we no longer “condone” (295) the violence Jack the Ripper represents and instead restore the humanity of his victims.
Part 5-Conclusion Analysis
Although throughout The Five Rubenhold makes the argument that three of Jack the Ripper’s victims (Polly Nichols, Anne Chapman, and Kate Eddowes) were not sex workers, she still presents a sympathetic and humanizing narrative for Mary Kelly, who was undoubtedly a sex worker. Rubenhold’s sympathetic approach reflects her ongoing commitment to The Humanization of Historically Stigmatized Figures.
While the details of Mary Kelly’s actual background are unknown for certain, Rubenhold does raise the possibility that Mary Kelly lost the privileges of a middle-class background because she had a child out of wedlock and/or was lured into becoming a sex worker by a cousin, which once again reflects some of the common social dangers surrounding vulnerable women at the time. Despite living a fairly comfortable life in London’s West End for a certain period, Mary Kelly nearly became a victim of sex trafficking, which further underscores the precariousness of many women’s circumstances. Rubenhold also describes how Mary Kelly “enjoying singing and telling stories” while remarking to a friend that she was “heartily sick of the life she was living” (278), which speaks of a complex, nuanced woman who was well-liked despite her sorrows and struggles.
Rubenhold concludes by discussing the legend of Jack the Ripper in the context of The Misrepresentation of Women in History. She argues that the misrepresentation of Jack the Ripper’s five victims as sex workers is rooted in sexism, both Victorian and across history. Furthermore, few journalists at the time and few historians over the centuries have shown interest in the five women’s lives. Such dismissive or uninterested attitudes toward the women obscure the reality that “the cards were stacked against Polly, Annie, Elisabeth, Kate, and Mary Jane from birth” (287) and that, rather than simply being sex workers, they were women who were representative of the social and economic hurdles faced by women outside the upper class in Victorian Britain.
At the same time, Jack the Ripper “has metamorphosed into the protagonist; an evil, psychotic, mysterious player who is so clever that he has managed to evade detection even today” (292). The mystery of his identity and the sensationalism surrounding his crimes not only overshadow the lives of the five women he killed, but, Rubenhold argues, by insisting his victims were “just” sex workers, it is easier to make Jack the Ripper into a twisted folk hero: “Insisting that Jack the Ripper killed prostitutes also makes the story of a vicious series of murders slightly more palatable” (293). Only by humanizing the victims and making them better known can the misogyny Rubenhold sees as essential to Jack the Ripper’s fame be addressed.
