On the trail of Jack the Ripper’s forgotten victims

This is a story of a woman whose life has been changed dramatically by education in adulthood - and a group of women she has set out to bring out from the shadow of the man who murdered them.

Before discovering a route to the lives of the victims of notorious Victorian killer ‘Jack the Ripper’, Charlotte Mallinson first discovered how learning could change her own life. As a teen it was certainly far from a racing certainty that she would ever go to university.

After her parents broke up she became the child carer to her father who had schizophrenia. She fell through a hole in the education system, didn’t take exams, then got pregnant at 15 with the boyfriend she went on to marry.

Today she is 40 and a single parent with two children from each of two marriages, now 24, 20, 13 and nine and including a son with Asperger’s Syndrome. Along the way has had a succession of jobs including bar work, a fish and chip shop and cleaning.

There was no time to stop working and caring to think about herself. It was a cancer scare in her early 30s that made Charlotte take stock.

“There’s nothing like a fright to make you look at your life,” she says. “I loved reading, felt I knew nothing. I talked to my brother, who was at university, and he said ‘To me you are brighter than some of the lecturers who teach me’. That set me thinking.”

At 34 she enrolled on Huddersfield University’s Barnsley Campus, on a course of English Literature plus Heritage, for people with an unconventional educational background. Quickly showing a great aptitude for academic work, Charlotte achieved first class honours in her undergraduate degree - despite the fact that her second marriage broke up towards the end and the family almost lost their home.

“Going to university changed everything for me. I had never realised what a big hole there was in my life until I began to study - but I also had a huge responsibility to my family,” says Charlotte, who’s from Newsome, Huddersfield. “I loved what I was doing but I couldn’t have them suffering because of it.”

She was able to continue her studies with a Master’s degree because the University waived 50 per cent of the fees. Having excelled at that she is now working towards a PhD, in between working part-time and caring for her two younger children.

Having studied literature, criminology and history as well as the politics of the heritage industry in her first degree, Charlotte’s research interests have become centred on the darker side of that business, particularly the way macabre stories are used for tourist entertainment.

Travelling regularly from Yorkshire to East London, Charlotte embarked on her PhD as an investigation of the popular tourism that has sprung up around the notorious Jack The Ripper’, who ran amok in Whitechapel during the late 1880s and is believed to have killed five prostitutes in a 10-week period. Another six murders of women happened around the same period, although it’s not known whether they were at the hand of the Ripper.

What drew Charlotte to the history of these gruesome murders, in which the women were mutilated, innards cut out and throats slit, was not the mystery of who Jack actually was - a question that has led to countless book and film representations of his crimes and the lionisation of the killer.

No, Mallinson’s interest lies solely in his hapless victims who, along with hundreds of other poverty- stricken women living in shockingly insanitary condition in East London at the time, plied their trade on the street and had stories that are rarely told.

“I think that, being a northerner, I can look at what happened in Whitechapel objectively,” says Charlotte. “And when I’m discussing my research with people in Whitechapel today, they agree that it is weird that such entertainment and profit are made from Jack the Ripper tours giving gruesome details of the killings and highlighting the killer rather than the victims - whose names, addresses and faces we do know, while his identity is still unknown.”

The five murders most categorically linked to Jack the Ripper are those of Mary Anne (Polly) Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catharine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly.Mallinson’s research has led her to meet and befriend some of the sex workers living and working in East London today. She says that there is connection between the way murders of sex workers have been treated and reported on in recent history and the “dehumanisation” of Jack the Ripper’s victims.

Charlotte’s PhD project will result in both a written thesis and photographs plus testimony from today’s Whitechapel sex workers, who live and work alongside Ripper tourism.

“The area of Whitechapel is saturated with tourists,” says Mallinson. “There is a difference between some of the tours and others. Some do emphasise the poverty of the area and that women were forced into prostitution to keep body and soul together.

“But another , more typical, tour I went on - but had to leave early because I was so grossly offended - included projected images of of the murder victims on the spot where they had died, and they ridiculed the appearance of the women - the fact that they were toothless or fat or had bad skin.

“The message is often loud and clear that these poor anonymous women were culpable in their own death because of the work they did. Actually, there were somewhere between 40-80,000 female prostitutes working on the streets of London at the time, and they were more likely to die of starvation than of being murdered by a customer.

“However the starkest tension for me, and the reason I decided to pursue this as a PhD, is that tourists might sigh at the plight of the victims of poverty and murder in the late 19th century, but then they’d go around the corner and simply step over a group of homeless women living on the street today. This seemed to say that attitudes haven’t changed much.”

Mallinson has found one tour which focuses on the lives of the victims of the killer - telling what is know of their everyday lives, broken relationships and how they were oftenforced into crime by poverty and fear.

“Mary Jane Kelly was bilingual, had travelled and been educated. Catharine Eddowes came from Sweden and was in London alone. For their different reasons these women worked in prostitution to pay for board because they couldn’t get into the workhouse and didn’t want to sleep in the filthy, rat-infested streets.”

On the day she was later knifed to death Polly Nichols said there was no fear that she would earn money for lodgings that night “...for look at my new bonnet.” Hours later she was found in a pool of blood.

Mallinson’s purpose is a simple one: “I want to recontextualise the narrative of Jack the Ripper, and also give a voice to today’s Whitechapel sex workers, some of whom choose their work and some of don’t. Other people discuss them but their voices and thoughts are not heard.

“The Ripper victims and sex workers today - they all have human and historical value, just the same as any of us.”

A life in academe seems to beckon to Charlotte Mallinson, after a circuitous route into education. “I’d say to anyone in a similar situation just do it. It will be hard but do it.”