Romanticizing Mary Jane Kelly

Posted by admin on July 30th, 2007 filed in Jack the Ripper, history

I can think of few pursuits in historical studies more heartless than the romanticizing of Mary Jane Kelly. Kelly, allegedly 25 and a native of Whitechapel, London, England at the time of her death on November 9, 1888, is allegedly the last of the so-called “canonical five” victims of the Whitechapel fiend known as Jack the Ripper.

More than any other victim of this 19th-century murderer, Kelly is the subject of the most fascination, the most romanticizing of whom she was and the most inexcusable speculation in all of Ripperology. Frequenting sites dedicated to the study of Victorian England, the poverty of late 19th century Whitechapel, the so-called “Jack the Ripper” crimes and specifically Mary Jane Kelly herself, one finds all sorts of ideas about who Mary Jane Kelly was and what became of her after that fateful Whitechapel night.

There are several factors that fuel this fascination. They include:

1) MJK was younger by far than all the other “canonical” Ripper victims. She was reportedly aged 25, whereas the rest of the canonicals were in their 40s.

2) MJK, primarily because of her youth, had not been used up by a life of poverty and prostitution quite so much as other victims, and therefore was considered attractive … at least in comparison to her older competitors for alleyway trysts. She may have even been the subject of anywhere from one to perhaps even three marriage proposals, none of which she apparently accepted.

3) Very little about her is actually known and verified independently.

Perhaps it’s that last bit that so captures otherwise brilliant minds to draw them off-focus. Human intellect is stimulated by mysteries, and other than the Ripper’s actual identity, there is no mystery in the Jack the Ripper case greater than the real identity of Mary Jane Kelly herself.

Perhaps it is best to approach this point by outlining the things folks commonly think they know about Mary Jane Kelly, which we actually don’t; at least, not beyond reasonable doubt. Three examples should be enough to get the point across here.

A) The victim’s name was Mary Jane Kelly.

False! Accounts of her actual name vary greatly. She is alleged to have referred to herself as Mary Jane Kelly, Mary Anne Kelly, Marie Jeanette Kelly and one newspaper contemporary to the time even reported that her actual name was believed to be Lizzie Fisher. Considering her name was quite common in London at that time, it could very well have been a chosen pseudonym, or street name, a not-uncommon practice in prostitution even back in 1888.

One earlier Ripper victim even used the name “Mary Ann Kelly” on the night of her murder, prompting much useless and distracting speculation that Kelly was the target all along due to some conspiracy, usually royal in nature, against her, and that the killings stopped when they finally got “the right Mary.” Hogwash.

B) MJK was 25 at the time of her death.

Again, false! Our only source on her age, at least according to Paul Begg in Jack The Ripper: The Facts, is the inquest testimony of Joseph Barnett. Since Barnett has come under the radar of some Ripperologists as a Jack suspect - or at least as a potential murderer of Mary Jane Kelly - how reliable should his testimony be considered?

Even if Barnett was being honest, was Mary? After all, shaving years off one’s age can keep the clientèle of her profession interested. Although she and Barnett were lovers and perhaps even common law spouses, there’s no certainty that she would have told him her true age, especially since they initially met in a “professional” encounter. Kelly could easily have been as old as 30, or as young as perhaps 20. That’s a 10-year spread.

The fact of the matter is, there is no birth certificate that has ever been found that verifies Mary’s date of birth. It’s a search made more difficult for the fact that we don’t necessarily know her given name.

C) MJK was born in Limerick, Ireland

Well, that’s what she told Barnett, whose trustworthiness, as pointed out above, is at least plausibly in question. The closest we can get to the truth here, I believe, is that MJK’s hair was reportedly red and among her best features.

While red hair is certainly a not uncommon Irish trait, not all redheads come from Ireland. Since we lack birth records or even a verifiable name for Kelly, we again cannot be sure of this.

Some argue that, given the tension between England and Ireland in the 1880s, there would be no advantage to Kelly to claim Irish heritage if it was untrue. To the contrary.

Although by the end of her life, she had stepped down into the level of an “unfortunate,” Kelly’s prostitution career allegedly began in a slightly more upscale bordello, which means that she was probably trained in some of the basics of slightly-more-upscale prostitution.

Part of such training is to indulge the fantasies of men, rather than disabuse them. If a young woman had red hair and a client wanted to believe she was Irish and that made him a customer, or even a repeat customer, why disabuse him of the notion? Allow the clients to fill in the details that make you more desirable and go along with it, offering up only the mildest of hints.

Given such training, everything Joe Barnett thought he knew of Mary Jane Kelly, and indeed testified to at her inquest, could easily be - even without him realizing it - more his invention of exotic fantasy than her confession of truth.

Among the many elements Joe Barnett contributed to the MJK mystique include her being widowed at an early age, which creates sympathy, one of the best ways to form an emotional bond that keeps a first-timer from being a one-time client; that she had been to France with a suitor, but that it didn’t agree with her and she returned, which creates a touch of the exotic to a woman otherwise completely unfortunate and on a rapid spiral downward, as well as making her seem patriotic, another way to create more psychological attachment to at least some clients; and even that she had a relative who was a notable person in the world of theater, which also adds a touch of the exotic to her image.

Of course, all of these seem a bit far-fetched for a woman quickly on her way to becoming as old, alcoholic, sick and near death as were the other four victims of Jack the Ripper. None of these fanciful flourishes to Mary Jane Kelly’s life have, as far as I am aware, been verified outside the testimony of Joe Barnett and one or two of her fellow street-walkers - and even they admitted they were only repeating what Mary allegedly told them about herself.

But the stark truth is, we really know less of Mary Jane Kelly than we know of Jack himself. The only truths we can verify are the tragic pair of photos of the scene of her death that bear testimony that her life had come to a sudden, violent, terrible end.

The deeply cruel element here is when some speculate MJK escaped her attacker, that she was out when Jack arrived and attacked, that it was some anonymous French prostitute in her bed and not Mary Jane Kelly herself.

How, exactly, does this make the death of the woman on the bed any less tragic? Could it be any crueler to wish her fate on one prostitute over another? Does it somehow ease the minds of some twisted-thinking researchers with an almost necrophiliac obsession with MJK, that they’d prefer to see some other unfortunate take on her fate? This wishful thinking is as dark and cruel and thoughtless as any of Jack’s crimes.

“Our” Mary Jane Kelly is, in honesty, as much a ghost as the woman Mrs. Maxwell claims to have seen the morning following the murder, heaving her guts out in the street to the “the horrors of drink,” whom she incorrectly believed to be a Mary Jane Kelly - or whatever MJK’s name really was - who had spent several months living with Joseph Barnett before tiring of him and kicking him out, and who had been dead several hours by the time Mrs. Maxwell claimed to her deathbed that she had seen long after her almost completely anonymous spirit had departed from this mortal coil.

Mary Jane Kelly has been called the mastermind of a blackmail scheme against the royal family; an alleged spy for the Irish resistance; a woman who survived an attack against her by not being the woman in the room at the time, surviving to escape (on what resources, heaven only knows) to live out a long and pleasant life raising many children, anywhere from the shores of her native Ireland, to Scotland, to France, to as far away as the imagination of morbidly-obsessed amateur Ripperologists can dream her, away from that bloody scene in Miller’s Court.

Where, in one of the only facts I believe we really CAN be sure of, she died a most horrible death, but has never truly been allowed to rest in peace.