Framing Deaths, Embracing Lives: Alan M. Clark’s Jack the Ripper Victims Series

Abstract

Jack the Ripper fictions tend to be realist in mode, making frequent use of the Victorian press and archives to depict the 1888 murders. At the same time, they marginalise and exploit the victims, defining them as silent testimonies to the power of the elusive perpetrator. In contrast, Alan M. Clark’s Jack the Ripper Victims Series (2011–2018), consisting of five novels devoted to one canonical victim each, shifts the focus and depicts their lives. This article outlines the way the fictionalisations of the five women’s lives bring to the fore five other ‘crimes’ or transgressions: addiction, domestic violence, unemployment, sex work, and homelessness, but also the way these texts replace what is sensational and formulaic in Ripperature with something more than mundane and gritty in the lived experience of everyday people, such as moments of personal joy or professional accomplishments. Drawing on Kate Mitchell’s approach to history, cultural memory, and neo-Victorian fiction, it argues that pre-dating the publication of The Five (2019), Clark managed to realistically re-present (make present) and represent (create a portrayal of) the late-Victorian crime of dismissing the women who were murdered.

1. Introduction

Regardless of their aim and medium, Jack the Ripper fictions tend to be realist in mode. Incorporating a plethora of material publicised in 1888 press reports, they recreate the minutiae of the murders as well as the socio-cultural background of the time and place, and Mark Jones categorised them as some of “the most scrupulously factual of historical reconstructions” (Jones 2017, p. 166). Such fictions are as old as the case and have been shaping the cultural memory of the Whitechapel murders.1 Focused predominantly on numerous theories about the identity of the perpetrator, they tend to limit the appearance of the victims to the crime scenes and witness testimonies, leaving the representation of the victims underdeveloped. The books by Alan M. Clark stand out as they shift the focus and depict their lives.

The Jack the Ripper Victims Series (2011–2018) originated from the author’s declining interest in the killer and overriding concern with the environment in which the murdered women lived (“Author’s Note—The Ripper’s London”, Clark 2017d, p. 5). It consists of five novels, each a standalone story devoted to one canonical victim, which may be read in any order. They were not written in the ‘canonical’ order, i.e., that of the murders: the first was Of Thimble and Threat: A Novel of Catherine Eddowes (Clark [2011] 2017), who is counted as the fourth victim; the second was Say Anything but Your Prayers: A Novel of Elizabeth Stride (Clark [2014] 2017), the third victim; the next was A Brutal Chill in August: A Novel of Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols, subtitled the First Victim of Jack the Ripper (Clark [2016] 2019), followed by Apologies to the Cat’s Meat Man: A Novel of Annie Chapman, subtitled the Second Victim of Jack the Ripper (Clark 2017a); the last was The Prostitute’s Price: A Novel of Mary Jane Kelly (Clark 2018), the fifth victim. Recently republished by IFD, Clark’s own company, the series tends to be marketed with the books set in the order of the actual murders. It might be perceived as a sign of the general audience’s fascination with the unsolved crimes, yet IFD itself offers Say Anything but Your Prayers and Of Thimble and Threat in one volume—as an eBook and audiobook—entitled The Double Event (Clark 2015), a name given to the night when the murders of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes took place. The last novel, The Prostitute’s Price, is also available as a part of 13 Miller’s Court (Clark and Grant 2018), forming a single title with John Linwood Grant’s companion novel The Assassin’s Coin, on another killer, with their chapters alternating.

Clark’s books discard the image of the victims as ‘unfortunates’, deserving their deaths from the hands of the Whitechapel killer, the notion that dominated late-Victorian popular imagination and largely continued until at least 1988, the centenary of the murders. Interestingly, the 1980s were also the time when “experimental literature was more capable of representing historically marginalized groups whose stories were absent from the official record” (Weiser 2017, p. 105), paving the way for the neo-Victorian boom of the 1990s and early 2000s. Although the author of the Jack the Ripper Victim Series does not classify his works as neo-Victorian but as historical novels (“Author’s Note—Historical Terror: Horror that Happened” Clark 2017b, p. 10), they share the neo-Victorian empathy for the marginalised and silenced in that period as well as its eye for historic detail and realism.

Neo-Victorian works “use cultural memory according to certain recognisable traits—in particular by recovering forgotten or deliberately censored (hi)stories” and are said to “privilege the interest in ‘deviances’, rather than in stereotypical depictions of the [Victorian] age” (Tomaiuolo 2018, pp. 3, 4). They centre the forgotten, both fictional and historic, speak “for these speechless characters, recording their unrecorded thoughts, telling their untold stories, asserting their human rights to be recognised, to be given back a face, to have their suffering affirmed”, and give “historical non-subjects a future by restoring their traumatic pasts to cultural memory” (Kohlke and Gutleben 2010, p. 31); all these are present in Clark’s series. But neo-Victorianism may also depict the Victorians as “our sometimes uncomfortable (and unforeseen) mirror-image” (Tomaiuolo 2018, p. 3). This bi-directionality—or double temporality—is typical of any historical fiction (Hadley 2010, p. 15; cf. Kohlke and Gutleben 2010, p. 2), and, as I will soon demonstrate, Clark presents us with such an uncomfortable vision.

Realism is broadly understood as a representation of reality, a convention lending verisimilitude to the story. As the editors of this Special Issue remind us, “Victorian realist texts have traditionally focused on the lived experience of everyday people, representing the observable world and embracing literal representation of it, and using it to present social commentary prescient to the real world it is designed to reflect” (Raines and Saunders 2024). At the core of the present analysis is realism’s concern with “the investigation of the moral behaviour of people in society” (Childs and Fowler 2006, p. 199). One of the major challenges of realist historical narratives is striking the balance between the interplay of fact and fiction so that the audience may enjoy the plot and appreciate the setting. Neo-Victorian works tend to integrate the Victorian context with the plot and their subject matter (Hadley 2010, p. 18), but realism is also an important feature of crime fiction, where socio-political background lends verisimilitude and provides a frame for the dual story of the crime and investigation. Clark’s series is not crime fiction in the traditional meaning of the term; it is, however, fiction about and commentary on the most prevalent social crimes and transgressions: addiction, domestic violence, unemployment, homelessness, and sex work. They are universal, but when viewed as a part of the discourse surrounding the historic victims of particularly gruesome crimes, they remind contemporary readers of the extent of late-Victorian negligence of and disrespect towards the lower classes of society. The Jack the Ripper Victims Series uncovers the five crimes listed above and challenges some of the commonly held assumptions about the murdered women.

These fictionalisations of the five women’s lives problematise binaries between what is right and wrong, moral and immoral, proper and improper, as well as what is real and what is not. They incorporate imaginary conversations, dream- or nightmare-like sequences, and unrealistic themes, paradoxically conveying an even greater sense of veracity in the representation of the women’s lives. The series replaces what is sensational and formulaic in Ripperature with moments of personal joy or professional accomplishments. I unpack these hitherto-overlooked texts to showcase how they draw together factual and fictional elements to probe Victorian social disorder by making its harsh realities manifest. Drawing on Kate Mitchell’s approach to history, cultural memory, and neo-Victorian fiction, I argue that Clark manages to realistically re-present (make present) and represent (create a portrayal of) the late-Victorian crime of dismissing the predominantly working-class women who were murdered. His texts not only re(dis)cover the women’s lives but also make readers re-think their victimhood in the context of the crime(s) they fell victims to before meeting the Whitechapel killer. Crucial to this conclusion is the paratextual framing of the novels. As noted by Gérard Genette, paratexts—including titles, subtitles, covers, notes and illustrations, as well as the author’s disclaimer that any resemblance to the real victims is entirely coincidental—are “thresholds of interpretation”, providing readers with a commentary on the main text (Genette 1997a, p. 3; 1997b). The commentary, stemming from the aforementioned bi-directionality and parallels between the Victorian reality and our own, is disquieting.

Before turning to the series itself, I would like to provide a brief overview of the way the canonical victims have been represented and establish the framework for my discussion of Clark’s works.

2. Framing Deaths

Although extensive research has been carried out on the Whitechapel murders, it tended to focus on the killer rather than the victims. As noted by Richard Whittington-Egan, a “typical ‘Ripper book’ … will generally begin with a chapter on London in the late Victorian era”, followed by “the sequelae of the slaughterings”, “a mustering and parade of suspects”, and concludes with “the name of the author’s own cherished suspect” (Whittington-Egan [2013] 2015, p. 14). Thus, a reader of such a work is provided with a lot of details pertaining to the general conditions of living, but not the victims’ lives, and with even more details relating to the circumstances of them dying.

In The Ripper’s Victims in Print: The Rhetoric of Portrayals Since 1929 (Frost 2018), Rebecca Frost surveys such publications for details about the victims and notes mostly minor differences between the approaches. Beginning with Leonard Matters’s The Mystery of Jack the Ripper (1929), the first major study of the 1888 case, and ending with Paul Begg and John Bennett’s Jack the Ripper: The Forgotten Victims (Begg and Bennett 2013), she examines what was written about the murdered women over almost nine decades, and her conclusions concur with Whittington-Egan’s: they are “to be discovered dead and to be subjected to a thorough post-mortem so that authors and readers might be convinced of the identity of the Ripper”, with the murders sometimes presented as an act of “redemption for their prostitution” (Frost 2018, pp. 30, 218). The two titles that seem to stand out are the aforementioned The Forgotten Victims, though it seems to extrapolate from previous approaches to include more women who died at the time, and The Victims of Jack the Ripper by Neal Sheldon (2007). Frost appreciates the fact that Sheldon’s work is devoted to the women and not their killer, but also notes that he presents them “as a gathering of facts, more extensive than many authors offer, but there is no attempt to take these pieces and reanimate them into people with personalities” (Frost 2018, pp. 204–5). The book is based on Sheldon’s 1989 article, called “new-ground-breaking” by Whittington-Egan ([2013] 2015, p. 414), due to its focus on the lives and not deaths of the canonical victims. It should be pointed out, though, that the text was accompanied by three postmortem photographs and the exterior of 13 Miller’s Court, Mary Kelly’s last address and the crime scene; still, the first image is the All Saints Church, “where middle class Annie Chapman was married on May 1st, 1867” (Shelden 1989, p. 49), which indicates the woman’s social position as well as her being lawfully wed. Published just after the centenary of the murders, it initiated what Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper (Rubenhold 2019) achieved on a larger scale thirty years later—shifting the perspective on the victims and their lives.

Rachel M. Friars and Jesyka Traynor classify works that provide “more comprehensive narratives of female victimhood and survival via narrative structures that centralise women’s lives” and “resist presenting the crimes themselves as the focal points” as feminist true crime (Friars and Traynor 2022, pp. 12, 23). They perceive Rubenhold’s book as one of its models but however influential it was, its effects were not immediate. Shortly after The Five, two more books on the 1888 victims were published: Robert Hume’s The Hidden Lives of Jack the Ripper’s Victims (Hume 2019) and Jackie Anderson and Ciara Wild’s Myth, Monster, Murderer additionally subtitled Jack the Ripper: The Victims, the Crimes, the Story (Anderson and Wild 2022). Despite the title, Hume’s chapters are bookended by references to the deaths, and although Anderson and Ciara call their book “a testament to those women”, they add that they “represented the universal victimhood of the women of their time … they were victims of a male dominated society that would use them for pleasure and punish them for the same” (Anderson and Wild 2022, p. 6). Two thirds of their book are devoted to the victims, Victorian poverty and attitudes towards prostitution, violence towards women, women and crime, and women’s mental health—both then and now—and yet its overall anti-patriarchal tone seems to obscure the lives of the victims of the Whitechapel killer themselves. Together with Rubenhold’s book, these titles form a new, largely feminist, context for examining Clark’s series.

Considering fictional works on the Whitechapel murders, they tend to be crime or detective stories revolving around the identity of the perpetrator and, thus, around the deaths of the victims. Often, the historic chronology of the murders would indicate to the reader the level of success or failure on the part of the investigators. Few stories give voice to the first four victims—one of the exceptions is John Gardner’s The Return of Moriarty (Gardner [1974] 2012), in which Catherine Eddowes shares some intelligence regarding the killer. Mary Kelly, being the youngest and the most attractive of them, as well as the most horribly mutilated, takes centre stage. The majority depict her as the last canonical victim, yet in others she is George Lusk’s lover (Morgan 2011), an accessory to murder (Thor 1997), or even Jill the Ripper, the female equivalent of Jack (Barry 1975; Carpenter 2005). I concur with Friars and Traynor’s conclusion that both fictional and nonfictional representations of these women “have not only elided the lives of the victims but have also served to literally inscribe their mutilated bodies in our cultural memory” (Friars and Traynor 2022, p. 13). Re-dismembered with each (stereo)typical addition to Ripperature, they keep being forgotten as human beings. They are “a product of mostly biofiction without the mythical element” and “the sites of memory of their killer” (Maier 2023, p. 270; Krawczyk-Żywko 2023, p. 124).

The medium that embraced the 1888 victims’ lives may be described as having (un)limited realistic possibilities. Though constrained by its setting, the stage offers considerable potential for the representation of reality stemming from the combination of the way the characters, the plot, and the dialogues are written; the actors’ performance; and the design of the production in terms of the costumes, props, sound, and lighting. The five canonical victims were given voice in Thomas Gemmell’s The Whitechapel Murders (Gemmell 2007) performed by the Glasgow touring company called TheatreFusion. The ephemeral nature of the performance has been saved by the publication of a series of monologues by the women and the detective investigating their murders adapted from the play and available as The Autumn of Terror: Whitechapel Monologues (Gemmell 2020). The image on the cover is one of the original posters still available on the company’s website: black London’s cityscape against a bright red background, captioned: “During the Autumn of Terror/Jack the Ripper/killed and mutilated five women/Time to meet them”, followed by the names in the order of the murders: Polly, Annie, Liz, Catherine, Mary; the three alternative posters suggest a more sensational and, thus, stereotypical, depiction of the crimes (Gemmell 2007). The other title was produced by the English National Opera. Jack the Ripper: The Women of Whitechapel (2019), composed by Iain Bell with the libretto by Emma Jenkins, is less historically accurate but more engaged with the exploration and portrayal of the humanity of its protagonists. The killer never enters view but is “personified by ‘the darkness’, a feeling which swallows up the stage as the victims are about to meet their demise” (Discover Jack the Ripper 2019). Impoverished and abused, dependent on alcohol and soliciting, they disappear into the darkness and oblivion.

Before turning to the question of memory, let me point out an interesting correlation between the dates of these two performances and the publication of the books by Neal Sheldon and Hallie Rubenhold. Thomas Gemmell’s play premiered during Glasgow’s Merchant City Festival 2006/07, while The Victims of Jack the Ripper was published in October (2007); Bell and Jenkins’ opera was first staged on 30 March 2019, two months after the publication of The Five. This re-presenting (making present) and representing (creating a portrayal of) the victims suggests that something must have been at work in the cultural memory of the Whitechapel murders in both periods.

“Unforgetting” is the first step towards remembering. It may be “a resource for redefining and extending the social imaginary” (Rigney 2021, p. 13) and, by extension, cultural memory. Clark’s series is an important step in unforgetting the 1888 victims. As noted earlier and suggested by the names of the fields themselves, Ripperature (fiction) and Ripperology (studies of the case) tell the story of the killer. Their dominant voices seeking the solution to the Victorian mystery were effective in silencing the victims, but the neo-Victorian and biofictional potential of these works, thus far, largely unexplored (with one of the exceptions being Elizabeth Ho’s 2012 study (Ho 2012), re-orientates the discourse around the lives, not deaths). Kate Mitchell’s observations on history and cultural memory in neo-Victorian fiction are important here, not only because of their closeness in time to Clark’s texts. She notes that such works

remember the period not only in the usual sense, of recollecting it, but also in the sense that they re-embody, that is, re-member, or reconstruct it. … the dis(re)membered pieces of the past are reconstituted in and by the text, and also in the reader’s imagination. The reader thus literally embodies (re-members) the reimagined past. … re-presenting (making present) and representing (creating a portrayal of) the Victorians fold together in these novels.

(Mitchell 2010, pp. 7, 180)

Re-membering the reimagined past helps readers move past the gruesome details of the deaths and reconstruct the realities of the lives of Annie Chapman, Catherine Eddowes, Elizabeth Stride, Mary Ann Nichols, and Mary Jane Kelly—here listed in the rare order of their birth dates. Transposing this new narrative onto the audience’s “previous network of historical knowledge” (Thomas Leitch qtd. in Weiser 2017, p. 112) lets them reimagine each woman as someone more than just a victim. And if “history as a concept must be based on existing individual histories” (Weiser 2017, p. 114), re-membering those individual stories creates a new context for the history and cultural memory of the Whitechapel murders victims. Let us move on to consider Clark’s depiction of those stories.

3. Canonical Victims and Uncanonical Crimes

While death inevitably occurs at the end of the novels in Clark’s series, their focus is on lives. We get to know Katie, Elizabeth, Polly, Annie, and Mary Jane as young girls, and follow them as they grow and, step by step, become the women readers may know from history, Ripperology, or Ripperature. These life stories were recreated and retold by the witnesses during the inquests—sometimes in painstaking detail, sometimes based on hearsay and conjecture—and, filtered through the press discourse, then treated as facts. The dominant discourse surrounding the case marginalised the murdered women, but their transgressions and mutilated bodies were very much in the centre of attention. The “inhuman crime” was a part of it but so was “immorality” and “the ‘deviant’ lives of [the] victims (Walkowitz 1992, pp. 200, 201). Even though the last performance of the stage adaptation of Stevenson’s story about Jekyll and Hyde, cancelled after the lead actor was accused of being Jack the Ripper, was a benefit for night shelters for homeless women and the murders drew attention to social injustices and iniquities, the victims themselves became “objects of fantasy” across social classes (ibid., pp. 207, 216). Clark’s series creates its own fantasy about the lives of the five canonical victims but subverts the late-Victorian narrative by bringing to the fore five other ‘crimes’, transgressions or atrocities that the women had to navigate: addiction, domestic violence, unemployment, homelessness, and sex work.

Addiction is at the core of the women’s personal problems, snowballing into their life tragedies. Katie, short for Catherine, whose partner, Conway, is against drinking and forbids her to even associate with people who get intoxicated, is introduced to drink by her alcoholic neighbour. Despite her initial negative reaction to its sour taste and burning effect, she soon fully appreciates its calming effect:

She found herslf [sic] soothed in an odd way as her troubles, both physical and mental tensions, left her. Carried for a lifetime, the troubles went largely unnoticed, like a burden in a rucksack, accumulated slowly, consistently over a journey of many miles. The relief created by their sudden absence was spellbinding. … Without a care in the world, she willingly fell into the calming, euphoric state.

(Of Thimble and Threat, Clark [2011] 2017, pp. 53–54)

Having secured a bottle of gin for the future, she manages to resist the temptation for fear of enraging Conway and failing to take care of her children. The next time she is offered alcohol, it is by a man who brutally raped her and later shattered her dreams of becoming a music hall singer due to her age. Having just left Conway and dwelling on her lost hopes and sacrifices for her daughter, she perceives the glass of whiskey as “a way out, an escape craved for years. She would drink it and order another and then another until she was insensible, oblivious to the pain that gripped head and heart” (ibid., p. 116). Raising the glass, she notices Conway entering the tavern and spotting her; at first apparently glad to see her, he leaves without a word. This moment is the beginning of a drinking spree that costs her the breach of family ties and drives her to the workhouse casual ward. A few years later, she drinks all sorts—a mixture of the pub leftovers:

it was her way of having a bit of everything. If she concentrated, she could taste the bitter, the wine, the whiskey, and even, occasionally, a little brandy. She enjoyed one after the next and was able to ignore the small thickenings of mucous, and the bits of tobacco, ash and other debris that sometimes floated up to the top.

(ibid., p. 135)

She resorts to it even on the occasion when she can afford a more decent drink, as a way of economising.

Another of the women is accustomed to alcohol already at the age of twelve. Elizabeth receives vodka in small quantities from her mother for pain or to help her sleep and has already developed a craving for it. Five years later, her intoxication is both caused and used by a pimp to have sex with her and later to procure her first client, though Elizabeth realises that post-factum. It is after she emigrates to London, while in a working and sexual relationship with Edward Winders, a police constable, that drinking becomes an issue. Winders’s working hours and his expectations regarding housekeeping result in a ban on drinking. However, by that time, “[a]lcohol not only helped Elizabeth set aside her troubles, if she drank just enough, it also provided her with an exuberance that allowed her to express herself more openly, to laugh, and to love” (Say Anything but Your Prayers, Clark [2014] 2017, pp. 105–6). When married to Jon Stride and happy, her thirst ceases, only to return with greater force after his death, leading to her occasional imprisonments.

Polly’s introduction to drink is linked to the foul living conditions in the neighbourhood—“We all have gin when the air and water go bad” (A Brutal Chill in August, Clark [2016] 2019, p. 13)—but also to secrecy and strong awareness of misbehaving. At thirteen, drunk for the first time on undiluted gin, “[s]he slumped into a stupor … enjoying a euphoric calm and distance from her cares for a time” (ibid., p. 20). The peaceful state is quickly broken by Mr Macklin—the Bonehill Ghost with a bottle of gin chained to his neck and a blue rummy-flamed breath—whose nightmarish presence will keep haunting Polly until her death. As an adult, she has problems with moderate consumption, something her husband notices and points out to her. Frustrated with Bill’s egocentric approach to sex and realising she is pregnant, Polly feels oppressed. The looming limitation of her freedom prompts her to enjoy herself, which results in heavy drinking and casual semi-conscious sex. After her son is born, she starts organising adventures: using each rare opportunity, she secures her father’s help with the child to do some shopping and, secretly, go to a pub. These outings offer a much-needed personal space, and meeting a woman in a similar situation allows Polly to effectively scheme some more. During her pub sessions, she meets Tom, her soon-to-be lover and fellow alcoholic; losing him causes such heavy drinking that she accidentally burns her father’s rooms. Diagnosed with delirium tremens and hospitalised, she manages to stay sober for some time but lapses into drinking again.

Annie’s alcoholism stems to some extent from her father’s. A light drink as a form of relaxation with her friends after work—“I have a glass of bitter, ale, or stout, nothing more. We talk, sing songs, gossip, tell stories, and flirt. It’s all quite harmless” (Apologies to the Cat’s Meat Man, Clark 2017a, p. 76)—soon turns into a daily routine and a form of escape; later, stronger drinks bring memory loss. Encouraged by her sister, Annie signs the pledge of abstinence—not once, but thrice, to no lasting effect. Even when her husband promises to abstain from drink with her and empties the gin bottle into her chamber pot, she is hoping some of it could still be saved. Eventually confined to an asylum, she gets better, but a whiskey-flavoured kiss from her husband is enough to send her on a drinking spree; its consequences finally force her to leave John, but not the drink.

Mary Jane is the only woman not addicted to alcohol. Once, her warm drink of rum and ginger is spiked by a woman with “a few drops of amber liquid” to make her evening in a Parisian cabaret more enjoyable; and though Mary Jane knew “some destroyed their lives with too much opium, yet she didn’t worry that might happen to her” (The Prostitute’s Price, Clark 2018, p. 25). Still, “Miss Laudanum” became an increasing part of her life, and it was only her lover’s continued pleas to give it that brought some effect; leaving him, she “returned to the drug with a vengeance” (ibid., p. 139). Eventually, Mary Jane decides to steadily and regularly reduce the dosage and free herself from the addiction, which sets her apart from the other women in the series.

It may be argued that a decision to give in to addiction depends on the given person, yet what transpires from these depictions is the omnipresence of alcohol in these women’s lives, often since childhood. Some of them are more eager to embrace it than others, but all are introduced to its soothing effects by the people close to them: neighbours, friends, and family. In the novels, drinking seems to be a common practice rather than a deviance, yet it is usually acceptable when performed in moderation and by men. Although readers might recognise some alcohol usages (for example to relieve stress, anxiety, or shed some inhibitions), in the context of the Whitechapel victims, they would almost inevitably be associated with depravity. It should be noted, however, that whether applied as a painkiller, an antidote to emotional distress, or even boredom, its consumption by the characters tends to be driven by external factors, such as domestic oppression, sexual exploitation, or poor living conditions, including the almost proverbial pollution of drinking water transforming beer or gin into a safer option for lower-class Victorians. Clark may be sympathetic towards his characters but does not make excuses for their choices; on the other hand, he makes some of them understandable by revealing different kinds and levels of violence all of the women experienced.

Domestic violence depicted in the novels takes various forms. Thirteen-year-old Katie is sexually abused by her uncle. What makes it even more heinous is both her thought after his first attempt—“That is what Mum wouldn’t tell me about him” (Of Thimble and Threat, Clark [2011] 2017, p. 21)—and the fact that six years later, when Katie’s aunt forbids her to go out with Conway to prevent any “shame”, she also blurts out: “It’s bad enough you’ve seduced your uncle. … Oh yes, I know what you two have been up to” (ibid., p. 31). This signals that at least two adult women in her family knew about his proclivity for girls and turned a blind eye. When Elizabeth decides to leave Edward, he punches her in the face. Polly is repeatedly beaten up by her husband, once so heavily that she miscarries; thanks to their neighbours’ help, and the amendment of the Matrimonial Causes Act, she manages to obtain legal separation on the grounds of cruelty along with a maintenance order. Annie is physically and psychologically abused by her father; Dadda, as she calls him, is tender and aggressive in turn, and possessive when she meets her first beau. When she was a young woman,

Dadda still slapped and jabbed at her, stomped her toes, pulled her hair, and twisted her ears when he was drunk. She’d learned early on in life that if she complained his features took on a gleeful look and he redoubled his efforts to abuse her, as if more of the same proved that he meant what he’d done and she should take mistreatment in stride.

(Apologies to the Cat’s Meat Man, Clark 2017a, p. 54)

He hits her with a hot poker, and gifts her “a fine, sky-blue linen skirt, dress bodice, and bonnet” so that next time she would be “pretty enough to keep [her] beau” as a birthday present (ibid., p. 64). When living in Whitechapel and sleeping with a man in exchange for a roof over her head, Annie is threatened and beaten by a woman who has a similar arrangement with the same man. Mary Jane, whose father blames her for her mother’s accidental death, experiences nothing but coolness from him; when he learns that, apart from earning her living as a servant, she enjoys some privileges, he sends her to work at the mill. Additionally, Mary Jane is exposed to what might be called “professional” violence, that is, abuse from her clients—with outcomes ranging from eight months in a workhouse infirmary to her killing a man in self-defence—and threats from the Gully Bleeders, a gang extorting money for “protection”. Still, she holds on to the profession she was introduced to by her cousin when she became a widow at the age of eighteen, because it enables her to earn a living and save a decent sum for her future plans.

In the case of Polly and, to some extent, Elizabeth, the violence the women experience is connected to their choice to turn to substances—it is a form of punishment by their partners, though it still does not justify the assaults; Katie is sexually abused by her uncle, and Annie is mistreated and beaten by her alcoholic father—men that should be protective of the teenage girls; Mary Jane first suffers her father’s indifference and then aggression from her clients. Vulnerable yet resilient, they sometimes admit defeat but, if possible, retaliate, which indicates that even if various forms of abuse were common, the women were not passively accepting their lot but endeavouring to change it through the limited means that were at their disposal.

Lack of employment is yet another societal problem explored in the series, often linked to homelessness and sex work. Katie, who worked mending clothes to earn her stay at her aunt’s, exchanges this for hawking and singing execution ballads; the Capital Punishment Amendment Act of 1868 banned public executions, which forced her and Conway to take odd jobs, for example, as a laundress or night soil man; their son is introduced to scavenging as a fun activity but for them it is also a possibility of gaining additional income. Problems with keeping Elizabeth and Jon’s coffeehouse mean economising first, supplementary jobs later, and eventually a workhouse for him and a return to prostitution for her. Leaving her husband was linked with Polly’s loss of her printing job, though her alcohol addiction was also affecting her performance. The consequences of Mary Jane’s self-defence bring about her descent from the top-end Phoenix gay house to the medium-quality Laughing Magpie to soliciting in the streets. Unable to live on lace work, Annie alternates between soliciting and begging. She finds herself in a lodging house in Dorset Street, Spitalfields. The description of the are reflects the majority of the problems the women face in the series:

During a time of high unemployment, with competition for jobs intensifying daily, at least a thousand poverty-stricken people occupied the low-cost, neglected housing that lined the streets. … Fully half those living in Dorset Street had “known life” since childhood … Others had fallen on hard times simply because they had no family support and did not contribute to a family’s welfare. Employers considered middle-aged women—like Annie—who had lost their husbands, to be a poor risk. … For the aging, single woman, temporary, low-wage work under harsh conditions might be found, but positions of employment had become rare. … Most of the women found themselves under the thumbs of various whore minders or, like Annie, had unlawful arrangements with men.

(Apologies to the Cat’s Meat Man, Clark 2017a, pp. 20–21)

Bullied out of the lodging house, she is sleeping rough, which by some was perceived as a better alternative than the workhouse.

Despite its reputation, the workhouse is what aids or even saves some of the characters. Katie’s sisters, Emma and Margaret, are sent there after their mother’s death; when she meets the former years later by pure chance, she is surprised at Emma’s not only “surviving the experience and coming out of it a whole human being”, but also having been married to a man she met there (Of Thimble and Threat, Clark [2011] 2017, p. 70); Margaret also survived, though with poorer health. The Poplar Workhouse is where Elizabeth seeks help, but the infamous oakum picking wears her out. Interestingly, Polly feels some contentment while staying in the Strand Workhouse, and its matron finds her a position as a servant, though Polly is not capable of keeping it long. The other women’s experiences with a workhouse are limited to its infirmary, where both of Katie’s children are born, Annie gets pills for her cough, and Mary Jane is recovering after being beaten.

Linking unemployment, homelessness, and sex work has a two-fold effect for the series. First, it allows the author to use his knowledge of late-Victorian London to anchor the lives he depicts in representational authenticity. Second, it showcases that the impoverished existence of the five women devoid of the freedom of choice seemingly results in their social deviance, but this deviance is in fact driven by desperation.

As indicated in the introduction, it is clear that Clark’s series shifts the late-Victorian discourse that misrepresented the victims as deserving their deaths. He makes readers follow their lives with all their twists and turns, and the language he uses, though not entirely dispassionate, facilitates an immersion into the seedy and sordid underbelly of the Victorian society. As evidenced by the quoted passages, the fictional descriptions of characters and events only enforce the impression of realism of the narratives—realism bordering on naturalism. Yet, despite all the difficulties the women face, Clark is far from idealising them and justifying their choices, leaving the assessment to the readers. Whether sympathising or veering towards poverty voyeurism, they become after-witnesses to the women’s struggles and a different kind of victimhood—not to the Ripper, but to the pervasive domestic and social precarities.

The complicated relationships between Katie and her daughter, Polly and her children, or Annie and her husband, may not excuse their decisions, but they all make it possible to see the emotions that informed them. Historical accounts prioritise facts over feelings, but it is “the emotional reality of the past” (Hadley 2010, p. 45) that animates characters and their stories. In the section that follows, I explore how complementing their stories with micro-moments of happiness allows readers to notice and appreciate the humanity of these women.

4. Everyday Joys

Defined by the postmortem facts, the five women seem to have led almost inaccessible lives. Their sorry but not uncommon stories, recreated on the basis of witness statements and journalistic enquiries are, as if by definition, incomplete, and overlooked because of the focus on the circumstances of their deaths. The first four were reduced to

women of middle age, [who] all were married and had lived apart from their husbands in consequence of intemperate habits, and were at the time of their death leading an irregular life, and eking out a miserable and precarious existence in common lodging houses. … not very particular about how they earned a living.

(Daily Telegraph qtd. in Walkowitz 1992, p. 200)

And yet, they were not only known in the area, but also “many were well liked” (ibid., p. 215). Their lives were “full of emotional content, conflict, and drama” (“Author’s Note—The Ripper’s London”, Clark 2017d, p. 8) but the emotional content would not be complete without love, contentment, pleasure, interest, or hope, and Clark punctuates the narratives with irregular but relevant moments of personal joy as well as pride of educational or professional accomplishments.

Relationships are such glimpses into the lighter side of existence. Not necessarily the first and usually not fully lawful, they are a source of emotional security and sexual pleasure. For Katie, meeting Conway is more than a mere opportunity for an escape from her abusive uncle and exploitative aunt. His openness, honesty, and genuine respect for her mean a lot to the girl deprived of warmth and kindness by the death of her mother and the consequential separation from her siblings. Elizabeth, whose sexual initiation was an immense disappointment, discovers with Edward that intercourse can be both tender and passionate, but it is with Jon that she experiences love and emotional safety. Polly and Bill’s brief courting is pleasant enough, as are the spells of marital congeniality, yet they cannot match what she is experiencing with Tom:

She noted that Tom didn’t treat her like a possession. With their first few meetings, although she enjoyed herself, she’d sensed something odd about the man, a peculiar twist to his outlook upon which she couldn’t quite put her finger. At present, she realized what had troubled her: He treated her like a friend. That was an unusual relationship for a man and woman, in her opinion, but one that she’d come to value greatly.

Despite her troubles, Polly was happier than at any other time in her life.

(A Brutal Chill in August, Clark [2016] 2019, p. 98)

Still bound to Bill, she believes Tom’s tenderness may have a positive effect on her marriage, making her a better wife and mother. Annie and John met largely because of their need for drink, yet one of the cornerstones of their marriage is a shared sense of humour. They enjoy each other not only during sex, but also as companions and she is happiest when they are on their own. Her decision to eventually leave him is made for his good since her drinking is affecting John’s relationship with his boss; sudden as it is, John does not turn his back on Annie but keeps supporting her financially until his death. Mary Jane is the only character who does not want to admit to being in love—neither to herself, nor to Joseph, which may stem from her cold upbringing and her profession, but also a sense of self-preservation. Once she does, she feels exposed as well as relieved because the feeling is reciprocated: “I am loved! Such a simple thing. How has that eluded me until know?” (The Prostitute’s Price, Clark 2018, p. 117). And it is not the scene of their passionate sex but that micro-moment of a comfortable silence in a pub, when both are “waking up with morning coffee, reading newspapers” (ibid., p. 131) that represents the pure ease of their relationship.

Parenthood is a more complicated aspect of the stories. Largely problematised through the economic situation, fathers’ absences and mothers’ ambitions or alcoholism, it also provides some comfort and hope. Whereas Annie is not thrilled by being “knapped”, John is so happy that “[h]e did a back flip, and walked on his hands, hooting and singing out, ‘I’ll be a father!’” (Apologies to the Cat’s Meat Man, Clark 2017a, p. 94). Although Katie’s relationship with her daughter is complicated by Katie’s drinking, she cares deeply for her when she is little and enjoys spending time with her. Conway wants both children to make a pecuniary contribution to the family as soon as possible, but Katie recognises the worth of the 1870 Education Act and wants them to use this opportunity for a better future: “If she’s to have a good life, she must have full education. … I will do whatever I have to do to make sure of that” (Of Thimble and Threat, Clark [2011] 2017, p. 68). Polly perceives her numerous pregnancies as obstacles, but when she realises one of them might be with Tom, her approach changes. As if by proxy, she takes care of the education of his teenage sister, taking real pride in her pupil’s progress in reading and writing as well as her enjoyment of the process: “Tom smiled. ‘My little sister, turned bookish. Look at your happy lamps’” (A Brutal Chill in August, Clark [2016] 2019, p. 104).2 All of the women in the series received some education: Katie managed to complete the basic stage before turning to full-time work for her aunt; Elizabeth expanded hers by learning English before coming to England; Polly was good at maths; Annie’s mother made sure she would “rest in the evening and devote her days to education so she’ll be intelligent enough to avoid marrying the likes of [her father]” (Apologies to the Cat’s Meat Man, Clark 2017a, p. 25); Mary Jane benefited from her work as a companion to a little girl with a disability by partaking in her home schooling and learning reading, writing, and maths, as well as elocution and etiquette, and when forced to work at the mill, would borrow copies of Dickens’s All the Year Round. Although such details may be a part of Clark’s writerly embellishments, several of the women did receive education: Polly attended school until she was fifteen, Annie attended a regimental school, and Kate a charity school (Rubenhold 2019, pp. 22, 94–96, 272).

The series also manages to demonstrate that before being remembered as barely surviving, the women worked and were good at their jobs. Katie’s talent as a singer is much appreciated by Conway, not just because it translated into an increased income from the selling of the death and murder ballads; moreover, her occasional contributions to the ballads themselves as an assistant writer enhanced her self-esteem. Elizabeth’s talent was for coffee-making, confirmed by the compliments from her father, one of her employers, her fellow servant, and eventually by Jon and the customers of the coffee-house they open together. Polly is not only quick to learn how to make prints and, thus, support the household income, but she is willing to experiment with their colouring; though punished for that by Bill, she is rewarded by a satisfied client. Annie is very good at lacework and makes antimacassars but cannot support herself solely on that. Mary Jane, who was able to secure for herself employment at a high-end brothel thanks to her education, had very good relationships with her madams and also trains a woman forced into soliciting in the ways of survival on the street; in 1888 she organises the girls into a ‘rumour mill’ to gather as much information about the murders as possible.

There are also glimpses into other moments of joy, usually connected with new experiences, such as Katie going by omnibus and train for the first time, or Elizabeth on her underground journey; there are pleasant memories and there are hopes for the future. The latter, usually appearing in the final pages, readers know to be unrealistic, but the characters cherish almost to the very end. As evidenced by the aforementioned examples, the stories we encounter are not completely bleak, and those micro-moments of joy, seemingly reserved for women of a different social class, enable readers to realise that hidden behind the constructed façade of deviance and degeneration is something more than the precarious existence—there are the lives of those women that were really lived.

5. “Any Resemblance … Is Entirely Coincidental”

While realist representation of Victorian London with its social divides and iniquities plays a key role in Clarke’s texts, the author conscientiously draws the line between fact and fiction. All the books of the series contain the following information:

This is a work of fiction. Although the novel is inspired by real historical events and actual human lives, the characters have been created for the sake of the story and are either products of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

(The copyrights page)

And yet, the novels are about the women murdered in the East End in 1888, their families and acquaintances, and the resemblance is far from coincidental. They were created to draw attention away from the killer and to the lives of those women. Moreover, the author’s notes to four out of five stories contain a disclaimer about the fictitiousness of the characters, which follows the same pattern:

This is a work of fiction inspired by the life of [name and surname], a woman believed to be the [ordinal number] victim of Jack the Ripper. For purposes of storytelling, I have not adhered strictly to her history […] I have assigned to my main character the emotional characteristics and reactions that seem consistent with her life and circumstances.

Arguably, as disingenuous as the disclaimer may seem, foregrounding fictionalisation allows Clark to espouse the humanity of his characters and juxtapose it with the callousness and indifference of the society in which they lived. All five novels are deeply rooted in historic detail and provide a commentary on the late-Victorian reality, but the notes additionally draw parallels between nineteenth- and twenty-first century lives, re-presenting and representing various social problems. It may challenge readers to confront their knowledge of inequities or prejudices present in both time periods with their fictional or media representations. Creative freedom may result in

a reassuring temporal remove, which conveniently renders impossible any actual intervention—beyond the purely symbolic and mnemonic compensatory functions of narrative—thereby absolving complacent readers of ant ethical obligations to take action, disconnecting the act of witnessing from subsequent political engagement.

(Kohlke and Gutleben 2010, p. 8)

Like many a neo-Victorian fiction engaging in a “tri-partite enquiry” into what happened, the way it is conveyed, and what we do with it (ibid.), Clark’s novels have the potential to affect the cultural memory of the figures they depict.

When she died, Catherine Eddowes was wearing so many layers of clothing not only to protect herself against the elements, but also because she had nowhere to keep them; this is also the reason why she carried so many items (over fifty)—things that Clark uses to title the chapters and to tell her story through them. This he represents alongside the situation of the contemporary homeless, making Catherine’s situation more palpable (“Author’s Note”, Clark 2017c, p. 8). In a similar vein, he pairs the negative outcomes of the Industrial Revolution and Victorian urbanisation to the Technological Revolution and American cities of today, putting a mirror to himself and the readers:

We find it easy to scorn the beggars on the streets and then project the disdain on all homeless people, further isolating them. As a result, the down and out are less likely to find help when in danger. If they are seriously harmed or killed, fewer people step forward to try to find what happened to them. Those who prey upon the homeless more easily get away with their crimes. The same was true for the down and out of Victorian London.

(“Author’s Note—The Ripper’s London”, Clark 2017d, p. 7)

This is the aforementioned “uncomfortable (and unforeseen) mirror-image” neo-Victorianism may project (Tomaiuolo 2018, p. 3), and similar reasoning is also at the forefront of Hallie Rubenhold’s nonfictional The Five.

Paratextually, the author’s notes both validate the texts as historical novels—genre identified by Clark himself (“Author’s Note—Historical Terror: Horror that Happened” Clark 2017b, p. 10)—and exude authenticity, a sense that the context he provides for the emotions, motivations, and decisions of the five women could be true (cf. Nilsson 2020). They also indicate a possibility of learning something from the lessons of the past. Such a didactic element is to be found in the dedications as well. Included in only two books—A Brutal Chill in August and Apologies to the Cat’s Meat Man—they address the victims and the readers:

For all the murder victims forgotten

in the excitement over the assholes who kill.

(Clark 2019, p. 7)

For those willing to put themselves in another’s

shoes, no matter how ragged the footwear.

(Clark 2017a, p. 7)

What makes them interesting is the way they intertwine the addresses and the criticism they contain. We are the ones who obsess about the killers and ignore the victims, we are the ones who are largely unwilling to sympathise with the have-nots. Drawing on the realities of the victims of 1888, Clark is trying to sensitise us to our reality.

The visual side of the books forms another significant, and more affective, paratextual aspect of the series. As a freelance illustrator, Clark specialises in fantasy, science fiction, horror, mystery, and historical fiction, and his works accompany the texts by, for example, Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, or Robert Bloch (Clark n.d.). He is responsible for the cover art and the interior images, which include both illustrations of selected passages and digital reworkings of four victims’ mortuary photographs; the excluded image is that of Mary Kelly, due to the extent of the mutilations of her body. Whereas the covers depict everyday situations, and the majority of illustrations zoom in on various details enhancing the realism of the stories, the modifications of the photographs create an eerie effect. Depending on the familiarity of a given reader with the postmortem images, they may seem more or less (un)real. The main modification involves the women’s eyes, which are open. Together with the angle, they place a reader/viewer in an awkward position: as an intruder rather than a bystander, a peeper rather than an observer—in other words, another silent witness to and a participant in the long history of gazing at the victims through the true crime lens. This, however, is not the main concern. If narratives themselves may raise questions on the ethics of appropriating historic lives (cf. Hadley 2010, p. 41), these modifications raise additional, rather rhetorical, questions: Is pretending that these are not post-mortem photographs a fair practice of representation? Can an attempt at bringing life to an image of someone who is dead be interpreted as obliterating the fact of death? These counterfactual palimpsestuous images go beyond transplanting the photographs from their customary context (cf. Flint 2017). Based on real post-mortem images, they, paradoxically perhaps, introduce greater ambiguity about restoring justice to the victims than the biofictional accounts of their lives.

The images illustrating particular passages of the novels depict a wide spectrum of the five women’s lives. There is little Catherine and her mother looking at London’s rooftops as well as the adult one’s hand reaching for the bottle of gin hidden behind a baseboard (Of Thimble and Threat, Clark [2011] 2017, pp. 10, 76); there is Elizabeth with her partner’s fist on her face, but also a close-up of her husband’s work-worn hand held tight in both of hers (Say Anything but Your Prayers, Clark [2014] 2017, pp. 115, 146); there is Mr Macklin, the Bonehill Ghost, haunting Mary Ann since she started drinking as a child and continuing to do so when she was middle-aged (A Brutal Chill in August, Clark [2016] 2019, pp. 81, 163); there is Annie’s delirium tremens hallucination as well as her holding the hand of her younger self moments before her death (Apologies to the Cat’s Meat Man, Clark 2017a, pp. 122, 152); and there is Mary, looking towards the jewels she stole and then towards a man putting coins into her hand (The Prostitute’s Price, Clark 2018, pp. 30, 201). Throughout the novels, they reveal various micro-moments—some lasting a few minutes, others only a split second—and make the women more visible, more tangible, and real.

Closing the paratextual overview of the series, I would like to mention the back cover information. Apart from the elements that, at least to some extent, contradict the copyright pages’ statement about entirely coincidental resemblance to actual events—the “Horror that happened/Based on a True Story” stamp with a red print of a hand in the middle repeated from the front cover, or a caption stating that “The outrageous is all the more extraordinary when we know it actually occurred”—there are endorsements and reviews. The former include praise from, for example, Elizabeth Engstrom or Simon Clark, and the latter an excerpt from Ripperologist, a journal dedicated to Jack the Ripper, East End, and Victorian studies. The selected passage addresses the question of the genre of the novel about the first canonical victim saying: “it’s not strictly a biographical novel” but a work “inspired” by her life, combining fact and fiction, which allows Clark to “create a ‘voice’ for Polly that is both original and appropriate and faithful to the spirit of the times” (back cover of A Brutal Chill in August; emphasis added). We could call it biofiction, even though Clark does not comply with Michael Lackey’s description of biofiction authors who “are more interested in contemporary social critique than accurate representation of the historical past, they alter biographical facts in order to illustrate how lives of people from the past can be used to illuminate cultural sickness in the present” (Lackey [2002] 2022, p. 84). As evidenced by his notes, Clark manages to marry both. In the journal itself, David Green calls the novel “in part a lament and a commemoration of Polly’s life, and in part an attempt to explore the world in which she grew up and struggled to survive”, praising its period detail—“from the smell of pickled whelks and horse manure in the streets to execution broadsides and divorce law reform”—and not falling for clichés (Green 2016, pp. 92, 93). The reviewer also brings to the fore “Demon Drink”, “marital violence”, “dead-end jobs”, and “fall into street prostitution” (ibid., p. 93)—overlapping four out of five transgressions and iniquities discussed here, which, together with homelessness, feature prominently in the whole series.

Clark’s pronouncements of fictionality do not make his storytelling or its visual representations less authentic. The “perceived authenticity” stemming from the “quality of historical detail” is present also in historical accounts (Weiser 2017, p. 110), and the Jack the Ripper Victims Series’ representation of the lives of those women may contribute to the reassessment of not only the past but also attitudes towards the homeless of today.

6. Embracing Lives

Clark’s series is an attempt to answer the questions that have no “solid answers”:

What events in the lives of the five Jack the Ripper victims led to their demise on the streets of London? How much of the way they lived was a result of the choices they made? What was beyond their control? Were they chosen at random by the killer, or did he choose them because he knew that fewer people would step forward to find out what happened to them?

(“Author’s Note—The Ripper’s London”, Clark 2017d, p. 7)

While his answers seem ‘true’ as far the harsh realities of nineteenth-century London are concerned, they are also distorting the late-Victorian discourse on the women that dominated the narrative of the Whitechapel murders. Clark realistically represents (creates a portrayal of) their lives but also re-presents (makes present) them by referring to the complex realities of early twenty-first century. Addictions, domestic violence, unemployment, and homelessness form a part of our reality as well, as are the moral superiority towards and economic exploitation of sex work. Perceiving these women as victims of social injustices and iniquities as well as the Whitechapel murderer’s is still perceiving them as victims. Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five (2019) keeps shifting the mainstream perception, but also replaces one culprit—the mythical Jack the Ripper—with another—misogyny; the book was described as “devastatingly scrupulous” but also as “profoundly sad” (Cooke 2019). Alan M. Clark’s Jack the Ripper Victims Series (2011–2018) went largely unnoticed and various reasons for that could be given, yet it also shows a considerable potential for transforming the memory of the victims. Fictionalisations may not offer such a quick change in current discourse as non-fictional accounts, but they gain in importance by enabling us to become witnesses to the women’s lives for a few hours. Examining fictional representation, the readers may appreciate the reimagined lives not only as another rewriting, but also as a form of re-righting (Zabus 2001; cf. Hadley 2010, p. 28).

The main themes that emerged in my analysis of the series, apart from the five (un)canonical crimes, were the micro-moments of joy and the exploration of the relationship between authenticity and representation. What Weiser calls a “creative confrontation of the past” and “speculative constructions of the past” are often juxtaposed with “the trap of accuracy”: factuality versus speculation, truthfulness versus fictive invention, objectivity versus partiality (Weiser 2017, pp. 111, 114–15). In the series, as I hope to have shown, fictional but realistic depictions create the space for the women’s attempts at surviving the social and economic environment of the late-Victorian London, which seems more relevant than actual history, despite the novels’ share of historic detail. Such detail is also deeply rooted in Ripperature, though its axis remains the mystery surrounding the identity of the killer. Replacing the sensational language of Ripperature with more mundane and dispassionate descriptions brings to the fore the lived experiences of everyday people. This is significant, because the mundane is real, as are the micro-moments of joy that Katie, Elizabeth, Polly, Annie, and Mary Jane also experienced.