{"id":1010,"date":"2020-04-08T13:28:02","date_gmt":"2020-04-08T20:28:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/genealogy.thundermoon.us\/blog\/?p=1010"},"modified":"2020-04-23T12:32:10","modified_gmt":"2020-04-23T19:32:10","slug":"jack-the-ripper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/genealogy.thundermoon.us\/blog\/2020\/04\/08\/jack-the-ripper\/","title":{"rendered":"Jack the Ripper"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jack the Ripper<\/h4>\r\nThe infamous Jack the Ripper was a contemporary of our great-grandmother Sarah Hutchings.\r\n\r\nJack\u2019s bloody rampage occurred in the autumn of 1888 in London\u2019s East End. At the time Sarah was 28 years old, an unmarried working class mother who was also living in the East End.\r\n\r\nResearch into Sarah\u2019s life logically invites a look at the story of this famous criminal\u2019s spree \u2014 if for no other reason than to get a glimpse into conditions in this sector of London in the late Victorian age.\r\n\r\nSo it was that I picked up the critically acclaimed book about the Ripper\u2019s victims, The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed By Jack the Ripper<\/em> by Hallie Rubenhold. The book examines the lives of the five working class victims, how they grew up, how social conditions affected them and other women of their era, and how their individual circumstances brought them to the impoverished East End.\r\n\r\n\"\"<\/a>\r\n\r\nTheir stories provide some insights into Sarah Hutchings\u2019 world as well. Ms. Rubenhold exposes the moral double standards applied to women vs. men, the living conditions in public housing, the difficulties of poverty, and in general the challenges of being a unprivileged woman in Victorian London. The book is a sad, but recommended, read.\r\n\r\n
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The book has another, though indirect, connection to Sarah Hutchings.\r\nA leading newspaper’s interview with the book\u2019s author was written by Sian Cain, who currently lives in the flat that Sarah Hutchings occupied in 1891. The interview is at The Guardian<\/a> newspaper’s web site.<\/em><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n

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Sarah Hutchings<\/h4>\r\nAs mentioned in an earlier post, an Estall family historian believes Sarah Hutchings was a prostitute \u2014 a suspicion based on the fact that she had three children out of wedlock to unnamed fathers while frequently changing residences in London\u2019s impoverished East End.\r\n\r\nAfter reading The Five<\/em>, I came to realize that Sarah was indeed a prostitute, or at least considered one by many people of her era. Here\u2019s a passage from The Five:<\/em>\r\n\r\n\u00a0 \u00a0 “From the introduction of the Contagious Diseases Acts in the 1860s through the period of the Whitechapel murders, very few authorities, including the Metropolitan Police, could agree as to what exactly constituted a ‘prostitute’<\/mark> and how she might be identified. Was a prostitute simply a woman like Mary Jane Kelly who earned her income solely through the sex trade and who self-identified as part of this profession, or could the term <\/em>prostitute be more broadly defined? Was a prostitute a woman who accepted a drink from a man who then accompanied her to a lodging house, paid for a bed, had sex with her, and stayed the night? \u2026 A woman who had sex for money twice over the course of a week, before finding work in a laundry and meeting a man whom she decided to live with out of wedlock? \u2026 A young factory worker who had sex with the boys who courted her and bought her gifts? \u2026 A woman with three children by three different fathers<\/mark> who lived with a man simply because he kept a roof over their heads?<\/em>\r\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 “Some of these women might be classed as professional or \u201ccommon prostitutes,’ while others might be called \u201ccasual prostitutes’ or just women who, in accordance with the social norms of their community, had sex outside of wedlock<\/mark>. But as the Metropolitan Police came to recognize, the lines separating these groups were often so blurred that it was impossible to distinguish between them.\u201d1<\/sup><\/em>\r\n\r\nAnother author, Judith Flanders (The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens\u2019 London<\/em>), clarifies that\r\n\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0 “the word \u2018prostitute\u2019 was not used entirely the way we would use it today, i.e. to refer only to women who sold their bodies for sex. In the 19th century, many people used it more widely, to refer to women who were living with men outside marriage, or women who had had illegitimate children<\/mark>, or women who perhaps had relations with men, but for pleasure rather than money.”2<\/sup><\/em>\r\n\r\nUnder Victorian mores and definitions, then, it would seem that Sarah Hutchings was a prostitute, though there is no evidence (for example, a criminal record) clarifying whether a professional or moral one.\r\n

A Difficult Life<\/h4>\r\nSarah worked at various times as a barmaid, a stay former [corset maker], a machinist [sewing machine operator], and a fur sewer. These were low paying occupations, though the last three seamstress-type jobs may have allowed her to work from home while caring for her children.\r\n\r\n
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Copy of birth registration showing Sarah’s occupation in 1889. Click on image to enlarge.<\/small><\/center><\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n\r\nGeorge Rosen’s essay, \u201cDisease, Debility, and Death,\u201d from the book The Victorian City: Images and Realities, <\/i>addresses the vulnerability of women holding jobs like Sarah’s:\r\n\r\n
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Stitch! Stitch! Stitch!\u00a0 by John Millais, 1876<\/small><\/center><\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n\r\n “The precarious economic situation of women workers, based on low wages, was depressed even further in some trades by seasonal unemployment, particularly in those connection with fashion and dress. Barmaids<\/mark> provided another large contingent of prostitutes, while still others were recruited from among seamstresses<\/mark>, laundresses, charwomen, and factory workers.\u201d3<\/sup><\/i>\r\n\r\nSarah also had three children to single-handedly feed, clothe, and attend to while working long hours and making wages likely insufficient to support herself. As explained in Revisiting Dickens<\/em>,\r\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 “Neither form of seamstress [individual or dressmaker\u2019s employee] would have earned enough on a regular basis to feed her family. Most couldn\u2019t feed themselves, let alone their children<\/mark>.\u201d4<\/sup><\/i>\r\n

Saved by the Ripper?<\/h4>\r\nAs I read these stories and related them to Sarah\u2019s experiences, a question arose:\u00a0 was Sarah aware of the the widely reported crimes of Jack the Ripper and if so, how did those gruesome articles affect her?\r\n\r\nJack\u2019s murderous spree covered the period from August through November 1888 when he attacked and eviscerated five women. Newspapers at the time covered the murders in bold headlines and graphic drawings. There could hardly have been anyone in London\u2019s East End who wasn\u2019t spooked by the specter of a butchering madman stalking prostitutes.\r\n\r\n
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The Illustrated Police News of 13 October 1888 from the British Library. Click to enlarge.<\/small><\/center><\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n\r\nBut it wasn’t just prostitutes Jack victimized. One of the insights in The Five<\/em> is that Jack the Ripper didn\u2019t appear to be targeting prostitutes per se \u2014 Ms. Rubenhold makes the case that three of the five Ripper victims weren\u2019t prostitutes at all. She also points out that there were no signs of struggle or yelling for help, indicating the victims were probably asleep at the time of the attacks. The commonality, then, was that his victims were poor working class women generally sleeping rough (outdoors) on city streets or alleyways easily accessible to attack.\r\n\r\nSarah conceived her last illegitimate child in October, 1888, shortly after a double Ripper homicide. It\u2019s fair to wonder if the Jack the Ripper headlines made her question her safety. There is no way of knowing what stopped her string of illegitimate births \u2014 fear of attack, growing maturity, falling in love, a desire for financial stability \u2014 but we know that after her third illegitimate child she began a long-term relationship with a man she would marry in 1891, William Estall.\r\n\r\nThough there are many unanswered questions, one thing can be said for certain. Jack the Ripper proved to women of his time that it\u2019s better to lose your heart to a lover than it is to a madman.\r\n\r\nAnd his crimes may,\u00a0 just may,\u00a0 have convinced Sarah to take a different path in life.\r\n\r\n
\r\n\r\nSources:\r\n\r\n1. Hallie Rubenhold, The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper<\/i>, (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019), p 290.<\/small>\r\n\r\n2.\u00a0Judith Flanders, \u201cProstitution,\u201d British Library: Discovering Literature: Romantics & Victorians, https:\/\/www.bl.uk\/romantics-and-victorians\/articles\/prostitution<\/a>.<\/small>\r\n\r\n3. George Rosen, \u201cDisease, Debility, and Death,\u201d from The Victorian City: Images and Realities<\/i>, edited by H. J. Dyos and Michael Wolff, (London: Routledge Degan and Paul, Ltd., 1973), 657.<\/small>\r\n\r\n4. Revisiting Dickens, \u201cProstitution in Victorian England \u2014 Presentation Page,\u201d https:\/\/revisitingdickens.wordpress.com\/prostitution-victorian\/<\/a><\/small>\r\n\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jack the Ripper The infamous Jack the Ripper was a contemporary of our great-grandmother Sarah Hutchings. Jack\u2019s bloody rampage occurred in the autumn of 1888 in London\u2019s East End. At the time Sarah was 28 years old, an unmarried working class mother who was also living in the East End. Research into Sarah\u2019s life logically … <\/p>\n

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