#kate eddowes

[victorianwhitechapel]

Catherine Eddowes' clothes and possessions

At the time of her murder, Catherine was wearing:

- A black straw bonnet trimmed in green and black velvet with black beads and black strings, worn tied to the head.

- A black cloth jacket trimmed around the collar and cuffs with imitation fur, and around the pockets in black silk braid and fur, with large metal buttons.

- A dark green chintz skirt patterned with Michaelmas daisies ans golden lilies, with 3 flounces, and brown button on waistband. 

- A man’s white vest, matching buttons down front.

- A brown linsey bodice, black velvet collar with brown buttons down front.

- A grey stuff petticoat with white waistband.

- A very old green alpaca skirt (worn as undergarment).

- A very old ragged blue skirt with red flounces, light twill lining (worn as undergarment).

- A white calico chemise.

- A pair of men’s lace up boots, mohair laces. Right boot repaired with red thread.

- A piece of red gauze silk worn as a neckerchief.

- A large white pocket handkerchief.

- A large white cotton handkerchief with red and white bird’s eye border.

- Two unbleached calico pockets with tape strings.

- A blue stripe bed ticking pocket.

- A brown ribbed knee stockings, darned at the feet with white cotton.

She also had: 

2 small blue bags made of bed ticking.

2 short black clay pipes.

1 tin box containing tea.

1 tin box containing sugar.

1 tin matchbox, empty.

12 pieces white rag, some slightly bloodstained.

1 piece coarse linen, white.

1 piece of blue and white shirting, 3 cornered.

1 piece red flannel with pins and needles.

6 pieces soap.

1 small tooth comb.

1 white handle table knife.

1 metal teaspoon.

1 red leather cigarette case with white metal fittings.

1 ball hemp.

1 piece of old white apron with repair.

Several buttons and a thimble.

Mustard tin containing two pawn tickets, one in the name of Emily Birrell, 52 White's Row, dated August 31, 9d for a man's flannel shirt. The other is in the name of Jane Kelly of 6 Dorset Street and dated September 28, 2S for a pair of men's boots (both addresses are false.)

Printed handbill and according to a press report- a printed card for 'Frank Carter, 305 Bethnal Green Road.

Portion of a pair of spectacles.

1 red mitten.

Gone but not forgotten. May she rest in peace. 🌺

[victorianwhitechapel]

Carnival Row

Carnival Row is an American neo-noir fantasy web television series created by René Echevarria and Travis Beacham that premiered on Amazon Prime Video on August 30, 2019, and it is based in a film script written in 2005 by Beacham. 

Carnival Row follows "mythical creatures who have fled their war-torn homeland and gathered in the city as tensions are simmering between citizens and the growing immigrant population." At the center of the drama is the investigation into a string of unsolved murders, madness of power, unresolved love, and social adjustments eating away at whatever uneasy peace exists.

The police inspector Rycroft "Philo" Philostrate (Orlando Bloom) stands in contrast to the world at large and the murders he has to solve, which in the original 2005 script their victims were all faerie sex workers killed in ghastly ways. The perpetrator was soon named "Unseelie Jack," likely a reference to the 1880s serial killer Jack the Ripper, who is widely but wrongly believed that similarly targeted only female sex workers. 

In the second episode, titled "Aisling", Rycroft  investigates the murder of a mysterious fae, Aisling Querelle (Erika Stárková, pictured above).

When we watched it, our first thought was Catherine Eddowes, looking at the way she was lying on the floor, disemboweled like this, and the character was a woman who's life went downhill and ended up in poverty, just like Kate’s (picture below).

[The sketch of Catherine Eddowes' body, as found in London's Mitre Square in 1888, drawn by Frederick William Foster, the City surveyor.]

We wondered if this was a kind of rememberance to these poor women who ended up living in poverty and were killed in that brutal way. In the series the killer is caught, we only wish in real life it really happened as well, in order to make justice to these poor women who didn’t deserve ending the way they did.

Partial source.

[victorianwhitechapel]

On the night that Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes were murdered, there was, at least, another murder. It took place at Westminster, some 4 miles away from Whitechapel, where Sarah Brown was murdered at home by her husband John Bown at around the time of the Stride murder (prior 1:00am, where her body was found). The husband handed himself in at the nearest police station, informed the police of his crime, at the same time surrendering to them the weapon with which he'd cut his wife's throat. 

Above there is The Times report. Below, there's another report:

The information comes from Casebook Forums. They do not say when these news were published or the second newspaper’s name!

[victorianwhitechapel]

The Five. 

The Untold Lives of the Women killed by Jack the Ripper/The Lives of Jack The Ripper's Women

By Hallie Rubenhold (2019)

Five devastating human stories and a dark and moving portrait of Victorian London—the untold lives of the women killed by Jack the Ripper. Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary-Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. They came from Fleet Street, Knightsbridge, Wolverhampton, Sweden, and Wales. They wrote ballads, ran coffee houses, lived on country estates, they breathed ink-dust from printing presses and escaped people-traffickers. What they had in common was the year of their murders: 1888. The person responsible was never identified, but the character created by the press to fill that gap has become far more famous than any of these five women. For more than a century, newspapers have been keen to tell us that "the Ripper" preyed on prostitutes. Not only is this untrue, as historian Hallie Rubenhold has discovered, it has prevented the real stories of these fascinating women from being told. Now, in this devastating narrative of five lives, Rubenhold finally sets the record straight, revealing a world not just of Dickens and Queen Victoria, but of poverty, homelessness and rampant misogyny. They died because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time—but their greatest misfortune was to be born a woman.

Get your copy here

[victorianwhitechapel]

Jack the Ripper. Blood Lines

By Anthony J. Randall (2013)

Anthony J Randall looks at the canonical victims of Jack the Ripper (Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Kelly) and investigates the family background of their paternal and maternal lines. Perhaps their histories reveal the origins of their destiny. Perhaps their family backgrounds hold the seeds to the paths they trod. In this searching investigation many birth, marriage and death certificates, and over two hundred census returns, have been transcribed and presented. 

This book examines the history and genealogy of the 'canonical' victims to guide the reader from the industrial centres of Staffordshire, the wide marshes of Sussex and the woodlands of the Forest of Dean to the east end of London and the deprivation of Whitechapel.

[victorianwhitechapel]

By Ear and Eyes: The Whitechapel Murders, Jack the Ripper and the Murder of Mary Jane Kelly

By Karyo Magellan (2005)

When Joseph Barnett gave evidence at the inquest into the murder of Mary Jane Kelly he told the coroner that he had seen the body of his common law wife and he identified her ‘by the ear and eyes’. Such was the extent to which Mary Jane Kelly’s body had been mutilated that the man with whom she had lived for the better part of two years described her only recognisable features. Mary Jane Kelly was murdered in 13 Miller’s Court, Whitechapel on the morning of 9 November 1888 and the police photographs of the crime scene have come to epitomise the ferocity of several murders committed in the same area during the autumn of that year. The series was regarded as the work of a serial killer known as Jack the Ripper and popular belief suggests that five prostitutes (Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes) died by the knife of the same killer, Mary Jane Kelly being the final victim. This book is a meticulous and objective examination of each of these murders and of several others that formed the Whitechapel series and comes to rather different conclusions.

Magellan provides an in-depth analysis of each Ripper murder, based almost exclusively on the medical and inquest evidence. In his analysis, Magellan removes Mary Kelly from the list of Ripper victims (he believes she was killed by an opportunistic copycat), and adds Mackenzie (1889) and Coles (1891), suggesting there were strong similarities in the modus operandi which connect the latter two victims with Nichols, Chapman, Stride and Eddowes.

From there, Magellan continues onward to examine (and dismiss) a handful of suspects - Druitt, Kosminski, Ostrog, Tumblety, Klosowski and Sickert. He also offers a critical re-examination of the Macnaghten memoranda, suggesting that the document was heavily flawed and largely responsible for misleading modern-day scholars into believing the "myth" of the canonical five victims.

By Ears and Eyes reads at times more like a doctoral dissertation than a traditional Ripper book. It is certainly not intended for the novice Ripperologist. Although some of his conclusions may be difficult for modern-day students of the case to accept, it is nevertheless refreshing to read such a thorough re-examination of the case. Recommended

Get your copy here

[victorianwhitechapel]

The Hidden Lives of Jack The Ripper's Victims

By Robert Hume (2019)

Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly are inextricably linked in history. Their names might not be instantly recognisable, and the identity of their murderer may have eluded detectives and historians throughout the years, but there is no mistaking the infamy of Jack the Ripper. For nine weeks during the autumn of 1888, the Whitechapel Murderer brought terror to London’s East End, slashing women’s throats and disembowelling them. 

London’s most famous serial killer has been pored over time and again, yet his victims have been sorely neglected, reduced to the simple label: prostitute. The lives of these five women are rags-to-riches-to-rags stories of the most tragic kind. There was a time in each of their lives when these poor women had a job, money, a home and a family. Hardworking, determined and fiercely independent individuals, it was bad luck, or a wrong turn here or there, that left them wretched and destitute. Ignored by the press and overlooked by historians, it is time their stories were told.

[victorianwhitechapel]

Elizabeth Stride and Jack The Ripper

By Dave Yost (2008)

As soon as the newspapers hit the streets on October 1, 1888, Elizabeth Stride became world renowned as the third victim of Jack the Ripper. Reportedly, Stride was killed only an hour before fellow victim Catherine Eddowes, becoming a key player in the legendary "double event" of Jack the Ripper's brief but notorious killing career. 

This book tells the complete life story of Elisabeth Gustafsdotter, beginning with her birth in Sweden during the winter of 1843. The author describes Stride's reported "habitual drunkenness," her brief career as a prostitute, and the public aftermath of her untimely death. Period photos and sketches are included throughout the work, along with several appendices and an index.

Get your copy here