The Reply

Annie Chapman married a Gentleman's Coachman. He worked managing the stables at St. Leonard's Hill, a large estate and manor house in Windsor.

Annie suffered from alcoholism and spent time in a Spelthorne Sanatorium, a facility for the treatment of middle-class women with drinking problems. She recovered for a time, but a kiss from her husband who had whiskey on his lips made her fall off the wagon once more, settling off a chain reaction and descent into alcoholism, estrangement and rough living. 

Mary Ann (Polly) Nichols,  and her family were among the first tenants of the charity-run Peabody Buildings set up to provide modern social housing. They moved into their new home on Stamford Street in Lambeth in 1876. Tenants were required to ensure properties were clean and well kept, along with maintaining correct moral behaviour.

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It was here that her husband began an affair with their neighbour and Polly made the pivotal decision to leave this home. She ended up between the workhouse and tramping in places like Trafalgar Square. 

Catherine Eddowes was described as lively and intelligent, and was chosen out of her siblings to receive an education where she also learnt music. 

Later in life she went to live with her uncle, who was a pugilist (bare-knuckle fighter) at the Peacock Inn in Wolverhampton. She met her lover, who was a chapman. They moved from town to town hawking goods, including printed material such as poems and ballads. Kate helped pen some such, including a ballad written for the public hanging of one of her relatives outside Stafford Gaol. She would sing in these streets to attract punters. 

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Catherine had her lover's initials tattooed in blue ink on her arm, an ambivalent, outsider act for women at the time, although tattooing had become a craze in Victorian England. Catherine and her partner's relationship later broke down violently. 

Mary Jane Kelly's story was somewhat of a mystery. Her background is unclear, but it's known that she worked as a prostitute in London's West End. It is possible that she was betrayed by her London landlady and tricked into being sex trafficked in France, and escaped. She returned to St. Katherine's dock and settled on the nearby notorious Ratcliff Highway, unable to return where she was known in the West End, and perhaps also pursued. 

She was described variously as 'a terror' with a dark temper, and a charming, pleasant woman neatly dress but wearing 'no hat' (a trope of sex workers). 

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While living in the East End, Mary Jane  "made no secret' about her previous adventures, and regaled her companions with tales of how she drove about in carriages, and 'led a life...of a lady', and even boasted that she had been to Paris." (Rubenhold, p327). 

Another landlord described her as "an excellent scholar and an artist of no mean degree." 

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Elizabeth Stride came from Sweden. She was offered the opportunity to work in domestic service in London. She married a ship's carpenter. They opened a coffee shop in Poplar, East London.

After her marriage had broken down and her business folded, Elizabeth began to tell the story that her husband and children had died in the Princess Alice disaster of 1878, when a passenger paddle steamer sunk in the Thames killing between 600 and 700 people. 

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Liz  claimed to have also been aboard and survived by escaping from within one of the ships funnels,  grabbing hold of a rope that had been dropped down. There was no evidence that this was true, and she may have made it up to gain charity, as she invented more stories about her identity later in life. 

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Precarious living circumstances and homelessness pervaded these women's lives. Some spent time in the Victorian workhouses, where women paid for bed and board by the labour of picking oakum, a kind of rope that was used in ship building.