Shadows of Whitechapel: Mary Jane Kelly, The Last Light in Dorset Street

Mary Jane Kelly © public domain

Everyone knows the terror that ripped through the East End, in 1888, but many forget the victims and who they were: Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly. Each of these women was a living, breathing person with a unique history and story.

Here I have tried to piece together the lives of the women who would go on to become known as 'The Canonical Five', resulting in a small glimpse into their lives. There is much that I have left out, but what I believe to be the important pieces of their lives are here.

Obviously, with census records, online records, books, newspaper articles, archives and much more, there are discrepancies and contradictory accounts, resulting in confusing timelines.

So, where there has been contradictory information, I have left that out, or bracketed the information, so that I could create the most accurate account of their lives.

If you do spot an error, please do get in contact.

Mary Jane Kelly (circa 1863 – November 9, 1888)

The Glamour of the West End

Of all the women caught in the Whitechapel horrors, Mary Jane Kelly remains the most elusive, her early life shielded by a dense fog of self-invention. According to the stories she shared with her lovers and friends, she was born in Limerick, Ireland, around 1863. While she was still an infant, her family reportedly relocated to the coal-mining districts of Wales, where her father, John Kelly, found work as a iron foundry foreman. Mary Jane was said to be highly educated, artistic, and fluent in Welsh.

Around 1879, she married a young coal miner named Davies, but he was tragically killed in a catastrophic mine explosion just two or three years later. Left a teenage widow with no safety net, Mary Jane moved to Cardiff, where she entered the sex trade.

Around 1884, she arrived in London, where her striking beauty, she was tall, plump, with excellent features and a thick mane of dark ginger hair, caught the attention of a high-class West End brothel madam. This period represented the absolute height of Mary Jane's material life. Dressed in fine silk dresses, riding in expensive horse-drawn carriages, and passing herself off as "Marie Jeanette," she catered exclusively to wealthy, aristocratic gentlemen. She even accompanied one wealthy client to Paris, but she quickly grew homesick for the familiar, raucous energy of London's streets and returned within a few months.

The Fall to Spitalfields

The transition from the opulent brothels of the West End to the brutal realities of the East End occurred with terrifying speed. Whether driven by a growing dependency on alcohol or a desire to escape the rigid control of her madams, Mary Jane drifted eastward into the cheap lodging houses of Ratcliffe Highway and Spitalfields.

On Good Friday of 1887, while drinking in the Commercial Tavern, she met Joseph Barnett, a hard-working fish porter at Billingsgate Market. The attraction was instantaneous. The couple moved in together, eventually renting a tiny, drafty ground-floor room known as Room 13, inside Miller’s Court, a narrow alleyway directly off Hanbury Street. Barnett was deeply devoted to Mary Jane, and for a time, his steady income allowed her to step away from the streets completely. They lived a quiet, relatively comfortable life in their small room, which Mary Jane kept meticulously clean.

However, by the summer of 1888, the Billingsgate fish market faced severe economic disruptions, and Barnett lost his steady job. With rent falling into arrears and hunger knocking at the door, Mary Jane made the desperate decision to return to the streets to pay for their room. Barnett, deeply distressed by this development and frustrated by the crowded, noisy sex workers Mary Jane allowed to shelter in their room, packed his bags and moved out on October 30, though he continued to visit her daily and give her whatever money he could scrape together.

The Closed Door of Room 13

© public domain

On the evening of Thursday, November 8, 1888, Mary Jane was seen drinking with friends in the Britannia public house. She returned to Miller’s Court around midnight accompanied by a man. Her neighbour, Mary Ann Cox, heard Mary Jane singing the popular Irish ballad "A Violet from Mother’s Grave" echoing beautifully from behind the closed door of Room 13 well into the early hours of the morning.

At 2:00 a.m. on Friday, November 9, another acquaintance spotted her talking to a well-dressed man carrying a small black bag on Commercial Street. By 3:00 a.m., the light from her tiny window showed she was alone inside her room. At around 4:00 a.m., two separate neighbours heard a faint, solitary cry of "Oh, murder!" cut through the quiet alleyway, but such cries were so common in the Spitalfields slums that no one rose to investigate.

At 11:45 a.m. that morning, the lodging house landlord sent his assistant, Thomas Bowyer, to collect the overdue rent. Knocks to the door went unanswered. Bowyer reached his hand through a broken window pane, pushed aside a ragged coat serving as a curtain, and looked inside. The horrific scene inside Room 13 shocked the world; Mary Jane Kelly had been brutally murdered in her own bed. 

On Monday, November 19, 1888, her funeral procession was met by thousands of weeping East Enders who crowded the streets to pay their respects as her coffin was carried to St Patrick’s Roman Catholic Cemetery in Leytonstone, bringing a tragic, permanent close to the autumn of terror.