1 October 1888, St. Jude’s Vicarage.
Early the next morning the fog lay so thick about the vicarage that the street gaslights were still on. They performed their usual efficient function of lighting the tops of the poles; looking down from our bedroom window, I could not see the street below.
Following our morning reading from the Scriptures, Edward called my attention to an additional passage. “Since you are aware of what the Ripper does to his victims, Beatrice, it will be to your benefit to hear this. Attend. ‘Let the breast be torn open and the heart and vitals be taken from hence and thrown over the shoulder.’”
A moment of nausea overtook me. “The same way Annie Chapman and the others were killed.”
“Exactly,” Edward said with a hint of triumph in his voice. “Those are Solomon’s words, ordering the execution of three murderers. I wonder if anyone has pointed this passage out to Inspector Abberline? It could be of assistance in ascertaining the rationale behind these murders, perhaps revealing something of the killer’s mental disposition…” He continued in this speculative vein for a while longer.
I was folding linen as I listened. When he paused for breath, I asked Edward about his chambray shirt. “I’ve not seen it these two weeks.”
“Eh? It will turn up. I’m certain you have put it away somewhere.”
I was equally certain I had not. Then, with some trepidation, I re-introduced the subject of our disagreement the night before. “Edward, would you be willing to reconsider your position concerning charitable donations? If parishioners can’t turn to their church for help—”
“Allow me to interrupt you, my dear,” he said. “I am convinced that suffering cannot be reduced by indiscriminately passing out money but only through the realistic appraisal of each man’s problems. So long as the lower classes depend upon charity to see them through hard times, they will never learn thrift and the most propi-tious manner of spending what money they have.”
Edward’s “realistic appraisal” of individual problems always ended the same way, with little lectures on how to economize. “But surely in cases of extreme hardship,” I said, “a small donation would not be detrimental to their future well-being.”
“Ah, but how are we to determine who are those in true need?
They will tell any lie to get their hands on a few coins which they promptly spend on hard drink. And then they threaten us when those coins are not forthcoming! This is the legacy my predecessor at St. Jude’s has left us, this expectancy that the church owes them charity!”
That was true; the vicarage had been stoned more than once when Edward had turned petitioners away. “But the children, Edward — surely we can help the children! They are not to blame for their parents’ wastrel ways.”
Edward sat down next to me and took my hand. “You have a soft heart and a generous nature, Beatrice, and I venerate those qualities in you. Your natural instinct for charity is one of your most admirable traits.” He smiled sadly. “Nevertheless, how will these poor, desperate creatures ever learn to care for their own children if we do it for them? And there is this. Has it not occurred to you that God may be testing us? How simple it would be, to hand out a few coins and convince ourselves we have done our Christian duty! No, Beatrice, God is asking more of us than that. We must hold firm in our resolve.”
I acquiesced, seeing no chance of prevailing against such unshakable certitude that God’s will was dictating our course of action.
Furthermore, Edward Wickham was my husband and I owed him obedience, even when my heart was troubled and filled with uncertainty. It was his decision to make, not mine.
“Do not expect me until tea time,” Edward said as he rose and went to fetch his greatcoat. “Mr. Lusk has asked me to attend a meeting of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, and I then have my regular calls to make. Best you not go out today, my dear, at least until Inspector Abberline has these riots under control.” Edward’s duties were keeping him away from the vicarage more and more. He sometimes would return in the early hours of the morning, melancholy and exhausted from trying to help a man find night work or from locating shelter for a homeless widow and her children.
At times he seemed not to remember where he’d been; I was concerned for his health and his spirit.
The fog was beginning to lift by the time he departed, but I still could not see very far — except in my mind’s eye. If one were to proceed down Commercial Street and then follow Aldgate to Lead-enhall and Cornhill on to the point where six roads meet at a statue of the Duke of Wellington, one would find onself in front of the imposing Royal Exchange, its rich interior murals and Turkish floor paving a proper setting for the transactions undertaken there. Across Threadneedle Street, the Bank of England, with its windowless lower stories, and the rocklike Stock Exchange both raise their impressive façades. Then one could turn to the opposite direction and behold several other banking establishments clustered around Mansion House, the Lord Mayor’s residence. It still dumbfounds me to realize that the wealth of the nation is concentrated there, in so small an area…all within walking distance of the worst slums in the nation.
Do wealthy bankers ever spare a thought for the appalling poverty of Whitechapel and Spitalfields? The people living within the boundaries of St. Jude’s parish are crowded like animals into a labyrinth of courts and alleys, none of which intersect major streets.
The crumbling, hazardous buildings fronting the courts house complete families in each room, sometimes numbering as many as a dozen people; in such circumstances, incest is common…and, some say, inevitable. The buildings reek from the liquid sewage accumulated in the basements, while the courts themselves stink of garbage that attracts vermin, dogs, and other scavengers. Often one standing pipe in the courtyard serves as the sole source of water for all the inhabitants of three or four buildings, an outdoor pipe that freezes with unremitting regularity during the winter. Once Edward and I were called out in the middle of the night to succor a woman suffering from scarlet fever; we found her in a foul-smelling single room with three children and four pigs. Her husband, a cabman, had committed suicide the month before; and it wasn’t until we were leaving that we discovered one of the children had been lying there dead for thirteen days.
The common lodging houses are even worse — filthy and infested and reservoirs of disease. In such doss houses a bed can be rented for fourpence for the night, strangers often sharing a bed because neither has the full price alone. There is no such thing as privacy, since the beds are lined up in crowded rows in the manner of dormitories. Beds are rented indiscriminately to men and women alike; consequently many of the doss houses are in truth brothels, and even those that are not have no compunction about renting a bed to a prostitute when she brings a paying customer with her. Inspector Abberline once told us the police estimate there are twelve hundred prostitutes in Whitechapel alone, fertile hunting grounds for the man who pleasures himself with the butchering of ladies of the night.
Ever since the Ripper began stalking the East End, Edward has been campaigning for more police to patrol the back alleys and for better street lighting. The problem is that Whitechapel is so poor it cannot afford the rates to pay for these needed improvements. If there is to be help, it must come from outside. Therefore I have undertaken a campaign of my own. Every day I write to philanthropists, charitable establishments, government officials. I petition every personage of authority and good will with whose name I am con-versant, pleading the cause of the children of Whitechapel, especially those ragged, dirty street arabs who sleep wherever they can, eat whatever they can scavenge or steal, and perform every unspeakable act demanded of them in exchange for a coin they can call their own.