Morbid stories

Regular readers will know that I love history, and that murder mysteries are just one of my many morbid interests. When I first started seeing my boyfriend, I took him on a date to Wilton’s Music Hall via Ratcliff Highway so I could tell him about the famous murder case there.

So I get it, I do. The Whitechapel murders of 1888 are grimly fascinating, and the question mark over the killer’s identity is a magnet for myths and stories. The study of the murders and their legacy illuminate the historical and the contemporary context in valuable ways. One example is Judith Walkowitz’s superb book, City of Dreadful Delight. And Madame Guillotine has a great post exploring her interest in Jack the Ripper as a feminist.

But there are other tales we could tell. There are plenty of morbid stories to choose from (our other major historical export is the Krays) and it might even be nice to talk about some East London history that doesn’t involve murder. Although we know nothing about him, Jack the Ripper overshadows a cast of amazing East End characters, and the Whitechapel murders draw far more attention than any number of incredible events. Just one example: this year is also the 125^th anniversary of the Matchwomen’s strike which launched the modern trade union movement. Thanks to the efforts of Louise Raw, there was a commemorative event at the Bishopsgate Institute and a bit of media coverage. But will we be tripping over Matchwomen walking tours in Bow?

Jack and his victims

It’s not just the extent of it but the tone. Jack the Ripper is everybody’s favourite mystery serial killer. There is endless speculation about his identity, his knowledge of anatomy and even admiration for his ability to evade capture. In contrast, the women he murdered are reduced to objects for study or criminal evidence for analysis.

For example: my local paper recently contained a special 12 page Jack the Ripper supplement including a page entitled “The victims: How women met their gory deaths”, featuring detailed descriptions of the last movements and mutilated bodies of five women who were murdered – Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Lizzie Stride, Catherine Eddowes, Mary Jane Kelly – complete with pictures of their faces taken after death.

Where is the respect for these women? Poring over details like how drunk they were and how deep the gash in their throat was or how their intestines were arranged may be one thing in a history book, but why is it being printed in the Newham Recorder, along with photographs of their corpses? I don’t want these intimate and gruesome details exhumed for my entertainment.

Missing the big picture

Like almost all media coverage of the subject the article fails to connect the Whitechapel murders to any kind of context about violence against women then or now. Another article highlights the fact that six other women were murdered in the same area in the same year, three also working in prostitution and killed by punters (Emma Smith, Martha Tabram, Rose Mylett), three killed by their husbands.

Sadly this article reads like a masterclass in how to subtly blame victims and excuse perpetrators when it describes the three cases of women killed by their husbands – Hannah Potzdamer, Susan Barrell and Elizabeth Bartlett:

“ordinary people driven to the ultimate crime by circumstance, a fit of anger or a desire for revenge” (this is a quote from author Peter Stubley, included in the article)

“her throat is slashed… in a jealous rage”

“Hannah had left him and moved in with a bootmaker”

“Robert, suffering from delirium tremens, also shoots himself”

“she refused to give him money for drink”

Over a century on it’s felt necessary to include details like this which serve to exonerate the killers. I wish I could afford to send every journalist a copy of this guide to responsible media reporting of violence against women (PDF).

Ripper chic

Whether blasé or breathlessly excited, the tone used to talk about Jack the Ripper almost everywhere makes me feel queasy. Have a look at this New York Times article about how All Saints clothing store makes use of “the romance of Jack the Ripper” and its location in “the Ripper’s hallowed stomping grounds”. Big stomper was he?

And did you know the Ten Bells pub in Spitalfields (where one of the victims had been drinking before she was killed) was at one point called ‘Jack The Ripper’? They used to sell T-shirts, and a blood-coloured cocktail called Ripper’s Tipple. Tasteful. Obviously there’s a difference between the crimes of one serial killer and the carnage of the First World War, but that has an anniversary coming up too – can you imagine a WWI-themed bar serving ham and mustard gas sandwiches? Although I guess we’re getting close with ‘Blitz parties’, but that’s a rant for another day.

Ripperology

Many people do seriously study the Whitechapel murders without celebrating ‘Jack’, but as this brave article explains, unintentional sexism abounds in Ripperologist circles. The focus is firmly on the suspects and not the victims, whose suffering is silent or sensationalised. The LIFT campaign in Tower Hamlets have subverted this with an alternative Ripper tour which talks about the lives and the communities of the women who were killed. There are some interesting tweets from the walk in this Storify.

Here’s a classic response to criticism of Ripperology:

We do not celebrate, we commemorate. We do not idealise, but we condemn him. We examine the harsh realities of that world to allow us to understand where we came from, how society has changed and why we should be thankful for these changes, and recognise where it has not and strive to put this right.

While this may be the aim, and I fully admit I haven’t had time to research this post very thoroughly, I haven’t seen many examples of Ripperologists striving to end violence against women.

Violence against women

That is the issue at the heart of this, and the reason I can’t join in the fun: violence against women is epidemic, often lethal but frequently trivialised. The most uncomfortable parallel I found between Ripper fandom and damaging contemporary attitudes to violence against women was this, on the London Dungeons profile page for Jack the Ripper:

DOs and DON’Ts

DO look over your shoulder.

DO dress conservatively.

DO go unnoticed.

DO NOT flirt.

DO NOT walk alone.

DO NOT accept his offer to buy you a drink.

This is advice that is seriously but unhelpfully issued to women today in the guise of rape prevention. It is also a classic example of the victim blaming which prevents many women reporting violence let alone seeing their attacker convicted. Repeated in this context it’s ghoulish, and not in a good way.

Now, as then, women working in prostitution are particularly vulnerable to violence – especially trans* women and migrant women. A woman working in prostitution is 18 times more likely to be murdered than the general population. While I don’t want to be a party pooper, I can’t get that figure out of my head. I’ll sign off with this quote on ‘Jack’, from feminist academic Deborah Cameron:

The question for society is not which individual man killed, but why so many men have done and still do.

Some links

• End Violence Against Women campaign
• The excellent NHS Open Doors project
• International Union of Sex Workers

Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies

This exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery looks at the moment immediately after Charles II reversed this rule, and it’s a fun little look at some portraits, caricatures and paraphernalia of women who were allowed on stage, ‘from Nell Gwyn to Sarah Siddons’. It’s focused on portraits, but there are some super little earthenware tiles with different actresses on them in Room 3. There’s also a facsimile of the Yellow Pages-style brothel directory, Harris’ List of Covent Garden Ladies; or, The Man of Pleasure’s Kalendar, illustrating the fall from grace of the once ‘Convent and Garden’ of Westminster Abbey – a bit too close to eighteenth-century Theatreland for PR-comfort. Since its reissue by the History Press this book has now achieved some cult status – the guy next to me, looking at it, said to his companion, ‘You know, Gladys: Harris’ List – that’s the one we’ve got in the toilet’.

Nell (c.1651-87) opens this exhibition – a talented comic actress, although she is popularly most recognised for inspiring Charles II’s last words ‘Let not poor Nelly starve’ (she survived him by barely a year, fact fans). There are two portraits of her here, in both of which she’s got her mammaries out. This exhibition would have these as evidence of her ‘skillful manipulation’ rather than ‘brazen hussydom’; the second portrait shows her naked to the waist and looking directly at the viewer with a gaze at once languid and challenging. You might be reminded of Manet’s Olympia, condemned as ‘vulgar’ and ‘immoral’ on its first exhibition at 1863, mainly because the nude is looking directly at the viewer rather than obligingly turning her head away for better ogling comfort. And indeed, such a tension between looking and being looked at probably underscored a lot of the moral uncertainty about the early actresses.

Later on, we get Sarah Siddons (1755-1831), powerful, tragic grande dame. She appears in Room 3 painted by Thomas Lawrence as public intellectual, tutor to the royal children – and at a vantage point that forces us to look up at her imperious face, rather than to avert our eyes from her naked bosom. This is hung alongside a number of grandiose actress-as-Muse paintings, large as their themes, and also including Muses of Comedy and society amateurs like Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.

But even in the late eighteenth century ‘actress’ still wasn’t a career you’d want for your wife. Thespiennes like Elizabeth Ann Sheridan (1754-1792) and Elizabeth Farren (1759-1829) – both exhibited here – gave up their acting careers, on request, upon marriage. While the eighteenth-century gentleman was not renowned for being into female careers in general, the issue here seems to be more ‘other men looking at your wife’ than anything else: after all, these men were ‘forward thinking’ enough to marry an actress in the first place. Perhaps they were nervous of the number of early actresses, like Nell, who had affairs with kings and nobles. If so, they had a good few hundred years of uncertainty left: Edward VII was still pretty into actresses at the turn of the twentieth century. ‘I’ve spent enough on you to build a battleship’ he complained to Lillie Langtry (1853-1929), eliciting the tart response ‘And you’ve spent enough in me to float one.’ (It may have been such impertinence that led to her replacement by another actress, Sarah Bernhardt, shortly afterwards.)

Dorothy Jordan in travesti - engraving after the John Hoppner painting in this exhibition

But, as this exhibition shows, one of the primary moral gripes with these early actresses was actually about something a bit unexpected: the travesti roles many of them built careers on. There are some fascinating visual representations in this exhibition of actresses – like Dorothy Jordan (1761-1816), whose bosom apparently ‘concealed everything but its own charms’ – in their famous ‘breech’ roles, both Shakespearean (stalwarts like Twelfth Night and As You Like It) and just… male (Tom Thumb). It seems that, after decades of young boys aping womanhood, the first actresses set themselves the challenge of continuing the noble tradition: it was conscious decision, rather than occasional dramatic necessity, for many of them to adopt the travesti.

The Immodesty here implied resulted in endless caricatures, many of which are exhibited here. My favourite was entitled ‘An Actress at her Toilet; or, Miss Brazen Just Breecht’ – though perhaps even stranger were the portraits of various male actors, including David Garrick, in drag – enormous hoop and all – as a kind of forerunner to the pantomime dame.

Take a feminist friend and thrash it out in the Portrait Gallery café with their superior yoghurt and granola, says this reviewer. And visit John Donne on the top floor, if he’s not gone into cleaning yet.

• The First Actresses runs at the National Portrait Gallery until 8 January 2012.

TEA

Make tea, child, said my kind mamma. Sit by me, love, and make tea.

Samuel Richardson, Clarissa (1747)

Ah, the Joke Post comes upon us at last. T is for ‘t’… very droll. I lift a cup to that. But fie! Have we learned nothing on this lexical journey? First and foremost, tea was not always pronounced as we currently say it: when it first appeared in English in 1601 it was ‘taaaaay‘ and often written tay (like the modern French thé, a bit). It is not quite clear when and why the shift to ‘ti’ happened, but, then, few things are as easy to lose sight of as pronunciation (how many people remember that Keats was a Cockney?)

Shall I be mother? Catherine of Braganza, painted by Jacob Huysmans.

Tea, of course, has the additional complication that it is not an English word (although what is?) – it came from the Dutch thee, in turn from Malay and, eventually, Chinese Amoy dialect: t’e, or the Mandarin ch’a. Woven into the geographical etymology, then, is a legacy of import history: around the mid-seventeenth century we procured our tea from the Dutch, who imported it from Malaysia and, ultimately, China. What exactly were they importing? Why, tea‘s first definition, of course: ‘the leaves of the tea-plant, usually in a dried and prepared state for making the drink’. In this form, tea began with a queen, and quickly became every eighteenth-century Cosmo girl’s first route of seduction.

Brew and Thunder.

But first – the drink. ‘Made by infusing these leaves in boiling water, having a somewhat bitter and aromatic flavour, and acting as a moderate stimulant’ – in this sense, the word tea is first recorded around 1601, so some trendsetters must have been aware of it before the widespread importing of the later seventeenth century, when tea really came into its own: Samuel Pepys tried it in 1660, and a couple of years later it found a celebrity backer in the be-farthingaled shape of the Portuguese queen consort to Charles II, Catherine of Braganza (remember her?). So, in England at least, tea was from the beginning tending towards the female of the species.

Catherine’s tea-drinking was partly to do with Portugal’s colonial links with Asia, but also with her temperament: solemn and pious, she initially had trouble fitting into the Protestant English court and her preference for a ‘moderate stimulant’ over the ales and beers otherwise drunk marked one of many departures. But tea was quickly owning its stimulating qualities and being marketed as a ‘tonic’, a civilized alternative to alcohol capable of soothing aches’n’pains and spurring on mental capacities: a zeitgeist for the intellectual impetus of the early Enlightenment – as against Charles II’s well-known debauchery – and, in fact, a ‘panacea‘:

Hail, Queen of Plants, Pride of Elysian Bow’rs!
How shall we speak thy complicated Powr’s?
Thou wondrous Panacea, to asswage
The Calentures of Youth’s fermenting rage,
And animate the freezing veins of age.

Nahum Tate, from Panacea: A Poem Upon Tea (1700)

But what started out as a Portuguese import became a matter of English national identity, and by the next century London’s East India Company had established a monopoly on trade, controlling imports into Britain (and thus, prices), using its extensive trade links with Queen Catherine’s dowry –then-Bombay – and the East Indies, and Asia. It was thus that the English turned not into a nation of coffee drinkers, but to devotees of the ‘Queen of Plants’. And a queen she certainly was, and not entirely distinct from the maternal and oft-secluded Queen Anne, who dramatically reduced the size of the English court and inspired a new fashion for calm domesticity and politeness. Thus, the bustling male-dominated coffee-houses, but also a more feminine fix at home…

Five Leaves Left.

So in 1738 tea came to mean not just some withered leaf, but also an opportunity for socialising! Hurrah! To be precise, tea became ‘a meal or social entertainment at which tea is served; especially an ordinary afternoon or evening meal, at which the usual beverage is tea’. The fact that it could connote an ‘ordinary afternoon meal’ made tea a convenient beverage to offer casual social callers, although it was also, of course, a beverage that demanded a whole host of conspicuous purchases: a full tea-set and the crucial Other Element – sugar. Thus your tea-table represented Britain’s colonial interests off in China and India to the tea-side, and Africa and the East Indies to the sugar-side, with all the attendant horrors of the emergent slave trade conveniently swept under the (Persian) rug.

Tea. Photo par Hodge.

The conspicuous consumption tea represented was exacerbated by its price: before mass importation in the mid-century had driven costs down, the leaf itself was fixed at so extortionate a price (a bargain in 1680 was 30s a pound) as to necessitate the purchase of a lockable tea-chest, which would become the responsibility first of the lady of the house, and, when age-appropriate, of her daughter. The woman who held the key to the tea-chest was, naturally, also the woman who made the tea – thus ‘Shall I be mother?’, a phrase of uncertain origin. One theory I came across was that it is a Victorian idiom related to the phenomenon of women unable to breastfeed naturally using teapot spouts to convey milk to their infant instead. OH THE SYMBOLISM.

Whatever the phrase’s specific origins, it’s certainly true that from tea‘s domestic beginnings onwards whole family power structures could hang on which woman this ‘mother’ was. Alas, London’s major galleries forbid image reproduction (WAAH), but if you turn to your handouts,  you will see this in action. This is the Tyers family: that’s Mr Tyers on the left, and his son just down from one of the universities. His daughter, on the far right, is about to be married (she’s putting her gloves on to go out – out of the door and out of the family). Her role as tea-maker has, in consequence, passed onto her younger sister, who now sits as squarely in the middle of the family portrait as she does in the family sphere. Conversely, in Clarissa, when the heroine angers her parents they sack her from her tea-task and grotesquely divide it up among other family members (“My heart was up at my mouth. I did not know what to do with myself”, she recalls, distraught. I WANTED TO MAKE TEA!).

And she feeds you tea and oranges…

Of course, while assigning the tea-making to your daughter could be a loving gesture of trust, it also pimped her marriageability: it requires a cool head and calm demeanour to remember five-plus milk’n’sugar preferences, judge the strength of the tea and pour it, all the while making small-talk and remaining attentive to your guests. Add to this the weighty responsibility of locking the tea away from thieving servants and you have the management skills of housewifery in miniature. It also showed off physical charms: poise, posture, the elegant turn of a wrist, a beautifully framed bosom. To take this momentarily out of the salon, no respectable punter would get down in an eighteenth-century brothel without first taking tea with the girls: Fanny Hill spends at least as much time drinking tea as (That’s enough – Ed), and, of course, this kind of performative tea-ritual femininity is a mainstay in the professional life of the Japanese geisha.

So, along with its identity as a colonial mainstay in Britain’s trading life, tea in its origins is also something specifically feminine: a kind of Muse inspiring intellectual greatness, a Queen to be worshipped as a symbol of Britain’s health and power, and a key element in the women’s domestic lives. It could be stimulating, relaxing and seductive, but, as would become disastrously clear, it was always political.

NEXT WEEK: U is for Uterus

D

DOLL

What fascinated Ermengarde the most was [Sara’s] fancy about the dolls who walked and talked, and who could do anything they chose when the human beings were out of the room, but who must keep their powers a secret and so flew back to their places ‘like lightening’ when people returned to the room.

– Francis Hodgson Burnett, ‘A Little Princess’

Were he not Romeo called…

Barbara Millicent Roberts is actually, it turns out, called Dorothy. At least, a ‘Barbie doll’ is a tautology, since the word ‘doll’ itself was originally a nickname. (Rs and Ls are colloquially interchangeable, donchaknow – see also Harry/Hal, Mary/Moll.)

‘Doll’ as a name makes an early debut in renaissance drama: first as Doll Tearsheet in Shakespeare’s Henry IV and then as Doll Common in Jonson’s The Alchemist. These two draw in ‘Doll’s’ second meaning, which assumes a ‘Dorothy’ is so common a species as to be generic. Thus, ‘Doll’ as a pet name is quickly expanded to indicate any female ‘pet’, or indeed any female ‘mistress’ (drawing confused attention to the potentially infantalising properties of nicknames in general). Additionally, as of 1560, it could also be used to mean ‘the smallest or pet pig in the litter’ (like Wilbur). But clearly there is a double edge to Dorothy’s common-ness, since ‘common’ means ‘for the use of everyone’ (tee hee) as well as ‘numerous’ – something Doll Common’s character demonstrates nominally. ENTER THE PROSTITUTE.

Work and Play

It is only in 1700 that ‘Doll’ loses its capital letter and acquires something of its modern sense. The dictionary defines this as ‘an image of a human being (commonly of a child or lady) used as a plaything; a girl’s toy-baby’. It is no longer a name, but it still stands in for something else, with a more spiritual implication in dear Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (that name-obsessed play). Here, Old Capulet refers to his daughter as a ‘whining Mammet’, a deviant form of ‘Maumet’ which, deriving ultimately from ‘Mohammed’, was a term used in medieval England to mean ‘a puppet, an idol, a doll’. Here lurks the second commandment, in all its thorny glory, giving an added layer to Barbie’s iconicism, not to mention the groom’s pledge to his bride in the traditional Marriage Service, ‘With my body I thee worship’. (I hear the clatter of toppling pedestals.)

clatterty clank

It is, I must NB, definitionally girls who play with dolls, and there is a pleasing juxtaposition of frivolous and stern in the dictionary’s reference to ‘playthings’ … but I cannot help but suspect that, in their initial incarnation, these ‘doll-babies’ were occasionally also educational tools, teaching the virtues of maternal care for something smaller and weaker, sartorial elegance and grooming and presumably also some degree of etiquette – these dolls could, after all, represent all ages, and I suspect that the comparative decline of the over 18s represented in modern doll-land may also signal a movement from dolls as work to dolls as play. (Incidentally, Londoners: for more on toys’ super-seriousness, go have a look at the Maritime Museum’s Toy Boats exhibition for examples of boys’ toys serving to illustrate German naval supremacy). But onwards.

From play to work, there’s a beautiful reference in the dictionary to ‘doll’ used in the more modern sense when, in 1860, the journal All Year Round talks about the ‘laborious class Who earn painful bread by fashioning dolls’ eyes’, which tellingly hints at the expanded manufacturing operations doll-craft represented by the mid-Victorian industrialised era – a far cry from what would presumably have been an ad-hoc domestic craft when ‘doll-babies’ first became popular. A Little Princess, quoted above, is a story obsessed with the power of make-believe and dolls as synecdoches for real-life figures. It features multiple references to the late-Victorian doll and the materialism she represents, including the disapproval of Sara Crewe’s family solicitor, who, on seeing what Sara dubs ‘The Last Doll’ says sternly ‘A hundred pounds […] All expensive material, and made at a Parisian modiste’s. He spent money lavishly enough, that young man’. Fans of Victorian women’s studies may think of Dickens’ Mr Merdle (Little Dorrit) and his search, not for a wife, but for ‘a bosom to hang jewels upon’.

Living Dolls

It has taken more time than usual, but finally the leximobile screeches up outside definition number three, another Victorian usage, ‘doll’ as ‘a pretty, but unintelligent or empty person’, especially, the dictionary adds, ‘when dressed up; also, a pretty but silly or frivolous woman’. Hence we have ‘a doll’s face’, which is one ‘conventionally pretty, but without life or expression’. Pleasingly, in this instance, it is the lifeless image of womanhood that inspires the pejorative reference to the real thing, rather than the other way round, although it gives rise to a disturbing number of aspirations in the sentient race to be ‘living dolls’ (a quick google, and you’ll see what I mean). The dictionary even has names for this sort of thing, giving a delightful number of compound terms: thus the (tautological) worship of dolls – dollatry, dollhood – the state or condition of being like a doll, dollship – the personality of a doll, although it also points out that these relate primarily to ‘doll’s’ fifth meaning, via a re-emerging ‘Doll Common’, as ‘a prostitute’. ‘Living dolls’ may in fact also be real-life Ladies Of Easy Virtue.

‘There is much for her to do, her whole sex to deliver from the bondage of frivolity, dolldom and imbecility.’

-Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), ‘Letters’, (undated)

So, from ‘Dorothy’ onwards, a ‘doll’ always represents something bigger, be it a name whose full gravity cannot yet be properly appropriated, a world of humans made more comprehensible for a small child, or even a religious figure incarnated in sacrilegious form. It is the idolatry of such a representation that I find most fascinating: it gives a whole new irony to Sara Crewe’s repeated assertion that, as her father has always told her, ‘All women are princesses.’

NEXT WEEK: E is for Emancipate