The Widows of Whitechapel
A Novel Excerpt
by Amy Sayre BaptistaIn 1888, between August and November, five women were brutally murdered on the streets of the Whitechapel neighborhood of East London. Their names are Elizabeth Stride, Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly. History has defined these women, popularly known as the Canonical Five, more by their murderer than by their own lives. As ghosts they walk the same streets as in life. They named themselves the Widows of Whitechapel, and this is their story, in their own words.
Elizabeth Stride (Died September 30, 1888, Berner Street)
A map is a story if you know how to read it. In 1902 Charles Booth made poverty maps of London, coding streets by color. Whitechapel, these streets we still haunt, was colored black in the famous Booth map legend. That Whitechapel was the blacked eye of London comes as no surprise to us who were familiar with its fists.
