Mary Jane Kelly - Early Life

Early Life

Compared with other Ripper victims, Mary Kelly's origins are obscure and undocumented, and much of it is possibly embellished. According to Joseph Barnett, the man she had most recently lived with, Kelly had told him she was born in Limerick, Ireland—although whether it was the county or the city is not known—around 1863, and her family moved to Wales when she was young. Barnett reported that Kelly had told him her father was named John Kelly and that he worked in an iron works in either Caernarfonshire or Carmarthenshire. Barnett recalled Kelly mentioning having seven brothers and at least one sister. One brother, named Henry, supposedly served in the 2nd Battalion Scots Guards. She once stated to her personal friend Lizzie Albrook that a family member was employed at the London theatrical stage. Her landlord, John McCarthy, claimed that Kelly received infrequent correspondence from Ireland. However, Barnett denied this.

Both Barnett and a reported former roommate named Mrs. Carthy claimed that Kelly came from a family of "well to do people". Carthy reported Kelly being "an excellent scholar and an artist of no mean degree"—but at the inquest Barnett told the coroner that she often asked him to read the newspaper reports of the murders to her, suggesting that she was illiterate.

Around 1879, Kelly was reportedly married to a coal miner named Davies, who was killed two or three years later in a mine explosion. She claimed to have stayed for eight months in an infirmary in Cardiff, before moving in with a cousin. It is at this point that she is considered to have begun her career as a prostitute. There are no contemporary records of her presence in Cardiff. Kelly apparently left Cardiff for London in 1884 and found work in a brothel in the more affluent West End of London. Reportedly, she was invited by a client to France but quickly returned, disliking her life there. Kelly, who liked to affect the French name "Marie Jeanette", could have made up the story of her early life as there is no corroborating documentary evidence, but there is no evidence to the contrary either. In Uncle Jack (2005), author Tony Williams claimed that Kelly had been found on the 1881 census return for Brymbo, near Wrexham. The claim was made on the basis that living next door to the Kelly family was a bachelor named Jonathan Davies, who could have been the "Davies or Davis" who, according to Joe Barnett, married Kelly when she was 16. This was almost certainly wrong, because if her husband was indeed killed two or three years later, this Jonathan Davies could not have been him—he was still alive and residing in Brymbo, as shown on the 1891 census return. In any case, hardly any of the details given by Barnett matched those of the family in Brymbo in 1881. Brymbo is in Denbighshire, not Carmarthen or Caernarfon, and the father was Hubert Kelly, not John. Allegations that the diaries of Sir John Williams, on which Tony Williams based his research, were altered in any case cast doubt on the whole of this theory.

A report of the 1888 London press of Kelly being a mother has led a minority of Ripperologists to suggest the birth of a younger Davies between 1879 and 1882. The story, however, contains several factual errors, including the claim that she supposedly lived on the second floor. It is likely that news reports initially identifying Lizzie Fisher (or Fraser) as the victim are the source for the rumour. Fisher did live on the second floor and did have a 12-year-old son.