The Cry From Street to Street - Reviewed by Peter Whitby

By Hilary Bailey - Published by Constable - ISBN 0 09 471450 9 1992 192pp

Fiction based on fact – but just how much of this is fiction…

A powerful, explicit and enthralling venture into the depths of London’s Victorian underworld, based on the life of Mary Anne Kelly.

Born and brought up, not in Ireland or Wales, but in a respectable terraced house in Hackney, her early days with her younger sisters Mary Claire and of course, Mary Jane, fall on hard times. After being forced onto the streets, she flees her “keeper” and the horrors of East End existence, for a new and better life in a distant land, a place far removed from the rookeries of Whitechapel and her grim past.

In 1888, eight years later, after triumphantly surviving as a prosperous brothel keeper on the Canadian frontier, she returns to London a rich and confident woman, to rescue her sisters and confront her demon’s, just in time for autumn….

Her desperate search for her two poverty–stricken sisters takes her deeper and deeper into the darkest dens of the evil quarter–mile, and with enemies and dangers at every corner, she must move fast…for it’s nearly November…

Ms Bailey’s sad and uncannily realistic interpretation of life in those dark autumn days is almost too real for a fiction story, and one may well take seriously the publisher’s postscript that this whole narrative was based on papers discovered by the grandson of a Mrs. Brown, in an old suitcase amongst family effects long since left by his grandmother in Kent.

If Mary Brown was indeed Mary Kelly, then this book is not much short of an autobiography of her early life, despite the final events being far-fetched and open to criticism. Nevertheless, at the very least, partly because of the literate speech of the time and lapses into argot, and partly because of the attention on the slain rather than the slayer, and the vivid picture it paints, one may well be tempted to believe the whole tale is contemporary and could only have been written by someone in the very midst of things in 1888.

A refreshing read for anyone more interested in the real characters of the saga, this book may yet well challenge current thinking on the life and death of someone as elusive and mysterious as the killer himself. Superbly haunting.