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Originally posted by Richard Patterson
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The Moorings of Francis Thompson and Mary Jane Kelly
Doctored, thank you for drawing attention to this puzzle of “moorings,” because it touches one of the deepest questions: how do we anchor Thompson to Mary Jane Kelly’s world? If we cannot place them in overlapping orbits, the theory risks floating free. But when we look closer, the moorings are there—documented, attested, even staring us in the face through Hopkins’s veiled words.
Let’s start with Providence Row. This was Thompson’s known abode during his homeless years, a Catholic refuge for men and women in Crispin Street, a stone’s throw from Spitalfields Market and within sight of Miller’s Court. Crucially, it was also remembered as a place Mary Kelly herself used. In a 1973 BBC interview, an elderly nun described how, back in 1884, another nun told her that Kelly had lodged at Providence Row, pretending to reform in order to secure a bed for a night or two. She even trained briefly as a domestic servant under its auspices. That is not conjecture—it’s oral testimony, passed down from the very women who ran the refuge. This testimony matters because it establishes a shared institutional link between Thompson and Kelly. Both used the Row. Both walked through the same doors. Both lived off the same fragile charity.
Now add Robert Thurston Hopkins. Hopkins (1884–1958) was not a fringe fantasist but a respected literary figure who, in the 1920s, went out of his way to research Thompson. He sought out John McMaster, the shoemaker of Panton Street, who took Thompson in off the streets in 1886. Hopkins preserved those conversations in This London – Its Taverns, Haunts and Memories (1927). But when he came to write about the Ripper in Life and Death at the Old Bailey (1935), he deliberately disguised his poet-friend’s name as “Mr. Moring.” He had good reason: Thompson by then had become a Catholic icon, his collected works published by the Meynells, his memory bound up in religious devotion. Hopkins could not risk the scandal of putting Thompson’s real name into print in connection with Jack the Ripper. So he created “Moring”—but left a breadcrumb trail of unmistakable clues.
What did Hopkins say? He described “Moring” as a poor devil-driven poet haunting East End taverns, walking the courts and alleys at night, smoking opium, proclaiming “alcohol for fools, opium for poets,” and muttering fatalistic lines like “To-morrow one dies … will it stop the traffic on London Bridge?” He gave him lank black hair, a moustache, and the long dark face of a bard. He said this man knew every opium den in the East End, and that when he read Hutchinson’s testimony about the man with Kelly, the description “fitted him down to the ground.” This is not Dowson. Dowson was a heavy drinker, not an opium man. Dowson died in 1900, when Hopkins was only sixteen—far too young for them to have walked the alleys together as adult friends. But Thompson died in 1907, when Hopkins was twenty-three, and Hopkins certainly had time to strike up acquaintance.
The “Moring” clue itself seals it. Almost all of Thompson’s published works before 1935 were decorated only with rings on the cover. On his gravestone the epitaph is “More rings,” carved as two entwined circles forming a vesica piscis. What looks meaningless becomes a pun on Thompson’s own symbolism. Hopkins, careful not to name him, chose “Moring” as the mask: More Rings. It is almost too neat.
This is how the mooring puzzle begins to resolve. Thompson’s Providence Row lodging literally stood in Hutchinson’s line of sight. When Hutchinson watched Kelly enter her room with a dark-haired, moustached man in astrakhan, all he had to do was turn his head and see the windows of Providence Row—where Thompson himself was housed. Hopkins says his poet-friend looked exactly like Hutchinson’s suspect. And Hutchinson’s testimony is central, because if Thompson is that man, then Thompson is the last known companion of Mary Jane Kelly.
But what about Walsh’s account of Thompson’s prostitute-lover? John Walsh, in his Strange Harp, Strange Symphony (1967), tells us that Thompson lived with a prostitute for a year, until she left him in the summer of 1888. Barnett testified that Kelly lived with him for one year and eight months, the last eight months in Miller’s Court. On the surface, the dates don’t overlap. Yet this is precisely where history resists neatness. Walsh may have been imprecise with dates; he wrote seventy years after the fact, relying on fragmentary reminiscence. Or Thompson’s unnamed partner may indeed have fled west-to-east in the summer of 1888—fleeing him, but remaining within the same orbit of prostitution that led directly into Whitechapel. In either scenario, Thompson is propelled into Kelly’s world: searching obsessively for the woman who abandoned him, burning with resentment, frequenting the very districts where Kelly lived. His poems—especially Nightmare of the Witch Babies—rehearse disembowelments of prostitutes in London streets.
And here the convergence sharpens. Walsh places Thompson with a prostitute until June. The nun places Kelly at Providence Row in 1884. Hopkins places Thompson walking East End alleys, resembling Kelly’s companion, calling him “Moring” to mask his name. Hutchinson places the suspect directly at Kelly’s side. These are not scattered whispers. They are multiple witnesses across decades aligning into a coherent picture.
Why does this matter? Because the Ripper case is full of suspects who float on speculation—Kosminski, Druitt, Bury, Maybrick, Sickert—yet none are moored to Kelly in this way. Thompson is. He is moored by geography (Providence Row, Panton Street), by testimony (Hopkins, Hutchinson, the nun), by biography (his lost prostitute-lover), and by symbolism (Moring/More Rings). The odds of this convergence being accidental are microscopic.
Hopkins himself wrote: “I could not connect a man of such extraordinary gentleness committing such a dreadful series of outrages.” That is the last barrier—the disbelief that the gentle, opium-addled poet could slaughter. But gentleness in public is the mask. Thompson’s poetry seethes with hatred for “harlots in the mother’s womb,” with imagery of womb-rending and blood. His medical training at Owens College drilled him in cutting into cadavers. His possession of a scalpel while homeless is attested. His breakdowns, hospitalizations, and institutionalizations fit Smith’s “asylum history.” And the murders ceased the moment Thompson was removed into six weeks of private hospital care after Kelly’s death.
This is not mere conjecture. This is evidence upon evidence, converging. To reduce Hopkins’s “Moring” to a literary quirk is to miss that Hopkins himself was a careful chronicler who spoke to police officers, preserved East End memories, and worked in the shadow of scandal. He chose his disguise deliberately. He wanted the truth remembered without inviting the libel suit of naming Francis Thompson outright.
So when we speak of the “mooring puzzle,” we are not inventing. We are recognizing that the poet and the prostitute shared the same institutions, the same lodgings, the same alleys, the same line of sight. That Thompson was already abandoned by a prostitute-lover in the summer of 1888. That Kelly herself had used Providence Row. That Hopkins masked Thompson as “Moring” and linked him to Kelly explicitly. That Hutchinson described a man who fits Thompson precisely. And that all of this comes not from one partisan theory but from multiple independent sources—nun, biographer, memoirist, shoemaker, police memoir, witness testimony.
It is fashionable to dismiss each link in isolation. But probability does not work that way. The chance that one man in 1888 London matches all five traits of Smith’s Rupert Street suspect—ex-medical student, asylum history, prostitute association, polished farthings, Haymarket residence—is already vanishingly small. Add the “moorings” to Kelly, and the probability collapses further. Thompson was not one of many candidates. He was uniquely positioned, uniquely moored.
That is why the Hopkins testimony is a gift. He knew Thompson. He disguised him. He preserved him as “Moring.” He tied him to Kelly’s orbit. And in doing so, he gave us the very key to the final puzzle: why Mary Jane Kelly was the Ripper’s last victim, and why the murders ended there.
"But gentleness in public is the mask"
Perhaps the fundermental answer to why the Ripper was never caught, rests in that very sentence.
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