The Real Mary Kelly Read Online Free PDF

considerable force in left-wing politics. ‘E.T.’ – as he was always known – and his wife Mary had an only child, a son who like his father earned his living by the pen. Unlike his father, who was a journalist of note and in his time the editor of at least eight newspapers, Francis was merely a humble penny-a-line reporter on local newspapers 32 . At 47 he should already have achieved his life’s ambitions and been the editor of a newspaper or an author of some standing with a house and servants, but instead he was still living in genteel poverty with his elderly parents in a two-up, two-down artisan’s cottage in the backstreets of Hammersmith.
    The Craigs were in no position to afford carriages even if E.T.’s socialist principles had allowed it, so they walked the mile to and from their house at 3 Andover Road to Morris’s mansion on the Thames. For his age E.T. was remarkably fit and a lifelong exponent of healthy living. Teetotal, vegetarian and non-smoking, he believed strongly in the virtues of fresh air and bodybuilding 33 . He and Francis sold fitness aids such as barbells, massage rollers and bath salts by mail order and the younger man had been trained from his youth to build up his upper body strength. Although no definitely identified pictures of him exist, Francis was probably of medium height but broad-chested and with well-muscled arms. His later writing revealed that he was a keen follower of rowing and it is likely that he had been an enthusiastic oarsman in his youth.
    Francis owed both his forenames to his father’s lifelong passion for phrenology, a pseudo-science that was pioneered by a German doctor, Franz Gall, and his protégé Johann Spurzheim in the late 18th century. By the first decades of the 19th century it was an established movement held in high regard by scientists, doctors and philosophers and E.T. had been a devotee ever since hearing Spurzheim lecture on the subject in Manchester in 1831. It was much beloved of the early socialists and co-operators because it offered the common man the possibility of gaining insight into his own character and, thereby, the capacity for self-improvement.
    E.T. became adept at the art and described himself as a ‘Professor of Phrenology’ for much of his life, but by the middle of the 19th century most doctors and scientists had realised that it was based on false premises 34 . Feeling the outside of the skull was of no more use than running one’s hands over the cover of a book and attempting to interpret its contents. The stubborn E.T., however, characteristically refused to accept the obvious and never lost faith in it. He was belatedly rewarded when he was elected President of the British Phrenological Society in 1888, the year of the Whitechapel murders, at a time when almost all educated people had long since abandoned it.
    E.T.’s other two passions were public health and anatomy. In his teens he had been admitted to Manchester Infirmary following an injury 35 . He later gave an account of creeping into the operating theatre after the day’s work was done to examine the amputated limbs before they were removed by the hospital porters. In his memoirs he wrote that it, ‘awakened a deep interest in the structure and anatomy of the body’. He is known to have taken part in dissections of the human body. In his
Lectures on Phrenology
the doyen of British phrenologists, George Combe, described Craig assisting Dr. John Abercrombie, the foremost neuropathologist of the day, to dissect the brain of a ‘Mr. N’, an aged diplomatwho had suffered a personality change shortly before his death 36 . It is likely that E.T. took Francis to observe dissections and encouraged him to study the subject from popular books such as Sir Charles Bell’s
A System of Dissection Explaining the Anatomy of the Human Body
, a detailed practical account of how to cut up the human cadaver and gain access to its innermost secrets.
    Although E.T.’s assertive and