Similarities to Mary Kelly's Room

[Anna Morris]

I love the 3-D work some have done to reconstruct Mary's room, yet those are always so neat and nice looking. I have long tried to visualize what her room might have looked like when she actually lived in it. Here is a picture from www.sarahwise.co.uk/blackest.html .

This room is probably narrower than was Mary's, if hers was 12 X 12 feet square, more or less. There are other differences but I bet it is somewhat similar. This is somewhere in the East End. I think the label says Somers Town, if it isn't on the picture.

[Debra Arif]

Yes that does look similar just minus the windows. Makes you appreciate how small the room was.

[Anna Morris]

I have a color picture of a refurbished silk weaver's room in Spitalfields. I have continually been unable to post it here due to too many mega bytes or something, even after I ran it through Pinterest. THAT room more resembled Mary's room, I think.

Her room was about the size of my bedroom if the measurements given are accurate. When Bowyer looked through the window he would have been close to the horror. The pictures and drawings make the room look large and Jack's work distant but it wasn't.

[Anna Morris]

A number of the tenements we know in the squalor if 1888 were once the habitations and work rooms of Spitalfields silk weavers. I always pictured the industry as the hand looming of fabric yardage but there was more to it apparently. I have been tracking down information on fly fringe for my own knowledge and I keep running into stunning examples of work done by the silk weavers of Spitalfields.

Whether or not they constructed the whole silk dress pictured below, they seem to be credited with elaborate fringes and embroidery or brocade work. A lot of the fly fringe examples go back to Spitalfields.* (I assume Mary's "box of costly dresses" never had anything quite this elaborate.)

*Fly fringe is a method of knotting silk thread to create tiny tassels along the length. This of course was done by hand, using a shuttle. It is said a fringe maker could make 12 feet in a day and that was the amount put onto a card in the late 1700s which sold for 2 shillings. I don't think this is made today, even by machine. I have an idea it would not do well in the wash.

If anyone is interested in the detail of trim on this dress, it is well worth going to the site and looking at the slide show. There is very intricate trim and braid pictured and, based on other research I think all of that was made in Spitalfields. The fly fringe is exceptional and includes loops resembling flowers in addition to flies.