Mary Ann Nichols, known as Polly, was born on August 26, 1845, in London to a locksmith and his laundress wife. From early in her life she was put to work helping her mother in the backbreaking labor of hand washing and pressing the clothes of others, according to “The Hidden Lives of Jack the Ripper’s Victims.” Polly had brown hair, high cheekbones, and a light-hearted demeanor.
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At 19 she married a printer’s machinist named William Nichols and they moved in first with his parents and then with her father who had set up a blacksmith shop. In 1876, Polly, William, and their growing family moved into the Peabody Buildings, new tenements for the working poor with such conveniences as indoor toilets and gas-heated baths, per “The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper.” But cracks in the marriage and the couple’s lives soon appeared. Polly began to overindulge in alcohol, and there were allegations that her husband was having an affair. On more than one occasion she left her husband and children — they had five by the time of her murder — and moved into a workhouse.
