What can be said about the presentation of the personalities of the prostitutes in From Hell is that the narrative constructs a species of friendship among them. They come together, for example, to help Ann Crook's baby, in proto-feminist solidarity about seeing to one another's lodgings and meals (Hughes and Hughes)--dramatically convenient but a fabrication. They lived either "alone," i.e., in common lodgings with other poor people, or with men in relationships of highly variable stability. What they had in common was poverty.
In the film these are attractive women, even if a couple of them are presented as being of a certain age. Real-life death photos make no one attractive; however, their real faces bespeak lives of hardship and poverty, and indeed they all had missing teeth--but not in the film. All but one were in their 40s, and the weight of evidence is that they lived for alcohol. The only man portrayed in their lives is a factitious villain-pimp called McQueen. Where film and actual events most strongly disagree regarding the murders is in the fact that the autopsies indicate that all of the victims appear to have been strangled before being slashed (Barbee). Cutting the throats postmortem, when there is no pumping action, would explain the relatively small amount of blood found at the body scenes. However, no reference to strangling is made in the film. Instead, the presentation is that the girls are killed in one place and dumped in another.
Mary Ann "Polly" Nichols. In the film, Polly is portrayed as a prostitute who can't quite seem to make enough money to both live on and pay her pimp; McQueen threatens her. What puts her in immediate jeopardy after that event is her refusal of the attentions of Elizabeth Stride. Polly is shown being killed, in shadows, throat cut from behind, in a room that is not clearly identified. Her body is then shown laid out on a dark London street that turns out to be Buck's Row, with a tr...