The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper

By Hallie Rubenhold

Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction and of the Goodreads Choice Award for History & Biography

The award-winning, best-selling book that changes the narrative of the “Ripper” murders forever

Polly, Annie, Elisabeth, Catherine, and Mary Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. They came from some of London’s wealthiest and poorest neighborhoods, from the factory towns of middle England, and from Wales and Sweden. They wrote ballads, ran coffeehouses, lived on country estates; they breathed ink dust from printing presses and escaped human traffickers.
What they had in common was the year of their murders: 1888. The person responsible was never identified, but the character created by the press to fill that gap has become far more famous than any of these five women. Now, in this gripping narrative of five lives, Hallie Rubenhold finally sets the record straight and gives these women back their stories.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Apr 9, 2019
• ISBN: 9781328664082

Hallie Rubenhold

HALLIE RUBENHOLD is a social historian whose expertise lies in rediscovering the stories of previously unknown women and episodes in history. The Five is the first full-length biography of the victims of Jack the Ripper to be published since 1888. By drawing upon a wealth of previously unseen archival material and adding a much-needed historical context to the victims’ lives, The Five promises to change the narrative of these murders forever.  

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title page

Contents

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Title Page

Contents

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Map: The Five's London

Introduction: A Tale of Two Cities

Polly

The Blacksmith’s Daughter

The Peabody Worthies

An Irregular Life

Houseless Creature

Annie

Soldiers and Servants

Mrs. Chapman

Demon Drink

Dark Annie

Elisabeth

The Girl from Torslanda

Allmän Kvinna 97

The Immigrant

Long Liz

Photographs

Kate

Seven Sisters

The Ballad of Kate and Tom

Her Sister’s Keeper

Nothing

Mary Jane

Marie Jeanette

The Gay Life

Conclusion: Just Prostitutes

A Life in Objects

Acknowledgments

Notes

Sources

Index

About the Author

Connect on Social Media

Footnotes

First Mariner books edition 2020

Copyright © 2019 by Hallie Rubenhold

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address HarperCollins Publishers, 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007.

Published in the UK in 2019 by Transworld Publishers.

marinerbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Rubenhold, Hallie, author.

Title: The five : the untold lives of the women killed by Jack the Ripper /Hallie Rubenhold.

Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018038562 (print) | LCCN 2018041373 (ebook) |ISBN 9781328664082 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328663818 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780358299615 (PBK.)

Subjects: LCSH: Jack, the Ripper. | Murder victims—England—London—Biography. | Working class women—England—London—Social conditions—19th century. | Whitechapel (London, England)—History—19th century.

Classification: LCC HV6535.G6 (ebook) | LCC HV6535.G6 L6578 2019 (print) |

DDC 362.88—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018038562

Cover design by Martha Kennedy

Cover photographs © Richard Jenkins (woman) and © Silas Manhood (street)

Author photograph © Sarah Blackie

v6.1021

Map by Liane Payne, based on 1851 edition of Reynolds’s Map of London

For

Mary Ann Polly Nichols,

Annie Chapman,

Elisabeth Stride,

Catherine Eddowes

&

Mary Jane Kelly

I write for those women who do not speak, for those who do not have a voice because they were so terrified, because we are taught to respect fear more than ourselves. We’ve been taught that silence would save us, but it won’t.

—AUDRE LORDE

Introduction:

A Tale of Two Cities

There are two versions of the events of 1887. One is very well known, but the other is not.

The first version, more frequently featured in history books, is the one that those who lived in late-nineteenth-century Britain wished to recall, the version they recounted to their grandchildren with a wistful smile. It is the story of Queen Victoria and a summer of celebrations for her Golden Jubilee. No more than a teenage girl when the nation’s weighty crown was placed upon her head, she had become, a half-century later, the embodiment of empire, and a suitably grand series of events had been planned to commemorate her fifty-year reign. On June 20, the precise day she had first mounted the throne, the crowned heads of Europe, Indian princes, dignitaries, and representatives from all corners of the empire, and even the Hawaiian queen, Lili‘uokalani, converged upon London. West End shopkeepers adorned their windows in red, white, and blue; Royal Standards and Union Jacks, festoons of flowers, and colored garlands could be seen hanging from every somber stone edifice. At night, the embassies and clubs, the hotels and institutions throughout St. James and Piccadilly threw the switches on the electric lights and turned on the gas jets, illuminating the giant crowns and the letters V and R affixed to their buildings. Her Majesty’s loyal subjects came to the center of the city from the suburbs and tenements; they punched their rail tickets from Kent and Surrey and pushed their way into the crowded streets, hoping to catch a glimpse of a royal coach or a princess in diamonds. They placed candles in their windows when the long summer twilight faded away, and toasted their monarch’s health with beer and champagne and claret.

There was a service of thanksgiving at Westminster Abbey, a state banquet, a military review at Windsor, and even a children’s fete in Hyde Park for twenty-five hundred boys and girls. They were entertained by twenty Punch and Judy puppet shows, eight marionette theaters, eighty-six stereoscope displays, nine troupes of performing dogs, monkeys, and ponies, as well as bands, toys, and gas inflated balloons, before being treated to a lunch of lemonade, cake, meat pies, buns, and oranges. Throughout the summer there were commemorative concerts, lectures, performances, regattas, picnics, dinners, and even a yacht race. As the jubilee corresponded with the traditional London season, there were also lavish garden parties and balls. Ladies dressed up in that summer’s fashions: lace-trimmed, bustled dresses in black-and-white silk, and hues of apricot yellow, heliotrope, and Gobelin blue. A magnificent ball was held at the Guildhall, where the Prince and Princess of Wales entertained their visiting regal relations, as well as the prince of Persia, the papal envoy, the prince of Siam, and the Maharaja Holkar of Indore. All of high society danced beneath banners and cascading arrangements of perfumed flowers. Tiaras and tie pins sparkled in the mirrors. Young debutantes were introduced to suitable sons. The whirl of Victorian life spun round and round to the dreamy melody of a waltz.

Then there is the other version.

This is the tale of 1887 that most chose to forget. To this day, only a scant number of history books recount it, and surprisingly few people know that it occurred. Yet in that year, this story filled more newspaper column inches than did the descriptions of royal parades, banquets, and fetes put together.

That jubilee summer had been exceptionally warm and rainless. The clear blue skies that presided over the season’s carefree picnics and al fresco parties had shriveled the fruit harvest and dried out the fields. Water shortages and an absence of seasonal jobs in agricultural labor exacerbated an already growing employment crisis. While the wealthy enjoyed the fine weather from beneath their parasols and from under the trees of their suburban villas, the homeless and poor made use of it by creating an open-air encampment in Trafalgar Square. Many had come to the center of town, looking for work at Covent Garden Market, where Londoners bought their produce, but a drought meant fewer boxes of plums and pears to lift and haul. With no money for lodgings, these migrants slept rough in the nearby square, where they were joined by an increasing population of unemployed workers who would rather live on the street than face the deplorable and demeaning conditions of the workhouse. Much to the horror of more fortunate observers, these campers could be seen making their morning ablutions and scrubbing their vermin infested clothing in the fountains, directly beneath the nose of Lord Nelson, high atop his column. When the autumn chill began to move in, so too did the socialists, the Salvation Army, and various charitable organizations, handing out Bibles, admission tickets to lodging houses, coffee, tea, bread, and soup. Tarpaulins were erected to create makeshift bivouacs; each day, impassioned speakers declared their messages from between the paws of the square’s mighty bronze lions. The excitement, the sense of community, and the free refreshments swelled the number of outcast Londoners, which attracted the police, which in turn brought the journalists. The newspapermen roamed among the square’s bedraggled population, collecting their names and stories.

Mr. Ashville called himself a painter and glazier by trade. Out of work for twelve months, he had spent thirty-three nights sleeping on the Embankment until the weather grew too cold. Then he moved to Trafalgar Square, hoping it might prove a bit warmer. Dejected and visibly worn down by his experience, he attempted to remain positive about his prospects of finding employment again one day.

A soldier’s widow circled Trafalgar Square, selling matches to support her young son, but she hadn’t always lived like this. After failing to pay the final installment on her rent-to-own sewing machine, she lost her livelihood and the single room she had called home. She knew that going into the workhouse meant that her child would be separated from her. It seemed a better option to rough it in the square each night, with the boy curled up under her shawl.¹

An elderly couple, who had never before faced adversity, now slept on a stone bench in the square.² The husband had been employed as a musical director at a theater, but an accident had left him unfit to work. With no savings, the couple soon fell behind on their rent and eventually were forced to make their bed under the stars. The thought of throwing themselves upon the mercy of their local workhouse was too shameful and frightening to consider.

Hundreds, each with a similar tale to tell, came to Trafalgar Square to lay their head against the paving stones. It did not take long for political agitators to recognize that this congregation of the downtrodden was a ready-made army of the angry with nothing to lose. Londoners had long realized that Trafalgar Square sat on an axis between the east and west of the city, the dividing line between rich and poor; an artificial boundary, which, like the invisible restraints that kept the disenfranchised voiceless, could be easily breached. In 1887, the possibility of social revolution felt terrifyingly near for some, and yet for others it did not seem close enough. At Trafalgar Square, the daily speeches given by socialists and reformers such as William Morris, Annie Besant, Eleanor Marx, and George Bernard Shaw led to mobilization, as chanting, banner-waving processions of thousands spilled onto the streets. Inevitably, some resorted to violence. The Metropolitan Police and the magistrate’s court at Bow Street, in Covent Garden, worked overtime to contain the protesters and clear the square of those whom they deemed indigents and rabble-rousers. But like an irrepressible tide, soon after they were pushed out, they returned once more.

On November 8, the police made a fatal decision. Sir Charles Warren, the commissioner of police, banned all meetings in Trafalgar Square. Those who had come to see this site, in the heart of London, as a rallying place for the common man and a forum for political action interpreted this as a deliberate act of war. Plans were made for a demonstration on the thirteenth of the month. Its pretext was to demand that the Irish MP William O’Brien be released from prison, but the grievances expressed by the protesters extended far beyond this particular cause célèbre. More than forty thousand men and women gathered to make their point, and two thousand police, along with the Queen’s Life Guard and the Grenadier Guards, were there to meet them. Almost immediately, clashes erupted. The police, wielding truncheons, fell on the protesters. Those participating in the march had been advised to demonstrate peacefully, yet many had come equipped with lead pipes, knives, hammers, and brickbats. Forty protesters were arrested, more than two hundred were injured in the riot, and at least two were killed. Unfortunately, Bloody Sunday, as it came to be known, did not signal the end of the conflict. The tinkling sound of smashing glass and the outbursts of public rage continued well into the start of the following year.

Through these two disparate scenes moved two women whose lives and deaths would come to define nineteenth-century Britain; one was Victoria, who gave her name to the years 1837–1901. The other was a homeless woman called Mary Ann, or Polly, Nichols, who was among those encamped at Trafalgar Square in 1887. Unlike the monarch, Polly would be largely forgotten, though the world would remember with great fascination and even relish the name of her killer: Jack the Ripper.

Roughly twelve months lay between the Queen’s Golden Jubilee summer and Polly Nichols’s murder on August 31, 1888. She would be the first of Jack the Ripper’s five canonical victims—those whose deaths the police determined were committed by the same hand in the district of Whitechapel, in London’s East End. A few days later, on September 8, the body of Annie Chapman was discovered in a yard off Hanbury Street. In the early morning hours of the thirtieth of that month, the Ripper managed to strike twice. In what became known as the double event, he claimed the lives of Elisabeth Stride, who was found in Dutfield’s Yard, off Berner Street, and Catherine Kate Eddowes, who was killed in Mitre Square. After a brief pause in his spree, he committed his final atrocity on November 9: a complete mutilation of the body of Mary Jane Kelly as she lay in her bed at 13 Miller’s Court.

The brutality of the Whitechapel murders stunned London and newspaper readers around the world. The Ripper had cut the throat of each victim. Four of the five were eviscerated. With the exception of the final killing, these violent deaths occurred in open places, under cover of darkness. In each case, the murderer managed to abscond, leaving not a trace of his or their or her identity. Given the densely populated district in which these killings occurred, the public, the press, and even the police believed this to be remarkable. The Ripper always seemed one ghostly, ghoulish step ahead of the authorities, which bestowed upon the murders something extra terrifying and almost supernatural.

The Whitechapel-based H Division of the Metropolitan Police did the best they could with their resources, but having never before faced a murder case of this scale and magnitude, they quickly found themselves overwhelmed. House-to-house inquiries were conducted throughout the area and a wide variety of forensic material was gathered and analyzed. The police were besieged with statements and letters from those who claimed to be witnesses, those offering assistance, and others who just liked spinning tales. In all, more than two thousand people were interviewed and more than three hundred were investigated as possible suspects. Even with assistance from Scotland Yard and the City of London Police, none of these efforts yielded anything useful. Genuine leads were certain to have been lost among the swirling wash of paper that the investigators had to process. In the meantime, as the constables scribbled into their notebooks and followed potential malefactors down dark alleys, the Ripper continued to kill.

As the Autumn of Terror wore on, Whitechapel filled up with journalists. They hovered over this seam of sensationalist gold with pencils sharpened. Their presence amid the ongoing police investigation and an East End population living in a state of fear proved explosive. In the absence of any conclusive information offered by the police, the newspapers posited their own theories about the killer and his modus operandi. As the papers continued to fly off the newsstands, journalists became hungry for more content and new angles on the story. Inevitably, embellishment, invention, and fake news found their way onto the page. However, printing rumors and hotheaded opinion pieces that disparaged the efforts of the police did little to quell the anxiety of those who lived in Whitechapel. By the middle of September, residents were described as panic-stricken; most were too terrified to leave their homes at night. Hooting and shouting crowds gathered outside the police station on Leman Street, demanding the arrest of the killer, and local tradesmen, eager to take matters into their own hands, founded the Whitechapel Vigilance Society. All the while, the press speculated wildly about the identity of the culprit: he was a Whitechapel man; he was a wealthy swell from the West End; he was a sailor, a Jew, a butcher, a surgeon, a foreigner, a lunatic, a gang of extortionists. The inhabitants of the neighborhood began to attack anyone who fit these descriptions; doctors toting medical bags were set upon, and men carrying parcels were reported to the police. Sickened by the grotesque events, many people nonetheless found themselves compulsively intrigued by them. Just as crowds grew outside Leman Street police station, so they also gathered around the sites of the murders. Some stood staring at the places where the vicious deeds had been committed in the hope of finding answers, while others were simply entranced by the horror of the spectacle.

Because the police failed to apprehend and charge a suspect for any of the five murders, the itch to see justice meted out in the form of a trial was never salved. Instead, that which served to offer a few answers and a degree of closure was the series of coroner’s inquests, one for each killing. These were held publicly in Whitechapel and in the City of London in the wake of each murder and covered extensively by the newspapers. At a coroner’s inquest, as at a criminal trial, witnesses are called before a jury to give an account of events; the objective is to piece together a clear and official picture of how a death occurred. Most of the information that currently exists about Jack the Ripper’s five victims appears in witness statements given during the inquests; however, these accounts are problematic. The examinations lacked thoroughness, the juries asked few follow-up questions, and inconsistencies and vagaries in the testimonies were rarely challenged. Ultimately, the information disclosed over the course of the inquests only skims the surface of a far deeper and murkier well of potential answers.

Investigations into the Whitechapel murders did, however, explicitly and convincingly expose a disturbing set of facts: the poor of that district lived in unspeakably horrendous conditions. The encampment and riots at Trafalgar Square were a conspicuous manifestation of what had been chronically ailing in the East End and other impoverished parts of London. It was a cough hacked in the face of the establishment. The emergence of Jack the Ripper was a louder and more violent one still.

For most of Victoria’s reign, journalists, social reformers, and Christian missionaries had been decrying the horrors that they observed in the East End, but the situation grew even more acute during the 1870s and ’80s, as the Long Depression bore down on the economy. What work there was for London’s vast army of unskilled laborers—those who sewed and laundered the textiles, carried the bricks, assembled the goods, peddled in the streets, and unloaded the ships—was poorly paid and insecure. Casual work on the docks might pay no more than fifteen shillings a week; sandwich board men who carried advertisements through the streets might make one shilling, eight pence per day. To worsen matters, rents had been steadily climbing and lodgings were harder to come by. Large areas of lower-income housing across the capital had been destroyed to make way for railroads, and the creation of broad new thoroughfares, such as Shaftesbury Avenue, decanted London’s poor into fewer and more densely packed spaces.

Whitechapel was one of the most notorious of these, but was by no means the only sink of poverty in the capital. As the social reformer Charles Booth’s extensive study of London’s impoverished areas in the 1890s revealed, pockets of destitution, crime, and misery flourished throughout the metropolis, even within otherwise comfortable areas. Still, Whitechapel’s reputation trumped even Bermondsey, Lambeth, Southwark, and St. Pancras as the most sordid. By the end of the nineteenth century, seventy-eight thousand souls were packed into this quarter of common lodging houses, furnished rooms, warehouses, factories, sweatshops, abattoirs, pubs, cheap music halls, and markets. Its overcrowded population represented diverse cultures, religions, and languages. For at least two centuries, Whitechapel had been a destination for immigrants from many parts of Europe. In the late nineteenth century, a large number of Irish, desperate to escape the rural poverty of the mother country, had arrived. By the 1880s an exodus of Jews, fleeing the pogroms of eastern Europe, joined them. In an era highly suspicious of those of other nationalities, races, and religions, integration, even within the slums, did not occur naturally. Nevertheless, Booth’s social investigators regarded these various residents as fairly uniform in terms of their social class. With a number of middle-class exceptions, a significant percentage of the inhabitants of Whitechapel were identified as poor, very poor, or semi-criminal.

The throbbing dark heart at the center of the district was Spitalfields. Here, near the fruit and vegetable market and the soaring white spire of Christ Church, some of the worst streets and accommodations in the area, and perhaps in all of London, were situated. Even the police feared Dorset Street, Thrawl Street, and Flower and Dean Street, and the smaller thoroughfares contiguous to them. Lined with cheap, vice-riddled lodging houses (known as doss houses) and decrepit dwellings, whose crumbling interiors had been divided into individual furnished rooms for rent, these streets and their desperate inhabitants came to embody all that was rotten in England.

Those who strayed into this abyss from the safety of the middle-class Victorian world were struck dumb by what they encountered. The broken pavement, dim gaslights, slicks of sewage, stagnant pools of disease-breeding water, and rubbish-filled roadways foretold the physical horrors of what lay within the buildings. An entire family might inhabit one vermin-infested furnished room, eight by eight feet in size, with broken windows and damp walls. On one occasion, health inspectors found five children sharing a bed alongside a dead sibling awaiting burial. People slept on the floors, on heaps of rags and straw; some had pawned all their clothes and owned barely a scrap to cover their nakedness. In this circle of hell, alcoholism, malnutrition, and disease were rife, as was domestic violence—along with most other forms of violence. Girls, having barely reached puberty, turned to prostitution to earn money. Boys just as easily slipped into thieving and pickpocketing. It appeared to moral, middle-class England that in the face of this level of brutal, crippling want, every good and righteous instinct that ought to govern human relations had been completely eroded.

Nowhere was this state of affairs more apparent than in the common lodging houses, which offered shelter to those too poor to afford even a furnished room. The lodging houses provided temporary homes for the homeless, who divided their nights between the reeking beds on offer here, the oppression of the workhouse casual wards, and sleeping on the street. They were the haunts of beggars, criminals, prostitutes, chronic alcoholics, the unemployed, the sick and the old, the casual laborer, and the pensioned soldier. Most residents would fit into a number of these categories. In Whitechapel alone there were 233 common lodging houses, which accommodated an estimated 8,530 homeless people.³ Naturally, those on Dorset Street, Thrawl Street, and Flower and Dean Street bore the worst reputations. Four pence per night could buy someone a single hard, flea-hopping bed in a stifling, stinking dormitory. Eight pence could buy an equally squalid double bed with a wooden partition around it. There were single-sex lodging houses and mixed lodging houses, though those that admitted both sexes were acknowledged to be the more morally degenerate. All lodgers were entitled to make use of the communal kitchen, which was open all day and late into the night. Residents used this as a gathering place, cooking meager meals and quaffing tea and beer with one another and anyone else who cared to drop in. Social investigators and reformers who sat at these kitchen tables were appalled by the rude manners and the horrific language they heard, even from children. However, it was the violent behavior, degrading filth, and overflowing toilets, in addition to the open displays of nakedness, free sexual intercourse, drunkenness, and child neglect to which they truly objected. In the doss house, everything offensive about the slum was concentrated under one roof.

The police and reformers were especially concerned about the link between common lodging houses and prostitution. As long as a dosser could pay the pence required for a bed, the lodging-house keeper asked few questions. Many women who regarded prostitution as their main source of income lived in or worked out of lodging houses, especially in the wake of the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act, which saw the enforced closure of many brothels. The result of this meant that a large number of prostitutes were forced to ply their trade in places separate from where they lived. A lodging house with eight-penny doubles was a convenient place to take a man who had been solicited on the street. Other prostitutes chose to sleep in a cheaper four-penny single but see to their customers in dark corners outside, where quick sexual encounters, which frequently did not involve full intercourse, took place.

Lodging houses provided shelter for a wide variety of women facing an assortment of unfortunate circumstances. While some resorted to what has been called casual prostitution, it is categorically wrong to assume that all of them did so. These women were inventive when it came to scraping together their doss money. Most took on poorly paid casual labor, doing cleaning and laundering or hawking goods. Generally, they supplemented the little money they earned by borrowing, begging, pawning, and sometimes stealing. Pairing up with a male partner also played an essential role in defraying costs. Often these relationships, formed out of necessity, were short-lived; some, however, endured for months or years without ever being sanctified in a church. The nonchalance with which poor men and women embarked upon and dissolved these partnerships horrified middle-class observers. Whether or not these unions produced children also seemed to be of little consequence. Obviously, this way of life diverged considerably from the acceptable moral standard and threw another layer of confusion over what exactly it was that the female residents of these wicked lodging houses were doing in order to keep a roof over their heads.

During the Ripper’s reign of terror, newspapers, eager to scandalize the nation with graphic details of slum life, regularly asserted that Whitechapel’s lodging houses were brothels in all but name and that the majority of women who inhabited them, with very few exceptions, were all prostitutes. In the grip of such terrible events, the public were willing to believe it. Hyperbole became enshrined as fact, although some within the police had come to perceive the situation in another light. An altogether different perspective is offered in a letter written by Sir Charles Warren, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, at the height of the murder spree. After doing some rough calculations, Warren estimated that approximately 1,200 prostitutes inhabited Whitechapel’s 233 common lodging houses. More importantly, he qualified this statement by admitting that the police have no means of ascertaining what women are prostitutes and who are not.⁴ In other words, the newspapers were in no position to make this determination when even the police found distinguishing a prostitute from among her sisters an impossibility. Warren’s figures present another intriguing prospect. If the lodging-house population was comprised of 8,530 people and a third, or 2,844, of those residents were female, and if it were to be accepted that 1,200 of these women could be identified as prostitutes, that would still indicate that the majority of them, or 1,644, were not engaged in any form of prostitution at all.* Much like the inhabitants of Whitechapel’s common lodging houses, the victims of Jack the Ripper and the lives they led became entangled in a web of assumptions, rumor, and unfounded speculation. The spinning of these strands began over 130 years ago and, remarkably, they have been left virtually undisturbed and unchallenged. The fibers that have clung to and defined the shape of Polly, Annie, Elisabeth, Kate, and Mary Jane’s stories are the values of the Victorian world. They are male, authoritarian, and middle class. They were formed at a time when women had no voice, and few rights, and the poor were considered lazy and degenerate: to have been both of these things was one of the worst possible combinations. For over 130 years we have embraced the dusty parcel we were handed. We have rarely ventured to peer inside it or attempted to remove the thick wrapping that has kept us from knowing these women or their true histories.

Jack the Ripper killed prostitutes, or so it has always been believed, but there is no hard evidence to suggest that three of his five victims were prostitutes at all. As soon as each body was discovered, in a dark yard or street, the police assumed that the woman was a prostitute killed by a maniac who had lured her to the location for sex. There is, and never was, any proof of this either. To the contrary—over the course of the coroner’s inquests, it became known that Jack the Ripper never had sex with a single victim. Additionally, in the case of each murder there were no signs of struggle and the killings appear to have taken place in complete silence. There were no screams heard by anyone in the vicinity. The autopsies concluded that all of the women were killed while in a reclining position. In at least three of the cases, the victims were known to sleep on the street and on the nights they were killed did not have money for a lodging house. In the final case, the victim was murdered in her bed. However, the police were so committed to their theories about the killer’s choice of victims that they failed to conclude the obvious—the Ripper targeted women while they slept.

Unreliable source material has always been the obstacle to discovering the truth about these murders. Although a handful of police records exist, the coroner’s inquests provide most of what is known about the actual crimes and the victims. Unfortunately, in three of the five cases, the official documentation from these inquests is missing. All that remains is a body of edited, embellished, misheard, reinterpreted newspaper reports from which a general picture of events can be teased. These documents have been approached with care on my part, and nothing contained within them has been taken as gospel. Similarly, I have also refrained from using unsubstantiated information provided by witnesses who did not know the victims personally prior to their deaths.

My intention in writing this book is not to hunt and name the killer. I wish instead to retrace the footsteps of five women, to consider their experiences within the context of their era, and to follow their paths through both the gloom and the light. They are worth more to us than the empty human shells we have taken them for; they were children who cried for their mothers, they were young women who fell in love; they endured childbirth, the death of parents; they laughed, and they celebrated Christmas. They argued with their siblings, they wept, they dreamed, they hurt, they enjoyed small triumphs. The courses their lives took mirrored that of so many other women of the Victorian age, and yet were so singular in the way they ended. It is for them that I write this book. I do so in the hope that we may now hear their stories clearly and give back to them that which was so brutally taken away with their lives: their dignity.

Part I

Polly

August 26, 1845

---

August 31, 1888

The Blacksmith’s Daughter

THE CYLINDERS TURNED. The belts moved, and gears clicked and whirred, as type and ink pressed against paper. Floors rattled; lights burned at all hours. In some rooms, lengthy sheets of words hung from the ceilings on drying racks; in others stood towers of wooden boxes filled with tiny pieces of metal type. There were rooms where men bent and molded leather, tooled gold leaf onto covers, and stitched bindings. There were sheds in which copper plates were etched and lettering was forged. There were shops stacked high with books and newspapers and magazines, redolent with the delightful scent of fresh paper and sharp ink. Fleet Street, and all the smaller byways surrounding it, was a multichambered hive of printing. Filthy canvas smocks and smeared aprons were the only fashion; the sootier and blacker, the harder the worker. Printer’s boys ran their errands arrayed head to toe in ink dust. Hardly a man in the publishing parish of St. Bride’s could boast of unstained fingers, nor would he wish to. This was the home of the author, the printer, the newspaperman, the bookseller, and every other profession related to the written word.

Fleet Street and its tributaries flowed constantly with human traffic. As one writer commented, it was possible to look back on the street from Ludgate Hill, near St. Paul’s Cathedral, and see nothing but a dark, confused, quickly-moving mass of men, horses and vehicles without a yard of the pavement to be seen—nothing but heads along the rows of houses, and in the road, too, an ocean of heads.¹ Between this broad thoroughfare and that of High Holborn, which paralleled it, a network of smaller alleys and passages was lined with rotting wooden structures and old brick buildings all crushed together. These had been the homes and workshops of printers, thinkers, and impoverished writers since the seventeenth century. Neighbors were close enough to hear a wail, a sneeze, or even a sigh from next door. In the summer, when the windows were thrown open, the thumping and the churning of presses—steam-powered and those run by hand—could be heard along nearly every street.

Amid this cacophony, in a cramped old room, Caroline Walker brought her second child, Mary Ann, into the world. She arrived on August 26, 1845, a day that the surrounding newspapers described as fine and dry. The home into which she was born, a dilapidated two-hundred-year-old house known as Dawes Court, on Gunpowder Alley, off Shoe Lane, bore an address worthy of any of Charles Dickens’s heroines. Indeed, the author of Oliver Twist had come to know these dingy courts and fetid alleys intimately in his youth while he worked as a shoeblack, and later scribbled away in nearby rooms. Polly, as Caroline Walker’s daughter came to be called, would spend her first years in lodgings just like those of the fictional Fagin and his pickpocket boys.

The Walkers had never been a wealthy family, nor, given the limitations of her father’s profession, were they ever likely to be. Edward Walker had trained as a blacksmith in Lambeth, on the opposite side of the Thames, until work along the Street of Ink beckoned him north across the river. He had turned his skills at first to making locks and then, quite probably, given his location, to the founding of type, or the creation of typeface.* Although blacksmithing was a respected skilled trade, it paid only a passable living. A journeyman blacksmith at the start of his career might be paid three to five shillings a day, a sum likely to rise to at least six shillings and sixpence when he gained a permanent position, though the expansion of a man’s family would stretch the extra pennies more thinly.*

Edward and Caroline and their three children—Edward, born two years before Polly, and Frederick, four years after—made a humble but steady life together on these wages. In the early decades of the Victorian era, this was not a simple task. Illness or the

Reviews for The Five

[Joanne · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Informative and fascinating. It’s very sad that the poor women of the Victorian era had almost no resources when they lost their men. It’s shameful that this went in for so long and that we still feel the repercussions of that time today.
These women were human beings and deserved better than what they got.

[jennybeast · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In the pros column:
Fantastically researched, well written, and a fascinating look at the lives of impoverished Victorian women in general. Also, well-argued -- I think Rubenhold is probably right, and these women were mostly not prostitutes. I loved the sheer variety of life trajectories that the women experienced -- you just don't get this kind of granular analysis of the lives of the struggling middle class/working class/poor for most parts of history. I'm astonished at how well documented it is.

In the cons:
Well, it's very dense. A lot of the information is kind of repetitive -- in that many of their lives followed a similar path. There's a whole lot of "the more things change, the more things stay the same" that is the main takeaway for me -- so I found it quite depressing.

On the whole, I thought it was a good read, and I appreciate the authors pro-women viewpoint.

[smorton11 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Since it’s Nonfiction November, I figured I better catch up on some of the Nonfiction Book Club selections from this year. Though book club is on hiatus until May (I am so burnt out on virtual meetings), it is still a very near and dear piece of my heart that has helped me, and many other members of book club make it through the pandemic.

The Five quickly became a favorite of my coworker, Marielle, who joined Nonfiction Book Club after her own book club, YA for all flamed out. She’s recommended it countless times at the store and made it one of her summer picks this year as well, she absolutely loves it. The book itself focuses on the lives of the victims of Jack the Ripper. Their deaths are barely mentioned and there is no gruesome true crime style recounting of how they died – Hallie focuses exclusively on how they lived. She also does not go into speculation about who Jack the Ripper was, and besides a cursory mention in the introduction, he is not mentioned again in the book. So if you are looking for an actual true crime book about about him, this is not it.

The five women of The Five were a fascinating group of women, most of whom fell to the circumstances of being a woman in the late 1800s – it wasn’t an easy time for women on the whole. Their backgrounds were varied, some had wealth, others poor, one an immigrant, one a pathological liar – they were all people, people with friends and families who cared about them, people who were more than just victims of a terrible crime.

One thing that did tie them all together, however, was that at the time of their deaths, they were all in some sort of destitute situation, either due to circumstances beyond their control, mental health crises, or addition. In book club we had a fascinating discussion about female freedom and oppression as well as the lack of agency women of the late Victorian era experienced and compared it to our own. We’re lucky, in book club, to have a number of generations represented by our members and our best conversations always arise when we get to discuss the different experiences we all had with feminism and sexism growing up.

The Five is a snapshot of London and the lives of the people who lived and worked there in the late 1800s. As we always do when we find a book categorized in a genre that we do not agree with, with discussed in book club where we should shelve it at the store. We made well reasoned arguments for true crime (because that’s where we found it and we may not have found it otherwise), sociology, history and biography before ultimately landing on biography. We found ourselves appreciative that Hallie Rubenhold went on the search she did to reclaim this women’s voices so we found biography to be the best fit.

[rosienotrose · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary-Jane.

Miscast in the media for nearly 130 years, the victims of Jack the Ripper finally get their full stories told in this eye-opening and chilling reminder that life for middle-class women in Victorian London could be full of social pitfalls and peril.

What Rubenfold does for the women behind the story of Jack the Ripper is take them out of the shadows and shine a light on their life and the ups and downs that followed them. It shows how easily a life can change in an era when there was no net to catch people when they fell on tough times and I found myself feeling for these women even when they were making decisions that were not in their own best interests.

Rubenfold spends a lot of time trying to prove the women weren’t sex workers, and while I understand these women’s murder were incorrectly dismissed due to the ‘fact’ that they were prostitutes - much like the Yorkshire Ripper victims nearly a hundred years later - even if they were prostitutes this was no excuse for murder and I think this could have been communicated more clearly.

Overall a deeply researched and insightful portrayal of life in Victorian England with a lot of situations that women still deal with today.

[librarycin · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book looks at the five (cannonical) women who were murdered by Jack the Ripper. It doesn’t look at the murders, but it is a biography of each of the women. So, they weren’t all prostitutes. In fact, most of them weren’t. They were all, however, poor and had trouble finding money to pay for a place to sleep on many nights. Most of them were also alcoholics (well, my perception is that they were – I’m not sure the book actually says that). In any case, I’m surprised the author was able to find as much information about them as she was. A number of years ago, I read another book that focused on the Ripper victims, but it was thin. I don’t remember it well (only the cover), and I thought I kept it, but it doesn’t look like I did, or I would have checked, but my assumption was that there just wasn’t a lot of information about five very poor girls who grew into women in the mid to late 19th century. But Rubenhold was able to find quite a bit. I was extra surprised to read about Mary Jane Kelly, but I won’t spoil it! I listened to the audio book and my mind wandered occasionally, but not much. I was interested enough a few times to rewind, as well, so as to not miss what was just said.

[lisamlane-535627 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Popular history at its very best, the book explores the lives of the five women whose deaths were attributed to Jack the Ripper. Rubenhold includes wonderful details that flesh out the places of that era, even if they don't always apply directly to the woman she's discussing -- sort of factually-based creative non-fiction, if you like. The theme of women being considered as prostitutes when they weren't runs throughout the book, and the making of that argument seems to dominate a bit too much. There's nothing wrong with being a prostitute. But knowing that these women probably weren't (most of them had bad luck and/or problems with drink) provides insight into the ways in which the whole Ripper case has been mishandled by both the police at the time and historians now.

[maryellencg-894309 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Fascinating and well researched.

[ghost_boy-691444 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Let's face it, we'll never find the true identity to Jack the Ripper. This book wasn't meant for you to solve a case. Instead, we focus on what we do know some information about the five. It's kind of nuts how much there is about Jack the Ripper, he's everywhere. Yet most people can't even name the victims. I have interest in the crime genre, but found this book refreshing. I don't feel like I went down some conspiracy rabbit hole. Plus, this book gives a good look at what was going on during 1888 with lifestyle, fashion, and the like with a lot of sources. The only thing I didn't care for was the author's writing, was a little dry at times.

[mstrust · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The author's focus is firmly on the lives of the five canonical victims of Jack the Ripper, not their deaths and not the unknown man who killed them. The amount of research done and the skill with with the author was able to show that these women had families who loved them, had struggles to survive, relationships and hopes, and most of all, that not all of them were prostitutes but simply poor, often homeless women who were lumped in as prostitutes simply because the police saw nearly all the women they dealt with in the East End as "fallen" women.If you're looking for information about the actual murders, you'll find very little here, except for the aftermath on the families.

[belana-990668 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This was an amazing book! I never spent much thought on Jack the Ripper, much less on his victims. This book is an eye-opener.
It tells the story of the lives of five very depraved women, who never had a chance from their first breath to their last. I'm in awe of the research that has gone into writing this book. Geez, I'm so glad I didn't live back then, especially not as a female.
Those poor women were being judged and condemned back then, and the myth that they were prostitutes, plus the implication that they didn't deserve better, lasts until this day and age.
Everybody should be made to read -- or better -- listen to this book. The narration was exceptional!
I'll recommend this book to everyone who'll listen, because it is such a great book.
I hadn't proceeded far, when I went to buy another book by this author. I love historical books, and this is one of the finest I've listened to in a long while.
I stumbled upon it through a review in a Swiss newspaper, got interested, and immediately bought the audio book. I hope somebody will do an audio version in German, to reach a larger audience.
This book should be widely advertised, and I hope the author gets the acknowledgement she deserves.

[nx74defiant · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

There is much written about Jack the Ripper. But little about his victims. This covers the lives of the five victims. How did they come to be in White Chapel? We learn about the harshness of life at that time for poor women, the middle and lower classes.

[debs4jc · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Fascinating. This book takes the five canonical victims of Jack the Ripper and gives us a detailed (in as much as they can be detailed, with what we know) biography of each women. In this way, the reader gets a focused look at the personal and societal forces that brought these women to a place of poverty and vulnerability which made them easy prey for a killer. I found these stories fascinating, yes the writer uses some dramatization and speculation to flesh the stories out, but that also made them relatable. With each woman's story there is plenty of commentary or background information given on such things as the state of London's housing for the poor or how the law treated common law marriages to help the reader understand the circumstances and choices of these women. I still found some of their choices hard to fathom, though I had the foreknowledge of their bad end and I also have never suffered from addictions or domestic abuse or the other issues that these woman had to deal with. Polly, Annie, Elisabeth, Kate and Mary Jane. I'm sure the author didn't get everything correct as she wrote their stories (who could), but I'm glad that she has made the attempt to tell their stories. It was well worth my while to read about them, more so than about the person who killed them. I would definitely recommend this book. Those who want to learn about and from history will greatly enjoy it. And those who want to think about how society treats the poor and women will find it thought provoking.

[helenliz_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is a difficult book to rate and review. is it important - yes. Is it a fun read - no. It's a bit like being hit over the head with a central thesis, which gets a bit wearing. This sets out to remind people that Jack the Ripper actually killed people by making each of the 5 victims ascribed to him into women again, rather than letting the victim fade into insignificance. After all, to whom did the murder impact most? the victim can surely put in a claim there - this book aims to speak for each of the victims. It barely mentions JtR the whole way through, and each life story stops at the death. There is nothing further than this, which felt like a miss. There is clearly a lot of research in here, but there is also a lot of unnecessary emoting - too much of the "X must surely have felt ...." that imposes a modern sensibility on a historic figure and detracts from the facts. And there are facts in here, but it feels that the author undermines herself here as well. There are statements that some of the coroners reports and police note were lost, but it never says which ones. So when we are reading about the facts reported at the inquest, we're not sure if these are first had or are reported in newspapers, with the likely distortion found therein. Having said that, the central thesis, that the 5 women were not all prostitutes, as they were tarred and that they deserve to be remembered as individuals as much as their murderer is remembered is a valid surmise. I would have liked to see more about the afterlives of the women concerned, the inquest, how their family were told, their children, for instance.

[maura853 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A fantastic piece of research, drawing together the details of the lives of five ordinary, all-too-typical working class women who, were it not for the terrible circumstances of their deaths at the hands of one of history’s most notorious killers, would have remained completely anonymous and lost to history.

Fascinating, even if you have no interest whatsoever in the … what can I call it, without being rude: “mythology”? …obsession? … of Jack the Ripper. This is a window into the downward spiral of the lives of five very different women of Victorian London, who illustrate all too painfully how most working class people of that era lived on the edge of an abyss, and how one life crisis -- illness, loss of employment, death of a parent or spouse, collapse of a relationship – could plunge them headlong into destitution, homelessness, and a life in the shadows, beyond the respectability and minimal comforts they had worked so hard to enjoy.

Sound familiar? What was just as shocking as the tragedies of these five women was how familiar it all seemed. They say that every American is only one serious illness away from bankruptcy. (And having experienced the American medical system, and the scam they call health insurance, I believe it.) Britain has a better safety net, with the NHS, but homelessness and sleeping rough, reliance on foodbanks and the existence of sub-par housing (Grenfell Tower, anyone?) is a blight on the whole country, not just the big cities. There was nothing quaint or historical about Rubenhold’s descriptions of pathetic figures, roaming the streets at all hours of the night, trying to beg, borrow or steal the price of a flea-infested bed in one of the doss houses in the East End of London, until they finally collapse in a doorway from exhaustion and cold, and probably a drink to dull the pain. Wearing every article of clothing they possess, pockets stuffed with the broken bits and pieces that either remind them of the lives they once had, or might come in useful, or might be pawned for a few coppers. That could be … that is … now.

In addition to that, Rubenhold’s main thesis, that four of the five were not prostitutes is important, and necessary, and if some reviewers seem to have become tired of her “banging on about it,” … well, all I can say is … y’know, tough. After 130 years, it is something that really needed to be said – the police and media and “respectable” public of 1888 took one look at the location of the murders, the degraded living conditions of the five victims, and their gender and gleefully declared PROSTITUTES. No better than they should be. Probably flouncing around in revealing outfits, tempting poor honest boys. Deserved whatever they got.

And they were wrong. One of the murdered women was a professional sex-worker, and probably would have made no bones about it. (Interestingly, she was the final victim, whose murder MO was very different from the previous four. Which makes me wonder …) The other four were middle-aged women from a variety of respectable, working poor backgrounds, whose lives had been torn apart by alcohol, the death of loved ones, and the breakdown of family ties. At they times of their deaths they were partnered up with men they would have described as regular common-law, if often unreliable, relationships. Not … prostitutes.

And (again, an example of history depressingly repeating itself) like the Yorkshire Ripper of the 1970s, the assumptions that the police, media and public jumped to in 1888 probably tainted the investigation of the murders, and the hunt for the identity of Jack the Ripper. Rubenhold makes a very convincing case that, far from targeting “ladies of the night” (with all of the sexist baggage of over-made up hotties, wearing scanty outfits and winking seductively under gaslight streetlamps), the Ripper was probably attacking vulnerable women, who were semi-comatose from drink in doorways and down dark alleys.

(It seems that there has always been some debate in “Ripperology research” … can you believe there is such a thing? … as to whether one of the five, Elizabeth Stride, was really a victim of the Ripper, because the circumstances of her death were slightly different from the first three. But Rubenhold introduces some information about the final victim, Mary Jane Kelly -- whose death, as I said above, was very different from the MO of the other four – which suggests to me, at least, that her murder might not have been the work of Ripper either, but instead have been a copycat killing, in revenge for crossing a human trafficking network. Again, that is scarily modern.

I’ve said a lot more about this than I really meant to, but I think it has gotten under my skin – and that’s a very good thing for a book, I hope you will agree. Rubenhold’s research is amazing. Her writing is very readable. The subject – taking the spotlight from the homicidal maniac, and refocusing it on the victims, and their lives, rather than their gruesome deaths – in other words, giving them back their dignity, and their humanity -- is important.

HIGHLY recommended.

[headinherbooks_27 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Filled with so much history and focused on the women and not on Jack the Ripper. Explicitly explains the social history on women of that era. Broke my heart and angered me on how women were discriminated and belittled during that period.

[deweyquilt · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book is a triumph of historical investigation and research. I loved it, despite the rather heavy going material which examines the lives of working class women in the late nineteenth century.Rubenhold's position is clear, she is quite incandescent that the five women of the drama of the Jack the Ripper murders were all brandished as common prostitutes and still are to this day. She is angry that the women have been dehumanised by the way in which they were killed and have been overshadowed by the so-called mastery of the killer himself. She seeks in this book to redress the balance, and to tell the stories of these women in a non-judgemental and scholarly manner. I 'enjoyed' each story immensely, though I have to say that afterwards all five stories merge into one big misery fest of working class poverty, illness, depravity and death. But it does what it sets out to do, and does it very well. Rubenhold is a good communicator as well as a thorough researcher and her writing is excellent. I thoroughly recommend this to anyone interested in the messier end of the class system in Victorian era London.

[charlotteburt · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Taking away the fame from a ruthless killer and giving it back to the women he killed who were for the last 100 years dismissed as being prostitutes. Five lives of women, who for the most part, ended up sleeping rough in what at the time was the worst part of London. What leads them to such a difficult period of their lives was a combination of the system, who paid women a pittance compared to men and made it almost impossible for them to thrive when either their husbands died or left them for other women. Alcoholism for many of them was the nail in the coffin.
I rarely read history books, but this book is a joy to read, and although much is educated guesswork it has been meticulously researched.

[rivkat_2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Biographies of Jack the Ripper’s victims with basically no details on the physical nature of their deaths; instead, Rubenhold tells us, as best as can be discerned, what they were like in life and more generally what it was like to be a poor or near-poor woman in Victorian London. I thought it was well-done.

[ritaer_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

What do we know about the victims of Jack the Ripper? Not much until now. Rubenhold has investigated the five canonical victims. Notably she ignores the various conspiracy theories and speculations about the identity of the killer. Instead she reveals the lives of women in the working class, the difficulty of maintaining self and children and the ease with which even a woman from a good background could slip into poverty, degradation and alcoholism. And once fallen, it was nearly impossible to rise.

[adonisguilfoyle · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I thought this would be interesting, a book about the victims of Jack the Ripper instead of theories about the killer himself, and Rubenhold is usually an engrossing writer - but I just don't feel that there is a whole book in the lives of 'the five', Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Ann Kelly. Of course they were human beings and didn't deserve to die in such vicious attacks, that should go without saying. Rubenhold has done her research, although she admits that most of the official paperwork about their deaths is missing and getting straight facts from the press of the time is a historical minefield, yet I felt like I was being beaten over the head with a feminist agenda rather than reading about the life of five individual women in Victorian London. No, they might not all technically have been classed as 'prostitutes', but what does that matter? One of them certainly was, and the rest were alcoholics whose family lives fell apart and left them either in the workhouse or on the streets. They were killed because they were defenceless, basically. Rubenhold throwing a strop because the women are still grouped together in the popular imagination as sex workers who somehow deserved their fates doesn't make their deaths more tragic. The vast range of subjects covered while dancing around the scant information about the lives of the women was instructional, though, from chapmen to the workhouse.

[lisahistory · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Popular history at its very best, the book explores the lives of the five women whose deaths were attributed to Jack the Ripper. Rubenhold includes wonderful details that flesh out the places of that era, even if they don't always apply directly to the woman she's discussing -- sort of factually-based creative non-fiction, if you like. The theme of women being considered as prostitutes when they weren't runs throughout the book, and the making of that argument seems to dominate a bit too much. There's nothing wrong with being a prostitute. But knowing that these women probably weren't (most of them had bad luck and/or problems with drink) provides insight into the ways in which the whole Ripper case has been mishandled by both the police at the time and historians now.

[lauralkeet · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The fibers that have clung to and defined the shape of Polly, Annie, Elisabeth,Kate, and Mary Jane’s stories are the values of the Victorian world. They are male, authoritarian, and middle class. They were formed at a time when women had no voice, and few rights, and the poor were considered lazy and degenerate: to have been both of these things was one of the worst possible combinations.Jack the Ripper murdered five London women in 1888, but was never identified or caught, and his gruesome story has fascinated people ever since. But the victims were summarily dismissed as “just prostitutes,” as if that were sufficient reason for them to lose their lives. The Five sets out to redress this wrong by piecing together public records, disparate news accounts, and other sources to tell the life stories of each victim. Hallie Rubenhold spends absolutely zero time on the details of each murder or the murderer himself. Instead, she tells us about the family each victim was born into, her adult life, and the circumstances which led to living in the Whitechapel area where the murders occurred. More often than not, the women's lives took a turn for the worse as the result of a marriage gone bad, widowhood, or being orphaned while still unmarried. A woman alone or with dependents would have found it nearly impossible to survive; there was no way for her to earn a living. In these circumstances it was imperative they become attached to another man who would provide for them, but decisions made in desperation rarely had positive outcomes. Add homelessness and alcohol to the mix and all hope of stability was lost. The five victims inevitably found themselves walking the streets of London, not as prostitutes but simply in search of one night’s food and shelter. When they ended up sleeping rough in a dark alleyway, their lives were even more at risk.The low value placed on women’s lives means that sometimes details are scarce, and Rubenhold’s research often strayed into adjacent spaces in order to paint a picture of how the victim might have lived. The author is very clear about when she is reporting facts about the victim, and when she is connecting dots to reach a plausible conclusion. While the victims’ stories are sad, I was also left feeling angry at a society that placed women at such disadvantage, and often continues to do so today.

[thornton37814 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Interesting account of the women victimized by Jack the Ripper. The author researched the subject well and created readable biographies of each women. He included documentation and used end notes. I felt the story was under-documented. Many points needed citation which lacked it. The author demonstrates that contrary to popular opinion, the women did not all practice prostitution. The author traces each victim's movements showing how they became victims. It's an interesting book, but the insufficient documentation lowers its rating.

[veronica.sparrow · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I cannot even begin to explain how much I loved this book or how important this book really is.I have always had a keen interest in Jack the Ripper and read everything I could lay my hands on. Jack has been researched, theorized, and written about more times than I can count but there has been barely a sentence put together about the women at the core of Ripperology... until now.This book is an attempt to set the record straight regarding the women at the center of this horrible period in time. It has always been assumed that they were prostitutes and though some may have been, they were also daughters, mothers, sisters, and wives/partners. They had lives and dreams before they ended up in the East End. Society has a nasty way of blaming the victim and the stories about these women are no different.Hallie Rubenhold delves into the history of the women whose lives were stolen from them. What strikes at the heart of all of the tales is the common theme of women starting off the race at the same time but each facing their own hurdles and bouts of bad luck that eventually led them to the East End and ultimately face to face with Jack.The conclusion at the end of the book is poignant and very relevant for society today and imparts the important message that we should have learned a lesson from these horrific murders and the tragic women behind them."Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it."We didn't learn to respect and protect women then and we do not respect or protect women now.Anyone who cares about violence towards women today needs to read this book. This is a book I will read again so am planning to buy a physical copy to add to my collection.

[carltonc_5 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book explores what is known and can reasonably be reconstructed about the lives of the five victims of Jack the Ripper. The main point that the author wishes to make is that although the five victims have always been portrayed as prostitutes, only one, Mary Jane, was what we would now understand as a prostitute, but the others were women who were down on their luck, living in a series of doss houses, poor houses and sleeping rough, which made them vulnerable to this murderer.The author skilfully helps the reader understand the different expectations and circumstances that nineteenth century British society had of women, which made women so vulnerable when they deviated from their society’s norms.

[japaul22 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I really appreciated this nonfiction account of the women killed by Jack the Ripper in the 1880s. What was moving about this book is that the killer and the murders themselves are not discussed at all. This book is exclusively about the women that were killed and their lives leading up to their murders. As such, it's a fascinating look a the very limited options for women on the lowest rung of the economic ladder in Victorian England. I learned a lot about workhouses, casual wards, and sleeping rough. I also learned about the limited work options and way women's lives absolutely revolved around having a man to provide for them. These victims are usually portrayed as prostitutes but actually except for one, they were not. Rubenhold tells us about the reality of their lives. She does an amazing job of teasing out the details of these faceless women and giving them back some dignity that was stripped from them in coverage of these murders at the time and over the century since the murders. I really enjoyed this and highly recommend it.

[cj82487 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I think the person I'm most curious about is the young woman that had the smallest chapter (of course). This was interesting to see behind what you typically know of Jack the Ripper's victims and I appreciated that it started off saying this wasnt about the killer and stuck to that statement. I did get bored at times though, so I think that is my signal to take a break from nonfiction for a little bit. Taking a peak into life in the 1800s England was intriguing and this was thoroughly researched. Like I said though, I do wish there was more information on Mary Jane Kelly, the only woman that had openly admitted to being a prostitute, but I have no doubt that the author did more than sufficient digging trying to unearth her details.

[medwards429 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Hallie Rubenhold’s “The Five” is no ordinary book on “Jack the Ripper”, the infamous Whitechapel serial killer from 1888.

Jack the Ripper had five (5) canonical victims. He started killing at the end of August, with no known pattern or motives, and suddenly stopped around the first part of November. The true identity has never been discovered and neither has his motive. There has been nothing to explain why he started and why he ended.

Perhaps that is why there is more focus on him than the victims. In order to understand why they were chosen, we need to learn his motives – which are unlikely to ever happen.

But, rather than focus on the motive, the killer, or the investigation itself; Rubenhold takes a different perspective – the victims. Who were they? Were they really prostitutes, or were they disadvantaged women caught in the crosshairs of a serial killer. Only two of the five could be considered prostitutes, in actuality, only Mary Jane Kelly listed that as a profession.

The reader is able to piece together the victim’s life from childhood (or as close as possible) up until the time they were reported as deceased and/or buried. Each victim’s “past” is uncovered and revealed, thus humanizing them rather than making them statistics, attempting to bring back some of their dignity –

Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols
Annie Chapman
Elisabeth Stride
Catherine Eddowes
Mary Jane Kelly

The book doesn’t discuss the grotesque details of the victim’s death – there is enough material out there. The author is careful not to place emphasis on Jack the Ripper at all, barely naming him. Rubenhold had seen that made the women merely corpses and thus dehumanizing them. The book isn’t just about the victims, but for the victims, complete with a dedication in the front to them.

Misogyny and gender are heavily mentioned as contributing factors in the deaths of the women by critiquing the standards and realities of living back in the mid-late 1800’s. Much is made of the inequality of what men were permitted to do or get by with as opposed to women. Women were treated less than men – expecting to eat less if there was little food to go around; be more pious and virtuous while men could have outside encounters with little to no chastising; barely educated; and of course, child-bearing.

While the treatment of women and lifestyle from that time would be abhorrent by today’s ideals, one cannot apply today’s standards to a decade ago, or even 200 years ago.

Even in the blurb inside the front cover, “their greatest misfortune was to be born women”, the tone seems slightly biased. The author also describes the laws that often governed prostitutes or any woman described with “lecherous living”. And, while the laws are archaic by today’s standards – therein lies the problem. Today’s standards are used to compare the laws, moral attitudes, as well as expectations while we read about the lives of these women.

That is one of the problems with this book. It isn’t entirely the author’s fault. Not having lived in that time, it is difficult to understand that life or see it as normal. Yes, women were not nearly as equal as men were.

Many of the victims were what was referred to as “fallen women” – drunks, morally questionable, etc. They didn’t start out that way though – however in each case, save for the last one, there was always some kind of domestic issues at home that led to the final years of the victim’s life at and/or nearly homeless.

Many became homeless because of either excessive drinking or inability to care for their large families. This was true of many of the poor women of the time. There were women who were just as poor who didn’t fall victim to Jack the Ripper, and some women who had large families didn’t drink. One woman was a victim of what today is called “human trafficking”.

Their past – whatever it was – in no way excuses their murders though. That much needs to be said. Sex workers or not, whoever they were, wherever they came from – they didn’t deserve to die.

The book is well researched, though there are times I believe there was too much information presented.

This is much a societal history lesson as a book with a different focus of the 1888 Whitechapel murders. But, there is quite a bit of conjecture as well as speculation in the book, and thus should be taken at face value.

Critics have thrown out that Rubenhold has tried to make the Whitechapel Victims part of the #MeToo era, which the author denies as #MeToo hadn’t happened when she started writing the book. However, there is a definitely a “slant” in the tone of the book.

It should be read along with the other Jack the Ripper novels and material out there to get a complete picture. Depending on how well vested someone is in this subject, the book can drag on. One reviewer stated that reading it was like “wading through mud”.

Given the type of book it was, and how it was written – I was able to finish it within a week, though there were some nights I didn’t bother to read it.

Thankfully my local library had a copy of this novel to borrow. The two stars are for “it was ok” and yes, it was an “ok” read for the subject material.

[beamis12 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Do we ever remember the names of victims of serious crimes or mass shootings? I seldom do, but I remember the names of the shooters of Columbine, yet not one of the victims. Is it the fault of the media, who continuously report the shooters names, but flash the pictures of the victims only once? We all know Jack the ripper, know he was never caught, and that debates today still ponder his identity. We have read repeatedly that he killed prostitutes, but was this an accurate description of these women? Rubenhold, does a fantastic job describing the lives of these women, as well as how the odds we're stacked against them from the beginning. As it was for many women during this time period.The author takes one woman's life at a time, chronicling their lives from birth to death. She also show us how life was for those who were poor, descriptions of the workhouses and the lives of those who slept rough. These five women took different paths to their eventual murders, but it is made clear that they could not all be considered prostitutes. Though they turned to drink, some to ease the pain of the lives they were forced to live, and in one case it as drink that caused her to lose her comfortable home and children.This is a well researched, well told book, and the names of the victims certainly deserve recognition. Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary Jane deserve no less. They were victims of a time and system where some they little choice in their lives, few safety valves and few chances for improvement. They were is essence victims, even before their murders by the notorious Jack the Ripper.The narration was excellent and I give the narrator Louise Brealey, four stars as well.

[whisper1_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is an in depth study of the lives of the five women believed to have been brutally killed by a man society called "Jack The Ripper."This is not a tale of the murders, but you will find page after page of detailed history of what it was like for those disenfranchised and poor in Victorian society.Told from a unique perspective of the way in which destitute women were treated. Previous books about these women deemed all as prostitutes. The author does a remarkable job at meticulous research noting these were women who, while some battled with alcohol problems, others simply found themselves on the street, slumped against a building in an alley. Seeking refuge in poor houses, or begging for enough money for an indoor shelter, all lived day-day, struggling for food and a roof over their heads.This cycle went on daily as there was no way out of the poverty.Highly recommended.