The Five

There is a whole library of books about Jack The Ripper, and almost all of them are concerned with the murders, the investigation, and speculating on who was the killer. In The Five, Hallie Rubenhold comes at the murders from a different angle: "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."

Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elisabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly. These are the five "canonical" victims of Jack The Ripper (some think that the first was Martha Tabram, and some doubt that Stride was killed by him). Rubenhold basically gives us biographies of these five women, and since most of them lived lives of poverty, it is a horrific tour through the deplorable conditions of Victorian England. "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."

Rubenhold also has another fish to fry--the assumption that these women were prostitutes. "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." Instead, the press and others at the time simply assumed that women "sleeping rough," that is, homeless, were automatically prostitutes. Elisabeth Stride was a prostitute in her native Sweden, but only Mary Jane Kelly (which was probably an assumed name) was an actual working girl in London (ironically, she was the only one killed in her domicile).

Rubenhold goes through each life in the order in which they were killed. Some of the topics touched on are the workhouse, where those who were desperately went, to work at menial but back-breaking labor while being fed the bare minimum; alcoholism; the life of soldiers (their families lived with them in the barracks); the lack of birth control (some of the illiterate poor didn't know there was such a thing); and in Kelly's case, the life of a prostitute. Rubenhold must have spent quite some time in the public records, as except for Kelly, about whom little is known for sure, she has put together biographies of women who led unremarkable lives, except in the notoriety of their deaths.

For women of that era and that class, the hope was to get a job as domestic and then hopefully marry a man with a good job. The life of a domestic was no picnic, as they may have one day of a month, and "If, while crossing a hall or ascending a staircase, she encountered a member of the family, she was to turn her face to the wall."

The biggest takeaway from this book was how horrible it was to be poor back then, especially if you were a woman: "Illiteracy and a poor level of education were hardly unusual among the daughters of the working class at this time when 48.9 percent of English women could not even sign their name.  Regular school attendance was not deemed essential when a girl was of more use assisting her mother at home or earning a wage."

The Five is a sad book. Some Ripper books, perhaps inappropriately, make him into some kind of comic book character: "Over the centuries, the villain has metamorphosed into the protagonist; an evil, psychotic, mysterious player who is so clever that he has managed to evade detection even today. In order to gawp at and examine this miracle of malevolence we have figuratively stepped over the bodies of those he murdered, and in some cases, stopped to kick them as we walked past." She sums up: "At its very core, the story of Jack the Ripper is a narrative of a killer’s deep, abiding hatred of women, and our culture’s obsession with the mythology serves only to normalize its particular brand of misogyny."