Ask anyone about the 'Jack the Ripper' murder victims, and most people will tell you that they were prostitutes. It's everywhere, from the BBC to Wikipedia. Even Hallie Rubenhold, an author noted for books on the history of women and sex, expected to use the infamous crimes as a gateway into the story of Victorian prostitution. There was just one problem. Her research showed little evidence that three of the five victims were sex workers. Thus the world lost an account of the historical sex trade, but gained an unexpected book about women, history and prejudice - 'The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper'.
'The Five' turns our gaze from the sadistic bastard who murdered defenceless women in late 19th century Whitechapel and forces us to look more closely at the vulnerable human beings he slaughtered. Rubenhold takes us beyond the grainy black and white morgue photographs and melodramatic artists' impressions, breathing life into each frozen face and revealing the normalities and tragedies that led to these women being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The five victims - four in their 40s and one just 25 - may have led very different lives, but all suffered familiar disasters made worse by the society they lived in. Polly Nichols' life seemed to be on the up when her husband's affair led to her downfall, destitution and rough sleeping. Annie Chapman was the victim of alcoholism long before she was the victim of a murderer. Swede Elizabeth Stride, ruined by sex and country-girl naivety, tried to build a new life in England before business failure and debt led her to Whitechapel. Dissatisfied with the working life, Catherine Eddowes became a ballad seller, who spent many years hustling her way around the country before returning to her disapproving family. Mary Jane Kelly was a woman of mystery and misfortune, a professional, high class prostitute until a sex trafficking plot sent her into hiding and led to a steady slide down the social ladder. Each of 'The Five' were fallen women, but not in the way history has always said they were.
This is a difficult, but fascinating and worthy book. It's the exact opposite of an easy read, but I feel we owe it to Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine, Mary Jane and every female murder victim maligned by popular culture to at least try to understand how damaging society and the media's depiction of such events can be. Stories are simplified and people become characters in the retelling and it's easy to see how serial killers become objects of fascination while their victims become meat on a slab for all to gawp at.
There are two great challenges in writing a book like this. One is that historical records are often patchy for ordinary people, so that the writer is tempted to fill in the gaps with lots of supposition along the lines of "she would have probably felt". The other is that knowledge of the terrible end faced by these women can tempt writers to be kinder to their subjects than they may deserve. They're understandable traps to fall into. While Rubenhold does slip into supposition, she also manages to leave enough space for the reader to make up their own minds about Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary Jane. Readers begin to fill in these spaces with how they would feel and cope with such unbearable circumstances. It's an artful way of enabling readers to understand and even identify with these women, humanising them as never before.
Overall, 'The Five' is a book that goes beyond its subject matter. While it does something very important - humanising the 'Jack the Ripper' victims, thus forcing us to see the cruelties of these crimes rather than just accepting it as an intriguing Gothic mystery to sit alongside Jekyll and Hyde, Sherlock Holmes and Sweeney Todd - it also says something about women in history and how women's history is told. It's genuinely shocking that these women have been called 'prostitutes' for over 130 years and NOBODY BOTHERED TO CHECK. Imagine if that happened to you. Not only defined by the person that took your life, but by the male dominated society that had to call you a whore so that it looked like you deserved what you'd got. These women fell, then society made them keep on falling. It's about time they were given some justice.
'The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper' by Hallie Rubenhold was published in February 2019 by Doubleday. This post is based on the hardback edition.
