The Five

There is so much rage between every line of this book.

There has been a lot of faux-intellectual lip service paid to our obsession with bad things. With bad men, with the brutally victimized, with the salacious details. Two things have opened my eyes a bit as to why we do this - the worldwide spread of COVID-19 and Uncover's most recent season detailing the Satanic Panic of the 1980s -, and it's interesting to me that I don't often hear it put to words. It's about control. It's about the consensual experience of negative emotion, a form of practicing for the real thing. You're scared about a worldwide pandemic, so you gorge yourself on the news and watch Contagion and Outbreak on loop. You're choosing to expose yourself to these things, and that control makes you feel a little bit better (unless it doesn't, in which case, stop). You're a suburban mom in the 1980s, part of a generation of women heading into the workforce and leaving your children with strangers at a daycare center, and in order to quell your anxiety you allow yourself to believe a fiction about those strangers. It's easier to create boogymen that make sense to you (Satanists) than to recognize the real ones (family members, clergymen, etc) because that way you don't have to question your worldviews.

We're fascinated by Jack the Ripper because it is easier to be fascinated than scared. And when its women who are victimized, we tell ourselves that they were bad women, different women, in order to convince ourselves that it won't happen to us and our own. If we're virtuous, if we teach our daughters to do the right things, the bad men won't choose us - they'll choose those women instead. But it's a lie - a self-congratulating, individualistic lie built on our worst instincts and propped up by institutions that benefit from this lie.

The five canonical victims of Jack the Ripper made good and bad choices in their lives - but this book also makes clear that because they were women and because they were born in the time period they were, they had very few choices that they could make. After the first two stories - Polly Nichols and Annie Chapman - I began to worry that each of these tales would be nothing but despair. Polly's life was a bleak haze of alcoholism and homelessness, and Annie's fall from middle class comfort to addiction, depression and poverty is one of the saddest things I've ever heard. But there was also so much more to all of them. Liz Stride, despite her gut-wrenching early years of being forced to live as a prostitute simply because Swedish law mistook her for one, had some fascinating shape-shifting abilities, morphing herself from a naive farm girl into a deft con artist. Catherine Eddowes was a talented lyricist and street performer, whose funeral was attended by thousands. Mary Jane Kelly escaped trafficking, had a worldly reputation, and was part of tight-knit family of working girls who she was loyal to. Annie used to sell her crochet work, and Polly sounds like she would have been a rabble-rousing anarchist if she was born in a later time.

All of them struggled with alcohol, all of them fought to survive under the boot of patriarchy, misogyny, and classism. They lived in a world where their lives were meaningless without the protection of a marriage, and yet they stepped out on their own anyway, in the face of impossible odds. Only Mary Kelly regularly worked as a prostitute, and in fact for a time lived an exciting and relatively comfortable life before being targeted by traffickers, and had to live more anonymously after her escape. The rest simply had the misfortune of not being able to put a roof over their heads on the wrong night, in the wrong city, on the wrong street corner. The fact that the myth of their supposed profession, printed in newspapers at the time simply to sell more copies, has persisted to this day says a lot about the way we choose to see the victims of violence. Other women. Not me. It'll never happen to me.

There is something to be said about the fact that we have deified and canonized a man who killed vulnerable women in their sleep as some kind of criminal genius. He targeted people who could not put up a fight and would not be missed. The easiest of prey. The institutions that kept Polly, Annie, Liz, Catharine and Mary down - keeping them from being able to live alone, to care for themselves, branding them adulterers, prostitutes, and failed women - did most of the work for him. As hard as it is to read these stories, and as easy as it is to breath a sigh of relief and be grateful that things are so much better for women today, I would not let out that breath just yet. This is still happening. And it's important to know how disenfranchisement and institutionalized misogyny actually function, because there are plenty of people today who would send us right back. The rage in this book is not just for the injustice of history, but for the fact that its still relevant today.

I appreciated the research done here to tell the stories of these 5 women who have been historically written off as prostitutes or less than deserving of humanity. Rubenhold's introduction and conclusion draw parallels from Victorian values to modern misogyny in law cases, (e.g. Brock Turner), where men are centered as if they're the victim in their own crimes and women are thus further harmed. However, because of all the research, it felt like a number by number accounting of facts about these women's lives rather than a compelling narrative, so it wasn't a particularly gripping read.

I shelved this as “true crime” because the subjects of this book are all linked by Jack the Ripper, but I really loved how this didn't focus on the murderer at all, really, and didn't delve into all the gore and details of the murders themselves. There are a lot of ethical issues with true crime, especially when it comes to murder, but I feel like this did a good job of avoiding those and really telling the stories of these women. I got really drawn into the stories, and even though I knew how they would all end, I found myself hoping that they'd find a way to escape what I knew was going to happen. The author gets so much detail from public records and really manages to make these women into fully realized people.

This was incredibly well researched. It is essentially a biographical study of the five women killed by Jack the Ripper. I was amazed by the wealth of information known about them, how varied their lives were, and ultimately how sad their lives were from start to finish.

I will say I think the cover of this book does a disservice to potential readers. I was put off as I thought this would be some schlocky, true crime book based on the cover when this reads more like a sociology text than anything.

The critiques of this book are valid (assumptions of what someone must have felt, etc.), but I think the author made a purposefully choice to give as much of these women's lives back to them. To make them as real on the page as possible, because we all know they've had that taken from them literally and then time and time again by the media for decades. I believe conjecture into how someone may have felt or what they may have done in an effort to accomplish that is absolutely fine. I appreciate that this book exists and attempts, and in my opinion succeeds, to redefine what true crime can be and how treatment of victims' stories should be done.

The amount of information that the author has been able to gather about five women about whom I previously knew: their names, that they were prostitutes (which turns out not to be true), and that Elizabeth Stride was from Sweden, is astounding.

The book is very interesting, and paints a stark picture of what it could be like to be a woman, and poor in times past. The story of these women is heartbreaking, and not only - nor primarily - because of Jack the Ripper.

Wanted to learn about the victims but just did not like writing style.  Also claiming they were not prostitutes when they were lost me.  Yes there is always more but I don't view prostitution as the big bad.  Women did it to survive.  There wasn't many options.  So trying to force a narrative that they weren't prostitutes did not sit well.  I think I'll find another book about Jack the ripper and his victims that isn't trying to force down an authors views and give more facts 

Book/Story: ⭐⭐⭐.5 (rounded up)
Book Cover: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

TRIGGER(S): Prostitution, sex trafficking (briefly mentioned), domestic abuse (briefly mentioned), miscarriages/still births (briefly mentioned)

POV: Third Person Series/Standalone: Standalone Part of a series: No Safe or Dark: Safeish (see trigger warnings above)

DISCLAIMER: I switched between the physical and audiobook while reading this.

“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.”

Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols

“This was indeed Polly, as he used to call her—the woman he had once dearly loved, and married. It was Polly, who had borne six of his children, who had comforted and coddled them, who had nursed him in times of illness, the woman with whom he had shared laughter and at least a handful of joys for sixteen years. It was Polly, who at eighteen had been his girlish bride, holding her father's arm as she walked down the aisle at St. Bride's. They had been happy, even if only for a short while.”

Eliza Ann “Annie” Chapman

“Emily, Georgina, and Miriam could not bear to tell their elderly mother that the child she had lost to alcohol had been killed in such a gruesome and dehumanizing way. They smothered their grief as they held the hands of Annie's two children, who would never know the fate that befell their mother.”

Elizabeth Stride

“Over the course of her life, Elisabeth had been a variety of things to many people; she had been both dark and light, a menace and a comfort. She had been a daughter, a wife, a sister, a mistress, a fraudster, a cleaner, a coffeehouse owner, a servant, a foreigner, and a woman who had at various times sold sex.”

Catherine “Kate” Eddowes

“Over the course of her life, Elisabeth had been a variety of things to many people; she had been both dark and light, a menace and a comfort. She had been a daughter, a wife, a sister, a mistress, a fraudster, a cleaner, a coffeehouse owner, a servant, a foreigner, and a woman who had at various times sold sex.”

Mary Jane Kelly

“Mary Jane was whatever she wished to be, and in the wake of her death, she became whatever Joseph Barnett wished to commemorate. It was he who insisted that the name on her brass coffin plate read “Marie Jeanette Kelly,” a moniker brimming with all the flounce and flamboyance of a Saturday night in the West End.”

The infamous canonical five

“The cards were stacked against Polly, Annie, Elisabeth, Kate, and Mary Jane from birth. They began their lives in deficit. Not only were most of them born into working-class families; they were also born female.”

TLDR: IF YOU ARE A SELF-PROCLAIMED RIPPEROLOGIST OR ARE JUST TIRED OF THE SAME OLD WORN-OUT JACK THE RIPPER NARATIVE, READ THIS BOOK!

Behind Jack the Ripper is the lives of his victims. Given the illusiveness of this particular killer, the women he slayed tend to be swept aside. This book gives them a voice.

Each section of the book discusses each woman: Polly, Annie, Elisabeth, Kate, and Mary Jane. We learn about their lives leading up to their murders rather than the murder themselves. Along with the story of their lives, the author provides a detailed history of life in England at the time. 

I was initially surprised by the fact Jack the Ripper was hardly mentioned, but I think I ultimately enjoyed the book more because of it. It was incredibly insightful and put a lot of things in perspective. I will say that this was about 60% general history and 40% the five women. While interesting, this did cause the narration to drag at times. It's worth wading through the slow bits. There is a lot to take in. 

Summary: This text focuses on what is known about the lives of the five canonical victims of Jack the Ripper, from before their birth to the time of their murders. The book challenges the notion that Jack the Ripper was a “prostitute killer”; in fact, only two of them can be said with any degree of certainty to have ever engaged in prostitution. Rubenhold’s writing humanizes these victims while also revealing the conditions under which working-class women in 19th-century England lived.

In “The Five,” Hallie Rubenhold takes a brilliant and compassionate approach to analyzing the infamous Jack the Ripper murders. Rather than sensationalizing the gruesome details as so many have done before, she shifts the focus onto restoring the humanity of the victims themselves - Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary Jane.

Through meticulous research, Rubenhold pieces together the lives of these five working class women in gritty, vivid detail. We learn their backgrounds, struggles, hopes and personalities. By giving them biographical narratives, she reclaims their identities beyond just being regarded as “prostitutes” and victims. This powerful act of reclaiming their stories is both fascinating and deeply moving.

Rubenhold's writing is engaging and transporting. You feel immersed in the tenement life, hardships and limited opportunities for women in 1880s London. The level of poverty and societal indifference to these women's plights is staggering. Their life stories, while tragic, shine a light on systemic issues of the era.

My only slight critique is that at times the narratives get slightly bogged down in excessive detail surrounding minor characters and events. But overall, Rubenhold's mission to honor these five lives is tremendously important and accomplished with compassion, thoroughness and skill.

For putting the victims at the forefront in such a thoughtful way, and making us see their full humanity, “The Five” is a captivating, moving, and successful work of historical resurrection. A powerful 4 out of 5 stars.