The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper - Hallie Rubenhold - ★★★★

AUTHOR: Hallie Rubenhold

NARRATOR: Louise Brealey.

GENRE: Historical Biography, True Crime.

PUBLICATION DATE: February 28, 2019

RATING: 4 stars.

In a Nutshell: A historical account of the women supposedly murdered by Jack the Ripper. Focuses more on the historical and social circumstances and the biographical sketches of the victims than on the murderer or the crime. Informative, but also slightly speculative. Recommended, not to true crime fans but to those looking for a picture of the dark underbelly of Victorian England.

I don't read true crime books anymore. With reality being so nightmare-inducing, I don't want anything else to add to my stress and fears. But as this book promised to focus more on the victims than on the crimes, I was intrigued. The resulting reading experience has been quite informative.

‘Jack the Ripper’ is one of the world’s most infamous undetected serial killers. He is known not just for evading capture and identity reveal, but also for choosing street prostitutes as his victims. British social historian Hallie Rubenhold, probably the first author to write an entire book focussing only on Ripper’s victims, denies this last claim, alleging that only two of the five murdered women were into flesh trade.

The canonical five Ripper victims are Mary Ann Nichols aka Polly, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly – all killed between August to November 1888. (Canonical because there were a few other equally brutal murders in Whitechapel during the same era, but these were not categorically assigned to Ripper.) In each instance, the victim’s throat was cut, and the body mutilated. Unfortunately, as with every murder case involving the underprivileged, their names are more like footnotes, forgotten unless brought up, even though Jack the Ripper still lives in public memory. This book aims to show us the actual women underneath the label of ‘victim’.

(Note: I would advise caution to those planning to read the Wiki page of Jack the Ripper. I didn’t expect to see a photo of Mary Jane Kelly’s eviscerated body there. It is so butchered that I immediately felt queasy.)

Given that these women were born between 1840 to 1863, none of them belonged to the elite classes, and none had lives documented beyond what was recorded after the crime, the book uses a fair mix of facts, conjecture, speculation, and hearsay. The author tries hard to make her version sound convincing, and I daresay, she is fairly successful at this. But as no one knows the actual truth, we cannot really jump to any conclusions. As always with such books, it is best to keep an open mind while reading rather than taking everything as the gospel truth.

I like the author’s choice of focussing entirely on the victims of the murderer than on the murderer. The book contains only seven broad sections: the introduction, the conclusion, and in between, five sections each containing one victim’s reconstructed life story from whatever is known and guessed.

The introduction sets up the social and political atmosphere of Victorian England – very helpful for us to understand the era before the individual biographies. We then go to the five victim-related sections, arranged sequentially in order of their dates of death.

Each section is written more or less in chronological order, going from the woman’s birth and stopping just a little beyond her killing. The actual murder is never described, even when we reach that timepoint in the narrative. I truly appreciate this decision; it helps keep the focus on the woman than on the criminal who brought her to an untimely end.

The author builds up each woman’s life story from local newspapers, investigative reports, the coroner’s trials, and statements by family members, neighbours, and other acquaintances. But rather than sticking to only these details, we also get an extensive insight into several topics that would have affected their life directly or indirectly. Women's rights, patriarchy, birth control restrictions, religious beliefs, alcoholism, homelessness, unemployment, social restrictions, illiteracy, immigration, and several other prevalent issues are highlighted such that we not only know how the women lived but also get a fair idea about why they might have made certain life choices.

It is really sad how all five Ripper victims came from miserable circumstances and didn’t receive peace even in death. Prior to this book, I had known nothing about these women except the supposition that they were prostitutes. In my mind, I had built up the picture of a young sex worker who innocently chose the wrong person as her last client. So I was quite surprised to learn that four of Ripper’s victims were in their forties; only the last one was twenty-five and the only one of these five women confirmed to be in the flesh trade at the time of her murder. Many of these women were also victims of alcohol addiction, a sad fact that had a great role to play in their eventual lonely end.

What comes out strongly throughout each biographical account is how the investigators and the media of the time declared each murder victim to be a prostitute based on their living alone during their deaths and staying either in the streets on in the poorest tenements of Whitechapel. The author argues against this assumption vehemently. A part of me felt like she was being too aggressive about the whole ‘not a prostitute’ concept for the most part. After all, whether the women were engaged in the flesh trade or not, they certainly didn’t deserve to be butchered like that. The conclusion redeems the author’s stance to a great extent as she elaborates on the true issue: not that they were called prostitutes but referred to as "just prostitutes", making their murder seem deserved, almost like a rightful cleansing of the evils of society. I wish she had worked this angle into each of the chapters instead of reserving it for a couple of paras in the final section.

While the overall structure of the book is worth appreciating, it takes some time to readjust to a new narrative after reading about one woman’s story. Thankfully, there is not much repetition in the content because the writing explores varied social topics for each woman. The only thing I wish hadn’t been so frequent was the guesses into the woman’s personal emotions. It’s not necessary that people react the same way, so if a particular event occurred in the woman’s life, how can the writing confidently declare that she felt angry/lonely/frustrated/upset/…? This attempt to add emotional drama to facts was the only writing choice that took me out of the narrative. The facts were pathetic enough; there was just no need for the added layer of filmic sentiment.

🎧 The Audiobook Experience:

The audiobook, clocking at 10 hrs 19 min, is narrated by Louise Brealey. She is outstanding, voicing the entire book without exaggerated emotions even when the circumstances were sad. The structure of the book is linear enough to suit even newbie listeners, unless they get easily overwhelmed by facts.

Overall, this book went almost exactly as I thought it would. I had been worried that the murder details would be grisly to read, so it was a relief to see that the writing is never voyeuristic about the killings. I truly appreciate how it sticks to the stories of the women and never succumbs to the temptation of including anything about Ripper’s identity or modus operandi. The added insights about the social conditions of the era are a welcome bonus. A couple of the writing choices didn’t work for me, but overall, I came away enlightened.

Definitely recommended. While we cannot know the complete truth about these women, this book still offers us a comprehensive enough picture of their documented lives.