Reviews with content warning for Mental illness - The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper

An extraordinarily well researched book which really brings to life the five women it documents. It is both fascinating and utterly heartbreaking, not because of their tragic ends, but because hundreds of thousands of other women lived in similar conditions (and the men's lives weren't much better). None of these five women started life in the doss houses of Whitechapel. They all spiralled downward, mostly through no fault of their own, but all due to the way society and the law was weighted against the poor and especially against women. They all had turned to drink, but who wouldn't be tempted to numb the pain of such an awful existence with a bit of gin-induced oblivion, even if it meant sleeping on the streets that night? This book taught me so much about the lives of the working classes in late Victorian London, which I thought I already understood. I did not.

I've read two criticisms of this book. Firstly that it's all conjecture. It's not, it's just very well researched. I suspect much of the detail comes from newspaper reports of the character witnesses' statements at the victims' inquests (I'm afraid I'm not a great reader of footnotes, but the author does reference her sources in detail). Newspaper coverage of trials and the like were very detailed at that time and reported almost word for word (although the author must have had a job filtering out the more sensational reporting). The other criticism I've heard is that, by putting so much emphasis on the fact that most of the victims, contrary to popular belief, were not prostitutes, the author was part of that section of society which believes sex workers' lives are less valuable or not worthy of saving. I agree that most of the book does have this feel, but it's clearly not what the author believes, as her conclusion makes clear.

This is THE book to read about the Whitechapel Murders (unless, of course, you just want to get off on reading about violence against women, which most Ripper books seem to pander to). Looking at the victims not only gives them the much overdue respect they deserve, but also shows us that their murderer was far more likely to have been one of the frequenters of the doss houses in the Flower and Dean Street area than a royal, a surgeon or a mysterious American.

I don't believe in an afterlife, but if I'm wrong I hope the five unfortunate women we meet in this book are finally finding some comfort by having their stories told so sympathetically. Five stars.

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vasha's review against another edition

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informative reflective sad fast-paced

5.0

This is a rather extraordinary book, and also a sad, almost depressing one. Why were writers, and many police, in 1888 certain that the five women murdered in Whitechapel were prostitutes? That's a question that Rubenhold, while demonstrating that at least three of them could not fit any possible definition of "prostitute," goes into in some detail (at much less length, in her angry final chapter, she considers the unsavory cultural factors which make Jack the Ripper's image as a killer of prostitutes a quasi-heroic one to this day). What it comes down to, as I interpreted it, is that in the Victorian upper- and middle-class mind, in the misogynist mind, classifying a woman as simply "a prostitute" was a way of ceasing to think about her at all: a woman's value resting on the foundation of the purity and "guardedness" of her sexuality, a woman whose sexuality was regarded as "public" had no basis on which to be valued at all, and it was easy to regard all those placed in this category as undifferentiated, and think that the details of their lives really didn't matter. And, as a corollary to "prostitution" being regarded as ultimate unvalued condition, all women who were outside social approval for any reason (having left their husband, being disorderly on the streets, whatever) were lumped into a single category to which the term "prostitute" could be applied (although the police were more cautious about the use of the term since they had a legal definition and standards of proof to adhere to, and knew that that definition would only fit a limited number of women). But the thought-stopping effect of creating a mental category of "common prostitutes" means that people in 1888, and (shamefully) since, did not need to consider the murdered women as individual lives, did not need to see them as human beings as familiar as the ones they personally knew, could leave them as props in a tableau for gawking fascination. This is just as unjust to women who did do sex work as to those who didn't: whichever was true of each of the five women in this book, Hallie Rubenhold has set out to at last do justice to her as an individual, as a personality, as a person who made choices and did far, far more over the course of her life than be on the streets of Whitechapel at one moment which put her name in the newspapers.

Beyond this fundamental wrongdoing, what I found depressing about The Five was that before these five women ended up in direst poverty and squalor in Whitechapel, each led a life quite different from the others. One was raised in a poor working-class neighborhood in London, one in the quarters of an elite cavalry regiment, one on a farm in Sweden, one in a family of skilled tinworkers of the industrial Midlands, and one (perhaps) in a well-to-do family in Wales. Some of them married, some didn't; one rose to nearly middle-class status; some worked in domestic service, but another was an itinerant ballad-hawker, and still another was in the elegant upper ranks of the sex trade; they all experienced periods of a much better life than what they lived in their final years, but what that consisted of was different in each case. The factors that brought them to adversity were equally varied, but putting them all together paints a picture of an interwoven system of social stratification and patriarchy that could and did all too easily crush women. Annie Chapman, who tried very hard for respectability, fared no better than Kate Eddowes, who boldly flouted society. Reading about these different lives all leading to the same place has made it hard, for the moment, for me to believe in happy endings in Victorian fiction because I'm feeling like these women weren't unlucky, but rather those who lived in peace were the remarkably lucky ones.

On a side note, I've read the graphic novel From Hell (which I can't recommend) and its author, in the course of thinking he's portraying the women of Whitechapel sympathetically, states that they were all prostitutes because that was the only job they could (were allowed to) do. How wrong he was, and what a superficial thinker! I'll leave it to readers of "The Five" to learn the wide variety of expedients that they turned to in order to get each day's food, and hopefully a bed each night; they were determined, experienced, and ingenious, and what's more they had the generous assistance of others in the same plight, returning the favor when they happened to have an extra penny.

I can highly recommend the audiobook, superbly read by Louise Brealey; the print version is also worthwhile for its illustrations and footnotes.

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epeolatri's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional informative mysterious reflective sad slow-paced

5.0

I have never heard anything about the women killed by jack the ripper before this book. It was very well informed and I’m so glad I read it. As the author said, it is important to remember these women as human beings and not just victims of a famous man.

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camz's review against another edition

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challenging informative reflective sad fast-paced

5.0

Un libro difícil de digerir. Pero era exactamente lo que buscaba de un libro así, incluso diría que más ya que se preocupa no solo de contarte lo que se sabe de la vida de estas mujeres sino que se preocupa de darte el contexto de por qué sus vidas fueron lo que fueron.

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katievh's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad medium-paced

4.75

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liviy0017's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad slow-paced

4.0

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rhiannonxgrace's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional informative sad

5.0

What an incredible book. I really enjoy Rubenhold’s writing style and find her to be an easy read, which can’t be said about all historians! This was a rough read, and more than once I had to pause and step away for a little while simply due to the content. But I am so glad I read this. It’s so important to move the focus back on to the womens’ lives and show them as fully fledged people, something that is often discarded when it comes to the Whitechapel murders.

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atsundarsingh's review

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adventurous challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad medium-paced

4.0

I really liked this as a model for doing popular history that reinstates women in their proper place as social actors and as people who act rather than just those that things happen to. As well, I think that this book does a really good job of de-sensationalizing the murders of these 5 women, and putting them in the social context of the allowability of the death of the poor, the addicted, and the female, marking out the ways those existences often overlap. Doing all this, and still managing not to sensationalize (or even really depict) their deaths is a huge accomplishment.

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