A review by distilledreads
The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold

dark informative reflective sad fast-paced

5.0

 Like so many, I went through a period of absolute fascination surrounding Jack the Ripper. At one point I could have easily rattled off to you the nights he murdered, peppered in some atmospheric facts about Victorian London, and told you the names of each victim. I would have told you the brutality with which each woman was murdered, but I could have told you no more than their names. And like so many, I never stopped and questioned that. I accepted as fact that these women’s identities began and ended with their murders. 

“The truth of these women’s lives is not simple … Ultimately, no one really cared about who they were or how they ended up in Whitechapel.” 

In retrospect, I think accepting their lives up until that point as a mystery helped create the illusion that Jack the Ripper was just a ghost story, something that went bump in the night, with an alluring haze of intrigue as the insurmountable whodunnit. It separated the events from the horror and allowed me to justify my fascination. 

“In order to gawp at and examine the miracle of malevolence we have figuratively stepped over the bodies of those [Jack the Ripper] murdered, and in some cases, stopped to kick them as we walked past. The larger his profile grows, the more those of his victims seems to fade.” 

Therefore, when I first heard of this book being published, I knew I had to read it. The Five did not disappoint. Hallie Rubenhold was able to reveal so much of these women’s lives from census records, lodging ledgers, birth/marriage certificates, and more. I felt a sense of shame that I never assumed these facts were waiting in archives to be unearthed. 

“In order to keep him alive, we have had to forget his victims. We have become complicit in their diminishment.” 

Rubenhold also wrote beautiful prose describing Victorian England. She supplemented her primary resources of Polly, Annie, Elisabeth, Kate, and Mary Jane with incredible detail of what was happening around them in the London they called home. It was beautiful in its language and harsh in its reality. 

Despite being a five-star read, as I would recommend anyone to pick up this book, I do have my hesitations and critiques. 

“The fibres that have clung to and defined the shape of Polly, Annie, Elisabeth, Kate, and Mary Jane’s stories are the values of the Victorian world. They are male, authoritarian, and middle class.” 

The biggest negative I would have is that Victorian morals still clung to these women and leeched into the way Rubenhold discussed addiction, alcoholism, and motherhood. 

Amidst the larger attempt to give these women back their humanity, Rubenhold’s treatment of addiction felt dehumanizing. There were certain tonal inflections that shifted throughout the narrative that took me aback and left a bad taste in my mouth. 

Referring to Annie, Rubenhold wrote: “Of the many tragedies that befell Annie Chapman in the final years of her life, perhaps one of the more poignant was that she needn’t have been on the streets that night, or on any other. Ill and feverish, she needn’t have searched the squalid corners for a spot to sleep. Instead, she might have lain in a bed in her mother’s house or in her sisters’ care, on the other side of London. She might have been treated for tuberculosis; she might have been comforted by the embraces of her children or the loving assurances of her family. Annie needn’t have suffered. At every turn there had been a hand reaching to pull her from the abyss, but the counter-tug of addiction was more forceful, and the grip of shame just as strong. It was this that pulled her under, that had extinguished her hope and then her life many years earlier. What her murderer claimed on that night was simply all that remained of what drink had left behind.” [emphasis added] 

Quite frankly, no. What ended her life was a murderer. She did not die from alcohol poisoning or even tuberculosis; she was murdered with a slit throat. Yes, there are records and accounts that Annie was an alcoholic throughout much of her life and this caused strain on her familial relations, but just because she was an alcoholic does not take away the fact that she was still human. We will never know for certain why Annie felt more comfortable sleeping on the streets than seeking out a family member’s house in the early hours of that morning, but as she died she was more than just a shell of addiction. 

It was an attempt by the author to end the paragraph in a flourish, but it came at the consequence of Annie’s humanity. 

Throughout the book, there is a frequent presumption around the emotions of Polly, Annie, Elisabeth, Kate, and Mary Jane that further uphold Victorian morals and values. While women would have dealt with the pressure to become a mother and embody these values during their lifetime, who is to say that Polly didn’t let out a sigh of relief as she left her children and husband? There was something, most likely multiple somethings, that led her to leave behind one life and create a new one for herself. Again, we will never know for certain those reasons, and because we will never know, I think it is further reducing these women of their identity and freedom of choice if we assume they had one emotion or another surrounding these decisions. To assume they all had a strong maternal instinct that tore them up inside at the choices they made implies shame if they didn’t. I use Polly as the example here, but this holds true for each of the victims. 

While I understand what Rubenhold was trying to accomplish by attaching emotion to the actions of the women, the narrative would have been strengthened considerably if Rubenhold had kept her romanticization to the Victorian streets and ambience instead of implying their innermost thoughts. 

As well, this is more subtle, but Rubenhold frequently referred to the murders just as deaths, which is another tonal inflection that disrupted the narrative for me. These aren’t alleged killings; therefore, the most severe language should be used. 

Whilst I have minor grievances with The Five, I truly believe that Rubenhold was able to accomplish an incredible feat within an accessible format. It is a phenomenal piece of research and an important addition to literature. She took the general assumption that these women were “just prostitutes” and ripped it to shreds with considerable evidence to the contrary. I also greatly appreciated how almost none of the text was dedicated to detailing the murders, or to the identity of Jack the Ripper. This book truly was about the lives of Polly, Annie, Elisabeth, Kate, and Mary Jane; from their childhood until the night of their murder, Rubenhold recounts the paths in life they travelled and what brought them to Whitechapel in 1888. In revealing their lives and movements, Rubenhold destroyed the assumption that they were prostitutes and brilliantly analyzed why that assumption was created and has been upheld over the years. 

“Just as it did in the nineteenth century, the notion that the victims were ‘only prostitutes’ perpetuates the belief that there are good women and bad women, madonnas and whores. 

… 

“Labelling the victims as ‘just prostitutes’ permits those writing about Polly, Annie, Elisabeth, Kate, and Mary Jane even today to continue to disparage them; to continue to reinforce the values of Madonna/whore.” 

If you’ve ever held a morbid curiousity surrounding Jack the Ripper or been intrigued by the Victorian era, I would highly recommend this book. 

“By permitting [the women] to speak, by attempting to understand their experiences and see their humanity, we can restore to them the respect and compassion to which they are entitled. The victims of Jack the Ripper were never ‘just prostitutes’; they were daughters, wives, mothers, sisters, and lovers. They were women. They were human beings, and surely that in itself is enough.” 
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