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Loading... The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper (original 2019; edition 2020)by Hallie Rubenhold (Author)
Work InformationThe Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold (2019)
   No current Talk conversations about this book.  la2bkk | Sep 18, 2023 |  Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary-Jane. Miscast in the media for nearly 130 years, the victims of Jack the Ripper finally get their full stories told in this eye-opening and chilling reminder that life for middle-class women in Victorian London could be full of social pitfalls and peril. What Rubenfold does for the women behind the story of Jack the Ripper is take them out of the shadows and shine a light on their life and the ups and downs that followed them. It shows how easily a life can change in an era when there was no net to catch people when they fell on tough times and I found myself feeling for these women even when they were making decisions that were not in their own best interests. Rubenfold spends a lot of time trying to prove the women weren’t sex workers, and while I understand these women’s murder were incorrectly dismissed due to the ‘fact’ that they were prostitutes - much like the Yorkshire Ripper victims nearly a hundred years later - even if they were prostitutes this was no excuse for murder and I think this could have been communicated more clearly. Overall a deeply researched and insightful portrayal of life in Victorian England with a lot of situations that women still deal with today. (  ) rosienotrose | Jul 11, 2023 | The author's focus is firmly on the lives of the five canonical victims of Jack the Ripper, not their deaths and not the unknown man who killed them. The amount of research done and the skill with with the author was able to show that these women had families who loved them, had struggles to survive, relationships and hopes, and most of all, that not all of them were prostitutes but simply poor, often homeless women who were lumped in as prostitutes simply because the police saw nearly all the women they dealt with in the East End as "fallen" women. If you're looking for information about the actual murders, you'll find very little here, except for the aftermath on the families. (  ) mstrust | May 9, 2023 | There is much written about Jack the Ripper. But little about his victims. This covers the lives of the five victims. How did they come to be in White Chapel? We learn about the harshness of life at that time for poor women, the middle and lower classes. ( ) nx74defiant | Apr 24, 2023 | 4.5* ( ) LisaBergin | Apr 12, 2023 |
These were not the kinds of lives that leave an extensive record, yet Rubenhold is able to weave a vivid narrative of Victorian working-class life from small factual scraps that she unearthed in police records, government reports and church registers ...The specter of illicit sex still haunts the Ripper story, an unkillable ghost that makes the crimes seem more titillating and their victims more expendable. Rubenhold’s account, however, makes a compelling case that the real monster shadowing these women’s lives was alcoholism ... Though we know how these women’s stories play out, Rubenhold achieves much here by making us feel genuine sadness and anger at their loss. This book is a poignant but absorbing exploration of the reality of working women’s lives in the late 19th century—and how perilously easy it was for married women with children to find themselves reduced to seeking shelter in the dank courts and alleyways around Spitalfields, where the Ripper operated. It is a book that brings a whole new meaning to the phrase 'Victorian values.' If the Dickensian emphasis is a touch overdone, the point remains ... Allowing that the documentary record is incomplete—the case files on three of the five murders have gone missing—Rubenhold urges us to see the victims...not as the 'fallen women' of the received record. A lively if morbid exercise in Victorian social history essential to students of Ripperiana. Hallie Rubenhold’s book about the 'canonical' victims of Jack the Ripper is, at one level, a victim impact statement ... What she has to say on that topic is as horrifying as the Ripper’s crimes ... Rubenhold is an engaging writer though, as she readily admits, these women’s lives were not well documented before they achieved their notoriety, and the reports that followed their murders are not reliable. Then, too, there is a certain grim monotony as we follow the five in their doleful circuit from poor house to flop house to the streets where they would be killed. Still, Rubenhold does a commendable job in bringing these women on stage and through their stories illuminating the appalling reality behind the veneer of Victorian complacency. AwardsDistinctions
Five devastating human stories and a dark and moving portrait of Victorian London-the untold lives of the women killed by Jack the Ripper. Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine, and Mary-Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. They came from Fleet Street, Knightsbridge, Wolverhampton, Sweden, and Wales. They wrote ballads, ran coffee houses, lived on country estates; they breathed ink-dust from printing presses and escaped people-traffickers. What they had in common was the year of their murders: 1888. The person responsible was never identified, but the character created by the press to fill that gap has become far more famous than any of these five women. For more than a century, newspapers have been keen to tell us that "the Ripper" preyed on prostitutes. Not only is this untrue, as historian Hallie Rubenhold has discovered, but it has prevented the real stories of these fascinating women from being told. Now, in this devastating narrative of five lives, Rubenhold finally sets the record straight, revealing a world not just of Dickens and Queen Victoria, but of poverty, homelessness, and rampant misogyny. They died because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time-but their greatest misfortune was to be born a woman. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)362.88Social sciences Social problems and services; associations Social problems of & services to groups of people Problems of and services to other groups People affected by criminal actsLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (4.22)
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Wikipedia in English
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Two minor complaints. The first is that, like many authors depicting the Victorian era, characterizations of the workhouses and other social systems tend to be overly negative and dramatic for effect. I also suggest skipping the second to last chapter where the author sets forth her ideological views which are little more than a diatribe.
Nonetheless, a worthwhile and enjoyable read. (