The Five

November 15, 2018

Debates have long raged about Jack the Ripper's identity, but what about the identity of his victims? A social historian and historical fiction writer, Rubenhold reveals that they were not prostitutes, as we've always been told, but women going about their business--one ran a coffeehouse, another worked at a printing press, yet another lived on a country estate--who sadly crossed paths with a killer.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2019
British social historian and novelist Rubenhold (The French Lesson, 2016, etc.) improves the reputations of "Jack the Ripper's five 'canonical' victims."Alcoholism, poverty, homelessness, abuse: London was awash in social problems in the later decades of the 19th century, a time when, as in New York, tenements were sprouting up, filled by immigrants and migrants from the countryside. Such was the setting against which the grimy life of Polly Nichols, the first victim of the legendary Jack the Ripper, played out. "The poor of that district lived in unspeakably horrendous conditions," writes the author. It was worse for women than men, since women were more constrained economically and often had multiple responsibilities as mothers and spouses as well as workers. Polly walked away from all that, addicted to alcohol, and took to the streets, where her murderer found her in 1888. "In death," writes Rubenhold, "she would become as legendary as the Artful Dodger, Fagin, or even Oliver Twist, the truth of her life as entangled with the imaginary as theirs." If the Dickensian emphasis is a touch overdone, the point remains: Polly would thereafter often be portrayed as merely a prostitute whose death was inevitable. So with the other four, who, argues the author, were not prostitutes and certainly were not complicit in the circumstances of their deaths, even though they have been depicted that way from the moment of their murders to the present--a matter of "guilt by association," the women left defenseless by the voicelessness of the poor and those who "broke all the rules of what it meant to be feminine." 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 as just that and not as the "fallen women" of the received record.A lively if morbid exercise in Victorian social history essential to students of Ripperiana.

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Starred review from March 18, 2019
Social historian Rubenhold (The Covent Garden Ladies) more than justifies another book about the 1888 Jack the Ripper murders by focusing on the killer’s five victims: Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elisabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly. This unique approach not only restores humanity to the dead and counters glorification of the Ripper but also enables Rubenhold to offer some original insights into the crimes. In her careful parsing of the available accounts of the inquests from newspaper reports, she convincingly argues that three of the victims were not prostitutes, and thereby undermines numerous theories premised on the killer’s targeting members of that profession. Rubenhold reconstructs their sad lives, which, for some, included struggles with alcoholism and domestic abuse. She believes that the women found dead on the streets of London’s East End may have been sleeping rough, and that all were slaughtered while asleep, a theory that explains the absence of outcries or defensive wounds. The lack of grisly forensic details highlighted in other books on the subject will be a relief to many readers. This moving work is a must for Ripperologists
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