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Summary
Summary
Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction
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, 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 werein the wrong place at the wrong time--but their greatest misfortune was to be born a woman.
Author Notes
HALLIE RUBENHOLD, a social historian and frequent consultant for period dramas, is the author of The Covent Garden Ladies, the inspiration for the Hulu series Harlots, and The Scandalous Lady W . She is also the author of the historical novels Mistress of My Fate and The French Lesson.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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 . Agent: Sarah Ballard, United Agents. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
A landmark study calls time on the misogyny that fed the Jack the Ripper myth. Why has it taken 130 years for a book telling the stories of the women to appear? Few women have had the moment of their deaths returned to more often, and with as much relish, as Mary Ann "Polly" Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly. In each case their throats were cut, and four of them had their entrails removed. Kelly, the only one of "the canonical five", as Jack the Ripper's known victims are called, to die in her bed, was completely mutilated. Forests have been felled in the interests of unmasking the murderer, but until now no one has bothered to discover the identity of his victims. The Five is thus an angry and important work of historical detection, calling time on the misogyny that has fed the Ripper myth. It is astonishing how little we know about these five, apart from their names. Hallie Rubenhold fleshes out their stories from the scraps that are available: coroner's inquests (three of which are missing); "a body of edited, embellished, misheard and re-interpreted newspaper reports"; parish registers; court registers; birth, marriage and death records; rate books and the archives of the London workhouses. For accounts of poverty in London she turns to Francis Place, Henry Mayhew and Charles Booth; she gets facts and figures from Mrs Beaton. With the documentary veracity of a set of Hogarth prints, Rubenhold follows the victims' doomed footsteps from birth to death. Except that there is no attempt to imagine each woman's last moments, or describe the state of her body, or further the search for their killer. Instead she asks how it is that these women - all of them somebody's daughter, somebody's sister, somebody's lover - ended up alone and destitute on the streets of Whitechapel. Their lives are grimly similar: born into hardship, they moved from the briefest of childhoods into a cycle of childbearing, alcohol dependence, poverty, emotional despair and homelessness. They died in hell, but they lived in hell, too - not least, Rubenhold argues, because they were born female: "Their worth was compromised before they had even attempted to prove it." Nichols, daughter of a blacksmith, spent her first years in Dawes Court, where Dickens had imagined Fagin living with his pickpockets in Oliver Twist . Her break came when she and her husband, William, qualified for accommodation in one of the newly built Peabody Buildings on Stamford Street in Lambeth. This allowed them, for the first time, an inside lavatory. But after four years of fighting - William was carrying on with the widow next door - Polly left her husband and children and entered the workhouse. There were, Rubenhold shows, few other options available to her. Eight years later, the inquest into Nichols's death shaped itself as an investigation into her moral character: "Do you consider that she was very cleanly in her habits?" the coroner asked her former roommate. In other words, was Nichols a prostitute and thus deserving of her fate? There is no evidence, Rubenhold argues, that Nichols or Chapman or Eddowes ever worked as prostitutes; the police conviction that the killer targeted women of "bad character" perverted the inquiry. The Ripper's victims, she suggests, were targeted not because they were soliciting sex but because they were drunk and homeless and - most importantly - asleep. The killer preyed on women whom nobody cared about and who wouldn't be missed. Chapman's story is one of addiction: she might have become middle class had she not become an alcoholic. The daughter of a soldier, Annie grew up in lodgings near the Knightsbridge barracks where six of her siblings died of scarlet fever in three weeks. Her father later cut his throat. She married a gentleman's coachman, moved to a cottage on his employer's Berkshire estate, and kept photographs of her children on the mantelpiece. She would stay sober for months and then be found drunk and disorderly in the street: eventually she left the cottage before her family were thrown out. There were, once again, few other options available to her. "What her murderer claimed on that night," Rubenhold writes, "was simply all that remained of what the drink had left behind." They died in hell, but they lived in hell, too - not least because they were female: their worth was compromised before they even tried to prove it Elisabeth Gustafsdotter, later known as Elizabeth Stride, was a Swedish farmer's daughter from Torslander. She went into domestic service - the "golden ticket" for a working-class girl - but contracted syphilis. She came to Britain where she found and soon afterwards left (probably due to a scandal) a good position in a house at Hyde Park; she married, and soon afterwards left, a carpenter called John Stride; she set up a coffeehouse that failed. For her final years she supported herself by posing as a disaster victim, which in many ways she was. Eddowes - who died on the same night as Stride - ran away from Wolverhampton to London where she hooked up with an Irish rover called Thomas Conway. Together, she and Conway, sporting matching tattoos, tramped the country as chapbook sellers: being literate, Catherine was able to write down Conway's ballads. Five hundred members of her family turned out for her funeral. No one, after the death of Kelly, claimed to have known her, but it was "easy enough", Rubenhold shows, for a woman to reinvent herself in the 19th century. Mary Jane probably came from a good family and fell into the wrong hands; whatever happened to her, she left her home in Cardiff (although she claims to have been Irish) and ended up in a west London brothel. To reconstruct her time in the whorehouse - what she wore, what she earned, where she went - Rubenhold turns to My Secret Life, the memoir of the pseudonymous 'Walter'. A series of setbacks brought her from the West End to the East End where, at 25, she was the youngest and the last of the Ripper's victims. The Five is not simply about the women who were murdered in Whitechapel in the autumn of 1888: it is for them. This is a powerful and a shaming book, but most shameful of all is that it took 130 years to write.
Kirkus Review
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 presenta 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 incompletethe case files on three of the five murders have gone missingRubenhold 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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
DON'T LET ANYONE tell you that a preoccupation with reallife murders and murderers is morbid. Morbid is dashing off to Paris every other week to gape at the corpses on public display at the city morgue, which is what Charles Dickens and his friend Wilkie Collins did for fun. Morbid is expecting an entire nation to wear black because you are personally in deepest mourning, which is what Queen Victoria did when her beloved Prince Albert died. Morbid is collecting 19th-century deathbed portraits - although I doubt those half-dozen vintage photos on my desk constitute a "collection." Speaking of Queen Victoria, she was scandalized by the violent death of Lord William Russell, as recounted by Claire Harman in MURDER BY THE BOOK: The Crime That Shocked Dickens's London (Knopf, $26.95). "This IS really too horrid! " the young monarch reportedly wrote in her diary about the events of May 6,1840. "It is almost an unparalleled thing for a person of Ld William's rank, to be killed like that," she remarked, referring to the manner of his death. As Harman reports it: "His throat cut so deeply that the windpipe was sliced right through and the head almost severed." The Metropolitan Police soon arrested François Courvoisier, Lord William's new valet, who was rushed to trial and speedily hanged before a crowd of around 40,000. (A hard death, but not as cruel as the customary penalty of being drawn and quartered.) Harman, bless her, avoids the bogus stratagem of inventing dialogue for historical characters, relying instead on authentic literary sources like "Going to See a Man Hanged," William Makepeace Thackeray's first-person account of the hurly-burly of Courvoisier's public execution. "Many young dandies are there with mustaches and cigars," he dispassionately observes, along with "quiet fat family-parties, of simple honest tradesmen and their wives, as we fancy, who are looking on with the greatest imaginable calmness, and sipping their tea." Leaving those blasé spectators to sip their tea in the shadow of the gibbet, Harman turns an eye to those newly literate Londoners of humble origins who craved something exciting to read. Something like the so-called Newgate novels that romanticized bold crimes and celebrated the audacious criminals who committed them. For those thrill seekers there was "Jack Sheppard," a popular potboiler by William Harrison Ainsworth romanticizing a real-life 18th-century highwayman. This dashing rogue, like John Gay's Macheath revered as a folk hero, became a role model for young men eager to prove their manhood - or at least dream of it - through criminal derring-do. Although their heroes were celebrated in song and story, this fashionable "felon literature" was excoriated by literary critics for its "corrosive effect on readers' morals" and "pernicious influences" on youth. Sounds familiar. when did the midwest lose its wholesome reputation? In WHERE MONSTERS HIDE: Sex, Murder, and Madness in the Midwest (Kensington, paper, $15.95) M. William Phelps makes Iron River, Mich., sound like a cesspool of depravity and murder. Before the rot sets in, this small town seems "quiet. Secluded. Wide open. Generally flat. Friendly. Homey. And totally Midwestern." That notion evaporates once we meet Kelly Cochran, a player who collects men like toys and tosses them aside when they break. "It was a game to her," according to Phelps, who takes a more forgiving tone with the men (including Kelly's long-suffering husband) who put up with her shenanigans. So, Kelly is shameless - but is she a murderer? That's what Laura Frizzo, the "street-tough and strong-willed" police chief, intends to find out when one of Kelly's boytoys, clean-cut Chris Regan, goes missing. The case isn't all that complicated, but Phelps knows how to work it, mainly by fleshing out Kelly's character with prurient details about her sexual escapades and examples of her maddening game-playing. "A person does not forget where she dumped a dismembered human body," one fed-up detective grumbles. life is cheap in the Mexican border city that inspired Dan Werb to write CITY OF OMENS: A Search for the Missing Women of the Borderlands (Bloomsbury, $28). Hundreds of women die each year in the city of Tijuana and along the highway of the Baja coast, many of them from domestic violence, drug overdoses and H.I.V.-related diseases associated with the sex trade. Other bodies, often teenagers, turn up "bound and mutilated." Still others simply disappear. The author refers to all these deaths as "femicide - an epidemic of death visited upon the region's women solely because they are women." Werb attributes much of the region's social and economic ills to the collapse of Tijuana's thriving vice economy after 2009, when the city became off-limits to American sailors and Marines. No longer protected by the Yankees, working girls became fair game for predators along the border. "Their lack of income from a dwindling clientele pool forced them to choose johns who were sick or crazy, their potential for violence flaring like a beacon." An epidemiologist by profession, Werb often lapses into science-speak that bogs down the narrative. But he's a good interviewer and he respects the voices of his sources. One primary informant, a prostitute named Susi, speaks expressively about some of the friends she has lost: La Paniqueada, murdered in a hotel room by ajohn; Angie, hit by a car as she was running from the police; La Lobita, killed by her boyfriend; La Osa, who died of AIDS - and the friend she never speaks of: La Paloma, the Dove, one of the many women who were "levantarlo" (disappeared). These are only a few of the latest count (in 2013) of 1,200plus women who die under suspicious circumstances every year in the Mexican state of Baja California, but Werb says they represent "a microcosm of the population at risk of succumbing to the epidemic of femicide" and he's determined to give them back some humanity. HALLiE RUBENHOLD writes about another group of forgotten women in THE FIVE: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $27). The main fallacy Rubenhold wants to rectify is the accepted notion that Jack's victims were all prostitutes working in the alleys of Whitechapel. But from the position of their bodies alone, it seems obvious to the author that the victims were all homeless and sleeping rough, not trolling for customers. And while the sensationalist newspapers were quick to identify them as streetwalkers plying their "hideous trade," even the police weren't so sure about that, acknowledging "the difficulties in distinguishing a prostitute and her behavior from that of other poor, working-class women and their behavior." By going into their individual histories in great detail, Rubenhold makes a convincing case that, while each of the Ripper's victims might have been "a broken woman" or "a fallen woman," there's no evidence that they were doing business when they were killed. William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, took a more charitable view of such street people. "To very many, even of those who live in London, it may be news that there are so many hundreds who sleep out of doors every night," he wrote in his study of poverty, "In Darkest England and the Way Out." "These homeless, hungry people are, however, there, but being broken-spirited folk for the most part they seldom make their voices audible." In giving these women their voices back, Rubenhold, a social historian, has produced a significant study of how poor and working-class women subsisted in an unforgiving age. Mainly, they got married, hopefully to someone who could hold down a job to support them and their large families. But they were hardly the slatterns history has made of them. Before falling on hard times, Elisabeth Stride once owned a coffeehouse. Kate Eddowes was quite musical; when her cousin was murdered, she composed a ballad in memoriam. Polly Nichols, a blacksmith's daughter who once worked as a maid, was schooled until the age of 15 and could surely read and write. Annie Chapman, the daughter of a valet, married a gentleman's coachman and lived with him and their children on his master's grand estate. Of all the Ripper's victims, she lived the most comfortable life before losing all those comforts when she became an alcoholic. Drink seems to have been the main reason Jack's victims slipped down the social ladder and wound up alone in the slums of Whitechapel. ("The female drunkard was considered an abomination," the author reminds us.) But the death of a husband, or a husband's loss of a job, could change any woman's fortunes overnight. Rubenhold doesn't transform these women into church ladies, but she's determined to save their sullied reputations. "The notion that the victims were 'only prostitutes,' perpetuates the belief that there are good women and bad women," she writes. "It suggests that there is an acceptable standard of female behavior, and those who deviate from it are fit to be punished." EVERYBODY LOVESA BAD GIRL - in Crime stories, if not in life. One person who meets that description is Florence Burns, the subject of Virginia A. McConnell's juicy biography, THE BELLE OF BEDFORD AVENUE: The Sensational Brooks-Burns Murder in Turn-of-theCentury New York (Kent State University, paper, $24.95). Coming of age at the turn of the 20 th century, the American-born sons and daughters of immigrants were not so keen on living by the austere moral codes their parents brought over from the home countries. There were so many amusing enticements in New York City: dance halls, gin mills and roadhouses for the adventures, the amusements at Coney Island for excitement, and fast cars with darkened back seats for sex. Florence Wallace Burns was one of those young rebels, her defiant behavior placing her at the extreme end of the spectrum. This wild child left school (under a cloud) after the eighth grade, got tossed out of the Sheepshead Bay Race Track for smoking, and hung out with the Bedford Gang, a group of bad boys. At one point, her exasperated father hired a private detective who found the poor man's errant daughter at a dancing pavilion in Coney Island. And on top of all that, she was boy-crazy. She started dating early and had a serious boyfriend by the time she was 16. Even at that young age there were signs that Florence was more than willful. When the boyfriend broke off that relationship, she hounded him so relentlessly that his parents had to send him away to prep school. Years later, when another boyfriend, Walter Brooks, rejected her, she shot him dead. She got away with it, too, because of what McConnell smartly calls "the Unwritten Law." By that reckoning, "once it was revealed that Walter Brooks had refused to marry her after supposedly taking her virginity and possibly getting her pregnant, the Unwritten Law was a subtext in the case." The thing is, that defense wasn't true. Florence hadn't been a virgin, she wasn't pregnant, and when Walter became involved with someone else, she made her intentions clear: "I will kill Walter unless he marries me," she told his own mother. Having done the deed, Florence was put on trial, but so thoroughly had she bewitched the jury, they acquitted her in less than an hour. "With such unanimity, it is not hard to imagine the jurors all taking out cigars or pipes or cigarettes to enjoy a smoke and give the illusion of an actual deliberation." McConnell's droll speculation offers a fair example of her extremely readable writing style, which is often sharp, but never nasty. She doesn't even make a big deal out of Florence's habit of carrying a gun in her muff - maybe not to the trial, but years later, she drew a piece from her muff and challenged the officer who was trying to arrest her: "One false move and there'll be one less cop." Spoken like a true lady. what would you do if you honestly believed that the world was on the verge of "a catastrophe of biblical proportions, one in which only the well armed and well prepared would survive"? Would robbing a bank seem like a smart move? That's what five California dudes do in norco '80: The True Story of the Most Spectacular Bank Robbery in American History (Counterpoint, $26), Peter Houlahan's alarming account of a bank heist that rocked the country in 1980 and reflected "the peculiar Zeitgeist of that decade" in all its cockeyed drama. George Smith's "evangelical zeal and deep belief in End Times theology" was the driving force behind the calamitous botched robbery on May 9,1980, of the Security Pacific Bank in Norco, Calif. A true believer in the coming apocalypse, George was desperate for money to build a secure bunker against the end of days. So he and his friend Chris Harven decided to recruit some guys they knew to rob a bank. As George later explained to an F.B.I. agent, he planned the entire robbery himself. "I told them. I cased the bank. I made the bombs. I did all that." Not his fault, really, but everything that could go wrong went wrong. Somebody forgot to lock the door, so bank customers kept coming inside. A helpful passing motorist stopped to put out the fire they had set as a distraction. Finally, through sheer incompetence, they find themselves with a hostage on their hands and no idea what to do with him. For a first-time writer, Houlahan sure knows how to dramatize a scene. His cinematic treatment of the robbery itself reads like wildfire, the fatal shootout with the police ends in colorful chaos, and the huge manhunt through San Bernardino National Forest conducted by "Hunt & Kill Teams" is a nail-biter. "Hundreds of heavily armed men were arriving with helicopters, dog teams, mounted search and rescue squads," along with the helicopter gunship and night vision goggles supplied by the military. But for my money, there's nothing quite as unnerving as the meticulously detailed descriptions of the militarygrade weaponry put into action throughout the story. Just for starters, there's a regulation .38 revolver, a modified-choke Wingmaster shotgun, a Colt "Shorty" AR-15, a Heckler .308 and, for some reason, a samurai sword. Gun control, anyone? MARILYN STASIO has covered crime fiction for the Book Review since 1988. Her column appears twice a month.
Library Journal Review
"A great moral act" was how the judges for the Baillie Gifford prize, the UK's most prestigious literary award for nonfiction, characterized social historian Rubenhold's (The Lady in Red: An Eighteenth-Century Tale of Sex, Scandal, and Divorce) depiction of the lives of Jack the Ripper's victims. While the details of the Ripper's 1888 murderous rampage are well known, and often gruesomely glorified, few people can name even one of his five victims. Now, thanks to Rubenhold's meticulously researched, humane portraits of the full lives of Polly Nichols, Anne Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Katherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly, listeners will come to truly know, and mourn, these five women. Using primary sources that record the lives of "ordinary" people such as census and court records, school documents, ships' manifests, and workhouse and public housing documents, Rubenhold tells each woman's distinct life story, exploding the myth that they were all sex workers. Persuasively arguing that the laws and social structure of Victorian society combined to almost completely disenfranchise women, Rubenhold shows that without the misogyny and classism of the times, it is unlikely that these five resourceful woman would have ended up in such dire straits, often homeless and hopelessly addicted to alcohol. Narrator Louise Brealey, whom listeners may recognize from her portrayal of quirky Molly Hooper on BBC's Sherlock, compassionately relays the compelling narratives, her measured delivery helping to soften the devastating details. VERDICT This heartbreaking work, both a micro and macro look at the precarious nature of Victorian-era working-class life, is an important addition to all history, true crime, and women's studies collections.--Beth Farrell, Cleveland State Univ. Law Lib.