57 pages • 1 hour read
Hallie RubenholdThe Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper
Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
IntroductionChapter Summaries & Analyses
Introduction Summary: “A Tale of Two Cities”
Content Warning: This guide contains explicit descriptions of sex work, alcohol dependency, sex trafficking, domestic violence, child neglect, and death by suicide.
Rubenhold begins by describing the year 1887 in London, where events took place illustrating both the ideal and dark sides of the Victorian era. The ideal was embodied in Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, celebrations marking the 50th anniversary of her reign. The dark side were the poor who were on the brink of finding themselves in Britain’s notorious workhouses. They could be found at Trafalgar Square, which was “an axis between the east and west of the city, the dividing line between rich and poor” (4). At the same time, Trafalgar Square was a major site for speeches delivered by social reformers like Eleanor Marx, George Bernard Shaw, and William Morris.
By November 8, 1887, London’s police commissioner, Charles Warren, had issued a ban on all gatherings in Trafalgar Square. In defiance of the ban, a protest of 40,000 people (5), including the poor who habitually camped out on Trafalgar Square, was planned. The goal of the protest was to demand the release of William O’Brien, an Irish member of Parliament. The clash with police, which led to two deaths, hundreds of people being injured, and riots, was called “Bloody Sunday.” Rubenhold argues that these separate events “moved two women whose lives and deaths would come to define nineteenth-century Britain” (5). One was Queen Victoria, and the other was Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols, the first of Jack the Ripper’s five “canonical” victims, who was murdered on August 31, 1888.
The Jack the Ripper murders took place in a poor neighborhood of London’s East End, Whitechapel. As Rubenhold notes, “The brutality of the Whitechapel murders stunned London and newspaper readers around the world” (5). The Jack the Ripper murders “overwhelmed” the Metropolitan Police of London and attracted the attention of the media, along with plenty of “fake news” (6). Since Jack the Ripper was never caught and put on trial, most information about the five victims comes from coroner’s inquests. Rubenhold argues these accounts are “problematic” because they were not thoroughly conducted and held unchallenged “inconsistencies and vagaries” (7).
The media attention on the Jack the Ripper murders also highlighted the poverty of the East End, especially Whitechapel, where poverty worsened even more during the Long Depression of the 1870s and 1880s. Whitechapel also had a large immigrant population, largely Irish migrants and eastern European Jews. Families often lived in one room, and domestic and criminal violence were rampant. Particularly notorious were the lodging houses, which offered temporary housing for the poor people who alternated between rooms at the lodging houses, the streets, and London’s notoriously brutal workhouses.
Women who relied on lodging houses sometimes resorted to sex work to pay the “doss” (a slang term for the rent paid to a lodging or “doss” house), but not always. They would more often sell items or offer laundry services to pay for the lodging houses. Sometimes, they would live with a male partner who would help pay for the lodging house without the couple ever getting married, which “horrified middle-class observers” (11). Due to such realities, newspapers unfairly characterized the lodging houses as brothels.
Rubenhold asserts that such views and mistaken notions still shape the narrative about the Jack the Ripper murders to this day. As a result, it is assumed that all five of Jack the Ripper’s victims were sex workers, when “there is no hard evidence to suggest that three of his five victims were sex workers at all” (12). By writing The Five and focusing on Jack the Ripper’s victims, she hopes to “give back to them […] their dignity” (13).
Introduction Analysis
The Introduction explains Rubenhold’s two goals in the book. The first is using the biographies of Jack the Ripper’s “canonical” five victims as a lens through which to examine the experience of women in the Victorian era, an approach known as “microhistory” (See: Background). The second goal is The Humanization of Historically Stigmatized Figures, specifically by debunking the widespread historical myth that all five of Jack the Ripper’s victims were sex workers and by presenting relatable details about the five women’s lives to the reader. Rubenhold is explicit in saying this is not a book about Jack the Ripper. She writes, “I wish instead to retrace the footsteps of five women, to consider their experiences within the context of their era, and to follow their paths through both the gloom and the light” (13). As will be clear in the following chapters, Rubenhold avoids describing the murders themselves or theorizing about the identity of Jack the Ripper, to the point that each biography rarely includes details about the women’s murders. Instead, Rubenhold describes their lives up until their last days and how their loved ones and the media of the time reacted in the aftermath of their deaths.
In doing so, Rubenhold also hopes to combat The Misrepresentation of Women in History by avoiding the sensationalism often surrounding the Jack the Ripper murders in pop culture, which has reduced the five women to their status as murder victims instead of as complex individuals in their own right. In choosing not to detail the murders themselves, Rubenhold invites the reader to instead consider the women as real people who lived full, complicated lives up until their deaths. Rubenhold’s decision to center the women instead of Jack the Ripper offers a feminist approach to the crimes, with Rubenhold wishing to reclaim the women’s stories and present them as worthy of study apart from the Jack the Ripper connection.
By opening The Five with a description of Trafalgar Square and the extreme economic disparity that existed within Victorian London, Rubenhold also calls attention to The Social Dynamics of Poverty and Gender. As will become clearer with the biographies of the five women, poverty or the threat of it and how that intersected with the inequality they lived under as women played major roles in all of their lives. The very fact that all five women are still mistakenly believed to have been driven to sex work reflects this dynamic. The narratives about them were formed at “a time when women had no voice, and few rights, and the poor were considered lazy and degenerate: to have been both of these things was one of the worst possible combinations” (12). A major part of Rubenhold’s argument is that this view of Jack the Ripper’s victims—born out of mainstream Victorian assumptions about women in poverty—still shape how we talk about Jack the Ripper and his victims to this day.
