The Five

Hallie Rubenhold

Doubleday, £14.99

Reviewed by Susan Flockhart

Of all the myths perpetuated about Jack the Ripper, the most insidious is that he targeted prostitutes. In fact, only one of the five women creditably considered to have been murdered by the notorious killer was involved in sex work around the time she died. And as Hallie Rubenhold reminds us in The Five, Mary Jane Kelly was never “just” a prostitute. She was also a human being.

The killings horrified London's East End during the autumn of 1888. As for the victims – Mary Anne “Polly” Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly – their pain and terror can only be guessed at. Rubenhold is not interested in describing the hellish handiwork of a figure whose presence becomes ever more sensationalised in books, films and tourist trails, while the focus on his victims diminishes.

"In order to gawp at and examine this miracle of malevolence,” she writes, “we have figuratively stepped over the bodies of those he murdered, and in some cases, stopped to kick them as we walked past.” The notion that they were prostitutes – and therefore, in some people's eyes, partly responsible for their own downfall – is one of the weapons used to brutalise their memory.

The Five is a passionate, and compassionate, attempt to atone for this injustice by telling the victims' stories. It clearly wasn't easy: little is known about these desperately poor, isolated women, who subsisted in the shadowlands of London's roughest neighbourhoods. To flesh out their biographies, Rubenhold trawled through myriad archival sources including workhouse admissions books, parish documents and police reports.

The Five begins with an eye-watering description of Whitechapel – an east-London area then characterised by sweat shops, abattoirs and sewage-filled streets. Entire families were crammed into decrepit furnished rooms. (During one health inspection, five children were discovered sharing a bed with a dead sibling who was awaiting burial.) Worse still were the common lodging houses where a filthy, flea-ridden, dormitory bed could be rented by the night. For the most desperate of all, there were workhouses – grim institutions which separated husbands,wives and children and demanded hard labour in return for meagre provisions that were often impregnated with rat droppings.

All five of Rubenhold's subjects were familiar with life inside Whitechapel's lodging houses and workhouses; by the time of their murder, most were sleeping (not working) on the streets.

Yet their prospects hadn't always appeared bleak and the book shows how easily people with no financial safety net can slip into society's underworld. For a while, Polly Nichols and her family rented a respectable Peabody tenement – high-quality, socially progressive housing available only to carefully-vetted, morally-upright working people. Annie Chapman once lived in a commodious house on a country estate. Elizabeth Stride grew up on her father's Swedish farm and Catherine Eddowes received a good education at a charitable school.

Life in Victorian Britain was, however, a precarious business and while Mary Jane Kelly's origins are undocumented and the precise reasons for the others' fall from grace will never be known, Rubenhold has identified some of the factors involved: they lost parents, children and siblings to disease and suicide; they experienced broken marriages and possibly domestic abuse. Catherine Eddowes's father became jobless after being imprisoned for trade union activism; Elizabeth Stride contracted syphilis.

Alcohol seems to have contributed to the collapse of all five women's fortunes. Did Polly Nichols drink to “dull the pain” of her husband's possible affair with the woman next door? Did loneliness and grief drive Annie Chapman to the bottle? Who knows: alcoholism is notoriously complicated and at times Rubenhold appears a little too eager to fill in the evidential gaps with sympathetic speculation.

Then again, perhaps that's fair. After all, history has unjustifiably damned these women as worthless whores and as Rubenhold points out, they were victims of Victorian double standards which allowed men to divorce their spouses for adultery but prevented women from doing the same unless their husbands were also found guilty of an additional crime. So while Polly Nichols's husband was living with his former neighbour, he used evidence that his wife was cohabiting with another man to avoid paying her maintenance, thus leaving Polly destitute.

On the night she died Polly Nichols was sleeping rough, having drunk away her doss money. Her murder was a tragedy and so, too, was the deplorably inadequate Victorian welfare system that allowed those who'd suffered misfortune or made mistakes to tumble into the abyss.

In 19th-century Britain, writes Rubenhold, “the poor were judged to be lazy and immoral paupers who refused to do honest work, bred bastards and enormous families while 'living off handouts'.” Welfare reforms designed to “compel the indigent to lead moral, hard-working lives” by driving them into workhouses, instead forced many onto the streets where they were at the mercy of the genuinely depraved.

This fascinating and hugely important book should act as a timely reminder of what happens when a society ceases to care for its most vulnerable residents.