The Five

Starting Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five: the untold lives of the women killed by Jack the Ripper (2019), another very different book came to mind. Hans Rosling’s Factfulness shows the (sometimes counter-intuitive) truths about progress in recent human history in areas like medicine and public health. Reading Rubenhold’s gripping descriptions of London in the 1880s, you have to remind yourself that this was ‘only’ 140 years ago. The horrendous living conditions in poor parts of the city make it sound medieval. How could anyone live a decent life in those circumstances?

Another book provides another thought. In Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Linda (Willy Loman’s widow) says, ‘Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person’, and this is what Rubenhold is doing. She rescues the murder victims from history, from their erasure by stereotype, laziness and misogyny, and makes them real again. The fifth woman, Mary Jane, had mysterious origins, but in the first four cases the lives come into the full clear focus of everyday detail. Each woman suffered a myriad of smaller tragedies before the final horrendous one (Rubenhold alludes only briefly and carefully to the murders themselves). Again and again these women slipped downwards through society through bad luck, loss of income, alcoholism and domestic violence. You read each story knowing what the end will be, your stomach clenched with anxiety as the story moves closer to its infamous ending:

The cards were stacked against Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Kate and Mary Jane from the day of their births. They began their lives in deficit. Not only were most of them both into working-class families, but they were born female. Before they had even spoken their first words they were regarded as less important than their brothers and more of a burden on the world than their wealthier female counterparts. Their worth was compromised before they had even attempted to prove it. (p.339)

The Five is a sober, superbly-researched and eloquent act of attention.