Recent Reads: The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold

The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication Date:  April 9, 2019

 

Format: Ebook
Source: Bought on Amazon. 

Rating:


Goodreads Synopsis:

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 were in the wrong place at the wrong time—but their greatest misfortune was to be born a woman.

Review: 

I heard about this book online and added it to our options for book club, it seems that everyone was just as intrigued as I had been about it because it is the book that was chosen. The Five is a non-fiction book about the five women murdered by Jack the Ripper, however if you are looking for the gruesome details, crime logs etc, you will not find that here.

The author highlights each girl covering the backstories that are available in history as best she can and paints the picture of Victorian London as dark and devastating for them even before their deaths. Each one has her own section, which looks at her life from sometimes birth to her untimely death, chronicling how they were part of the English society at the time. Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary-Jane all led very different lives up to a point, but all succumbed to addiction in the form of alcoholism. 

This book was very factual and the first few chapters are a bit of a slog as the author portrays the working class of London through their types of jobs and their pay ranges, but it sets the scene although it was hard to get through. One thing that I had trouble with was that all the salaries and money were in GBP and did not include conversions, I know that is not the biggest deal, but I didn't want to stop reading or listening every time she mentioned pay to look up the conversion rate, and today's rate would not be the same; so it would have been nice to have at least one quick US rate.

I really liked how we got information about their lives without going into any detail about the murders, it was interesting to see them in this light, not as victims but as humans. It was hard reading about alcoholism affecting them, but it made me realize that maybe Jack the Ripper had an issues with drunks, or experienced abuse from a drunk somewhere along the line. Or maybe like prostitutes and women of the night, drunks were just easy targets. 


Most intriguing of the whole book was after all the tales, it was the list of the items found on each of the women at the murder site, one was wearing and carrying just about everything she probably owned, it was both eye-opening and sad, but very surprising.