“What we need to do is know them as human beings, that’s the most important thing”
Out of these five women, was there one story in particular that affected you?
They all affected me in different ways, and when you work in-depth as I’ve been doing you get to really know the subject matter and become very close to the women, close but not losing your objectivity. That’s the one thing that I’m very aware of, you always have to make sure that you are showing the subject matter in the round. These women were not the same and they were imperfect like all of us. I found Annie Chapman’s story very moving because I think she and her husband managed to claw their way out of grinding poverty into the lower-middle classes, which was no small feat at that time and their lives, their children’s lives, could have been so much better if Annie had not been an alcoholic, which was the downfall for her entire family.
In your book, you’ve made a point of not discussing the final and tragic moments of these women – why did you decide to take this approach?
There’s enough of it out there already because every single book that has ever been written on Jack the Ripper goes into finite detail about how these women were murdered. You can Google any one of these women, the Whitechapel murders, and find lots of gratuitous detail about how they were murdered. You
can see pictures of them lying dead in the morgue and we don’t need that. What we need to do is know them as human beings, that’s the most important thing. Jack the Ripper’s legend begins with their death and what I wanted to do was completely turn it around so that the first chapter begins with these women’s lives.
You’ve also made a deliberate choice to avoid speculating about Jack the Ripper’s identity. Why do you think we are so obsessed with him over a century later?
Because I think this is probably the most famous unsolved series of murders in history. It’s a rather self-perpetuating thing, where it’s famous so it continues to be because nobody’s thought of it in any other paradigm. It’s a good question, why are we still interested in it? Over the years it has acquired a taste of allure and to be honest, become its own genre. As I mentioned in the book, it has become fused with fiction and a part of this fictional London map, part Sherlock Holmes, part Jekyll and Hyde and part Dracula. Jack the Ripper was real but we forget that, so he becomes a monster. He was a human being who killed human beings and we forget that. So this all becomes part of the game and its shadowplay, it’s interesting and it’s fun, and we lose a sense of reality in it.
Your book has received a lot of praise, it won the Baillie Gifford Prize last year and it was nominated for the Wolfson History Prize 2020. However, it has also received a lot of criticism from Ripperologists who object to your research – why is The Five so controversial?
I think several reasons and, first of all, I’ve come along and upset the orthodoxy. I’ve upset a lot of people, mostly men but some women, who have staked their reputations on being Jack the Ripper experts. Their interest has been about this for years and years of their lives. I’ve had people say to me, “I studied this for 30 years.” Well, you’re reading the same books, by those same people who are repeating all the same things. It’s insular, it’s not open-minded and none of these people are trained historians.
Just because you’ve read a lot of books that doesn’t make you a historian. It doesn’t make you able to understand documents. And just because you’ve read a lot of books on Jack the Ripper, you’re not an expert on 19th century sex work. There are a lot of people – I have to say it is mostly men – who have pinned their egos on being experts and here I am, an outsider, saying that’s not true because of this, this and this, and they just go berserk because it becomes like a personal attack on them. They do absolutely everything they can to try to discredit me, and they were doing everything they could to discredit me eight months before the book was even published! They didn’t even know what was in the book – they had no idea.
What do you hope readers will take away from The Five?
I hope that they will see the women as human beings and that this will change the Jack the Ripper narrative for the better. It’s not a story which starts with the death of these women, but incorporates their lives so we can better understand this period, this episode in the late-19th century, and we can understand the people who were involved in it and we can understand that this is not fiction. This is not a legend. This is real and it affected real people and these women can have some dignity restored to them.