The Ripper’s Victims
Historian Hallie Rubenhold discusses her book The Five and her mission to give Jack the Ripper’s victims the dignity that they deserve
Telling the real story of the five women with Hallie Rubenhold
Can you name all five victims of Jack the Ripper? If you can’t then you are not alone. Ever since Mary Ann ‘Polly’ Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elisabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly were murdered in cold blood over 130 years ago, the identity of their killer has continued to fascinate the world, his legacy has been glamorised in books, songs, films and television, while his victims have been forgotten. We spoke to historian Hallie Rubenhold about her latest book The Five and how she has upended the Jack the Ripper narrative, restoring his victims to their rightful place in their own stories.
What inspired you to write The Five? Have you always had an interest in these women or did you come across something that made you want to tell their stories?
I was looking for another subject to write a non-fiction book about and I thought back to my first non-fiction book called The Covent Garden Ladies, which was about Harris’s List Of Covent Garden Ladies, a bestselling annual guidebook of prostitutes in the 18th century. It gave short biographies of these women’s lives and their sexual specialities, but also descriptions of who they were and where they came from, and I wrote about their lives. I wanted to do this for the 19th century and find some hidden lives of Victorian women, poor women, women who’ve been written out of history, and tell their stories. I was looking, much like with Covent Garden Ladies, for sex workers and I thought, who were the best-known sex workers of the 19th century and in London? Well, that’ll be the victims of Jack the Ripper. I soon realised that there had been no full-length book written about these five women looking at their lives collectively. Probably the five most famous murder victims and most people wouldn’t know their names.
I was so shocked by this I thought I absolutely had to write this story. It’s a gross injustice that everybody knows who Jack the Ripper is but nobody knows anything about the women he killed.
How did you do your research and what sources did you use?
First, I looked at the existing literature and in most books about Jack the Ripper there’s very little good research. They’re not
written by historians and people who really understand the sources or how to evaluate them. I quickly noticed that a lot of these books weren’t even footnoted and that they relied on what somebody else’s book had said – somebody who wrote it in the 1960s, it becomes gospel and it’s repeated enough times that it becomes what they think of as a fact. I had to reinvent the wheel, go back and trace where a lot of quotes came from about these women’s lives and almost everything that was used came from 19th century newspaper reports. Well, newspaper reports can tell us some things but certainly not everything, especially if the reports come from the five inquests into these women’s deaths.
Independently, after each of these five were killed, an inquest was held to look into the cause of death because no perpetrator had been found. A coroner’s inquest is a bit like a trial, so witnesses would talk about the circumstances of death, who the murder victims were and what was seen and heard prior to the murder. But what really shocked me as a historian was that when I looked in the police files for these women that were held in the public records office, often the only thing in them were newspaper reports. All the inquest documents are missing, except for the last two victims, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly. So, in terms of the material, it was all from what journalists heard in the courtroom. Now, you lay out ten different newspapers who all report a quote in ten different ways, and some directly contradict one another. You deconstruct that and realise that we don’t have a definitive source and we don’t know what was said. You have to get through all the shale, hearsay and everything at the top, which is all unstable and has been repeated within this canon of Jack the Ripper. You have to get down into the base level, which is the sources, and piece together bit by bit the lives that were lived and then contextualise them with the lives of other Victorian women of their class who were living in the same place, at the same time, under the same circumstances.
“It’s a gross injustice that everybody knows who Jack the Ripper is but nobody knows anything about the women he killed”
What can you tell us about the lives of these women? Did you discover anything that wasn’t known previously?
Oh my gosh, lots and lots! For example, Annie Chapman was in one of the first women’s rehabilitation centres for alcoholism in the early 1880s and I found the record books for that in a Protestant convent in Wantage, Oxfordshire. So that was quite amazing. With the help of a Swedish-speaker who lives in Gothenburg, I found some interesting stuff about Elisabeth Stride in the records that she was treated for syphilis and that she emigrated to the UK. We knew that but the circumstances surrounding that, that she may have had a relationship with her employer in London when she worked here, we didn’t know. I’ve found out new information about all of the women, even if it was just contextualising it.
We know the least about Mary Jane Kelly because that was almost certainly not her name, as she doesn’t appear in any of the records and it’s impossible to trace her. She was the only known career sex worker and she worked in the West End, so she wasn’t born in Whitechapel into poverty. But the interesting thing about it, nobody has contextualised what was said about her by the people who knew her, like that she had a good education, she was an artist and she held herself very well. All of these are little indicators of somebody who had received at least a middle-class education. If you know about women’s lives and their experiences in the 19th century, you can’t miss that – things like art lessons that are only available to girls who went to middle-class schools or above. If you were a poor working-class girl, you wouldn’t have learned to be an artist or even had the means, the time and the paper available to learn that. So the added context tells us new things as well.
All five of these women were identified as prostitutes at the time. How did this affect the way their murders were portrayed in the media?
It was a combination of pity, obviously, and quite a lot of fear. How it was discussed and regarded was that this is what happens to bad women, if you’re a woman who doesn’t follow the prescribed path for women, who doesn’t have a house, who isn’t part of the household, who doesn’t live under a man’s roof, who drinks, who is ‘defective’, this is what happens to you. It suited society
for them to be bad women – society couldn’t conceive of them in any other way because women’s roles were so circumscribed. A woman had to be a wife and a mother or a carer, a woman had to live under a man’s roof, a woman had to be looked after, if that was her role, and if she did anything other than that she was a ‘defective’ woman.
Was there anything you learned about the five women that really struck you?
Yes – how different all of their stories were! When I’ve spoken to groups, I’ve asked them to tell me one fact about Jack the Ripper and most people will say that he killed prostitutes. That’s really interesting. You tend to think all these women were young women but they weren’t – four of the five women were in their 40s when they were killed. None of them came from the East End and they all came from different places. Elisabeth Stride was from Sweden, Mary Jane Kelly was from Wales, Catherine Eddowes was from Wolverhampton, Annie Chapman grew up in between Knightsbridge and Windsor and was living on a country estate before she separated from her husband. So all of these things are surprising because the collective cultural understanding of Jack the Ripper is almost the Hollywood version of the story.