Anytime we watch a slasher movie, we are perpetuating the legend of Jack the Ripper, the first widely acknowledged serial killer of the Industrial era. Between the months of August and November 1888, the district of Whitechapel, in the east end of London, witnessed the brutal slayings of five women in the late hours of the night. The killings started as abruptly as they ended. The first victim was Polly Nichols, whose slashed body was found slouched against a wall on 31st Aug 1888 on one of the many meandering and dingy side streets that dotted White Chapel. Her throat was surgically cut and her bowels were eviscerated. The last victim was Mary Jane Kelly murdered on her own bed: cut, dismembered, and left as a bag of hanging flesh and nothing more. With each killing, the police, the local government, and the public grew restless and panicky, but no arrests were made. More than five thousand suspects were questioned, but nothing concrete emerged, and the identity of Jack the Ripper was never established – the killer remains anonymous to this day. In fact, it wasn’t clear if the five murders were the work of one man or a gang. Was he a Jew, a sailor, a surgeon, a lunatic, or a member of the Royal family? – the ripper was given many identities, and none led anywhere. In fact, the name Jack itself is an invented name, a groping effort to shape the identity of a man who was striking terror in the hearts and minds of people. The public was desperate to know who this monster was, and in doing so, they inadvertently created an archetype, a legend, a shadow figure, whose influence – literally, artistically, and metaphorically – would permeate the culture and social fabric of urban cities around the world. In a way, it was ironic that the ripper killings should fall around the same time as that of the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria (1887). England was celebrating the queen’s reign with much aplomb and paraphernalia. As a woman, she epitomized the power of the British empire, but down below, in her society, Women, especially those who belonged to the working classes were stigmatized and never felt the tremors of liberation, freedom, or the dignity they deserved.
“Jack the Ripper killed prostitutes”. This is the one-line summation of the events of those two tragic months at White Chapel. While the legend of the killer grew and the image of the killer was carefully nurtured each day by the newspapers, what was utterly ignored, blind-sighted, or worse still – brushed under the carpet or not worth noting were the true identities, lives and the dignity of the five women who were victims to the ripper’s knife. It was and is implicitly assumed, the five young ladies: Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddows, and Marie Jeanette ( Mary Jane Kelly) were living an immoral life, living off the streets and selling their bodies to earn a living. Hence their horrific deaths somehow justified the life they led. Victorian England had no place or sympathy for women they perceived and categorized as depraved. It was a deeply entrenched opinion at that time ( the era before women-rights and equality) that young ladies roaming about the streets in the dead of the night in shabby clothes and fully drunk would only do so with the objective of soliciting and luring men into lechery and sex. No other reasons could possibly exist or be conceived for such a lifestyle. “Walking in the streets” meant prostitution, and homelessness was construed as reckless behavior. The rightful place of working-class women was with their husbands and family. Anyone falling off those diaphanous social boundaries wasn’t leading a “good” life. While the English empire was busy imposing victorian standards of progress and decency on those they governed, their own center, the bulk of the English population was groveling in poverty, with large family sizes, and a lack of education and hygiene. The reason why the lives of the five women aren’t widely known is that it wasn’t considered important to know them, to understand them, to find who they were and how they got to the place they were found mutilated. Their lives were deemed inconsequential. After all, they were “prostitutes”. Encapsulated in that single word are the reasons and the justifications for their lives and the brutal end they faced. The thirty-odd years of each victim’s life – lived as a daughter, mother, husband, a friend; their dreams, their desires, their loves and aches, their highs and lows – amounted to nothing, and worse still, reduced to an insensitive and irreverent epithet that history books have slapped on them – that they were prostitutes, and therefore somehow brought this tragedy on themselves. Such is the inhumanity of our labels, prejudices, and opinions.
There are numerous written and dramatizations about Jack the Ripper, some grounded in facts, and some primarily based on dark speculations and gory imaginations of minds that seek more to titillate the senses than illumine the matter at hand. But there has never been a book, at least to the best of my knowledge that has spoken about the victims in great detail; until Hallie Rubenhold’s brilliant 2018 book “ The five – the untold lives of the women killed by Jack the Ripper”. Rubenhold, the elegant and young English historian, specializes in the lives of women who haven’t been given their due share in history. She has written extensively about English and French women, both as works of fiction and Non-fiction. Her peculiar brand of research takes her into the dark corners of libraries, studying dusty tomes of discarded correspondences and notes, newspaper cuttings, and social laws, and reinterpreting prevalent historical narratives, to unearth and demystify the lives of women who have been branded, unwisely or inaccurately, as someone or something. In her book “The five”, she turns her attention to the individual lives of the five women the ripper claimed, and the result is a work that shimmers with empathy and radically revises the established narrative about these ladies.
The first fact that stares out at the reader is that only one among the five victims ostensibly worked in the sex trade; with regard to the others, there is absolutely no evidence that any one of them had anything to do with soliciting men on the streets. Rubenhold bases her narrative on the available evidence at that time: the coroner’s reports, the people whose depositions were hastily recorded at the district courts, the ambiguity and the glamorization of the murders in the newspapers of the day, the contradictions of the eye witness accounts at police stations, the emphatic statements of those who knew the victims well. The picture she draws of each victim is representative of London and the working class at that time. The tapestry of the lives led by each of the girls is woven by the strands of social, economic, and political circumstances of Victorian England – an England so stratified and so backward in its outlook. All the five victims were homeless, pushed and buffeted by circumstances, prey to alcoholism, lived with different partners, tramped, slept under fountains, garbage piles, and way-side benches, and relegated to working-houses – places where the poor could live for days or months sundering applying conditions; and once out, they continued to shiver in the freezing cold of London winters and bodily exhausted themselves in the summers; they were uniformly ostracized by family, friends, and society for reasons beyond their control, they mothered children without limits or discretion and wallowed in poverty. Yet, in all the facts we know about the victims, there is no shred of evidence, except in the case of Mary Jane Kelly, that they prostituted for a living. Polly, Annie, Elisabeth, and Catherine led, or tried their very best, to lead dignified lives, married, with kids and family. And each time they struggled to climb up the social ladder, they were pushed down by circumstances that manifested in the form of joblessness, more children to raise, and infidelity. Rubenhold traces the trajectory of each woman’s life, based on evidence till the unfortunate night that ended their lives. There is nothing in the specific details that could have predicted or led to such a tragic end; but unfortunately, it is the way their lives ended, that has come to define the way they lived. And Rubenhold’s book attempts to set the narrative right.
Each chapter in the book is devoted to sketching the life of a victim. It is interesting how many details Rubenhold has been able to unearth about each woman, and reading each page, raises important questions about why such critical information on each victim wasn’t brought to light earlier in all these decades we have known the ripper’s victims. The only answer seems to be that we were comfortable not to. It is better that these ladies remained labeled as prostitutes than dig around and face the truth – which Rubenhold has had the courage to do. In beautiful prose, she has resurrected the lives of these unfortunate women and placed them in the context of the inequality, injustice, and prejudices of those times. Looking at the quality of their lives from the vantage point of the twenty-first century can send shudders through our spines about how women could have been treated so badly and with so disregard and disrespect those days. But let us not forget, not much has changed even today. The inequalities faced by women which are glaringly visible and openly acknowledged during victorian times are still there; the only difference is that those attitudes are now masquerading themselves in subtler and refined ways. Rubenhold quotes a haunting statement made to the press by a Senior servant, Mr. Edward Fairfield working at the colonial office, shortly after the murders of Whitechapel. He wrote a letter to the Times, and I paraphrase: “ On the whole, it was a good thing that they fell victim to the unknown surgical genius ( Jack the Ripper). He, at all events, has made his contribution towards solving the problems of cleansing the East-end of its vicious inhabitants”. We may be appalled at the audacity and the openness of such a callous comment today, but let us acknowledge, there are still many societies and people around the world who may feel the same way in private.
There are few books that have moved me as “The five” did. I picked it up on an impulse, and after reading it did some googling to realize that the book has been critically acclaimed, and had won the Bailie Gifford prize for 2019 – a prestigious award given to historical writing that revises our understanding of history. Rightfully so!! After nearly one hundred and forty years, the five women who died in Whitechapel have regained their dignity in the hands of Rubenhold. No one can look at the Ripper’s victims with the same eyes as before after reading this book.
Furthermore, Rubenhold directs the reader’s attention to the individuals of the tragedy and weans us away from abstractions. We like to comfort ourselves with abstractions. Every day we read and watch news reports about tragedies across the world. We call them victims – one blanket word – that masks the individual lives of all those who have perished. We like to call the massacre of seven million Jews in the Second World War as “holocaust” – again, a single word – to abstract away the specific lives of each jew with a personal history behind them. In a way, abstractions are necessary to function in the world, but at the same time, they should not be a shield to hide behind. By calling the five women brutally killed by the ripper prostitutes, we have abstracted away their lives to a word that means nothing at all without knowing who they were and how they came to be what they were. By hiding behind a term, we have rationalized their deaths, and in a perverse way, justified it too.
Hallie Rubenhold has written a timely book, a book that sets right a grave injustice, and also has the possibility to open our eyes and start looking at our prejudices, masks, rationalizations, and hypocrisies more closely.