‘The victims of Jack the Ripper were never ‘just prostitutes’; they were daughters, wives, mothers, sisters, and lovers...’
Society’s ghoulish obsession with serial killers has reached fever pitch in recent years. True crime is a cheap and easy win for streaming services and podcasters and this has resulted in a market saturation concluding with the entire genre being spoofed with A Very Fatal Murder, American Vandal and The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window all recent high-profile examples. There has however been a bit of a backlash against the rogue’s gallery of serial killer multimedia in recent years. Documentaries such as The Ripper and The Hunt for Bible John have tried to frame these tragic stories through both the eyes of the victims and through the cultural context when the crimes took place. At the centre of this revolution is Hallie Rubenhold’s ground-breaking Jack the Ripper study The Five. Although this book isn’t actually about the Victorian era’s most famous criminal, not really…
As suggested by the subheading, The Five is more interested in the ‘untold lives’ of the five canonical Ripper victims rather than the ripper himself. Rubenhhold’s exhaustively researched novel delves into the lives of these five women without judgement or sensationalism in an attempt to humanise them, to remember them, but also to dispel the many myths, untruths and downright lies that have dogged the Ripper victims since the moment they ceased being women and started being pawns in the game of some kind of supposed evil genius.
Now would probably be a good time to point out that I’m no better than anyone else in this regard. I have devoured as many serial killer documentaries and podcasts as anyone, and have even gleefully attended a Jack the Ripper walk around Whitechapel in which the tour guide described, at great length, the grisly deaths of each victim. The Five is an attempt to redress the balance in this regard however, and it succeeds spectacularly. This is not just a chronicling of the lives of five unfortunate women, it is also a book that explores social convention, poverty and sexual politics. This is a book that is as much a warning for the future as it is a missive from the past. The media still treats women who are victims of violence the same way that the newspapers did for these five women back in 1888.
It is also important to note that while The Five is far from a cold presentation of fact, it is also never preachy or didactic. Instead, Rubenhold presents the facts in a way that is always captivating and compelling and allows the reader to reach their own conclusions. I came away from this book feeling that I had learned something, really learned something, in a way that other historical non-fiction hasn’t quite matched.
In the end, The Five is quite simply one of the best non-fiction books I have ever read. Utterly essential.