The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper

“Through these two disparate scenes moved two women whose lives and deaths would come to define nineteenth-century Britain; one was Victoria, who gave her name to the years 1837-1901. The other was a homeless woman called Mary Ann, or ‘Polly,’ Nichols, who was among those encamped at Trafalgar Square in 1887.”

All five women who were Jack the Ripper’s victims were impoverished. Rubenhold points out that, given the status and treatment of women in Victorian Britain, poverty disadvantaged them even further, which introduces the theme of The Social Dynamics of Poverty and Gender. To drive this point home, Rubenhold paints a contrast between the Victorian London experienced by the upper-class and the one seen by vagrants and the extremely poor.

“It appeared to moral, middle-class England that in the face of this level of brutal, crippling want, every good and righteous instinct that ought to govern human relations had been completely eroded.”

The Jack the Ripper murders called attention to the extreme poverty and horrific living conditions in Whitechapel (5). However, respectable Victorian society often ignored or downplayed the systemic economic and social factors that created the problems in the East End, choosing instead to often frame issues like crime and poverty as moral failings. Such views reflect the Victorian prejudices and assumptions against poor and working-class people.

“The fibers that have clung to and defined the shape of Polly, Annie, Elisabeth, Kate, and Mary Jane’s stories are the values of the Victorian world. They are male, authoritarian, and middle class. They were formed at a time when women had no voice, and few rights, and the poor were considered lazy and degenerate: to have been both of these things was one of the worst possible combinations.”

The Social Dynamics of Poverty and Gender intersected in Victorian Britain, in ways that further disadvantaged working-class and vagrant women. For example, the lack of jobs women were allowed to have made women more financially dependent on men and more likely to fall into poverty, but sympathy for impoverished women was often in short supply.