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

The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper (2019) is a nonfiction historical work by Hallie Rubenhold. In the book, Rubenhold offers a closer look at the lives of the “canonical five,” the five women who are agreed by scholars to have been killed by the 19th-century serial killer Jack the Ripper in the Whitechapel district of London. Rubenhold’s work aims to restore dignity to the five women by centering their own stories and experiences, offering a feminist approach to a story long dominated by the serial killer. Upon publication, The Five won the 2019 Baillie Gifford Prize and was shortlisted for the 2020 Wolfson History Prize.

This guide uses the 2019 Mariner Books hardcover edition.

Content Warning: The source material contains explicit descriptions of sex work, alcohol dependency, sex trafficking, domestic violence, child neglect, and death by suicide.

Summary

The Five is a collection of biographies of each of Jack the Ripper’s “canonical” victims: Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine “Kate” Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly. Instead of giving details about their murders, each biography examines the woman’s individual life and the social circumstances surrounding her. As Rubenhold explains, “I wish […] to retrace the footsteps of five women, to consider their experiences within the context of their era, and to follow their paths through both the gloom and the light” (13).

Polly had married a warehouse worker named William Nichols. The two managed to set themselves up in a charitable working-class apartment complex called the Peabody Buildings. However, Polly’s life started to unravel when her husband left her for another woman. Under the laws of the time, they could not actually divorce, only be separated. Polly fell into poverty that required her to work in London’s dehumanizing workhouses. She developed an alcohol dependency and was frequently unhoused, until she was murdered on the streets of Whitechapel.

Annie Chapman was the well-educated daughter of an up-and-coming military officer, George Smith. Her family struggled with the deaths of her siblings from scarlet fever and tuberculosis and her father’s death by suicide. It may have been these traumas that drove Annie to develop an alcohol dependency. She married a gentleman’s coachman, John Chapman, who provided her with a comfortable lower-middle-class life. However, despite her sisters and mother being committed to the temperance movement, Annie’s drinking habits worsened. Eventually, she left her husband and ended up in Whitechapel.

A domestic servant in Sweden, Elisabeth got pregnant by an unknown man, likely her employer or one of their relatives. She likely caught syphilis from this lover. Under Swedish law, as an unmarried mother, she was considered equivalent to a sex worker. Seizing on an opportunity for a new life, she migrated to London where she married a carpenter, William Stride. After his attempts to open a coffeehouse failed, their marriage fell apart and Elisabeth developed an alcohol dependency and became ill from the effects of the late stages of syphilis.

Kate Eddowes married and had children with Thomas Conway, a wandering peddler selling chapbooks and songs. The family moved to London, where they experienced extreme poverty. Thomas became abusive toward Kate, who also developed an alcohol dependency. Estranged from her husband, she too ended up frequently living in unhoused circumstances in Whitechapel.

Finally, Jack the Ripper’s last victim, Mary Kelly, had a mysterious past that has never been verified with evidence, but she may have had a middle-class education. She was a sex worker who worked in the wealthier West End of London. After she was nearly captured and sex trafficked, she was forced to leave the West End. She stayed in a lodging house in Whitechapel with her boyfriend, Joseph Barnett. Joseph eventually left her due to disagreements over Mary continuing to work as a sex worker and having unhoused women stay in her lodgings to protect them from Jack the Ripper. Mary herself would become the only victim of Jack the Ripper to be murdered in her own home.