The Five

Much has been written about the notorious Whitechapel murderer known as Jack the Ripper, from the Penny Dreadfuls of that time, to various books down through the years positing theories as to his identity. For almost 140 years, the world has been fascinated by Jack the Ripper, how he evaded capture, and who he might be.

But what of his victims? In the shadow of the Ripper's notoriety, these women were barely given a second thought. The world forgot that they were someone's daughter, sister, wife, mother. No one told their story. That all changed thanks to Hallie Rubenhold.

The Five is, as it's cover states, the untold story of the five victims of Jack the Ripper. It's not an easy read, but theirs were not easy lives, living as they did in poverty, in the slums of the Eastend of London.

The Five is a book that was crying out to be written, and it is a book that should be read, just as all those books about Jack have been read. It should be read so that we may understand something of the lives of these women that time forgot. Their names were:

Polly Nichols

Annie Chapman

Elizabeth Stride

Catherine Eddowes

Mary Jane Kelly

They deserve to be remembered.

Summary: This text focuses on what is known about the lives of the five canonical victims of Jack the Ripper, from before their birth to the time of their murders. The book challenges the notion that Jack the Ripper was a “prostitute killer”; in fact, only two of them can be said with any degree of certainty to have ever engaged in prostitution. Rubenhold’s writing humanizes these victims while also revealing the conditions under which working-class women in 19th-century England lived.