Can you name all five victims of Jack the Ripper? If you can’t then you are not alone. Ever since Mary Ann ‘Polly’ Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elisabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly were murdered in cold blood over 130 years ago, the identity of their killer has continued to fascinate the world, his legacy has been glamorised in books, songs, films and television, while his victims have been forgotten. We spoke to historian Hallie Rubenhold about her latest book The Five and how she has upended the Jack the Ripper narrative, restoring his victims to their rightful place in their own stories.
What inspired you to write The Five? Have you always had an interest in these women or did you come across something that made you want to tell their stories?
I was looking for another subject to write a non-fiction book about and I thought back to my first non-fiction book called The Covent Garden Ladies, which was about Harris’s List Of Covent Garden Ladies, a bestselling annual guidebook of prostitutes in the 18th century. It gave short biographies of these women’s lives and their sexual specialities, but also descriptions of who they were and where they came from, and I wrote about their lives. I wanted to do this for the 19th century and find some hidden lives of Victorian women, poor women, women who’ve been written out of history, and tell their stories. I was looking, much like with Covent Garden Ladies, for sex workers and I thought, who were the best-known sex workers of the 19th century and in London? Well, that’ll be the victims of Jack the Ripper. I soon realised that there had been no full-length book written about these five women looking at their lives collectively. Probably the five most famous murder victims and most people wouldn’t know their names. I was so shocked by this I thought I absolutely had to write this story. It’s a gross injustice that everybody knows who Jack the Ripper is but nobody knows anything about the women he killed.