Hallie Rubenhold’s hard-edged, heartbreaking biographies ... [resurrect] these women’s complicated lives through diligent research in public records, Rubenhold aims to restore them to history as full human beings. Equally important, she places them in context within the beleaguered Victorian working class, struggling to survive in the brutal society forged by the Industrial Revolution ... Rubenhold does not pretend her subjects were admirable characters, but she makes a compelling case that 'the cards were stacked against [them] from birth' ... Her tone is slightly overheated ... But she has a point about the legions of books that speculate endlessly about Jack the Ripper’s identity while displaying scant interest in the five human beings he viciously dispatched. Her riveting work, both compassionate group portrait and stinging social history, finally gives them their due.
Rubenhold resists rehashing the sensationalist details of the slayings and instead concentrates on these so-called 'canonical five' ... A social historian and a historical novelist, Rubenhold is a painstaking researcher and a lucid wordsmith. Without lionizing or sentimentalizing her subjects, she writes of these women with clarity and compassion, pointing out that much of what we think we know comes wrapped in the condescension of officials who were 'male, authoritarian, and middle-class' ... Rubenhold’s The Five eloquently makes the case that while we will likely never know the identity of Jack the Ripper himself, we can and should understand and respect the identities of the individuals whose lives he took.
...vividly written, carefully researched ... All the stories in the book are steeped in tragic detail ... This book is a poignant but absorbing exploration of the reality of working women’s lives in the late 19th century—and how perilously easy it was for married women with children to find themselves reduced to seeking shelter in the dank courts and alleyways around Spitalfields, where the Ripper operated. It is a book that brings a whole new meaning to the phrase 'Victorian values.'
These were not the kinds of lives that leave an extensive record, yet Rubenhold is able to weave a vivid narrative of Victorian working-class life from small factual scraps that she unearthed in police records, government reports and church registers ... The specter of illicit sex still haunts the Ripper story, an unkillable ghost that makes the crimes seem more titillating and their victims more expendable. Rubenhold’s account, however, makes a compelling case that the real monster shadowing these women’s lives was alcoholism ... Though we know how these women’s stories play out, Rubenhold achieves much here by making us feel genuine sadness and anger at their loss.
The Five is...an angry and important work of historical detection, calling time on the misogyny that has fed the Ripper myth ... The Five is not simply about the women who were murdered in Whitechapel in the autumn of 1888: it is for them. This is a powerful and a shaming book, but most shameful of all is that it took 130 years to write.
... devastatingly scrupulous ... Critics often describe books as 'long overdue', but few histories have arrived as late in the day as this one: you could fill a library with titles, serious and spurious, dedicated to so-called Ripperology, yet not one of them would cover this territory. Turning resolutely away from the theories, the gore and the prurience, Rubenhold’s achievement is two-fold. The Five is an immaculate work of social history, her accounts of Victorian workhouses, slums and brothels as vivid as any I’ve ever read. But it’s also a feminist act. Her simple care and exactitude in the matter of these women – her dogged refusal to accept that they were “only prostitutes” – restores their dignity and humanity, and in doing so exposes in the most powerful way the misogyny that has for so long been the repugnant, ever-whirring engine of the Ripper myth ... Rubenhold dedicates her book to the five, and this seems right, for she has done them proud.
Hallie Rubenhold’s book about the 'canonical' victims of Jack the Ripper is, at one level, a victim impact statement ... What she has to say on that topic is as horrifying as the Ripper’s crimes ... Rubenhold is an engaging writer though, as she readily admits, these women’s lives were not well documented before they achieved their notoriety, and the reports that followed their murders are not reliable. Then, too, there is a certain grim monotony as we follow the five in their doleful circuit from poor house to flop house to the streets where they would be killed. Still, Rubenhold does a commendable job in bringing these women on stage and through their stories illuminating the appalling reality behind the veneer of Victorian complacency.
If the Dickensian emphasis is a touch overdone, the point remains ... Allowing that the documentary record is incomplete—the case files on three of the five murders have gone missing—Rubenhold urges us to see the victims...not as the 'fallen women' of the received record. A lively if morbid exercise in Victorian social history essential to students of Ripperiana.
