The Five

I’m in no way a ‘Ripperologist’ but I have always been interested in Jack the Ripper: the ghastly nature of the crimes themselves, the fact that he was never caught, and the mass of theories about who he was. But I’ve never given much thought to his five victims because the focus of all the books and films has never been on them.

Until now.

The Five is an account of the lives of the five women murdered. It devotes not one word to the murders themselves, nor to any of the (wild) theories about why they were murdered.

What it does instead is follow them from birth to death and, in the process, paint a picture of what it was to be a poor, often homeless woman eking out a living from day to day on the streets of Victorian London. It’s a grim, gripping read that describes an almost merciless society, one in which poverty was punished rather than helped, where alcohol was often the only ray of light in a bleak existence, and where the murderer’s victims, once discovered, were dismissed as ‘just prostitutes’. (Which three of them most definitely were not.)

Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly. The Five turns them all from ‘victims’ into living, breathing ‘individuals’ with mothers and fathers, and husbands and children, and occupations. It gives them back their lives.