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

by Hallie Rubenhold

but into the stony embrace of Lambeth

Victorian society conflated the broken woman with the fallen woman.

Margaret Llewelyn Davies called ‘a life of excessive childbearing’. Its tolls on the physical as well as the emotional and material well-being of women like Catherine were enormous. In large families like the Eddoweses’, where the addition of another mouth became almost an annual occurrence, resources grew increasingly limited.

The intention of the Dowgate School and others like it was to create a better sort of working-class person: one who valued themselves and the principles of Christianity and who would go forth into the labouring force dignified, clean, thoughtful and obedient. When a student approached the age of fourteen and completed their schooling, Dowgate strove to place them in a respectable industry. Boys were offered placements with architects and engineers, or as clerks in banks and businesses, while girls were prepared for roles in domestic service. Successful pupils who persevered at their new trade and were commended by their masters or mistresses became eligible to receive prizes from the school, amounting to as much as 5 pounds, and Dowgate’s minute books are filled with such stories. Ultimately, one of Dowgate’s objectives seems to have been to separate the child as much as possible from the demeaning circumstances of his or her daily life, where they were viewed simply as another pair of hands, rather than as a scholar. The demands of a full day of schooling seven days a week would have meant that children would have rarely seen their families but for dinner and bed, and would have been at least partially removed from exposure to vices present in their home. Any parent who put their child forward for such an opportunity would have recognized that the Dowgate School offered a stepladder out of the cycle of poverty.

Simikar to balmoral indusrial school

The Great Famine that devastated the Irish countryside from 1845 to 1852 fell hardest upon County Mayo. By 1851, nearly 30 per cent of the population of the region had died or emigrated. Conway was no exception. At the time he enlisted in 1857, it appears he had already moved across the Irish Sea to Yorkshire where he had been working as a casual labourer near Beverley. Upon his discharge on 14 October 1861, he claimed his pension, paid a visit to relations in Kilkerry and returned to England, this time to Newcastle, where he stood a better chance of making a living.

Annie, who was then thirteen, and Thomas, at the age of eight, were dispatched to the Industrial School in Sutton.

the government made provisions in 1857 for the expansion of what were called Industrial Schools, which strove to remove young paupers not only from the corrupting influence of the workhouse but also from the unwholesome environment of urban centres, and provide them with a practical education. This amounted to occupational training as well as formal schooling, to provide them with the means of earning a respectable income. Boys were taught trades such as shoemaking, tailoring, carpentry and music; girls were educated in the domestic arts, such as needlework and knitting, in order to prepare them for lives in service.

The Ratcliff Highway was as much a neighbourhood as it was a road, bearing its own identity and an economy driven largely by the steady influx of ships and sailors who stalked its streets in search of drink and sex. At the end of the century it still retained the reputation for violence it had acquired in 1811 when seven people were murdered in their beds in one of England’s first serial killings.