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

by Hallie Rubenhold

It is the story of Queen Victoria and a summer of celebrations for her Golden Jubilee.

Although schooling would not become compulsory until 1876, more prosperous working-class parents often sent their boys and sometimes their girls to local charity schools or even to schools requiring a fee.

This was especially true among the families associated with the printing trade, where literacy was not only highly valued but considered essential. Some employers, such as Spottiswoode

During this period, when it was conventional to teach reading but not writing to working-class girls, Polly mastered both skills.

Parents, children, siblings, and members of the extended family dressed, washed, engaged in sex, and, if no “adjacent conveniences” were available, defecated in full view of one another.

Tenants might expect damp interiors, soot-blackened ceilings with peeling plaster, rotting floorboards, and broken or ill-fitting windows with gaps that allowed in the rain and wind. Blocked chimneys blew smoke back into the rooms and contributed to a host of respiratory illnesses.

Unsurprisingly, deadly outbreaks of cholera, typhus, and what medical inspectors described broadly as “fever” were rife, especially in the warmer months.

Little about the pathology of tuberculosis would be understood until the end of the nineteenth century. The disease, spread via airborne particles over a period of regular exposure, remained one of the Victorian era’s greatest killers, especially within family groups. Women, who assumed the burden of nursing their ailing relations and neighbors, often unwittingly introduced the infection into their own household.

While separation from a husband was not uncommon among the working class, it spelled the end of a woman’s status as a respectable member of that class.

In reality, inmates frequently stepped from life in the workhouse directly into life on the streets—begging, prostituting themselves, or stealing in order to earn enough to pay for food and a night’s lodgings. Many others ended up sleeping rough.

committed the murder; the second, which later gained more traction, posited a lone “prostitute killer.” Whichever scenario a person might favor, everyone was certain, without so much as a single shred of actual evidence to reinforce their convictions, that Polly Nichols was a prostitute. These assumptions subsequently had a hand in crafting the direction of the entire investigation, the coroner’s inquest, and the way that the story was reported in the newspapers, even though virtually everything in the testimonies of the three witnesses who knew Polly most intimately—Ellen Holland, Edward Walker, and William Nichols—runs counter to the preconception that she was engaged in prostitution.

whether her behavior warranted her fate.

Like Ellen Holland, whose name the journalists could not even bother to confirm or record correctly, Polly was just another impoverished, aging, worthless female resident of a Whitechapel lodging house.

In the late nineteenth century, Notting Hill, just across Hyde Park and to the west, became notorious for its shabby working-class housing and deprivation.

IN THE NINETEENTH century no household could operate efficiently without female labor, yet bringing unknown young women into a home was a risky business.

At the end of March, when the wind was still sharp with ice, Elisabeth was ordered to appear at the first of what would become regular examinations of her genitalia by a surgeon at the police inspection house.

By the time Elisabeth was placed on the police roll, her syphilis had already entered its secondary phase. The first presentation of the disease would have occurred roughly ten to ninety days after exposure and included the appearance of a telltale chancre, or painless sore on the genitals, which would subside within three to six weeks. After this, Elisabeth would have begun to experience flu-like symptoms; a fever, swollen glands, a sore throat, and then the eruption of a rash on her back, hands, and soles of her feet. In this stage, victims also suffer from wart-like growths and lesions on the genitals. This secondary phase may last for no more than several months or may continue to plague the sufferer for well over a year.

In 1855, the Kurhuset housed 133 women in its syphilis ward, many of whom shared beds due to overcrowding.

The first, and more traditional, involved the ingestion of mercury as well as the topical application of this liquid metal to chancres and lesions.

cannot be overestimated. To have been publicly denounced as a whore, to have suffered the indignity of police examinations, to have discovered that she carried a potentially deadly and disfiguring disease, to have been incarcerated like a prisoner and subjected to excruciating medical procedures, to have suffered a miscarriage in a hostile environment and then to have been released onto the street with no relations

Once a woman appeared on the police register, she could not procure respectable work.