by Bryan & Heather
Welcome back to another Concerning History book club, where we recreate the experience of the engaging book discussions we’ve had throughout the years in classes and with each other! This week, Bryan and Heather discuss Hallie Rubenhold’s fascinating treatment of five lives in Victorian London: five women whose lives would be bound together for posterity by the nature of their endings.
BC: As I perused the lists of Wolfson History Prize winners and nominees in late Fall 2025—looking for potential new reading material and gift ideas, of course—I was brought up short by a different sort of title than any I’d been bookmarking. Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper seemed to promise a mix of social history and the original 1888 “true crime” case. While neither of those areas are a particular interest of mine, I knew they would certainly appeal to Heather. Christmas morning thus saw her unwrap our new copy of The Five, and soon after we dove into our next tandem-reading book.
HC: To put it simply, this book is a fantastic social microhistory explored through the lives of Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elisabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly. Rubenhold builds something completely distinct from and, indeed, critical of traditional true crime. In carefully deciphering the life and circumstances of each woman in her own right, Rubenhold exposes the need for radical revision of the historical record around these cases.
The commonly accepted Ripper victimology characterizes the women as lowly streetwalkers laid yet lower by the blade of a merciless, homicidal sadist. The only problem? It gets almost everything wrong about the victims. Despite 150 years of rumors, there is no historical evidence of sex work for three of the five Ripper victims. The Victorian press, hungry for a tidy, salacious morality tale, conjured up something kaleidoscopic in its Ripper coverage: an ever-shifting, seldom-truthful array of identities for both the Ripper and the women whose lives he stole. The actual through line of the Ripper victimology, outdoor sleeping necessitated by abject poverty, is far less titillating than what the mythology would have you believe.
And Rubenhold writes about these women with such heartbreaking compassion and empathy. Because of the way she vividly brings them to life through 360 degrees of historical analysis, I found myself spellbound almost enough to forget how their stories ultimately, inevitably would be ended. And because the book is so multifaceted, I feel like anyone can read it and come out enriched by it, no matter what their level of historical understanding is.
BC: I couldn’t agree more. The Five is one of the best, most approachable microhistories I’ve read in recent memory, if not ever. That would be the case even if Rubenhold had examined only one of these women at this level of detail, but here she does it with five, and her work is only the better for it. As chance would have it, these women lived lives that, while broadly similar in some aspects stemming from their gender, class, and ultimate poverty before their untimely ends, were strikingly unique. This allows Rubenhold to cover so much more ground than she might otherwise in a more “typical” microhistory. She conducts readers through a variety of trades, neighborhoods, and lifestyles with remarkably little repetition or noticeable abbreviation.
What’s more, the sourcework that makes all these narratives possible is truly outstanding. To be a historical detective on this level, tracking down women of a social strata that written records tend to remember the least, not to mention across a wide geographical area and multiple different aliases, is truly award worthy and must have consumed massive amounts of time. Indeed, I would have loved it if Rubenhold had been more explicit about exactly how she found the information she did and the reasoning behind some of her hypotheses. Too many public-facing works of history needlessly dilute their supporting historical methodology when in reality a more frank, thorough discussion of the history writing process not only would be intelligible to most readers but make arguments more persuasive and buttress respect for the profession as a whole.
HC: Ironically—though not unexpectedly, since Rubenhold warns of it in her introduction—the only thing missing from the book is an overview of what information exists about these women’s murders and the killer behind them. It almost feels like Rubenhold’s got your back on every other detail of Victorian London except those details. And I don’t think she’d need to sacrifice her victim-forward approach to do it, either! It could be as simple as adding a brief summary of the murder investigations to the introduction. Even better, she could add a timeline to the front matter. One that encompasses key dates in the lives and deaths of all five victims would also go a long way toward restoring some interconnectivity and historical context between the women.
In its current form, the book leaves the reader with an uncanny There’s a Monster at the End of This Book–esque tension that Rubenhold never resolves. There’s still no consensus among historians about the true identity of the killer behind these five gruesome homicides, but if Rubenhold had briefly touched on a few key case details for her readers, she could help ground her interwoven narratives for us.
BC: Which is a shame, because while I understand Rubenhold’s motive, and she clearly expressed her intended scope in her introduction, it does mean that The Five was robbed of the full weight of its potential impact on our historical analysis. If, as she so persuasively demonstrates, Jack the Ripper was not a killer of prostitutes but a killer of homeless women “sleeping rough” outdoors, how does that impact the historiography and our understanding of the case? Going further, is it possible that not all of these five “canonical” victims were actually killed by the same person? Mary Jane Kelly, the final victim, was not killed outdoors but in her bed, inside her dingy rented room that opened onto an alley (and had a broken window pane at the time through which anyone could unlock the door)? Conversely, might the circumstances surrounding Mary Jane’s death narrow the circle of possible suspects to those who would have known not only the location of her room, but that her window was broken? None of these questions are ever mentioned, let alone discussed, nor are any of the implications for the murderer himself touched upon.
These omissions also lead to an uncharacteristic and unfortunate gap in reasoning. Rubenhold establishes that only one of the five was a sex worker at the time of her death, and that popular memory of them all as prostitutes is due to Victorian culture of the time assuming any homeless woman was automatically a sex worker, but then she lets these two opposed principles stand on their own without pursuing the accompanying logic into how the murderer might have conceived of his actions. In other words, he may not have factually been a killer of prostitutes, but he may very well have considered himself so. All this lack of follow-through left me feeling like The Five was just short of complete and analytically did not rise to the levels that so many of its other aspects did.
HC: Opportunities for further inquiry aside, there’s no denying that The Five takes a powerful new approach to one of the most infamous casefiles in true crime history. Today, the genre is staggeringly popular. The demographics of those engaging with its content are evolving and noteworthy: with an audience that’s overwhelmingly female, usually without a college degree, and typically on the younger side of middle age, true crime’s readers and viewers have a lot in common with the average victim of the homicides it explores. And it’s an audience that’s increasingly calling for a more victim-first, ethical approach to the genre. With The Five, Rubenhold answers that call loud and clear, encouraging her readers to take those values with us after we turn the last page. Doing so feels like a kind of justice, albeit a century and a half in the making.