The Five

Summary: This text focuses on what is known about the lives of the five canonical victims of Jack the Ripper, from before their birth to the time of their murders. The book challenges the notion that Jack the Ripper was a “prostitute killer”; in fact, only two of them can be said with any degree of certainty to have ever engaged in prostitution. Rubenhold’s writing humanizes these victims while also revealing the conditions under which working-class women in 19th-century England lived.