Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
We are all guilty of playing the game one sadistic and evil man has managed to trick us into partaking, perhaps willingly as some have searched for answers to a 19th Century riddle, maybe in naïve conversation when we have been drawn into the media spotlight which routinely returns to the streets of Whitechapel, the chilling music reaching our ears, the sensationalist need for gossip but presented as a preamble into lively, even intellectual, discussion. In the shadow of Jack the Ripper we have all at some point ventured, and by doing so, we have created a smokescreen in which entertainment and investigation have become one and the same.
It may be understandable to have been caught up in this 140 year old mystery, the chance through speculation or dedication to unearth the anonymous killer, the butcher, the spectre of the East-End to whom so much has been written, and yet further still has been portrayed on screen, in cinema, in music halls, on television, the figure still able to conjure up nightmares and investigation. Understandable maybe but what everybody has forgotten in this tale of macabre and terror, is that there is another story, and so like the way in which we present wars as heroic, in which we place great stock in the name of Empire’s old and see history as being written from the top down, what is often overlooked is the story of those affected by the events described with ghoulish glee by the media, by those with a nest to feather and whose word is taken as gospel.
Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed By Jack The Ripper is an examination into our preconceived ideas, that we allowed ourselves, no matter how well-meaning at times, to being part of the game, and with shame dismissing the five canonical victims of the murderer as nothing more than the lurid headline, the resulting piece of the puzzle in which the facts of their lives are only worth the end in which they met at the hand of a killer and of a Victorian society which disregarded them with the same animosity as they cherished in their murderer.
Five women, amongst thousands, millions, who have seen their lives come to a bloody end at the hand of a man, of patriarchy and in which their voice has been lost, the evidence of their lives somehow relegated to sensationalism, of mattering less than the opinion of a society still bound up in seeing the world through the eyes of a system that keeps the downtrodden, the forgotten, the overlooked and the ignored in their place, as a footnote, the sentence in the paragraph which fills the column inches and the gossip mongers and the hierarchy bellies.
Ms. Rubenhold’s investigation, the pursuit of righting a wrong perpetuated by media over 140 years deserves full recognition in bringing a change in attitude to those who will take the time to read the stories, the lives, of Catherine Eddowes, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Mary Ann Nichols and Mary Jane Kelly.
The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed By Jack The Ripper is not a discussion on who is the person behind the murders but a reminder that these women were real human beings, their downfall which was amplified by alcohol, neglect, of unfortunate circumstances, and once and for all exploding the myth that these women were all prostitutes, an unkindly tag administered by an era that was as chilling in its hypocrisy as today’s is in its callousness to anyone caught in a cycle of debt and struggling to survive.
A magnificent investigation, a view that is sincere and compelling; it won’t unfortunately change the way many look at the reign of terror in the East End in 1888, there is too much mis-identity wrapped up in the myth but if it opens the mind to ask further questions, to see beyond the headline and the fabrication, then The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed By Jack The Ripper should be considered a work of truth laid bare.
Ian D. Hall