Five

I got this book for my birthday:


Life's greatest pleasures must include an unexpectedly awesome book (or movie), and this one fits that bill. I have no particular interest in Jack the Ripper, but this book is hugely interesting and enjoyable. It's not actually about Jack the Ripper at all - the crimes are barely mentioned. It is really about what it was like to live in 1880's London. tl,dr: if you were poor - pretty awful! If you were a poor woman - even worse.

I had a vague idea that at one point London was pretty awful, but I would have said that was much earlier than 1880 (well, it probably was also, but I would vaguely have thought that being poor in 1880 was somewhat tolerable). My grandmother was almost alive in 1880!

I also would have said that JtR had dozens of victims. Actually, "The Five" are the only ones that they are fairly certain were JtR's; there are six others that might be, but nobody knows for sure, because he was never caught. He was called "The Ripper" because he hugely mangled the bodies of his victims (not just their throats) in ways best not gotten into (and this book does not, at all).

The author is clearly offended that the five victims were assumed to be prostitutes - it seems to be the overarching purpose of the book to prove otherwise. There is no evidence that they were and she claims it was a convenient assumption by the police and media of the time. Wikipedia still repeats this assumption.

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