The voices of the victims

Before she was the subject of true-crime mythologising, Catherine Eddowes made her living from it, selling ballads based on real-life murders to avid Victorian audiences. The historian Hallie Rubenhold suggests that Eddowes may have written them too; unusually for a working-class woman, she was literate. Still, the possible example of her work that Rubenhold reproduces in The Five shows no sign that female authorship led to incipient feminist consciousness. Typically for the 19th century (and still often seen in reporting today), Verses on the Awful Execution of Charles Christopher Robinson, for the Murder of his Sweetheart, Harriet Segar focuses attention on the femicidal man, investing sympathy in him rather than the woman he killed.

Eddowes’s own murderer is known only as Jack the Ripper, but from the time of his murders he was treated as a mix of titillating bogeyman and street-cleansing folk hero. The only thing anyone knows about Eddowes is that she was a prostitute, and even that’s not true. By Victorian middle-class standards, she was a fallen woman, living unmarried with one man and taking up with another after that relationship failed; but she did not sell sex. In fact, Rubenhold points out, Elizabeth Stride and Mary Jane Kelly were the only two of the five definitely known to be involved in prostitution, and it’s doubtful whether Elizabeth was even killed by the Ripper.

Ripperology is a feverishly productive industry, but a woeful field of study. For all the thousands of books, articles and documentaries made about the Victorian serial killer, the case is no closer to being cracked now than it ever was. Our cultural fixation on the Ripper has done little more than secure the anonymous murderer’s reputation as, in the words of Deborah Cameron and Elizabeth Frazer (authors of The Lust to Kill), ‘the most enduring sex beast myth’.