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Chargement... The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper (original 2019; édition 2020)par Hallie Rubenhold (Auteur)
Information sur l'oeuvreThe Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper par Hallie Rubenhold (2019)
Chargement...
Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. Everyone knows the overall story of Jack the Ripper, but what about the women he murdered? Rubenhold does an amazing job of going into extreme detail to each of their lives, right down to what they were carrying the nights of their murders. She breaks down the myths that have followed the women through the years. It's a non-fiction book told with the intensity of a thriller, and I could not put it down. The Five was a hard book to get through. I don't find reading non-fiction easy. Few non-fiction titles hold my interest if it's a physical book I'm reading, and I have learned that the best way to handle non-fiction is on audiobooks. For some reason I bought a paper copy of this book, maybe it wasn't available on the Scribd app? - and that was my undoing. The book tells the story of the five canonical victims of Jack the Ripper. There may have been other victims, but these five - Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine, and Mary - are the ones whom most historians accept were definitive victims of the Ripper. The book tells the story of their lives. I will easily admit that the record-searching and novel ways of finding out facts about their lives was nothing short of breathtaking. For most of the women Rubenhold can give meticulous details about their clothing, their lives, where they lived, why they turned to prostitution. As an act of research, it is excellent. As an act of entertaining and informing her readers, she falls down in my opinion. One thing that evoked the strongest of pity from me is an appendix to the book, which lists exactly what each woman owned at the time of their murders. These are some of the saddest lists I've ever seen. Polly owned only the clothes she stood up in. That's all. The other women owned little more. Feeling poor because I couldn't afford portabella mushrooms today (they were $13.00 EACH), is a far cry from the utter poverty of Victorian London. If I ever get a time machine, that is not an era to which I will venture. Two stars for research well done; three missing because it took me two weeks to read a 330 page book because it was so dull. This book focuses on the lives of the five accepted or 'canonical' victims of the murderer known as Jack the Ripper. Through the documentary evidence that does exist - birth, marriage and death certificates, census returns and in one case, a letter from a sister of one victim published in a newspaper - the author attempts to build a picture of the life of each woman and the individual tragedies that led to four of them being homeless. Drink played a big part in the social descent of most of them from relatively prosperous lifestyles and, despite the censorious and titillating attitude of the newspapers at the time, only one was a prostitute. Ironically, she had had a comfortable existence in the West End until being forced to lie low in Whitechapel through no fault of her own. There is a lot of interesting information on the lives of the poor in Victorian Britain and the double disadvantage of being female as well as poor. Some of the narrative is speculative but the author is honest where that is the case. The suggestion that the target victims were attacked while sleeping was a novel one to me and made sense. I found it an absorbing read and would award it 4 stars.
These were not the kinds of lives that leave an extensive record, yet Rubenhold is able to weave a vivid narrative of Victorian working-class life from small factual scraps that she unearthed in police records, government reports and church registers ...The specter of illicit sex still haunts the Ripper story, an unkillable ghost that makes the crimes seem more titillating and their victims more expendable. Rubenhold’s account, however, makes a compelling case that the real monster shadowing these women’s lives was alcoholism ... Though we know how these women’s stories play out, Rubenhold achieves much here by making us feel genuine sadness and anger at their loss. This book is a poignant but absorbing exploration of the reality of working women’s lives in the late 19th century—and how perilously easy it was for married women with children to find themselves reduced to seeking shelter in the dank courts and alleyways around Spitalfields, where the Ripper operated. It is a book that brings a whole new meaning to the phrase 'Victorian values.' If the Dickensian emphasis is a touch overdone, the point remains ... Allowing that the documentary record is incomplete—the case files on three of the five murders have gone missing—Rubenhold urges us to see the victims...not as the 'fallen women' of the received record. A lively if morbid exercise in Victorian social history essential to students of Ripperiana. Hallie Rubenhold’s book about the 'canonical' victims of Jack the Ripper is, at one level, a victim impact statement ... What she has to say on that topic is as horrifying as the Ripper’s crimes ... Rubenhold is an engaging writer though, as she readily admits, these women’s lives were not well documented before they achieved their notoriety, and the reports that followed their murders are not reliable. Then, too, there is a certain grim monotony as we follow the five in their doleful circuit from poor house to flop house to the streets where they would be killed. Still, Rubenhold does a commendable job in bringing these women on stage and through their stories illuminating the appalling reality behind the veneer of Victorian complacency. Prix et récompensesListes notables
Five devastating human stories and a dark and moving portrait of Victorian London-the untold lives of the women killed by Jack the Ripper. Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine, and Mary-Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. They came from Fleet Street, Knightsbridge, Wolverhampton, Sweden, and Wales. They wrote ballads, ran coffee houses, lived on country estates; they breathed ink-dust from printing presses and escaped people-traffickers. What they had in common was the year of their murders: 1888. The person responsible was never identified, but the character created by the press to fill that gap has become far more famous than any of these five women. For more than a century, newspapers have been keen to tell us that "the Ripper" preyed on prostitutes. Not only is this untrue, as historian Hallie Rubenhold has discovered, but it has prevented the real stories of these fascinating women from being told. Now, in this devastating narrative of five lives, Rubenhold finally sets the record straight, revealing a world not just of Dickens and Queen Victoria, but of poverty, homelessness, and rampant misogyny. They died because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time-but their greatest misfortune was to be born a woman. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)362.88Social sciences Social problems and services; associations Social problems of & services to groups of people Problems of and services to other groups People affected by criminal actsClassification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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In fact, the book lives up to the promise of its cover/title and gives short shrift to Jack the Ripper, which is a nice change. Each section follows one of these five women from her birth to her murder (the latter covered in very brief detail), as best/where possible with records of the time, and along the way does its best to connect the reader with the women, through their hardships, joys, personalities, and choices.
It's excellently done, fascinating, at times horrifying, and always keeps the women centric in their own stories. Speculation is presented where helpful, but only under the heading of speculation - whether it is of reasons one of the women might have made a particular choice, or to posit potential happenings to fill in a blank in her life as history records it. ( )