30: The Five

A book by Hallie Rubenhold

Back in 2013, Jon Ronson, the writer, documentary maker, and adventurer with extremists, opened the seventh season of his Radio 4 series Jon Ronson On with a programme about confirmation bias. I happened to hear it, and it was riveting. (You can listen to it here. It has much to recommend it, including this line: “I remember a few years ago I went to a UFO convention with Robbie Williams.”) As defined by Ronson himself in the programme, confirmation bias is “the way we tend to look for and find evidence that confirms our pre-existing beliefs, and how we ignore evidence that disproves our beliefs”. It’s an incredibly powerful phenomenon that affects us all. It’s why Ronson himself briefly became convinced that every time he looked at a clock it read: 11:11. It’s why football fans across the world will trot out the cliche that “2-0 up is a dangerous scoreline” despite all the evidence to the contrary:

Perhaps more seriously, it's why huge swathes of people are convinced climate change isn’t real.

Social media thrives on confirmation bias by showing users only information they are likely to agree with.

Hallie Rubenhold, in her meticulously-researched and terrifically readable 2019 book The Five, outlines a textbook case of confirmation bias in relation to the canonical five victims of Jack the Ripper: Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly. According to no lesser source than the Encyclopaedia Britannica, these five women were “all prostitutes [murdered by Jack the Ripper] in or near the Whitechapel district of London’s East End, between August and November 1888”. The fact that all five victims were prostitutes is as indisputable a fact as the date and location of their murders. Only, it isn’t. Or it shouldn’t be. And Rubenhold is disputing it, with evidence. The idea that they were all prostitutes, she says, has proliferated over the last 130 years because, at the time, “the coroner’s inquests demonstrated that all of the women were murdered in reclining positions and there was no sign of struggle, [and] rather than reach the conclusion that Jack the Ripper killed women whilst they slept, the police were committed to the theory that the women were prostitutes and the papers, eager to make money, ran with this story”. Confirmation bias at its best. Or worst.

By insisting that all five women were prostitutes, the Victorian society in which they lived were able to write off their “disgusting, impoverished, drunken lives”. What did it matter if a few prostitutes had been killed? Much more interesting was the uncatchable mystery-man, the legendary genius that was the Ripper himself. And that remains to this day, when Whitechapel is a place of pilgrimage for Ripperologists. The Jack the Ripper Museum offers visitors the chance to “step back in time to the London of 1888, the greatest city in the world, where the greatest unsolved crimes of all time took place”. (This is not an implicit criticism of the Ripper Museum, by the way. I’ve never been and it seems to me it’s merely responding to a demand.)

In The Five, Jack is almost entirely absent. Instead, the lives of Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine, and Mary Jane are impressively, and painstakingly, recaptured by Rubenhold. What emerges is a picture of five women who became victims of the horrific Victorian system they were born into. One of workhouse casual wards, filthy lodging houses, "broken pavements, dim gaslights, slicks of sewage, stagnant pools of disease-breeding water, and rubbish-filled roadways". Rather than being linked by the fact they all sold sex—which Rubenhold disproves—Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine, and Mary Jane were bound by a shared misery. Despite flashes of happiness, these were not women who had—or, more accurately, were allowed to have—anything other than desperate lives. And then they were murdered by a maniac. "All of the Ripper's victims had their throats cut. Four of the five were then eviscerated." Alcohol played a devastating role in the lives of all five, as did the fact that they were women, which meant that “before they had even spoken their first words they were regarded as less important than their brothers”.

The Five is not a jolly read. But it is a necessary one.