Dan Snow's History Hit - Jack the Ripper Retold

Episode Date: October 10, 2021

In 1888 a series of brutal killings took place in Whitechapel, London which might be the most famous unsolved murders of all time. The case and the killer attracted a worldwide media frenzy like never before and the perpetrator nicknamed Jack the Ripper has gone down in infamy. But an obsession to identify the killer both then and now has meant that the victims of these terrible crimes have been largely forgotten. Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly all met their end at the hands of this monstrous killer and their lives deserve to be remembered.Joining Dan to try and help put the victims back at the centre of this case is Hallie Rubenhold host of the new podcast Bad Women: Ripper Retold. Hallie has worked to explore in-depth the lives of the Ripper's victims and the issues that contributed to their deaths, such as homelessness, addiction, domestic violence, and prostitution.

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Some things just take too long. A meeting that could have been an email, someone explaining crypto, or switching mobile providers.

Except with Fizz. Switching to Fizz is quick and easy. Mobile plans start at $17 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at fizz.ca. Hi, everybody. Welcome to Dan Snow's History. You know there's an old expression that part of you dies when one of your friends succeeds or something like that.

Well, I must say, I'm blessed. That's not true for me. I love it when the gang does well. And no one deserves more success than Hallie Rubinold. She has been writing wonderful history books for years. We share a love of the 18th century and success has come to her. Monumental, best-selling, global, renowned success has come to her following her publication of her book about the victims of Jack the Ripper, The Five. The women who've been overlooked in our obsession with the kind of mythologized Victorian serial killer who may not even existed or have been one person.

Anyway, Halley has put those women squarely back in the center of the story. And in doing so, she's turned the entire industry on its head. She just released a podcast series, Bad Women, The Ripper Retold. It's available wherever you get your podcasts now. And I got to talk to her. I caught up with her. I asked about Jack the Ripper. I asked about the women who he killed in 1888

within spitting distance of the History Hit office, which is situated in what is now the hippest and most exciting part of London. Before you go and listen to Hayley's podcast, please listen to her here. You're going to love it. And then after you've done that, please go and subscribe to History Hit TV.

We've got documentaries on London. We've got documentaries on Victorian London. We've got a documentary made as modern academics and jurists recreate a trial of a man thought to be potentially Jack the Ripper. That was up in Aberdeen. We've also got Matt McLaughlin walking the streets of Whitechapel where those murders took place. So plenty of 19th century content on History Hit TV, recently nominated, although not crowned victor of best specialist channel in the uk but it's available everywhere in the world folks that's the internet for you it's amazing go to historyhit.tv get 30 days free if you sign up today but in the

meantime everyone here's hallie rubinall Hallie, good to see you. Hi, Dan. Nice to see you too. I have been missing you, but congratulations on your crazy year of winning prizes and being cited everywhere and all the excitement around your book. It's so well deserved. Oh, thank you. With that wonderful 18-month pause in the middle of everything. I was all rumbling on during that, but you were just doing everything. Hallie, let's talk about 1880s London. What was the scene? What was going on? Well, first of all, how violent was it even outside these kind of canonical Jack the Ripper so-called murders? Like just in 1880s London, how much violence of this nature was there?

Well, I think the question is how much criminality was there. How long is a piece of string really? Because a lot of this is going under the radar. It's going unrecorded. Obviously, London had a police force at that time. At the time of the Jack the Ripper murders, it was this idea of having a serial killer with a number of murders that took place in a very short period was more than they could actually handle. It really pushed their capacity. So it gives you an idea of how ill-equipped they were at that time to actually deal with a lot of this sort of violent crime. That isn't to say that there wasn't a lot of crime. And you can look at the police ledgers at the trials that were heard at that time. It's a lot of drunken disorderliness,

there's knife crime, there's all sorts of stuff, but not a vast amount of murders. I mean, certainly not like anything like that we have today. And certainly the concept of a serial killer was quite a new thing. Okay, interesting. And is that why these women's murders garnered such extraordinary attention at the time? newspapers played and the birth of really this kind of sensationalized journalism, this need to keep constructing stories and keep selling newspapers was really born around this time. First of all, we also can't forget that these were incredibly gruesome. The wounds that women received, they had their throats cut. In most of the cases, they were eviscerated in absolutely unspeakably awful ways. They're going to be eviscerated in absolutely unspeakably awful ways.

They've wanted to be eviscerated in a good way. I don't know. I haven't found out yet. But this kind of all played together to make these exceptional. And also the fact that there was a lot in the news at that time about poverty and about the sort of living standards that people were facing and how bad poverty was. And all of this seemed to come together just at this time with the Ripper murders. It seemed to sum up everything that was happening. So the murders themselves, we're talking

autumn of 1888. And was there something different immediately? So the newspapers are looking for these stories, but was there something unusual from the normal fare the newspapers were serving up at that time? Was this unusual? To a greater or lesser extent, it was more sensational. But also what I think is so interesting about this is that this story travelled internationally in a way that we hadn't really seen before. So this story was picked up all over the world. People were reading about the Ripper murders in New York, in Australia, in France, in all parts of the world. People were curious about this because these were really heinous crimes. And because the police were unable to identify the killer, to catch somebody. It then kind of took on an even greater kind of almost supernatural element.

And then you get this, well, this almost supernatural letters. Presumably that was a very dramatic twist of the tale that, again, made for good newspaper sales. Yeah, but again, one of the things we have to be very careful about is that these letters were acknowledged to be fraudulent, even at the time. And so they just fanned the flames and they helped to give Jack the Ripper the name Jack the Ripper. So this letter that someone said, I'm Jack the Ripper and I've done this, the police never believed that was true? I think everybody thought that they were journalists having a bit of a laugh. But also you have to think in the context of all of this, the police received a lot of letters from people claiming to have been Jack the Ripper.

They received hundreds of letters. And there were also people walking into the police station, turning themselves in and saying that they were Jack the Ripper. And you could see how all of this made for just a complete environment of chaos where police were concerned and where coverage was concerned because nobody really knew what the truth was. Nobody knew what was going on. Nobody could really get on top of this, and so the killer seemed to just slip through the cracks.

There are obviously a dozen murders, and then five are believed to be committed, certainly, by the same person. I mean, is it the work of a serial killer? What was your thinking on that? Probably, to be honest. I'm now going to say what I often say at this point, which is I don't really care who Jack the Ripper was.

That's really not any of my interest at all. I didn't go into this to speculate about if it was Kosminski, if it was Montague Druitt, if it was all of these other, you know, literally hundreds of names have been put forward as a possible suspect. I don't really care because I think, A, we're never going to find out who Jack the Ripper was. B, it doesn't matter. And C, if this is about getting justice, securing justice for the people who were killed. The way we go about doing that is not by endlessly hunting for somebody who is dead, but actually commemorating the people who were killed and learning about their lives, finding out who they were and honouring them as human beings.

Right, which coming onto that, is that something that from the beginning was lacking? Were these women, although there was, as you say, columns and columns of press coverage, from the beginning, were these women almost a kind of passive, they didn't actually have their role in this? They weren't placed as centrally as they should be in this story. Yeah, absolutely. And I think this is true of murder victims today in most murder stories. Most murder stories are about the murderer and not about the murdered. And especially in this story, I think one of the things that's so difficult with this is that in some tellings,

it's like these five women died to create the legend that is Jack the Ripper. So the way in which they're talked about in some ways, it's like their lives were sacrificed so this great, terrifying figure could come into existence. And they're like stepping stones towards the real activity, which is figuring out who the murderer is. And so they've been just brushed aside and discarded. And I think by stepping back and looking at this whole case, you know, I mean, if you look at the victims, you're looking at this whole case in a completely different way. You change the perspective, you turn the telescope around. And this is what investigators do today. You would normally be doing a deep dive

into who the victims were, interviewing their family, figuring out who they related with, who they spoke to, where they worked, all of these things. And the same effort obviously wasn't put into it at the time they were murdered. And we can learn a lot about not only who they were, but if you are interested in knowing who the killer was, you can learn a lot about not only who they were, but if you are interested in knowing who the killer was, you can learn a lot about who a potential killer was by knowing who the victims are. And who were these? I mean, the victims nearly ever, even today, they're just described as prostitutes. They just killed prostitutes in Whitechapel. Your book has taught me that they were human beings and that they had long and complex and extraordinary lives like all of us do. And that dismissal of them as sex workers in the Victorian slum

is not appropriate. Yeah. Yeah. It's also because we're carrying with us Victorian prejudices. So Victorians looked at fallen women. And when I say fallen women, I mean like literally women, every woman who had sex outside of wedlock was a fallen woman, from the rape victim to the victim of incest to the woman who lived out of wedlock with one man her whole life to the woman who worked sexual knowledge outside of marriage was a fallen woman, aka a whore, aka a prostitute. And any woman who led an irregular life was assumed to be a prostitute. An irregular life meant she wasn't living under the roof of a father or a husband or a son or a brother or some male relation. And it was the case with all these women. I mean,

they drank in some cases very heavily. Annie Chapman was addicted. And Victorian society conflated all of these things. And so the broken woman and the fallen woman were the same thing. Any woman who didn't fit the mold could be called a prostitute, could be called a whore. And that's what happened. So what right have we with no actual evidence in the case of three of them? No actual, I'm not talking about spurious witness statements derived from newspaper reports. I'm talking about actual hard evidence and documents.

Without any documentation, what right do we have, well, in any of the cases, to repeat this Victorian epithet, to label them? And so what do they have in common? Or are they all very, very different women whose lives ended in this extraordinary way? Well, they are all very different women whose lives ended in this extraordinary way. I mean, that's the only thing really that ties them together. And what actually I think is so interesting is that when we think of the Victorian underclass, when we think of the underclass at all, when we think of the poor, we think about this sort of amorphous mass of people who all have

the same story and they have nothing interesting to contribute. This is completely wrong. Because what I've done with this book is you literally take five random people and you reconstruct their lives and you see how different their lives were. And you see how they ended up in poverty. And some of them didn't necessarily start that way. I mean, Annie Chapman lived for part of her life on the grounds of a country estate with her husband, who was a coach driver. Polly Nichols lived in some of the first social housing in London. These women had backgrounds. Elizabeth Stride came from Sweden.

She was a farmer's daughter. How'd she end up in London? And you realize everybody has a unique and individual story. And all of these stories intersect with some other part of history. Something else that happened. Annie Chapman's father was present at Queen Victoria's wedding. Polly Nichols was sleeping rough in Trafalgar Square

during the Trafalgar Square riots in 1887. Catherine Edo's father was a union agitator in the 1840s. So nobody's life is ahistorical. You know, all of these people are like core samples of the era in which they lived. And they're fascinating. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hip, talking Jack the Ripper, more coming up. If you love ancient history, then don't worry, we've got you covered. I'm Tristan Hughes, ancient history, then don't worry, we've got you covered. I'm Tristan Hughes, host of The Ancients podcast, the podcast for all things ancient history. Subscribe to The Ancients on HistoryHit

wherever you get your podcasts. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny. You'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman,

for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Some things just take too long. A meeting that could have been an email, someone explaining crypto, or switching mobile providers. Except with Fizz. Switching to Fizz is quick and easy.

Mobile plans start at $17 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at fizz.ca. Research-wise, the trade as a historian, how did you learn so much about their lives? How documented were they? Again, this is the thing. It's something, Dan, I think you and I have talked about before, which I feel very strongly about, which is the place of social history and the place of bottom-up history. When I did my postgraduate work at university, I was still told, this is in the 90s, that, oh, well, you know, we can't really tell the story of poor people or people who were largely illiterate because, you know, they left no records. And so we don't know what their stories were and it's not worth bothering.

And that is, I think, one of the biggest lies ever perpetrated in history because there are so many stories and actually there are so many sources. And in fact, what makes these sources even more accessible now is digitization. And digitization means you can just dig into the records. I mean, you're not always going to find answers, but quite often you'll find information, which you can then flesh out. You can look at other people's experiences, which is what I did. I may not have Catherine Edo's precise experiences of giving birth in a workhouse in Great Yarmouth in the 1860s, but I have other people's experiences of that in that same workhouse. And you can create a bigger picture.

And, you know, we have to retrieve these stories. We have to tell the stories of people who've been written out of history. History is the story of all of us. And all of these people deserve to have their voices restored to them. I'm really interested in your book, The Pastors, to talk about what options there were for women to support themselves in a misogynist and unequal society. And by the way, everyone hears me saying the word misogynist, they might kind of slightly roll their eyes. But can you explain actually how misogyny was a practical, well, reality of that late

Victorian world? Gender and class intersect here. And that's one thing that we can't discount. How poor you were and what gender you were really determined what your life choices were. It was believed at that time that women had one role in society. And that role was to get married and to produce legitimate children and to raise those children and to look after her husband. That was it. Women were the carers and they were the mothers. And if you didn't do that, you'd failed. So society, everything was stacked against women. But as we know, life doesn't always turn out that way for

people, does it? So for example, your husband may die. Your husband may walk away from you and leave you with four children. And because women's work was designed not to pay as much and because men were supposed to bring in the bread, women couldn't support themselves. They had to find other means of making an income. The professions, for example, even if you were middle class, the professions were closed to women. Women couldn't go to the bar and become barristers into the early 20th century. Middle class women were just entering things like medicine and journalism in the second half of the 19th century. But you had to have a good education and you had to be from the right social standing.

So this idea of a woman supporting herself, especially if she was poor, I mean, forget it. You had no hope in hell. And not only that, what education was available? And education wasn't mandated until the 1870s. It was patchy. And if somebody was sick at home, they pulled the girls out of school. So girls were less well-educated than boys. Girls could go into domestic service. Boys could train to be a bank clerk. So the odds were stacked against women, no matter what they did, no matter which way they

turned. Do these women each have a moment of inflection where they end up going on down this path of trying to support themselves in one of the most terrible slums on earth? Or am I thinking about that wrong? Was this not a kind of like a moment of, oh no, I've fallen away from normality and respectability? Was this just the experience of millions of women? There was no particular moment of discontinuity? This was the experience of literally millions of women, literally millions, through the 19th century, even earlier as well, the 18th century too, when there was even less of a safety net to catch people. And what's remarkable is for men and women, how easy it was just to slip very, very quickly

into complete destitution. I mean, you could be middle-class, you could lose everything, and then you are quite literally in the workhouse and you are shamed and you have nothing. Dickens writes about that, and that's probably what people are most familiar with. But I don't think we can even begin to fully comprehend in the 21st century just what that's

like, because there were no safety nets. There was nothing. And we are incredibly fortunate for what we have. I mean, things like socialized medicine in the UK. We're very, very fortunate to have that because if you got sick back then, I mean, you could go to the workhouse infirmary, but you would have to pay to actually see a decent doctor. There was no guarantee you'd get any sort of good treatment. Things have changed and I think we're very fortunate. So how did these women stave off death for as long as they did? I mean, is it sex work? Is it casual work? What are these women doing to feed themselves, albeit in a very meagre fashion? Well, it's interesting because it's not just what were these women doing, it's what was everybody

who was poor doing? Because there's something that historians often call the economy of makeshift, and I think in the book I call the economy of the slum, which is there are ways in which people made ends meet when you are absolutely destitute that it wouldn't occur to us because there's a whole different world. There's a whole different economy. And so, for example, if you are living in a lodging house, and a lodging house is like temporary accommodation, it's a DOS house. If you're living in a lodging house and a single bed costs four pence per night, and you don't have that money, I mean, you look quite literally living hand to mouth and you don't have that money. Well, what are you going to do? So there was this real, this tradition amongst the

poorest that if you had three pence, you could give somebody a half penny. And then that person would see you at some other time and give it back to you and there was this whole thing of standing people drinks so you would go around and you would ask people for did you have a penny because i've got two pence i just need to make up for my bed maybe you've got that you might look at what you could pawn people are constantly pawning things everything people owned was in and out of the pawn shop. I mean, even stuff that people didn't own because people stole stuff. Then there was just enormous begging scams going on. I mean, both Polly Nichols, we know, and Catherine Eddowes especially were involved in all sorts of

begging scams, fraud. And then there were odd jobs and you could get a job as a charwoman, you could work one day selling something, you could work whitewashing some walls one day. So there were ways in which you could get money. You just didn't know where that money was coming from day to day, and that was the difficult thing. You'd have seen women working on the streets for pence each day doing a range of different jobs. Yeah, various things. I mean, of course, that's not to say that there wasn't sex work around. I mean, there was a lot of sex work. But the real problem with this is the police at the time couldn't even identify who a working class woman was who wasn't a sex worker from a sex worker who was a working class woman. Because it's a moral judgment. It's a judgment about how these women are living their lives.

So they have a very different way of living, which is they don't necessarily get married, or they get married, their partner abandons them, and then they're literally recoupling with somebody else that same day or a day later, because they need to, because there's an economic necessity. So women are changing partners all the time. It's periods of monogamy, and then you move on to somebody else. But you need to, because if you've got kids, and you might have kids by three different fathers, you've got to be able to feed those kids. And so the authorities would look on this type of behavior in a woman as prostitution. But the woman herself, and we know this from records, because when these women were interviewed during the time of the Contagious Diseases Act, which was when there was an attempt to control the spread of syphilis in port towns, and there were interviews and these women were brought to court and often they were questioned, how long have you been working in prostitution?

would say, what do you mean working in prostitution? The guy left me and then I had to find somebody else. I've been living with him. And then he went away and so I found somebody else. What do you mean prostitution? So there is this lack of understanding of the subculture of how these people lived. And you have rescued these women from those stereotypes. It's fair to say.

Like, it's amazing. But the response from the world of Ripperology has been pretty weird for you. Yeah, been mad talk to me about that because that's when i last talked to you that you're at the start of this adventure yeah it's been a wild ride i think people have gone completely insane deliberately misinterpreting what i've written before the book even came out the ripperology, so they're a group of people who are really invested in the study of Jack the Ripper, and they did not like the cut of my jib. That was it, basically, because I wasn't from within their community. And I was saying, well, actually, I think there's a lot of significant evidence to suggest that not all five of these women were working in a sex trade.

And the interesting thing is, ripperologists disagree about everything. The one thing that ripperologists agree on is that Jack Ripper killed prostitutes. And if you kick away that cornerstone, the whole pursuit of ripperology just comes crashing down. I think that's too much for a lot of these people who have invested so much of their identity and so much of their time in trying to crack this case, in knowing about it and being an authority in it. And like, and here was this woman was like, how dare she? How dare she? In order for her to have come to these conclusions, she must have lied. She must have hidden evidence. It's not about, oh, she looked at these records and actually she saw something different and she asked a different set of questions, which is what historians do. It's no, she had an agenda that was

a feminist agenda. I still, Dan, I have yet to figure out what exactly is on that feminist agenda. I don't know what a feminist agenda is, you know, like take over the world, enslave men. I don't know, but that's certainly not my agenda. I came to this as a historian. I looked at the documents. I made an assessment. I contextualized things. I read around things.

And these are the conclusions I came to. There was no agenda. And it is extraordinary how heated this has become. Well, it is extraordinary how good your book is. I mean, I can understand some of the energy around your book because it's great. Hallie, the book is called? The Five. And I have a podcast, which is coming out.

It's great of you to come on the History Hit Book Club and talk to all the subscribers and me about that. That was cool. you to come on the History Hit Book Club and talk to all the subscribers and me about that. That was cool. But tell us about the podcast. Yeah, this is really, really exciting. So I have a podcast that is dropping on the 5th of October, and it's called Bad Women, The Ripper Retold. And it's 15 episodes. It's with Pushkin Industries, but you can get it wherever you get your podcasts. And basically, we do a deep dive into the five women's lives. But also, we look at all of the peripheral issues that came out of this book. So even if you've read this book, this is the story after the book was written.

And we look at true crime. And we look at addiction. And we look at education. And we look at how this is being taught. We talk to a variety of people, everybody from a judge to a sex worker. And we look at the impact of these women's lives and their stories today, and how it compares with what's going on in our world today. But also, we look at the misogyny and we look at what these women suffered that is still with us today. And it goes in all different

directions. And I think it's really, really exciting and really fascinating. Well, I'm looking forward to hearing it. Thank you very much, Hallie, for coming on. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Thanks, folks. We've reached the end of another episode. Hope you're still awake. Appreciate your loyalty.

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