57 pages • 1 hour read
The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “Annie, September 1841-September 8, 1888”
Part 2, Chapter 5 Summary: “Soldiers and Servants”
Annie’s father, George Smith, moved from rural Lincolnshire to London to join the royal family’s household calvary. As such, he was present for the funeral of King William IV and the coronation of Queen Victoria in 1838, and for her marriage to Prince Albert in 1840.
George was romantically involved with a servant from Sussex, Ruth Chapman. However, soldiers in the British army were discouraged from marrying, and Ruth gave birth to a daughter out of wedlock, Annie Eliza Smith, in September of 1841. The situation put Ruth in the position of a soldier’s lover, a “dolly-wop.” She would have lost her job as a servant, but she would have been given a paying job doing laundry and sewing for the army.
Had George been assigned overseas, Ruth would have been left without any financial support. Like many dolly-wops whose husbands were stationed in a foreign country, Ruth would have likely had to find another partner in the army willing to take care of her and her daughter. Luckily, George instead remained in Britain and got permission to marry Ruth. They finally married on February 20, 1842. To help legitimize their daughter, the date of their marriage was backdated to two years, to before Annie was born.
Still, Ruth would have had a difficult life “on the strength” (81), a slang term for living as a soldier’s wife. She and Annie had to live in a corner of the barracks’ communal room at a time when barracks dormitories were in poor condition. She did, however, have free access to the army’s health care resources, the barracks’ library, and the army savings bank. After 1848, the Smiths started to receive an allowance that would allow them to live outside the barracks.
Ruth and George had more children. These children would have attended the regimental school, which was reserved for children of officers. Annie would have been taught subjects like writing, reading, history, and mathematics along with “industry” (82), meaning sewing and knitting. Even so, life was unstable for officers’ families, and the Smiths lived at 12 different addresses around London and Windsor (83). While Annie received a better education than many working-class girls, she and her family were still poor. By 1854, they lived in a house in London with two other families, with each family having two rooms each.
That year, London was hit by an epidemic of both scarlet fever and typhus, both deadly diseases at the time. Four of the Smiths’ six children died (86). Once she turned 15, Annie, like “nearly 43 percent of British women between the ages of fifteen and twenty” (87) between the years 1851 and 1891, got a job as a domestic servant. She worked for the architect William Henry Lewer and his brother Edward. Servants like Annie would have cooked, cleaned, handled laundry, washed dishes, lit fires, made beds, and carried buckets of coal upstairs for fuel. They usually had only a day off a month at most, along with at least an hour on Sundays to attend church.
Meanwhile, George Smith was promoted to becoming a gentleman’s valet for the military officer, member of Parliament, and Irish baronet Roger William Henry Palmer, and later for the officer Captain Thomas Naylor Leyland. These were prestigious, well-paying positions. As a result, George’s family relocated near Leyland’s mansion, Hyde Park House.
Despite his success, George died by suicide, possibly because of grief over his children’s deaths. At the time, there would have been no legal provisions or a military pension for George’s family. However, Leyland seems to have given Ruth enough money to purchase a house, from where Ruth made money renting out rooms and doing laundry “in the respectable lower-middle-class Knightsbridge neighborhood” (93).
One of the lodgers at Ruth’s house was John Chapman. A horse-keeper from Suffolk, he was not related to Ruth although they shared a last name. Annie married John, perhaps to avoid the risk of becoming a “spinster” (94) since she was already 27 years old.
Part 2, Chapter 6 Summary: “Mrs. Chapman”
After they were married, Annie and John Chapman followed the Victorian custom of having their photograph taken. John found work as a gentleman’s coachman, which paid well and sometimes provided free lodgings for the coachman and his family above or near the stables owned by the gentleman. Coachmen were not middle class, but they could sometimes afford to hire a maid or send their daughters to a boarding school. By 1873, Annie had given birth to two daughters, Emily Ruth and Annie Georgina, whom Annie also had photographed.
Starting in 1879, John began working as a coachman and a manager of the stables for a wealthy industrialist and member of Parliament, Francis Tress Barry, who owned an estate in the rural country of Berkshire. As such, John, Annie, and their children were entitled to live by themselves in a cottage that had a kitchen and three bedrooms. Annie’s story “might have ended in quiet, middle-class comfort on a gentleman’s estate” (104), if not for her dependency on alcohol.
Part 2, Chapter 7 Summary: “Demon Drink”
A letter written by Annie’s sister, Miriam, to the Pall Mall Gazette revealed that, while Annie’s sisters took a pledge to abstain from alcohol, Annie signed the pledge repeatedly only to succumb to alcohol dependency. It was difficult to avoid alcohol in Victorian society. Since water quality in London tended to be poor, most workers drank a low-alcoholic beer. Alcohol was often used as a medical treatment, even for children, and was the center of many people’s social lives, especially at pubs.
Rubenhold speculates that Annie may have been one of many middle-class women who turned to alcohol because they led boring lives, with their husbands away at work and with maids handling most of the daily chores. Six of Annie’s eight children possibly died from, or would show symptoms of, fetal alcohol syndrome, a disease that began to be understood by doctors as early as 1878 (108). These factors encouraged the temperance movement, a primarily middle-class campaign that sought to discourage the consumption, if not outright outlawing, of alcoholic drinks.
Despite a growing scientific awareness of alcohol dependency, mainstream Victorian thought still held alcohol dependency to be a moral, not a medical problem. The temperance movement was linked with the concept of “self-help,” which held that anyone could overcome their problems with “tough-mindedness and grit” (109). However, Annie clearly “desperately did want to give up drink, but found it almost impossible” (110). Her alcohol dependency may have worsened when her daughter Emily died from scarlet fever, the same disease that had killed many of her siblings. Annie’s alcohol dependency reached a point that she became an inmate at Spelthorne Sanitarium.
After 1879, the British government attempted to address alcohol dependency through the Habitual Drunkards Act. It established several state-funded sanitariums for the medical treatment of alcohol dependency, one of which was Spelthorne Sanitarium. Once she was discharged from the sanitarium, Annie was able to avoid alcohol for a time. According to her sister Miriam, she became dependent again when her husband drank whiskey to treat an illness and Annie tasted the whiskey when she kissed him. After she became dependent again, she was sent to live with her mother and sisters on a small income provided by her husband.
Part 2, Chapter 8 Summary: “Dark Annie”
It is unclear how Annie ended up in Whitechapel, especially since it was more likely she would have ended up in a poor district like Notting Hill, which was close to Knightsbridge. As a woman with an alcohol dependency, Victorian society would have considered Annie a “fallen woman” (124), an attitude she may have internalized. At some point, Annie left her mother and sisters and started living with a man named Jack Sievey, who may have been the reason she relocated to the notoriously impoverished neighborhood of Dorset Street in Whitechapel. There, she became known as “Dark Annie” (118) because of her brown hair.
Annie lost her income from her husband John when he became sick and died in December of 1886. John’s death devastated Annie both financially and emotionally. Jack Sievey left her and she moved in with another man, Harry the Hawker, who also had an alcohol dependency. Annie was given financial support by her brother Fountaine, who also had an alcohol dependency but who managed to keep a job as the manager of a printer’s warehouse, and by a man named Edward Stanley, whom Annie pretended was her husband.
Although by the standards of her time Annie would have been considered a “fallen woman,” she was not a sex worker. However, the police labelled her as such to fit their theory that Jack the Ripper was targeting sex workers. The newspaper media followed suit, drawing on confused and even contradictory quotes taken from people who knew Annie, like her friend Amelia.
Even with Edward Stanley paying for her to stay at lodging houses, there were nights when Annie would have had no place to stay. She would have avoided staying in hospitals or casual wards, since they had restrictions against drinking. Apparently on September 7, 1888, Annie stayed at a lodging house named Crossingham’s to rest by a fire and out of hope someone would give her the doss money to stay. No one paid her rent for the night. That was the night she was killed by Jack the Ripper.
Part 2 Analysis
Given the fact that all five women discussed in The Five were from working-class and lower-middle-class families, the documentation about their lives often has gaps. Likewise, they left very few writings of their own. In these cases, Rubenhold uses reasonable speculation about what they may have been doing and thinking. In the case of Annie, such speculation gives Rubenhold an opportunity to humanize the women, as part of her general commitment to The Humanization of Historically Stigmatized Figures.
Rubenhold tries to present Annie as someone who was psychologically shaped by the forces of her time. For example, she notes how Annie, “[a]s one whose family subscribed to religious teachings and who strove to maintain respectability […] would have perceived her fall as an unredeemable one” (117). Rubenhold reflects that Annie’s life is a tragedy, wherein alcohol dependency, along with Victorian society’s belief that alcohol dependency was a moral failing, caused a woman to lose her chance at a comfortable middle-class existence. Rubenhold treats Annie’s alcohol dependency with sympathy. While all five of the women had an alcohol dependency, she emphasizes that the dependency was the catalyst in Annie ending up living quasi-unhoused in Whitechapel. As Rubenhold remarks, “Of the many tragedies that befell Annie Chapman in the final years of her life, perhaps one of the most poignant was that she needn’t have been on the streets on that night, or on any other” (132).
Rubenhold strives to present Annie as a nuanced figure, depicting how she sought treatment for her dependency. In particular, she notes that, “In Miriam’s letter she made it clear that Annie desperately did want to give up drink, but found it almost impossible” (123). Rubenhold’s highlighting of Annie’s desperate desire to wean herself off her alcohol dependency provides a counternarrative to the Victorian temperance movement’s attitude that ridding oneself of a dependency was purely a matter of will and moral commitment: While Annie sincerely desired to regain her health, she struggled to do so despite her attempts.
Thus, like the other five, Annie’s life also illustrates The Social Dynamics of Poverty and Gender. As a woman with an alcohol dependency who became estranged from her husband and children, Annie would have been seen as a social pariah who failed to live up to the standards of “self-help” (109). Despite doctors’ awareness of alcohol dependency as a disease, a woman like Annie “who had lost her marriage and her home through her moral weakness was viewed with no less abhorrence than the woman who had engaged in extramarital sex” (117). This social stigma had consequences for Annie’s treatment. Even though Annie was committed to a sanitarium, her treatment would have been “largely spiritual in nature,” designed around the idea that alcohol dependency was simply a “weakness of the will” (111). Rubenhold speculates that Annie internalized such beliefs, causing her to view “her fall as an unredeemable one” (117), which of course would have further worsened her drinking.
Finally, the way Annie’s death was written about by her contemporaries spread the idea that Annie was a sex worker. In a case of The Misrepresentation of Women in History, police officials investigating her murder labelled her a sex worker to fit a narrative about Jack the Ripper that they were already forming. Rubenhold argues, “Just as they had with Polly Nichols’s case, the authorities began their inquiry from a fixed position: that Annie must have been a sex worker, a stance that from thereon guided the direction of their investigation, as well as the attitudes and interrogations of the coroner’s court” (125-26). Addressing such false narratives is a major reason why Rubenhold presents the stories of Annie and the others: In drawing attention to the complex details of these women’s lives, Rubenhold suggests that Victorian biases and sexism distorted the story of their true lives and, inevitably, the police’s understanding of their deaths.
Unlock all 57 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features: