Just finished a very different non-fiction book written by someone who has got a very strong, and justifiable, bee in her bonnet.
She has taken it upon herself to research the backgrounds of all the Ripper’s 5 victims in an effort to set straight deliberate glossing over of them as personalities and off hand description of them as prostitutes.
She has managed to trace 4 of them right back to birth and brings them forward through hope and tragedy to their grisly ends. Of those grisly ends, hardly a mention, we all know what has been written of that over the more than 130 years since, but a very detailed account of how they came to be there at that precise moment, and why.
By the way, only 2 could really be considered as prostitutes, and only one of those, the youngest, as a professional. The main theme that runs through them all is mysogeny, gender descrimination and violence, poverty and, in almost all cases, alcohol.
A sober, but fascinating, read. All we need now is a similar treatment of their nemesis. Especially of the ‘why?’ But sadly that trail has long gone cold.
On a brighter, but perhaps no less interesting, note, the next book is Alan Johnson’s memoire ‘Please Mister Postman’ . 3 chapters in and I am already hooked.
I read a news article on SkyNews about how the cost of living crisis in the UK is pushing more women into sex work in the UK… another “ripper” opportunity?
graham, that is the best one yet; why not go the whole hog and say that Jack the Ripper was caused by the Tories. Personally I think he was a Lib Dem as they seem to be of the night!
didn’t Ann Widdecombe (once a Tory) once say of her boss, Now Lord Howard (a Tory Peer) and then Home Secretary that he had something of the night about him?
Well I learned something useful. I did not know that so long as you are not working with others, providing these services indoors isn’t illegal in the UK.
And even though the article is clearly “placed” to beat the drums of obvious causes (knock the government in power and publicise the work of the charities named) it was a refreshing change from The Guardian.
I think it is not so much the ‘act’ that is illegal, but soliciting for the purposes of.
However, if we have to have prostitutes, and it seems that every society does, surely it is better to legalise approved and regularly checked brothels, which could advertise their services in likely places, clubs etc., to avoid the dangers to the women, and disturbance to the general populace on the streets, by having them safely and healthily operating indoors.
Not sure it would have been the answer to J t R though as only 1 of his victims would have been a likely candidate for such a place.
His only other victim who might have been a casual prostitute, Elizabeth Stride, was Swedish and, after going astray and contracting syphilis, was effectively driven abroad as a means of escaping the strict reporting rules enforced on sufferers in that country at the time.
Of course some women will be forced on to “the game”, Graham. It has even been thus.
As for you Rando, your two and two makes… skills are overheating, calm down old son. But do hold onto your hat for the next Tory chapter. It’s not going to be pretty.
