London, 1888: five women—Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Kate, and Mary Jane—are remembered only as Jack the Ripper's victims. This history turns away from the killer to reconstruct their full lives: their families, work, migrations, and the poverty and misfortune that brought them to Whitechapel's streets.
When a notorious killer becomes the story, his victims are killed once by him and again by being forgotten. Tours, artwork and endless guesses about his identity keep him vivid while the people he killed shrink to a few basic facts.
Calling murdered poor women "just prostitutes" lets a convenient category stand in for who they were. Of the five, only two are known to have done sex work and four were over forty, yet the label stuck for 130 years.
In the industrial city, an ordinary married woman with children could slide quickly into homelessness. Poverty, drink, illness and women's lack of protection meant the odds were stacked against them from birth, and the same pattern persists among poor women today.
People who end up in the same abject poverty did not get there the same way. Each of these lives followed its own path down, so treating 'the poor' as one story hides how each person actually fell.