Top 120 Hallie Rubenhold Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Household income ebbed and flowed according to the number of mature earners residing under a single roof.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

52. “I forgive you as you are.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

53. “By 1851, nearly 30 percent of the population of the region had died or immigrated.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

54. “Jack the Ripper killed prostitutes, or so it has always been believed, but there is no hard evidence to suggest that three of his five victims were prostitutes at all.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

55. “Fighters generally came from working-class backgrounds, and the Midlands contributed a number to their ranks.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

56. “Similarly, the coroner’s attempts to goad William Nichols into elaborating on his wife’s character only succeeded in casting doubt over his own behavior in light of his marriage breakdown.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

57. “By embracing him, we embrace the set of values that surrounded him in 1888, which teaches women that they are of a lesser value and can expect to be dishonored and abused.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

58. “While the coffeehouse may have had its dedicated adherents, a business could rise or fall based on its location: too many pubs and too few teetotalers nearby could close the shutters of even the most welcoming coffee room.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

59. “The family, now six in number, took a house at 131 Trafalgar Street, on what was described as “a terrace of two-story brick cottages.” Although the road and its dwellings had been constructed relatively recently, shortly after 1805, they had not weathered the passage of sixty years especially well.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

60. “Ellen described her roommate as “melancholy” and said “she kept herself to herself,” as if “some trouble was weighing upon her mind.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

61. “By January 1841, Ruth found herself in just such a situation. The precise day on which Annie Eliza Smith was born in September 1841.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

62. “Factory workers and craftsmen who once drank porter in the mornings now stopped on their way to work to buy a penny roll and a cup of hot caffeine.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

63. “Catherine, whose body had been ravaged by childbearing, physical labor, and poor nutrition, had, at forty-two, lived the average number of years for a woman of her class at that time.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

64. “In 1887 the estimate of those sleeping in Trafalgar Square varied between “more than two hundred” and “six hundred” each night.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

65. “In a good year, such as 1890, an estimated fifty to sixty thousand men, women, and children arrived for the hop harvest, where they were paid two pence a bushel for their labor and were housed in huts, sheds, or barns near the hop gardens.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

66. “The fibers that have clung to and defined the shape of Polly, Annie, Elisabeth, Kate, and Mary Jane’s stories are the values of the Victorian world. They are male, authoritarian, and middle class.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

67. “By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the trafficking of women between Britain and continental Europe had become a lucrative enterprise.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

68. “Additionally, in the case of each murder there were no signs of struggle and the killings appear to have taken place in complete silence. There were no screams heard by anyone in the vicinity. The autopsies concluded that all of the women were killed while in a reclining position. In at least three of the cases, the victims were known to sleep on the street and on the nights they were killed did not have money for a lodging house.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

69. “Before the introduction of the Marquess of Queensbury’s rules in 1868, boxers were permitted to wrestle as well as throw punches.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

70. “They were human beings, and surely that in itself is enough.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

71. “Like Ellen Holland, whose name the journalists could not even bother to confirm or record correctly, Polly was just another impoverished, aging, worthless female resident of a Whitechapel lodging house.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

72. “Throughout the nineteenth century, newspapers were accustomed to receiving this type of correspondence from the many adherents of the temperance movement, who sought to restrict the sale and consumption of alcohol.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

73. “She had been brought into the world along the Street of Ink, and it is to there, riding on its column inches, its illustrated plates, its rumor and scandal, that she would return: a name in print.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

74. “Annie was permitted visitors as well. On December 30, shortly after she arrived at the sanatorium, the logbook recorded that “Mrs Chapman’s husband called to see her.” John, who must have worried incessantly about his wife, had begged leave from his obligations to the Barrys during the height of the Christmas social calendar to ensure that she had settled in well. It was he who was paying the expense of her treatment, at a cost of twelve pence per week.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

75. “Whitechapel alone there were 233 common lodging houses, which accommodated an estimated 8,530 homeless people.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

76. “Alfred and the three youngest were sent to Bermondsey Union Workhouse as orphans. Thomas joined them there the following day.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

77. “No amount of women’s labor in a factory, a sweatshop, or a laundry, selling items on the street or doing piecework from home, would ever bring in an amount adequate to cover a family’s needs and keep it from the workhouse.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

78. “The pension to which George had been entitled expired with his death; in the mid-nineteenth century the law did not permit a widow to make a claim on behalf of a deceased husband.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

79. “Is it any wonder that there has been no public appetite to examine the lives of the canonical five, when they have never seemed real or of any consequence to us before?”

— Hallie Rubenhold

80. “In the evenings these places become reading rooms,” wrote one observer. “They are convenient to thousands of persons who have not the comforts of domesticity at home. The good fire, the bright light, the supply of newspapers and magazines, and the cup of simple beverage, are obtainable for a few pence.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

81. “Coachmen generally lived in the narrow mews, strung with laundry lines and smelling of stables. Nonetheless, these humble homes, usually with three or four rooms, one of them designed as a respectable parlor, were located in some of the country’s most aristocratic districts.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

82. “Polly, quite unusually for her gender and class, was permitted to remain in school until the age of fifteen.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

83. “Everyone was separated by gender and age, stripped of clothes and possessions, ordered into the bath, and handed a workhouse uniform.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

84. “Illiteracy and a poor level of education were hardly unusual among the daughters of the working class at this time when 48.9 percent of English women could not even sign their name.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

85. “Is it any wonder that Polly fled the comforts of the Cowdrys’ home, that Annie could not bear to tell her sisters where she lived, that Elisabeth never let anyone truly know her, that Kate fell out with her children, and that by age twenty-five Mary Jane had become an angry drunk?”

— Hallie Rubenhold

86. “The courses their lives took mirrored that of so many other women of the Victorian age, and yet were so singular in the way they ended. It is for them that I write this book. I do so in the hope that we may now hear their stories clearly and give back to them that which was so brutally taken away with their lives: their dignity.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

87. “That jubilee summer had been exceptionally warm and rainless.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

88. “Whatever relationship they formed, whether it was one based on a niece’s admiration of an older family member, or common interests, Kate came to believe that her Uncle Tom would offer her the sort of home and sympathy she did not find in Wolverhampton.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

89. “It had two main goals: to regulate the lives of the poor by forcing them to earn a meager sustenance within the filth-ridden workhouse walls and ultimately to frighten them into leading upstanding, industrious lives outside, in the community.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

90. “Neither did the editors nor the journalists covering this story deem it necessary, worthy, or interesting to delve into the biographical details of the victims.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

91. “Annie’s first child, Emily, appeared to be healthy as an infant, but by the time she was eight, she was suffering from epileptic seizures.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

92. “To some merchandisers, the victims are no longer human beings, but rather cartoon figures, whose bloody images can be printed on T-shirts, whose deaths can be laughed about on postcards, and whose entrails decorate stickers. Is it any wonder that there has been no public appetite to examine the lives of the canonical five, when they have never seemed real or of any consequence to us before?”

— Hallie Rubenhold

93. “The only means by which she could then sustain herself would be to resort to the profession she had been accused of practising.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

94. “Brick had been built upon brick, and all of it was smudged with thick black coal dust.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

95. “At some point after this date, Elisabeth’s syphilis entered its latent phase. Although her symptoms would disappear and she would no longer be contagious, eventually, many years later, the disease would return for its destructive, and terminal, tertiary stage.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

96. “Polly Nichols’s last movements are largely known through the testimony that Ellen Holland offered at the coroner’s inquest into her friend’s death.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

97. “In the eyes of society, and the army, Ruth had become a “dolly-mop”: a soldier’s woman. Though such a woman did not quite fall into the category of “professional,” she was deemed a sort of “amateur prostitute.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

98. “From all accounts, the coachman’s wife did not make for an ugly drunk, but rather a sad, sullen, quiet one, weighed down by heartache.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

99. “While life in London held many benefits for a private coachman, John’s work could come and go like the tide.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

100. “Far from being a sanctuary to which sufferers could retreat for a cure, Gothenburg’s venereal disease hospital had a reputation for treating patients as prisoners.”

— Hallie Rubenhold