Top 120 Hallie Rubenhold Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

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

— Hallie Rubenhold

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

— Hallie Rubenhold

54. “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. They were formed at a time when women had no voice, and few rights, and the poor were considered lazy and degenerate: to have been both of these things was one of the worst possible combinations.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

55. “Mercury and other metals discharged from manufacturing plants made the neighborhood’s water unfit to drink; residents relied on deliveries from a cart.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

56. “Filthy canvas smocks and smeared aprons were the only fashion; the sootier and blacker, the harder the worker.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

57. “The male carrier was exempt from any such regulation.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

58. “According to the writer Jerome K. Jerome, who lived there as a child in the 1860s, it was a place of contrasts, where “town and country struggled for supremacy,” where the surrounding marshes were still dotted with farms, and where herds of goats and cows might be driven through the streets.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

59. “The timing of the first of these pictures was significant, in that it marked a change in the Chapmans’ fortunes.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

60. “Wilmott’s catered to female lodgers only; for a solitary woman, this was the safest accommodation available.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

61. “These official pronouncements must be taken as the final word on whether or not we are justified in claiming that “Jack the Ripper was a killer of prostitutes.” To insist otherwise is to fall back on arbitrary supposition informed by Victorian prejudice.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

62. “Annie needn’t have suffered. At every turn there had been a hand reaching to pull her from the abyss, but the counter-tug of addiction was more forceful, and the grip of shame just as strong. It was this that pulled her under, that had extinguished her hope and then her life many years earlier. What her murderer claimed on that night was simply all that remained of what drink had left behind.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

63. “All these stipulations implied that Elisabeth, or any registered woman, was, without a doubt, a prostitute.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

64. “Household income ebbed and flowed according to the number of mature earners residing under a single roof.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

65. “I forgive you as you are.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

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

— Hallie Rubenhold

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

— Hallie Rubenhold

68. “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

69. “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

70. “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

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

— Hallie Rubenhold

72. “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

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

— Hallie Rubenhold

74. “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

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

— Hallie Rubenhold

76. “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

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

— Hallie Rubenhold

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

— Hallie Rubenhold

79. “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

80. “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

81. “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

82. “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

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

— Hallie Rubenhold

84. “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

85. “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

86. “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

87. “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

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

— Hallie Rubenhold

89. “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

90. “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

91. “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

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

— Hallie Rubenhold

93. “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

94. “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

95. “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

96. “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

97. “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

98. “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

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

— Hallie Rubenhold

100. “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