Top 120 Hallie Rubenhold Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “One of the workhouse’s primary functions was to humiliate those who were forced to rely upon it. Regardless of their circumstances, the old, infirm, the sick and abandoned, the able-bodied but unlucky were treated with equal disdain. If the head of a household lost his income, he and all of his dependents had to join him under the workhouse roof.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

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

— Hallie Rubenhold

53. “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

54. “At times the coroner’s inquest became a moral investigation of Polly Nichols herself, as if the hearing was held in part to determine whether her behavior warranted her fate.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

55. “Investigations into the Whitechapel murders did, however, explicitly and convincingly expose a disturbing set of facts: the poor of that district lived in unspeakably horrendous conditions. The encampment and riots at Trafalgar Square were a conspicuous manifestation of what had been chronically ailing in the East End and other impoverished parts of London. It was a cough hacked in the face of the establishment. The emergence of Jack the Ripper was a louder and more violent one still.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

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

— Hallie Rubenhold

57. “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

58. “At its very core, the story of Jack the Ripper is a narrative of a killer’s deep, abiding hatred of women, and our cultural obsession with the mythology only serves to normalize its particular brand of misogyny.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

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

— Hallie Rubenhold

60. “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

61. “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 dishonoured and abused. We enforce the notion that ‘bad women’ deserve punishment and that ‘prostitutes’ are a sub-species of female. In.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

62. “Much as anticipated, three months after the nuptials, Polly was expecting the couple’s first child. On December 17, 1864, the cries of William Edward Walker Nichols filled the rooms of 17 Kirby Street.7 By the autumn of 1865, Mrs. Nichols was pregnant once more, and the need for larger accommodation grew as obvious as her maternal belly.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

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

— Hallie Rubenhold

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

— Hallie Rubenhold

65. “In early June, the London Fever Hospital proclaimed a crisis when ‘upwards of 100 patients’ were admitted for scarlet fever alone. What then exacerbated the situation was the arrival of a second epidemic: typhus.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

66. “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

67. “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

68. “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

69. “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

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

— Hallie Rubenhold

71. “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

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

— Hallie Rubenhold

73. “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

74. “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

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

— Hallie Rubenhold

76. “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

77. “Roughly twelve months lay between the Queen’s Golden Jubilee summer and Polly Nichols’s murder on August 31, 1888.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

78. “Not only were most of them born into working-class families; they were also born female.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

79. “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

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

— Hallie Rubenhold

81. “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

82. “Less than an hour later, when George had still not appeared, the landlady went upstairs and, much to her horror, discovered Leyland’s valet “with his throat cut, in a shocking manner, with a razor lying by him covered with blood.” George was dead by the time he was found, on the floor, “with only his shirt and drawers on.”11.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

83. “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

84. “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

85. “Finally, to gain admission, each household member needed to provide proof of inoculation against smallpox.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

86. “I forgive you as you are.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

87. “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

88. “John’s devotion to his wife, in spite of her affliction, demonstrates nothing short of genuine love.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

89. “At each juncture, she made it perfectly plain that Polly was not what the officials insinuated.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

90. “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

91. “The demanding schedule, seven days a week, kept children away from their families but for dinner and bed; it also limited a child’s exposure to any vices that the home might harbor.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

92. “Late-nineteenth-century science had already begun to uncover the links between maternal alcohol consumption and its danger to children.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

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

— Hallie Rubenhold

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

— Hallie Rubenhold

95. “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

96. “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

97. “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

98. “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

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

— Hallie Rubenhold

100. “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