Completed: 3/17/2022
Recommendation: Highly Recommended
Recommended By: Nobody
Review:
The author here makes a good argument that at least 3 and probably 4 of the women killed were not prostitutes at the time of their death. One definitely was (by her own reckoning) and one had been. The extensive research done by the author tells the story (where possible) of these women's lives in rich detail for the most part (the last woman, the prostitute, had a habit of telling people different back stories and was not the pauper that the others were, so her movements were not recorded in poor houses, courts, and the like). These were all daughters, mothers, sisters, and wives (separated and in some cases common law) struggling to live in the desperate circumstances of single women in Victorian London. This book is worth reading just to understand what life was like in Dickens' England (one of the women grew up in the same area where Dickens lived when writing his early works).
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