Flowers, flowers everywhere

I’m carefully avoiding the news again and find myself looking at my photos of Singapore’s orchids. So, I’ve put some more up for you to enjoy.

And now for something completely different.

Like most readers of crime, I have an interest in Jack the Ripper. I wrote a review of Bruce Robinson’s book They All Love Jack: Busting the Ripper. The author thinks he knows who the Ripper was (although we’ll never know for sure). It’s an interesting read nevertheless, since the author has a lot to say about social conditions in the 1880s. All fine and dandy for the gentry, not so flash for the poor.

Then later I came across another book.

Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five is about the five women Jack murdered in Whitechapel. Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly would scarcely have caused a ripple in the flow of history if they hadn’t been murdered by probably the most famous serial killer in the world. Even so, they were just faceless victims of little real interest aside from what was done to them. But they were real women, each with her own story. Rubenhold has researched them all and describes their circumstances throughout their lives until their horrible deaths. It’s not a crime story. Jack barely gets a mention. This is a social history of London in the late Victorian period using these women as examples. Life was precarious for women without a man at that time. Here’s my review, The Forgotten Women of Whitechapel.

By the 1880s transportation of convicts to places like Australia had stopped. I think the unfortunates eking out a living of sorts in East London might have been lucky to have been sent to the colonies.

Just a thought.