The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends

Abstract

In the last fifty years folklorists have amassed an extraordinary corpus of contemporary legends including ‘the Choking Doberman’, ‘the Eaten Ticket’ and ‘the Vanishing Hitchhiker’. But what about the urban or contemporary legends of the past? These have only rarely been collected and when they do appear they do so as precursors of the urban legends of today, rather than as stories in their own right. In The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends (NITS) this lacuna is corrected for nineteenth-century Britain (and for the wider English-speaking world) The book includes seventy Victorian urban legends ranging from “Beetle Eyes” to the “Shoplifter's Dilemma” and from “Hands in the Muff” to “the Suicide Club.” A handful of these stories are already known and associated with Victorian Britain, but the vast majority have never been studied. NITS draws on numerous nineteenth-century books, periodicals, chapbooks, and ballads. However, the most important source has been digitized newspaper archives, particularly the British Newspaper Archive: an exciting new hunting ground for folklorists. As today newspapers were, in the 1800s, fly-paper for urban legends and a lengthy introduction assesses nineteenth-century media in folklore terms. NITS is primarily an academic book. There is an analysis tying each narrative into folklore studies past and present and transversally into Victorian society. These sources and their analogues are international. However, it is hoped that the volume will appeal, too, to urban-legend and Victorian enthusiasts outside of academia.