Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight sagas seemed to go down well, as vampires are wont to do.
There is nothing like a male tortured soul with a soupcon of horror thrown in for good measure to capture a teenage audience. The undead are everything which is misunderstood, and young adult audiences are afforded the opportunity to empathise with the unthinkable.
It could be argued these tales are twaddle; but it is very entertaining twaddle. Our young people have long loved this stuff, it seems.
A century and a half ago, in London during the 1850s, the literature was there, right enough. It was churned out on cheap pulpy paper, and followed the most lurid and sensational of themes: rampant highwaymen, murderous butchers and naturally malevolent undead were all serialised for a penny an issue.
And they were dubbed the Penny Dreadfuls.
Also tagged Penny Horribles and Penny Awfuls, they cost one-twelfth of the shilling required to buy the august periodicals which carried the works of Dickens and his contemporaries. They were gothic to the core, marketed at working class adolescents.
And there is one tale they snapped up with an appetite more voracious than almost any other.
Maybe it was a prank, or maybe those who saw it drank the wrong kind of tea or partook of the wrong pipe. Whatever the roots of this tale, it was the most stunning of yarns.
London: 1837. A businessman was passing Barnes Cemetery on his way home one night. What better setting could a ghoul choose for his debut? The gentleman was walking past the big high iron gates. The world inside was dark and indistinct and, let us face facts, no-one is going to turn and stare straight into a cemetery at the dead of night.
So the cemetery came to stare at him. Suddenly a figure sprang high, over the tall gates, and came to land in front of the man.
It didn’t do anything, it seems It just stood there: a deeply unsettling muscular figure with devilish features and molten protruding red eyes.
Spring-heeled Jack, London called him, and the city took him to its dark heart. First, in a series of hurried tales which sped informally by word of mouth. Young Mary Stevens, flew the tittle-tattle, was walking to Lavender Hill across Clapham Common when a demonic figure with claws surprised her and started to ravish her before her screams drove it away; his hands were ‘cold and clammy like those of a corpse’ she related to gawking listeners.
When it started jumping in front of carriages, causing near-fatal accidents, the bureaucrats began to take notice.
On January 9th, 1838, none other than the Lord Mayor of London, Sir John Cowan, stood up in the Mansion House and told the assembled body that he had received a letter, informing him that some prankster was causing a bit of a stir by dressing up and creating havoc.
He said: “At one house the man rang the bell, and on the servant coming to open door, this worse than brute stood in no less dreadful figure than a spectre clad most perfectly. The consequence was that the poor girl immediately swooned, and has never from that moment been in her senses.
“The affair has now been going on for some time,” he added, “and, strange to say, the papers are still silent on the subject. The writer has reason to believe that they have the whole history at their finger-ends but, through interested motives, are induced to remain silent.”
The papers did not stay silent for long. The Times broke the story that very day, and the other papers followed suit the next. All London was alive with rumour. It was said servant girls from Kensington, Hammersmith and Ealing were all telling dreadful stories and having vapours about this ghost, or devil.
As twaddle is wont to do, the stories began to go national. The Brighton Gazette accused the creature of terrifying a gardener, although the description sounds most unrelated: a figure in the shape of a bear or some other four-footed animal growled at him, and then scaled the wall and ran along it, topping this off with a terrifying romp as it chased the poor horticulturalist round the garden.
Of course, this could always have been a bear or some other four-footed animal.
Jack was impersonating police officers before long. Poor Jane Alsop opened the door to a copper who asked her to bring a light: because they had caught Spring Heeled Jack out there in the lane.
But as she handed over the candle he threw off his coat and showed a horrifying figure wearing tight clothing which resembled white oilskin, a helmet, and his eyes were like coals. Blue flame came from his mouth.
Spring Heeled Jack became an accepted part of folklore. Theatres featured him and even the Punch and Judy show incorporated him , according to Henry Mayhew in his ‘London Labour and the London Poor.’
For more than sixty years he provided an inexhaustible supply of gothic horror, petrifying everyone from Mail coach drivers to squaddies at Aldershot barracks. The Liverpudlians were the last to see him in 1904.
And then the sightings ceased as suddenly as they had started.
Dreadful rubbish for the Penny Dreadfuls: but oh, what a yarn.
I wonder of it is the last we have seen of Spring Heeled Jack?
Kate Shrewsday 
Oh my, how thrilling. I expect that, once you’d encountered old Jack, you’d be able to dine out on the story for years; be a sort of local celeb?
The names of the people who saw him are still legend today, Cindy, so I think they might even make national celeb 🙂
Never heard of this fella, but his reputation is not unwarranted: when you said ‘So the cemetery came to stare at him.’ I jumped out my skin 🙂
I’ll let you into a secret, Tilly: after writing this I went downstairs in the dark to make a cup of tea.
Big mistake. The kitchen window had never looked so ominous. I kept thinking there was someone else the other side staring back…the power of suggestion….
That’s either the mark of a really good story or an overactive imagination – or both.
I regret: both…
I had a similar experience years ago after seeing the movie Halloween – a film I laughed at throughout because it struck me as ridiculous. Then when I got back to the dorm, for a couple of weeks I just knew a white-masked face was going to appear at the window in the door at the end of the hall as I walked down it late at night.
I would have been snatching up those periodicals like the last morsel of oat. Of course, I would have had to change my own name to Penny Panic.
LOL Yes: I would probably have had a secret stash of them myself! It’s amazing the stature that tales like this gain on a dark murky night, even for sensible British housewives like me. I’m afraid the name Penny Panic is now forever indelibly imprinted on my brain, Penny 😀
Well woven yarn, Kate.
I’ve heard of the chap . . . but never heard the entire history. Must say that it doesn’t encourage one to wander around cemetaries after dark.
Yes. Must make mental note. No cemeteries after dark. Got it. 😀
Fabulous. I love lore like this, especially when joined with news of how the story spread to become such a national phenomenon!
Tilly Bud’s and Patti’s comments above made me think of a movie my husband watched a few weeks ago. It’s a foreign film called “Let the Right One In,” about an awkward 12 year old boy who meets a beguiling 12 year old girl who just happens to be a vampire. My husband isn’t frightened easily, but when the movie was over, and it was time to go outside to close the garage door, he literally sprinted from to the garage and back, thinking, “Vampires can only come in if you invite them.” LOL. The imagination is truly a convincing tool.
It is indeed, Maura 😀 And have you noticed how night time makes the imagination on these matters more vivid?
Best to wipe this post from your memory…
Ooh, how spooky, Kate 😀 Methinks you’d be a master at the next best seller!
It would make a good book, wouldn’t it, Naomi? Maybe it’s time to do a little research….
It isn’t my type of reading matter, Kate, but you put a slant on it that makes me want to find out more….
It’s so very Victorian, Pseu, isn’t it? There’s the hint of the Big Top, a little devilry, and lots of showmanship. I would give anything to know what had really happened.
In USA they were called dime novels
Must have a look at those, Carl. I wonder if your bogeymen were similar to ours?
Ooh, scary! I guess if you saw him today, you’d blog about him! haha! I’ll keep my eyes peeled when I walk back from the bus stop in the evenings…
I thought that Penny Horribles were those dreadful romance novels – thanks for increasing my education, yet again, Kate!
Sunshine xx
I think romance might well have come into it, Sunshine….of a kind…and the Mills and Boon school of literature is certainly a direct descendant. We used to have an underground library of them at the convent school I attended!
What is it about people that we secretly love a good scare? I think by ‘good scare’ I mean being frightened by something that we know doesn’t really exist- but just might….
Would be curious to know what you think of the novels that have come out recently that insert vampires, zombies, and the like into classic literature- like ‘Pride and Prejudice and Zombies’ and ‘Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters’…
http://www.amazon.com/Pride-Prejudice-Zombies-Classic-Ultraviolent/dp/1594743347/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_b http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pride_and_Prejudice_and_Zombies
Jane Austen would have turned in her grave.
And then decided she wasn’t comfortable and got up….
🙂
Love it!