Description

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 legends of the past These legends and tales have rarely been collected and when they occasionally appear they do so as ancestors or 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 Simon Young fills this gap for British folklore and for the wider Englishspeaking world of the 1800s Young introduces seventy Victorian urban legends ranging from Beetle Eyes to the Shoplifters Dilemma and from Hands in the Muff to the Suicide Club While a handful of these stories are already known the vast majority have never been identified and they have certainly never received scholarly treatment

Young begins the volume with a lengthy introduction assessing nineteenthcentury media emphasizing the importance of the written word to the perpetuation and preservation of these myths He draws on numerous nineteenthcentury books periodicals and ephemera including digitized newspaper archivesparticularly the British Newspaper Archive an exciting new hunting ground for folklorists