Description
Book SynopsisIn 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 English-speaking world) of the 1800s. Young introduces seventy Victorian urban legends ranging from Beetle Eyes to the Shoplifter''s 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 nineteenth-century media
