Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Spring-Heeled Jack: The Terror Of London
    Spring-Heeled Jack: The Terror Of London
    Spring-Heeled Jack: The Terror Of London
    Ebook114 pages1 hour

    Spring-Heeled Jack: The Terror Of London

    By Anonymous

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    The "penny blood-came into being through a process which began with higher standards of general education and literacy in England at the beginning of the 19th century, and continued with the invention of fast and efficient printing presses and cheap paper production. These combined elements simultaneously created a new, mass market for literature, and fed that market with new, affordable product. The gothic novel, popular amongst a rarefied class of literary readers, duly gave way to sensationalistic, graphic shockers for the masses. The PENNY BLOOD CLASSICS ebook series, which focuses on the "golden age-of the penny bloods, continues with the legendary tale of Spring-Heeled Jack, first reported in 1808, and again in 1837. Spring-Heeled Jack was described by people who claimed to have seen him as having a terrifying and frightful appearance, with diabolical physiognomy, clawed hands, eyes that "resembled red balls of fire', and the ability to perform astounding leaps. Jack was perfect melodrama material, and in 1840 John Thomas Haines wrote "Spring-Heeled Jack, the Terror of London", a play portraying him as a villain who stalks and attacks innocent women. This volume features "Spring-Heeled Jack: The Terror Of London", an anonymous penny blood published by the Newsagents' Publishing Company c.1864-1867. The book also includes an extensive introduction on the history of the penny blood.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherElektron Ebooks
    Release dateMar 4, 2015
    ISBN9781908694874
    Spring-Heeled Jack: The Terror Of London

    Read more from Anonymous

    Related to Spring-Heeled Jack

    Related ebooks

    Action & Adventure Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Trump Derangement Syndrome

      Feb 23, 2023

      Just like stains, some ghosts can prove more stubborn to remove than others. Whereas a quick splash of Holy Water and prayer might suffice to see off most spooks, others require rather more obscure methods of banishment. Yet for sheer oddness, the ef

      6 min read

    • Article

      The Ruskington Horror

      Jan 28, 2021

      The Ruskington Horror
      17 min read

    • Article

      Prisoners of Love

      Oct 8, 2020

      Prisoners of Love
      4 min read

    • Article

      Horror In Highgate

      Jul 9, 2019

      Horror In Highgate
      2 min read

    • Article

      On The Dark Side

      Jul 14, 2022

      Mark Norman & Tracey Norman The History Press 2021 Hb, 174pp, £14.99, ISBN 9780750998017 There is certainly darkness a-plenty within the world of folklore; what Chthonic treasures will be found in Dark Folklore? Its five chapters offer a bewitching a

      4 min read

    • Article

      History Extra

      Jun 9, 2022

      History Extra
      1 min read

    • Article

      In The Wake Of Morag

      Jul 15, 2021

      In the summer of 1979, Morag wasn’t the only strange and elusive entity in the vicinity of Loch Morar: two LN&MP (Loch Ness and Morar Project) members told of encountering a mysterious American who claimed to be living in a cave on the northern shore

      15 min read

    • Article

      The Story Of WITCHES

      Oct 20, 2021

      Many of those dressing up as witches and ghouls for Halloween know little of the real history of witches. We see modern incarnations in culture as harmless, like Jill Murphy’s The Worst Witch children’s books, and the trainee witches from the Harry P

      3 min read

    • Article

      Dracula’s Child

      Oct 7, 2020

      RELEASED OUT NOW! 569 pages | Paperback/ebook/audiobook Author JS Barnes Publisher Titan Books A sequel to Dracula is a great idea on paper, but it’s been written on too many pages here. Dracula’s Child has drained Bram Stoker’s poetry, and replaced

      1 min read

    • Article

      Strange Days

      Nov 3, 2022

      Strange Days
      3 min read

    • Article

      An Enchantment Of Lore

      Jan 5, 2022

      Sirens, Selkies and Ghost Ships Dee Dee Chainey & Willow Winsham Batsford 2021 Hb, 192pp, £12.99, ISBN 9781849946599 Wild Gods, World Trees and Werewolves Dee Dee Chainey & Willow Winsham Batsford 2021 Hb, 192pp, £12.99, ISBN 9781849946872 Dee Dee Ch

      4 min read

    • Article

      Archæology

      Jan 27, 2022

      A MONTHLY EXCAVATION OF ODDITIES AND ANTIQUITIES The Srivijaya empire was a fabled kingdom known in ancient times as the Island of Gold, a civilisation with untold wealth that explorers tried in vain to find long after its unexplained disappearance f

      6 min read

    • Article

      Vampire Or Victim

      Oct 6, 2019

      An ominous chill hung over Brisbane in the early hours of October 21, 1989, when self-proclaimed vampire Tracey Wigginton trawled the empty streets under cover of darkness, hunting for human blood. Shunning daylight and mirrors, the former grammar sc

      7 min read

    • Article

      Let’s Get Physical

      Mar 21, 2024

      Many stories of tactile ghosts are recorded across the years from séance chambers and haunted houses – entities that stroke, caress, tap, grasp, poke, pinch, punch, push, pull, scratch, slap, beat, levitate and even on occasion take intimate libertie

      9 min read

    • Article

      Demons, Djinns, And Devils

      Jan 5, 2024

      Demons, Djinns, And Devils
      11 min read

    • Article

      Strange Deaths

      Aug 12, 2021

      Waiting at the altar for his bride, Paul Wynn, 57, became breathless and slumped into a chair moments before Alison, 38, started to process down the aisle. Family and guests administered CPR and used a defibrillator on Wynn but were unable to revive

      3 min read

    • Article

      Necrolog

      Jun 16, 2022

      John Nicholson was the only child of Captain W Ivan Nicholson and Eleanor (Nella) Zollner, daughter of the Danish Consul. In 1946, when John was six, the family moved to Flying Rat Cottage in Great Dunmow, Essex, where they kept poultry, plus a goat

      6 min read

    • Article

      Television

      Mar 21, 2024

      Forty years ago, a publishing sensation was born: a book, promoted as wholly factual, by journalist Jay Anson about the haunting of a house in Amityville, Long Island, which had been the site of a massacre years before. The perp, Ronnie DeFeo, claime

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Classical Werewolf

      Nov 4, 2021

      Daniel Ogden Oxford University Press 2021 Hb, 280pp, £25, ISBN 9780198854319 Daniel Ogden has established himself as the go-to academic for scholarly, text-based surveys of supernatural motifs in the Ancient World, into which context this book fits a

      8 min read

    • Article

      13 More Medieval Queens

      Feb 18, 2021

      Known as the Lady of the Mercians, Æthelflæd was the eldest daughter of Alfred the Great of Wessex. Though she played an important role in Anglo-Saxon England, her story is often overshadowed by her more famous father. Æthelflæd was born during a cha

      8 min read

    • Article

      Magical Texts

      Mar 21, 2024

      An Illustrated History of Magic Books and Spells Owen Davies Yale University Press 2023 Hb, 256p, £25, ISBN 9780300272017 With a proven record in the study of magic and witchcraft, Owen Davies brings us this full colour appraisal of magical texts fro

      3 min read

    • Article

      Under Mediæval Skin

      Mar 21, 2024

      Taylor McCall Reaktion Books 2023 Hb, 223pp, £16.95, ISBN 9781789146813 In Thomas Harris’s novel Red Dragon (1981), a body is discovered with multiple weapons protruding from it, seemingly the latest victim of a serial killer. On investigation, FBI o

      2 min read

    • Article

      Penis Snatching Panic

      Nov 2, 2023

      Penis Snatching Panic
      3 min read

    • Article

      Fairy Origins

      Jul 13, 2023

      For many decades British folklorists have been largely silent on the difficult question of where fairies come from. There has been a great deal of discussion of where fairies go – “always going, never gone” – why fairy belief declined, and the fairie

      10 min read

    • Article

      Scottish Witches To Get Apology

      Jan 27, 2022

      After a two-year campaign, the pressure group Witches of Scotland is on course to win pardons and official apologies for the estimated 3,387 people who were tried as witches in Scotland between the 16th and 18th centuries. The Scottish witch panic st

      1 min read

    • Article

      The Peril Of Moving Statues

      Oct 8, 2020

      Over spring and summer 2020, the public display of statues of selected historic figures suddenly excited people on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, intemperate mobs of protestors struck at a diverse range of statues deemed offensive.

      13 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Spring-Heeled Jack

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Spring-Heeled Jack - Anonymous

      credits

      SWEENEY TODD

      BY ANONYMOUS

      AN EBOOK

      ISBN 978-1-908694-86-7

      PUBLISHED BY ELEKTRON EBOOKS

      COPYRIGHT 2013 ELEKTRON EBOOKS

      www.elektron-ebooks.com

      No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a database or retrieval system, posted on any internet site, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holders. Any such copyright infringement of this publication may result in civil prosecution

      INTRODUCTION

      The penny blood came into being through a process which began with higher standards of general education and literacy in England at the beginning of the 19th century, and continued with the invention of fast and efficient printing presses and cheap paper production. These combined elements simultaneously created a new, mass market for literature, and fed that market with new, affordable product.

      The gothic novel, popular amongst a rarefied class of literary readers, duly gave way to sensationalistic, graphic shockers for the masses.

      The most popular forms of publication during this period were chapbooks and broadsheets; broadsheets, favoured by the poor reader, usually contained an illustrated ballad based on some (often scandalous) item of news. In 1818 James Catnach, one of the major London broadsheet publishers alongside John Pitts, was gaoled for producing an exceptional gruesome sheet telling the story of a cannibal butcher. But even more relevant to this study are the gothic chapbooks – illustrated booklets of either 36 or 72 pages – which began to proliferate at the turn of the century, and presented new literary form in a new physical template; typical titles would include The Secret Oath, or Blood-Stained Dagger (1802) and The Cavern Of Horrors, or, Miseries of Miranda (1802). Among the main publishers of these chapbooks were Dean And Munday and Thomas Tegg; they sold their wares at sixpence for 32 pages, and one shilling for 72 (hence the term shilling shockers). By condensing the contents to a series of gory and macabre highlights, reinforced by graphic woodcuts, these pamphlets were an early forebear of the penny papers to come.

      A typical example of the transition from gothic literature to populist pulp is Edward Montague’s The Demon Of Sicily, a book first published in London in 1807, and reprinted with lurid illustrations in 1839 by William Dugdale, a noted pornographer and publisher of The Exquisite erotic periodical (1842-44). Basically, Montague’s novel takes the most outrageous elements of gothic works such as The Monk, ramps them up to new levels of sex, violence and gore, and delivers them in a literary form more accessible to the then-putative mass market:

      At the decayed bridge Leonardi alighted, he conducted the trembling form of Isabella through the broken portals. Well knew the Knight the subterraneous recesses of the castle; within its tottering walls his own arm had perpetrated dark deeds of horror.

      Down many a step which seemed to be a passage to the bowels of the earth, he forced the wretched Isabella, till at length they entered a dungeon.

      Now, lady, said he in harsh accents, ‘tis like thou mayest repent of the deep insult you have offered me. No longer a suitor, I command thee to yield to my wishes; dreadful indeed will be the punishment of disobedience, for my soul yet burns with the remembrance of the injury I have received.

      The soul of Isabella rose above the horrors of her situation; she seized the dagger that glittered in the girdle of the gloomy Leonardi.

      Barbarian, said she, I fear thee not; in a moment I can put myself beyond thy infamous design. Powers of mercy, receive my soul!

      The dagger she had directed to her bosom here interrupted her; she fell to the ground, her pure blood dyed her garments.

      Furious grew Leonardi at being disappointed of his expected prey; he looked blackly on the prostrate Isabella; she still lived, for the wound was not mortal.

      Since not my desires, I can however yet satiate my revenge; the pangs of death from my hand shall torture thee. Thus said, he drew his glaive; he divided the lovely head of Isabella from the convulsed body; he caught it by the beautiful long black tresses, and strode away with it to another chamber; he set it on a piece of a broken column, and contemplated with a demoniac satisfaction the features once so lovely, so interesting, but now ghastly with the agonies of death. Those eyes, said he, "will no longer look indignant on me; neither will that mouth further insult me.

      Would I could have increased the torture of death; gladly would I have done it; for her groans were comfort to my soul."

      Some days he continued indulging his black revenge; at length a new thought struck him; I will go, said he, to the cell where her body lies, and take from it her proud heart; I shall find pleasure in trampling on it.

      Other sub-gothic melodramas of this period included The Witch of Ravensworth (1808), by George Brewer; The Mysterious Hand, or, Subterranean Horrors! (1811), by Augustus Jacob Crandolph; Manfrone, or, The One-Handed Monk (1809), by Mary Anne Radcliffe; and Rosalviva, or, The Demon Dwarf (1824), by Grenville Fletcher.. By 1826, macabre literary material of this type – dealing with witchcraft, deformity, depravity, insanity, sadism and gore – could be found in Legends Of Terror, a 40-part omnibus of supernatural tales, and later in The Casket, a weekly publication which touted itself as the first of the penny papers. Published through the auspices of the Ladies Penny Gazette, The Casket regularly contained such tales as The Ice-Witch, The Devil’s Ducat, The Evil Eye, The Fiend Of The Heath, The Skeleton Count, and Vampires Of London, completing the transition from gothic novel to mass-produced pulp horror. Such weeklies, usually of eight pages in length, tightly typeset in double columns, cheaply printed and illustrated by gruesome woodcuts, were produced in vast numbers from then until around 1850; this was the golden age of the penny blood.

      As early as 1823, horrific material was also available in various proto-true crime periodicals, serial publications such as The Tell-Tale (1823-4), Legends Of Horror (1825-6) and The Terrific Register (1825-7); packed with illustrated accounts of violent robbery, murder, cannibalism, dismemberment, torture and execution, these had their roots in such 18th century book anthologies as Captain Johnson’s A General History Of The Robberies And Murders Of The Most Notorious Pirates (1724) and The Newgate Calendar (1774), a compendium of crimes, trials and hangings which appeared in numerous editions and even spawned a separate literary sub-genre, the Newgate novel as epitomised by William Harrison Ainsworth’s Rookwood of 1834. The History And Adventures Of That Famous Negro Robber, Three-Fingered Jack, The Terror Of Jamaica (1822) was a one-off, 24-page crime romance in this tradition which described itself as a penny misery. Later penny crime weeklies would include William Strange’s Calendar Of Crime (1832) and George Drake’s Calendar Of Horrors (1835, notable for its serial Geralda, The Demon Nun; or, The Charmed Bracelet). The Calendar Of Horrors was edited by one Thomas Peckett Prest, a key figure in the history of pulp fiction. Prest, who also edited The Horrors Of War (1936) for Drake, was soon turning his hand to writing serial fiction, and over the ensuing decade would produce a huge volume of work notable for its grotesquerie and gore.

      It was Edward Lloyd, a bookseller turned publisher, who detonated the penny-pulp market with the inauguration of a new line of sensationalistic mass-produced bloods, his career starting in 1936 when he took over The History and Lives Of The Most Notorious Highwaymen, Footpads, Murderers, Brigands, Pickpockets, Thieves, Banditti, and Robberies of Every Description and The History Of The Pirates Of All Nations (both originally published by George Purkess). Although these were published monthly, ran for around 24 pages and sold for sixpence, Lloyd soon realised that the format favoured by The Casket – weekly, 8 pages, and retailing at just one penny – was the way to reach the masses. Running stories in a multi-episode, serial format also ensured repeat custom. Supplementing his income by low-rent plagiarisms of Charles Dickens, Lloyd soon built up a raft of weekly publications, including Lloyd’s Entertaining Journal, The Penny Sunday Times, Lloyd’s Companion To The Penny Sunday Times, Lloyd’s Penny Weekly Miscellany, Lloyd’s Penny Atlas, Lloyd’s Weekly Miscellany, and The People’s Periodical. By 1843 he had moved to new premises in Salisbury Square, introducing new high-speed printing presses, and was even manufacturing his own paper. He also employed a pool of writers-for-hire in order to cover the immense anmount of work needed to fill his weeklies; chief amongst these were the aforementioned Thomas Prest, one James Malcolm Rymer, and one E.P. Hingston.

      Besides short stories with such lurid titles as Confessions Of A Deformed Lunatic or The Madhouse Of Palermo, Lloyd’s journals were primarily driven by the serials, largely written by either Prest, Rymer, or a combination of both with

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1