The Legend of Spring-Heeled Jack: Victorian Urban Folklore and Popular Cultures by Karl Bell (review)

Penny Dreadfuls! … Gothic Melodramas! … Victorian Freak Shows!

The subject of folklorist Karl Bell’s text, Spring-heeled Jack, was a “contemporary Sweeney Todd and a shadowy predecessor of Jack the Ripper [who] went on to become a focus of theatrical plays, ballets and dioramas, and a nursery bogeyman”(2). In Bell’s analysis, the figure of Jack (as I shall refer to him) was not only a persistent nineteenth-century nemesis to “eight old bachelors, ten old maids, six ladies maids and as many servant girls […], by depriving them of their reason and otherwise accelerating their deaths,” but also a folkloric figuration of rapidly accelerating Victorian Age industrialism, whereby class difference was becoming articulated across metropolitan, provincial, and rural England (23).

The first chapter describes Spring-heeled Jack as a multifaceted phenomenon with predecessors (Jack o’ Lantern, Jack o’ Lent, Jack of the Green, the earlier Commedia trickster, et al.), the perpetrator of a well-cataloged list of frightening nocturnal incidents and prankster imitations; Bell’s case studies are well supported with substantially footnoted nineteenth-century sources, including local tabloid newspapers, as well as the London Times, the newspaper of record. The second chapter articulates a typical folkloric functional analysis. However, not limiting himself to descriptions of Jack’s exploits and their function across a troubled century (e.g., Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion [New York: Macmillan, 1890], among others), the author configures Jack, in a theoretically based third chapter and conclusion, as a folkloric representative of sociocultural tension between high and low popular cultures across a broad geographical spectrum. In particular, “low” popular culture is described as that transmitted through protean oral and performance modes in contrast to the emergence of a (hyper)active, yet still nascent, objective “high” culture transmitted in the form of printed police reports, broadsides, and local newspaper journalism. At the intersection between modes of cultural transmission, Spring-heeled Jack sustains a porous enough character, “a cultural text … [who] moved back and forth between oral rumours and press reports, a broader range of literary texts and theatrical forms, between the metropolis and the provinces, and industrial cities and rural villages” (11). This fluid porosity is reflected in Bell’s earlier description of Jack’s chimeric character: sometimes he dressed in a bear skin and sometimes in human form as “an unearthly warrior clad in armour of polished brass, with spring shoes and large claw gloves” (Camerwell and Peckham Times, quoted in Bell, 20). He uses “spring-heeled or India-rubber soled boots, for no man living could leap so lightly … fly[ing] across the ground as he did last night” (Camerwell and Peckham Times, quoted in Bell, 37). While terrifying servant girls in urban back alleys or policemen in rural graveyards, Jack “emits fire from his mouth, wears a cape, claws at the flesh and clothes of his victims” (20). Ultimately, for Bell, a chimeric Jack stands in for the persistence of an improvisational oral and performance culture but, most importantly, protests against the loss of that protean world under the onslaught of the solidifying print culture of the Victorian Age.

The author is most interested and interesting in revealing how Jack represents the persistence fertility of an organic oral and performance culture as it is challenged by an emerging unauthentic mass popular entertainment culture. This emergent culture is driven by the commercialization of rapidly urbanizing industrial nineteenth-century England. The author notes how Jack persists across that century, appearing and disappearing in waves of elusive events and prankster imitations. Bell relates how Jack is eventually appropriated by Victorian commercial entertainment culture, eventually appearing as a side-show freak and enlivening puppet shows, dioramas, plays, musicals, and even a ballet titled Spring-heeled Jack or A Felon’s Wrongs! Jack becomes tamed; as a proto-superhero, he still operates outside the law, but he protects the weak rather than working...