SHOCK! HORROR! READ ALL ABOUT IT!

Simon Young. The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends. University of Mississippi Press. 2022.

I have always felt that not enough attention has been paid to the disastrous effects of cycling. Now held as the key to a new urban utopia of fume-free, polar-bear friendly, sustainable transport, it seems the Victorians had a more critical view of dangers of the then novel machines. They identified a number of afflictions resulting from excessive cycling, for instance the Bicycle Face.

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This was more than just a smug grin and an inability to see red lights. It particularly affected female cyclists. One report from 1896 gives an account of “a large dance given in London” and remarks that “the number of girls with the bicycle face was so extraordinary, that the fact was generally noticeable”. This was caused by “anxiety, the everlasting looking ahead, the strain on a nervous disposition which imposes a hard, set look to the face and gives haggard, anxious expression to the eyes”

Bicycle ailments also included Bicycle Back from leaning forward to the handlebars; Bicycle Hand “took on the permanent form of a claw”; the Bicyclist's Nose; and the Bicyclists Sore-Throat, amongst many other life-changing impairments. 

These afflictions were all reported in the newspapers of the day. The Bicycle Face being found in both the Dundee Evening Telegraph in 1896 and the Worcester Chronicle in 1897; the Edinburgh Evening News in 1898, reporting on the Cyclists Sore-Throat. But by the turn of the century all these tragic ailments seem to have disappeared, the Leeds Mercury in 1902 finding only 'mild forms of inflammation' as a consequence of cycling.

This is just one of seventy 'urban legends' chronicled in this volume. Besides the eponymous cranial nail, which dates back well before Victorian times, there are many then-contemporary horrors such as stories of passengers being drugged and robbed on trains, which have survived as rumours until today. Trains feature regularly in these tales, still being a novel and often rather scary form of transport in the nineteenth century. They were definitely places for sexual transgression; young lovers might take advantage of the seclusion of the compartments, or predators strike in the darkness of tunnels.

Tunnels were so feared as places of attack that a rumour circulated that the Great Western Railway was planning to take the top off the Box Tunnel, near Bath, turning it into an open cutting. At the time the tunnel was the world's longest, and the rumour suggested that it was to be opened to daylight to prevent “illicit coupling” as the carriages were plunged into darkness for an extended period. The idea of a couple in unchaperoned darkness was clearly disturbing to the Victorian mind and required a drastic engineering solution.

Many of the legends described in this fascinating collection are expressions of fear and ignorance of new ideas, inventions and social attitudes. In his introduction Simon Young compares the function of the urban legend to that of the dream: “Much as the dreamer processes his or her day at night, so society runs through its concerns in compelling and easily shared narratives”.

In the nineteenth century the place where these concerns were most often processed was in the popular press. The author, Simon Young, is also the author of The Boggart, where he examines the origins, distribution and evolution of tales and legends of the north-west of England's native supernatural creature. Many of the stories of the boggart's malice and mischief were reported in local and national newspapers and locally published pamphlets, and in that book and this Young has explored the resources of the growing volume of digitised newspapers and journals that are now available from online sources. In his introduction he gives valuable advice for anyone following him into this arena.

Important to the circulation of these stories was the great spread of literacy throughout the nineteenth century, which rose from around 50% of the British population at the dawn of Victoria's reign, to nearly 100% by the end, and virtually all of this increase was in the urban working class.

This resulted in a steadily growing number of print sources to satisfy the demand created. Young points out that by the end of the 1890s there were over 300 penny magazines published in the British Isles, all of which needed a regular supply of short, amusing, inspiring, alarming or sentimental stories. Although these tales were seldom printed as out-and-out fiction, many were hedged around with terms such as 'unable to verify the narrative with precision', or heading it 'A Very Strange Story' or 'Wonderful if True”' or vaguely crediting it as 'a story circulating in...' Young comments, “the reader got to enjoy the narrative, and the editor avoided direct responsibility.”

The seventy stories are laid out here with references to the newspaper or magazine source, and follow through the development of the story as it is reproduced, in varying degrees of faithfulness across a wide range of sources and over a long period of time. Many of them are still in circulation today in a recognisable form. Every now and then a contemporary newspaper will run a story of a 'cruel hoaxer' who has tricked people into collecting some unlikely object – often empty crisp or cigarette packets – to raise funds for the treatment of a seriously ill child. This can be traced back to stories of campaigns to collect a million postage stamps “under the idea that they will be able, by presenting them, to gain admission for a child, to some benevolent institution” which were in circulation just a few years after the introduction of postage stamps in 1840.

Some of the stories correspond to recognisable folklore motifs, and this is noted in the introduction to each section, along with notes of any comparable stories in other literary sources.

This is a scholarly account of an area of popular literature that has only recently been recognised as an area of serious research by folklorists, historians and social scientists. Young comments that a 'cogent' definition of urban legends might be “stories not collected by British and American folklorists before about 1950.” But it is also an entertaining and engrossing introduction to some of the stranger preoccupations of Victorian life, many of which find a echo in our own time.

• John Rimmer