A joke about banning under-sixteens from social media sent me to the winter London frightened itself with a leaping man who breathed blue fire, with nothing but newspapers
Tuesday, the Folklore Shelf
We had a school group in this morning. Fourteen-year-olds, on a “local history trail,” which had been abandoned in favour of their phones by the time they reached us. One girl was showing another a video and saying, “It’s real, it’s been seen in three places.”
I do not know what it was. Something with long arms. Their teacher sighed and said to me, “It’ll be a different one next week.”
After they left, my colleague read me a headline from NewsThump, off its politics section: “Under-16 social media ban heralds return of locally sourced, artisanal teenage bullying.”
We laughed. Then I thought: it is not only bullying that got along without it. Panics did too. I went and got a book down.
The Winter of 1837
It began in the villages round London, which are now suburbs. Barnes. Peckham. Clapham. People walking home at night across the commons said that something had jumped out at them.
The descriptions varied. A white bull. A bear. A figure in armour. A ghost. What they agreed on was that it leapt. Over hedges. Over walls. Enormous bounds, as if it had springs in its boots.
For some weeks it was only talk. Then, in January 1838, the Lord Mayor of London, sitting at the Mansion House, read aloud a letter he had received. It was signed “a resident of Peckham.” It said that a wager had been laid among certain persons of high rank, that one of them should visit the villages near London in three disguises, a ghost, a bear and a devil, and that he had already frightened several young women out of their wits.
The Lord Mayor was sceptical. But the letter was in the papers the next morning. And then everybody had seen him.
The Two Girls
The famous accounts are from the next month.
A young woman called Jane Alsop, at her father’s house in a lane in the East End, answered a violent ringing at the gate one evening. A man in a cloak stood in the dark. He said he was a policeman. “For God’s sake bring me a light, for we have caught Spring-heeled Jack in the lane.”
She fetched a candle. He threw off the cloak. She told the magistrates that he wore a kind of helmet and a tight white suit like oilskin, that his eyes were balls of fire, and that he vomited blue and white flame from his mouth. He seized her and tore at her dress and hair with what felt like metal claws. Her sister dragged her inside.
A few days later a girl called Lucy Scales, walking home with her sister in Limehouse, passed a figure in an alley who spurted blue flame in her face. She fell down in a fit.
These were taken seriously. There were hearings. Men were questioned. Nobody was convicted.
How It Spread
What I notice, reading it now, is the speed.
There were no pictures. No recordings. There was a letter read by the Lord Mayor, and there was the press.
But the press of 1838 was a new thing. Cheap papers, a penny each, printed overnight on steam presses and sold in the street to people who had never bought one before. They needed something to fill the columns every day, and a fire-breathing leaper who attacked servant girls was perfect.
So each report produced more reports. A paper printed a sighting in Peckham. Next day a reader in Hammersmith wrote that he had seen it too. The day after, Kensington. Each one was a letter from “a respectable gentleman,” unnamed.
The descriptions grew. He acquired a name within weeks. Then the claws. Then the fire. Then pointed ears. You can watch him being assembled, sighting by sighting, the way those long-armed things on the girls’ phones are assembled now.
Within a few years there were plays about him, and serial stories sold in weekly parts for a penny. He was being spotted in Sheffield and Liverpool. The last reported sighting is 1904.
Was There Anyone?
Probably, at the start. Some young men amusing themselves by jumping out at women. A cloak, a mask, perhaps a mouthful of spirits and a flame. There was a notorious rowdy aristocrat of the time who was widely suspected. He was the sort who would. Nothing was ever proved.
But one or two pranksters cannot be in Barnes and Limehouse on the same night for sixty years. After the first few weeks, the thing people were seeing was the story.
That is not to say the fear was false. Women were afraid to walk home. Servants would not go out after dark. Something real was being talked about, which is that a woman alone on a common at night was in danger, and had been long before any devil in oilskin.
The monster gave it a shape. I think that is often what monsters are for.
The Ban
Which brings me back to the headline, and the fourteen-year-olds.
I understand why people want the ban. Those girls did not look up once. Whatever they were watching, it had them.
But the idea that without it children would not frighten each other with things that are “real, seen in three places” is not supported by the folklore shelf. London managed a city-wide panic with a letter and some penny papers. Before that it managed with ballads. Before that, with someone’s cousin who had heard it from a man.
What the new machinery changes is the speed and the reach. Spring-heeled Jack took a winter to cover London. The thing on that girl’s phone crossed the world before breakfast.
And one more difference. In 1838 there was a Lord Mayor, and magistrates, who held hearings and tried to find out. Slowly, clumsily. Somebody was in charge of asking whether it was true. I am not sure who that is now.
In Fairness to the Girls
I was fourteen once, in Hereford, and we had a ghost at the back of the science block that every one of us had personally seen. No phones were involved. We did it with our own mouths.
It is what that age is for. Scaring yourselves, together, about something that is not quite the real thing you are scared of.
The teacher was right. It will be a different one next week. It was a different one every week in 1838.
Wednesday
I looked up the lane where Jane Alsop lived. It is under a housing estate now. I may go and stand there. I shall not ring anybody’s bell.
The customer who lends me his London Prat says it has form on panics. Its English satirical news on things seen leaping over walls turns out to be about a councillor, and its UK satirical news about panics lists this month’s in order of how long each lasted. The shortest was a morning.
For God’s sake bring me a light. I have been saying it to my flatmates whenever the bulb goes.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
