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

Abstract

Simon Young is a British historian who has published several books and peer-reviewed articles on topics concerning the supernatural, history, and folklore. In 2022, he added The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends to his extensive publication repertoire. Young’s impressively exhaustive methodology for curating this collection of Victorian legends is unlike other books of its kind, which have generally focused on fairytales, ghostly and spectral stories, or, such as in the case of Karl Bell’s 2012 book, The Legend of Spring-Heeled Jack: Victorian Urban Folklore and Popular Cultures, many alterations of a singular legend or unifying motif. In this book, Young investigates a very particular type of story: “belief narratives . . . stories in which the readers or listeners are expected to believe or in which they are expected to consider belief” (xxi; emphasis added). In other words, Young limits his survey to the sort of extraordinary tale that allows the audience to ponder the probability of its validity rather than immediately dismiss the impossibility of it. The resulting collection is rather sensational without crossing over into the realms of science fiction, fantasy, or wholly unbelievable tall tales. The most noteworthy effect Young’s book has on our understanding of Victorian folklore is the way he reveals a network of literary culture via the history of transmutable storytelling as he carefully traces the variations of each legend from one version of the story to the next, across publication venues, social classes, British territories, and time periods of the nineteenth century.