Simon Young 
The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends 

Winner of the 2023
Brian Mc Connell Book Award from the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research


In the last fifty years, folklorists have amassed an extraordinary corpus of contemporary legends including the “Choking Doberman, ” the “Eaten Ticket, ” and the “Vanishing Hitchhiker.” But what about the urban legends of the past? These legends and tales have rarely been collected, and when they occasionally appear, they do so as ancestors or precursors of the urban legends of today, rather than as stories in their own right.


In
The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends, Simon Young fills this gap for British folklore (and for the wider English-speaking world) of the 1800s. Young introduces seventy Victorian urban legends ranging from “Beetle Eyes” to the “Shoplifter’s Dilemma” and from “Hands in the Muff” to the “Suicide Club.” While a handful of these stories are already known, the vast majority have never been identified, and they have certainly never received scholarly treatment.


Young begins the volume with a lengthy introduction assessing nineteenth-century media, emphasizing the importance of the written word to the perpetuation and preservation of these myths. He draws on numerous nineteenth-century books, periodicals, and ephemera, including digitized newspaper archives—particularly the British Newspaper Archive, an exciting new hunting ground for folklorists.
The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends will appeal to an academic audience as well as to anyone who is interested in urban legends.

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Simon Young, a British historian, is author of The Boggart: A Study in Shadows. His work has appeared in many periodicals including Contemporary Legend, Supernatural Studies, and Folklore.