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The things that scared Victorians tell us a lot about the city in which they lived.
The Great Garroting Panic of 1862.
What they believed: A band of criminals were stalking the capital, garroting anyone unfortunate enough to come into their path. One unfortunate M.P., Hugh Pilkington, had already fallen victim to them as he made his way home from his club.
Why they believed it: Pilkington was mugged and quite possibly choked - this much is true. But this random incident exploded in the public's imagination. And that was due to magazines and periodicals, who were keen to stoke up a frenzy about the end of transportation to Australia and the activities of ticket-of-leave men (offenders released on a provisional licence), as well as the apparent ineffectiveness of reform programmes for criminals. As a result, in 1863 Parliament passed the Garrotters Act, which reintroduced corporal punishment for armed or violent robbery, and in 1864 the Penal Servitude Act, which made mandatory the police supervision of ticket-of-leave men.
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Spring-Heeled Jack.
What they believed: In October 1837, a girl called Mary Stevens was walking to Lavender Hill, where she was working as a servant. On her way through Clapham Common, a strange figure leapt at her from a dark alley. He began to kiss her face while ripping her clothes with his claws, before fleeing the scene. The next day, the same figure caused a carriage to crash before breathing fire, laughing and leaping away over a nine foot-high wall. The legend of Spring Heeled Jack was born.
The Times would later report on the Jane Alsop case: on the night of 19 February 1838, she answered the door to a man claiming to be a police officer, who told her to bring a light, claiming "we have caught Spring-Heeled Jack here in the lane". She brought the person a candle, and noticed that he wore a large cloak. She gave him the candle and he tore his cloak off, vomiting blue and white flame from his mouth while his eyes resembled "red balls of fire". He tore at her with his long claws, but she managed to escape him.
For ten years, Spring Heeled Jack gripped the Victorian imagination. He was seen all over the city, an official enquiry was set up, and a man who was believed to be the monster was even put on trial. Many believed it was the alter-ego of a mad Marquess, who had the money to design such a disguise and the time to prank people with it.
Why they believed it: Well now, this is rather a long and complicated story. If you want the full answer, this is easily the best article on it. But basically, it appears to be a classic case of mass hysteria - helped in large part by the occasional prankster, a lot of superstition and of course the burgeoning print media of the day.
Jack Noel / BuzzFeed
Doubles and Doppelgangers.
What they believed: Such stories appeared in the press as that of a civil servant who saw himself on the other side of Tavistock Square every evening as he walked home from work: 'He tried to give pursuit, but once his double turned a corner he was gone.'
Another woman saw a vision of her sister across Russell Square at the precise moment the woman was dying. Princess Marie Lichtenstein, who occupied the grand Jacobean mansion of Holland House (in Holland Park) wrote a history of the building in which she recorded that 'Whether we respect tradition or not, it is as a received fact, that whenever the mistress of Holland House meets herself, Death is hovering about her.'
Why they believed it: This kind of thing is as old as the hills, of course. But there's an interesting angle: when Britain became the first urbanised society in the world, London became the largest city in the world. A population of one million at the beginning of the century increased to five million by its close. The modest Georgian architecture was replaced by neo-Gothic and neo-classical Victorian public buildings. Hotels, office buildings and blocks of flats in limestone or brick and terracotta rose above the city like giants in the mist.
It's easy to forget the powerful mental effect such a new environment would have had on its denizens. The crowds of people, of a scale never before seen, created a whirlpool of strangers all around. The idea of the death warning wasn't new: there were reports of similar cases as early as the Seventeenth Century. But this was something different; an urban horror that seemed to fit perfectly within the immensity of the growing metropolis.
Jack Noel / BuzzFeed
The Black Sewer Swine of Hampstead.
What they believed: That the sewers of London were full of monstrous pigs that would one day free themselves from their foetid home and run riot through the city.
Why they believed it: It was just your classic urban legend - someone had put it about that a sow had somehow got into the sewer, littered some offspring and fed them on the rubbish being washed into it continually. Chinese whispers ensued, and it was even mentioned in a Daily Telegraph editorial in 1859.
Of course sewers were a major deal for this rapidly expanding city. The Thames was essentially one large open sewer, and cholera was prevalent.
It was only after engineer Joseph Bazalgette constructed miles upon miles of underground brick main sewers to intercept sewage outflows, and 1,100 miles of street sewers, that sewerage stopped flowing freely through the streets and thoroughfares of London.
Jack Noel / BuzzFeed
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