London: The Biography

Stranger still is the case of “Spring-Heeled Jack.” He appeared in the streets during the 1830s and was soon known as “the terror of London.” One statement, given by Jane Alsop at Lambeth Street Police Office, describes how the unfortunate girl encountered him on her doorstep. “She returned into the house and brought a candle and handed it to the person, who appeared enveloped in a large cloak, and whom she at first believed to be a policeman. The instant she had done so, however, he threw off his outer garment, and applying the lighted candle to his breast, presented a most hideous and frightful appearance, and vomited forth a quantity of blue and white flame from his mouth and his eyes resembled red balls of fire.” This may seem the merest fantasy, and yet the particulars are confirmed in an account of another attack by “a tall thin man, enveloped in a long black cloak. In front of him he was carrying what looked like a bull’s eye lantern. With one bound he was in front of her, and before she had a chance to move, he belched blue flames from his mouth into her face.” The entire grotesque history is narrated by Peter Haining in The Legend and Bizarre Crimes of Spring Heeled Jack.

Jane Alsop’s testimony had other, equally disturbing elements. From “the hasty glance which her fright enabled her to get at the person, she observed that he wore a large helmet; and his dress, which appeared to fit him very tight, seemed to her to resemble white oilskin. Without uttering a sentence he darted at her, and catching her part by the dress and the back part of her neck, placed her head under one of his arms, and commenced tearing her gown with his claws, which she was certain were of some metallic substance.” She screamed aloud, and her sister came to the door. But in her police statement that sister, Mary Alsop, admitted that although she “saw a figure as already described … She was so alarmed at his appearance, that she was afraid to approach or render any assistance.” A third sister then ran down and dragged Jane away from the terrible assailant, yet his grip was so strong that “a quantity of her hair was torn away.” She slammed shut the door but “notwithstanding the outrage he had committed, he knocked loudly two or three times at the door.” This knocking at the door, so strange that it could scarcely have been invented, is perhaps the most alarming moment in an entire alarming episode. It is as if to say-Let me in, I have not finished with you yet.

It is not at all surprising that in the popular urban imagination “Spring-Heeled Jack” was identified as the offspring of the devil, and described by witnesses as possessing horns and cloven feet. In February 1838 he was reported to have been seen in Limehouse with blue flames issuing from his mouth, and in the same year was said to have thrown a prostitute into the water at Jacob’s Island in Bermondsey. Peter Haining has suggested that the perpetrator was a fire-eater who wore a helmet or mask to protect his face. The great leaps and bounds that were also ascribed to him were perhaps the effect of springs concealed in the heels of his shoes. The metallic “claws” have yet to be fully explained. Yet the point is that “Spring-Heeled Jack” became a true London myth because he was so fantastic and artificial a monster. With his helmet and “white oilskin suit,” breathing fire like a circus performer, he is a London devil curiously resembling the fiends portrayed in the Clerkenwell mystery plays. Accounts of his appearance and behaviour spread very rapidly all over the city; he was seen, or was reported to have been seen, in various locations. It is almost as if this bizarre figure emerged from the streets themselves, like a “golem” which is supposed to be made from the mud and dust of a certain vicinity. The fact that “Jack,” like a later and more notorious “Jack,” was never apprehended serves only to deepen that sense of anonymity which suggests the monstrous figure to be some token or representation of London itself.

For the city is seen, by many, to be a kind of hell. It became a cliché in the poetry of the nineteenth century; its citizens resembled a “Satanic throng” while the atmosphere was that of a “brown Plutonian gloom.” The sulphurous smell of coal dust and smoke provoked images of Satan, while the manifold and manifest vices of the city represented all the works of the devil incarnate.