Conclusion: Spring-heeled Jack and Victorian Popular Cultures

Summary

This study has attempted to engage with popular culture at a relatively abstract level, trying to bring a degree of joined-up thinking back to a concept that is now more frequently viewed through the fragmented lens of particular subdisciplinary interests and perspectives. It has tried to tether these somewhat amorphous conceptualisations through exploration of a specific historical artefact, the Victorian urban legend of Spring-heeled Jack. Whilst this may obviously make me guilty of the very charge I have just leveled at practices elsewhere, it is my hope that I have been able to indicate the broader reflections upon popular cultures that this intriguing character can facilitate. In this vein, this study has sought to contribute to the fascinating historiography relating to imaginary characters, beings who can cast interesting and unusual reflections upon the nature of the cultures in which they were formed and flourished.

Spring-heeled Jack played a highly unusual role in the Victorian popular imagination, for he represented a ‘modern’ expression of a number of ‘traditional’ folkloric tropes and practices. It was this alloying of the ‘modern’ and the ‘traditional’ that meant he did not wholly belonged to either and was always out of step with both. He was a secularised ghost but something far different to anything that could be summoned by a spiritualist medium in a Victorian drawing room. Yet like spiritualism, Spring-heeled Jack represented a Victorian repackaging of older, ethnographical beliefs in a ‘new’ age.