3 - Spring-heeled Jack, Crime, and the Reform of Customary Culture

Summary

When Spring-heeled Jack has been remembered at all it is as a curious footnote in the history of nineteenth-century crime, and this chapter approaches its various concerns from this perspective. Spring-heeled Jack intersected but never clearly correlated with contemporary notions of criminality. Whilst accounts firmly indicate Spring-heeled Jack was male, the rumours that he was a malevolent aristocratic prankster contradicted more conventional views that most criminals were lower-class men motivated by poverty. Given his peripatetic nature, Spring-heeled Jack was not associated with any of the capital's perceived criminal localities. Despite multiple appearances around London he appears to have studiously avoided the most infamous metropolitan localities of the time, namely ‘the Westminster rookery known as Devil's Acre … St Giles … the Saffron Hill and Field Lane areas of Holborn … to the north of the City, an area comprising parts of Whitecross Street, Golden Lane, and Grub Street … and … the eastern nexus of parts of Whitechapel, Spitalfields, Bethnal Green and Shoreditch’. Since he roamed freely through a diverse range of neighbourhoods, from quiet rural suburbs, to poorer districts like Limehouse, to respectable ones like Kensington and Richmond, it was hard to portray him as a product of a particular criminal (or criminalised) environment.

Furthermore, Spring-heeled Jack was dependent upon being seen, upon drawing attention to himself, and his overt theatricality clearly ran counter to more mundane criminality that emphasised concealment. Nor were his motivations typical.