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  • Victorian Urban Legends: The Smiths and the Rookery July 8, 2022

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Victorian Urban Legends: The Smiths and the Rookery

    ***I’m putting a series of Victorian Urban Legends posts up to draw the reader’s attention to my just released book: The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends. This legend (with full references) will appear in a second volume. If anyone can fill in missing pieces or offer other sources… I’ll be grateful […]

    John Clare and ‘Will O Wisp’ July 1, 2022

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    John Clare and 'Will O Wisp'

    John Clare (1793-1864) was a Northamptonshire poet from a poor rural background. He includes in his writings a series of supernatural experiences that are more usually filtered through the educated writing of Clare’s ‘betters’. As Chris Woodyard and I speak, on this month’s Boggart and Banshee, about spook lights, I thought I’d revisit Clare’s run […]

    Victorian Urban Legends: Canine Protector June 20, 2022

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Victorian Urban Legends: Canine Protector

    ***I’m putting a series of Victorian Urban Legends posts up to draw the reader’s attention to my forthcoming book: The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends. This legend (with full references) will appear in a second volume. If anyone can fill in missing pieces or offer other sources… I’ll be grateful and you’ll […]

    Victorian Urban Legends: The Gentleman Crossing-Sweeper June 10, 2022

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Victorian Urban Legends: The Gentleman Crossing-Sweeper

    ***I’m putting a series of Victorian Urban Legends posts up to draw the reader’s attention to my forthcoming book: The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends. This legend (with full references) will appear in a second volume. If anyone can fill in missing pieces or offer other sources… I’ll be grateful and you’ll […]

    Victorian Urban Legends: Incognito Aristocrat June 4, 2022

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Victorian Urban Legends: Incognito Aristocrat

    ***I’m putting a series of Victorian Urban Legends posts up to draw the reader’s attention to my forthcoming book: The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends. This legend (with full references) will appear in a second volume. If anyone can fill in missing pieces or German sources… I’ll be grateful and you’ll be […]

    Victorian Urban Legends: Nose Duel May 28, 2022

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Victorian Urban Legends: Nose Duel

    ***I’m putting a series of Victorian Urban Legends posts up to draw the reader’s attention to my forthcoming book: The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends. This legend (with full references) will appear in a second volume. If anyone can fill in missing pieces or German sources… I’ll be grateful and you’ll […]

    A Manx Wizard in Victorian Liverpool June 30, 2020

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    A Manx Wizard in Victorian Liverpool

    Introducing the Magic Mersey Between 9 March 1857 and 22 June of the same year the Liverpool Mercury ran a series of thirteen articles on ‘fortune-tellers and their dupes’. I’ve just published these articles (about 30,000 words) in a pamphlet entitled: The Wizards, Astrologers, Fairy Seers and Witches of Victorian Liverpool.*  Taken together they are […]

    Ghost or Fairy on the Road from Wilden to Ravensden? June 25, 2020

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Ghost or Fairy on the Road from Wilden to Ravensden?

    1873, 2 women see a weird humanoid on the road between 2 Bedfordshire villages. Was it a ghost, a fairy, death or an itinerant tramp?

    Victorian Fancy Dress April 25, 2018

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Victorian Fancy Dress

    Stressful days – just discovered our house is riddled with woodworm – are ameliorated by making lists. This is one I’ve been playing around with all afternoon: the demography of Victorian fancy dress parties. You know the drill. Invitation arrives with instructions to turn up on the Sunday afternoon in a costume and identity of […]

    Seventh Bastard! March 29, 2018

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Seventh Bastard!

    This is a scene that I recently ran across in the parish records and that I can’t get out of my head. It is Sunday morning 14 Oct 1855, and we are at the impressive Church of St Mary the Virgin, Blackburn in Lancashire, England. At the baptismal font waits the local vicar John Arthur […]

    Christmas Fairy Trees December 24, 2017

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Christmas Fairy Trees

    What is a fairy tree? By rights a fairy tree should be where fairies gather to dance or perhaps to dwell: fairies it will be remembered have a special place particularly in Irish legend. However, Beach has recently started to run across curious late nineteenth-century reference to fairy trees of a decidedly none traditional sort. […]

    Exploding Pipes March 20, 2017

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary, Modern
    Exploding Pipes

    Bored, got nothing to do? Here’s a thought. Why not blind a friend for a lark? There are a couple score newspaper stories from 1850-1950 of workmen, companions and complete strangers giving victims pipes that have been doctored with gunpowder. Typically the smoker puts a match to the shag of tobacco, takes a deep breath and […]

    Victorian Urban Legend: The Egg Ring March 16, 2017

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Victorian Urban Legend: The Egg Ring

    Beach has recently been looking at ring stories in his quest for Victorian urban legends. Here is one that sounds simply impossible: though if any poultry experts want to contradict: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com A doctor, residing in Moringa, in Australia, writes to the Revue Sanitaire to solicit the attention of naturalists to the […]

    Working Class Professors in the Nineteenth Century February 24, 2017

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Working Class Professors in the Nineteenth Century

    Imagine that you are born in the industrial heartlands of England to a working class family in the mid nineteenth-century. Aged six you are already sent out to earn a crust: let’s say you have to drive a donkey for a cruel master. You never get an education worth the name and still by your […]

    Victorian Criminal Slang January 8, 2017

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Victorian Criminal Slang

    Beach has been enjoying Pickpockets, Beggars and Ratcatchers by Kellow Chesney on London’s underworld in the teeming, dirty and unmatchable nineteenth century: the illustrations are great too. One of the joys about entering this world is the lively slang used by the underclass. The following come from Pickpockets but also from one of the most […]