Update to Spring-Heeled Jack

Surely no one is impatient for a book review from one hundred eighty years ago, and no one will mind if I add material. The Penny Dreadful tale of Spring-Heeled Jack is interesting, at least to me, because it is the precursor of similar nocturnal avengers, as The Shadow and The Batman, and because the great difference between the Penny Dreadfuls of 1840 and the Pulps of 1930.

I took the liberty of adding the following paragraphs to my review from earlier this week:

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Lucy Grahame (for such is the young lady’s name) is not the first damsel rescued by Jack. Earlier, he had visited a farmer named Brown, a tenant of Sir Michael, counting out the rent money which Jack meant to take for himself.

Jack leaps in the man’s upper window.  Farmer Brown faints instantly upon seeing Jack, as many folk in this narrative do, keeping him nicely out of the way so that Jack can rifle through his papers.

Jack discovers not only the cash but a hidden last will and testament showing Brown was not lawfully in possession. The land in truth was owned by his orphaned niece,  Selina Brown, a lunatic who was kept chained in the attic.

Jack undoes the frees the girl, takes the will, and spirits her away to the local squire, with evidence enough to have the farmer arrested, tried, and transported to a penal colony overseas.

Selina happened to recover her wits once her due was restored to her. The author assures us that she marries and mothers a large family in the very farmhouse which was once her prison.

I notice that Jack never once in this story throws a punch or fires a pistol: his epigones The Shadow and The Batman routinely leave a much larger number of fallen criminal behind, either in jail or in a grave.

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The story could not have been told in America, only in England, because the main plot point that drives the plot is the practice of entailing land, that is, preventing land to be sold, subdivided, or pass to anyone other than the eldest heir in entirety.

Every part of the drama is driven by this law.

The hero’s father goes to India to earn his fortune, because he is not the firstborn, and hence is penniless. After making a fortune in the tea trade, he receives news that his elder brothers, both killed in war with the French, now leave him sole heir. He was on his way back to England to claim this patrimony when the storm struck that sunk his ship, orphaned our hero, and destroyed the letters and records Jack needed to prove his identity.

The entail means that there is no legal way for Jack and his evil cousin to share the property or to compromise. One or the other owns the whole possession, and the title of knighthood. This prompts the murder attempt against Jack, earns him his nickname, and drives the whole plot.

Likewise, the murder scheme by the stepmother against the daughter Lucy is prompted by this rule of primogeniture, as Lucy is the sole heir from the prior marriage, and no provision is possible for the stepmother once her husband, the baronet, dies.

Thomas Jefferson, in the greatest act of legislative wisdom in his long career, but the least well known, promoted the idea that entailing land would not be legal in the newborn United States: all would hold in fee simple, or in trust, or by some other form of title.

How much mischief the nation thereby has avoided, one need only ask Spring-Heeled Jack, or his lady love.