OK, once and for all. I am constantly amused by the need to correct people on this front. Something about smokey Victoriana just gets people confused. What links these people is fairly simple: cravats, crime, at least a hundred media adaptations between them, not to mention fog and gaslight. But it's the telly and novels which are key in making their "existence" murky, blurring boundaries and consigning them all to the same semi-real twilight.

It's alarming that it should be my job to be the arbiter of what is and isn't real. But for the record:

SWEENEY TODD = NOT REAL (1785)
An invention of an 18-part Victorian Penny Dreadful called A String of Pearls, contemporary with Dickens, and serialised in the papers. Sweeney Todd, as you doubtless know, is a barber who slits his customer's throats and deposits them in the basement via a ludicrous chair, where his next door neighbout Mrs Lovett turns them into pies. Though there are some sources for the story, it is effectively an urban legend that has been much retold.

(Recent culprit: Calypso)

BURKE AND HARE = REAL (1820s)
Two serial murderers from Scotland who killed 17 people in the 1820s then sold their corpses to an anatomical school. Though I knew they existed, I was a little surprised to learn they were killers: I thought they were merely bodysnatchers. Soon to be a movie starring Simon Pegg.

(Recent culprit: a lecturer!)

SPRING-HEEL JACK = NOT REAL (1830s)
An urban legend, of a man with glowing eyes who could leap to extrodinary heights. Last time I heard this rumour, Jack was a cheeky nobleman who had startled a maid by blowing alcohol onto a candleflame and thus breathing fire. Or so I thought - a recent lecturer attempted to convince us that he was an actual multiple-rapist, famous for "leaping out" at his victims, which inspired the myth. Not as far as the internet informs me.

(Recent culprit: a different lecturer!)

JACK THE RIPPER = SORT-OF REAL (1888)
Five women were killed horribly in Whitechapel. Everything else is fictional or conjectural, including the fact that a single man did for all five: it's probably true, but could easily have been different men, a group working together or a woman. Or a leprichaun. There is undeniable truth at the heart of this one, but anything else you know beyond five corpses is probably wrong. Because it wasn't solved, innumerable ideas have built up in the collective imagination about who it "was", and all these tropes and codes have built up to form a man called Jack (probably wearing a top hat; probably a rakish gentleman).

(Recent culprit: Friend 5)

And while we're at it:

SHERLOCK HOLMES = NOT REAL (1887-)
You'd think this was obvious, but at the time many people wrote to Arthur Conan Doyle requesting the services of Mr Holmes. There is a Sherlock Holmes museum on the site of his house at 22B Baker Street, preserving it "as it was". An address they have, by the way, invented - at the time Conan Doyle was writing, there was no 22B on Baker Street. There is also a fake-blue plaque on the building. To muddy the waters more, as the most famous Victorian character Sherlock Holmes is always dragged into narratives featuring the characters above, fictional or no. This includes Dracula, Dr Jekyll, the Lovecraftian Mythos, the Doctor, everyone in League of Extraordinary Gentleman - and, of course, Mr Ripper in more novels than I can be bothered to list, the movies A Study in Terror, Murder By Decree, The Case of the Whitechapel Vampire, and even the most recent 2009 one.

And that probably is the most important point: they are all confused together. They inform one another - ideas and concepts about one meld into another, dragging people into or out of fiction in a pretty indescriminate manner. Victorian detective Holmes? Meet other Victorian criminals. Sweeney Todd with a barber's razor? Meet other Victorian knife-wielders. Spring Heeled Jack has supernatural powers? Why shouldn't they all? And so on.


So, is there anyone else dubiously real from the Victorian period whom I have missed? I can go on, you know...