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Journalist’s collection brings Victorian stories back to life

A regional journalist has published a collection of outlandish news stories from the Victorian era – including a drunken monkey smashing up a bar and a bearded lady’s brawl with a snake charmer.

Leicester Mercury features editor Jeremy Clay has brought back to life more than 250 long-lost tales of crime, tragedy and coincidence from local newspapers after spending 18 months searching through the British Library’s newspaper archive.

His book, which is called The Burglar Caught by a Skeleton – And Other Singular Tales from the Victorian Press, includes a story about a holidaymaker wrestling a lion which leapt through a window, a pallbearer killed by a coffin in a London graveyard, and an escaped python being stoned to death by boys in Middlesborough.

The Sun and Daily Mail have already run extracts of the collection which Jeremy says came from an inability to concentrate in the newsroom.

The book includes more than 250 stories from Victorian newspapers

“From time to time I’d find myself leafing through one of the Mercury’s hefty old back issues to check a date or the spelling or some other fact,” he said.

“A five-minute job, which invariably ended up eating up half an hour or more because I’d get distracted by all the other daft stuff I’d spot along the way.

“Then one day I stumbled across the British Newspaper Archive and was instantly addicted. Soon after, I chanced upon a story of a lion loose in Llandrindod. It leapt through an open hotel window, giving a startled holidaymaker a crash course in lion taming.

“Not long after that, I found the tale of an actual bull in an actual china shop (damage: none, curiously, although some rubberneckers pressing to see what was going on did smash a few plates on display outside).

“And from there on in, they came thick and fast. An unseemly brawl between a bearded lady and a snake charmer. A drunken monkey smashing up a bar and a grieving husband dying of shock when his wife revived in her coffin.”

Other bizarre stories include a cricket match between one-armed and one-legged players and a woman living with her husband’s corpse to claim his pension.

Jeremy also discovered a story about a missing girl found in a fair with fur glued to her face, billed as the dog-faced girl, and an editor horse-whipped by chorus girls.

“A year and a half’s worth of virtual rummaging later, I’d unearthed enough outlandish material to fill a book,” he added.

“The result is a lost history of the Victorian era, made up of the stories that tickled or appalled the newspaper readers of the age, which have been all but forgotten even in the very places they played out.

“It’s like a tenner stuffed down the back of history’s sofa. Or a fiver, maybe.”

The Burglar Caught by a Skeleton – And Other Singular Tales from the Victorian Press can be bought by visiting www.iconbooks.net