Sign-In
Cart
Dandy Dick or The King's Highway (1900-1901)
Paperback
Series: The Spring-Heeled Jack Library, Book 5
Classic FictionGeneral Fiction
ISBN13: 9781917130059
Publisher: Isengrin Publishing
Published: Jul 1 2025
Pages: 426
Weight: 1.31
Height: 0.87 Width: 6.13 Depth: 9.25
Language: English
Dandy Dick; or, The King's Highway (1900-1901), written by Ned Neolan and Ben Brightly and here edited and introduced by J. S. Mackley, was originally serialised in The Halfpenny Marvel over forty-two issues between April 1900 and February 1901. Unlike the earlier penny-dreadful tales of Spring-Heeled Jack, this narrative casts the leaping phantom as a mysterious side figure while its focus turns to the gallant world of English highwaymen.
Set against the romanticised backdrop of eighteenth-century London and the wilds of Finchley Common, the story follows Dandy Dick, a wrongly-accused nobleman turned outlaw, whose adventures bring him into the company of legendary figures-Dick Turpin, Colonel Blood, Jack Sheppard, and the sinister thief-taker Jonathan Wild. Their clashes of honour and corruption evoke a folkloric England poised between chivalry and criminality.
The extensive introduction explores how the serial transforms criminal folklore into heroic romance, blending Gothic sensationalism with historical myth-making. The figure of Spring-Heeled Jack, glimpsed as a spectral protector amid highway skirmishes, bridges the gap between supernatural horror and patriotic adventure. Through Mackley's annotations, this volume illuminates how Victorian readers re-imagined earlier centuries as moral theatre, where even the outlaw could embody virtue.
Drawing on British Library copies and previously inaccessible materials, this is the first collected edition of Dandy Dick and its sequel Dandy Dick's Double. It offers modern readers both a thrilling glimpse of Edwardian serial fiction and a critical reappraisal of Britain's enduring fascination with gallant crime and Gothic justice.
Also in
General Fiction
Elizabeth Spencer: Novels & Stories (Loa #344): The Voice at the Back Door / The Light in the Piazza / Knights and Dragons / Stories
Spencer, Elizabeth
Hardcover
Anniversaries, Volume 2: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl, April 1968-August 1968
Johnson, Uwe
Paperback
Philip Roth: Novels 1973-1977 (Loa #165): The Great American Novel / My Life as a Man / The Professor of Desire
Roth, Philip
Hardcover
Selected Writings: Robert Musil: Young Torless, Three Women, the Perfecting of a Love, and Other Writings
Musil, Robert
Agee, Joel
Paperback
Before Gatsby: The First Twenty-Six Stories
Baughman, Judith
Fitzgerald, F. Scott
Bruccoli, Matthew J.
Paperback