The Winged Man or, ‘Twix Midnight And Dawn (1913)

The Winged Man; or, 'Twixt Midnight and Dawn (1913) by E. Dudley Tempest marks the last major evolution of the Spring-Heeled Jack myth. First serialised over twenty-eight issues of The Wonder (1913) and here presented as a continuous narrative for the first time, the story transforms the Victorian leaping phantom into an aerial avenger who dominates the skies on the eve of the First World War.

Edited and introduced by J. S. Mackley, this edition situates The Winged Man as both sequel and reinterpretation of The Human Bat (1899-1901). Its detective, Danby Druce, pursues a brilliant but deranged "strange genius" whose mechanical wings and sense of divine retribution embody the tensions of modernity: empire, technology, and the moral cost of progress. Drawing on Gothic melodrama, crime fiction, and early science-fantasy, the narrative fuses fin-de-siecle paranoia with the thrill of aerial adventure.

The extensive introduction traces the character's lineage from Spring-Heeled Jack through the penny-dreadful tradition to Edwardian popular culture, exploring how each incarnation mirrored contemporary fears-urban violence, industrialisation, and the loss of moral certainty. The volume also surveys later sightings and impostors, from the 1904 Liverpool "Leaping Man" to the 1929 Stockport "Spring-Heeled Jack Dog-Poisoner," showing how the legend mutated across media and decades.

Richly annotated and sourced from rare British Library copies, The Winged Man completes The Spring-Heeled Jack Library, offering scholars and enthusiasts the definitive conclusion to Britain's most persistent urban legend-a myth that began in the gaslight streets of 1838 and ended, almost eighty years later, among the clouds.