Ingoldsby Legends, 2nd Series

Before Monty Python and Terry Pratchett, there was Thomas Ingoldsby: a fictional baronet of Tappington Manor whose pen name mask allowed Richard Harris Barham to pillory Victorian England with gleeful irreverence. The Ingoldsby Legends are macabre fairy tales, spectral anecdotes, and mock-heroic verses that take English folklore and twist it into something deliciously absurd. A ghostly nun stalks a monastery. A brave knight faces a dragon that speaks in the cadences of a London cabbie. A family curse turns out to involve something rather less mysterious than the ancestors intended. Barham's wit is razor-sharp, his verse nimble, and his mockery of upper-class pretension still lands two centuries later. Illustrated by George Cruikshank and John Leech, these legends capture a moment when England was inventing itself through its own mythology and thoroughly enjoying the joke. They will appeal to anyone who delights in the company of sharp, strange, laughing ghosts.